Eight and Nine and Ten: Coffee Kottke Rock Garden

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Random skins eight, nine, and ten are back up, still keeping with the trend of expanding on the themes of older layouts.

 

Number Eight used to have coffee beans in the upper left; now it uses a close-up photo of my coffee pot. I guess you could make an analogy to growth and development in progress to completion, going from beans to the coffee maker to the pot, but I just thought the photo was cool.

 

Number Nine has always been done with Kottke in mind, even in past random skin series. Love him or micro-hate-ronize him, he was keeping a weblog before a lot of us were, so my incipient site was structured after his. Redoing an old but fun layout in CSS is a homage to old days being made new again.

 

Number Ten used a photo of the Ateneo Grade School Rock Garden. I opted for a different photo in rethinking the layout, but kept things simple. It was when I first made Skin#10 that I was introduced to the revolutionary new concept of using CSS rather than tables for layout. Immediately afterward I went back to the nine prior designs and redid them in CSS.

LOST Notes: Henry Gale, Claire, Kate, James, John

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(Update, 3/30/2006: Please see my post on “Lockdown” for more commentary.)

A few LOST notes for recent and upcoming episodes. I’m big on spoilers, so stop reading right here if you don’t want to know what’s coming.

First, be sure to read DCeiver’s latest Pompatus of LOST.

Claire and Kate?

Now, about Claire and her Flashback Adventure with Kate and Rousseau to the abandoned DHARMA medical facility, I have only one question: why did she ask Kate to go with her? I don’t remember Kate and Claire having any special friendship or connection through the course of the series. And if she wanted a tracker, she’s got ever-trustworthy, not-creepy-at-all Mr. Locke bedding down by her tent. (Of course, you just know it was because the writers had to get Evangeline Lilly and Emilie de Ravin together, out and alone in the sweaty jungle of mystery and passion. And with an insane wild French chick to boot.)

Henry Gale

As for Henry Gale, he’s an Other, right? But it’s not sure: maybe he really is just a rich balloonist with a penchant for making evil faces at Sayid and spouting offhandedly manipulative phrases at Locke while living on an island for four months and not hearing a plane crash. Next episode (2.16), Locke will enlist Ana Lucia’s help in interrogating him. You know what this means: Henry Gale will have met almost all of the LOST survivors’ minority representation. So far he’s had the Iraqi Torturer, the Weird African Beard Trimmer, and now the Trigger-Happy Hispanic Vigilante Ex-Cop. After next week, all he’ll need for the full LOST racial experience will be Jin the Korean Kneecapper coming into his cell and expressing his “extreme disappointment.”

James and John

One last point, and this is a major spoiler: we’re going to find that Locke and Sawyer have some kind of a “surprising connection.” (No, no, not that kind of connection — Sawyer loves Kate, remember?) I’m putting my money on Locke’s kidney-conning “father” also being a con man of Sawyer’s association, possibly even the Original Sawyer who killed his parents. Since LOST is big on biblical allusion (though occasionally getting it wrong), it’s worth noting that Sawyer’s real name is James, and Locke’s first name is John, and in the New Testament, James and John were brothers, the sons of Zebedee who were called to be among Jesus’ first apostles.

Also, what’s Eko building? A church?

Safe on the Sidewalk

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(mo_424_.jpg, uploaded by brownpau.)

A safe, comically upturned with casters in the air at R and New Hampshire NW. I kept expecting Wile E. Coyote to crawl out from under it any moment.

Deacon Daniel

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Congratulations to Daniel, who is now an ordained deacon. For Anglicans, as with Roman Catholics, deacons are clergy ministers, above lay persons in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. They assist the priest in the celebration of the eucharist, minister to the poor in the congregation and community, and get preaching rights. (And by the way, unlike Roman Catholic deacons, Anglican deacons — and priests — are allowed to marry.) Go Go Deacon Daniel!

Back to Kinja

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My Kinja Digest, and HNBP’s Kinja Card.

The new Kinja went completely under my radar when it relaunched, partly because I was in the Philippines at the time, but mostly because all my feedreading had been on Bloglines.

My problem with Bloglines, however, (and this is a problem with me, not with Bloglines) was that I had 252 feeds, (it was over 300 at one point before I did some pruning) and the inbox-like “unread messages” interface became intimidating if I left anything unread for more than a few hours. Treating each new weblog entry from each feed as an individual item to be read became an overwhelming exercise in trying to keep up with a never-ending flow of content, and clicking “Mark All As Read” always left me with a gnawing feeling of having missed something.

I couldn’t keep going like that, waking up with hundreds of unread feeds waiting for me every morning, and then again every evening after work. (Not that and have a life too, anyway.) If feeds are a river, I was drowning in a flood. I had to stop being anxious about missing dozens of unread posts per hour. To badly mangle the river metaphor, you can’t drink a river with a cup; you’re supposed to sit on the riverbank and peacefully watch the current flow — and not try to catch sight of every single boat, beaver, or twig that floats by.

So I’ve switched back to Kinja for feed reading. Tagging has been added, and my old concerns with post-strafing and long pauses between updates seem to have been addressed. (On the down side, batch-editing of subscriptions seems to have been removed as a feature, which makes tagging, deleting, and editing multiple digest links rather tedious, and the AJAX interface is something I could do without.) I can go to my digest and not be pressured by an insanely high “unread posts” count, and now I regard my links as a view that I can occasionally admire, rather than a list of tasks that need to be done.

Kitsch ‘n Ditz Indulgences

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I’m about to tell you something shocking and awful which might cause you to lose a lot of respect for me. If you don’t think you can stand to be terribly disillusioned with the Paulo you’ve come to know and love, stop reading right now.

I have a Livejournal. I use it to paste funny chat transcripts and random stupid images I make or find on the web.

Wait, wait; it gets worse.

I’m also on MySpace. And I revived my Friendster profile, too.

Links to all have been added to Brownpau’s Home on the Online Internet Web. It’s my hope that despite my petty and shallow indulgence in these aspects of internet kitsch ‘n ditz, you may retain at least some of the former esteem with which I was once held before I admitted these horrible secrets.

(The MySpace profile is especially fun to work with, since the customization uses a freeform <textarea> which takes just about any snippet of code, even <style> tags which can override the default profile CSS. Is it any wonder people go so wild with it?)