Want…sleeeeep

Stay up ridiculously late, collapse in bed, drop off to sleep. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Not spend another hour-plus tossing & turning.

I “woke up” his morning unsure of just how long it took me to fall asleep last night, but somehow convinced that all I had to do was look at the modification time on the most recently changed files in… something. My brain, probably.

Then I went back to sleep.

Eventually I woke up and realized that the file timestamp thing was just plain silly. Kind of like the time a few years back that I half-woke up, convinced (probably from an interrupted dream) that I could manipulate reality by altering its HTML code.

Anyway, I know there are people on my friends list who have serious insomnia, and I just want to say: I salute you. I don’t know how you put up with it on a regular basis.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy
Current Music: A radio commercial put the Nutcracker Suite in my head. Grr.

Wireless in tinseltown

If you have a wireless network, you might want to go easy on the tinsel [archive.org] this Christmas. Otherwise you might not have a wireless network for the next few weeks!

From Dave Phelan’s “Insuffucient Time” blog regarding a Pier To Pier network outage:

“Window” was the codename for strips of foil dropped by Lancasters on D-Day to fool German Radar into believing there was an attack on Calais. Radar bounces off the foil sending the radar waves in random directions.

Nowadays we don’t call it Window, we call it “Tinsel”. Lots of small reflective strips. Tinsel is an effective blocker of microwaves as Window ever was. Yesterday’s network outage was caused primarily by the addition of some, very tasteful, Christmas decorations to the antenna of node 4!

Note: Added the quote as part of the archiving project.

Collection of interesting links

Roads Gone Wild: a traffic engineer discovers that, in some circumstances, if you design the road right, you can actually make it safer by removing signs, lane lines, curbs and the like. The comments at Photomatt.netare interesting as well.

The History of Mathematical Symbols. Some of them are more recent than you might think.

Top 10 cheesiest movie lines—though they should probably be renamed the top 10 high profile cheesy movie lines. I think “I’m just the cook” in Under Siege (or was it the sequel?) is at least the equal of “No, I’m a postman” in cheese level. And once you get into the realm of B movies, there’s a wealth of cheese to be found.

Ursula Le Guin doesn’t like what Skiffy did to the Earthsea books. She really doesn’t like it She really, really doesn’t like it. She really, really, really doesn’t like it. And she’s not alone.

Daniel Handler, however, seems okay with the screen adaptation of his books.

Tree!

Well, we’ve hit a milestone. The last few holiday seasons, there’s always been something preventing me and alenxa from putting up a Christmas tree. At long last, we’ve managed to accomplish this difficult feat.

You see, the way our furniture is arranged, we only have one spot in the apartment suitable for a tree. The broken desk that blocked it one year has long since been repaired. The boxes that blocked it another year have been unpacked. This year looked grim as well, but for once everything fell into place. Since we hosted a “Refugee Thanksgiving” for our friends, we had to clean the corner out. And the apartment management owed us a free carpet cleaning, so we waited a week before looking for a tree. And when we visited my grandparents that following weekend, they asked if we wanted a tree, since they’d been putting up a small one instead of a large one the last few years.

So we set it up last night, and went hunting for ornaments today. First it was storage, then my parents’ house (to pick up a collection I’d been making since childhood), then shopping. And so, I present to you: our first Christmas tree!

Our first Christmas tree (ambient light)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Tori Amos – Snow Cherries From France

Better movies through time-shifting

The Hollywood blockbuster formula:

  1. Make a movie with some sort of draw—action, big-name star, whatever. Don’t worry too much about quality, since it won’t matter.
  2. Publicize the heck out of it.
  3. Watch lots of people go see it opening weekend.
  4. Watch as attendence drops off sharply because they all told their friends it sucked. Who cares? You already made tons of money the first week!
  5. Release on DVD two months later with special features. You’ll make enough on sales and rentals to cover your expenses.
  6. Repeat.

