K-Squared Ramblings

Priorities

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.

Flashes in the top 50

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.

Speed Force

I 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.

Not a problem

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.

Temeraire Flies Again

I 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.

Rays of Light

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

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

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)

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 1,398^th 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

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!

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.)

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.

Cylon Sighting

Hmm, does anyone else think that the logo on this sign….

…looks a bit like a Cylon Basestar?

Invasion of the Lenticular Clouds!

I wasn’t expecting to see more after my last post on lenticular clouds. As I said, they’re (usually) rare in this area. But as I left the office Friday evening, I pulled onto the freeway and nearly freaked out at what I saw: A line of three smooth, layered clouds running above the ridge of the mountains to the north of Saddleback, and two more less-defined clouds picking up south of the peaks. I took the first exit and headed for a spot where I knew I could get an unobstructed view: a park in the Quail Hill area. (Knollcrest, I think.)

Click for a larger image

It was near sunset, and I was in a hurry to get some photos (not to mention a better chance to look at them!) before the light faded. You can see that the sun had already dropped behind the hill on which I was standing.

Click for a larger image

If you look at the horizon in the wide view, near the left at what looks like the base of the hills, you can see the orange balloon at the Great Park. I’m fairly sure they’d stopped taking people up by then, though I did see it airborne during my walk at lunch.

I’ve enhanced the contrast on these next few images, all cropped from the same photo to show close-ups (relatively speaking) of the three clouds:

I’m going to do something unusual here, and post an original-resolution copy of that contrast-enhanced photo, just ’cause it’s so cool. It compressed really well, to 170K, but beware—it’s still a 2,567 pixel–wide image.

Web Contest: 11 Years Later

While checking some dead links in the Internet Archive, I decided to see what they had of the website for the Literary Guild at UCI. This was a creative writing club we were both involved in back in college. There’s an abbreviated history of the club still online.

I looked at the earliest archived copy I could find, and noticed down in the corner a badge for a long-forgotten website contest. Every quarter, the UCI Bookstore holds a literary contest, sometimes poetry, sometimes short stories. In spring 1996, they decided to make it a website contest. I had just built a website for the club, and submitted it. Our site was one of the three winners [archive.org].*

Just for kicks, I decided to see which of the sites were still around.

• Literary Guild at UCI - gone. The club disbanded after the 2000 school year, and the defunct website was removed 2 years later. I still keep an archive of one segment, the collaborative writing projects, but it used to have 10 times as much writing, meeting minutes, club info and news, etc.
• The Orchid Weblopedia - gone. It appears to have moved around a bit for several years, but the top search result for the title brings up its last web designer, and a note saying that “this page no longer exists.”
• Ishmael’s Companion - the study guide for the book, Ishmael is still around, but it’s now a tiny part of author Daniel Quinn’s site.

1 out of 3. And even that one’s at a different location.

And so the link rot continues…

* I was hoping to link to an independent announcement, but the UCI Bookstore website only lists the most recent winners (Spring 2007), and while the Anteater Weekly regularly announced the winners, their archives only go back to 1997. I did find the announcement in the May 30, 1996 Zotmail Archive, but it doesn’t return linkable results, so you’ll have to search for it.

The Perfect 404

Digg has a link to a story on creative 404 error pages. Amazingly enough, I managed to look at the page at the exact moment that it had 404 diggs.

How perfect is that?

Full screenshot below: Read the rest of this entry »

Sneaky Spammer

Judging by a quartet of comments posted this evening, 3 of which slipped past Spam Karma, someone’s started outsourcing comment spam to India. (I’m serious, the IP addresses were assigned to Bharti Airtel and BSNL Internet, both ISPs based in New Delhi.)

They were posted quickly, as if they’d been composed in another editor and pasted into the form. More importantly, they were actually posted through the form, not just sending data directly to the handler. And most tellingly, the posters had gone to the effort to fill out the CAPTCHA that Spam Karma provides to allow human commenters to recover from a false positive.

The one I liked best, from a technical perspective, was posted on Tall Ships of San Diego. The spammer had followed my link to the San Diego Maritime Museum, then followed that to a page describing one of the ships, the Californian, and generated a post by stringing together sentences from that page. The whole thing linked to a student loan site.

At first glance, it looked like a garbled, on-topic comment from someone who maybe didn’t speak English as their first language. That happens, and if it’s a legit comment, I leave it. In fact, I considered leaving the comment but deleting the author URL, until I looked up the ship. (It wasn’t one of the ships we toured on our visit, and I didn’t recognize the name.) As I looked at the ship’s profile, I started recognizing text from the comment. At that point it became clear what was going on, and I started looking at the other comments posted over the last few hours.

Is there demand for more Flash Archives?

