Our friend Jason spotted this partial sign over the weekend:
As you may or may not be aware, an alien foodstuff called spoo was a running joke in Babylon 5. The first time it was mentioned in the show, someone asked what it was, and JMS replied with a long, humorous explanation.
(Thanks to Wayne for taking the photo.)
I just posted a short-short story I wrote: The Tale of Sleepy Beauty. It was inspired by a conversation Katie and I had Monday morning on the way to work. Enjoy!
We have four coffee-house chains in the area, in addition to local places.
My favorite is Diedrich Coffee, with a couple dozen locations in Orange County, two each in LA and San Diego… and three each in Houston and Denver. (In the last few months, Diedrich has started selling T-shirts that say, “Venti, Schmenti.”)
Then there’s Kelly’s Coffee and Fudge Factory, which had about five locations the last time I checked but now has about thirty scattered around Southern California with one more in Lake Havasu… and according to their website, they’re opening one in Riyadh. Yes, Riyadh.
And then there are the international chains. Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is all over the American Southwest and Southeast Asia. Starbucks, of course, is everywhere.
At one point we had all four chains in one mall. The first phase of the Irvine Spectrum had a Diedrich Coffee attached to the Barnes & Noble, before the bookstore hooked up with Starbucks. The second phase added a Coffee Bean. The third phase added a Kelly’s, and the Barnes & Noble moved to the new section… and added a Starbucks coffee bar inside. Unfortunately the Diedrich’s was off in a corner, and without the bookstore to bring people in, it eventually closed.
Edit: I can’t believe I forgot these, but if you really look for them, you can find Peet’s and Seattle’s Best. Neither has many stores in the area, though.
Neil Gaiman weighs in on the flap over adult-oriented comics in a Denver Library:
It’s been twenty years, and newspaper headlines still oscillate between “Wham! Bam ! Pow! Comics Have Grown Up!” and “OH MY GAAAD THIS COMIC NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN HAS CONTENT NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN IN IT!” articles. Bizarre.
(Ironically, the people complaining don’t seem to care much about the content—they just wanted to get the Spanish-language books off the shelves.)
I just discovered that this week’s Green Arrow #53 is actually written by William Messner-Loebs. (DC’s website still says Judd Winick.)
Messner-Loebs and his wife have been in terrible financial straits for some time. An article about their plight last January led to fan mobilization complete with donation drives, benefit auctions and books, and—most importantly—a campaign to convince publishers to start hiring him again.
I’ve already ordered The Three Tenors: Offkey from Äardwolf Publishing and Heroes And Villains: The William Messner-Loebs Benefit Sketchbook from TwoMorrows Publishing. Neither has arrived yet, though they’re supposed to have come out last month.
Now I’m off to the comic store to pick up Green Arrow.
Lost in the news about the IE7 Beta and Mozilla Corporation has been Opera’s decision to stop spoofing IE in its latest preview release.
So what is User-Agent spoofing? Well, let’s say someone decides that he’ll only allow blondes into an event. Depending on how its done, UA spoofing can be like wearing a blonde wig, or it can be like a brunette wearing a badge that says “Blonde.”
For several years, Opera has done the latter, basically wearing a badge that says “I’m Internet Explorer (wink, wink).” The sites with oversimplistic detection are fooled, but anyone paying attention can tell that it’s Opera.
The next question: Why is it even an issue? Well, web developers want to make sure that visitors will actually be able to see the site as intended, but it’s historically been easier to look for the browser’s name and version than figure out exactly what it can do. So developers often do the equivalent of asking someone whether they can speak French by asking them whether they live in France. You’ll get French speakers, but you’ll also block people from Quebec or Haiti, bilinguals, etc.
These days it’s recommended to check for capabilities, not to check the name of the browser and see if it’s on the approved list. It’s not always possible, since every browser has its own quirks, but it produces better results—and blocks fewer people who might otherwise be able to visit your website.
Mnemovore #5 came out this week. (For some reason issue #4 shipped twice—once just before Comic-Con and again last week.) This week’s issue, or at least my copy, has a strange quirk to it. Some of the word balloons are faded, as if a rubber stamp was pushed down with unequal force, or as if someone ran a gradient tool over the text with Photoshop. I’m still not sure whether it’s intentional or just a coloring or printing error.
This scan should be relatively non-spoilery:
At one point I thought they might be the result of coloring gradients applied above the word balloons instead of below, but I could only get a few to match up.
The thing is, it’s appropriate for the book—if maddening to try to read. The premise is that into our information-saturated world has come a predator that feeds on information, eating people’s memories and leaving them amnesiac or worse. In a story about information loss, gaps in information make thematic sense. And there was one panel with the same effect last issue: “They can make it so you can’t…”
Just one issue to go…
It occurred to me today that if you lay out the three major players in computer operating systems and the three major players in web browsers, the results track remarkably well.
It breaks down, of course. Traditional UNIX is missing from the OS wars, though it provides a nice analogy to Netscape for Firefox. The battle lines don’t quite track either, since the previous wars were Windows vs. Mac and IE vs. Netscape. And Safari’s missing entirely. But it’s interesting to see the same three roles in play.
Today was a reminder that just having cloud cover doesn’t necessarily keep things cool. We’ve had occasional wispy clouds at evening, and at one point some serious cloud cover closer to the coast, but today was hazy and overcast all day—and it was just plain muggy.
Eh, it’s only early August. It’ll get hotter (and occasionally muggier).
