how now brownpau
(Me Graduating uploaded by brownpau.)
This is my graduation from Ateneo de Manila in 1998. (Yeah, I was pretty thin and slouchy back then.) The graduation “celebration” dinner that followed was something I don’t remember with much fondness.
The next time I would shake hands with Father Nebres would be seven years later.
(Playing with a Peacock Feather 2 uploaded by brownpau.)
Peacock feathers come a close second to laser pointers for “most effective way to drive your cat crazy.” Styrofoam packing peanuts are a possible third. Are they okay for cats to play with?
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!
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
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.
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):
I also got this lovely tall photo of the Fountain in snow, actually four horizontal photos stitched vertically for a “simulated wide-angle” effect:
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.)
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.)
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.)
Some hubbub going around over the Chitika revenue audit: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
I’m not giving up on Chitika completely myself. I lost nothing in the October audit, though the total income for that period was barely enough to get a Grande Decaf Skim Mocha with extra whipped cream. I’ll stay for another month or two, but these conditions must be met: speed up the audit-and-update process, allow multiple domain channels, get on a real dedicated server (not VPS), and for crying out loud, change the revenue interface to allow monthly viewing. Twenty days at a time is not an optimal range. Oh, and send me a paycheck, of course. If they haven’t done that by the time February rolls around, I’m writing Chitika off as a scam. And that’s being quite generous.
Just a light dusting tonight, with a bit more on the way:
(Snow.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
I’ve also just finished uploading my older photos of DC in the snow from 2003 to 2005: see Snowy DC (Dec 2003), Snowy DC (Jan 2005), and Theodore Roosevelt Island in Winter. (Last winter came a bit late, didn’t it?)
I’m especially fond of this one I took in 2003 with the old Zire 71, of an NPS guide at Lincoln Memorial:
First snowflakes from the approaching system are starting to fall, but it’s too light to even be considered flurries. Temperature is in the mid 40s, so nothing would stick, but that’ll change later this afternoon to early evening. DC should be under a picturesque winter blanket by tomorrow morning.
Is it Metro Buffet Day or something? At Union Station, a man was brazenly eating an everything bagel with cream cheese while waiting for the Red Line, and at Farragut North, I saw someone on the train with a glass of iced tea. Not a fastfood cup or a tumbler, mind you, but a glass. Of iced tea. With a slice of lemon in it. He sipped from it as though he were sitting on a porch in Alabama, watching the sun set.
One of these mornings, you should go get a sausage+egg+cheese bagel from Bagels Etc. on P Street between 21st and 22nd St NW. Just go. Do it. The Asian family behind the counter runs a tight ship, with a lightning-fast assembly line that delivers food to you like clockwork. Seriously; it’s fun to watch them at work.