K-Squared Ramblings

Skull Pumpkin & Vampire Halloween

Katie carved this incredible anatomically-correct skull Jack-O-Lantern for Halloween today. Update: Check the comments for her writeup on how she carved it.

It seems to have worked as a “yes, we’re handing out candy” signal. Last year we didn’t get any trick-or-treaters. (We also didn’t put up any decorations that year, either.) This year, they started arriving while I was taking photos of the pumpkin…and while Katie was opening the bags of candy!

She dressed up in her vampire costume, which got some great responses. One trick-or-treater asked about the fangs. She overheard another walking away from the door and wondering, “Do you think she was a real vampire?”

By 8:50 we were down to only three Starbursts left to hand out, so we brought the pumpkin inside and called it a night.

Earlier this afternoon, I ran some errands and deliberately went to the Spectrum so that I’d have a chance of spotting the Great Park Balloon in the air while it still had the Jack-O-Lantern face on. I thought this view made for a nice image of the Great Pumpkin, rising up over the trees.

Geeky Pumpkins of Halloweens Past

I’m not much of a pumpkin carver myself, but Katie likes to get creative. Here are some Jack-O-Lanterns she’s done, inspired by science fiction, fantasy, comics and games.

From 2003… Gourdzilla!

Inspired by a Grand Ave. strip earlier that week.

Also, Aeryn Sun from Farscape!

More about these: 2003 Halloween Madness

From 2005… Puzzle Pirates’ Navigation puzzle!

Yes, the “Arrr!” on the wall is a projection.

More: Pumpkin Arrrrrt.

And finally, one that hasn’t been on this blog before: The Eye of Sauron, from 2002. Unfortunately we could only find one picture of it, and it was lit up from the outside, so you can’t see how awesome it looked in the dark.

(Evidently, whoever sat at this desk liked dogs.)

This year’s Jack-O-Lantern will be up soon!

Errand Observations

• The Spectrum food court has ripped out the planters. I guess they realized they needed the floor space after they chopped off one end. #
• It’s Halloween, so Target has the Christmas decorations up! #
• Just heard a commercial that started off, “Winter is Coming.” #
• OK, only 3 people reading this will get the reference, but… “Where are you going?” #

All it Needs is an iPod

Seriously: this Starbucks VIA stand-up looks like it could use an iPod #

There’s a Slogan for That

“There’s a ___ for that” is the new “Got ___?” #

Great Park, Great Pumpkin

Great Park – Great Pumpkin, originally uploaded by Kelson.

The Great Park Balloon in Irvine, California, all dressed up as a Jack-o-Lantern for Halloween. I was hoping to get a shot of it aloft, but it landed as I approached the park.

It looks really eerie lit up at night, floating off in the distance. Or just floating above office buildings.

It’s not as good a picture as the one I found on Flickr last week, but you can see the whole face.

Here’s a non-zoomed shot, showing the big empty field and Saddleback in the background:

Outer Planets: Viewing Neptune

This morning I saw some wavy clouds that reminded me of the patterns you see in pictures of Jupiter. I started thinking about gas giant planets, and had an odd moment of realization: when I was a kid, astronomy books didn’t have actual photos of Uranus or Neptune. They couldn’t have — there weren’t any! There were nice photos of Jupiter and Saturn from the Voyager missions, but Voyager 2 didn’t reach Uranus until 1986, or Neptune until 1989.

The really weird thing, though: modern astronomy books do have photos of Neptune — but the ones for general audiences probably all use the same picture I got as a framed poster when I was in high school. We haven’t been back in 20 years. Jupiter and Saturn have gotten a lot of attention, partly because they’re a lot closer and partly because their ring and moon systems are so fascinating. So we have a more continuous view of those planets and how they change over time.

Neptune? One snapshot (metaphorically speaking) of the planet from 20 years ago. Everything before and everything since then has been done with telescopes. Even the Hubble barely has the resolution to tell that the Great Dark Spot broke up sometime between 1989 and 1994. That’s something that maybe shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given how quickly storms form and dissipate on Earth, but back in 1989 it seemed so much like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (going on 400 years or longer) that it was easy to think it too would be persistent.

It’s a good reminder that the universe beyond Earth does change with the passage of time…even on a human scale.

Download? Don’t Download?

• How appropriate! You can download @alyankovic’s “Don’t Download This Song” for free: http://j.mp/4zf5Rd (via @amazonmp3) #
• Whoa…the spamtraps are *full* of bogus Facebook password reset notices! #

GeoCities / Com & Line

• GeoCities lingered for a day, but has shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. # Over at Speed Force, I wrote a piece on GeoCities, RIP: Fandom’s Lost Pages.
• Interesting typo seen on a mailing list: “com and line option.” (command line) #

G1: No Android 2 for You!

Okay, I get it. By buying the first device of its kind (i.e. an Android-powered smartphone), I’m an early adopter. In a sense I was helping out in a massive public beta as Google, mobile phone carriers, and handset manufacturers worked out the kinks in the design and realized things like, “Oh, we really do need more memory than that, don’t we?”

But it’s still annoying to read the early reports that Android 2.0 “Eclair” won’t fit on the G1.

We have done this dance before, when rumors surfaced that the G1 wouldn’t be able to handle Android 1.6 “Donut.” Fortunately, engineers managed to squeeze it into the space available, and T-Mobile sent out Donut as an OTA (over the air) update to MyTouch and G1 devices alike. But I’ve had time to think about the issue, and my thoughts basically come down to this:

• New software eventually reaches a point when it can no longer support old hardware. You can’t run Snow Leopard on a G4 or Windows 7 on a Pentium II.
• When the hardware is usually tied to a fixed-term service contract (in this case, 2 years), the provider really ought to fully support it for the length of that contract. The G1 launched 1 year ago with (in most cases) a 2-year contract.
• Even if this is the last major update, my phone is still better now than it was when I bought it.

It will be very nice if history repeats itself, and Google and/or T-Mobile finds a way to cram Eclair onto the G1. Even if it means dropping the convenience of OTA updates and instead requiring you to download it to a PC and update over a USB cable. More likely, though, they’ll freeze the G1 on Android 1.6 except for bugfix and security updates, and it’ll be up to unofficial distributions like cyanogen to bring a newer OS to the older phone.

Because I don’t really want to mess with rooting my phone and installing a third-party distribution, if this is the end of the line for the G1, well…Android 2 has some really nice features that I’d really like to be able to use, but nothing that screams “must have!” The only real worry I have at this point is that app developers might start requiring newer versions of Android.

The other option: buy a newer phone. I’ll probably want to do that anyway in a year or so, but I’m not there yet. It still feels like I just got this one.

Why?

• Got a tech support question consisting of a single word: “Why?” #
• What genius decided dark green on black was a good way to mark up parking spaces? # To make matters worse, some of the spaces actually are 20-minute spaces…only they’re labeled on the ground, in the same color green paint. I was almost into the space before I noticed.
• Judging by the commercial, Ford’s hybrids are hippier than the Prius. # And I say this as the happy owner of a Prius. Seriously…the size of a tree indicates energy efficiency? The Prius has a bar graph.

Vampire Castle

• Castle as a “space cowboy” – “Didn’t you wear that, like, 5 years ago?” #
• They so should have called this episode “Castle-vania” #

Droidmark

I wonder if Lucasfilm will try to assert trademark over the Motorola/Verizon Droid? #

One Letter Off Movies

Another Twitter meme: come up with movie titles just one letter off from the original, tagged #oneletteroffmovies. I posted these on my other account on Friday.

• New Dork Stories #
• Annie Get Your Gum #
• Fight Clue #
• There should be an Oz sequel called All About Ev. #
• Reaching a bit, but Key D’argo (Farscape) #
• Ok, I keep coming up with movie titles for and finding that someone else has already done them. Time for bed I think. #
• Okay, one more. There are those who call it…The Land Before Tim. #

Sci-Fi Remakes

There was a meme running through Twitter today to come up with movie titles for #scifiremakes. Here are my contributions.

• Shaka Sulu #
• Schindler’s Arcology #
• Obi-Wan Hur #
• Droids on the Side #
• Shuttlecraft 54, Where Are You? #