Zire Straits

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I’ve had a Palm Zire 71 for over a year now, and it’s been a decent multiple-use handheld. In addition to the standard Palm OS features, it also includes a digital camera and music capability, both of which function acceptably. The camera, though not drop-dead exquisite, produces good enough photos for 0.3MP; while music playback, though quite soft on the default MP3 player, can be ramped up with PTunes or AeroPlayer.

Anyway, after a year with the Zire 71, I noticed that the last batch of photos — the cherry blossoms — was looking rather hazy in places, and a close look at the handheld’s camera revealed the problem: a miniature dust bunny (or perhaps pocket lint) had gotten between the glass window and the camera lens. That’s what was causing the hazy diffusion.

At this point, I’m well past warranty, so PalmOne’s official Zire 71 repairs will set me back at least $125 — which I estimate to be about the resale value of this handheld in its current condition. Another riskier option, but also much more fun, is to take the unit apart and clean it myself: an exciting, no-holds-barred, all-or-nothing gambit.

So what’s a handheld user to do? Get it repaired at exorbitant rates, sell it as “slightly defective” for a dusty camera lens, or disassemble it? (The last option is the most tempting, I must say.) In any case, if I get rid of the Zire 71, I may opt to settle for an older, cheaper handheld for the time being, just for simplicity’s sake. (Well, in truth, to tide me over till a decent smartphone falls within my price range.)

Update: Also posted to AxMe.

CVS Brats

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About 9am this morning: four boys, early teeners, Hispanic-looking, wait outside CVS Dupont Circle, sitting on the rails near the entrance. When you exit the store, one of them will come up to you with a $5 bill and ask you, “Excuse me, sir, can you go back and buy me a patch, I can’t go in there, and I really need it,” then, as you splutter for some kind of meaningful response, his three cohort brats from the sidelines will start laughing — pretty forced, throaty, kiddy cartoony laughs, actually — at your discomfiture. They will keep laughing at you from there even as you walk away in annoyance, and they will try to make sure that their high-pitched, broken-voiced kid laughs carry as far as possible down P St.

Well, I guess it’s a bit more savvy than rocks.

Sniffing out Page 23

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Tracking the Page 23 Meme to its source, starting from where I first saw it:

OKCalvin < Tulipgirl < Thinklings < Jared < Elfin Ethicist < Limey Brit < Woodlief < Collected Miscellany < Caterina < David Chess < Long Story Short Pier < Elkins < Happy Potterer < Sternel (fails to credit, but leaves hint in comments) < Peg Kerr < Kij < Chris < Bob Howe < Silvertide < Sentimental Curmudgeon < Tully Monster’s Fair and Balanced Fossil Record < Paintbrush Sage < Cyn < Seamus D.

Deep into LJ territory, the trail abruptly ends, with Seamus D reattributing the meme back to Tully, who in turn cross-attributes it to BluishOrange, whose trail returns through the A-listers to Seamus D. This trail was also sniffed by CrushingKrisis (Wish I’d seen that earlier, *kick self*). Unfortunately, neither the Google cache nor the Wayback Archive have mirrors of Seamus D’s entry, so the source is lost to the ages.

Update: Or is it? Some LJers have been meme-tracking in plaintext, starting from Andpuff’s list, we can pick up a new trail to: Ranger Rick < Stone Mirror < Artistic Chaos, who points to Cynaguan as having taken the first question in Paigh’s survey post, and changed it to the “23/5” format.

Imagine that. It all started as one of those mundane email surveys posted to someone’s LJ.

(Oh, my results? Well, the nearest “book” to me is The Scarlet Letter, but it’s in Palm DOC format, so there aren’t any “pages” or “lines” in CSpotRun, so I’ll pass on the meme, thanks. ;)

Update 2: Duh, it was done, and researched, and concluded. Even tracking the meme is a meme in itself, I suppose.

Run and Soak

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Summer-y weekends are here, and I spent Sunday after church mostly outdoors: skating to Da Hua for siomai and rice crackers, and going for a run down the National Mall. I have neither gone running nor been in hot weather since last summer, so my embarassingly less-than-optimal condition manifested itself in an ever-slowing pace — though I at least managed to sustain a jog-like pace from the Capitol to Lincoln Memorial. Um, not counting traffic lights.

The National World War II Memorial is almost complete, and with the former Rainbow Pool properly dammed and paved, the NPS has seen fit to refill the Reflecting Pool with fresh water. I caught it at a good time; the water was clean and clear (unlike in previous years where it has been either muddy and mossy or else completely absent) and tourists eagerly waded in to cool off. There is nothing quite like finishing off a hot afternoon run with a cool foot soak between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. And inquisitive ducks coming up to you to see if you have tourist crumbs to offer.

Ouch. Now my thighs ache.

Slam, Boom!

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People were quite livid that a “SLAM” and a “stink” stunk of anti-Muslim bigotry, but where was the outrage over suicide bombers on Star Trek? Or could it have been simply because B.C.’s Gary Hart is Christian, and is therefore, like Mel Gibson, an easy target for such unqualified derision? (Yes, yes, an old issue, but seeing Enterprise reruns on tape brought it to mind.)

Yank the Wonk, Jump in the Swamp

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If you’re tired of all the buzz, hype, and ado over the Denton Empire’s Gawker-like DC blog (and even if you’re not), then check out Swamp City, who’s been running the DC news-and-gossip bloggage circuit for a season longer. (Actually, Wonkette cites Swamp City as a source and helper, so they’re probably not clawing at each other’s faces the way we sometimes wish whey would. <g> Swamp City deserves the recognition.)

Two To-Do-List Checkmarks

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Consummatum est: the websites of Electromedia and Imagineers are back up, two of the first professional* commercial websites I ever worked on. Once, they were entombed in Flash menus, frames, nested tables, and buggy HTML — wrought by my own hand! Today they are resurrected: PHP-driven, faster, tighter, gloriously robed in XHTML and CSS. (To save time and energy, however, I made it a point to use the graphics from older iterations, since those were still good for use, embossed and drop-shadowed though some of them may have been.) Whew. That’s two sites out of the project bottleneck. Feels good.

* (Well, there was also MyPhilippines.com before them, but my work on that was hardly “professional,” I admit with great shame.)

Khaaan

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“I shall leave you as you left me, marooned for all eternity, in the center of a dead planet, buried alive, buried alive…”

“KHAAAN!!!”

A definitive Shatner moment forever immortalized. (Link via MeFi.)

Update:

Pardon Who?

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(Update: Arnold just pointed out that Philippine elections are May 10, not 20. I don’t know how I missed that. Maybe it was from thinking of 2010. And I think Erap really does have Gloria dancing in the palm of his hand: she even sent him a penholder for his birthday. Update: And golf carts! What a sellout.)

Remember this? Estrada out to delay trial until 2004, in hopes that the elections would install a more lenient loyalist administration. Well, it seems to have worked. Here we are, three weeks to May 2010, and Estrada can’t wait to be set free, he’s milking Gloria’s populist-oriented opportunism for all it’s worth, and playing her like a kulintang.

If Gloria loses to FPJ, and she and/or her husband gets arrested for corruption, will they get the same treatment, I wonder? Will Lacson pursue his “Incredible Hulk” case for the opposition considering how they treated him in favor of Da King?

(Okay, just to recap: Roco’s Denouement, Wife vs Puppet, and Bro Eddie’s Chance, and this. Barring the likely event of some other massive development, this is probably my last post on the May 2010 Philippine elections until, well, May 2010. I’ve just had a lot to get off my chest since I started moderating politics on Pinoyexchange.)