K-Squared Ramblings

Arm Fall-Off Boy

Somehow I’d missed this one, though I’d seen people toss the name around (and assumed they were joking). But it seems that yes, the Legion of Super-Heroes did in fact once reject Arm Fall-Off Boy:

Legion of Super-Heroes in the 31st Century #16, out next week.

Tori at Comic-Con!

I’d been trying to decide whether to pre-order Comic Book Tattoo (the graphic novel anthology based on Tori Amos songs) or pick it up at San Diego Comic-Con next month. Now I know.

Colleen Doran reports that Tori Amos will be signing the book on Saturday. Tickets for the signing — just 200 of them — will be given to people who purchase the book at the con (limited each day, so that they don’t all go on Wednesday).

She’ll also be on a panel on Saturday from 11:30–12:30. Here’s hoping DC doesn’t schedule a “What’s really happening with the Flash” panel at the same time, ’cause if they do, I’m skipping the Flash news. Someone’ll post it online. (Oh, wait…)

I am so looking forward to this…

B5 Script Series Shutting Down

I just got an email with the reminder that J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 Script Book Series is going out of print at the end of the month. Monday, June 30 is the last day.

It’s hardly a surprise, since the series was always advertised as a limited edition.

The weird thing is that they’re also shutting down the related store, with all the quote merchandise, until August. Presumably that includes the Londo/G’Kar campaign signs as well.

Meanwhile, the companion series, Other Voices, with scripts and commentary by the other writers who worked on the show, just released the second book. (To give you an idea of just how much of B5 JMS wrote, his scripts take up 14 volumes. The others add up to just 3.) It’s been interesting to compare the different styles of commentary. Some wrote epics, some did Q&A or interview-style introductions, and David Gerrold simply wrote half a page about why he resisted writing “Believers,” and what he did when he realized exactly why they wanted him to write it.

I hate to admit it, but I’ve only just started reading the bonus volume of the original set last weekend (in between bouts of re-reading The Ringworld Throne and writing). After so many years wondering “what would have happened if Sinclair had stayed?” you’d think I’d be in a bigger hurry to find out. Okay, I was busy with the whole moving thing, and then unpacking, and then trying to catch up on a fan site, and then trying to launch a blog, and I keep getting sucked into comic forums…

I think I need to sleep more.

Surrounded!

Upgrade Priorities

TigerDirect keeps sending me ads for widescreen LCD monitors. I’d love to pick up a 22″ widescreen (right now I’ve got a 17″ LCD that runs 1280×1024), but my computer is in much more need of a mobo+processor upgrade. Especially since something on the system — and not the video card or the monitor — went bad recently and is preventing it from running at any resolution higher than 1024×768, leaving me stuck with a blurry screen on the monitor I’ve got. So I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of a new monitor anyway.

I’m putting that off mainly because I need to do make the time to research what I’m going to get. I’ve narrowed it down to a dual-core AMD, but then I have to balance which processor, motherboard, and memory to get.

Also, at this point, I may as well go 64-bit, which is going to mean reinstalling Fedora. Though in theory I should be able to run the 32-bit OS to start with, which means I could do the hardware upgrade one weekend, and the OS reinstall the next.

The other tech upgrade I’m desperate to get is a new phone. While my ideal phone doesn’t quite exist yet, I’d really like something with better mobile internet access than my RAZR V3T — particularly with Comic-Con coming up next month. They’re usually good at keeping you informed of scheduling changes (unlike Wizard World), but now that I’ve got SpeedForce.org, I’d like to be able to do at least minimal blogging from the convention floor rather than waiting until I get back to the hotel. Posting by email doesn’t cut it, and even with the WPhone Plugin providing a stripped-down admin interface, half the time the built-in browser tells me it can’t display the page. I may bite the bullet and pay T-Mobile the extra $20/month for a data plan so that I can run Opera Mini.

On the plus side, I’ve at least found a way to post photos directly using Flickr.

Pack of Sundogs

Last Wednesday, on my drive home from work, I spotted a sundog on the way home from work. I finally snapped it when I pulled into the parking lot at Trader Joe’s.

The picture on the left was the best of the set, with the best contrast. The red is clearly visible on the end toward the sun, and the reflection is clearly brighter than the surrounding clouds. The one on the right is actually two minutes earlier, and isn’t as good — except that it looks like there are two sundogs (something I hadn’t noticed when I took the picture). Presumably there was a gap in the cloud of ice crystals, and one half or the other drifted out of alignment.

