K-Squared Ramblings

New Year’s Eve & Avatar

• 10 years ago I had just started working at an Internet provider and was very glad they didn’t want me in the server room at midnight for Y2K. #
• I just ordered tickets to Avatar in IMAX 3D. It actually *was* cheaper to see Xanadu on stage, even including parking! #
• Made it into Avatar. Got surprisingly decent seats considering how long the line was. We’ll miss midnight, so Happy New Year! #
• Overheard waiting for the movie: If you lost an eye, would you get a glass eye or an eye patch? I’d get an eye patch and grow a beard! #

To Buy or Not To Buy?

Yesterday I spotted a listing on Amazon for the complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus for $35. (It jumped back up to $55 today.) I was seriously tempted, but asked myself: how often would I actually watch it?

Since lugging around several boxes of CDs, DVDs, and even a few VHS tapes (no Blu-Ray yet) the last time we moved, I’ve asked this question (in the broader, two-person sense) about any video I’ve considered buying. If we’re only ever going to watch something once, we’re better off renting it. It’s cheaper and it takes up less space.

In this case, we borrowed the series from a friend a few years ago, so we’ve already watched it once. There’s plenty of good stuff, but I’d probably only rewatch a handful of sketches.

Late Night

• Staying up until midnight for New Year’s Eve was a BIG DEAL when I was a kid. Now it’s a typical day. (I need to try to sleep earlier!) #
• OK! Project is in a state that I should be able to finish it tomorrow! Going home now! # (At 11:00 PM)

Favorite Music of 2009 – Top 3 Albums

#1 Vienna Teng, Inland Territory – We discovered Vienna Teng’s music by chance a few years ago, when we heard “Harbor” playing in a restaurant. Katie looked her up by a fragment of lyrics and bought the then-current album, Warm Strangers, and was hooked. It took me a bit longer, but her latest album is my favorite of the year. Stylistically, it’s a very mixed album, ranging from pop to piano to a capella and even music hall sounds.

We caught Vienna Teng’s concert at the Roxy in April, a few weeks after the album came out. The Paper Raincoat opened for her, and I picked up their EP (and later, their first full-length album).

#2 Vertical Horizon, Burning the Days – After years off the grid (they’re best known for “Everything You Want,” which came out in 1999!), Vertical Horizon finally got back together and recorded a new bunch of songs. It’s not quite as good as the Gin Blossoms’ comeback, but it’s absolutely recognizable as Vertical Horizon and yet still new. (Well, mostly. “Welcome to the Bottom” sounds an awful lot like “Inside You,” though it does have more words.) Musically it’s similar in style to Go (a mix of hard and soft rock), but the lyrics are better, more on a level with Everything You Want.

#3 Butterfly Boucher, Scary Fragile – It’s been about five years since Butterfly Boucher’s last album. We heard “Another White Dash” the first time we listened to Indie 103.1 back in 2004, then caught her opening for both Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan, but her second album was delayed by contract problems with her ex-label. As it turns out, it’s very good — Katie described it as the best sophomore album she’s ever heard. It’s a sort of indie rock sound. It was really tough for me to figure out whether to put Burning the Days or Scary Fragile in the #2 spot, but I finally settled on the one that I’ve been playing the most lately.

We saw Butterfly Boucher in concert last June at the House of Blues in San Diego.

WTF Reindeer Lady

Spotted in a storefront at the mall while Christmas shopping. Sorry about the image quality, but if you can see past the reflection, it’s a female mannequin with a reindeer’s head, wearing what appears to be a corset, a tutu, full-length gloves and a white beehive (hairstyle).

Gramma got mashed up with a reindeer?

Brilliant Deduction, Mr. Holmes.

Last night, while waiting in line for Sherlock Holmes, saw a guy walk away from the box office, stop, and say, dripping with indignation, “Is this the line for the f***ing movie?!” (There was, of course, a sign saying “Sherlock Holmes 7:20.”)

Somehow, everyone in our group managed to resist the temptation to respond immediately with “No shit, Sherlock.”

I’m Not Even Supposed to Be Here Today!

Walking into Best Buy wearing a bright blue shirt. On Christmas Eve, no less. This could get interesting. #

As it turned out, it didn’t. Either people weren’t quite so desperate and panicked as they often are that close to Christmas, and paid more attention, or the shirt has faded past the point of confusion. In the past, I have had people walk up to me and ask questions about pricing, where to find things, etc.

