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.)

Chitika Auditing Hubbub

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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.

Observations on the Trip to Work

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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.

Mount Vernon by Candlelight 2005

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The Mansion I hadn’t originally planned on joining my church group to this year’s Mount Vernon by Candlelight, but seeing that the tour comes highly recommended, and since I hadn’t yet been to Mount Vernon (George Washington’s estate to which he retired after the presidency), I decided at the last minute to tag along. I did not regret it. Tour guides showed us what the estate was like at Christmastime in the 1790s, and actors and actresses within the mansion portrayed such persons as Martha Custis Washington and Tobias Lear, providing a convincingly immersive historical experience.

Washington Scultpure in Profile Salthouse Sewinghouse Overseer's Quarters Shoemaker's Bench Slave's Quarters

The full Mount Vernon by Candlelight 2005 photoset. Forgive any blurriness; it was nighttime, after all.

Photography was not allowed inside the mansion, but I did get a few exterior shots, and the various outbuildings were also interesting. I’ll have to come back to this place in the daytime someday, to check out the art hanging on the walls of the mansion, and to see other parts of the estate in a warmer season.

Photo Retrospectives

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Still on the topic of Flickr, you may have noticed a bunch of old photos starting to appear in my photostream. I’ve been scanning the original prints from my point-and-shoot film camera days (1996-2002) and uploading them to retrospective photosets. There’s a lot of duplicate material which gets only low-res treatment in the old photos section, which now I’m happy to be able to show full size in its original state, without all the tedious and amateurish image “enhancement” I used to apply to each and every photo. This also gives me the chance to show off long-forgotten pictures which predate my photolog.

Sailing to Fortune Island

I think this is from an April 2001 dive trip at Fortune Island. The passage from Cavite to Fortune is usually pretty rough, but it was really nice that day. I also had an artsy grainy B/W version of this shot.

Tempering my YahooFlickr Cynicism

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I come across as fairly cynical in my brief history of Yahoo acquisitions with regard to Flickr’s prospects for brand survival. On consideration, however, $24.95/year is still a great price for unlimited image storage, 2GB upload bandwidth per month, and an excellent dynamic interface to upload, organize, and share photos. So long as (1) the interface maintains its quality and continues to improve, (2) I can keep remote loading Flickr photos from my weblog, (3) image URLs don’t break, and (4) uptime stays consistently decent, I can stay with Yahoo-Flickr.

But if they block remote loading like they did with Geocities, things will get very ugly. (I mean that literally; broken image icons all over the place are not pretty.)

Of course, I may just be rationalizing, since I have over 1,400 photos already on Flickr, and am still adding more, and backup plus reorganization at this point would be a major pain.

What? December Already?

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It was cold and windy yesterday. I slept in most of the day thanks to nagging nasal congestion, but felt good enough in the afternoon to brave chill and wind to get some work done. Temperature was at freezing (32°F) by the time I left the office last night, with a stiff wind biting right through my layers. And to think that just two weeks ago, we were in the 70s. See what my thermometer has been saying (upper reading is from the outdoor probe sticking out the window):

Mid-November Late November Early December
Low 70s Low 40s Mid 20s

(For you Celsiusites, that’s about 22°C, 6°C, and -3°C respectively. I plan to call this Temperature Blogging, or “TLOGGING.” It’ll be so revolutionary.)

As with the year before last and the year before that, it looks like the season’s first snow will be coming on or around the 5th of December, though it may not be a blanket and it’s going to be a blanket.