how now brownpau
After years of cross-linkage, silver ladles, and other miscellaneous adventures, I finally met up with Brandon today, as he visits DC for an SBL conference. We had an Indian lunch at Mehak near the convention center, and talked about church, weblogs, school, DC, CA, GA, and The Dane. Here is us, post-lunch:
White kid, about 25, medium height and build, spiky blond hair and a single earring, wearing jeans and generic university shirt, walking down M St SW across from Waterfront/SEU Metro station. He’s just hanging up a cellphone as he calls to me, “Hey, do you speak English?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Oh, thank God. I live right behind the Safeway, and my dad is in Salisbury, Maryland. He’s dying, and I need-”
I interrupt. “Right.”
“Did you say, ‘right’?”
“Find someone else to grift.”
I walk off towards the Metro. (In retrospect I probably shoudln’t have turned my back on him; no idea if he was packing.) He yells, “Well, God bless you. I hope you have a good evening!”
I just repeat over my shoulder, “Find someone else to grift.”
Thank you, LOST. You have taught me well.
A few people have been arriving at my old entry on the DC Metro “flipbook” ads, looking for the newer “Target” ad between Gallery Place and Judiciary Square, on the Red Line. Here’s a video I took of it, a bit dark, but you can see a person floating in what seems to be a space station, and a woman in a red dress descending a spiral staircase:
There’s a point in the ad where the scene breaks up for a bit, just when the lady in red appears; apparently that’s where there’s a couple of holes between screens to allow passage to the Shady Grove side of the Red Line. Sorry about the noisy kids.
“I can’t believe you’re still seeing him; isn’t he, like, twice your age?”
“I don’t mind, really. It’s so wrong, but at the same time, it feels so right. Besides, he’s a triathlete, and he’s got a hot body.” (Giggling) “He’s there in Colorado, I’m here in Washington, so he’s … convenient for me … He’s just what I need right now.”
“Wow, now the age gap between me and my boyfriend doesn’t feel so big.” (More giggling)
I might be way off on this, but here’s my translation:
“So wrong, but it feels so right” = “His wife hasn’t found out yet.”
“Convenient for me / just what I need right now” = “Sugar daddy money is good, but not too much messy committment.”
The original webcam page had a single still image uploaded every minute from the Unibrain Fire-I, my primary webcam on the iBook. I recently purchased a Philips SPC200N as a backup plugged into my Windows PC, to keep an eye on the cat when I’m out with the iBook. For a time, each cam would upload its own separate image, so there were two captured images on the webcam page, refreshing every 30 seconds, usually showing two different locations in or around my room. Then I signed up with Stickam, and added a remote live player with a chatroom to the mix. (PC cam only, as the Stickam player is incompatible with the Fire-I.)
Two images every 30 seconds with a separate live player was getting to be overkill, and you can’t have the PC cam app running with the Stickam flash app at the same time anyway, so I pared down the features a bit. Now it’s got just one still image refreshing every 60 seconds, uploaded from whichever webcam is on at the moment, plus the Stickam player.
At the moment the iBook cam is catching a time lapse of my african violets, while the the PC cam is showing live video of Pandora on the bed. Enjoy. It’s exciting stuff.
The next book on the reading list was supposed to be Jane Austen’s Emma. I had already downloaded it from Gutenberg and converted it to Palm DOC PDB format and HotSynced it to read in eReader, but then my eyes alit on the first line…
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
…and I could really go no further. She sounds far too much like a Mary Sue character at the start, and I’m not feeling too patient with that. Instead, I’m going for something a bit meatier: Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, which I plucked off my uncle’s Filipiniana shelf about two years ago and had been meaning to read since then. Publishing date is 1989, which means it’s almost two decades out of date, but it should still be good for Philippine history up till EDSA and Cory Aquino.
Most people know Antoine de Saint-Exupéry for his classic The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince), but Amy introduced me to another of his famous works, Wind, Sand and Stars (originally Terre des Hommes in French), via an aged, yellowing volume which she had picked up from her church library.
The book is a collected series of autobiographical vignettes from Saint-Exupéry’s life as a pilot, interspersed with philosophical reflections on the human condition. Published in 1939, much of the narrative takes place in the period between world wars, when Saint-Exupéry flew post between Europe and Africa, in a time before weather radar and air traffic control grids, when pilots flew more by a primal understanding of the air and the earth than by the few instruments their planes had.
To Saint-Exupéry, flight is both a triumph of human achievement and a glorious spiritual vocation, one which both figuratively and literally lifts up the pilot who takes on the mantle of the aircraft, giving him superhuman powers, responsibilities, and challenges. He never fails to stress the burden of the air courier to deliver the post, who stands head and shoulders above the common crowd, to face down distance and wind and weather and darkness and crashes and Islamic desert warriors, while at the same time treating these troubles with the nonchalance of a seasoned veteran without fear of death. There is an especially thrilling chapter about his crashing onto a plateau in the African deserts and nearly dying of thirst with his engineer in the cold, bitter night.
Don’t approach this, however, as a book entirely about the historical wonders and dangers of early flight, else the final chapter about his philosophical wanderings through the Spanish Civil War will leave you disappointed. These meditations have little to do with his tenure as a pilot, but much to do with war and death. I found this to be the weakest section of the book, especially with the somewhat fuzzy and postmodern conceptual denouement on the resolution to conflicts of human belief.