The end result: tons of substandard movies that nobody really likes, but that make plenty of money. More to the point, there’s not much incentive to make anything better

I had an idea on how to deal with the problem, based partly on mine and alenxa’s viewing habits: Unless you’re reasonably certain the movie will be worth seeing, wait until the second week it’s out. Aside from saving you from ghastly lines, it gives you a chance to pick up the word-of-mouth. If it turns out to be lousy, you save yourself 2 hours (more like three when you throw in parking) and 10 bucks. More importantly, if enough people wait for week 2, films will need to keep second-week ticket sales, which should encourage studios to make films that will have first-weekend people saying, “I loved it! It was better than Cats!” and recommend it to all their second-weekend friends.

It’ll never happen, but it’s at least an idea.

They really do come in threes

Saturday night: Driving home from a day with parents & grandparents. Two blocks from home, we made a left turn, and someone coming sideways ran the red light. They slowed down, we sped up, and disaster was averted.

This morning: After talking, for whatever reason, about car crashes and why you shouldn’t stop on the side of a bridge if you can help it (the chance of being hit and knocked over the edge, which happened to the younger brother of someone I knew in high school) during the carpool section of the morning commute, I watched an SUV plow into the center divider, hitting its right front wheel and, I’m fairly certain, knocking that wheel off.

This evening: Driving home from work, the right front tire went flat while we drove over a bridge.

Overall damage: I need to buy a new tire, and my shoes are scuffed up. But the level of coincidence is disturbing.

Current Mood: 😉weird

Strange Sights of the Weekend

Driving along the toll road and spotting an earth dam that I suspect is the end of a trail I used to hike as a kid.

Sitting in a sandwich shop, watching the rain outside, and seeing a man walk down the street in jeans, denim jacket, a cowboy hat… and sunglasses.

Pulling onto the freeway just in time to see an SUV heading the wrong way, apparently attempting a U-turn despite the presence of a concrete divider. It was almost completely turned around when it hit, and I could swear the front right wheel actually fell off when it struck the barrier. The driver looked okay, and other people were stopping, so I continued on to work. I figured I hadn’t seen enough—like how the truck ended up going the wrong way—to be a useful witness.

Current Mood: 😉weird

A Tale of Three OCs

Well, the office is closed today for the company Christmas party, which for the first time in several years I’m not attending. (It’s out on an Indian casino/resort, and with our usual Dec. 24 holiday being unnecessary, they moved it around so people could beat the traffic.) But since alenxa’s office isn’t, and we only have one car, I had to get up early anyway.

I decided, on a whim, to go exploring a bit. I’ve recently developed an interest in local geography and trying to associate what landforms I can see at a distance with actual locations I can stand on or point to on a map. So I headed toward the mountains, looking for a way past Foothill Ranch. I didn’t make it up into the mountains, but I did find a beautiful drive through what I think was Trabuco Canyon, with twisty, oak-lined back roads, semi-isolated feed stores, random diners in the middle of nowhere, clear views of the mountains—all just a few miles outside my usual haunts.

It made me realize there are actually three Orange Counties: North County (flat and urban), South County (hilly and willfully suburban), and the canyons (willfully rural), which for some reason I’d been including in South County in my mental demographic map.

We’re definitely going to have to explore this further.

Old Town, New Town

Ever since I found out there was actually an area called “Old Town Irvine,” I’ve found the idea somewhere between funny, pretentious, and oxymoronic. Looking at nearby cities, we have Old Town Orange, a collection of streets with shop buildings dating back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, centered around an actual traffic circle. The place could have been the model for Disneyland’s Main Street. There’s Old Town Tustin, another collection of streets with shops going back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, with contemporary houses nearby for good measure.

Then, there’s Old Town Irvine, a couple of barns that have been converted into restaurants and a motel. Why? Because there effectively is no Old Town Irvine — it sprang whole from a designer’s master plan in the late 1960s. Most people assume UCI is named after the city, but it actually predates the city of Irvine. Both were named after the Irvine Ranch (or possibly the Irvine Company or the Irvine family — all three are tied together) on which they were built. Maybe 50 years from now there really will be an “old town” — and it’ll probably be Northwood or Woodbridge or something. But the name will already have been trademarked by the shopping center, so they won’t be able to use it.