Two demonstrations in three days?
3 minute read
March 18, 2009, 4:50 AM
Yeah, I’m going to two demonstrations in about three days’ time, which is something unusual for me. Usually things aren’t spaced so closely, but this is what happens sometimes.
Thursday is the sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, and that day will be full of activism in DC for it. I’m planning to attend another Funk the War demonstration with DC SDS, and hopefully, unlike last year, all my equipment will come out intact this time. The Canon didn’t get to come out for the Anon raid last weekend, so Funk the War will be its first protest, provided the weather cooperates. According to AccuWeather, it will be in the mid-50s, and raining on and off throughout the day. Thus it might be Duckie’s time to shine again, but hopefully I’ll get to see how the Canon does in the bouncy conditions of a protest. Duckie, meanwhile, is a known quantity at protests, and does quite well in the daytime, as it was pressed into service, by necessity, as the primary camera for the NSM Counter-Protest last April.
Then on Saturday, March 21, there will be another march on the Pentagon, sponsored by ANSWER Coalition. This hopefully will not be a repeat of the March on the Pentagon from two years ago, but we shall see, I suppose. Recall that I described the previous Pentagon march as a poor idea, since it was in not-very-visible locations, and the final rally was in the Pentagon’s somewhat-isolated north parking lot – in front of an office building that would be mostly empty on the weekend. Of course, what a difference two years makes otherwise, though – last time, I had received numerous threatening messages from right-wing wackos just ahead of the event, and this time, I seem to have slipped in under the conservative radar. And when you consider that the de facto leader of the Republican party is Rush Limbaugh, of all people, they have more pressing matters to worry about than threatening activists. And with the right-wing wackos safely back on their medicine, AccuWeather indicates that it will be sunny and again in the mid-50s on Saturday. Excellent!
Continue reading…Something about the rain that keeps people home…
4 minute read
March 15, 2009, 10:39 PM
Anonymous had its March raid on Saturday, and those of us who came out to brave the cold and the rain had a great time protesting the Church of Scientology. It was raining on and off all day, and it was a bit cool, which makes for cold rain. It was enough to where I had to leave the Canon in the bag and shoot with Duckie all day. I had kind of figured that the Canon’s first protest would be an Anon raid (specifically, this one), but it looks like that distinction will go to a Funk the War demonstration later this week.
Nonetheless, though, for those of us who came out, we had a blast, “celebrating” L. Ron Hubbard‘s 98th birthday. And of course, we got photos…
JB got us started on the right foot, with a “Honk if you oppose Scientology” sign for MaidofWin to troll the cars with. The use of “oppose” was new this time, since consensus was that the previous “Honk if you hate Scientology” was playing too much into the Church of Scientology’s hands. We don’t hate them, after all, and we would welcome any Scientologist who escapes the cult with open arms. We oppose Scientology’s practices.
Categories: Project Chanology
You know, I understand the whole concept of wanting to promote good health while the economy’s in the dumper, but…
3 minute read
March 12, 2009, 7:46 PM
Indeed, I understand about wanting to promote good health while the economy is in the can, but I think we’ll all agree that this is probably not the way to do it:
Categories: Advertising, Safeway
I just realized I never told you about my weekend…
4 minute read
March 9, 2009, 11:38 PM
What fun I had! I got to take a bunch of railfan photos, and I also got to meet the DC area Wikipedia gurus once again.
First, though, I railfanned. I had gotten wind on the Railroad.net forums that Metro would be single-tracking between Vienna and West Falls Church, and with that configuration, that usually means that (A) some trains will be terminating at West Falls Church instead of Vienna, and (B) trains will be utilizing the center track at West Falls Church to cross over to the proper track for single-tracking.
Thus, I rolled on over to West Falls Church, coming down from Glenmont via Metro Center. I caught a train terminating at West Falls Church, and was initially disappointed because the train offloaded at West Falls Church on the correct track. I was disappointed because I figured that they would terminate the short-turn trains on the center track and then dwell there before departing to New Carrollton.
Before we continue, here’s the track layout at West Falls Church:
So what is this supposed to accomplish?