Coincidentally, that was the same day that aeryncrichton sent me a link to these sky phenomena photos. They’ve got several halos, a pair of auroras, a double rainbow with supernumeraries, and a photo of star trails (which is technically a photographic artifact, but still looks nifty).

Comic Con = Cheapskates?

It’s long been a mystery to comic fans why the city of San Diego seems so uncomfortable with Comic-Con International. After all, with upwards of 100,000 people coming in for 4 days, renting hotel rooms, buying meals and drinks, and so on, we must be giving the city an annual boost of extra income, right?

Okay, there’s the usual love-hate relationship between any tourist destination and its clientele. Plus some people get freaked out by anyone in a costume. And sure, some attendees don’t understand basic concepts of hygiene, or bear an uncanny resemblance to the Comic Book Guy. But most of us are normal people (and shower every day). And besides, we’re bringing in all this business, right?

Well, maybe not. The New York Times writes, in an article about Hollywood’s uneasy relationship with the con, that the con is “decidedly low-rent.”

No. 33 on the official tip sheet* lists the grocery chain Ralph’s Market as an alternative to dining out. The Bio International Convention in San Diego, a gathering of the biotechnology industry, with one-sixth as many attendees, produces about double Comic-Con’s $41.5 million in economic impact on the city.

Yes, that’s right. A biotech conference brings the city 12 times as much per attendee as Comic-Con. The city puts up with 6 times the strain on their roads, public transportation, and other infrastructure, for only half the reward?

No wonder they don’t like us.

So here’s a mission for those of you going to San Diego this year: Head down to the reservations pavilion in the convention center lobby at least once, and make a reservation at a nearby restaurant. The Gaslamp District is right across the street from the convention center, so there’s plenty of good food to choose from. Be clean. Be polite. Don’t order the cheapest thing on the menu with a glass of water. Tip appropriately. Overall: make a good impression.

(via Comics Worth Reading)

*Not that I can find this official tip sheet anywhere. Plenty of unofficial tip sheets — heck, we wrote our own a few years ago — but no sign of an official one.

iPod on Random

Caught “Weird Al” Yankovic’s song, “She Drives Like Crazy” — appropriately enough, while on the freeway. I never used to understand why he did the funny voices in the song, until I remembered the Muppets music video of the original song (”She Drives Me Crazy”), with Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog…and suddenly the voices clicked into place.

It’s odd that the intro on the title track to “The Phantom of the Opera” (the Andrew Lloyd Webber show) sounds so much like the MIDI file I found in the mid-1990s. I don’t know if that’s a comment on the quality of my old sound card, or a comment on how many synthesizers were used in the original recording. Either way, whoever sequenced that MIDI file got the timing exactly right.

Photo: Old Balcony

06-16-07_1338.jpg, originally uploaded by Kelson.

This is a picture I took last summer of the balcony on our old apartment. I used it to test using Flickr’s email upload and blog-posting features to upload a picture straight from my phone.

Unfortunately, it needed cleanup. The title (and post slug) end up being the filename, which I suppose I can fix before sending, and the content seems to get posted twice. I suspect the phone is sending both formatted and plain-text versions of the message, and Flickr is reading them both.

Anyway, it’s not a bad picture, so I figured I’d leave it up instead of deleting the test post.

Swoop Warning

Well, that’s encouraging. I mean, nothing makes lunchtime better than worrying you might be about to star in a Hitchcock remake.

Planetary to Conclude

Warren Ellis just posted to his Bad Signal mailing list that John Cassiday has started drawing Planetary #27! It’s been something like a year since Ellis finished writing the issue, and closer to two years since the last issue shipped. Wildstorm even released Absolute Planetary in a not-quite-absolute state, rather than waiting for a story that’s described as an epilogue. (I seem to recall hearing that they planned to add it in a second edition.) Edit: I should have realized from the page count, but the listing at Amazon makes it clear that this is Absolute Planetary Volume 1, and only covers the first 12 issues.

9 years is a bit long for a 27-issue comic book series, but Planetary has been consistently worth the wait.

Firefox Download Day is Upon Us!

Just a reminder: Tuesday is Firefox Download Day, and Firefox is trying to set a world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

It starts at 10:00 AM Pacific Daylight Saving Time (the Mozilla offices are in Mountain View, California), i.e. 17:00 UTC. You can use a time zone converter to figure out your what time that is in your own time zone.

Only full downloads count, so if you’ve been using one of the release candidates and want your download to be counted for the record, you’ll have to go to the website instead of just using auto-update. Edit: The Download Day page is swamped — just head to Mozilla.com for now.

And yes, Firefox 3 is good. I’ve been using the betas and release candidates for several months, and it’s a huge improvement over version 2!

Announcing SpeedForce.org!

I’ve just launched SpeedForce.org, a companion blog to the website, Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning.

Since I started adding news items to the front page of Ride the Lightning, it’s started to get a bit crowded. I thought about converting it to a del.icio.us feed, but then I realized it really ought to be a blog. There hasn’t been a major Flash-focused blog out there since Crimson Lightning shut down, so I figured I’d step in and fill the gap. And I could use the domain I picked up last year!

I’ll be posting Flash-related news there, including a weekly round-up of Flash comics, as well as articles that might not fit into the existing site structure, and (eventually) reviews as well. Some stuff that I would have posted here will end up on the new site. Certainly Flash news, but I may start shifting more comics-related commentary over there as well.

I’ll be refining the look and features over the next couple of weeks, and cross-linking it more into Ride the Lightning. I might keep the current theme with a few tweaks, or I might try to match Ride the Lightning, or I might build something else entirely.

So please, check it out and let me know what you think! I’m open to suggestions as to content, design, etc. And of course bug reports.

TV Shows that Should be on DVD

One nice thing about the DVD market is that it seems like just about every TV show imaginable has gotten released on DVD over the past few years (to the point where, in some cases, it feels like studios are scraping the bottom of the barrel). But if you look at the full list at TV Shows On DVD, the percentage of shows available is actually quite small.

Once the trend had been established, I waited years for first Babylon 5, then Animaniacs, and then The Flash to make the list. I’m still waiting for VR.5, a show from the mid-1990s that, like Firefly and Drive, got half a season on Fox and didn’t even see every episode aired. (Okay, the premise was total fantasy wrapped in a sci-fi buzzword, but the concept, characters, and storyline were interesting.)

So, what TV shows of days past are you hoping to see again? I’m mainly curious about shows that have been off the air for at least 5 years.

Opera 9.5 Release Round-Up

Yes, Opera 9.5 is now available, beating Firefox 3 by just 5 days! Highlights include:

• Opera Link synchronizes your bookmarks, Speed Dial, and notes between Opera on different computers, and even links to Opera Mini on your phone!
• Enhanced address bar searches your entire browsing history, including the contents of each page.
• Security enhancements: malware protection, improved fraud protection, and support for Extended Validation SSL Certificates
• New rendering engine with improved site compatibility and performance.
• Opera Dragonfly, the long-awaited tools for web developers.
• New theme inspired by Scandinavian design.

(List re-used from my Opera Watch post on the then-imminent release.)

Link Round-Up

• Press Release: Opera redefines Web browsing yet again
• Opera 9.5 Changelog (Windows) — My favorite improvement on the Unix side is the 64-bit version for Linux
• Opera Watch: Opera 9.5 Released
• Opera Desktop Features
• Opera 9.5 - the next generation of web standards (What’s new for developers)
• CSS3.info: Opera 9.5 launches with lots of CSS improvements

Digg it or Download it!

Smilers in Concert

Went to see Aimee Mann on Friday at the House of Blues. She’s promoting her new album, @#%&*! Smilers (and yes, it’s pronounced as you might expect, though she also gave an alternate pronunciation of “Effing Smilers”), which just came out last week. Of course, this meant that most of the audience either hadn’t heard the new songs, or had only heard them a few days before. Old favorites like “Save Me” tended to get cheers as soon as people recognized the intro music. With the new stuff, people were quieter, as if they were waiting to hear the song for the first time. But they all got applause in the end.

In the past, when we’ve gone to the Anaheim House of Blues, we’ve tried to eat at Downtown Disney. It always proves problematical, with restaurants either not taking reservations for parties of two or not having any reservations left. This time we just at near home and drove up after dinner. We got there after the doors opened, but before most of the audience arrived, and managed to claim a spot dead center in the main floor, much closer than we’d ever been to this stage.

The opening act was Rebecca Pigeon. She was quite good, and a good match stylistically. (Too often, you only get one — or neither. We still joke about “Corn Mo” who opened for TMBG a few years ago.) She started with “Tough on Crime,” which Katie figures has to have a Heroes video in it somewhere. Interesting fact: it turns out she’s married to David Mamet.

