DC: 9/11/2005

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Today was September 11th, 2005: a Sunday.

As with most Sundays, I started it with church. Here is me in the choir rehearsal room, where the choir practices before and after worship. Flanking me are Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Franz Josef Haydn.

After service a small group of us went to join the DC Unity Walk, an interfaith walk down Massachussets Ave to build peace and friendship among DC’s religious communities — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and others — acknowledging our differences while meeting on common ground to work together for a better city and nation. Pictured above is the Washington Islamic Center. Today was my first time to see inside Hebrew and Muslim houses of worship. Keith from DCDL joined us, and got to see me twist my ankle very painfully outside the Naval Observatory.

Later in the day, I watched Lawrence Schreiber, our choir director and associate pastor for music at First Baptist DC, play a moving 9/11 memorial organ performance at the Kennedy Center Millenium Stage. Wonderful music from a wide gamut of classical eras, plus the premiere of “A Tribute to American Heroes,” an organ composition by Dr. Schreiber himself. His renderings of Myron J. Robert’s “In Memoriam” and Bach’s “Now Thank We All Our God” were my personal favorites.

This lovely scene on the River Terrace presented itself on emergence from the performance: twilight over the Kennedy Center River Terrace.

On my way back to the Metro from Kennedy Center, a fellow choir member from church pointed me to the Safeway hidden in the bowels of the Watergate Hotel — “Senior Safeway,” as the DCist Grocery Politics guide calls it. This saved me the trouble of making a Metro stop elsewhere to pick up rice, broccoli, baby spinach, and Nyquil.

Dinner consisted of baked peppers stuffed with chicken, a recipe I improvised on the fly, thanks to a lovely batch of fresh green and violet bell peppers from Amy’s mom’s vegetable garden. With rice and broccoli, a nice, light dinner to cap off a day of walks, music, and memorials.

Random Update

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Doc Mic has resurrected his weblog, Antifaust.net.

I talked a bit with Raffy last night, and he tells me he’s suffering from problems with Affordablehost similar to mine, only he didn’t lose three days of data, but two months. Which is why his latest entry is suddenly back to July. Thankfully, some of his archives were still in my Firefox “Work Offline” cache, and in the Google cache as well, and I was able to send him raw HTML snapshots of most of the lost content. SpankGranny will live on.

Emeth Hesed Smith is back with a new domain. She once shared a brief reflection on lost love in my comments on that topic, then lapsed into silence on her old domain, eh43.com, and it was feared she was gone forever. Twenty months later, however, she returned.

Russ of MyBrainHurts, one of the first weblogs I ever linked and a key figure in introducing me to Reformed Christianity, is not only back, but engaged.

Ganns has started Husband Chronicles, a weblog on basic life tips, kind of like Lifehacker for single males.

Speaking of Lifehacker, Kottke’s “Popcorn Hacks” has spawned Kottke-inspired Life Hacks.

Nokia 6600

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So, yeah, the Nokia 6600, as I said I’d review three months ago. I got a blemished secondhand unit from an eBay seller, and it arrived in pretty good condition, only mildly scuffed. Since then I’ve found it to be an excellent mobile phone and a passable personal organizer. Let’s start with the good.

The Good:

  • It’s an acceptable combo device. In addition to its cellphone functions, the 6600 is an organizer and handheld computer. It has calendar, to-do list, and notepad applications, and the Series 60 Symbian OS means you can install software, all for half the price of a Treo 650.
  • The Series 60 interface, though a bit more complex than it used to be, is still superior, and I still find it one of the most user-friendly interfaces by far, especially with regard to quick and easy text messaging.
  • I can copy and paste text! Now this surprised me; I thought that by getting a device with a numeric keypad rather than a stylus or keyboard, I’d necessarily be sacrificing the ability to highlight text, but there’s a little text-functions button on the side of the keypad which, when held down with the joystick, will select blocks of text and copy and paste them within a document or between applications, just like any word processor.
  • The camera is pretty decent for its size. Though limited to 640 x 480 pixels, the photo quality is a lot better than the camera on my old Zire 71, and faster.
  • Bluetooth! This is my first bluetooth-enabled gadget, and I still haven’t gotten over the enthrallment of being able to sync with my iBook and transfer files from up to ten feet away.

The Bad:

  • It’s wide. The first thing you notice when you hold the 6600 is that it takes up a lot more horizontal space than an average cellphone, though not as much as a Palm. Still, it’s narrower than the old Globe Telecom Bosch 608 “pancake” I used to have in Manila.
  • The keys are very small and close together, without space between them, often making for difficult texting. At the start, I made a lot of “fat-finger” SMS typos, even with my thin, pointed fingers. Having the keys all scrunched up at the bottom makes lots of space for a giant screen, at least.
  • Some buttons are in strange places, as the 6600 came at a time when Nokia was experimenting with weird keyboard layouts. It’s rather non-intuitive to have the Call, End, Clear, and Menu buttons practically on the sides of the phone rather than in front where they should be. Again, that makes space for the giant screen. I guess I should be thankful this doesn’t have the “combined butterfly” keypad of the 2300, or the “rotary” layout of the 3650. Or worse, I could be sidetalking. Horrors.
  • Image management isn’t so great. Image sizes are limited to 640 x 480 pixels, and cannot be resized down, nor can the camera resolution be changed. (This, by the way, is why I can’t post mobile photos to my weblog right now, as the full size image breaks the layout, and Flickr does not yet, to my knowledge, resize photos posted via email-to-blog.) Images can be rotated while viewing in Gallery mode, but the rotation is not saved. I also have issues with being able to rename image filenames to any length, but having them truncated to 8 characters when sending them via MMS or email — which is why my mobile photo titles on Flickr are never more than 8 characters long.
  • There isn’t a whole lot of free software out there. You’d think that such a popular Linux-based phone would have an active following of open source developers, but I’m just not seeing that much activity on the free software front. There are a few quality free applications out there, though. Perhaps I just haven’t looked hard enough.