Newsarama reports that during the Q&A part of the DC Nation panel at this weekend’s Baltimore Comic-Con, a fan asked:

Are there more Legion, Flash or Justice League Archives coming? [VP of Sales Bob] Wayne said that when you get up to the issues that can be affordably bought by collectors the demand for the Archive Editions goes down.

Okay, this might apply to the Silver-Age material. The four Flash Archives books so far are up to Flash #132 (1962). When I was tracking down back-issues in the #133–140 range (the likely contents of a hypothetical book 5) about 6 or 7 years ago, I seem to remember finding reasonably good copies in the $5-15 range. (Better copies, of course, run into triple digits.)

But there’s still 8 years of Golden-Age material to cover, from 1942–1949: more than 75% of Jay Garrick’s solo run. And those books are much harder to find, with battered readers’ copies often selling for $40–150.

Moreover, those 8 years include the first appearances of every major Golden-Age Flash villain. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve Been Stumbled Upon

Wow! Songs Not to Play at a Wedding has been one of our more popular posts for a long time, and I’d seen hits start coming in from StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site, about a week ago. But that was a trickle. I wasn’t prepared to check my stats at lunch today and see 1,112 visits from StumbleUpon (here’s the review page) since 5pm yesterday (WordPress’ daily stats rotate at midnight GMT), with another 632 the day before. Read the rest of this entry »

Halo and Sprocket to Return

I just discovered that cartoonist Kerry Callen is working on a new volume of Halo and Sprocket to be released next year!

The book ran for just 4 issues about 5 years ago, plus a few more short stories that appeared elsewhere. It’s about a trio of unlikely roommates: the human Katie, the angel Halo, and the robot Sprocket. More precisely, it’s about the different ways they each look at the world. Sprocket is intensely logical, Halo brings a spiritual perspective, and Katie’s humanity manages to perplex both of them no end. Each story is stand-alone, suitable for kids or adults, and a wonderful mix of insightful and drop-down funny.

The website has several stories online. Comics Worth Reading has a review of the first collection, Halo and Sprocket: Welcome to Humanity, which I highly recommend.

I was really disappointed when the series just stopped a few years ago, and I’m very glad to see that there’s going to be more.

Butterfly

Experimenting with the macro setting on my camera:

I cut across a vacant lot on my way to lunch last Friday. Most of it is just dirt and flattened stalks of of dry grass, but there are some plants that have sprung up since it was last mowed (probably sometime in spring) or have managed to hang on past then. (There’s a 2-foot-tall palm tree elsewhere on the lot.)

This was a cluster, maybe 3 feet long and 2 feet wide, of little white flowers about 1″–1½” wide. I put the camera as close to ground level as I could without setting it down, and aimed as best as I could from that angle. I took about a dozen photos, and lucked out: halfway through the shoot, a butterfly fluttered into the cluster.

Patch…Friday?

I suppose it’s best to release the security fixes when they’re ready, because any time you pick is going to be inconvenient for someone, but lately it seems like Friday is suddenly in style.

Last Friday saw the release of PHP 5.2.4, on the Friday before—in the US, anyway—a 3-day weekend. This morning Apache released security updates for all three supported branches of their webserver. And this evening—yes, Friday evening—WordPress 2.2.3 came out.

Which reminds me, I’m going to have to start looking at the betas for WordPress 2.3. I think it’ll be a good time for a redesign. Maybe pick a new theme and tweak that one, maybe try my hand at actually designing one. I wonder if the new tagging system can import Bunny’s Technorati Tags.

From DM of the Rings to Chainmail Bikini

After a year, DM of the Rings is finished. The comic recast Lord of the Rings as a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, using stills (sometimes brilliantly chosen) from the Peter Jackson–directed movie trilogy in a comic-strip format.

The series poked fun at RPG tropes and player types, with the players’ dialog given to the LOTR characters. Every once in a while, someone would speak in character. But mostly, they’d be asking about the Cheetos, or why there wasn’t enough loot. And speaking of loot, it also pointed out where the story would fall down as a game.

Anyway, cartoonist Shamus Young has already started his next project, this time with artist Shawn Gaston: The webcomic Chainmail Bikini: The Nightmare Legend of Deuce Baaj started today. From the first strip, it looks to be covering the same territory—foibles of role-playing games—this time explored through an original story. It’s not clear where the title comes in, though.

Tumbleweed Cluster

Tumbleweeds tend to collect along roadsides and fences in Orange County, dropping their seeds for the next year. This can lead to some spectacular clusters of car-sized puffballs of plant.

SR-55 off-ramp at Edinger

In a few weeks*, these will dry out, turn brown, and get picked up by the Santa Ana winds. They’ll roll along the road until they hit a fence, or perhaps fetch up against another cluster, and the cycle will start all over again.

* Or possibly already — I took this photo about 3 weeks ago, and with this past week’s heat wave, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

Into the Storm

Here’s a photo from the same April rainstorm in which we spotted the red rainbow at sunset:

This was taken about an hour earlier, driving up the 405.

