Some photos from the walk home along the National Mall while the slanted rays of a Friday sunset tinted the monuments and buildings amber:
Mentioned on Thumbtack Press
Thumbtack Press liked my San Francisco photos, especially since I release them under a CC license. I’m happy to oblige.
(The weird part is that I found this link, not from my regular scans of Technorati or Google Blog Search, but via a completely random stumble upon KBCafe, which at first glance I thought was a spammy bot-copied content republisher, based on the ad clutter. It took a closer look for me to decide it was legit — and hey, they picked up a link my regular inbound-link haunts didn’t. Update: Never mind; KBCafe is just republishing search results from IceRocket and splattering contextual and affiliate ads all over that.)
Blogger Pruning
As you may surmise from Backup Brownpau and my Blogger profile, I’ve recently done a big Blogger cleanup, pruning out dormant weblogs and repurposing the single active one into a downtime fallback. Whereas my Blogspot space has served several roles in the past, I found over time that each of those roles was best filled by this site itself: mobile weblog and self-sightings, for example.
I’ve also found Blogger insufficient for the needs of White House Fence Jumpers, and am retooling that site on its own domain with its own database.
I’m not giving up on Blogger, though. It’s still the best externally hosted weblog solution there is, and is still great for immediate and usable out-of-the-box functionality. I will be using it for the “news” sections of other sites coming up — with a very stripped-down template and no comments.
Updates on all that soon.
Outage
So sorry about today’s downtime. Site 5 hardware trouble brought everything down for six hours, but their support staff has been very responsive regarding the server issues, and it looks like they managed to restore everything with no data lost. Always keep backups!
Backup Brownpau is now up on Blogspot for updates during any future outages.
A Pause While Cleaning
Pandora stops licking herself in awkward places for just long enough to pose for the camera.
Corner Redux
Notice anything new about The Corner?
One of my neighbors just moved out and was selling stuff, including a lovely old wicker rocking chair. It just barely fits, and if I rock it too far back I get Norfolk Island Pine needles in my hair, but hey, it’s a wicker rocking chair! Perfect for making Psycho Mom impressions.
Update, 4/29/2006: As you can see from the new photo below, someone’s already making herself quite at home with the new furniture!
IceCream.jpg
(IceCream.jpg, uploaded by brownpau.)
Lining up for free ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s in Union Station now. I’m getting Phish Food.
Update: Phish Food was out, and wow, you know demand is high when vanilla has run out. I got Chunky Monkey instead.
SMART-1 to be Crashed
Crash. Tiny SMART-1, ESA’s first lunar probe (also a compact spacecraft technology test bed), has been in lunar orbit since November 2004. Following the success of its primary and secondary missions, ESA now plans to crash SMART-1 into the moon, with a hard landing on the near side which may be visible from Earth. More stuff on ESA’s little lunar trooper: SMART-1 lunar imagery, SMART-1 NASA Master Catalog entry, Planetary Society’s SMART-1 category, and SMART-1 on Wikipedia.
Corner.jpg
(Corner.jpg, uploaded by brownpau.)
My sitting corner, with a folding lawn chair cushioned by a comforter, in the shade of a norfolk island pine. Just testing mobile posting. I’m limited to eight character filename-based titles on the Nokia 6600, and posting by API does not assign a default category. Any tips on that?
Back From Retreat
The theme of the retreat at Camp Fraser was “community,” so the young adults of First Baptist and Calvary Baptist DC spent Friday night and Saturday discussing the Church as Body of Christ and fellowship of believers united by common belief towards common goals.
Saturday morning, I got up at 6am for a damp hike down to the Potomac River. I didn’t see the beaver, but I did run into two foxes. The nature preserve is lovely as always, and I got this panorama of a fallen tree on the riverbanks of the Potomac (beaver’s dam attempt?) and lots of other nice nature-y photos. (I was sadly unable to catch the foxes, as they bolted before I could even grab my camera.)
