Changes

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As you can see, HNBP is back in action, and a few things have changed:

  • All parts of the site (including inside static pages, not just the weblog) now run on Movable Type 3.2, in tandem with a bit of PHP for easier templating. I was partly inspired by Tim Murtaugh’s work on the MT-driven structure of Seed Magazine. Hierarchically, my site is nowhere near that complex, but it was while browsing Seed’s content that I realized it would be a trivial matter to open a separate “Pages” weblog in MT, then have the different sections of my site reside in category folders at the root level, separate from the weblog stream, with the main index published as a simple navigation list.
  • Speaking of navigation, I’ve consolidated non-weblog content into just two sections: About and More. After a review of the pages on my site, I realized that my nav bar could be a lot simpler than it was, so now it is. Probably the only down side is that the links to my Christian testimony and contact info get pushed off the front page, a layer into the site, but a sidebar author bio (coming soon) can fix that with a few links.
  • A split-sidebar brings HNBP into the world of 3-column layouts. Sidebar links, formerly handled by a large and ungainly PHP-parsed text file, are now published in an MT template, augmented by MT-Blogroll.
  • The travel logs have been integrated back into the main weblog stream. I don’t know why I insisted on maintaining a separate “travel” folder of tedious, manually uploaded files for so long, when the weblog itself was a perfectly fine venue for trip narrative.
  • Along the lines of “simplify simplify simplify,” the inside pages currently have an austere, unadorned, bare-bones, plain-vanilla look, which suits me just fine for now.
  • Finally, HNBP has gotten off Affordablehost. It was a great hosting service back in the day, under Tina Peters, but the sale to DotCanada signaled the end of an era, and the multiple server crashes, spotty data backup, poor support, and changes in pricing finally drove me to leave. I’m now hosted with the most excellent Site5.

I have to admit, I reached the brink of switching over to WordPress several times in the process of rewriting the site in Movable Type. WordPress is an excellent publishing solution which gives you a great-looking site, with themability, link management, and non-weblog content pages, all right out of the box — features which MT does not give you without a bit of a struggle and a couple of plugins. Nonetheless, I decided to stick with Movable Type, mainly to reap the benefits of static pages, and to maintain technical familiarity with what is still a versatile and adaptable content management system.

There’s still a lot that needs to be done. My links page is currently a blank slate, and it’ll take me a while to refill that blogroll. More importantly, the photo section is woefully incomplete, and the photolog and travel log are plagued by broken images, as I have not yet finished (1) transferring my old photo albums to Flickr, and (2) updating the image URLs in the archives. That will gradually be fixed. And of course, randomizing CSS layouts are coming back.

So how do you like it? Any issues?

Dive Log, Malapascua Island

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Another cursory entry in the travel log: my dive log from the holiday diving trip to Malapascua. This is mostly here for my own personal posterity. You’ll probably just want to see the lovely underwater photos my brother took.

(1) Isla de Gato
12/27/2005, 10:30 am, 50 mins,
max depth: 70 ft
air used: 2500psi
notes: big seahorse, 3 tiny cuttlefish, 3 white tip sharks

(2) Isla de Gato Sea Snake Sanctuary
12/27/2005, 12:30 pm, 50 mins
max depth: 70 ft
air used: 2500psi
notes: drift dive, no sea snakes, one really big cuttlefish, brave puffer fish which wouldn’t puff for me

(3) Monad Shoal
12/28/2005, 6:00 am, 50 mins
max depth: 65 ft
air used: 2500psi
notes: Very early morning Thresher Shark dive, but came a bit too late. Saw thresher sharks circling in the far distance.

(4) Fish Sanctuary
12/28/2005, 10:30 am, 60 mins
max depth: 60 ft
air used: 2800 psi
notes: mostly small life, small cuttlefish, school of saltwater catfish in cave

(5) Japanese Wreck
12/28/2005, 5:30 pm, 60 mins
max depth: 50 ft
air used: 2500psi
Twilight dive. Japanese wreck in pieces along reef, a few colorful red mandarin fish, got dark during dive, had no flashlight for a night dive, very annoying.

(There was another early morning thresher shark dive at Monad Shoal the last day, but I opted to skip it. The group didn’t see any thresher sharks, but they did see some very large manta rays, but those were subsequently scared off by another group of flailing amateur divers.)

Travel Log: Christmas Holiday in the Philippines, 2005

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JFK-YVR, CX889, A346, 6h15m, 12/20 9:20pm – 12/21 12:35am
YVR-HKG, CX889, A346, 13h20m, 12/21 1:45am – 12/22 7:05am
HKG-MNL, CX901, B773, 2h5m, 12/22 9:10am – 12/22 11:10am

MNL-HKG, CX918, A330, 01/03 5:45pm – 01/03 7:45pm
HKG-JFK, CX830, A346, 01/04 10:15am – 01/04 12:50pm

  1. Flight is out of JFK, so Amy and I fly up to NJ the day before.
  2. The next day turns out to be the day of the New York Transit Strike. The trip to JFK from NJ involves a transfer from NJTransit to LIRR at Penn Station. Gladly, aside from a few security cordons at Penn Station and a taped-off elevator at the Jamaica LIRR Station (still operational, so a bunch of us passengers just slip under the tape), the ride to JFK is uneventful.
  3. A hug and a kiss goodbye to Amy, hop on to the plane, and I’m off to Manila, with a stopover at Vancouver and Hong Kong.
  4. I arrive just around noon in Manila. My brothers pick me up. I spend Christmas in Manila with the family.
  5. A lot of shopping is done at the tiangge. It occurs to me that we Filipinos sure do pump a lot of bad 1980s love music into our public spaces.
  6. After Christmas, we fly to Cebu to go scuba diving at Malapascua.
  7. We come back for New Year. There are many explosions.
  8. I fly back to JFK, but first, a 14 hour layover in Hong Kong. For that, I get a sleeping cubicle at the Traveler’s Lounge.
  9. Amy meets me at JFK. We head back to her home in NJ, where I deliver pasalubong to her family.
  10. Next day, I fly back to DC on the very last Newark-Dulles flight of Independence Air before the company shuts down.
  11. Home. Sleep.

So ends that trip. Click on the thumbs for more photos:

Sorry, my travel logs are pretty cursory when I’m not writing during the actual trip itself, but that’s fine, since I hear people generally hate reading travel logs anyway. Is that true?

Downtime Update

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What with the frequent hardware failures, the loss of my entire database, the lack of full daily backup, the poor support, and the stealthy changes to the user agreement, there’s a lot I could say right now about my former web host, Affordablehost; but really, other irate ex-customers are already saying it:

I’m finally moving everything over to Site5; something I should have done a long time ago, but which I can no longer afford to procrastinate on. Unfortunately, all my weblog backup data is in DC, and I will not be home for a few more days. For now, check out my photos, and watch out for a travel log and a new site in weeks to come.

Update: My digital “art” site, WWTQ, is now a Whyblog.org subdomain. Fitting, since that domain was purchased specifically for a digital art project back in my MICA days.

Update: 14 hour layover in Hong Kong, 16 hour flight to New York, stop in New Jersey, take absolute last Independence Air flight ever from Newark to Dulles, get home, and find that the iBook power adapter is missing. Give me a few more days.

Update: MT 3.2 installed, backups restored, but I’ve been wanting to rebuild all this from the ground up, and now’s my chance for it. More to come.

It’s a Brownpau Holiday Extravaganza!

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If you’re still wondering about possible presents to give in this last week to shop before Christmas comes, remember that Pandora calendars, mugs, and dog shirts are still available, and BTQ shirts and mugs make perfect gifts for the language curmudgeons and philosophy professors in your life. Raffy and I also have a bunch of cool stocking stuffer roundups on Cheap And Tiny:

  • Stocking Stuffers for Dull Misers. USB Optical Liquid Mice with fishies, tiny robots, and the Return of the Ring Thing.
  • Cheap USB Cameras Galore. Skim the part about “lounging naked” before the image sears itself into your brain, and you’ll find some pretty good deals on basic USB webcams.
  • NYTimes.com does cheap and tiny gift list. I was kind of miffed that New York Times would do a story on cheap and tiny gadgets for Christmas and not once even mention us. But it’s a long, hard road to fame and fortune. They’ll notice us one day. You’ll see.