Opera 9.5 Preview: First Thoughts

Opera Software has just released the first preview of Opera 9.5, code-named Kestrel.* It’s still a long way off from a beta, but the weekly previews should satisfy both web developers and fans of the Opera web browser.

In addition to Opera’s own page, Cybernet News has posted a run-down of new features. Improved compatibility with existing websites is, as always, at the top of the list. There are reportedly improvements in support for rich-text forms. Coupled with Opera’s outreach to libraries like FCKEditor, we should see more of these forms working in Opera soon.

Synchronizing bookmarks and cookies is nice, but what I really want is something that will not only keep multiple installations of Opera in sync, but will also keep that list in sync with Firefox and Safari.

The full-history search is going to be really nice once I’ve done some new surfing. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to bring up a page but couldn’t remember the name of the site, or needed to find a particular page on a site that gives every single page the same title. It doesn’t seem to be able to find anything from before I upgraded (yeah, I’m living dangerously, upgrading to an alpha), so it must index sites as you visit them, rather than converting the existing cache.

As a web developer, I’m most interested in the improvements to the rendering engine. David Storey posted a summary of new CSS features a few days back, and the changelog has a detailed—and fascinatingly long!—list of all the new and updated capabilities. I’m thrilled to finally have text-shadow in more than just WebKit, but was really hoping for border-radius and box-shadow support. (I’ve been having fun with the Safari 3 betas.) I should be more excited by the improved CSS selectors** support, but until Firefox or Safari implements the rest of them, we’ll still be stuck with the more broadly-supported subset. (Fortunately it looks like, as Konqueror switches from KHTML to WebKit, they’ll be merging KHTML’s capabilities into WebKit. That will give us full support in 2 of 4 major browser engines.)

Opera is also gearing up a new version of Opera Mini, the free browser for cell phones, having just released a beta of version 4. I keep meaning to check and see what data plan I need to be able to use it, because the built-in browser on my RAZR V3T is…extremely limited. There was a brief period last year in which T-Mobile let everyone use networked applications, and even Opera Mini 2 was leaps and bounds ahead of the Motorola browser.

Between Opera Mini and Safari on the iPhone, the mobile web seems to be really opening up in a way that people were scoffing at just a year ago.

*The name Kestrel always makes me think of Queen of Wands these days, which is better than always making me think of the Hawk & Dove villain.

**Current CSS Selectors support out of 43 selectors:
IE6: 10 + 1 partial
IE7: 13 + 4
Opera 9.23: 25 + 3
Safari 3 beta: 25 + 9
Firefox 2: 26 + 10
Firefox 3 alpha: 32 + 4
Konqueror 3.57: 43
Opera 9.5 alpha: 43

Unsyncable

I use Firefox, Opera, and Safari on a regular basis on three computers at home (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and two at work (Windows and Linux). That’s 11 sets of bookmarks that I’d like to pare down to 2.

del.icio.us helps somewhat, especially since I discovered I can add it as a search in both Firefox and Opera, but web apps have a certain amount of delay that doesn’t work for the most frequently-accessed sites. And I don’t want to add yet another web app, I want to sync the bookmarks in each browser.

Most of the solutions I’ve found (.Mac, Google Browser Sync, Opera 9.5, various Firefox extensions) are geared toward syncing two or more copies of the same browser on different computers. What I want is to bookmark a site in Firefox on one computer, and have it show up in Safari on another.

Any suggestions?

BEM: Ladies Man

Take a look at this public service announcement I found in a 1967 comic book:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Other Blue Ice

Saw this truck on the road a while back, a possible case of branding gone awry:

The problem is, when I see the words, “blue ice,” I don’t think of glaciers, I think of this:

And I seriously don’t want to drink the contents of a re-freezable block for portable coolers.

Ah, well, Google disagrees with me, returning the vodka as #1. (For the record, it’s hard to go wrong with Grey Goose.)

Saw Transformers

I finally got out to see Transformers today. Yes, I grew up with the cartoons, the toys and the comics. Yes, I even collected every comic book from the original Marvel series through the Generation 2 series (including the prologue in G.I. Joe) through the first round from DreamWave. But somewhere along the line I just lost interest, and ultimately sold off my entire collection. (On eBay, actually.)

But still, there’s some sort of primal thrill—at least for anyone who grew up as a boy in 1980s America—in seeing giant robots fighting each other. So I finally decided to catch it while it was still in theaters.

It was better constructed than I expected. They had a plausible reason for the Autobots and Decepticons to be on Earth, and they were very good about following up on exposition. Every gun that appeared on the wall was eventually fired, down to Sam’s eBay auctions, with one exception: I really expected them to blow up Hoover Dam.

Which brings me to the biggest gap in logic. SPOILERS follow, for anyone who, like me, has been living in a cave. Read the rest of this entry »