- When I got out of bed, alenxa said, “Hey, there’s fog out there!” A half an hour earlier, when she’d gotten up, it had been clear. By the time we left for work, all that was left was just enough haze to maximize glare and make the broken sun visor and lack of sunglasses a problem. We did get a great view of one of the ex-marine base blimp hangars where the near end was perfectly visible, but it faded into the fog so that the far end was completely hidden. (Naturally, by the time I dug the camera out, the light turned green and we didn’t get a picture.)
- There’s something fascinating about the high-tech/low-tech contrast in surgery where the instruments consist of a styrofoam cup and a long Q-tip. OK, the cup has to be full of liquid nitrogen, but it just seems so simple.
- Last week I got into work and said to a co-worker, “Is it just me, or do people not know how to drive in the rain?” “I think they just don’t know how to drive.” I spent nearly 10 minutes at a turn signal this morning because some idiot didn’t notice it turned green, and the next car was a big two-piece truck with no acceleration capability whatsoever. And then there was the freeway…
- Amazon’s shipping decisions just don’t make any sense. Last week I placed an order for three items (so I could hit that magic $25 and get free shipping). I checked the box to lump everything into as few shipments as possible. So of course they decided to just ship two of them. Then they shipped the third the next day. Yesterday, the second shipment arrived, but I’m still waiting for the first. Edit: The first package arrived today. It seems holiday shipping is already in full swing, because the UPS guy showed up around 7:30.
- Server room is freezing. This is good. When it isn’t, my boss says things like “You can smell the electronics trying to die!” And things crash. And we have to spend half the day fixing things that crash.
- Speaking of things that crash, I’m getting very annoyed at Microsoft’s decision in MFC 7.0 to stop hiding menus and toolbars in Print Preview mode.
Tag: thoughts
Sunset
Since about 7:15 (barring a break to bring in laundry), I’ve been out on the balcony with the laptop, doing Net stuff I’ve been meaning to catch up on. It’s been quite nice outside today, except in direct sunlight, but there’s been a light cloud cover most of the afternoon. But we just can’t seem to get the apartment cleared out.
There was a dicey moment when I was watering the plants, though, and somehow managed to overwater the plant that hangs above our patio table. So it immediately started dripping on the table and splashing the laptop and small stack of books next to it. It was closed, at least, so no harm was done, and the day was so dry that by the time I finished with the other plants the table was already drying out.
We don’t have a view of the horizon — there are too many trees and buildings in the way — but the high cloud cover meant a very nice sunset, and the parts of the sky I could see turned fantastically gold, orange, and finally pink before fading.
Now it’s dark, and while I don’t need to see to type (and the screen casts plenty of light for that anyway), one of the things I was doing was typing in the quotes we collected at Comic Con. The balcony light really doesn’t cast enough to read at this end, so I’ll probably have to either go over to the bench by the light, where there’s nowhere to put the notebook, or go back inside, where it’s still uncomfortably warm.
On the other hand, I won’t be able to hear my neighbor hocking loogies on his patio. He started about halfway through this post, and I hope he’s finished. Blech.
No Looking Back
I got in the car to go to lunch today, and noticed something sitting on the cup holder in front of the dashboard: the rear-view mirror.
I tried to stick it back to the window, but wasn’t confident that it would stay. Rather than risk it falling off in the middle of driving, I pulled it off again (too easily) and set it on the chair.
On another note, I was standing in line at Robeks when someone behind me asked, “What part are you at?” I said something eloquent like, “Huh?” and he repeated the question, at which point I realized he was referring to HBP, which I was holding in my left hand… without the dust jacket, and with the spine facing downward. He had to have recognized it solely by its size and the color of the cover.
Lunchtime observations
All the “meadows” (i.e. weed fields) I noted a while back have been mowed down and just look like dead brown grass. The one where I stopped and watched birds and butterfies has a few flowers that have popped up since then, but is otherwise pretty much dead.
Speaking of dead grass, the traffic island where I took the picture of the Grass Under Renovation sign is almost completely dead now.
Jamba Juice gets really loud when they’re making lots of smoothies.
A green tea boost turns mango smoothies green. I’d hate to see what it does to a berry smoothie. With luck it’ll look sort of like a mocha… but it sure won’t taste like one!
I suspect the local schools are out, since there were a lot more teenagers than I’m used to seeing on a weekday. That’s part of why Jamba Juice was so busy.
As I was leaving with my smoothie, a pair of girls waiting to pick theirs up suddenly hugged each other and started dancing in circles for no apparent reason.
