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?

Moses and Jesus Action Figures

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Moses Action Figure Jesus Action Figure

I had originally bought the Jesus action figure for the FBCDC White Elephant* Christmas Party, but Amy thought it was a bit too close to being a graven image of Deity much a trivialization of Christ by turning him into a joke and a toy, so I went back to the toy shop and traded Gliding Action Jesus for Moses with Removable Stone Tablets. It’s kind of strange that the profile of Moses on the back of his packaging is so much closer to the Biblical narrative, while the Jesus description is rather noncommittal, with quotes from such sources as the apocryphal gospel of Thomas.

Action Moses ultimately ended up in Pastor Jim’s hands, while I received a little Decision Ball, which I traded with Logan for her 2006 Chinese Restaurant Calendar, from a Chinese restaurant just a block from my new office.

* White Elephant: a Secret Santa style gift exchange of weird-but-useful presents where participants can opt to either (1) get wrapped gifts off the table, or (2) “steal” an already-opened gift from someone else, who must then get another wrapped gift off the table. A gift can only be “stolen” three times before it settles with the third person.

Update: I got Amy’s reasoning on the Jesus action figure wrong, so I corrected them as per her comment. Sorry, my love!

A380 Interiors

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Lots of amazing interior and aerial photos of the new Airbus A380 are up on Airliners.net. It’s a huge, huge plane.

Update: More recent photos from Gizmodo and Airliners.net

Flight deck: 1, 2

Upper deck with ballast tanks: 1, 2

Lower deck with test equipment and cargo: 1, 2, 3, 4 (note the temporary lavatories and champagne boxes)

More stuff: Test crew seating, a lovely overhead view for scale, wing droop.

Boeing has responded with plans for a 747-800 (not to be confused with the 747-800 GigaTop), to which Airbus might respond with the A383.

[crossposted to Metafilter]

Yet More Snowy DC Photos

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I admit it: I was holding off posting new weblog entries and photos because I heard about the coming storm and wanted to wait so I could have an uninterrupted string of winter photos. Sadly, when I woke up at 6am this morning, the snow had turned to sleet, and it was just too nasty outside for me to pick up my National Mall photo run from where I had left off on Tuesday. Instead I paused at snow-covered Dupont Circle on my way to work and took a panorama of the Circle in the long shadows of winter morning (click for huge image):

Snowy Dupont Circle Morning Panorama

I also got this lovely tall photo of the Fountain in snow, actually four horizontal photos stitched vertically for a “simulated wide-angle” effect:

Dupont Circle Fountain

More in the full Dec 2005 Snowy DC photoset.

More Snowy DC Photos

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I went for a walk this morning before work, snapping photos of the National Mall, buildings, memorials, and museums under the modest 2-3 inches of snow that fell last night. My walk went from the the Robert Taft Memorial and the Capitol to the Smithsonian Metro station near the Castle. If I’d gotten up an hour earlier, I could have kept going to Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, but I had to get to work.

The piece de resistance is a north-facing, 16+MP, 180° panorama of the National Mall from near the Smithsonian Castle, Washington Monument at left to Capitol at right: (WARNING: Clicking on this will take you to a large 10152×1648 px image, so it might be a bit of a wait, even on a broadband connection.)

IMG_4085-4087_pano IMG_4095 IMG_4098 IMG_4106 IMG_4107 IMG_4112

See the full photoset: Snowy DC (Dec 2005).

(As an added bonus, on the Metro to work, I got to hear Asian Hymn Singing Guy sing “The First Noel.” Next time I see him, I will try to stand beside him and sing second voice.)

How Performancing and PSPFanboy helped Cheap and Tiny

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Pidgin’s Progress. Raffy, who does the tech-scouting and writing for Cheap and Tiny, has now also been tapped by Weblogs Inc to write for PSPFanboy. Coincidentally, Performancing did a “Monetization Makeover” study on PSPFanBoy just as I was mulling an ad placement redo on Cheap and Tiny, and some of the tips provided were quite useful in my assessment of what to move. See, somehow the synchronicity of it all centers on Raffy, like he was some sort of cybernodal hub. Like Neo.

Anyway, I reviewed the Adsense Heat Map, and re-reversed the sidebar and skyscraper positions on the Yurt template. (Sorry, left-sidebar fans, but that’s where the clicks are.) The top leaderboard, which was vacillating between above-header and below-header positions, has settled for the latter. Finally, given some of the Chitika audit hubbub, I decided to relegate the eMiniMalls units to below-the-fold positions in favor of the more reputable (and more likely to pay) Google Adsense.

It’s worked too. I implemented the changes about a week ago, and click-through and daily average revenue are up. Still pretty meager, since we’re still just in the baby-steps stages, but the improvement is noticeable.

By the way, at the risk of sounding like an overeager self-promotional marketer, do check out Cheap and Tiny; Raffy finds some pretty cool stuff. I had no idea Bluetooth headsets were getting so cheap, for example, and the Totebag Square Micro looks tiny enough to swallow. (In that Totebag entry, by the way, Raffy didn’t know about ZomboCom.)