Whenever the low-on-space warning* icon shows up on the phone, I open up the list of applications. Then I sort it by size, look for the largest apps that I don’t use anymore, and start uninstalling.

“Browser” is always high on the list, but it’s all data. While I could free up the space by telling it to clear everything, I want to hang onto things like bookmarks. Each time the icon popped up, I’d go back to the app, open up More and then Settings, and clear the cache, or the history, or cookies**, one category at a time.

Then I’d go back to the App list and it would still be using up several megabytes of space.

Yesterday, it occurred to me to check the Gears settings. Months ago, I’d set up two WordPress blogs with Turbo mode, which uses Gears as a permanent cache for the admin area. It’s great on a desktop or laptop with lots of local space and a slow or flaky Internet connection. But it wasn’t helping me much, because…

• WordPress Turbo Mode is only really useful if you use the rich-text editor, which I don’t.
• On the phone, I rarely manage either blog through the browser anyway. I usually use WordPress for Android (formerly wpToGo).
• The files it stores take up a whole megabyte — per blog! (possibly more, depending on how the file system stores them.)

So I removed both sites from Gears, along with a couple of other sites that I’d added, but didn’t need anymore, and freed up about 3 MB.

It should be a while before I see that low-space icon again, and I shouldn’t have to ration my installed apps quite so closely!

*This wouldn’t be a problem if they’d given the G1 enough memory for apps in the first place, or if they’d let us install apps to the SD card (where I still have gigabytes of free space), or if I were willing to root my phone, or if I’d just bite the bullet and buy a Nexus One.

**I’d really like to be able to selectively delete cookies — or rather, to selectively keep a few cookies and delete the rest — but that’s another issue.

My first thought: They’d copied the text from another comment on the site. I’ve seen that happen before, but usually it’s comments on the same post. A search through existing comments didn’t turn up any matches, though.

So then I did a search on the rest of the web, and found the original comment on a review of an Atom Smasher toy.

Someone had gone looking for a site with a similar topic (comic books about super-heroes, action figures made from super-heroes), copied text from there, and pasted it onto mine…and yet they hadn’t bothered to match up specifics (like pasting it on a post about action figures or Captain Cold). So it’s not quite as sneaky as the one who followed a link in my post and pasted in text from the other page, but it’s pretty close.

Is it just that I’m more accustomed to the other stuff? Possibly, but I think it’s a little deeper than that. I think the reason it bothers me is that, beyond the spammer himself being dishonest, this is encouraging the target to be dishonest as well.

Yes, guestbooks and counters. For WebRing.

The 1990s really are back!

• “Damn it, dear, I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer!”
• “Damn the torpedoes, dear. Full speed ahead!”
• “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes, dears.”
• “Hello, dear. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
• “I aim to misbehave, dear.”
• “I came, I saw, I conquered, dear.”
• “Kneel before Zod, dear.”
• “Madness? This is Sparta, dear!” ← (this one’s my favorite)
• “More weight, dear.”
• “Something wicked this way comes, dear.”
• “The same thing we do every night, dear: Try to take over the world!”
• “Why so serious, dear?”
• “Yippee-ki-yay, dear.”
• “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, dear?”

The only downside is that it looks like ABC has decided to throw Better Off Ted under the bus. I was really hoping that it was only preempted for the two-hour premiere, but there’s no sign of it next week. It would be nice if they’d at least let the show finish out the season.

Also: really angry at ABC News’s scare tactics of “OMG Al Qaeda intends to attack us!” Um, yeah. We knew that. We’ve known that for over a decade. We’ve known that since before 9/11. Trying to scare your viewers into a panic at every commercial break is not what I’d call responsible journalism.

Anyway, Lost spoilers below…

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I’ve never liked the “none of this ever happened!” approach to ending a story, since it always makes me wonder what the point was. Exceptions are those where there are clear consequences. Someone who experienced the erased timeline is changed by it, for instance, like in It’s A Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day. “LA X” managed to do this twice: First by clearly establishing that in the alternate timeline, the island had actually been destroyed, and second by picking up five minutes later in the original timeline, making it clear that everything the show has built over the last five years hasn’t been a waste of time.

