Jopogo

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Jopogo At the start of this year, I went part-time with my current employer so as to get time to launch Jopogo, my independent web design and development venture. Concurrent with the lead-up to this decision, I bought a work desktop machine, signed up for a new web hosting account, read up on small business tax matters, registered a business name with the DCRA as a sole proprietor, and struck up a working partnership with Mike on my last trip to the Philippines.

As you can see from the links in the sidebar, I haven’t made a secret of it or anything, but I told myself I would get a few clients under my belt and settle into a steady income stream before I actually announced it here on HNBP. Suddenly, it’s ten months later, and here I am, with a few clients under my belt and managing to tread water income-wise. I’m not going to post an “X Things I Learned as a Newbie Entrepreneur” entry, as that’s been done by others, but I’ll say this: these last ten months have driven home just how important it is for an entrepreneur to be utterly fanatical about his business and the products or services he offers.

So yeah, here’s the official announcement. Jopogo is open for business, and has been for the last ten months. “We do web stuff.” I need a more original tagline.

Rained Out of RFK

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Steve and I (and our respective significant others) were at RFK last night to watch the Nats/Phillies game, but after a few hotdogs and an hour of waiting, we figured it would be called, and left before the rain got any harder. It wasn’t a wasted trip; I’d never been to RFK before, and I got a few nice photos.

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(The game did push through later, but I don’t think we could have waited till 11:30 pm anyway. Nats won.)

LOST Third Season is Coming

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Those of you who haven’t been following LOST too closely, but want in on the upcoming third season, tonight is your lucky night: ABC is showing the requisite recap clip show to help newcomers (and overly rabid fans) get their LOST fill before the new season premiere next week.

It’s been four months since the 2nd season finale, but the story has not been sitting idle. ABC’s marketing and multimedia departments have been dangling easter egg carrots before internet-savvy fans hungry for more of the Dharma/Hanso conspiracy aspects of the plot, in the form of an “alternate reality game” called “The Lost Experience,” a fairly successful viral marketing gimmick which got fans to buy books, view websites with subtle and not-so-subtle product tie-ins, and develop further buzz about the TV show. With this game, ABC has built a community of insiders interacting with the show at a higher tier of involvement, with a degree of investment in the show which keeps them watching, constantly on the lookout for new clues to dig up online.

Having something resembling a life, I didn’t get into The Lost Experience any, but thank goodness for sites like Tail Section and Lostpedia, who gladly share the wealth. Apparently one of LOST’s greatest mysteries, the Numbers, was revealed as The Valenzetti Equation, a series of values representing factors in the ultimate doom of humankind — factors which the DHARMA Initiative is attempting to change by any means possible to avert disaster, even at the expense of the lives of a good fraction of the human population. That still doesn’t explain how those numbers won the lottery for Hurley, and gave him such bad luck, though. Will this plot point still garner any mention during the show at all, I wonder, or will it be left to the game-playing fans to lord this insider info over casual viewers, while the TV show just focuses on the human drama?

And those of you who, like me, have been watching out for LOST spoilers, be warned: the producers have been putting out “foilers,” preemptive red herrings meant to confuse and confound. So maybe Jack won’t be getting that “Other” love interest?

Oh, with regards to my prior theory, held by some others, that the black smoke security system is a nanobot cloud, looks like that rumor was debunked by LOST producer Damon Lindelof at Comicon. My new theory is that it is secondhand smoke from cigars lit by Alvar Hanso.

It also pleases me to no end that one of the new characters being introduced next season will be named Paulo, to be played by Rodrigo Santoro, an actor almost as hot as I am.

More links:

On Running and Pockets

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All winter I slacked off my running because it was too cold. Through the spring I kept saying I would start running regularly again after it got just a bit warmer. For summer I was reluctant to go running because it was too hot. Finally it’s not too hot and it isn’t freezing cold and I have no reason to procrastinate on getting back to my exercise and availing of my proximity to the National Mall, so last week I started running again: about 5 miles to start, three times a week.

