blogonhoy: October 2004 | pauline orendain

17.10.04

more halcon days
My Halcon days are concluded at Philippine Explorer at inq7.net.

Thanks again to Joey Alarilla!

16.10.04

da da-da da

Dylan sings the Winnie the Pooh theme.

gmail drive works!

Pretty painless, and still a lot of limitations though - nothing over 10MB, no zips, and no encryption - so, if you don't want your naked pictures floating out there, I suggest you don't use this for that.

gmail drive

This is a brilliant idea! Will presently be off to test gmail drive - did I mention Hotmails sucks?! And, oh, another Googlemail angsty thing - no zip files! ARgh!

11.10.04

scenes from the road

No strength to see more text and words after a full day of...text and more words. So, some scenes from my daily road trip - and I've never seen so much roadkill in my life - entire deer, rabbits, racoons, other things beyond recoginition laying across and on sides of the road. Much more than the occasional fox and squirrel in Las Vegas, for certain.

Interstate 78. Don't try this at home/in your car - taking pictures while driving 90 miles an hour at 7 AM.

Hillcrest Road - narrow, slick rural road that I wouldn't want to be on after the first snow storm of the season.

Elevator View

View from the glass elevators. That's a waterfall landing onto the basement floor from the first floor.

View from the Top

View from the HP offices.

6.10.04

halcon days

Big thanks to Joey Alarilla for publishing my Mount Halcon (in)experience on inq7's Global Nation Phil. Explorer Section! Read Part 1 here.

interstate 287

It's a good thing I don't pack. If I did travel armed, there would have been two dead and two cars strafed on Interstate 287 early this evening. The main problem was a fire caused by some stupid guy's mattress that caught fire last night at the exit 10 toll (don't ask). Because of him, the exit was still closed as we crawled home this afternoon and had to find an alternate exit to get onto the NJ Turnpike. Traffic and all, cars and trucks are jammed on all four lanes. I'm minding my business, sticking to the lane I picked because my exit was still another 3 miles down, then some asshole decides he wants to cut into my lane because it's actually moving and his isn't. I'm cruising at 15mph and have to hit the brakes hard - it was close. Expletives fly. I only wish he heard it in place for the lack of a firearm. Second time was this stupid woman who wasn't even LOOKING and suddenly swerved into my lane. ARGHHH! If only looks could kill.

A few things I've learned from seeing all the advertising in Time magazine from the 50's through the 70's:

1. Whisky companies wanted the lush in you to drink like there was no future tomorrow
2. Cigarette companies wanted you to smoke like the Surgeon General's income depended on it
3. Hoochie mama fashion has been around for a Long time - moms growing up in the 70's have no right to say "Kids today!"

And:
1. Dick Cheyney actually had hair and it was thick and dark
2. According to my co-worker, Donald Rumsfeld actually looked handsome back in the day
3. Anwar Sadat was Man of the Year in 1978

The editing tool was slow and majorly disfunctioning today, so we spent time counting alchoholic beverage ads. We had to get the HP programming guys to do their coding magic and finally get us back up to speed.

4.10.04

grounding the truth

Today was my first day being a "ground truther", whatever that means to HP Invent and Time Magazine. To me, we are simply editing every scanned issue of Time from the very first, 1923, up until 1985, into an electronic version for archival purposes. HP (yest the same one that makes your desktop, scanner, printer, what have you computer peripheral) created a program that takes scanned pages (HP scanners, no doubt) of the magazine and turns it into a massive database of information. Later, this will be converted, for translation to web.

This means my friends, that I get to sit through the decades of every Time magazine that was ever published, peruse its pages, grind out the truth and say that it's OK to convert the issue to database for upload to the web. Imagine the volume of words. Imagine all the articles I've seen just today. I went through 3 issues from the decade of the late 50's and about 4-5 from the early 60's. I saw articles on Magsaysay, the Lopezes, and a 1963 ad for Philippine Airlines as the gateway to the "Orient". We were quite the quaint country then, marketing our tribal offerings and the Banawe Rice Terraces. Very interesting indeed.

We're (about 90 of us invovled in the project) currently working out of HP's offices in west Jersey which is really their conference center (i.e. where a lot of their conferences, training and presentations take place). We took a tour this morning and I drooled over the RAIDs in the server room and the fantastic views out of the break rooms and cafeteria (sad to say, the food is terribly bland). Autumn should make the view even more gorgeous since we're in the middle of a forest of trees which will most likely be golden within the next few weeks.

More on the project later.