By the end of the opening act, the house had filled up considerably, and was respectably packed by the time Aimee Mann took the stage. Read the rest of this entry »

The Race is On

With the Firefox 3 release imminent, Opera Software has just announced a release candidate for Opera 9.5, “arriving very soon.”

Neither browser has announced a definite release date (though Mozilla has stated Firefox 3 will launch in “late June”), but both are in the final stages. Update: Mozilla has announced a release date of June 17.

Update 2: Opera wins with a June 12 release.

• Read about Opera 9.5 RC1
• Read about Firefox 3 RC2

The Accidental Beekeeper

On Monday, Katie found a bee flying around the kitchen, and a disturbing buzzing sound coming from the stove vent. Outside, bees were swarming around the outlet. We clearly had bees in the ceiling. Worse, they were getting into the kitchen. By Monday evening, we’d found at least 8 bees in the kitchen, two of them at once.

Maintenance came out that afternoon, realized there were too many bees to handle, and called in the professionals to come out on Tuesday. By Tuesday evening, there were only a handful of bees outside, and we found a half dozen dead on the floor near the window. And, disturbingly, one dying bee stuck in a pool of unidentified goo in a skillet that had been left to dry on the stove.

And that was the end of it, until Katie opened up the cabinet above the stove today, and was greeted by the sight of dozens of dead bees:

They weren’t just in the vent, or the ceiling: if we’d opened that cabinet on Monday, we’d have had a full-on swarm in the kitchen.

The Flash Companion Arrives in July

A couple of bits of news on TwoMorrows’ upcoming book, The Flash Companion by Keith Dallas. This is the book for which I wrote several articles last fall.

First, the book has been scheduled for July 23, which brings it out just in time for San Diego Comic-Con.

Second, I noticed this week that Amazon is offering 26% off on pre-orders, bringing it to $19.81.

I’ll let the official summary speak for itself (with a bit of reformatting):

The Flash Companion details the publication histories of the four heroes who have individually earned the right to be declared DC Comics’ “Fastest Man Alive”: Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West, and Bart Allen.

With articles about legendary creators Shelly Mayer, Gardner Fox, E.E. Hibbard, Julius Schwartz, Robert Kanigher, John Broome, Ross Andru, Irv Novick and all new interviews of Harry Lampert, Carmine Infantino, Cary Bates, Alex Saviuk, Mike W. Barr, Marv Wolfman, Mike Baron, Jackson Guice, Mark Waid, Scott Kolins, among others, The Flash Companion recounts the scarlet speedster’s evolution from the Golden Age to the 21st century.

Also featured are “lost covers,” never before published commission pieces by Flash artists throughout the decades, a Rogues Gallery detailing The Flash’s most famous foes (including 3 profiles by the author of this website) a tribute to late artist Mike Wieringo by Mark Waid, a look at the speedster’s 1990s TV show, and “Flash facts” detailing pivotal moments in Flash history. Written by Keith Dallas, with a cover by Don Kramer (Detective Comics, JSA) with colors by Moose Baumann (Green Lantern).

I’ve contributed three articles to the Rogues Gallery section, and a convention photo. I’ve had a chance to read some of the other articles and interviews, and this is going to be a great read for Flash fans!

Edit: One more item: This is small press, and I’m not the main author on the book, so I’m not getting paid for the articles I contributed. But I do have an Amazon Affiliate account, so if you order through this link, I’ll actually get paid a little in a roundabout way.

Quick Thoughts on Gas Mileage

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times ran an article about the fact that, in response to soaring gas prices, smaller cars are outselling light trucks (which include SUVs, pickups, and minivans) in the US for the first time since 1996. Last night I was going through old magazines that we’d just tossed in a bag before moving. I found the September 2006 issue of Westways (the California Auto Club’s magazine), with a cover story about the new breed of small cars, wondering when the market would shift in response to the high prices. Now there’s timing.

On a related note, 9 months of driving a Prius has given me a somewhat different perspective on “good” and “bad” mileage. When I see averages of 38–48 MPG over the course of a tank of gas, and can get up to 60 MPG on straight, flat stretches of freeway, advertisements touting 25–30 MPG just don’t sound that enticing.

Summer of the Browser

Firefox: The new release candidate Firefox 3 RC2 is out. No date yet on the official launch, but they’re still saying June. Also, developers are starting to talk work that’s gone into what will become Firefox 3.1, such as completing CSS3 selectors support.

Opera: A new Opera 9.5 preview came out today, showcasing the browser’s new look. Also, the Opera Core team takes a look at what you can do if you put hardware acceleration on the whole browser.

Internet Explorer: IE8 beta 2 is scheduled for August. I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ve done, and figure I’ll start updating sites to accommodate changes. I held off changing too much when IE8b1 came out, because some of the differences were obviously bugs (triggering the Caio Hack, for instance; and yes, I reported it).

Flock has been moving ahead with small, rapid releases, adding integration for new services each time. They just added Digg and Pownce in Flock 1.2 a few days ago. Now they’re getting ready to start on Flock 2.0, which will merge in all the new capabilities of Firefox 3. That means it’ll get new rendering capabilities, better memory management, probably EV certs and such.

Comic-Con - Get Your Tickets Now!

Seven weeks left until Comic-Con International, and the San Diego convention has sold out of 4-day memberships. One-day tickets are still available — for now. They’d already decided not to sell tickets at the door this year, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they actually sell out before the event. (via sd_comic_con)

Recovering Lost “Drive”

While looking to see if Amazon had the Flash TV series available on their Unbox video download service (they don’t), I noticed that they do have the short-lived 2007 TV series, Drive.

Drive was an ensemble series about contestants in an illegal cross-country race. Some drivers volunteered, while others were forced to compete. Nathan Fillion (of Firefly and Serenity) starred as a man forced into the race in order to rescue his kidnapped wife.

The four — count them, four episodes that actually aired last spring were extremely good. Naturally, FOX canceled it immediately, and (as far as I know) never showed the remaining episodes that had been completed. And of course there’s no DVD release (so far).

The interesting thing: Unbox has six episodes at $2 each (or $9 for the full set). I’m going to have to check this out.

Let’s see if this preview widget works…

Annoyingly, the actual download service requires Windows, though they apparently have a setup where you can download it straight to a Tivo box now. And I’m sure it’s DRMed up one side and down the other, with all the hazards that entails.

Update: It turns out that iTunes Has Drive too, with all 6 episodes. The last two are actually labeled as never having been aired.

Web Browser Milestones Passed

Last October I wrote about some milestones in web browser marketshare. Specifically, I was looking forward to IE7 overtaking IE6, and to Firefox overtaking IE6. Well, both of those have finally happened, at least on this site, and a little more besides. Take a look at these stats from May 2008:

Back when I wrote the original post, I had a series of 5 or 6 milestones in mind, but decided to keep it simple and only post the first two. The next one after Firefox passing IE6 was for Firefox 2+ to pass IE6. I should have been checking in more frequently, since it already has.

So what’s next? Well, I expect to see the following in the next year or two:

• Firefox 3 replacing Firefox 2. It’s already got a strong pre-release following. (Fx2 will stick around while there are still Win98 and WinMe users, but they’re already at less than 1% here and falling.)
• Firefox 1 fading into the sunset in favor of newer, more capable releases.
• Netscape disappearing into history. (It’s already below 1% here.)
• IE6 dropping below 25%, 20%, 10% (watching it go to single digits will be satisfying), and finally 1%.
• Safari approaching 10%. It’s holding steady here, but keeps climbing globally.

Things I’d like to see, but am less confident about in the near-term:

• IE6 disappearing from the radar. There are hold-outs, both at the user and the sysadmin level, plus a sizeable minority on Windows 2000. Plus I think Microsoft is committed to supporting IE6 through the lifetime of Windows XP, which means they’ll keep shipping security fixes until 2014. On the other hand, IE 5.0 is technically still supported as part of Windows 2000, but I see very few IE5 visitors these days.
• IE8 replacing IE7, for most of the same reasons it’s taking so long for IE7 to replace IE6.
• Opera breaking out of its steady marketshare and hitting a solid 5%. That would make them much harder to ignore. (10% would be better, since Safari’s still struggling for recognition at 6%.) Of course, to get there they’ll have to pull off a major publicity coup.
• IE dropping below 50%. Could be done, but it’ll be tough. If there’s no majority browser, it’ll be very difficult to justify building a site for one browser only.

Of course, these will probably all happen faster locally than globally, since the audience seems to skew slightly toward the alternatives, but then local stats are the ones that actually matter for a specific site.

Sushi is your friend!

The restaurant, Ra Sushi, has quite good food. But don’t plan on holding any conversations over dinner, since they play loud, driving music with the bass turned up to 11.