Back to Bloglines

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I just went back to Bloglines. I know I said before that feeds are a river and Bloglines was drowning me, but after a few months, Kinja just isn’t doing it for me, plus, like Google Reader, it lacks batch editing capabilities, which is a real pain when you want to remove or recategorize a whole bunch of feeds. Worse, the javascript-heavy interface takes a while to load, with all the yellow fades and curve-cornered layers — especially on the “manage favorites” page — and it was hindering rather than helping my feed management labors.

So, it’s back to the frames-based, occasionally clunky Bloglines UI. To stem the sometimes overwhelming tide of content, I’ve switched the feed display to “Titles Only,” making it easier to filter through stuff. Kinja stays as backup.

I do not like AJAX.

Squirrel at Fountain

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Walking home from work yesterday, I ran into this squirrel eagerly sucking water from a fountain in Lafayette Park, near the White House. I pressed the button on the fountain to see if I could give him a little more water, but the fountain was not actually working, so he’ll have to be satisfied with the drops he could get. I’d like to point out that he never ran off, even when I stuck the camera in his face or pressed the fountain button right by his head.

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Lafayette Fountain Squirrel is also featured in today’s DCist Morning Roundup, and was one of the Interesting Flickr photos of 06/06/06.

Upgrading my Mac Life

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I did two major (to me) Mac-related things recently: I upgraded to OS X 10.3.9, and I got a 512MB iPod Shuffle. Yeah, I’m cheap.

IMG_5477.JPG iPod Shuffle 512MB

It’s been three and a half years since the iBook’s tumultuous arrival, and it continues to serve me faithfully, chugging along with its 384 MB of RAM, a bit battered and worn with age, but still working pretty well. I contemplated trading up to a G4 (or, more recently, an Intel MacBook), but this iBook has sentimental value to me, having been my first Mac, the machine which helped me get my Master’s Degree, and it still runs fine, so I’ve opted not to sell it. Today the iBook sits on its iCurve beside the Netvista, running as a webcam server and music player — and I still bring it with me when I go on trips. All this time it’s been running OS X 10.2 “Jaguar,” but I figured if I was going to keep it, I had better upgrade, since Jaguar seems to have almost completely lapsed into obsolescence in the Mac software world. A G3/700 with only 384MB of RAM probably would have trouble handling OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, so I opted for 10.3 “Panther,” which came relatively cheap secondhand on eBay.

No mercy: I wiped the HDD completely after a quick backup. (I didn’t even bother to keep my old email.) OS X 10.3 installed quickly, and just as quickly ran software update to get up to 10.3.9. Since I named the Netvista “Fezzik,” for being a huge, hulking brute, I renamed the iBook “Vizzini,” after the proud Sicilian intellectual who met his untimely death in a poisonous mind game with the Dread Pirate Roberts.

I will talk about the iPod Shuffle at length in another post.

06/06/06

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Good morning, everyone. It’s 6:06 AM EDT of 06/06/06, and the world hasn’t ended! A lot of people will probably feel an urge to leaf through John’s Revelation today. The dreaded number is mentioned in Rev 13, at the sight of the Second Beast, which rises out of the earth after the First Beast rises from the sea, after John’s vision of Israel as a woman adorned with the sun, moon, and 12 stars, who is chased by Satan, who makes war on her offspring, the Christians.

Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence, and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound was healed. It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in front of people, and by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that was wounded by the sword and yet lived. And it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain. Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.
– Rev 13:11-18

(Note that “Antichrist” is not mentioned. The term is not used in John’s Revelation, but in two of his earlier letters, and is thought to have referred to the Gnostics, who denied Christ’s bodily nature.)

Many Christians believe the Two Beasts are a prophecy of a coming time when a great world leader and his servant will lead the world in ways against God. Others believe that the passage refers to a time already past, when Christians were persecuted by the Empire. At various times by various people, the 666 Beast has been thought to refer to Nero, Caligula, Domitian, Adolf Hitler, Aleister Crowley, Ronald Reagan, the Pope, the United Nations, credit cards, barcodes, RFID technology, and David Hasselhoff.

(There was some earlier hubbub about the discovery of a manuscript which used the numbers “616” rather than “666,” but given that the Greek forms of the differing characters are very similar, and the overwhelmingly larger number of corroborating manuscripts use “666,” it may just have been 3rd-4th Century copyists writing a bit fast.)

I think it would take a somewhat loose hold of scriptural interpretation to regard the Second Beast as an already-fulfilled prophecy, seeing as how we haven’t yet had a public figure who has used miraculous fire-calling powers to support an oppressive leader while establishing an economic system of head-and-hand markings; but then, John uses a lot of unclear, way-out symbolic language in this text, so it’s not meant to be taken all that literally to begin with. Expectant mothers need not be worried about having their kids today, any more than a person should worry about the dreaded numbers being in a home address or on a license plate. I mean, if you’re not entertaining thoughts of oppressing Christians and making everyone put barcodes on their hands and foreheads, then it’s just a simple number to you, and our God is bigger than a sequence of three digits.

More from Tim Townsend of the St Louis Post-Dispatch, By Farther Steps, GetReligion, Slacktivist, and HolyOffice. What do you think 666 refers to?

Pentecost Sunday

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Church.jpgYesterday was Pentecost Sunday, so worship service was started with a traditional flag procession. I carried the Philippine flag, of course, which was a bit of a challenge to juggle with choir duty, since I had to march with the flag-bearers to the balcony, stick the flag in its mount, then run through the bowels of the building to come out in the chancel in time to catch the end of the processional hymn.

(Those of you wondering how I square up a flag procession with my stand on patriotic hymns sung in church, I must stress that at no point were the praises of any one country extolled during worship, and the flags are meant as a symbol of the universality of the faith, with people of many nationalities and backgrounds worshipping together in church.)

After service — and a Communion Sunday potluck luncheon — I joined two friends from church, Rod and Jeff, for a walk down to the World War II Memorial, with a stop at Decatur House. Then I walked down the Mall to head home, dropping by the Philippine Festival on Pennsylvania Ave. (I didn’t stay long, as it was rather loud and chaotic, and I wanted to curl up on the couch with my cat and a Hostess cupcake.)

Here’s Gordon Richmond getting a wheelchair wash at the youth car wash fundraiser. At back, far left, is his fiancée, Kathryn. They’re getting married this month.

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Pray for Alicia

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Pray For Alicia, a 24-week preemie born to Mike and Hechung Delgado. (Some of you may remember Mike as the funny guy at Picklebrine and The Dangling Conversations.) In addition to cheering for the baby, we also get tons of firsthand education from Mike and Hechung about premature babies, in live weblog format, with photos. We’re all rooting for you, Alicia!

Update: A Blogger bug caused Mike and Hechung to move Alicia’s weblog to Call Me Alicia. Update your bookmarks accordingly.

Recent Content at the Top

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You may have noticed the new “latest posts” thingy at the top of the weblog. I just wanted to make it easier for you to see recent stuff which may have been bumped below the fold by long posts. (I still prefer not to limit the front page to excerpts unless absolutely necessary.) Also, I’ve added a little more focus to my mobile photos, for when I’m out snapping pics with my cellphone. Not sure how that’ll affect my local mobile category, which is slowly growing obsolete as Flickr takes over its function.

Comments, Archives, and Speed

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I discovered a few months ago that Movable Type commenting on HNBP was slowed down by republishing of static monthly and category archives. (See Scot Hacker’s Foobar Blog and UnderscoreBleach.net for details.) Basically anything that had a pertinent <$MTEntryCommentCount$> tag in it was being rebuilt everytime a comment was submitted, and the default template was set up with comment counts in the main index, plus individual, monthly, and category archive files, so MT was rebuilding at least four different files with each comment, and those archive files could get big.

I rectified this by simply trimming down the monthly and category archive templates to their bare bones: linked titles and dates. (I still didn’t want to go the dynamic db route, as one of the main reasons I’ve stuck with MT was to cut server overhead by serving static files.) No more rebuilding of comment counts, and the much smaller, more streamlined archive format saves space and bandwidth. So ends the archiving devolution: from full monthly archives with entry anchors, to full monthly archives alongside individual entries, to just excerpted archives, to a simple list of dated and linked titles.

I’ve also re-deactivated trackback, as I’ve been getting several trackback spam attempts. MT’s excellent feedback filter plugins catch them all, but each spam hit is still an entry in the database, and when they’re coming in at a rate of dozens per minute, the site takes a noticeable performance hit. So goodbye to trackback once again, for now.