I flew up to New Jersey for the weekend to go kayaking with Amy and her folks, and now I’m rather busy with several projects, at work and at home. Will be back soon with some words on introversion, moblogging with Flickr, Spiderman 2, and my new nephew! Yes, I’m an uncle now. More on that in a couple o’ days.
“Gross National Slur”
Dear Philippine Government,
Filipino taxpayers do not pay you to waste time advertising your thin-skinned pettiness by drafting official statements about jokes made by foreign comedians following the shameful servility you exhibited to the world in the face of terrorist intimidation. Get back to work, because you may soon have a rash of kidnappings of Filipinos to deal with, both locally and abroad, inspired by your response to the Khaled bin Al Walid Brigade.
That horrible Jay Leno, making political jokes at other countries’ expense! Clearly, joking about the Philippines’ obsequious appeasement makes Leno a swashbuckling Bush apologist!
I sure hope Leno’s writers get wind of these reports: it could make comedy gold for minutes on end. Welcome, Philippines, to the “laughing stock of the world” box. For the next fifteen minutes, you get to sit beside France. (Sarcastic, double-edged link intended. Besides, Leno isn’t so funny; Conan is where the good stuff is.) And Leno gets to join Claire Danes and Howard Stern in the panoply of American celebrities who have managed to raise the all-too-easily inflamed ire of Filipinos’ media-induced public opinion.
Meanwhile, Filipino troops have finished vacating Iraq, with still no official word from the terrorists on the hostage’s condition. Antiwar and anti-American ideologues are hailing the pullout as an act of “defiance” to US interests on Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s part, but defiant courage had little to do with it so much as the fear that a hostage’s head might be cut off by a gang of hooded kidnappers. Right action, wrong reasons, all too late.
Update: Hostage freed! Praise God for little blessings. Now prepare for the onslaught.
oneMoTime
Good news: (Yay!) The mobile blog, aka “Mobrownpau,” is back, running on Blogger via my GSM phone. Right now it’s on a default template; that will change when I have time to work on it.
Bad news: (Boo!) Blogger’s email-to-post feature can’t take image attachments from MMS, so I’m limited to plain text entries just like I was on the now-defunct AIM Bloggerbot.
Good news: (Yay!) Seeing a tip from Matt, I re-registered with Flickr, and found that posting of photos to blogs — to mobrownpau, in this case — is so easy and seamless that it’s amazing. Exactly the solution I’ve been needing.
Bad news: (Boo!) I can’t get the name “brownpau” on Flickr! Apparently some kind of db hitch kept the username “taken” after I deleted the old account. Or worse, there’s also the slim chance that someone else registered it; WHO COULD BE SO EVIL?! At the very least, my People and Photos pages bear the proper alias. (Update: Just got a message from Stewart, and it’s all fixed: I have my username back. Yay!)
So until I can get this Flickr screen name issue straightened out with support, I won’t be participating in any “friending” activity there; right now I’m on it for the moblog capability. And it certainly is capable; photography, hand in hand with social networking — what a fantastic community idea. Admittedly, the Flash-based rich media chat feature is a bit intimidating to me, and it bogs down older machines’ performance considerably, but the interface — free and open drag-and-drop realtime photo sharing via an IRC-ish interface — is defining the shape of things to come I smell the future in this venture, and it is spicy with the scent of promise.
Google knows it too, I think. That’s why they acquired Picasa. Big things are on the horizon.
I Win
(Just fooling around with output from the Safety Sign Builder. Feel free to use it for anything; I uploaded it to Imageshack, so it’s not my bandwidth.)
I Do Not Feel At All Well
Reminder to self: never, ever get the Decaf Iced Mocha at Starbucks 21st and P St NW ever, ever again. Ever. The only thing keeping this heat-induced, over-flavored migraine at bay is the large quantity of acetylsalicylic acid in my veins.
