How Now?

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If you are reading this, then the transplant was a success.

I apologize for my long internet absence. It was not my intention to leave you comfortless for such an extended interval, but I was loath to release an incomplete site, and could not bear to emerge from the dust of rebuilding until everything was… just… so.

Major changes follow.

  • The “hownow” subdomain, in addition to reinforcing the “brownpau” brand, is also part of an effort to organize and modularize hosted projects and site content, with the “hownow” section devoted to personal text, pictures, and weblog material. More projects are in the pipeline, struggling amongst themselves to rush out of a narrow time-and-focus bottleneck.
  • Weblog archives now publish as single entries. The decision to switch to individual posts was a long and conflicted one. My preference for monthly archives was rooted in the desire to show posts within a temporal, narrative context; but a monthly listing is long, slow, tedious, and bandwidth-intensive, and anchored permalinks — textual or numeric — proved unreliable and confusing. Additionally, trackback pings sent out for date-based archives carried nonstandard numeric anchors, a default which could not be changed to the dirified title anchors that I preferred. Individual entry links fix this problem, giving each entry its own easily identifiable page, with comments and trackbacks all integrated. Monthly archives remain, but only as entry excerpts linking to full entries. With enough coding, you too can have future-proof and cruft-free MT archive URLs.
  • New CSS on inside pages. Initial inspiration for the design came from the introductory header box at the top of Andy Budd’s blog. A fixed-width layout was settled on, for simplicity’s sake, and the header-nested vertical nav menu came soon after.
  • I was startled to realize that one can easily link to PHP scripts as CSS files with dynamically generated content, using header to declare a crafty “Content-Type: text/css.” This bodes well for the return of randomizing blog layouts.
  • As has been stated elsewhere: Georgia. It’s the new Verdana.
  • More coming soon. It’s been a busy interval.

Lions, Saints, Rainbows, Oh My

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Stitched panoramic view of E Street side of the White House from the Zero Mile Marker, tourists and all. Amy to right.

One of Canova’s lion sculptures, guarding the Corcoran Museum.

From the Corcoran collection, stained glass windows showing scenes from the lives of Saints Crispin and Crispian, patron saints of shoemakers and cobblers.

Shortly after a powerful thunderstorm, a rainbow appeared over Downtown DC.

Photos taken with a Palm Zire 71.

Revenge

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Seen on a messenger bag: “Revenge” of the Jedi? And why’s Yoda there when he was barely in the movie? Confusing, this is.

Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.

Crowded Platform

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Metro Center. With the possible exception of the Smithsonian Metro stop on a summer weekend afternoon, this is the most crowded I’ve ever seen a Metro platform.

Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.

Multiple Pipes

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I’m not sure why, but there is something strangely disturbing, in a dark and Geiger-ish way, about the arrangement of all the dryer exhaust pipes in the laundry room.

Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.