< 1 minute read
March 9, 2009, 5:55 PM
Okay, check this out:
(Apologies for the butt crack – I have no control over that)
Categories: Project Chanology
So rather than use an actual photo of the station your complex is named after, now you’ve resorted to photoshopping…
2 minute read
March 8, 2009, 11:33 PM
Remember back in June when I criticized the people advertising the Fort Totten Station complex for using Clarendon station in their advertising? Well, they fixed it… kind of. Take a look:
March 4, 2009 issue of Express, page 2
Categories: Advertising, WMATA
So, yeah, it was nasty this morning…
3 minute read
March 2, 2009, 9:54 PM
I think the one time that taking public transportation to work truly sucks is when it’s snowing outside, and you have to wait outside for the bus out in all of that. And let me tell you something… it was really coming down. The federal government had a late opening today (two hours late), and I think that definitely worked to my advantage, since it gave everyone a chance to dig out and give the buses a better chance to get where they’re going, and for the sidewalks to get cleared so as to lessen the chance of my falling on snow and ice.
And because of my later start time, I wasn’t able to take the 51 to work, since the last 51 of the morning goes past my house at 8:40. So I went down to Georgia Avenue and caught the Y5. And as you can see, it was nasty out there when the bus arrived:
Categories: Winter weather, WMATA
“Use $1 coins: They last for decades and save our nation money.” Okay, but…
2 minute read
March 1, 2009, 5:27 PM
Categories: National politics
Well, easy come, easy go, I suppose.
< 1 minute read
March 1, 2009, 4:46 PM
Well, that was a short-lived feature. I have officially reversed my position on use of Lightbox on Schumin Web. It’s going away. As seems to be so often the case with fun enhancements, the feature worked well in testing, but then fell apart in production use.
What happened is that when using Internet Exploder, and only Internet Exploder (no surprise there), pages that included it were getting an error that said, “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site [URL]. Operation aborted.” Clicking “OK” would then switch to an error page. And this would be after the browser had already completely loaded the page. So it would be like, “Here’s the site, oh, ha ha, just kidding.” A little research indicated that it was indeed a problem with Internet Exploder, but since most of my visitors use IE (but ought to try Firefox), a new feature is not worth locking people out over.
So as a result, I removed the Lightbox feature from Schumin Web, and retrofitted Midnight March with the older display-page enlargements that have been demonstrated over countless photo sets over the last seven years to work very well.
So yeah, stuff happens. Let this be a lesson to me about jumping for something overly fancy on this site, I suppose.
Categories: Schumin Web meta
Why is it that I always seem to finish photo set projects at two in the morning?
2 minute read
March 1, 2009, 2:49 AM
Yep… it’s almost 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, and in the last hour or so, I finally finished Midnight March, which is about a protest against the World Bank and IMF during their fall 2008 meetings.
This set was more challenging than most protest sets I’ve shot. I’ve done plenty of protest marches before, both in daylight, as well as at night. I believe my most recent nighttime protest photo before that one was October Rebellion, specifically the Georgetown march. That was shot in some of the worst weather conditions that I had ever experienced during a protest march. After all, it was raining hard, and it was cold. Plus everyone was on edge due to the way that march was promoted. But for Midnight March, I had the weather on my side, as the skies were completely clear. And it was only slightly cool outside, much to my delight. Very comfortable protest weather. But the camera was something of an unknown quantity. I had barely done any shooting at night with the Kodak, with most of the nighttime shooting consisting of two Anon raids, and a day out with Katie. And all those were cases where I could carefully line up my shots. Can’t do that at a protest march, unfortunately. You have to go with the flow and keep up with the crowd.
Categories: Photography, Schumin Web meta, World Bank
Presenting the newest display function for photo sets…
3 minute read
February 25, 2009, 9:51 PM
Yes, I found the coolest new feature for the photo sets. It’s called “lightbox”, and basically, it allows you to enlarge the photos on the page without going to a separate page. What I usually do for photo sets, you may recall, is if you click an image, you go to a separate page where you are presented with an enlargement of the image and the caption. Thus it usually looks like this in this excerpt from the Weekend with Katie photo set:
A Red Line train to Glenmont arrives at Metro Center on the Shady Grove platform.
Categories: Schumin Web meta, WMATA
A day of railfanning, and then a somewhat disturbing dream…
5 minute read
February 23, 2009, 8:44 PM
First of all, hello! I can’t believe it’s been a week since last I wrote a Journal entry. I guess I haven’t had much to say lately. But now I do.
And by that, let me tell you about the fun I had on Saturday! Matthew Tilley and I got together and hit the Metro, doing a railfan trip on the Blue, Orange, and Yellow Lines. The trip served two purposes. First of all, I really enjoy Matthew’s company, as we always have fun when we get together, and this was no exception. Secondly, I bought a new Canon PowerShot SX10 IS camera in the past week, and so this was also acceptance testing for the camera, as I ran it through all of its paces in the many varied lighting conditions that Metro offers.
