K-Squared Ramblings

New Fallen Angel for the New Year

After months of waiting, I finally picked up the newly-relaunched Fallen Angel today. This was a bit of a challenge. My usual comic store hadn’t ordered it for some reason (despite the “Fallen Angel” note on my pull list. Maybe it was still listed under DC? They figured out when Angel moved from Dark Horse to IDW, and even picked the right cover for me.

So I stopped by my other regular comic store this afternoon—the one near home instead of near work—and picked up Fallen Angel and Night Mary. In the rain. And had to get them not only back to the car, but from the car up three flights of stairs, around the apartment building, and up to the landing without getting them wet. While carrying three bags of groceries and two umbrellas.

Anyway, the book is well worth it. Peter David launches a new story with all the major players 20 years later. Some of the dynamics have changed, some are the same… and some look about to be altered significantly. Lee still fights the good fight in Bete Noire, Juris is still Magistrate, even Dolf still runs his bar. But there are new players in town, including Juris’ wife and 18-year-old son (who he thinks is his firstborn)… and a figure from Lee’s past who comes to her with a tantalizing offer (an actual “Whoa!”-out-loud moment). It looks like we may be learning the Fallen Angel’s origin soon. We’ve only just learned her real name…

Yes, this comic is good. It’s pricy at $3.99, but the story’s great, and J.K. Woodward’s art is fantastic. (See the cover? The whole thing looks like that!)

Strange Shopping Sights

While Christmas shopping, I kept seeing things that made me wish I had brought my camera. The ridiculously giant Christmas tree at Fashion Island was not one of them; all I needed was a picture demonstrating its height.

A toy store yielded a number of amusements (appropriately enough), in the form of a series of unconventional action figures—Jane Austen, Leonardo DaVinci, Mozart, Charles Dickens… and of course talking Jesus and Moses figures. And then there’s the Avenging Unicorn!

Read the rest of this entry »

Moroccan Mint Mocha

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf has a drink they call a Moroccan Mint Latte. It’s a tea latte with chocolate. You can get a fairly good approximation by making hot chocolate using mint tea instead of hot water. Katie suggested Bigelow Plantation Mint (after I mentioned that I’d tried it with Stash Moroccan Mint), which seems to work well.

Update: I forgot to mention the key difference between the two varieties of tea that I tried. Black tea works better with chocoloate than green tea.

Bunny’s Technorati Tags and WordPress 2.0

Solved! To make Bunny’s Technorati Tags fully compatible with WordPress 2.0 you need to change two lines in the add_tags_textinput() function.

Just replace this:

function add_tags_textinput() {
	global $postdata;
	$tags = get_post_meta($postdata->ID, 'tags', true);

with this:

function add_tags_textinput() {
	global $post_ID;
	$tags = get_post_meta($post_ID, 'tags', true);

The problem is that it will show existing tags, or let you add a new tag, but it will lose tags when you edit a post. It’s not able to retrieve the tags to fill in the form field, apparently because $postdata isn’t returning the ID it expects.

I’ve submitted the fix to wp-plugins.org, so if the author is keeping track of tickets there, the fix should show up in the next version of the plugin.

Update Jan. 3: The plugin author has released version 0.5 with a slightly different fix (plus a few other improvements), and it’s now compatible with WordPress 2.0.

WP2

Well, I see that WordPress 2.0 was released on Monday. Oddly, no fanfare from the WordPress website since last week’s release candidate. Upgrade was fairly quick and painless.

So far only three gotchas:

1. The spell check plugin is not compatible.
2. The new post preview, while nice, does not work with the stable release of the Permalink Redirect plugin. The test version posted in the comments seems to fix it.
3. The old pop-up “Press it!” bookmarklet is a bit messed up. There’s a new bookmarklet that just pre-fills the regular post page, but I liked having it in a pop-up window so that I could keep the original page open for things like quoting, going back to make comments, adding it to del.icio.us, etc.

