Monthly Archives: September 2007

Priorities

Reason #918,622: Caffeine. (Espresso, Mocha, Latte, Tea and More.)The new shopping center, The District (built on a corner of the former MCAS Tustin base), has an ad campaign with the slogan, “A million reasons why.” Each poster shows someone posing with a random number and something that can be found, done, or resolved by going there.

Here’s a guy who has his priorities straight. They’ve got Peet’s, Seattle’s Best Coffee, there’s a coffee bar in the Whole Foods, and who knows how many more restaurants that serve it.

Of course, if he wanted more choices, he’d be better off going to the Irvine Spectrum. They’ve got a Coffee Bean, a Kelly’s, 2 Starbucks (and a third on the way), and a Nordstrom Espresso Bar. And once upon a time, they had a Diedrich…

Speaking of Diedrich, the one on Culver and Barranca is still around at least through next summer. I haven’t been by the one near UCI lately, but I seem to recall hearing October, so it may not be long for this world.

Hmm, you know what? That poster lists a lot of caffeine sources, but it doesn’t say anything about coffee. With luck they won’t be too confused if you just order a coffee, as in this strip from Real Life Comics. :-D

Posted in Food, Signs of the Times | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Flashes in the top 50

[Flash Logo]Last month, Comics Should Be Good ran a fan poll for the top 50 DC characters and top 50 Marvel characters. They’ve been posting the results over the last few weeks, finishing on Friday. The four main Flashes all made it to the top 50, and one even made it to the top 5.

#3.  Flash: Wally West
#29. Flash: Barry Allen
#41. Flash: Jay Garrick
#42. Kid Flash/Impulse: Bart Allen (tied with Bizarro)

Master list of all winners. Profiles of all four Flashes (and dozens of fill-in, alternate, and one-offs) at Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning.

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Speed Force

The FlashI just discovered that the domain name speedforce.org was available. I couldn’t pass it up. Now I have to figure out what to do with it.

I’ve toyed with the idea of separating out all the Flash stuff from this blog and creating a dedicated comics blog. I’ve also thought about renaming the site, Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning (it’s an awkward name*, no matter how you slice it), though it’s got enough mindshare that I’d rather just simplify it to “Ride the Lightning.”

Any suggestions?

*Come to think of it, I have a history of picking names that seem perfect at the time, only turn out to be awkward later on. The Alternative Browser Alliance seemed like the perfect name, but I got so sick and tired of typing www.alternativebrowseralliance.com that I registered altbrowser.net just so I could use it more easily.

Posted in Comics, Site Updates | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Not a problem

No Parking sign… in the middle of the lawn.Ordinarily, there wouldn’t be anything odd about this sign. But look at the placement.

Why do they need a No Parking sign in the middle of the lawn? It’s a new sign, too—they just redid the entire lawn last year.

Seriously, I don’t think they’re going to have much of a problem with people parking on the lawn in front of an office building in Irvine.

Come to think of it, though, this is only 50 feet or so from the crosswalk warning device.

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Temeraire Flies Again

Cover: Empire of IvoryI just found out that Empire of Ivory, the fourth book in the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik, came out today!

The series takes place in an alternate version of the Napoleonic Wars in which dragons exist, and are used in warfare. This results in an odd mix of naval battles and aerial dogfighting, with full human crews carrying bombs, guns, etc. Dragons bond with the first human they see (not telepathically, like in the Pern books, just emotionally), so captains in the Aerial Corps are given quite a bit of leeway—though the entire Corps is considered rather unsavory by the general public.

It focuses on naval Captain Will Laurence, who captures a French vessel just as an egg is ready to hatch. The dragonlet Temeraire imprints on him, and he is whisked away from the sea and into the world of air warfare. (Think of it as Master and Commander with dragons instead of ships.) During the first 3 books they go through training together, travel to China to discover Temeraire’s heritage, and find themselves called back to Europe in the thick of the war.