Now if you’re wondering about why I got another new digital camera within a year of getting Duckie and the Kodak, and since neither of those cameras have broken down (trust me, I’d tell you), let me explain. When it comes to the Kodak and me, it’s not working out. Basically, the Kodak is a little too automated for my needs, and goes from fully automated to fully manual with very little in between. Big Mavica gave a lot of in-between options for shooting, and I had gotten accustomed to having those, and missed them terribly. So the Kodak will be going on eBay soon. I figure, while it didn’t work out with me, it will almost definitely be perfect for someone else, and so let’s see if I can recover some of my investment in it. Plus I can provide sample images taken with the exact camera being offered for sale, so we’ll see what happens.
We had far more than enough win to go around on Saturday night thanks to a model UN conference…
3 minute read
February 16, 2009, 12:35 PM
So I had fun on Valentine’s Day, and it had nothing at all to do with love. After all, I am single, and all these couples getting kissy on Valentine’s Day makes me nauseous after a while. I am one of the many who calls the day “Singles Awareness Day” for that matter.
But yes, the fun came not from actually getting a date or something, but rather, I, along with a small group of other DC Anons, raided outside the Founding Church of Scientology. This was Part 2 of a two-part strategy for that day. Part 1 was a visit to Katsucon, which is an anime and manga convention for enthusiasts of the genre, being held at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City, where we had previously held AnonyCon. The mission there was basically trolling, going around and handing out literature in the non-paid areas to Katsucon participants. I’m told it went well until Anonymous was booted due to fire code issues – Katsucon was at capacity with the paid participants, and Anonymous trolling put them over the limit as far as occupancy loads went.
I skipped Katsucon mainly because of Metro. Metro took the entire Presidents’ Day weekend to do a major track maintenance project on the C&L Junction (where the Blue and Yellow Lines join just north of Pentagon), and thus Pentagon station was closed, cutting off Pentagon City and below from the rest of the system. I didn’t want to deal with a bus bridge between L’Enfant Plaza and Pentagon City, so I skipped it.
Categories: Project Chanology
So I have completed my service to the circuit court system of Montgomery County, Maryland.
3 minute read
February 11, 2009, 12:33 PM
So today, I had jury duty, which involved sitting and doing nothing for a shade under three hours over at the Montgomery County Judicial Center in Rockville.
According to them, they had a small docket today judging by the number of jurors that they called. So I got in and found the jury waiting room, where they gave us our little juror badges. Then we watched an orientation film, where the late Ed Bradley, as well as Diane Sawyer, explained why jury service is such a high calling, and how it basically works and what happens. Then it was time to play the waiting game. I found a nice place to park myself and pull out the Lappy, and I took care of some odds and ends while waiting to see what happened. I did some work Email, I fooled around on Wikipedia for a while, and watched some videos on YouTube.
Then after about an hour, my number, 73, was called up, along with the numbers of about 30 other people by my best estimate. I went up to Courtroom 14 on the sixth floor with the other prospective jurors, and we sat down in the gallery. At the front of the courtroom, the attorneys for the prosecution and the defendant were seated at tables, as was the defendant himself. Then the judge, the Honorable Mary Beth McCormick, came in, and things began. She explained that this was a criminal case related to an alleged violation of a protective order. The jury’s job was to determine guilt by the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, and sentencing would be up to the judge. We were all sworn in, and things got started, as the process of voir dire began. The judge asked a number of questions to us related to disclosure of information that might affect our service as a juror in this particular case, and in the event that anyone had something to disclose, those individuals were called up, one at a time, to make their disclosure to the judge and the attorneys for both sides. While disclosures were going on, the judge activated a “husher”, which turned off the microphones and played white noise over the sound system.
Categories: Rockville, State and local politics
So we had a meeting of about fifteen people, all named “David”, outside the Founding Church of Scientology on a Saturday afternoon. And that means…
6 minute read
February 9, 2009, 9:27 PM
Yes, a meeting of about fifteen people, all named “David”, outside the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington DC on a Saturday afternoon means that it was once again time for Anonymous DC to have its monthly raid, protesting the practices of the Church of Scientology. And as always, we had fun, we had epic win, and we had more than enough lulz to go around. And in Anonymous, everyone is “David”.
This time around, the theme was “Space Opera”, taking a science fiction theme, mainly centering around Star Wars.
MisterTastee wore two cinnamon buns on his head, imitating Princess Leia’s distinctive hairstyle.
Categories: Project Chanology, WMATA