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
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
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:
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.
State of the Brownpau
It’s 80°F out today, the first really warm day of the year. The air conditioner is running.
I’m still looking for a job. Mid-April is my deadline, by which point I have to be earning a fulltime paycheck if I want to continue eating. My resumé is out there with a bunch of applications, and I scour SimplyHired, USAJobs.gov, and Craigslist everday for new positions. One good lead fell through, but something new popped up — just as I was writing this post, in fact. Hopefully I’ll know by the end of the day.
Last week I found a new apartment — right here in the building I currently live in. Amy and I have been hunting all over the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor for a place to live after we get married: something Metro-accessible, reasonably clean, cat-friendly, with at least one bedroom, and affordable enough that we can save up to finally buy a place over the next couple of years. Nothing of the sort, of course; Arlington and DC rents are through the roof in any place that isn’t roach-infested or crime-ridden, and very few apartments within our meager price range would take cats. Then I found that a 1BR right in my building was about to open up, and we realized that deep in our hearts, we like this place a lot better than anything we’ve seen in Arlington: it’s cheap, the neighbors are great, the location is right beside Capitol and museums and Metro in a safe neighborhood, and management will let me keep my cat. So next month, I move down a few floors, to prepare a room for my bride.
I was up in New Jersey with Amy’s folks over the weekend: met with a maitre’d to talk wedding reception stuff, finished up some premarital counseling (but there’s one more session with my pastor here in DC too), got a new pair of casual-use shoes on clearance at a DSW somewhere on Route 22, ate more White Castle, tried a rare House Sirloin at Applebee’s, and listened to Diggers.
So basically I’ve got to move to a new place, find a new job, and get married, all in the span of about three months. I often joke that I’ll have run out of hair by summer.
QuikTrak.jpg
Looks like Union Station has new Amtrak Quik Trak ticket machines. I hope the interface on these is better than the old Windows NT ones with the default ‘Ding’ sound.
(QuikTrak.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
EagLob.jpg
Eagle and lobster ornaments cling to the rim of some kind of round wooden vessel at A.C. Moore. Shopping around New Jersey.
(EagLob.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
