Greenpeace clipboarder, off-duty, at Union Station. When these guys try to solicit me I usually say No and mention the Rainbow Warrior at Tubbataha. “Outdated maps,” my foot, someone fell asleep at the depth sounder.
Metro.jpg
Balloons.jpg
Dolphin balloons at Safeway. They also have bird, bumblebee, and dragon balloons. Not sure what holiday these are for. Lent? Maybe the dolphins signify tuna?
(Balloons.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
Not a Missile on Google Maps
My first reaction on seeing this Google Maps zoomed-in sat photo was “OMG MISSILE OVER UTAH MUST SEND LINK TO EVERYONE” but OKCalvin has set me aright by pointing out that cruise missiles don’t have dual contrails, and that closer examination of the object shows that its wings are dark against the background:
Sure enough, someone on this Airliners.net forum entry is pretty sure it’s a Mesa Air CRJ-900, with dark green wings and tail. I am, as usual, late to the party. (AIM transcript in the comments.)
Lovely Weekend: Blood on Stairs and Hemp Brownies Edition
Above: Museum visitor viewing Rosie the Riveter, sunset along the Southwest Waterfront, blood on the stairs, hemp seed brownie mix (non-THC), and a panoramic photo of the Capitol taken right before a friendly reminder from CHPD that tripods are not allowed on the grounds.
It was a lovely weekend out in DC. Amy and I viewed Treasures of American History, sat along the Waterfront near the Women’s Titanic Memorial to sketch buildings and watch the sunset, listened to the Master Chorale sing various popular classical masterworks at National Presbyterian, and viewed Rembrandt prints and photos of Paris in Transition.
Mobile Posting Annoyances
As part of my plan to integrate mobile content into the main weblog stream, I’ve been wanting to start posting to HNBP by sending MMS messages from my phone to Flickr’s email-to-blog feature. There are a few problems with the process, however, as one may have seen while I was posting Test.jpg multiple times through the course of the evening:
- My Nokia 6600 sends MMS with the image filnename as the default message subject — eight character limit and “.jpg” extension and all. This cannot be changed on the N6600. This means that mobile photo post titles will usually be awkward filenames.
- Flickr has no option to set Movable Type categories. Del.icio.us is able to do this via the “cat_id” field, and it should be a relatively simple API function, but Flickr has not implemented it.
- Flickr’s blog post layout template tags include photo size options, but they do not work. Instead, you need to go to your upload by email-to-blog settings and change the photo size there, and the change cascades down to your template layout, regardless of what photo size tag you are using. This was very confusing, and is a pretty serious bug.
So for now, I can post to here from my phone; I’ll just need to log in and add the “mobile” category later on, which kind of defeats the purpose of posting from my phone to begin with, but it’ll have to do till Flickr finally gets on fixing their various email-to-blog issues.
That’ll just leave the Twitter feed to add to the weblog. Sadly, the Feeds.App Lite plugin which comes bundled with MT 3.3 only does links and titles, not dates, so I can’t use it to chronologically blend my Twitter posts into the content stream. I’ll probably take a cue from Sparticus’ advice and use a third party feed parser like SimplePie to grab the content on a schedule and show it here. But now I have rambled on enough.
Test.jpg
New Horizons Jupiter Flyby
Hot on the heels of the Rosetta Flyby, NASA/JHUAPL’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Jupiter last week, en route to the icy Kuiper Belt Object Pluto, and returned some lovely photos of the gas giant and its moons.
Most of the public buzz surrounds this photo of Io, which shows at least three huge volcanic plumes, most notably that of Tvashtar near the moon’s north pole. The New Horizons team also put together this animated global map of Jupiter showing the movement of its storms over a full 10 hour rotation. Lovely stuff, and I eagerly look forward to the Pluto-Charon encounter in 2015. Just eight and half more years!
Caturday!
Welcome to a special Caturday: Vet Visit Edition.
Pandora, being a ripe old 13 years of age, has intermittent urinary mishaps in the locale of her litter box (occasionally referred to as “Pandora’s Box”), which I have taken in stride with a handful of paper towels, a bottle of environmentally friendly non-bleach sage and citrus all-purpose cleaner, and trips to the laundry room with the bathroom rug.
The last few weeks, however, have seen an escalation in the occurrence of her “thinking outside the box,” which has resulted in more frequent than usual rug launderings and bathroom floor cleanings. I was in denial about the possibility of a urinary tract infection, even after an impromptu late-night on-the-bed “liquidation” which ruined my mattress and sent me to Craigslist for a new one. (I still have to tell you my mattress story, by the way.) The second time I found a giant cat urine stain on my bed at 3AM, however, (by God’s grace I had been up doing my taxes so it did not touch me as I slept) I knew it was time to call the vet.
Union Veterinary Clinic is just a few blocks away. Quite appropriately, the vet was named “Dr. Kats.” Pandora was weighed, probed, rectally thermometered, and generally checked out. I left her there for the day so they could do a urinalysis and give her some long overdue booster shots, and picked her up later that evening, none the worse for the wear.
The total damage: $295, and the results of the urinalysis will come in next week. There appear to have been bacteria and red blood cells in her urine, and culturing will show if this is an infection. Otherwise it’s a behavioral problem, and I’ll have to retrain her in litterboxing.
This was Pandora’s first time outdoors in, like, ever. She was very calm and cooperative about the whole thing, and took to her carrier just fine. My gangly arms, however, are aching.
Twitter Out
You may have noticed that I’ve removed the Twitter badge from the “Latest” section above the weblog. I got a number of complaints that front page access had slowed to a crawl, and it seems the Twitter javascript badge was to blame. Twitter itself is often somewhat slow to load, and their own AJAX posting interface usually shows a significant lag between clicking “Update” and actually seeing the post come up in the stream.
Part of the problem is with the very concept of a javascript badge, as detailed by Jeremy Zawodny and Ed Eliot. Generally, any time you have an element loading data from a third party live and in-browser, you have a critical point of failure which can lock up loading of anything after it on the page — and those Twitter and Flickr badges come right at the start of the main content. Ideally the remote content provider should provide a static, cached copy of the content stream on a separate “feed” server for badges, updated on a frequent schedule from the DB, but you can’t control how a third-party does its content. I wonder if those Twitter feeds are updated straight from the db on every load, or if the server is just slow.
Anyway, I’ve been wanting to integrate the Twitter messages and Flickr mobile photos into the weblog as a single stream of content. Maybe this Feeds widget they included with MT 3.3x will do the trick. Maybe some day I’ll have the time to actually fiddle around with it.
Update: Flickr is having a massage. See what I mean?