Many of the trees along the path from the building where I work to the Spectrum shopping center are purely decorative. The sidewalk along Irvine Center Drive is lined by trees on both sides, but only a few shadows managed to touch the sidewalk. As for shade for someone walking at high noon? Not a chance. Maybe in a few more years they’ll be useful. Or maybe if the city doesn’t trim them back so far next year.
This lack of shade may be connected to the lack of pedestrians. Today, for instance, I encountered no one on the way to lunch until I reached the office building across the street from the center. On the way back there was one guy carrying a soda and a bag from fye, and a woman jogging with an iPod. And they were both on the first block out, before the first signal.
Speaking of that first signal (second if you count the one crossing the street from the Spectrum itself)…drivers don’t expect pedestrians there either. A truck was turning right in front of me as the light changed, and another car zoomed right behind it despite me stepping forward into the street. By the time I got three steps in, the “don’t walk” signal was already flashing… and this is nine lanes worth of street.
A matter of perspective
Yes, you really do notice different things on foot than in a car. For instance: after the heavy rains this past winter, all the empty lots in the Irvine Spectrum area are full of weeds. But in spring, when the weeds are green and in bloom, those fields look an awful lot like meadows.
The lot (or meadow) in front of the Ford building, in particular, had so many birds wheeling and swooping above it that I stopped to watch, and also spotted butterflies and a ladybug that zoomed past my hand to land on the bag of allergy medication I always carry whenever I go somewhere to eat. (I moved it over to the hedge I was standing next to and waited for it to jump off.) A bit later in the walk I started to notice bird songs, and something I couldn’t quite identify as a very loud cricket, a frog, or just a gravelly-voiced bird.
Not all the empty lots look like this. The one nearest the building where I work is, at this very moment, being reduced to stubble by some guy on a power mower.
Still preoccupied with 1995
Heard “1985” at lunch today and finally got a chance to listen to the lyrics. It was followed up with “Dreams” by the Cranberries (whose heyday was the mid-1990s). The two songs together got me thinking. I’m fine with the fact that it’s been more than 10 years since I graduated high school (1994). But it still weirds me out that it’s been more than 10 years since I started college. They’re only a summer apart, but for some reason one feels more remote.
Of course, I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that I’ve now been a college graduate longer than I was a college student.
Weekend Thoughts
Rain should not fall at an angle more horizontal than vertical.
Whoever came up with the idea for a warning chime to let you know your headlights are still on is a genius, and has saved my car battery many times over.
It doesn’t take much rain to screw up freeway visibility. I could swear I’ve driven in heavier rain and been able to see better.
Our apartment complex suffers from the same problem as UCI: no one bothered to build in decent drainage. Fortunately that’s only been a problem with the sidewalks so far, and not, say, parking or storage.
What the heck is “white whole wheat” flour? It sounds like raw Twinkies, or wild tofu, or Sweet ’n’ Bland. Is it a 50/50 blend or something?
If you run a Persian restaurant, and advertise belly dancers, no one really cares whether the dances are authentic. On that note, Caspian is very loud, at least on Saturday nights. But the food’s good.
The web is a stranger place than you think. Yesterday I was looking at website referrer stats, and discovered a link to our Comic Con photos on a site that specializes in super-heroine, uh, “fantasies.” I.e. dressing models up as superheroines and then, shall we say, reversing the process. Apparently with rope often involved, though that’s almost classic if you’ve seen any 1940s-era Wonder Woman. They had a page full of links to people’s convention photos, focusing on cosplayers.
Just how do they fit Christmas lights into the box? I’d rather let the cord tangle up and then untangle it next year than go through the exercise in frustration that involves trying to get them all into the plastic framework, only to have them pop out, not fit in the box, etc. At least when you untangle them to put them up, you get something out of it: pretty lights on the tree (or window, or roofline, etc.) All you get from carefully placing each light in the frame is a box you’re going to put away and ignore for 11 months, and you can get that much more easily just by jamming the string of lights into the box in the first place.
Better movies through time-shifting
The Hollywood blockbuster formula:
- 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.
- Publicize the heck out of it.
- Watch lots of people go see it opening weekend.
- 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!
- Release on DVD two months later with special features. You’ll make enough on sales and rentals to cover your expenses.
- 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.
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.
Semi-Random Thought of the Day
Just what is so “Fun” about “Fun Size!” candy? Did they look at the gap between “Bite Sized” and “Regular Size” and say, “Hey, we need another size in here, should we call it ‘Mini Size’ or something?” “Nah, that sounds small, we don’t want that! Let’s pick something that sounds appealing, something that sounds like fun. Hey, why not just call it ‘Fun Size?’”
(Inspired by the bowl of leftover Halloween candy sitting on the receptionist’s desk.)