Okay, it’s sort of an “eat your cake and have it too” approach, but it works for me. It even makes some amount of sense that they’ve changed the rules of time travel, because changing history — or rather creating an alternate timeline — takes a lot more energy (adding a nuclear bomb to the island discharge) than the fully self-consistent time travel we’ve seen before.

It seems clear that the point of divergence isn’t whether the 815 survivors were present in 1977, or whether they tried Faraday’s plan, but whether the bomb detonated or not. They were instrumental in making sure that young Miles and Charlotte and their families left the island, cementing Ben’s connection with the Others, and saving Dr. Chang after his arm was crushed in the “incident.”

So far it’s been fun to look at the way the crashless reality aligns with and differs from the original, and look back at how characters have grown and their relationships have changed during the show. (Jin is a much better person, and Sun much stronger, for their time on the island.) It remains to be seen whether it’ll ultimately be anything more than a “what if…?” and a way to illustrate character traits. I’m not sure I want to see the timelines actually merge or cross, but I’d like to see some sort of link between the two.

Some things I want to see this season:

• What’s up with the Others at the temple?
• Jin and Sun reunited in the main timeline.
• What’s up with Desmond and Penny? (both timelines)
• More focus on people who aren’t named Jack.
• How will destiny play out in the alternate timeline?
• What’s the cost of saving Flight 815?

We can assume everyone on the island in 1977 died. No Eloise Hawking, no Daniel Faraday, no Mittelos Bioscience, etc. The island itself was apparently destroyed, though it seems to have sunken relatively intact (suggesting something else was going on and not just the bomb). Clearly Desmond wasn’t shipwrecked there, but what about Rousseau’s expedition? Was it recovered, or simply lost at sea? Did Charles Widmore know the island was destroyed, or did he keep looking for it? Edit: I just remembered that Widmore was still on the island in 1977. Which might also mean no Penny, depending on when she was born.

As for the passengers on the uneventful Flight 815, Rose’s cancer won’t be healed, Locke won’t find his calling, and Jin and Sun may never reconcile.

And what about the island itself? What does it mean for the rest of the world that the mysterious island no longer exists?

In addition to letting you follow the blog through Facebook, it also lets me auto-publish new posts to my profile. I haven’t decided whether I want to enable that. It’s convenient, but I’m not sure I want every post to be imported. When I had the blog, Twitter and Facebook all linked together, I found myself occasionally making a post on one network and then deleting it from another because it was redundant, or didn’t really apply to the other audience, or there was a better way to cover the same thing in a different format. I also found myself trying to craft posts in one medium for another, rather than playing to their individual strengths. (Consider Facebook vs. Twitter link sharing.)

Follow K-Squared Ramblings on Networked Blogs!

A lot of what’s left are to-do items for my Flash website. (Some reminders I sent to myself, some info people sent me.) I should either find time to do them, or add them to my current to-do list and remove them from my inbox.

Next goal: Inbox 50 by the end of February.

While driving from Newport Beach to Lake Forest, we watched the full moon rise through a layer of haze and clouds.

For much of the drive it was surrounded by a bright yellow glow, light reflecting off the haze. A few minutes in, we noticed a light pillar shooting straight up from the moon. I seriously considered pulling over to the side of the freeway to take a photo, and probably should have, because it was almost faded by the time we reached our destination. The moon may have risen too high, or the ice crystals drifted away or evaporated, or perhaps it was simply drowned out by the city lights. A lot of the 405 runs past residential areas with lots of trees, so there aren’t too many lights visible from the freeway. You can just barely see the remnant of it in this photo.

I did manage to get one picture of the moon rising behind a cloud layer at the beginning of the drive:

Yes, it’s digital zoom. On one hand, at times like this I wish I had a better camera. On the other hand, if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to capture this while sitting at an intersection waiting to turn!

Now, I realize this is simply a brand name, probably inspired by the “pure” part of the slogan…but I can’t help but be reminded of the brief fad for clear products in the early 1990s. Remember Crystal Pepsi? Of course you don’t.

