SixApart Redesigns

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Six Apart (Movable Type’s parent company) has redesigned their site. It looks pretty good, it degrades nicely, and nothing gives me a more overwhelming sensation of change than that new Livejournal section in the 6A top menu.

The drop-shadowed, fixed-width, “vertical layer floating over textured or solid background” effect seems very much in demand these days: Blogger, Powazek, StopDesign, Sidesh0w, just to name a few — and now Six Apart. Is it just me, or is every site redesign starting to look like Happy Cog?

In fact, the width of Six Apart’s main container div is exactly the same width as the Blogger Dashboard. Observe: Animated comparison of Blogger and Six Apart designs.

Update: It’s with some chagrin that I correct myself: Sidesh0w is not fixed width, and if I’d just bothered to wiggle my browser window a bit, I’d have seen it for myself. There’s a new CSS trick I need to master.

Valentine’s Day Bus Bombings

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I sign on, and Mic messages me that there have been bus bombings in the Philippines: in Makati, General Santos, and Davao. Abu Sayyaf has claimed responsibility. I just talked to Mom on the phone, and the family’s all okay at home.

(Updates will be posted to this entry as I see them. Leave a comment if you’ve written something about this.)

Reports: Manila Times, Inquirer, ABS-CBN News, Sun Star, AP via CBS News, BBC.

Five years ago, I would have said that the Abu Sayyaf have accomplished only their own final demise, but we know better now, don’t we? People will die, there will be mourning and outrage, fingers will point, politicians will grandstand, bombs will fall, and at the other side of it, things will be the same. Before I go on, this is not a “give peace a chance” platitude, but a simple statement from past experience: the Philippine government has neither the resources, motivation, or integrity to get rid of terrorists. Years later, the Abu Sayyaf and the MILF are still there, killing Filipinos.

More from ClickMoMukhaMo, Kanto Girl, In Retrospect, and ongoing discussion at PinoyExchange.

Chaos in Makati. If I were still working in Makati, I would probably have been hunting for a Sucat bus at EDSA-Ayala Terminal, right at the time of the explosion.

“There’s a Bomb on the Bus,” and Ayala Incident: two bloggers who passed through the EDSA-Ayala area just after the explosions. Monique was almost there.

Monica has some fuzzy pictures from the location. T0nichi heard it, and thought at first that it was thunder. Lynn could have been driving right through EDSA-Ayala at the time of the explosion. TwistedKamote has details on which buses were damaged: northbound Fairview and Novaliches buses, apparently. Alexandra contacted two friends who were in the MRT station directly above the bombing at the time.

Willie Galang was in Glorietta when he saw the mob of people running through the mall.

Not So Easy Greens

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I bought a bottle of Odwalla Superfood “Easy Greens,” just to tide me over between lunch and dinner yesterday. It’s thick and goopy and grainy and green, and the taste is strongly evocative of the ripe, heady waters of Manila Bay at peak Red Tide season. Here are the ingredients on the label:

Apple Juice, Peaches, Mangoes, Strawberries, Bananas, Spirulina (1230 mg), Soy Lecithin, Open Cell Chlorella (240 mg), Royal Jelly, Wheat Grass, Barley Grass, Wheat Sprouts, Jerusalem Artichoke, Lemon Bioflavonoid, Nova Scotia Dulse, and Soylent Hippie (may contain trace amounts of patchouli).*

Get used to it, folks; if the blurbs on the labelling are to be believed, after Peak Oil, Peak Meat, Peak Dairy, and Peak Soy, this will be the Food of Tomorrow!

* Humor. Did not contain hippie, and it didn’t taste half bad.

With Fr. Nebres

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Me and Fr Nebres

Here’s me with Father Bienvenido Nebres, SJ, president of my alma mater. He was at the Philippine Embassy tonight to promote Gawad Kalinga to the local Fil-Am community, so of course the local Ateneo Alumni Association was all there to greet him. In the background is Albert Del Rosario, Philippine Ambassador to the USA.

(In my hand is Fr. Nebres’ report on addressing Philippine poverty, a lovely piece of print work designed by an old colleauge, Ali, whom some of you Ateneans may now know as Mr. Figueroa from the Philosophy Department.)

More photos from the evening:

IMG_1379 IMG_1397 IMG_1398 IMG_1401

Non-Emergency Response

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non-emergency-response

A bit of hubbub at 21st and P St NW yesterday, with hordes of firetrucks, hazmat teams, policemen, and other emergency response personnel laying down flares and blocking off the intersection. Before I could ask anyone what was going on, however, they started clearing out, and within five minutes the firetrucks were gone and the streets were open again. False alarm, I guess.

Cho_Ree

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A brief, annoyed aside.

(“Cho_Ree” from Pinoyexchange, I know you read this occasionally, and since your email address is untended, and the PEX thread in which you were attempting to spread nasty rumors about me and my girlfriend has been locked and your posts in it deleted, I’m just going to say it here: I think you’re a spiteful, hateful idiot. But I’m glad no one takes you seriously anyway, thanks to your own blithering incoherence and spittle-flecked anti-Semitism.)

Everyone else, move along, nothing to see here.

Oh Two Two Oh Oh Five

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Late last month, I realized that this coming May would mark two years since my graduation from MICA. My “artistic” output has, of course, dropped since then, and what good is a Master’s degree in Digital Art if you don’t use it for something? So, to get back in the habit of creating, I committed myself to the task of publishing at least one new digital piece per day through the entire month of February 2005.

I then promptly forgot about it till February 2, but I caught up with myself, and have been going at it for over a week now. The name of the project is “022005”, and it can be found on WWTQ. As an added bonus, digital art pieces which easily scale to the desktop can be downloaded as desktop wallpapers.

022005. Enjoy, and check back everyday till the 28th for a new piece.

NAIA from Above

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Just found two lovely photos of Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport (airport code MNL) and environs, seen from high above by Airliners.net contributors: this one looking downward and northeast, encompassing Makati, Taguig, Pasay, and Baclaran; and this one looking towards the south horizon, with Bicutan, Sucat, Alabang, Laguna de Bay, and even bit of Makiling and Taal in the distance. Large JPGs, but worth the load if you live in the area and want a clear bird’s eye view.