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.

Squirrels Attack Dog

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IMG_3877SQUIRRELS. Cute critters though they may seem when you see them scurrying about parks and trees, but their sinister side is never too far off: a pack of squirrels allegedly killed a stray dog in Russia, after a pine cone shortage drove them to extremes. And not just that, but they’ve been known to go after birds. And I need not remind you of my own close brush with Flying Squirrel Death when I encountered the Supreme Court Attack Squirrel. So now we know why White House grounds staff put out nut feeders: it keeps the murderous buggers off us and our pets!

Beware. A nearby squirrel may already have its eye on you.

Review: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was an okay film, but the stress of condensing 700+ pages of story into 2+ hours of movie showed strongly, so the storyline felt a bit rushed, with the sensation that many pieces were missing. [spoilers, highlight to read] We hardly saw Sirius Black outside of a few letters and a 3D fireplace cameo. Cho Chang was relegated to the background, a passing ball proposal added as an afterthought to the owl tower. Draco Malfoy got little screentime beyond his weasel scene with Professor “Moody.” I wondered why the screenplay, with so much cut from the book, actually added to the climactic buildup to Cedric Diggory’s death, having him speak a bit more and pose a bit before being felled by the Avadra Kevadra. One could have shaved precious seconds from that, as well as from various action scenes and Moaning Myrtle’s antics, to better pad more important aspects of the plot, and perhaps move Cedric’s character development to other parts of the story.

Still, the important aspects of Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s tense coming-of-age were explored, and the film just barely managed to maintain its narrative cohesiveness. Nonetheless, I wasn’t as impressed with the HP4 movie; any one of the last three films exceeded this one for overall enjoyability.

I would write more, but I found that Raffy has said everything I was thinking already.

Stand Far From Disembodied Head

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Photos from my Thanksgiving weekend trip to visit Amy and her folks in NJ have been mixed into the full NJ/NYC Nov 2005 photoset. We were looking at some of my older pre-Flickr albums and I realized I really need to get all these things in one place.

For now, enjoy this safety sign on the NJ Transit Bus, depicting the proper distance you should stand from the hat-wearing disembodied head at the top of the stairs.


(Stand Far From Disembodied Head Wearing Cap uploaded by brownpau.)