K-Squared Ramblings

Flip-Floppers, all of ’em!

Spotted on a school marquee:

Gee, I hope none of them ever runs for office. Some opposing PAC group will dig this up as evidence of constant flip-flopping!

Evening Skies

Here are a couple of photos, one just before sunset, the other just after, over the past month.

First up is a twilight view of South Coast Plaza. On Friday the 13th, we went to the nearest Borders to pick up The End of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events and Neil Gaiman’s new short story collection, Fragile Things. We ended up crossing the bridge over to the main section of the mall, turned around, and saw an amazing twilight display with clouds silhouetted against the blue.

We stopped to take pictures. We weren’t the only ones.

Perhaps an hour later, the rainstorm arrived.

Next up is from this past Monday, October 23. I was driving up the 405 after work and noticed that there were some feathery clouds in the right area, so I started looking for sundogs. Normally I don’t find anything. It’s Southern California, after all, so the right conditions are relatively rare. (Though occasionally I see something spectacular like the full halo I caught in February.)

To my surprise, I saw a faint bright spot in the clouds, level with and to the right of the sun. It got brighter over the course of my drive, with hints of red, orange and yellow creeping in on the sunward side: a classic sundog. Once I got onto city streets, I had a chance to stop and take a picture.

Genuine Muppet Fur Pillow!

I forget where we found this—I think it might have been Linens and Things. Katie (shown here with the pillow) took one look at it and said, “Made of genuine Muppet hide!” It reminded her of a certain sketch from The State.

Whaam!

I’d known that artist Roy Lichtenstein’s most famous works were done in the style of gigantic comic book panels. Something I didn’t know was that many of those paintings weren’t just in the style of comic panels, but were blown-up copies of specific panels from actual comic books (done, of course, by other artists).

An art teacher named David Barsalou has been tracking down the originals. He has a website, Deconstructing Lichtenstein, which displays dozens of actual comic panels side by side with the corresponding Lichtenstein paintings.

Some are nearly exact. Some depart a bit more, but many of those actually keep the same dialogue or narration. And yet, somehow Lichtenstein’s work has been hailed for decades as “original.”

(via A Distant Soil)

The Call of the Wild Noodle

The name of this restaurant reminds me of two things:

1. A “Get Fuzzy” comic strip in which Bucky Katt proclaims that tofu tastes better in the wild. (Rob had to tell him it was an animal to get him to eat it, and of course Bucky had to boast about his hunting prowess.)
2. The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest April Fool’s broadcast.

Riddle Me This

I really liked the last two Five For Fighting albums, America Town and The Battle for Everything. “Superman” was quite possibly the only song I’ve heard that made me run out and buy an album without checking other songs first. So I was eagerly awaiting “Two Lights.”

Unfortunately, after listening through twice, I only actually like two songs on the album: “California Justice” and “Policeman’s Xmas Party.” Everything else is just too…sappy.

And “The Riddle” is everywhere. Radio, supermarkets, fast food, shopping malls. I can’t escape it. Worse, it’s one of those tunes that worms its way into your mind and runs around in circles.

But here’s the odd thing: Does anyone else think the verse sounds a little bit like “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “The Night Santa Went Crazy?”

IE7 got you down? Try Firefox or Opera!

Microsoft will be releasing the long-overdue Internet Explorer 7 any day now (possibly as soon as Wednesday, if rumors prove correct). It will only be available for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003, and the upcoming Windows Vista.

I know there are people out there still using Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows Me, and other older systems that won’t run IE7. Why not take the opportunity to check out something new? Firefox 2 is also due out this month, and Opera 9 just came out this summer.

Despite what you may have heard, the vast majority of websites really do work on all major browsers. And with alternative browsers gaining popularity, the number of websites that block anyone but Internet Explorer is shrinking.

Opera and Firefox will bring you tabbed browsing, RSS Feeds, security and privacy controls, built-in searching, pop-up blocking—all the advantages IE7 boasts over IE6. Plus you get more customization, built-in spell checking, download management, session saving, and support for up-and-coming web technologies like SVG graphics and WebForms 2. Opera adds blazing fast display, voice commands and mouse gestures (leave that keyboard behind!), and per-site preferences.

