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.

State of the Brownpau

.

Self-Portrait 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

.

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

.

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.)

Crowd.jpg

.

Crowd.jpg

Big crowd at Union Station waiting for a delayed MARC Penn Line train. It arrived as I snapped this, and the mass of humanity cascaded out and disappeared through the gates in the span of 30 seconds.

(Crowd.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

LOST 3.13: The Magic Box of Brokeback Island

.

Before we launch into my thoughts on LOST 3.13: The Man From Tallahassee, a couple of popular retro-TV themes to consider:

Star Trek: Shore Leave
The Rabbit from Shore Leave
In which the crew of the Enterprise spends shore leave on a planet where their thoughts and fantasies are brought to real, deadly life, thanks to ancient technology guarded by an alien named “The Caretaker.”

 Welcome to Fantasy Island!
Mr. Rourke and Tattoo
In which Khan Mr. Rourke and his gigantic assistant Tattoo fulfill the island guests’ deepest wishes. It should, of course, be noted that the original 1970s Fantasy Island often began with Tattoo yelling “De plane, de plane!”

Back in the DHARMA Ba Gua entry, I theorized about the Island’s seeming wish-fullfillment aspect, and now we have confirmation of this in last night’s episode, with Ben speaking of the Island as having a “Magic Box” that can manifest the thoughts and desires of its inhabitants. (Whether the Magic Box works for all the inhabitants, or only those “special ones” like Jack and Locke and Walt, or at varying degrees at times for different inhabitants, is only hinted at.)

A few other character notes:

Ben

I wonder if Ben, being a longtime island native, might share in the precognitive powers recently acquired by Desmond in the Hatch Anomaly. This might explain his abilities as a leader and master manipulator, and also why he immediately knew to look up just before Oceanic 815 broke up overhead in the third season opener. Also, he doesn’t blink. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ben blink.

Locke

Locke’s motives are becoming clearer now, though there’s still an overwhelming tone of irrationality in them. He believes himself an agent of the Island, definitely wants to stay there and cut it off from the rest of the world, and is a real booster for anarcho-primitivism — possibly owing to his time spent with the Marijuana Farmers’ Collective. Ben perceptively identifies father issues as a source of these motives, which foreshadows the reveal of the “Man From Tallahassee” — Cooper, Locke’s kidneynapping con dad. Whether the Island’s Magic Box somehow twisted fate to get Cooper there by natural means, or teleported him straight to The Barracks from Tallahassee, or it’s just the Black Smoke manifesting as a ghost from Locke’s tortured past, has yet to be explained. Tallahassee, of course, is where Kate was planning to escape to after she killed her first Dad.

Jack and Kate

Oh, the irony and drama! “Oh Kate, you loved Sawyer! So I gave up hope on you and made a deal with the Others to get me home, from where I could mount a rescue mission, because I hadn’t really given up hope on you, but in any case I have a ride home with Juliet, and don’t you feel crappy that you just broke up with Sawyer only to find me playing football with Mr. Friendly!” And once again, Kate messes up everything. Also, the Jackface entry needs updating.

More stuff from DarkUFO, Kristin at E!Online, Nik at Nite, TVSquad, Televisionary, Lost and Gone Forever, Mostly Muppet, and Completely Lost wins the best blog post title of the week: You Sunk My Battleship. Laff laff laff laff laff.

MSRBOT at 209.249.11.4

.

Would someone at Microsoft please explain why something from IP 209.249.11.4 is crawling this site extensively and using up huge quantities of bandwidth while passing a clearly faked “blogger.com” referrer field in the headers?

This is behavior I usually associate with malicious spam and scraper bots, and indeed in the past I have had to block an IP from which a bot with user-agent “MSRBOT” for being over-aggressive. I had thought at first that it was a script kiddie using an authentic-sounding name to mask his malware, so imagine my dismay to find that MSRBOT is not only coming from an official “Microsoft Research” server this time, but is also rather ill-mannered, going through a different file every 3 minutes and deceptively leaving in its wake a referrer spoofing a competitor’s URL. (At least they’re giving that 3 minute pause rather than going all out without a delay, but still, it makes a mess of my referrer log stream and is not the least bit ethical.)

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Microsoft server in question has been cracked by a malware/botnet operator, which wouldn’t surprise me all that much. Blocked and blacklisted.

DomainTools has noticed it too. Also see the official MSRBOT FAQ, which makes no mention of the referrer URL spoofing.

No Cubes?

.

Arlington County Pen - No Cubes!

Amy got me this Arlington pen in the course of her work for the county. It’s a nice pen, with a wavy pocket clip and a rubber grip, and the name of the county and state on it, but we were wondering about that weird logo. What does it mean? No cubes? No squares? No Time Cubes? No cubing? Think outside the box?

(Arlington County Pen – No Cubes! uploaded by brownpau.)