Saturday Night Live summed up just how unappetizing this fad really was in two words: Crystal Gravy.

Thankfully, Crystal Hot Sauce is not clear (as you can see!), and actually tasted pretty good.

The old structure was put in place when I upgraded to WordPress 1.0 six years ago. It seemed reasonable at the time, but the URLs were always just a bit too long. They’d break across lines in email, or get hidden by ellipses in forum posts, or (much later) take up 80% of a post on Twitter. When I launched Speed Force, I took the chance to learn from all the mistakes I’d made with this site and keep it simple from the start. Now that I’ve finished the tweet cleanup project, I’m taking the opportunity to do some more cleanup here.

So, the old structure was this:

http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/archives/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

The archives bit is useless, and didn’t do anything but take up space. The day was somewhat more useful, but it’s on the page already, and it’s not critical enough to include in the URL. I considered dropping the www. prefix, but that affects everything on the domain, not just the blog, and I’m sure if I’m ready to do that for my Flash site.

It’s been simplified to this:

http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/yyyy/mm/post-name/

It’s still not tiny by any standard, but it’s a lot more likely to fit on one line of an e-mail, and won’t be quite so unwieldy in social networking.

Next challenge: trying to make some sense out of the mess of categories and tags.

Yesterday morning on my way to work, I looked over and saw the San Gabriel Mountains practically glowing with the morning light of the sun. A layer of cloud blocked the sun where I was, making the distant peaks look that much brighter. I stopped at a spot where I knew I’d have a good view of the mountain range.

It turned out to be a really interesting view, as you can see from the panorama below.

District Mountain Panorama, originally uploaded by Kelson.

By lunchtime, the sky above was mostly clear, and clouds were bunched up against the mountains, completely blocking them. I was indoors most of the morning, but it seemed as if the cloud layer had just blown northward until it hit the mountains, then stopped.

Click on either image to go to its Flickr page.

Side Note: Stitching

Since Canon’s PhotoStitch no longer works on Snow Leopard, I’ve tried out Hugin again. It’s come a long way since I first tried to use it and spent hours just getting a panorama to break up spectacularly and went hunting for PhotoStitch on the disc that came with the camera! I can’t get it to automatically detect control points on Fedora, but it does a surprisingly good job even when I’ve only marked around 10 or so. The ability to customize things like which pieces appear in front of others, or which projection to use, has turned out to be useful as well.

Fortunately, we managed to miss the worst of the storm. There was a lull in the early evening, and the cloud layer broke up enough that I could see the moon as I left work. We only hit rain during the post-dinner drive to the show. One moment: clear. The next: lots of brake lights ahead of us. The next: intense rain!

As near as I can tell, the storm passed through just north of the grandiosely-named Great Park in Irvine, where the circus had set up their tent. We could see lightning flashes in the distance, and it was cold and wet and windy, but the sky above was clear. So we reached the show against the backdrop of the moon, Orion and Sirus, lightning, and a giant orange balloon.

Night at the Circus

The show was impressive. I think this is the sixth Cirque du Soleil show I’ve seen* and they’ve all been good. A few acts did look kind of familiar, like the guy balancing on a 20-foot-tall tower of chairs (we’d seen a similar act at the OC Fair last summer), but even those acts maintained the “how the heck do they do that?!” factor. A contortionist act reminded me of someone’s idea back in the early 1990s, never realized as far as I know, to get contortionists to play non-humanoid aliens on science-fiction shows. (These days, you can just use CGI to portray any body structure you want.)

The centerpiece of the show was sort of a giant double human hamster wheel. Two mesh wheels, each with a diameter of perhaps 1½ times the height of the performers, are attached to either end of a scaffolding, which is then suspended from the ceiling so that the entire structure can rotate. Then two performers proceed to run and jump inside the wheels as the whole thing spins around in the air…and then they start running around the outside of the wheels! According to the website, it’s called the Wheel of Death.

The clowns seemed more prominent in this show than in the others I’ve seen, to the point where they basically had two MC characters: one serious, one comedic.

Oddly enough, the show features a rainstorm. There was enough fake thunder and lightning that we probably didn’t recognize the real thing a few times!