Spammers, Stickers, Shirts, redux

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Heh, my entry on Spammers, Stickers, and Shirts appears to have struck a nerve in Link Spam Land, because I’m being hit with repeated rape/incest/bestiality spam comments, specifically targeted at that single post. Just goes to show: there may be lots of money in illicit mercenary weblog vandalism (I don’t really think of it as “marketing”), but money can’t buy morals.

It’s also worth noting that money couldn’t save Vardan Kushnir.

No Bones, Mo’ Bowels

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So I tried watching Bones last night, and in the first two minutes, the show tries to make you believe that you can see the US Capitol from Dulles Airport (you can’t), that a woman will gladly flash her breasts to get a snooty flight desk clerk’s attention, and that TSA agents will only accost you for the decayed skull in your handcarried luggage — several minutes after you’ve arrived and come out the gates. All this, in an airport which was very clearly not Dulles, nor was it National, nor was it BWI.

I decided to turn off the TV and just wait for something considerably less insulting to the viewer’s intelligence: House, which featured race issues and LL Cool J, with a bad heart and necrotic bowels. Brilliant.

Update: The proof:

Thanks to DCist for the hat tip.

WaPoRati?

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If you scroll down through the Washington Post story I previously linked in the espionage post, you’ll see a little box titled “Who’s Blogging?” with Technorati-powered trackbacks, and a link to more inbound weblog content.

A bold move! Opening up the paper’s online content to the wild, distributed interactivity of the weblog world will attract inbound links from bloggers eager to see their names in the Post, widening readership and possibly increasing revenue from ad clicks; but this also raises the possibility of specific WaPo-critical links — or worse, spam — being published alongside WaPo’s own content. This WeblogsInc report implies that the links will be filtered or moderated, but even considering that, the Technorati deal is still an excellent way to get inbound traffic from weblogs. Great to see the Post freely embracing interactivity with its readership.

(Emphasis on “free,” unlike the NYTimes, which is apparently attempting to alienate its online readership by charging for select content.)

Atheist Debate Bingo

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Somewhat inspired by CatBirdSeat’s Hipster Bingo, (thanks to Raffy for the link) I’ve taken a list of popular fallacies, straw men, misconceptions, and trolls often used by strident atheists in religious discussion, and collected them in one fun game: Atheist Debate Bingo!

You win when you can get intolerant skeptics to trot out all twenty-five memes in one discussion, at which point you should yell “Bingo!” as loudly as possible, especially when in public. (And yeah, I know it’s not strictly the Bingo format, but the numbers rule over the need for a “FREE” middle box in this case.) Phase two will one day involve having each bingo square link to sound theological refutations for each argument. Your suggestions are welcome.

God Hates Fags / Fred Phelps Jesus never existed Problem of Evil Jebus Crutch for the Weak
Salem Witch Trials Opiate of the Masses Women in Church / Head Coverings Jesus was just a great philosopher Can God Make a Rock…
God is Dead Sky Fairy / Imaginary Friend Flying Spaghetti Monster! Virus of the Mind Bible Retranslations Fallacy
Religion as root of violence Baby-dashing in Psalm 137 Da Vinci Code / Magdalenic Sacred Feminine Pat Robertson All religions worship the same god
Problem of Hell/Satan Lost Gospel of Thomas The Inquisition The Crusades God Hates Shrimp

Filipinos Charged with Spying

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Two Filipinos, Leandro Aragoncillo and Michael Ray Aquino, were charged with espionage today, for having shared secret US Government information on the Philippines. Aragoncillo, an American FBI intelligence analyst (of Filipino descent, I’m guessing from the name) seems to have been working for Aquino, downloading and printing classified documents relating to Filipino government officials. Aquino (no relation to Cory) was a senior superintendent in the PAOCTF (Presidential Anti-Organized-Crime Task Force), an Estrada/Lacson institution, and was implicated in the murder of Bubby Dacer. Possibly a conspiracy related to the opposition cabal’s attempts at a power grab?

More in the news:

Probably the first thing that jumped out at me from this story was that Aquino was not initially charged with conspiracy, but was arrested by immigration authorities for overstaying his tourist visa. (In other words, nag-TNT*.) He was found living in Queens. Yes, Queens. Are there nice neighborhoods in Queens, or did he just fancy the “urban decay” chic? It was only later, when Aragoncillo tried to intervene by vouching for his friend, that additional investigation uncovered the abuse of intelligence material. “Pakiusap lang pare, i-print mo yung documents.” **

Update: More from Kingdom of Chaos and Rant Street. Apparently Aragoncillo was half a million dollars in debt. How does one rack up so much debt? Gambling? Buying a mansion with 100% downpayment?

Ping Lacson has already preempted conspiracy speculation by publicly stating he expects the admin to link him to the case. Considering Lacson’s history as a Marcos/Erap crony, Gloria opponent, and crafty political power player, I think it would be imprudent not to implicate him.

PCIJ has more details, including background info on Aquino and Aragoncillo, and a PDF of the official criminal complaint.

The official Lacson press release gives Aquino a nickname of “Ninoy,” attempting to sweeten his reputation via association with a prior Filipino hero, then praises him as a true “Filipino patriot.” Because after all, true Filipino patriots overstay their US tourist visas.

* TNT – tago nang tago, literally, “hide-hide,” referring to some Filipinos’ method of using tourist visas to gain access to the USA, then stay under Immigration’s radar till they can get work.

** “Just do me a favor, buddy, and print the documents.”

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.