I’m trying to get used to the WYSIWYG post editor, but I suspect I may go back to textile. I’m too much of a control freak when it comes to HTML, plus this does stupid things like <span style="font-style: italic">...</span> instead of <i>...</i> or <em>...</em>. (Older versions of WordPress did similarly stupid things like always using <em>...</em> for italics—sometimes you aren’t using them for emphasis, you’re using them for, say, a book title.) Of course, what I’d really like is to use the rich text edtor for the comments. Probably only the comments. I do like being able to change the size of the entry field, though.

Update: Well, the rich editor trashed my examples. There’s no clear separation between formatted mode and HTML mode. If you type in HTML tags in formatted mode, they look like they’ll appear as text, but they actually get stored as HTML… and it even converted my italic tags to emphasis tags! Add in the fact that I can type in the HTML for a link faster than I can point-n-click, and the editor, for now, is toast.

Update 2: Bunny’s Technorati Tags only half-works. It can add tags to a post, but will lose them when you edit it.

Update 3: Something Unpredictable has a list of known bugs in WP 2.0 [archive.org]. Of particular interest is bug 2160 in get_post_custom_values(). Unfortunately the patch doesn’t seem to fix the tags problem. It actually makes it worse by breaking the plugin’s ability to display the tags.

Update 4: And there’s the official announcement.

To read tonight: What’s New in WordPress 2.0. And maybe I’ll finally get around to putting together a new theme sometime.

Edward Scissorhands Sharp as Ever

We went to see a screening of Edward Scissorhands tonight. A couple of local art cinemas (both part of the Edwards/Regal chain) have been doing a weekly “Flashback Features” series since summer (or possibly earlier). The first one we went to was The Princess Bride, which was absolutely packed with people who knew the movie so well they were laughing before the jokes.

None of the others we’d been to were anywhere near as full, and we lost track of the series a couple of months ago. Then yesterday I remembered we’d been planning to go see Edward Scissorhands, and figured we’d missed it. (I finally bought the DVD a couple of months ago, but wanted to hold off until after the screening since Katie hadn’t seen it before.) Fortunately, Katie remembered that it was this week, and we were able to make it. (And for once, we made it on Wednesday, so we could go to South Coast Village instead of Rancho Santa Margarita.)

Well, we prepared to turn into the theater parking lot and noticed it was full. Katie was the first to realize why: Johnny Depp. We got in, but I had to park across the street. The crowd was as good as the one for Princess Bride, and there was even one guy in full costume (the normal-clothes version, not the leather and buckles). We were pleased that while they showed “The Twenty,” which I suspect is a contractual obligation, they neglected to turn on the sound! The 15-year-old print was in terrible shape, but the condition was forgotten quickly.

It’s always a risk to go back and watch something you enjoyed when you were younger. Your tastes change as you grow up (or you actually develop a sense of taste). There are some cartoons I refuse to watch because I want to remember liking them. Sometimes they work out. Sometimes they don’t. Edward Scissorhands still holds up: The contrast between the inventor’s mansion and the pseudo-50s achingly “normal” suburbia, Danny Elfman’s fairy-tale music, the neighborhood’s curiosity, then acceptance, then ultimate rejection of this strange visitor, Peg’s determination to make things work out, Kim’s slow realization that her boyfriend isn’t a very nice guy, and that this scary blade-handed stranger is, the cop’s efforts to smooth things over—all with Tim Burton’s distinctive quirky style.

Back to the screening series, it really brings out the difference between the home movie experience and the theater experience. It’s not just the size of the screen and the volume of the sound. It’s the audience. When you have a few hundred people all watching the same movie, reacting to the same things, you get an emotional synergy that you don’t get with a couple of people at home—or with a few dozen people yakking and answering their cell phones!

Flop? What Flop?

OK, so we know Serenity didn’t do that well at the box office (despite being an excellent movie), but the DVD sales seem to be doing great. Last Thursday, just two days after release, Best Buy not only had it on its Best Seller shelf, they were actually sold out of the widescreen version. And Amazon.com’s DVD rankings show Serenity at #2 and Firefly at #3. Considering that the Firefly DVDs have been out for something like two years, and everything else on the 25-item list is either a new release or a new special edition, the obvious conclusion is that Amazon’s “Buy this DVD with Firefly” ploy is working—or that people are (again) watching the movie and then coming back for more.

