Here’s a summary in links of our trip to the Philippines and Hong Kong through Christmas 2011 and New Year 2012:
Photo and Video
Travel Log Entries:
HKG-ORD-IAD
A few notes on the trip from Hong Kong back to DC:
We were originally supposed to fly through SFO on a 777 but at some point United did a schedule change and it became a 747 to ORD. The change meant departing an hour earlier, and our seat reservations were wiped. We lost our pair of rear window seats and had to settle for middle seats, one by the aisle. This turned out okay since I got an empty seat beside me. Our plane was a B744 with registry N122UA.
Oceans and History in Hong Kong
After leaving the Philippines we spent a few days in Hong Kong before heading back to DC. This was our third time doing so, as United usually flies as far as HKG en route to MNL (I usually book the HKG-MNL trip separately so it’s cheaper), and it made for a convenient “decompression” stop after the hectic holidays.
Dive Log: Wrecks of Coron
Coron’s main draw for scuba divers is the fleet of World War II Japanese shipwrecks sunk around the Calamian Islands by US bombers in September, 1944. Around an hour by boat (give or take a few minutes depending on which wreck) from Coron proper, the wrecks sit on various reefs — or have become reefs by themselves — in relatively shallow water, some as deep as forty meters and one as shallow as the surface itself.
Holiday in Manila and Coron
We were in the Philippines for about a week and a half — in Metro Manila for Christmas, then in Coron, Busuanga after Christmas through New Year, and back in Metro Manila for a few more days onward.
IAD-SFO-HKG-MNL
Our adventures started the night before, with United changing our seat assignments without notification, then disabling Amy’s online check-in. Then, some excitement on departure: a transformer blew up at the corner as we left in our taxi.
Notes on Elderly Cat Care
Pandora the Cat is now 20 years old, and still enjoying a reasonably good quality of life, but her advanced years have seen many feline health difficulties common to cats her age.
New Twitter, First Tweet
I’m not a big fan of #newtwitter, partly because I don’t like client-side-scripting-heavy content delivery interfaces with hashbang URLs, and partly because the redesign still fails to address a long-standing problem with archiving.
Old tweets are still not organized in any kind of list or dated format; there aren’t even next/previous buttons on individual tweets. As a result, Twitter entries tend to fade into forgotten unsearchability after a few days, weeks, or months — depending on the user’s post frequency. Previous promises to offer native archiving have fallen by the wayside, and the Google Realtime deal expired in July 2011, transforming into open hostility between Twitter and Google. Nor have we heard much about the Library of Congress Twitter archive project since it was announced.
Had I known my tweets would continue to be so ephemeral years later, I would have implemented a third-party backup solution much earlier. As it is, years of my Twitter use are in limbo and for now effectively wasted. That said, I’m thankful for an XML file provided to me by Russell from an archiving script, containing my tweets up till 14 Feb 2009 — back when it was easier to crawl Twitter for full posting histories. From that I can glean my first tweet in 2006, and use one of the features I do like about #newtwitter, easy tweet embedding:
Im in ur twitter txtng ur fons.
— brownpau (@brownpau) October 8, 2006
Despite my protestations regarding archival impernanence, I know there are people who’ve switched to Twitter as a feed reader replacement, so in the fashion of @kottke and @gawker I shall indulge these “tweedreader” types by auto-feeding RSS from How Now Brownpau through Twitterfeed to @hnbp. (I’ll also be using @hnbp to follow preferred RSS-auto-fed Twitter streams to test viability as a feed reader versus my current RSS-reading web app, Google Reader.)
Through all this, I’ll be tweeting as usual at @brownpau but always with the full knowledge that all things there are tenuous at best, and what I wish to preserve should go to my site rather than be lost to an eternal scrollback mist.
Update: I canceled the @hnbp account because it was additional maintenance that seemed at best vestigial.
Overheard at HKG
Filipino family at Hong Kong Airport airline transfer desk, answering some questions due to some missing paperwork.
Gate agent: “Country of origin for this trip, ma’am?”
Saucy Pinay lady: “United States of America, which is our home.”
“And what city?”
“Texas.”
Sick Days
Been a trying time health-wise; a sore throat from last week blossomed into a full-blown bronchial infection with fever, sinus congestion, and painful coughing. I took sick days off from work to recover but my condition worsened, and with an unavoidable travel deadline looming a trip to the doctor was needed.
Two days of clogged eustachian tubes and sinus congestion got me interested in this chart.
I was prescribed azithromycin, an antibiotic, on the chance that the infection was bacterial, and a bottle of antitussive syrup to soothe coughing through the course of the trip. By lunchtime I was feeling well enough just from general placebo effect to have lunch at Maneki Neko, a Japanese eatery in Falls Church. I sampled a couple of Kumamoto oysters and finished a bowl of Okinawa Soba noodle soup with roast pork, quite therapeutic for my tortured throat.
I write this the next day aboard a trans-Pacific flight to Manila, still a bit sniffly and phlegmy, but feeling otherwise comforted by a mild codeine-and-analgesic haze. The symptoms are subsiding more quickly with the antibiotics, which might mean that the bronchial infection was indeed bacterial — or if it was viral, has simply run its course. It’s the sickest I’ve been since my shingles experience: another illness that hit me on a trip to the Philippines, interestingly enough. Pre-travel stress does that, I guess.