So I was about to go out for my first re-run last Wednesday when I paused in front of my pocketable items. Habit when I leave home is to stuff my pockets with the standard cellphone and wallet and Palm and handkerchief and keys and sometimes camera, and my reflex was to put all that in my shorts. Impractical, of course: you can’t have all that jangling while you’re jogging. All I really needed was my keys, iPod, and a bottle of water. And yet, my mind rebelled against this minimalist cargo: What if someone calls? What if you need cash to get a Metro card to go back if you’re too tired? What if you see something Flickr-worthy and need to take a photo of it? For a moment I thought of Christ’s instructions when he sent out the apostles: “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics.” I really was loving the world at that moment, I guess. But I would only be out for 45 minutes to an hour: calls could wait, there was really nothing to spend money on, if I got tired I could pause on a bench and walk the rest of the way, and some days you just don’t need to snap photos of everything.

It felt good to let go of the pocketables and run with my mind off worldly things. (Of course, I was kicking myself in the rear on Saturday for not bringing a small camera when I got to Lincoln Memorial and saw a red fox sitting in the grass nearby — a rare site in those crowded areas in the middle of the day. It eventually snuck off in the direction of a fenced-off construction area. Maybe I’ll find a decent small camera which won’t knock around my pockets when I next go running the scenic route.)

Mayon Eruption Update: Over?

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Props to JarodM for the photos.

PHIVOLCS 9/23/2006 Mayon update reports weakening seismic activity and decreased lava flow. The Alert Level has been dropped to 3, refugees have been allowed to return to their homes near the volcano, and Mayon generally seems to be calming down. It’s probably a good thing that the eruption consisted mainly of a steady flow lava punctuated only occasionally by relatively weak ash explosions: it most likely means the pressure of magma was relieved slowly, rather than allowed to build up into a major explosive eruption which could have caused much more damage and death.

Oh, and that whole “full moon” thing never materialized.

Update: I may have spoken too soon; Mayon has suddenly sprung back to life with new tremors and an ash explosion. Alert Level 3 remains, which means a continued high level of unrest.

Interested volcano watchers can keep an eye on the PHIVOLCS “latest activity” log, which shows releases for significant volcanic events.

Sunset Down the Road (Again)

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Fall is just around the corner, and as always around this time of year, the ecliptic is aligned such that for a few days, the sunset shines right down DC’s downtown street grid, just so.

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I took this photo of the start-of-Fall sunset back in September 2004, too.

DCist and Pentagon Hot Dog Stands

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Some of you may be stumbling in via a hat tip from DCist, in the story about the Pentagon hot dog stand. The link isn’t here yet, as I posted it to my del.icio.us link stream with a for:dcist tag, which is how they saw it. (Late tonight, my del.icio.us links for the day will be picked up by magical internet fairies who will carry them one by one to brownpau.com to be posted to my weblog. If you use del.icio.us and want this to happen, refer to my entry on del.icio.us daily blog posting.)

Me, I picked up the story from FP Passport, who in turn got it via the Pentagon media listserv.

CCM on FM in the Philippines

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Jim asked me to pass this along: The Edge Radio, now on FM in the Philippines.

I’m not much of a CCM guy, but for those of you in the Philippines who are, The Edge, a ministry of UCB-IFA, has stations in Manila (91.5), Davao (104.3), Lucena (90.3), Ilocos Sur (90.5), and Zamboanga (98.1). It’s nice to see evangelical Christian radio broadcasting in the Philippines taking hold of the mainstream in this manner, especially given the heavily Catholic context; but then, Filipino religious practice has always leaned toward the charismatic, so it should come as no surprise that CCM of the “non-hard-sell” variety should appeal even to Filipino Catholics. (By the way, my ex’s own station, 98.7 DZFE, under the FEBC banner, continues to struggle onward.)

At some point in the future, I really should tell you about growing up with RJ 100.3, back when they were still a 1950s oldies station. “Gising na, RJ na!”