Tori Amos vs. the Hulk

I never thought I’d see Tori Amos show up in a Marvel Comics comedy video starring M.O.D.O.K. — or that when someone started singing Christmas songs, it would be the Hulk.

From the M.O.D.O.K. Holiday Special.

Züm Züm

I saw a car this morning with the license plate “ZU SHNL.” It took me a minute to realize it was “zu schnell” – German for “Too fast!” # (It was a Mazda.)

Misdirected

• Got a compliment on good tech support … but it was intended for another company with a similar name. #
• I alternate between finding it amusing & annoying that I get spam for local businesses in Brazil. It’s a bit of a drive from SoCal. #
• It’s sad to get Christmas cards for someone who used to live at your address. We’ve gotten two this year, but none last year. Maybe last year’s were still forwarded, and the forwarding order expired. #

Location, Location, Location

As near as I can tell, all they sell are iPod/iPhone accessories. But they’re right across from the Apple Store.

Case of Mondays: Usability, 2012, and Chkdsk

• Usability question: Is it better for a form to auto-detect the credit card type from its number, or have the user select it as an error check? # (Consensus on Twitter & Facebook was to have the user select it.)
• In case you were worried, the world will NOT end on this date (or any other) in 2012. #
• Yay, the PC isn’t totally crashed! Grabbed a current backup & now running chkdsk. Work last week, home this week. Pattern? #
• Chkdsk is FINALLY running. If you get a “cannot open volume for direct access” error trying to run it on Windows XP, try running msconfig and selecting a Diagnostic startup. #

Eifelheim & Rethinking the Black Death

I recently finished reading Eifelheim by Michael Flynn. It’s a science fiction novel written as historical fiction, following two parallel stories:

• In the present day, a historian is trying to figure out why a village wiped out in the Black Death was never resettled, while a physicist tries to work out a new cosmological theory.
• In 1348, the pastor of Oberhochwald unexpectedly makes first contact with shipwrecked aliens, who spend the next year stranded on Earth near the village.

The present-day story is interesting, but hard to follow just because the viewpoint characters are very…self-absorbed.

Fortunately, most of the book focuses on the middle ages and the story of how a tiny German village encounters and eventually learns to live with the stranded aliens. It paints a detailed picture of life in the 1300s and how their strange visitors disrupt it, and it’s fascinating to look at how someone highly-educated in science and philosophy, but with a medieval European mindset, might see concepts like space travel, electricity, or even evolution. How do you explain coming from another planet in another star system to someone who believes that the Sun moves around the Earth, the stars are all the same distance away, and the “world” encompasses all of the above?

The Black Death

As the book caught up to the arrival of the plague in the village, I found myself curious about the timeline of the pandemic. In looking it up, I found an article proposing that, based on descriptions of the symptoms and spread of the disease, it might have been a viral hemorrhagic fever like Ebola or Marburg (with a longer incubation period), and not the bubonic plague. It probably falls under the category of “extraordinary claims,” but it’s certainly an interesting idea!

Browse-o-Smart

After a week of playing with Chrome as my main browser, I’m back to Firefox. Chrome’s fast, but sometimes too much like Breathe-o-Smart.

Me: Why won’t you show me the full (relatively long) URL of this link?

Chrome: You won’t want to look at the full URL with Chrome!

Me: But what if I do?

Chrome: Trust me, you won’t. You’ll never need a URL again.

Me: But what if I need to look at it just this once?

Chrome: Well, I suppose you could actually follow the link. Or copy it and paste it into a text editor. If you really must have the URL. Not that you’d want to, of course.

Me: Why should I have to do that just to look at a URL? *headdesk*

¾ Sun Halo

I spotted a great 22° halo around the sun this morning, almost by accident. There was a reflection in the rear window of the car in front of me that looked like it could be a distorted contrail or it could be a distorted halo. Once I parked, I looked — and there was this clear halo, almost 3/4 of the circle. The missing quadrant was to the lower right, so I just framed this to get as much of the visible part as I could.

It wasn’t really this blue. The G1 tends to make images in daylight a little extra blue, and seems to have really gone overboard on this one. I’ve got to remember to bring the regular camera with me more often!