K-Squared Ramblings

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. #

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?” #

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!

Morning

Morning: The time of day when you can set up coffee but forget to turn it on, or walk past a mailbox with a Netflix envelope in your hands. #

Line Items for 2009-10-15

• Good news for Sidekick owners: Microsoft/Danger has recovered “most” of the lost data. (I much prefer auto-sync to cloud-only.) #
• Mozilla Plugin Check helped me figure out why Flash was being flaky on one computer: I had different 32bit & 64bit versions installed. #
• Just finished watching Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. #
• Awesome! Butterfly Boucher’s Scary Fragile is #4 on Amazon’s MP3 Bestsellers! (via @butterflyb) #

Line Items for 2009-10-13

• It’s not off to a great start, but heres hoping today is less frustrating than yesterday. #
• Was hoping for more than 30% chance of rain, esp. the way TV news was going on last night w/LIVE DOPPLER 2000! Where’s that @alyankovic vid? #
• Appropriate. Today’s Word of the Day is triskaidekaphobia. #
• Slowest Patch Tuesday update ever. ’Course that’s partly because Norton decided to run a full scan DURING the update. #
• Patches did eventually finish, but it took >1.5 hours to install them. Usually if I start it before lunch, it's done when I get back. #
• Someone searching for “old photos of shoreline village long beach” hit this photo…taken last week. Oops. #

Halo Triplet

While walking to lunch today, I spied a fragment of halo above the sun. (Whenever I notice a really thin layer of cirrus clouds, I always try to find an opportunity to block the sun and look for halos.) I tried to get a couple of shots with my phone, and figured I’d try enhancing them when I got home.

What surprised me is that the halo was not only still there after lunch, but clearer. On the way back, I stopped in several places with a building, or a sign, or a tree blocking the sun. The curve seemed too shallow to be a standard circular halo, so I wondered what I was actually seeing. Then I realized there was a faint halo inside the brighter curve, the two fragments meeting above the sun and splitting like diverging roads.

Then I noticed the sundog.

Three distinct sun halos. Not complete, and far from the clearest display I’ve seen, but certainly the most complex.

The brightest part appears to be the top of a circumscribed halo, which varies in shape from oval to kidney-bean depending on how high the sun is. You can just see the 22° circular halo branching off below it. Off to the right is a sundog.

It’s too bad I only had the phone, but it did manage to catch all three halos. I fiddled with the contrast a little to make them clearer, but they are visible without it.

And to think I saw this from the middle of suburban Southern California!

Android FTW!

• Wasn’t aware there was a Sidekick outage. My T-Mobile G1 has been working just fine. Score one for Android! #
• Wasn’t planning to have a donut today, but T-Mobile just sent Android 1.6 to my phone. #

I’ve had this phone almost a year now, and it’s actually a better phone now than it was when I bought it! How cool is that?

Maxfield Parrish Sky

Maxfield Parrish Sky, originally uploaded by Kelson.

I stepped out of the office building tonight and felt like I’d stepped into a Maxfield Parrish painting. The whole sky looked like this. (Or at least the half that was visible.) It literally stopped me in my tracks.

I spent the next 15 minutes walking around the parking lot, watching the lighting on the clouds change as the sun set, and taking pictures.

Line Items for 2009-09-25

• RT @lol_spam: Spam subject: “Your decent watch will upgrade your status.” You mean I won’t need my phone to update Facebook? AWESOME! #
• WTF? Google C&Ds Android modder Cyanogen. Isn’t it supposed to be licensed open-source in the first place? # The cease-and-desist order is about Google’s apps (Maps, Gmail, etc.) that are pre-installed, not about the operating system itself, but still, it feels like a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the license.
• Would you believe I found a postcard for Irvine? It’s a bunch of office buildings with mountains in the background. #
• Odd: it took 3 hours for my shoulder to get sore after the flu shot. Still, NOTHING compared to last year’s tetanus shot. Now THAT hurt! #
• This XKCD comic reminds me of the “uranium-free pizza” joke from some scouting event way back when. #

TV, Smoke & Flash

• TV: Castle good. Bones OK but more Katie’s thing. Still undecided on Glee. Excited about Flash Forward. Not sure on Heroes or Dollhouse. #
• The “Mind the Gap” monster in Neverwhere sounds a lot like the smoke monster on Lost now. #
• Speaking of smoke, I’ve been trying to figure out where all the crud in the air is coming from today. Norco maybe? #
• Flash-only sites are also invisible to smartphone users, even with iPhone & Android. @rzazueta #sbbuzz #

Re-creating Ansel Adams’ UCI

Here’s a cool project: In Ansel Adams’ Footsteps, re-creating his photographs of UC Irvine from the 1960s. There are a lot more trees now. (Or, as a friend pointed out, the trees that were there are a lot taller!) It’s a really impressive look at how the campus has changed…plus it’s always fascinating to look at Ansel Adams’ photography. I remember when I was in college, prints of Adams’ photos lined the walls of one of the Student Center hallways.

A couple of years ago I did my own then and now project — well, less a project than a spur-of-the moment 2007 re-creation of a 1997 photo I took of the Student Center as seen from what was then the Humanities Office Building (now Murray Krieger Hall). In this case the trees hadn’t changed much in 10 years, but UCI had flattened the Student Center complex and built an entirely new one.

Partly Cloudy, Late Afternoon

Partly Cloudy, Late Afternoon, originally uploaded by Kelson.

A better copy of the photo I posted to Twitpic earlier today.

San Gabriel Mountains Emerging From Smoke

The wind’s changed, the weather’s cooled off, and firefighters are starting to get the Station Fire under control. For the first time in days, we’ve been able to see the San Gabriel Mountains.

The eastern part of the range was clearly visible this afternoon — more visible than it usually is during the summer, with LA’s famous smog. The middle was completely shrouded in smoke. Interestingly, while it looks like the plume is being blown east, visibility seems to be worse toward the western end. Maybe wind near the ground is blowing west, and wind higher up is blowing east?

Compare to this shot of the mountains covered in snow last December: