K-Squared Ramblings

Help Solve a Mall Mystery!

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?

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?” #

Great Park, Great Pumpkin

Great Park – Great Pumpkin, originally uploaded by Kelson.

The Great Park Balloon in Irvine, California, all dressed up as a Jack-o-Lantern for Halloween. I was hoping to get a shot of it aloft, but it landed as I approached the park.

It looks really eerie lit up at night, floating off in the distance. Or just floating above office buildings.

It’s not as good a picture as the one I found on Flickr last week, but you can see the whole face.

Here’s a non-zoomed shot, showing the big empty field and Saddleback in the background:

It’s the Great Pumpkin

_MG_4592, originally uploaded by blueskyoveraquatic.

Actually it’s the Great Park Balloon in Irvine, done up with a Jack-O-Lantern face. I keep meaning to run out at lunch and try to catch a photo of it floating above the office parks, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

For now, this photo I found on Flickr will do.

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. #

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.

Station Fire Smoke Plume from Irvine

Station Fire Smoke Plume from Irvine, originally uploaded by Kelson.

About 2:00 in the afternoon today, in a park in the Quail Hill area of Irvine. Roughly 50 miles away from the fire, perpendicular to the wind (thankfully!)

That puffy plume looks a lot whiter than the rest, which is clearly smoke, making me wonder if it’s a cloud that’s formed above the fire somehow. Edit: And literally seconds after I post this I spot the term pyrocumulous in another window. So, yeah, it’s a cloud produced by the air heated by the fire. The Wikipedia article has a picture of a cloud produced by this same fire a few days ago.

Pipeline to the Underworld

Sometimes when walking to lunch I pass this pipe sticking out of the ground. I have no idea how deep it goes, or whether it connects to something or just stops. I also have no idea what it’s for, unless as a vent or a placeholder. It just pokes out a couple of feet next to the hedge bordering a vacant lot.

I wonder how much litter collects at the bottoms of things like this. People tossing garbage, leaves falling in, people dropping rocks to gauge depth, people accidentally dropping things like flashlights or keys. If I dropped something important, would it be retrievable? If I couldn’t fish it out with a hook or gum on the end of a string, who would I call? Or would I just have to write it off as lost?

Walking

• Today’s Amazon MP3 deal: 99 “relaxing” (classical) songs for $0.99. I figure if even 10 of them are good, it’s worth it #
• Trying to get back into habit of walking to lunch once/week. Of course, the weather picks today to heat up. I’m thinking maybe Jamba Juice. #
• Breeze really helps – when it’s not blowing past fields of mulch. #

Not In New York

Launchpad, originally uploaded by Kelson.

We went out to the “Great Park” yesterday to see if we could go up in the balloon. It turned out to be completely booked or the day (there was some big ice skating event going on) but we got in some photos on the ground, including a couple of pics with our copy of Scott Pilgrim 5 to submit to the contest.

More photos: OC Balloon set on Flickr.

Green Lots & Venus

Walking to lunch. Vacant lots are actually green! #

Spotted Venus at 1 in the afternoon! Thanks, Sky Map app! #

Saddleback Snow – Two Days Later

Saddleback Snow – Spectrum Wheel Two Days Later, originally uploaded by Kelson.

I’ve added a few more pictures to my Snowline photoset showing the unusual amount of snow in the local Santa Ana Mountains.

There’s a few more from Thursday, plus a couple of pictures I grabbed Friday morning, like the one shown above.

Update: Here’s one more, from a batch of photos I took at lunch today. More at Flickr…

Woodbridge Snow View

Woodbridge Snow View 1, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains got an amazing amount of snow yesterday, and I went out to a couple of spots this morning to take photos. Check this Flickr set for more.

Seeing LA From Irvine?

It’s an amazingly clear day morning today. So clear that I suspect I saw part of the outline of Catalina Island off in the distance, between trees and buildings, on the drive to work. So clear that I decided to drive up to the park at Quail Hill in Irvine where I once spotted what I think thought was Downtown Los Angeles at a distance of ~40 miles (same as the “contrast” shot in last year’s Spring Haze post). And this time, I had a better camera.

First, here’s the view from the camera, at 3x optical zoom, to give you some context.  This is looking northwest from the park.  (It occurs to me I could probably have checked the direction with my phone’s GPS info.)

Everything’s flattened out near the horizon.  Near the right you can see the MCAS Tustin blimp hangars, with Santa Ana beyond them. The area I’m looking at is too small to see at web size, on the left side right near where the hill cuts in front of the horizon.

Here it is zoomed in and enhanced.

I gave it a shot with the digital zoom out to 12x, but it was way too fuzzy.  It worked out better just to crop the file and look at its native resolution.  Someday I’ll save up and get a nifty digital SLR that will save raw images instead of JPEGs, and let me swap out lenses for serious telephoto work, but for now, this is what I’ve got.

Actually, looking at the picture, I’m no longer convinced that it’s actually downtown Los Angeles.  What I can see doesn’t look clustered enough, and the buildings look shorter than I’d expect.  But I can’t think what else has a bunch of buildings tall enough to see at that distance and in that direction.

It could be that only the tops of the building are visible, in which case that black rectangle bordered in white, roughly in line with the top of the light pole, could be the top section of the Aon Center, the second-tallest building in the city and the one that’s mostly black with white corners and white around the top. But in that case the US Bank Tower (the tall round one) must be completely faded into the haze.

Or it could be Century City, which is a few miles to the west of Downtown LA, and has a couple of similar buildings (black with white outlines).  If that’s the case, though, downtown should be somewhere to the right and taller, and I just don’t see it.  And Century City would be closer to 45 miles, rather than 40.  Maybe the smog’s just thicker around downtown? Edit: This does seem more likely (see comments).

Anyway, I took some more pictures to make a panorama, which I’ll stitch together at home when I have a chance and see if it’s worth posting.

Suburbia

How appropriate: “Barons of Suburbia” while driving through Irvine. #