The prose of the English version occasionally seems a bit stilted. I imagine the original French must have had a magical, flowing eloquence, but the philosophical lilt does not always come out in the English as well as it did in Little Prince. Because of this I occasionally found Wind, Sand and Stars a difficult read, but this was certainly not a grave fault.
(Small side note: this was a very old copy of the book, possibly a 1939 first edition, hardbound in blue without a dust jacket. It was previously used by Amy’s pastor when he was much younger, and still bears his margin notes in pencil, along with hasty bookmarks made from torn sheets of blank newsprint, and newspaper clippings about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry pasted or inserted in various locations. This made reading the book all the more charming for its historical personality.)
Update, 11/16/2006: See this comment from Pingdom on the issue. They claim they are tweaking the GIGRIB bot for better behavior and will soon have a working monitoring page on the other end of the referrer. (Preview of that here.)
Update, 2007: Well, the public monitoring page never happened, and Pingdom’s spoofed referrers still forward to their main page. So yeah, they’re still referrer spammers.
My entry on Pingdom’s referrer spam gets a response in the comments from Pingdom themselves:
What Pingdom says:
Crawling the Internet for statistics and information is nothing new. Search engines and other statistical tools have been doing this since the start of the Internet. The referrer link you mention will be leading to a stats page as soon as the service goes live. The page will contain very basic statistics about your site, such as IP address, country of your server, etc. We are not collecting any visitor statistics (this is impossible for us or anyone else to do anyway) or any private information.
I respond to that in the comments, but here it is again just for purposes of clarity.
My response:
The issue, “Pingdom,” isn’t the crawling, it’s the spoofed referrer in the headers. You say that pingdom.com/monitor/whatever.com will eventually point to a working page, but right now it just rewrites to the front page of Pingdom, a page which does not actually link to the site being crawled. So the name of Pingdom and the name of the crawled site are being search-engine optimized in Pingdom.com’s favor in public referrer logs without any current reciprocal link.
That’s referrer spam, and that’s unethical. I would not be complaining about this if the referrer field in the uptime crawler were blank, or led to a current, working page with an actual link to the site, the way the Whois.sc crawler does it. As it is, Pingdom’s in my blacklist, until such time that the monitor link actually returns a real page.
I must add that it’s even worse for Pingdom’s reputation that their monitor bot is working from a server with a questionable history, and hosted by EV1, a company which Michael Pollitt has previously complained about as being lax on spammer activity.
Guys at Pingdom, I’m trying to help you out here. I’m not hating or trying to be an irritant; I’m pointing out where your bot practices are falling short of what people would expect of an ethical company. Uptime monitoring is fine, crawling web content for legitimate reasons is fine, in every way Pingdom appears to be a fine and legitimate service, except for those spoofed referrers. It’s the same reason I’m blocking RSSMicro’s bot.
Other complaints about the Pingdom bot’s behavior on various forums and weblogs follow. A lot of people are having trouble figuring out the purpose of the bot because of the referrer redirect, and are getting suspicious:
Also check out this Google search for the Pingdom referrer string, showing how the spoofed referrer is coming up on public logs everywhere.
On a related note, the original entry on Pingdom is a huge magnet for all sorts of comment spam now, mostly of the standard pharmaceutical and pornographic variety. MT’s spam filters have been catching all of it so far, but it’s interesting that the overwhelming majority of link spam I’ve been receiving is now targeted at that single entry, even more than at my older entries on referrer, comment, and trackback spam attacks.
Matt’s entry on Flickr “detail” sets got me looking through some of my old photosets, and I found this forgotten gem in Views From Plane Windows, which I had failed to post to my weblog at the time. I think it’s the wing of a United Express / Mesa Airlines CRJ-100 over New Jersey last December:
I also tried my hand at the fake tilt-shift effect that’s been so popular with the cool photo kids lately, using this photo of the Newark skyline, taken on the same flight:
Amy and I braved rain and wind yesterday to view Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, a new exhibit at the National Gallery. “Netherlandish” in this context refers to the Burgundian Netherlands of the fifteenth century, a somewhat different territorial spread from what we know today as the “Dutch” Netherlands. Diptychs — paired religious paintings on hinges — were favored objects of portable devotion, usually depicting the Virgin and Child or Christ’s Passion, often alongside a portrait of the donor. The exhibit gets especially interesting later in the Renaissance, when mannerist aesthetics gained popularity, so that artists depicted their subjects in poses and settings that the museum literature describes as “histrionic.”
After the exhibit, we watched the Suspicious Cheese Lords sing sacred music of the Flemish Renaissance. As always, the Suspicious Cheese Lords (named for a humorous transliteration of the Tallis motet Suscipe Quaeso Domine) deliver early vocal music flawlessly, every note and every part a deep, multifaceted resonance bubbling up from centuries past. I especially loved their rendition of Nicolas Gombert’s Lugebat David Absalon, which appears to have been based on his secular chanson Je Prens Congie. (I cringed when some n00b in the rear applauded right in the pause between movements. The lesson here is to wait until the music majors clap first, so as to avoid offense to the performer and embarassment to the audience.)