Welcome to WWTQ 2.0

.

Today seems like a good day to make a very important announcement: Welcome to WEB 2.0. (If you’re coming here through a feed reader, you have to go to the home page of my site to get the full impact of this update.) (Okay, redirect fun is over.)

Okay, seriously now, you can stop laughing. What I really meant to announce, apart from the Zombocom-inspired April 1st gag, was that I’ve relaunched What Was The Question, my old repository for digital art projects from my MICA grad school days and onward. Not much new content, but I cleaned up the code, streamlined the design a bit, and chased down hastily-coded renegade pages which hadn’t yet been assimilated into the overall WWTQ style.

Some notable changes: a bar across the top of the site doubles as page header and breadcrumb navigation, the Strangelover and Resemanticizer have been incrementally updated with a somewhat cleaner backend, the LJ Image Feed now has a fresh new look, the Mars Rover Wiggles have a new javascripty interface (but no new wiggles, sorry), and the whole site is now done in Lucida Grande (or Trebuchet MS for those stuck on Windows).

Some day I’ll have time to add new “art” to the site along the lines of the typography and syndication exploration that I once explored as a graduate student mired in liberal postmodernism. I might even beat Kottke to an update.

Ladybug

.

IMG_0907.JPG

As we picnicked on the grass under the shade of the cherry blossoms today, Amy pointed out a ladybug lazily crawling through the grass by my leg. I took it upon my finger and let it scuttle about my person for a bit, before it grew tired of my company, opened its wings, and flew off back into the grass.

On a related note, you can buy 1,500 live ladybugs for about $15 with shipping. They eat garden pests without harming your plants.

Capitol and Cherry Blossoms

.

Capitol and Cherry Blossoms 2.jpg

Capitol and Cherry Blossoms 1.jpg

Got these panoramic photos on my way to an interview yesterday afternoon: blooming Yoshino trees lining the plaza leading from North Capitol and D Streets up to the Capitol itself. This is the weekend of the National Cherry Blossom Festival in DC, so Amy and I will shortly be going over to the Tidal Basin to check out the blossoms and the kites, which were kind enough to time their bloom to coincide with the Festival this year.

Caturday!

.

IMG_0850.JPG Sneaking up from behind

I’m happy to announce that the cat’s bathroom behaviors have mostly normalized, and that she is going in the litterbox again, with far fewer mishaps than in the last few rocky months. It helped to remove the overpowering air freshener from the bathroom, change her litterbox to a new one, and switch to unscented litter. She is, however, still banned from the bed, so sadly she will still not be on webcam, but I’m moving apartments soon, and we’ll see if we can position the webcam such that it has a view of whatever spot in the new place she decides to settle in.

TrackWrk.jpg

.

TrackWrk.jpg

Track work on the Red, Yellow, AND Green Lines. Wow, this Cherry Blossom Festival weekend on the Metro is going to be awesome.

(TrackWrk.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

USPSR2D2.jpg

.

USPSR2D2.jpg

One of those Star Wars mail boxes sits outside the post office at Union Station. It does not roll around the station, beeping, nor does it project holos of Carrie Fisher, nor does it perform astromech droid functions on Rebel Alliance fighter spacecraft. It will, however, keep your Death Star Plans and other mail safe till the mailman picks it up. More info.

(USPSR2D2.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

Arrest.jpg

.

Arrest.jpg

Looks like there was some kind of disturbance at Union Station, as this was the sight that greeted those emerging from the Metro. No blood or guns or anything, probably just a fight.

(Arrest.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

Jun Ducat Hostage Crisis

.

“I love these kids; that’s why I am here. We have a field trip. I invited the children for a field trip.”

In the Philippines, a Tondo day care center owner hijacked a bus of his own students and teachers and held them hostage near Manila’s City Hall, to demand better treatment for Filipino children.

A moment now to let the irony sink in.

Amee is collecting, linking and quoting news updates on the hostage crisis, and the more I read, the more tragicomedic the whole situation sounds.

Giving the crazy man a portable radio so he can tell the credulous general public to light candles for the country, getting action-star senator Bong Revilla on to the bus to negotiate and pledge to support the hostage-taker’s cause, Ducat himself railing against untrustworthy politicians and corrupt dynasties while he himself is running for a councilor seat and simultaneously praising President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for fighting corruption; plus the mere fact that Ducat had previously held priests hostage with grenades for unpaid dues so that Alfredo Lim had had to negotiate with him, and that he was subsequently freed because the grenades were fake, then that he was allowed to run a daycare center — it’s all the standard circus of dangerously wild-eyed (yet sloppily ham-fisted) posturing amid incompetence.

Remember Panfilo Villaruel and his violent seizing of the NAIA control tower in the name of fighting corruption? I wonder if anyone plans to lionize Ducat for daring and chutzpah in the name of better education and housing for children, rather than see him for what he is — a raving kidnapper and hostage-taker?

At the time of this writing, the situation has ended, and Ducat has freed his hostages. I’m very interested in knowing if anyone actually did rush to light candles for him at 7:00 PM.

The African Violet That Won’t Quit

.

My African Violet has been blooming vivid lavender flowers all winter. It’s amazing; just when I think this is the last set of blossoms before it takes a break, more buds spring out of the mess of leaves and cheerfully open up into a new batch of flowers. Here’s a photo of the latest bloom:

IMG_0891

paulo.ordoveza.com

.

Of course I cannot write about my job hunting adventures without mentioning my professional front on the web: paulo.ordoveza.com, home to my resumé and portfolio. I went with an über-minimal look for this one, to get it out the door faster and make navigation a snap for potential employers and other visitors, hence the four boxes on the front page. Some of the content is crosslinked with my other sites, seeing as how there’s really no need to copy pages that are easily linkable and part of the network.

The portfolio was a bit of a challenge to do in PHP, because I was using a huge nested associative array structure which did not give itself easily to quick navigation. I eventually figured out how to use array_keys() to get it to do what I wanted, but it was a lot more difficult building those previous/next links than I thought it would be.