This morning, I hit 50,000 miles on the Prius. We’ve had the car for four years now, and it still feels like a new car — or at least, it doesn’t feel old yet. That’s why, though I’d love to have the plug-in hybrid model launching next year (and Toyota keeps sending me ads for it), I don’t feel any need to get onto any waiting lists. There’s plenty of life in this one yet, and no reason to trade it in early.

For the record: Typically around 43 MPG on an eight-mile commute that mixes city streets and freeways, plus errands and occasional longer trips. It was a bit higher when I was commuting 25-40 miles each way, mainly on freeways, but I don’t remember exactly how much. I think it was around 48 MPG.

Comics

• Girl Genius interview with Phil Foglio. Three more prose novels on their way, and Vol. 12 of the webcomic/graphic novels will “conclude the first half of the Girl Genius storyline,” after which the characters will start to travel beyond eastern Europa.
• Muppet Lantern Corps
• The Flash on a Segway at Comic-Con

Neat Stuff

• Band recreates Prisoner opening shot for shot
• Carmageddon: Trio holds “dinner party” on empty 405 via @lanow
• Aurora Australis seen from space

Online Security

• “The problem isn’t that people are idiots…The problem is that the OS trusts random USB sticks.” Schneier on Security: Yet Another “People Plug in Strange USB Sticks” Story (via slashdot)
• Should you change your password? Naked Security explains why. See if you're already compromised: Should I Change My Password?

Spam

• The Robustness Principle Reconsidered (via ma.tt) I remember a lot of discussions on this during my spamfighting days.
• I saw a massive surge in blogspam to my sites around the same time as this Spam Surge against Social Networks. I’m not convinced they’re related, but it certainly seems suspicious.
• Blacklist Monitor: Spam block lists, rated for both spam caught and false positive rates.

Social Media

• Is blogging dead? “Those links that appear on Twitter or Facebook rather than on linkblogs — to what are they linking?” (via ma.tt, IIRC)
• xkcd explains Google+
• Google confirms that business/organization profiles are in the works for Google+, just not ready yet.

Other Tech

• Los Angeles Coldusion UserGroup – Monthly meetings with tech talks on topics related to ColdFusion development. Next up is a talk on BlazeDS.
• 30 Creative 404 Error Pages (via Slashdot)
• Things to consider before a redesign: Istanbul (Not Constantinople) Will Confuse Your Users (via ma.tt)
• Developer error: The most dangerous programming mistakes (via Slashdot)
• WordPress’ perspective on software usability: The Software is Wrong, Not the People (via ma.tt)
• Akamai’s State of the Internet report – Asia still fastest, new source of attack traffic emerges
• How to filter on the List-Id header in various clients…even Outlook. Useful if you still follow email mailing lists

So I did what any geek would do: looked up the angle at which the sun had set that evening.

I found two tools: The NOAA solar position calculator let me figure out, given latitude, longitude and time, the sun’s declination. Then I found another tool that let me enter the latitude, longitude, and compass bearing and see a line drawn on a map.

It turned out that the sun was setting roughly 21° north of due west, putting it roughly in line with the coast from Malibu toward Ventura…on the seaward side. The line finally connected with land out toward Point Conception, roughly 120 miles away. That’s probably too far away to be visible from near sea level, depending on how high the mountains are out there, but if the angle was off just a little bit (I did estimate the time), it could easily have be the Santa Monica mountains above Malibu (more like 20 miles).

So yes, I did watch the sun set over the ocean and over land at the same time!

All right, all right! ) Happy now?