All in all, I’m happy with this phone and its Nokia-driven advantages. The Nokia-driven quirks took some getting used to, but they weren’t deal breakers. By this time, the 6600 is an old, outdated model, supplanted elsewhere by faster, sleeker designs, but for now, it serves all the needs I have for a cellphone/combo device: calls, text messages, mobile photos, and personal data organization.

No Gloria Impeachment

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Remember when Manny Villar railroaded the Estrada impeachment by segueing from the pre-session prayer straight to the articles of impeachment without missing a beat? Wasn’t that fun and exciting? A dubious precedent and complete travesty of due process, of course, but still fun and exciting. The same cannot be said for the current attempts by the opposition to impeach Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, which so far have completely failed, in addition to being boring, tedious, and uninspiring. The ensuing protests appear to be halfhearted and noncommittal, a far cry from what we thought would be the start of Edsa 4, scant months ago.

Enrile’s apparent switch really threw me for a loop. I know he supports the shift to parliamentary federalism, but not to the extent that he would leave the “Estrada-Marcos-Poe cabal,” as Willie calls it. I’m not sure it’s a good thing to have Enrile on one’s side.

Anyway, fun things happen when you’re near the top of the list for politically contentious search terms, as evidenced by some of the comments in my “Gloria Resign” entries. The “YOUNG OFFICER” threatening mass resignations is probably fake, which just makes it funnier.

Labor Day in NJ

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(The Union Water Tower uploaded by brownpau.)

I spent the Labor Day holiday up in New Jersey with Amy, soaking in all that the town of Union, NJ had to offer — which mostly consisted of dollar stores and thrift shops. But there was a very nice little Filipino food market and restaurant, and of course, the famous Union Water Tower (photo above), still the tallest spherical water tower in the world.

More photos in the Labor Day in NJ photoset.

Spammers, Stickers, Shirts

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Spamhuntress points to a Guardian story about an unapologetic referrer spammer. The last quote is absolutely precious:

“Why would it be unethical, any more than it is unethical to wear a highly visible company logo on a piece of clothing?”

My response is in the comments:

“Someone tell him to make highly visible red and pink stickers which say TEXAS HOLDEM POKER PHENTERMINE VIAGRA MILF RAPE SEX, then walk around Oslo, randomly slapping those stickers onto people’s clothing without permission, then claim that it’s all perfectly ethical when the mob comes with pitchforks and tazers.”

…Because that’s what referrer and weblog spam is more analogous to. Joe at Spam Chongqing has the shirt.

(By the way, I refuse to use the word splog, any more than I refuse to use words like podcasting, folksonomy, or blog. Okay?)

Update: This entry is now a regular target for revenge spam attacks, which is great, because each spam comes with a bunch of URLs and an IP, all data which help me build a distributed blacklist. At the same time, I regularly delete the spam after using the information supplied, so they get no search engine value out of it. (Not that they get anything anyway, since rel=nofollow has been implemented on my comments.) Just goes to show, spamming might make money, but money can’t buy morals. Or brains.

Relief Comes to New Orleans

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Massive relief is finally arriving in New Orleans. It’s been four days. Government was just far too slow to respond, both locally and federally, and I’m sorely disappointed at the delayed deer-in-headlights reaction we’ve been seeing from FEMA, Homeland Security, and President Bush. It took two days just to get the President to a token Air Force One flyover, while DHS Chief Chertoff denied reports of chaos, State Secretary Rice shopped for shoes and watched Broadway plays, and FEMA Chief Brown implicitly blamed the victims.

To those who say it’s the non-evacuees’ fault for not getting out, remember that NOLA isn’t a wealthy town where everyone has an SUV, ATM card, and family in other cities. Accordion Guy has several sobering questions for those of us who claim we would respond differently in such a situation: “Are we who weren’t in Katrina’s path laughing at the speck in others’ eyes while ignoring the log in our own?” I think what we’re seeing is not just a discrepancy between what government knows about a situation and what’s really going on, but a real disconnect in the way government understands the plight of the urban poor in America.

But enough of politics; I’m glad that relief has come. As for the lawless, the looters, the gangs who roam flooded streets firing their stolen Walmart guns at rescue workers and preying on tourists and helpess New Orleaners, they represent the absolute worst side of humanity that can come out of a disaster, and I hope the National Guard repays them bullet for bullet.

Update: “The cavalry is and will continue to arrive,” said Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, commander of the National Guard. “Is and will continue…” Um, what?

Hurricane Katrina Aftermath Update

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In the News:

In Weblogs:

In Aerial and Satellite Imagery: