K-Squared Ramblings

Don’t Plug the Automatic Sink!

The restrooms in the office building where I work have sinks with automatic faucets, triggered by some sort of sensor, probably motion detectors. I walked in this afternoon and noticed one sink was completely full, with a skin of soap bubbles on top. From past experience, I had my suspicions about what had happened, so I tried to look through a clear spot to the base of the sink.

Sure enough, someone had plugged the sink with a paper towel, then walked away.

That’s inconsiderate enough in any public restroom. But when the sink is automatic, there’s another problem: Once the water reaches high enough, it trips the sensor, and it can get into a feedback loop. As near as I can tell, it filled up the sink until it hit the overflow drain, and eventually the sensor stopped registering movement and shut off.

I rolled up my sleeve, reached in there, and pulled the soggy paper towel out. It started draining, and I started washing my hands in another sink. As I watched, the movement of the water triggered the faucet, and it started running, though fortunately the drain was faster. By the time I was finished, it was clear. Problem solved, though it had already wasted a whole sinkful of water (or more — I have no idea who long it was running before it shut off).

So please, if you must plug a restroom sink with a paper towel, especially if it’s automatic, take two seconds to remove the paper towel before you leave.

Comic-Con Sellout

I’m floored.

Absolutely floored that 4-day passes for Comic-Con International 2010 have sold out.

I mean, it’s the first week of November, and the convention isn’t until next July!

Tickets with access to Wednesday’s Preview Night sold out a few weeks ago, but at the time, CCI didn’t provide any information about how many regular 4-day passes were left. This Monday, they posted a progress gauge at 70%. The last time I looked yesterday, it was up to 89%.

Today? Sold out completely.

I can’t help but think it would have taken longer if they hadn’t provided a gauge to let people know just how scarce a resource memberships were going to be. There’s nothing like the fear of a shortage to get people to run out and buy up what’s available (and create a shortage). But I also can’t complain, because without that feedback, we might have kept putting off plunking down the $200 for the two of us, and we might have missed our chance.

Single-day tickets haven’t gone on sale yet, so it’s still possible to go if you haven’t already bought your tickets. You can of course buy more than one, it just means standing in line each morning to pick up the next badge. (Even the more relaxed WonderCon, run by the same organization, doesn’t let you pick up a Sunday badge on Saturday, as we discovered last year.)

If you’re planning on going to San Diego next year, keep an eye on the website. Four-day passes went insanely quickly, and I would expect the one-day passes to do the same.

(Cross-posted at Speed Force)

Line Items for 2009-11-04

• Cool: Tori Amos’ classic Little Earthquakes is today’s MP3 deal of the day at Amazon. #
• RT @2012hoax: How to survive 2012: Do not piss off Chuck Norris. <== Sounds like a good idea! 2012 Hoax. #
• WTF? Louisiana (ex) Justice of the Peace who opposes interracial marriage STILL claims he isn’t racist? #
• And Maine bigots insist they aren’t anti-gay, they’re just “protecting” marriage…from people who want get married. #

Line Items for 2009-11-03

• Cool: retro posters for Pixar’s “Up” #
• Interesting: I can call OUT from @TMobile_USA to a landline, & have 3G data, but can’t call mobile to mobile or land to mobile. #

Traffic Spike & Comic-Con Pile-Up

• 6 years ago I titled a blog post “Offensive Driving.” It’s getting a traffic spike from people searching for a particular “handbook.” # Blame Balloon Boy.
• Crazy: 4-day tickets for Comic-Con International 2010 – NEXT JULY – are 70% sold out. #

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.

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?” #

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:

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.

It’s the Great Pumpkin

_MG_4592, originally uploaded by blueskyoveraquatic.

Actually it’s the Great Park Balloon in Irvine, done up with a Jack-O-Lantern face. I keep meaning to run out at lunch and try to catch a photo of it floating above the office parks, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

For now, this photo I found on Flickr will do.

Bright Fog

Weird: I had to wear sunglasses while driving through fog. The layer was just thin enough to produce major glare from the sun. #

Stella!

After last weekend’s trip to storage, I was planning to re-read Greg Keyes’ Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series, until I remembered that the new Wheel of Time novel, The Gathering Storm (why, oh why did they have to pick such a generic title?), comes out next week. Not the best time to start a four-book epic.

So I rummaged through the to-read box this morning, looking for something to bring along and read at lunch, and settled on The True Stella Awards. I picked it up when it was new, four years ago, but somehow never got around to reading it.

The nonfiction book is by Randy Cassingham, author of the long-running This is True newsletter, and is a collection of write-ups of frivolous lawsuits. It’s named after an email forward that used to go around with the title “The Stella Awards” (only that used made-up lawsuits like the one about the guy who supposedly put his Winnebago on cruise control and went into the back to make a sandwich). That list was named after Stella Liebeck, the woman famous for suing McDonalds after spilling scalding hot coffee on herself. Cassingham decided that using fake examples to illustrate a real problem was counterproductive, and started a newsletter featuring real cases of legal abuse, eventually making it into a book.

It’s been interesting to see which cases have been included. One of the first examples was a 2003 lawsuit against Nabisco for using trans-fats in Oreos (they’ve since been reformulated, IIRC)…which was dropped as soon as the filer had racked up enough publicity.

Mountain Silhouette

It’s cool that sunset/sunrise can make distant mountains stand out in silhouette even when they fade into the haze in broad daylight. # The San Gabriels to the north, the Santa Monica Mountains to the northwest, Signal Hill Rolling Hills* to the west, and even a small segment of Catalina Island to the southwest were all visible, though I don’t remember seeing any of them during the day today.

I remember riding in a shuttle back from LAX once before dawn, and I could swear that I could see the silhouette of the San Jacinto Mountains from Los Angeles. They’re out near Palm Springs. Not exactly something you normally see from LA.

*There’s a wedge-shaped hill that’s visible in the west from north Orange County on really clear days. Somehow I had it in my head that it was Signal Hill, but I noticed when I went to Long Beach Comic Con a few weeks ago that (a) I passed the city of Signal Hill on the way to the con and (b) the hill I can see from Orange County was still visible to the northwest from Long Beach. Thanks to Google Earth for helping me figure out just what hill it actually was!