Is Fox TV eligible for the “Turning down the Beatles” award yet?

Merry Christmas!

Mauna Kea Star Trails

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is an incredible long-exposure picture of star trails above Mauna Kea:

I think the picture says it all.

Holidays Redefined

hol·i·day (n): Day on which one eschews ordinary work in favor of twice as much celebration-related work.

IE/Mac: The Final Nail

The WaSP is reporting that Microsoft will end support and cease distributing Internet Explorer for the Macintosh at the end of January. It’s been about eight months since the latest version of Mac OS X shipped without IE, and almost three years since Apple launched Safari.

While there is an “end of an era” feeling to this, it’s kind of like losing the last veteran of World War I. It’s of more historical significance than anything else. When Microsoft released IE5/Mac, it was hailed as the most standards-compliant web browser available. But Microsoft abandoned it years ago.

Fortunately, not only is Safari a worthy successor, but there are other options as well. What’s great about the web browser field these days is that the major players are constantly improving their offerings and working toward greater compatibility. And soon any website that wants to cater to Mac users will no longer be able to fall back on “Just use IE!” They’ll have to test in Safari, and of course the easiest way to build a website that works in IE/Win, Safari, and Firefox (the two defaults and the major alternative) is to start with standards-based code in the first place—which improves compatibility with even more browsers. Users get more choices, and websites get more users. Everyone wins.

The City Still Has Heroes

It seems Marvel Comics’ insane lawsuit against City of Heroes has been settled. Details are sketchy, but “no changes to City of Heroes® or City of Villains’™ character creation engine are part of the settlement.”

Given that the lawsuit was basically the equivalent of suing pencil manufacturers because they could potentially be used to draw Spider-Man, it’s good to see that Marvel didn’t win (though a precedent-setting loss for Marvel might’ve been better in the long run).

(via Slashdot)

Daystar!

I saw the planet Venus four times on my walk to and from lunch today! Yes, in broad daylight!

Someone on Slashdot mentioned it was possible last week. I took it seriously because back in high school, I used to watch Venus fade into the brightening sky on winter mornings. Often I could still find it once I arrived at school, since I knew exactly where to look.

I tried unsuccessfully a couple of times over the past week, but today I had a ~20-minute walk mostly facing southward, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

I used the Moon as a guide, trying to guess the distance based on how far apart they were last night. As I passed through a building’s shadow, I spotted a stationary white dot in the right area, a bit more than a hand span away from the crescent Moon in the direction of the sun, barely visible next to some wispy clouds. I couldn’t find any sign of a con trail, and it didn’t move, so it clearly wasn’t an airplane, but I was able to look away and back and still see it. Read the rest of this entry »

Captain Carrot Returns!

Teen Titans #30-31 will feature the long-awaited* return of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! It seems that Kid Flash is a fan of the series, which never actually got canceled in the DC Universe, and has gone grim-n-gritty with the rest of the DC line. “Excerpts” of a Zoo Crew “parody of Watchmen and Dark Knight and their fallout” will be interspersed with the regular story.

While grim-and-gritty doesn’t seem to go with Captain Carrot, parody does. And to think, I was this close to dropping Teen Titans. It looks like I’ll be staying on a few more issues.

(via Cognitive Dissonance)

*OK, long-awaited by some. Let’s just say it was Captain Carrot that got me into comics at the age of seven, so there’s a serious nostalgia factor at work.

Caught in the act

This sort of thing just goes to prove that no one has quite the same college experience, even at the same college. (In this case, the UCI School of Humanities, where I spent two years before coming to my senses and switching to a major I actually liked.)

It’s probably just as well.

The best line has got to be the grad student saying, “You’ll report me for your having sex in my office? ”

(via The Esoteric Science Research Center)