Archive for July, 2004
Divisoria Building Collapse
A building collapsed yesterday in Divisoria, Manila’s classic bargain street-shopping district. The building owner himself is claiming that the collapse was caused by multiple excavations in lots adjacent to the property. That would not surprise me at all; there are construction firms in Manila who could not care less about the effects of their digging. [...]
Coleus in Bloom
One of the new additions to my troops, a Coleus blumei, blooms into tiny purple flowers. They’re nice to look at now, but I’ll have to prune off the blooms before they start wilting and dropping invader-seeds into neighboring pots. Photo taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.
Back and Busy Uncle
I flew up to New Jersey for the weekend to go kayaking with Amy and her folks, and now I’m rather busy with several projects, at work and at home. Will be back soon with some words on introversion, moblogging with Flickr, Spiderman 2, and my new nephew! Yes, I’m an uncle now. More on [...]
“Gross National Slur”
Dear Philippine Government, Filipino taxpayers do not pay you to waste time advertising your thin-skinned pettiness by drafting official statements about jokes made by foreign comedians following the shameful servility you exhibited to the world in the face of terrorist intimidation. Get back to work, because you may soon have a rash of kidnappings of [...]
oneMoTime
Good news: (Yay!) The mobile blog, aka “Mobrownpau,” is back, running on Blogger via my GSM phone. Right now it’s on a default template; that will change when I have time to work on it. Bad news: (Boo!) Blogger’s email-to-post feature can’t take image attachments from MMS, so I’m limited to plain text entries just [...]
I Win
(Just fooling around with output from the Safety Sign Builder. Feel free to use it for anything; I uploaded it to Imageshack, so it’s not my bandwidth.)
I Do Not Feel At All Well
Reminder to self: never, ever get the Decaf Iced Mocha at Starbucks 21st and P St NW ever, ever again. Ever. The only thing keeping this heat-induced, over-flavored migraine at bay is the large quantity of acetylsalicylic acid in my veins.
Watch Repair
Just got my old watch — a 14 year old Casio Quartz dive watch I’ve had since high school — fixed and tuned up by a sociable old timepiece artisan in Downtown Washington. Full service: new leather strap, new battery, and a new O-ring, with waterproofing gasket gel, all for cheap. (Well, cheap for DC, [...]
Never Saw the Sun…
I’ve been trying my hand at some Mars Rover color imagery, pasting pancam images into Photoshop channels and tweaking colors (with cues from some cool BABB advice and Keith Laney’s pancam calibration page) to approximate how the human eye might see the surface of Mars. The first time I tried combining channels from Spirit’s photos [...]
Interruptus
Pinoy troops are pulling out, and apparently Angelo de la Cruz is heading home. His family must be so happy; I wish I could say the same for the rest of the Philippines’ overseas workers in the Middle East. Update: Oh look, he’s not heading home. But do not worry, those honorable, honorable Iraqi “militant” [...]