I keep walking past this empty storefront at the Irvine Spectrum, and I have yet to spot anything indicating just what is going in. The phrasing kind of implies that something specific is opening soon. It makes me wonder if I’m supposed to recognize the pattern or something.

Any ideas?

Smoke from a brush fire near San Juan Capistrano, seen from the parking structure at the Irvine Spectrum. I wouldn’t have caught this if I hadn’t checked Twitter when I sat down to lunch and seen an update from @LATimesfires. (As it is, I still had to make do with the camera on my phone.)

The picture was taken around 1:30. It’s about 3:30 now, and I don’t see a plume anymore (though it could be behind a building) — just a smear of haze to the south and west.

According to the LA Times, the fire started when a tractor crashed into a power pole this morning.

It started up with “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Bohemian Polka,” which was a fun, off-kilter start to the week. When it followed up with “Jurassic Park,” I didn’t think much of it. Twofers by artist, and even by album, aren’t that uncommon.

When “Living in the Fridge” started up, I got a little suspicious.

Sure enough, when I stopped the car and checked, shuffle was set to “off.” I figure the playlist must have been sorted by album the last time I synced, with Alapalooza the first on the list.

I’m still not sure whether it switched off shuffle when the battery ran down, or I just had it off before and didn’t notice because the last playlist I was listening to was pre-shuffled. Still, it was — appropriately — weird.

• Test the memory so that, if it’s good, we can resell it instead of recycling it.
• Wipe the hard disk so that we can recycle the computer.

Tools:

• Tech Tool Pro 4 disc
• Tech Tool Pro 5 disc
• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard install disc
• Mac OS X 10.3 install disc (came with laptop)

You’d think this would be easy…

Sunday

I spent a couple of minutes looking for the Tech Tool Pro 5 disc, but couldn’t find it, so I figured I’d try version 4 since I knew where it was. I’d forgotten that TTP4 doesn’t like this display. The colors were so messed up I couldn’t read it.

So I figured I’d use the Leopard install disc to wipe the hard drive first, and look for the TTP5 disc in the meantime. I spent at least an hour and a half looking through my CD rack and a messy pile of paper and had no luck. Meanwhile, the laptop froze while zeroing the disk. The screen had turned off, so I have no idea how much it actually wiped.

Then I found the TTP5 disc between two CD boxes.

At this point I figured I’d let the machine cool off overnight and deal with it the next day.

Monday

I got home from work, then set the laptop up on a cooling rack with a floor fan next to it. Booted to Tech Tool Pro 5 — no problem. The memory test options are time-based: do you want to test for 15 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc. I figured I’d start with 15 minutes and see what it did. It passed. Just in case, I ran it for another hour. Again, it passed. *whew!*

Not wanting to risk damaging the RAM, I powered the laptop off, unplugged it, removed the battery, opened up the access panel and removed the RAM extension. I closed everything up, plugged it back in, and tried to boot to Leopard.

10 minutes later, with the DVD drive still chugging away and the beach ball still spinning, I thought maybe I should take another approach.

I dug out the original install discs, which I’d found while looking for TTP5 the day before, and tried booting to that. 2 minutes, tops. That’s when I checked the Leopard box and saw that it required 512 MB of RAM. The G4 PowerBook only had 256 MB built-in. You’d think the boot loader on the disc could maybe tell you “This requires more memory than you have” instead of sitting there trying to load everything without any swap space.

Anyway, from the 10.3 installer I fired up Disk Utility, told it to zero the drive, and waited. 10 minutes later, it still said “Preparing to zero drive.” The day before, it had only stayed in that state for a few seconds before starting to show progress.

Great. Maybe it needed the memory. Power down, open it up, plug the RAM back in, close it up. This time it after booting to the installer, I couldn’t even get the menus to respond.

I figured it had managed to overheat (or whatever is going on) despite the fan and cooling rack. So I closed it down and put everything away to try again the next day.

Next Sunday

I picked things up again a few days later. First I pulled battery out in case it was overheating. So, with the extra RAM, I booted to the Leopard install discs and tried to zero the drive. After about 10 minutes, a message popped up that the computer needed to restart. So I tried again. Same thing.

Since I half-suspect the drive itself is part of the problem (though it could be a fan), at this point I decided it was probably as close to wiped as it was going to get. So I pulled out the RAM again and set it aside to sell, and figured I’d just send the machine back.

Then I remembered I should drain the battery.

What could I do with a machine that had no OS to drain the battery?

Of course! I could run Disk Utility! So I left the computer unplugged, booted to the 10.3 discs (since I’d already removed the extra RAM), and started to zero the drive again, figuring it would either freeze or run out of power.

About half an hour later I looked over…and as near as I could tell, it was done. There was no message, but there was also no progress gauge and no error…and Disk Utility showed an empty Mac OS filesystem on the drive.

Great! It finally worked! But I still needed to drain the battery, so I figured I’d start a second round. This time it froze, and the computer made grinding/clicking noises until it ran out of power. But the mission had been accomplished.

Aftermath

I sold the RAM on eBay last week. Now I just need to send the computer back to be recycled. End of an era in some ways, but we haven’t actually used it in almost a year.

I thought a major point of PulseAudio was to let applications share the sound card cleanly. *grumble* Sound worked fine before Fedora switched. I can’t even blame it on a bleeding-edge distribution, since from what I hear, Ubuntu has similar problems.

At least now I know (sort of) why it stopped again after applying the Complete guide to fix PulseAudio and video/audio VLC Media Player issues.

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.

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)