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…

We were driving back from Los Angeles Saturday night around 11:30pm. You might think at that hour traffic would be relatively light. Not so: it was Saturday night, after all, and the route we were taking (101 south to 5 and onward) went straight through Downtown LA. By the time we merged onto the 5 we’d already been delayed by several slowdowns from accidents. It was a bit past midnight when traffic just…stopped.

We waited, figuring it was another round of stop-and-go traffic. And waited. A fire truck quietly worked its way along the right shoulder. After a few minutes, I put the parking brake on.

But the funny part was the driver of the car next to us.

He looked like he was probably around 20, and was driving an SUV with a sunroof. After a few minutes of dead stop, he opened the sun roof — this was midnight, remember — and climbed up on top of his car to see what was going on.

Then he got back down, opened the door, and walked around to the back of his truck so he could get his camera…and his guitar.

Next step: He handed the camera to his friend in the passenger seat, then walked out in the middle of the lane to pose by the car in front of him, giving a double thumbs-up sign and a goofy grin. As far as we could see, he didn’t actually end up playing the guitar.

I expect the photo is probably on Facebook or Myspace by now…somewhere.

All I’ve got are some blurry photos of the dashboard and the cars ahead.

Oh, and the traffic break? Not surprisingly, it turned out to be an accident. Once we started moving again, we passed an area where several lanes were blocked off…and a car was propped up on its side.

Update: more about the weirdness of this trip.

*sigh* Google maps informs me that my usual route home is solid red. Rush hour + OMGWTF water from sky! Surface streets it is. #

While writing up my commentary on IE dropping WGA last Thursday, I realized that the original story was perfect for Slashdot. It had Microsoft, anti-piracy methods with privacy concerns, Internet Explorer and browser marketshare. So I looked to see if the IE team’s post was on the Firehose already, didn’t see it, and wrote up a quick submission. I also realized that I had an opportunity to plug the Alternative Browser Alliance in the text of the submission—something that I hadn’t been able to do on previous stories I’d submitted. (This is my 6th Slashdot submission to be accepted.)

So I submitted it Thursday evening, got a couple of dozen hits from the Firehose, and it got accepted around 11:30 pm, local time. I took precautions in case the traffic spilled over onto the blog, like turning on WP-Cache and disabling a few plugins, then went to bed.

Slashdot posted the story, Internet Explorer Drops WGA Requirement, at around 4:30am, and the hits started coming in. When I woke up, I checked to see whether the story had run yet, what the general tone of the discussion looked like, and—most importantly—whether the site was still up. Everything was running smoothly. (Katie remarked that I sounded “almost disappointed.”)

Ultimately, the Alternative Browser Alliance got an extra ~4,200 visits on Friday, most of them during the first few hours after the story was posted, and an extra few hundred over the weekend. For a site that normally gets 100-200 visits/day, that’s a big jump. The highest rate was 26 visits/minute, just after the story went live. Far less than the hundreds-to-thousands of hits per minute that some sites report, and entirely manageable for a small static page with a stylesheet and a handful of images.

K2R, linked via my name, only pulled in about 10 hits directly from Slashdot that day, and another handful from the About page over at ABA. Hardly a blip, really. I can’t say it’s much of a surprise, since I’ve never seen much traffic from the link on my name the other times I’ve submitted stories.

I’ll admit, I’m curious to see how the server would stand up to a more serious case of the Slashdot effect, as well as how well other pages (larger or dynamic) would hold up…but I’m not in a hurry.

It was so unusual I was half-convinced there must be a glitch in the tracking script, so I checked the server logs to compare. The server logs actually showed more hits—over 1300, in fact—during the same period. A lot of them were duplicated, though, which presumably means that people either hit reload after 10 seconds (not sure why), or they did something with the SU toolbar and came back. (Sadly, WP doesn’t yet provide 304 responses except on feeds).

If I’d caught the surge earlier, I would have turned on WP-Cache, but it seems to have weathered the storm just fine.

The last big traffic spike this site got was at the end of July, when three things converged: Girl Genius had a second round of technical difficulties, so people were searching and finding my post from the previous month. Lots of people were looking for Comic-Con photos. And my post on finding two female Flash cosplayers showed up on When Fangirls Attack. Even that only brought the total up to ~1,400. Today’s running 1,699 total hits to the blog, with just over 4 hours left to go.

It does seem to be slowing down now, so it’s not likely to have the staying power of the April 2006 surge in traffic to Another One Bites the Dust when the Jamie Jack and Stench show went off the air. That one managed ~600 hits per day over about 3 weeks.

It jumped up to 1½ times the usual number of visits on the day “Justice” aired, then quickly started trailing off to normal levels. It’s nowhere near as big a jump as last time the Flash appeared on the show, when I saw a threefold spike in traffic for the first two days.

Why the difference? I’ve got several theories:

• Interest in Smallville has waned over time, so fewer people dropped in. Pure speculation.
• Viewers remembered Bart from “Run” (which was rerun a few weeks ago) and many didn’t feel the need to look him up again. Again, speculation.
• Bart was sharing the limelight with other guest stars this time. But I’d expect people to look for all of them, which is borne out by the number of people who have searched the site for Green Arrow in the past week.
• Overall site traffic is higher, causing the jump to be less noticeable. Wishful thinking, but the last spike hit ~7,600 hits/day, while this one hit ~8,200, so the numbers hold up. (Hits & bandwidth are down for the Flash section, but I’ve done several rounds of optimization in the last few years.)
• Fewer sources linked to the site. Last time, there were lots of links from forums and blogs. I even got linked from Television Without Pity. (They decided to go with Wikipedia instead.) This time around, it was mostly search engine hits.

Then I realized the author of that post had another story show up on Slashdot today. I discovered this chain of links:

1. Slashdot: Just what has Microsoft been doing for IE 7?
2. Idealog: Microsoft Drops The Ball on Internet Explorer 7 Standards Compliance
3. SFX: Should NewsCloud.com Remain Firefox Only?
4. The Alternative Browser Alliance (via signature in comment)

You can see how powerful the Slashdot effect is, if it can cause a noticeable (if minor) spike in traffic to a page 3 degrees away!

Of course, it pales next to being linked from the ISC Handler’s Diary, which seems to have pulled in 15 10 times as many visitors in 2 days. (Thanks!)

This is a traffic signal on the Jeffrey off-ramp from the northbound 5 in Irvine. The ramp is 3 lanes wide, and the middle lane can go either way. It’s not often that you actually see a double arrow like this, though.

It’s times like this that make me wish I’d taken a picture of the “U-Turn Only” sign I saw a few years ago. The street it was on has since been extended, and the sign is long gone.