Check out Opera. Check out Firefox. Or check out a dozen other alternative web browsers. Try them out, and see what works best for you.

Get used to “disapointment”

Found written on a stairway tile:

Someone’s teacher might be disappointed in the spelling…

A9 and the demise of SiteInfo?

Amazon.com’s search site, A9, has scaled back drastically. The rewards program is gone, as are bookmarks and history. They’ve even discontinued the A9 toolbar.

This of course brings up questions about some of the site integration technologies that they developed. OpenSearch has already taken on a life of its own, and in fact the new A9 seems to be mostly an OpenSearch aggregator. But what of SiteInfo? Read the rest of this entry »

Traffic Truth

I was listening to the traffic report on KCRW this morning, and realized the background music sounded familiar. I thought about it, and realized that it was the instrumental track from Aimee Mann’s song, “Nothing is Good Enough.”

Advantages of standards-based design: Compatibility

Microsoft is really pushing for people to make sure their websites and apps are compatible with IE7. Apparently this is a real concern for a lot of people who relied on certain proprietary features, bugs, and quirks in IE6. I guess they figured they wouldn’t have to worry about future versions. (Hmm… I wonder where they got that idea?)

The fact of the matter is, I’m not worried. I tested my personal sites and the sites I’d built for work months ago, using the IE7 betas, and more recently with RC1. I made a couple of minor changes to some stylesheets, but that was about it.

Why? I’ve been writing standards-based code for years. I validate it from time to time, and I test to make sure it works in the latest versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari as well as IE. So the code was already portable.

Plus, anything new I’ve built since January has been designed with IE7 in mind from the beginning.

Most of the changes were to workarounds for IE6. Either stopping them from running on IE7 (if the bug was fixed), or keeping them running on IE7 (if it was done using a CSS hack).

Assault via Battery?

Received the replacement battery for the PowerBook yesterday. It was shipped out via DHL, with a prepaid return label for shipping the old battery back via regular mail.

Last night I drained the old battery, plugged the new one in, and packaged up the recalled one in the box. At lunch today I went to the post office to send it off.

As I was walking up the steps, I remembered the “Does this package contain anything liquid, explosive, or otherwise hazardous?” question that postal clerks are required to ask. If you’re mailing a defective battery that could theoretically burst into flames, how exactly are you supposed to answer?

I figured it would be best not to joke about it.

As it was, I just said it was a laptop battery straight out, so the question didn’t come up.

Pumpkin Patch Day

Well, it’s the second Tuesday of the month. With Microsoft’s regular update cycle, that makes it Patch Tuesday.

It’s also October, the month leading up to Halloween.

I hereby declare today to be Pumpkin Patch Tuesday.

Update: Mozilla’s Josh Aas has carved the perfect pumpkin to go with this declaration.

Infinity, Inc. and Beyond!

In 52 Week 21, Lex Luthor’s super-heroes were finally given a team name and code names: Infinity, Inc. About half of the individual names are recycled from former members of the real Infinity, Inc.: Fury, Skyman, Nuklon, etc.

Interestingly enough, it turns out that a month ago, someone posted a different set of names:

Actually it’s Lumina.

The rest of the Luthor’s JLA is:

Trajectory/Eliza Harmon
Omnivore/Hannibal Bates
Ultimate Man/Jacob Colby
Reaver/Erik Storn
Herakles/Gerome McKenna

I don’t know where swallowhawk got the names (presumably somewhere offline), but it’s interesting to note that nearly all of them were changed by the time the team made its official debut.

All but one, in fact: Trajectory. And her story didn’t end so well.

In Your Office

A long row of furniture stores sits in the city of Lake Forest, on a frontage road alongside the 5 freeway. Among them is this:

I can just see the exchange at the workplace:

“Nice chair! Where’d you get it?”
“In your office.”
“Hey! What’s the big idea!”