Addendum: Thanks to the Kyriosity line of fashionable merchandise, I now know what “imprecatory” means.

Photo Retrospective: Westmont Village, 1998-2002

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I moved out of my parents’ home in San Juan when I was 21, just a few months after graduating. I was young and reckless and in love, and needed the freedom to make huge life and career decisions out on my own. The place I chose to live was Westmont Village, a highly-compressed modular condominium complex sitting behind a branch of Westmont Bank on Sucat Road, in the middle of Parañaque City, a southern suburb of Metro Manila.

My room (pictured above) had a total area of about a hundred square feet, and was shared with one other person. I took the top bunk. The room was one of three in the condo, whose owner rented them out to workers in need of affordable middle-market housing — usually workers at nearby Ninoy Aquino International Airport. It was somewhat cramped, far from luxurious, without air conditioning or TV, and when it rained, the windows would often leak. Still, it was home to me for three and a half years, with a nice north-facing view of the airport, and just a jeepney ride from my then-girlfriend’s home, and a much longer jeepney + bus ride to work in Makati. (Optionally, I could take the Tamaraw FX shuttle from McDonald’s BF to Landmark Mall, but that cost P35. Sucat-dwellers, you know what I’m talking about.)

The rent? Per month, the peso equivalent of about $50. There were lots of friendly feral cats, too. Full photoset: Westmont Village.

Photo Retrospective: Memories of Manila, 2000-2002

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Talipapa sa Sucat, nighttime Talipapa sa Sucat, daytime

Last night I scanned and uploaded several photos I took of Manila from 2000 to early 2002 with my point-and-shoot Canon Prima BF-800. Now, when I say “Manila,” I actually mean “Metro Manila,” the metropolitan area hugging Manila Bay, consisting of various cities and municipalities, from Valenzuela and Caloocan City to the north, to Parañaque and Muntinlupa, touching Laguna de Bay* to the south. Most of my time was spent in San Juan, where my family lived; Quezon City, where I studied; and Makati, where I worked. Later on I would move out of my parent’s house to be closer to my then-girlfriend in Parañaque (Long story for another day). I rarely went into the City of Manila itself, which was rather crowded and depressed.

Full Photoset: Memories of Manila, 2000 to 2002.

Pictured above is the service road just south of the Sucat Road – South Superhighway interchange. In the daytime, the street was used as a holding area for jeepneys plying the Highway-Kabihasnan route down Sucat Road. At night, fisherfolk and farmers from around the lake would pitch rainbow umbrellas and hawk fish, meat, and fresh produce.

* Laguna de Bay: “Lake of Bay,” where “Bay” is pronounced “Ba-ih,” for the shoreside town of Ba’i. “Bay” was the archaic Spanish spelling. The spelling change has resulted in some confusion among the geographically inexperienced as to whether Laguna de Bay is a lake or a bay. Having no opening to the sea outside of its rivers and tributaries, it should correctly be classified as a lake.

More Hosting Issues (updated)

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My shared server on Affordablehost continues to have persistent database issues, probably from some other user getting DDOS’d or Slashdotted or running infinitely looping database calls. Twice yesterday, my site has jumped into a time warp, first the MySQL databases resetting back to Nov 26, then the whole site resetting back to Dec 12. Then, right after restoring the last two days of content (the last two days of comments are gone, sorry) — but before I could do backup — the database went down again.

It’s all up and running now, and I’ve gotten my backups, but it just highlights how far downhill Affordablehost has gone since they were bought by dotCanada.

UPDATE: It happened again. The db jumped back a day to Dec 13, so that I regained the comments which I thought were lost, but then I lost the last three posts made since last night. This means that they did have db backup to Dec 13, but did not restore it yesterday, opting instead to restore Dec 12’s.