Our friend andrea-wot lent us the first three books last year, and we both really enjoyed them. In fact, Naomi Novik has joined the short list of authors whose new books I’ll pick up sight unseen (currently sharing that spot with Neil Gaiman and Greg Keyes), though for some reason I thought this one was coming out in October. I’m definitely going to be stopping by Borders or Barnes & Noble tomorrow to pick this up. If you’re at all interested, I highly recommend picking up the first book, His Majesty’s Dragon (in the US; in the UK it’s just called Temeraire) and giving it a test flight.

Posted in Sci-Fi/Fantasy | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Rays of Light

Every once in a while, I manage to get a decent shot with my cell phone camera (currently a RAZR V3T).

Cloud Rays

Taken August 4 at 6:20pm. Cleaned up slightly to remove a digital glitch just above the cloud.

Posted in Photos | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Updating Again: WordPress 2.3

Well, I’ve updated the site to WordPress 2.3. Let me know if anything’s broken.

The closest thing to a problem was just that I didn’t know I had to run the tag importer manually. I assumed it would be run during the upgrade. No biggie, I went to Manage/Import, ran the importer for Bunny’s Technorati Tags, and waited a few seconds. (I already knew I’d have to adjust the theme.)

I guess fewer things can go wrong if it waits for you to tell it which tag format to import, the one time you actually need it to, instead of having the updater try to guess between 5+ structures (and no structure!) every single time you update for the foreseeable future.

Anyway, I’ll probably be trying out some new themes over the next few days, so don’t be surprised if the site changes appearance wildly. It seems about time for a change.

Theme Testing:

  • Blue Box, with a custom logo & splash image (one of our photos from Waikoloa) & some minor tweaks. (Sep. 24)
  • Still tweaking Blue Box. Trying to condense the extraneous splash image with the title bar. (Sep. 25)
  • I think I’m going to stick with this theme for now. I’ve added some workarounds for IE6 to (mostly) handle the changes I made. (Sep. 26)

To do: small-screen compat, put recent links back in the sidebar, fix the duplicate IDs in the Links widget. Maybe clean up the 60-item list of monthly archives. (Sep. 27)

  • Cleaned up the giant archive list via Flexo Archive Widget. Unlike others I’ve tried, this one won’t hide all the links if JavaScript is disabled. (Sep. 29)

Posted in Site Updates | Tagged , | 3 Comments

K2R is 5 Years Old

I just realized that as of last week, this blog has been online for 5 years.

Crazy, huh?

This is the 1,398th post. We’ve got 2,307 comments at the moment, including pingbacks. Typical traffic these days seems to run around 650-700 views on weekdays, 550-600 on weekends. Most of it seems to be people searching for images.

The top-viewed posts lately have been:

  1. Songs Not to Play at a Wedding (Normally #2, but it got something like 3000 hits from StumbleUpon last week.)
  2. Comic Con 2003
  3. Philosophy of Time Travel
  4. Creative Computer Names

Posted in Site Updates | Tagged | 3 Comments

Flash vs. the Pirate Torpedo

Arr! Barry Allen may not know how to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, but he do celebrate Jog Like a Pirate Day!

Showcase #13: The Flash runs across the water from a torpedo with a pirate flag on front. 'No matter how fast I go---this pirate torpedo keeps following me!'

From Showcase #13, it’s “Around the World in 80 Minutes,” a tale of the Flash. (Mostly he runs around the world, helps people out, and gets kissed by women. Aye, it be good to be a superhero.)

(Cover via GCD. This story appears in Showcase Presents: The Flash vol.1 and The Flash Archives vol.1.)

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ΠR8

If ye be wonderin’ why this site be lookin’ strange this day, wonder no further. It be Talk Like a Pirate Day.

This day o’ pirate speak is brought to ye by the Text Filter Suite of Dougal Campbell.

I might be recommendin’ ye set course for the sea shanty, Voyage of the Fyrefawkes, or embark upon the Tall Ships of San Diego. Or if ye wish, ye might search yerself fer more pirate tales.

Katie at Nav

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