Tag Archives: college

Friday at San Diego Comic-Con (2011)

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Kelson

Darth JokerThis year, we approached Comic-Con International a bit differently than usual. For the last seven years we’ve been staying in town for all four days. This year, with the baby, we decided to just do one day. So we left him with relatives and took the train down to San Diego for the day. We arrived in town about 9:00, walked down to the convention center, and had our badges just after the floor opened at 9:30.

(Full photo set on Flickr.)

Jack Skellington Puppet/CostumePlanning a trip to Comic-Con is always about trade-offs. It’s so big that you can’t see everything, and there are so many events going on that you can’t attend them all. With four days, there’s some wiggle room. With just one, it seemed like I was constantly thinking about those choices.

One of the first choices I made: No news panels. I could get that the next day online (and did). I wanted to focus only on what was unique to the con: exhibits, meeting people, the art show, etc. Basically, I wanted to experience as much of San Diego Comic Con as I could in one day.

Katie decided to pick two things and build her day around them: visiting The Field, an Irish pub our friend Sean introduced us to a few years ago, and seeing the new Thundercats screening. Continue reading →

Posted in Comic Con 2011 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Links: Traffic, Scott Pilgrim, Soviet Hobbit, Facts, Moon, Toyota and New Spice

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Kelson

Want to see what Los Angeles traffic looks like on a typical Friday evening? You can! A co-worker pointed out to me that you can view statistical traffic on Google Maps in addition to live traffic. To see it, go to Google Maps, enable traffic, then look at the inset traffic key and hit “change.” You’ll be able to choose a day of the week and time.

A Scott Pilgrim fan tracked down the real-life locations in Toronto that Brian Lee O’Malley used as reference, then took photos to match them up with the comic panels.

It reminds me of a story that O’Malley told at Comic-Con last(?) year about the movie production. They tried to use actual locations when possible, and at one point went to film a scene with a particular phone booth, only to find it had been torn out. They rebuilt the phone booth for the scene!

How To Be a Retronaut has a fascinating gallery of illustrations from the 1976 Soviet edition of The Hobbit. (via @dixonium)

Copyblogger presents: Five Grammatical Errors that Make You Look Dumb. Please, people: learn the differences between your and you’re, and between they’re, their and there! (via This Is True)

A university library has put together a great parody of the Old Spice ad campaign: Study Like a Scholar, Scholar. (also via This Is True )

NPR story: In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don’t Matter

New research suggests that misinformed people rarely change their minds when presented with the facts — and often become even more attached to their beliefs. The finding raises questions about a key principle of a strong democracy: that a well-informed electorate is best.

This makes me feel a little less enthused about the next two items:

It’s incredibly cool that we’ve got photos of the Apollo 16 landing site. But that won’t convince people who are absolutely certain that the landings were faked.

And a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation of Toyota crashes blamed on sudden acceleration has implicated driver error in nearly all cases. Of the 75 fatal crashes investigates, only one could be verified as a problem with the vehicle: the Lexus crash last August in which the accelerator was caught on the floor mat, leading to a recall. Of course, the court of popular opinion has already made up its mind…

Posted in Comics, Life, LOTR, Politics, Space | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Re-creating Ansel Adams’ UCI

Posted on September 17, 2009 by Kelson

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.

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College Essentials

Posted on July 11, 2008 by Kelson

College Essentials, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Let’s see… coffee mugs, latte mugs, travel mugs… yep, that’s everything you need for college! (Found at Target earlier this week.)

Posted in Signs of the Times | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Web Contest: 11 Years Later

Posted on September 15, 2007 by Kelson

While checking some dead links in the Internet Archive, I decided to see what they had of the website for the Literary Guild at UCI. This was a creative writing club we were both involved in back in college. There’s an abbreviated history of the club still online.

UCI Bookstore WWW page design contestI looked at the earliest archived copy I could find, and noticed down in the corner a badge for a long-forgotten website contest. Every quarter, the UCI Bookstore holds a literary contest, sometimes poetry, sometimes short stories. In spring 1996, they decided to make it a website contest. I had just built a website for the club, and submitted it. Our site was one of the three winners [archive.org].*

Just for kicks, I decided to see which of the sites were still around.

