how now brownpau
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ironically, President Bush’s proposed budget allocates more money for spaceships to the moon, but completely eliminates subsidies for passenger rail service. If that passes Congress, I fully expect that by 2010, a ride to Luna Base One will be far cheaper than the Amtrak Regional to New York Penn Station.
Think of it as checking for lumps: search Google for “phentermine,” “viagra” — or some other common spam word/phrase — along with site:domain.com (replacing “domain.com” with your own website, of course), and you should get a quick slice of possible spam on your weblog which may have slipped through your filters. Kottke.org, for example, has a mild infestation in older entries. More examples.
Old Philippine Embassy building in DC at 1617 Mass Ave NW, now boarded up and unused. The new — and much more modern-looking — Embassy is right across the road from here, at 1600 Mass Ave NW.
Today was Transfiguration Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary, and the gospel at worship service was read by yours truly. I memorized the ESV text of the reading last night, and was able to deliver it this morning in hammed-up, Shatner-esque mode. Despite one slip-up where I almost repeated a verse before I caught myself, I think I managed to pull it off.
But enough about me. More importantly, I want to draw attention to a section of today’s epistle reading from Second Peter, and the ESV text is especially striking:
For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts….
– Excerpt from 2 Peter 1 (emphasis mine)
Are you getting what Peter is stating here? For Peter, the prophetic word is something we have as more sure than his own eyewitness of the voice from heaven. Let that sink in for a bit: the Scripture itself is more certain than the voice from heaven. By the time of this writing, the Epistles of Paul were already known in the churches, and portions of the Gospels, though fragmented, were almost certainly in circulation, and were already regarded as Scripture, of divine origin. It’s this same Scripture that we read in our bibles, and Peter is telling us that this same Scripture holds as much, if not more, assurance for us of Christ’s Sonship than even the Loud, Booming Voice From a Glowing Heavenly Cloud.
I find that as mind-bogglingly amazing as the Epiphany itself.
Now those accursed comment spammers are using quotes from Futurama to obfuscate their junk strings. Do you know what we give spammers? THE CLAMPS!
Yes, the spammers have figured out trackback, and are now pinging our trackback URLs repeatedly with multiple GET requests, littering our old, pingable weblog entries with links to sleazy sites for personal injury lawyers and Texas Holdem Poker. Seeing as how I want to avoid the drudgery of installing additional filtering, throttling, moderation, and other hackage, and since it’s only once in a blue moon that I get an actual trackback ping, I’ve opted to go the path of least resistance and turn off trackback — utterly. No more pingable entries, no more “trackback ping URL” links, no more trackback metadata in my markup, no more mt-tb.cgi. Just comments. Good old-fashioned comments.
Here’s how to utterly remove trackback from MovableType 3.15:
<$MTEntryTrackbackData$>, <$MTEntryTrackbackLink$>, <$MTIfAllowPings$>, etc. (Leave a comment to tell me if I’m forgetting anything.) You want any mention of trackback — visible, linked, or hidden — gone from your weblog.update mt_entry set entry_allow_pings=0;mt-tb.cgi to something without a .cgi extension, .txt or .bak or something. (We do want to keep it around, of course, in case trackback suddenly becomes a feasible idea again in the future. Right?)In 2002, the world of weblogs and comments and trackbacks were built on a culture of trust and openness. How naive we were. And now, the spammers have set DIY weblogging back by at least two to three years.
More material elsewhere:
(If you link to this entry, leave a comment with the URL of your weblog post. See? It’s just like pinging!)