Watch Repair
Just got my old watch — a 14 year old Casio Quartz dive watch I’ve had since high school — fixed and tuned up by a sociable old timepiece artisan in Downtown Washington. Full service: new leather strap, new battery, and a new O-ring, with waterproofing gasket gel, all for cheap. (Well, cheap for DC, anyway.) So if you’re in DC and need a watch fixed, check out the shoe/watch/clock repair shop at 18th and H NW, right across the street from Farragut West Metro, near the World Bank.
Update: For Dupont Circle area people, there’s also a jeweler and watchmaker at 17th and R NW, right by Steam Cafe.
(Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.)
Never Saw the Sun…
I’ve been trying my hand at some Mars Rover color imagery, pasting pancam images into Photoshop channels and tweaking colors (with cues from some cool BABB advice and Keith Laney’s pancam calibration page) to approximate how the human eye might see the surface of Mars. The first time I tried combining channels from Spirit’s photos of the Columbia Hills, I was startled at how blue the sky turned out. I still can’t hold a candle to Keith Laney’s work on the Spirit and Opportunity pancam images.
(Title reference: Blue Skies.)
Interruptus
Pinoy troops are pulling out, and apparently Angelo de la Cruz is heading home. His family must be so happy; I wish I could say the same for the rest of the Philippines’ overseas workers in the Middle East.
Update: Oh look, he’s not heading home. But do not worry, those honorable, honorable Iraqi “militant” “insurgent” “freedom fighters” can always be trusted to keep their word, right? That’s why we’re obeying them!
- When one yields to blackmailers, they tend to keep coming back for more.
- The Philippines will reap this.
- I worry that the Philippines is about to learn a harsh lesson about paying the Dane-geld. (Actually, I wonder if the Dane-geld analogy is more applicable to the UN Oil for Food scam. And the antiwar folk wanted the UN to handle Iraqi liberation? ;)
- Mollycoddling Milksops of Manila. (Caveat: Malkin. What? Malkin is Filipina?! That’s horrible! ;)
- Nice work, Philippines. We’ll be sure to put you on speed dial right next to France, Spain and Dr. Kevorkian when we need help.
- Wala na talaga yong development aid. (Well we shouldn’t have been sending troops to Iraq with the motive of getting development aid or currying American favor; it’s supposed to be with the altruistic aim of helping to rebuild a broken country. Yup, that was it, wasn’t it? Of course. Riiight.)
- GMA’s decision may be a sign of withdrawal of confidence from the Bush government. (I’d agree if we had begun pullout as soon as it was evident that WMD presence and the Iraq-Al Qaeda link had been debunked, but to do it the way the Philippines did it cannot be interpreted in any way but as a response to terrorist pressure, and the fault for that lies squarely on the terrorists’ and GMA’s shoulders, not Bush’s or America’s.)
- Wages of Capitulation.
- Sipadan.
CVS and CSS
“Welcome to CVS Pharmacy! You can only view our website with a dangerous, buggy, unstable, nonsecure, feature-poor web client with patchy and inconsistent CSS and standards compliance, or with the outdated browser of a former AOL subsidiary with even worse standards support. Sure, we could code for all browsers with web standards and get more visitors and revenue that way, but we’d rather restrict our options with lots of stupid proprietary tag soup, then equivocate about the CSS and security ‘benefits’ in our ‘Upgrade’ Notice. You’ll have to close Safari and Opera and open up something else to get your CVS Extracare card, loser!”
Update: Hmmm, looks like it works in Firefox and Safari now. But still not in Opera.
CVS Pharmacy is not to be confused with CVS, Concurrent Versions System.
Update: Also see Waxy.org on the new Allmusic.com.
From Google to Me
Found via Kottke: Matt asks, “How many links from Google to you?” in what promises to be the next big navigational meme of the moment. Without using search fields, how many clicks does it take to get to your site from the Google home page? It’s 8 clicks for me, via the directory:
Google > More > Directory > Internet > On The Web > Weblogs > Personal > B > Me.