  • Literary Guild at UCI – gone. The club disbanded after the 2000 school year, and the defunct website was removed 2 years later. I still keep an archive of one segment, the collaborative writing projects, but it used to have 10 times as much writing, meeting minutes, club info and news, etc.
  • The Orchid Weblopedia – gone. It appears to have moved around a bit for several years, but the top search result for the title brings up its last web designer, and a note saying that “this page no longer exists.”
  • Ishmael’s Companion – the study guide for the book, Ishmael is still around, but it’s now a tiny part of author Daniel Quinn’s site.

1 out of 3. And even that one’s at a different location.

And so the link rot continues…

* I was hoping to link to an independent announcement, but the UCI Bookstore website only lists the most recent winners (Spring 2007), and while the Anteater Weekly regularly announced the winners, their archives only go back to 1997. I did find the announcement in the May 30, 1996 Zotmail Archive, but it doesn’t return linkable results, so you’ll have to search for it.

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Pick a city, please!

Posted on May 12, 2006 by Kelson

A few days ago I was remarking on the signs by the side of the 405 indicating where to find the Cal State Fullerton El Toro Campus. This is odd for several reasons, namely:

  • The signs went up years after the city of El Toro changed its name to Lake Forest.
  • Having the two cities in the name makes it sound like “University of California, Colorado Campus.”
  • From what I could tell, it wasn’t even in El Toro/Lake Forest—it was in Irvine.

Today I noticed that the signs have been changed to read “Cal State Fullerton, Irvine Campus.” That takes care of 2 out of 3, and the remaining one is at least logical, even if it sounds a bit odd. I mean, it’s a satellite campus, what else are you going to call it aside from the school name plus the location?

As for why they started out calling it the El Toro campus: it turns out it’s on the grounds of the former El Toro Marine Base.

Posted in Strange World | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Caught in the act

Posted on December 3, 2005 by Kelson

This sort of thing just goes to prove that no one has quite the same college experience, even at the same college. (In this case, the UCI School of Humanities, where I spent two years before coming to my senses and switching to a major I actually liked.)

It’s probably just as well.

The best line has got to be the grad student saying, “You’ll report me for your having sex in my office? ”

(via The Esoteric Science Research Center)

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I almost saw this happen once…

Posted on January 6, 2003 by Kelson

Back at the UCI Artslab one of my co-workers opened a CD-ROM and the disc kept spinning and flew out at him (though it didn’t actually hit him). I was on the other side of the room and just missed seeing it.

Posted in Computers/Internet, Strange World | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Creative Computer Names

Posted on November 23, 2002 by Kelson

I remember back in college we had interesting naming schemes for computers. The ICS labs had the Guilder and Florin Macintosh networks with servers Westley and Buttercup. There was also a Solaris network where each machine was named after a Roman emperor, with names like Aurelian, Caligula, Gothicus, Hadrian, Pacatian, Saloninus, Trajan, etc.

The lab I worked at over in the School of the Arts started naming their Windows NT servers after renaissance artists: Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello… well, that’s what we told them the origin was, anyway! The first SGI box (for 3D modeling) we got we named Trippy, and then when we got several in we started naming them Happy, Sleepy, etc.

Then we got in a whole mess of computers, expanding our NT network from 3 machines to 14. We were trying to come up with a theme to name them, and started in with names like Pepsi, Mountain Dew, etc. I had to leave after we set up the first 3 or 4 of them, and the next morning I received a mass e-mail stating, “The Artslab liquor cabinet is stocked.” The message went on to list the new computers’ names: Absolut, Alize, Bacardi, Baileys, Bombay_Sapphire, Captain_morgan, CuervoGold, Glennfiddich, Jagermeister, Jimbeam, Midori, Remmy_Martin, Seagrams, and Wildturkey. Soon after, we got a pair of Mac G3s and named them BlackLabel and BlueLabel.

The names stayed at least as long as I did, and may be there still. It was funny, though, to get reactions from people – students who had actually used the machines, or faculty and staff opening up Network Neighborhood – as they realized they were all alcoholic drinks!

Posted in Computers/Internet, Strange World | Tagged , | 5 Comments