I’m very tempted to ascribe this oversight to malice, seeing as how they very conveniently erased this entry about their incompetence, but someone once said something about not ascribing to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. I’ve restored the lost sites from my cache, but I doubt that the restored posts will even stay up a day, given Affordablehost’s track record. There have been no notifications of downtime, no apologies, no admission of error at any point. Responses from support have been slow and cryptic. The sooner I can migrate, the better. Easier said than done, but this gives me impetus to hurry up. (“Hurry up” meaning it’ll take about two months to get down to it instead of six. Busy busy busy.)

UPDATE: A message from support: “I did some changed from our end, It should be fixed by 4-8 hrs. Please check after that time.”

Good heavens. I sent off this response:

“NO NO NO, please don’t. Last time you “fixed” it, you reset my whole site back by two days and I had to restore from backup. I’ve already fixed it myself. Now that my site is in exactly the state I want it to be, if you “fix” it now, you’ll probably be using two-day-old backups again. Whatever you’re doing to this server, please make sure it doesn’t affect brownpau.com’s db or static files any more. This site is updated every day, and the rate at which you do backups is not keeping up with that.”

Update: Special Axishost deal for Affordablehost refugees! Axishost is Tina Peters’ new web hosting venture.

A Candlelight Carol Service

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IMG_1233_st Early Sunday evening was the Christmas Candlelight Carols Service at First Baptist DC. The choir (of which I am a part), joined the Calvary Baptist Choir, the Friday Morning Music Club, and the Runnymede Singers (no website), to sing such Christmas greats as Gustav Holst’s “Christmas Day” medley (a rather fast and challenging piece) and “Salvation is Created” (English translation of Pavel Tschesnokoff’s Spasyeniye Sodyelal).

Choir was a bit short on tenors, so I moved up from my regular bass/baritone to help out the tenors with the higher, reedier aspect of my voice. Quite a challenge, since the aforementioned pieces have some fairly high tenor parts, which I strained to reach. Thankfully my voice handled it okay without lapsing into a broken “Miss Piggy” falsetto.

Probably the funniest part of the evening came just five minutes before the service started, while we were sitting in the back of the sanctuary, preparing for the processional. Jeff, our hyperactive always cool and impeccably composed operations guy, suddenly came up to me and David Hughes, one of the other tenors (great guys, both of them, I must tell you about these people some day), and told us to hurry back to the narthex ASAP. You must remember, we were just a few minutes from the processional, but we went back to the narthex anyway, where those long candle lighter rods were handed to us and hurriedly ignited, and we were told that we would be the candle-lighting acolytes for the evening, since whomever was in charge of such affairs had forgotten to get altar boys/girls to do it, and we were already in choir robes, so we would look acolyte-ish.

So David and I processed to the front of the church, and lit the candles on the chancel, by the pulpit, and on the Advent wreath. It’s clumsy, annoying work, because the flame on the candle-lighting rod thingy (someone tell me what the ecclesiastical name for it is, please) is extremely tiny, and must be held to the wick for a long time to transfer flame. It didn’t help that the wicks on the pulpit candles were new and untrimmed, so they needed extra-long heating. Plus, we forgot that it was the third, and not the fourth, Sunday of Advent, so we lit four of the Advent candles by mistake.

All this happened in front of the waiting congregation. It was like a second childhood. A sudden and exhilarating, horribly, embarassingly, exposed second childhood.

But we pulled it off, and hurried back to the narthex, and everyone was happy for our acolyte work, and we joined the choir and processed, and the music went swimmingly, and our pastor’s reading of Luke’s Nativity went wonderfully as he read it by candlelight held by two young acolytes as they slowly walked from the back of the church to the front. (Acolytes too young to handle lighting the candles David and I lit at the start of the service, I suppose.) And if you missed it, well, too bad, but next Christmas will be First Baptist DC’s 50th Candlelight Carols service, so I’m telling you to mark your calendars for it now, okay?