Monthly Archives: October 2005

Running late

Posted on October 26, 2005 by Kelson

Opening April 2005! Or not...

We drove past this two weeks ago (i.e. October 2005), and were struck by two things:

  1. The last time we’d seen the corner, they hadn’t even broken ground on anything.
  2. Opening April 2005?

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Ta’veren of the DCU

Posted on October 24, 2005 by Kelson

I was idly wondering about the way super-heroes and villains are named—not the code names, but the actual names like Clark Kent, Matt Murdock, etc. Was Hunter Zolomon destined to become Zoom? Was Roy G. Bivolo doomed to become the Rainbow Raider the moment his parents named him? And why do so many people with the initials L.L. gravitate toward Superman?

“Obviously, he’s a ta’veren!” Katie said. I laughed for a second, but then remembered an interview I’d read about Infinite Crisis. It actually fits.

Ta’veren is a term from Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time that refers to a person who forms a focal point for history (or, from another perspective, destiny). Threads of probability bend around them, and the unlikely becomes likely. Babylon 5 referred to the concept as a nexus. “You turn one way, and the whole world has a tendency to go the same way.” Continue reading →

Posted in Comics | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Mirrormask DVD could take a long time

Posted on October 24, 2005 by Kelson

Neil Gaiman writes that Amazon lists 2025 as the release date for the MirrorMask DVD.

Twenty years seems a long way away, but Sony are probably just scheduling it that far off because during the Great iPod Content Uprising Years of 2013-2024 people aren’t going to have much time for things like actually watching films, what with gathering together in places where the iPodPeople can’t get them and shooting them in the brain and all that stuff, and it’s only after the Man-Droid-iPod Peace Treaties of 2024 that anyone gets back to the serious business bringing out DVDs of long-forgotten movies.

“Alternately,” he adds, “I suppose it could be an Amazon.com typo and MirrorMask could be coming out on the last day of this year. That would be nice.”

Posted in Humor, Sci-Fi/Fantasy | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Who invented the gay artist?

Posted on October 24, 2005 by Kelson

Over the weekend, Something Positive’s Monette met her girlfriend’s half-brother, who wants to write showtunes when he grows up. Friday’s Real Life featured Tony taking Greg to task over singing a song from Monty Python’s Spamalot. Where did the showtunes=gay (or at least effeminate) stereotype come from? While we’re at it, where did the art=gay stereotype come from?

I mean, most of the people who actually write musicals are probably straight. Not all of them, of course, and some of the exceptions (Cole Porter, for instance) are rather prominent. And I would guess that a majority of the actors and audience are probably straight, also.

I have no doubt that the percentage of gays in the arts is higher than in the general population. I studied drama in college—all I had to do was look around to see that. But that’s a far cry from “most.” I mean, to pull some numbers out of thin air, let’s say it’s 20%, or even 30%, instead of the commonly-cited 10%—that would be like saying an industry with 30% women is primarily female. Continue reading →

Posted in Music, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Troubleshooting by Blog

Posted on October 24, 2005 by Kelson

From time to time I’ve written up the results of a particularly interesting (or annoying) computer problem with the intent of helping out other people who run into the same issue. Daring Fireball calls this Writing for Google and provides suggestions on how to make sure the write-up gets found.

There are enough of them that I think they’re worth labeling. Although the category list is getting complicated enough it might be worth chopping everything down to 4 or 5 and using tags for everything else.

Posted in Site Updates, Troubleshooting | Leave a comment

“Expected dict” Errors in FDF Acrobat Forms

Posted on October 24, 2005 by Kelson

Today I was trying to fix a problem in a section of a website that hadn’t been changed in roughly 5 years. The page in question retrieved data from a database and filled out an Acrobat form using FDF. Under some circumstances, Adobe Reader would generate an error message, “Expected a dict object.” Then it would freeze, and crash the web browser for good measure.

This site was built with ColdFusion, and used a then-freely-available library called PDFFormFiller.cfm (I can’t find any sign of it now) to generate the FDF code. After saving the offending FDF to a file (eliminating the browser as a factor), I started manually editing the code to see what happened.

The problem turned out to be parentheses appearing in the form data. FDF uses parentheses-delimited strings, and it was finding ) in the code and trying to parse what was left as FDF tokens. The solution was simple: just escape the parentheses as \( or \). Continue reading →

Posted in Troubleshooting, Web Design | Tagged , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

Lots of Wind

Posted on October 24, 2005 by Kelson

You know, somehow I wasn’t convinced we’d actually run out of hurricane names this year, even though it looked possible. But the National Hurricane Center has just named tropical storm depression Alpha, marking the first time more than 21 tropical storms have been recorded in the Atlantic in one year.

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Singing Monkeys on Stage!

Posted on October 23, 2005 by Kelson

Just got an email from Disney on Broadway (I assume I must have given them my email address when I bought Lion King tickets several years ago) offering me advance tickets to their new Broadway show, Tarzan.

WTF?

Admittedly, I thought The Lion King was an odd choice for a stage musical, and it turned out to be quite good. But Tarzan? I mean, it’s a weird enough choice for a musical in the first place, but Disney’s cartoon wasn’t even really a musical—it was a movie with a Phil Collins soundtrack.

I wish I could remember exactly what Aimee Mann said last week when she introduced “Save Me.” It was something like “Yes, this is the song that lost the Oscar to Phil Collins and his cartoon monkeys monkey love song.” (Katie remembered it.) Apparently she says this regularly.

Bleah. I’d rather they put together a new tour of Beauty and the Beast. With any luck it’ll still be playing when we finally get around to visiting New York. (I honestly didn’t know it was still playing now until I went to look at the Tarzan info.)

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Bon voyage, mon appetit!

Posted on October 22, 2005 by Kelson

IHOP poster with slogan: Tell your appetite "Bon voyage!"

One look at this, and you’ll say goodbye to your appetite! Wait, I’m sure that’s not what they’re going for…

(On another level, the reflected palm trees fit in with the travel theme.)

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Which way do I go now?

Posted on October 22, 2005 by Kelson

Traffic signal with both left and right arrows

This is a traffic signal on the Jeffrey off-ramp from the northbound 5 in Irvine. The ramp is 3 lanes wide, and the middle lane can go either way. It’s not often that you actually see a double arrow like this, though.

It’s times like this that make me wish I’d taken a picture of the “U-Turn Only” sign I saw a few years ago. The street it was on has since been extended, and the sign is long gone.

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