Category: LiveJournal

Timing is everything

Two weekends ago, alenxa and I agreed that we would pick a vacation destination within a week, and make arrangements to go somewhere for a week sometime in March. I heard an ad for deals on Hawaii trips through Travelocity, checked out the prices, and was very impressed.

Last Friday we both got our vacation time approved, and I kept meaning to call a travel agent all week. Tonight I just went back onto Travelocity, pulled up the dates we’d picked… and it kept reducing the number of days and giving me prices that were twice what I had seen last time — and for fewer days! Other sites weren’t much help — Expedia couldn’t find any package deals at all unless I shortened the trip!

alenxa figured it out before I did: Spring Break. I guess I’ve just been out of school too long to remember when things hit.

Prices for the following week are back to what I was seeing before. If we can both get our vacation changed tomorrow, we should be set…

(Side note: I find it interesting that Travelocity emphasizes the total cost, while Expedia emphasizes the cost per person. Both numbers are there on each site, but it does make it a bit annoying to comparison shop.)

Organizing Comics

I finally got around to reorganizing my way-too-many boxes of comics. Mainly I had a bunch of stuff on the top layer I hadn’t looked at in months and a bunch of stuff in the middle layer I kept dragging out, but I also found a bunch of comics I don’t want to keep anymore…

…including my entire Transformers collection.

I’m giving my friends first crack at those, and the rest of it (including the stuff left over from the last few clean-out rounds) is up on my website.

If you’re interested in any of the following (or anything at the above link), let me know:

List of Transformers comics up for grabs

Mistargeted

One of the *ahem* “perks” of registering to vote as “decline to state” is that you get political propaganda from all sides. But this is far beyond anything I’ve seen before.

Someone from the NRCC Business Advisory Council called me, at work, to invite me to the “annual dinner with President Bush.” (Not surprisingly, the NRCC is the National Republican Congressional Committee.)

Someone really missed the boat on that research.

(Meanwhile, having looked at their website, I’m trying to figure out how an agenda can be both progressive and conservative.)

Admittedly, the Democratic party doesn’t line up perfectly with my ideals either, but they seem bigger on things like civil liberties, good citizenship (at home and internationally), consumer rights, and—in a bizarre twist—financial responsibility than the Republicans are these days, and the Libertarian party is too far on the “business can do no wrong” side to be taken seriously. Even small-l libertarianism doesn’t work for me: while I like the idea of small government, I also like the idea of government-as-watchdog, making sure businesses don’t totally screw us over. (Even then, they can go too far, like the eternal cries of “Comic books/movies/TV/video games are corrupting our youth!” that never stop, just jump to a new medium every decade or so.)

I suspect I will eventually find a party I agree with, but there will only be three other members, none of whom want to run for office.

Ramp of Doom Update

I keep forgetting to post about it, but last week there was another car accident on the Ramp of Doom. This time, as I drove up and around the cloverleaf, there was an SUV stopped several feet down the slope inside the curve, at such an angle that I just couldn’t figure out what enabled it to stay put, with a police accident investigation unit crawling around the area.

What’s interesting is that all the accidents I’ve seen (with the possible exception of the multi-car pile-up, in which case I don’t remember what type of vehicles were involved) have involved SUVs. Maybe it’s just statistical likelihood given what’s popular to drive, or maybe it’s the high center of gravity like sekl suggested.

I can see clearly now

The sun is shining for the first time in over a week, and the gardeners at our apartment complex are out in force, almost as if they were on call, waiting for a chance for it to be dry enough to work.

It’s always amazing how green the hills are after rains like this, and it always seems unbelievable that they’ll be golden brown again by summer.

Current Music: Guess.

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.

Off-Ramp of Doom

I’ve been driving the same route to work for about two years, finishing with a transfer from one freeway to another and then to the first exit. The transition ramp is a cloverleaf up onto a bridge. Aside from an incident in which I was nearly clipped by a maniac in a Mercedes who insisted on climbing into my trunk on the off-ramp and zoomed past me the moment it reached the second freeway, I’ve never encountered anything worse than merging traffic.

In the past month I’ve seen three accidents—or, more precisely, one accident and two aftermaths.

First was an SUV that I watched slowly make a U-turn and crash into the center divider. (I have no idea how much control the driver had over the car at the time, but I swear I saw the wheel fall off when it hit.) Then last week there was the aftermath of a multi-car pileup on the side of the road. With the rain yesterday, I deliberately avoided the ramp and took the previous exit and surface streets. I was driving on automatic pilot today, so I took the ramp, and there was a car on the right shoulder and another SUV parked backwards, its right front wheel crunched into the center divider—in almost exactly the same spot as the one I saw a month ago.

Edit: I just wasted 10 minutes to bring you this *ahem* high-tech diagram:

The Ramp of Doom

Actor’s Nightmare

I haven’t done any acting in years, but I still occasionally get the Actor’s Nightmare. (When I saw the Buffy episode where Willow dreams she’s in the play that doesn’t quite make sense, I sat up and said, “I’ve had that dream!”)

Last night I dreamed I was in a community theater or children’s theater production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It seemed to be only the songs from the movie, not the entire play. It was opening night, and there was a certain lack of sufficient rehearsal.

The canonical actor’s nightmare is like the clasic final exam nightmare—the final exam in the class you never actually attended, for instance. The play makes no sense, you don’t know your lines, you’re not even sure how the scenes go together, but everyone else knows what they’re doing. (I never did figure out what the tanks were doing in Oklahoma in one of my dreams.) This was different: I hadn’t just missed rehearsals, there hadn’t been enough rehearsal. There were scenes we hadn’t even blocked, never mind actually practiced.

So it’s opening night, it’s a makeshift theater (basically a conference room with a pair of doors near one end, one going to the descignated green room and the other outside), and the audience is arriving. We’re all “backstage” (i.e. in the next room), I’m running through songs (OK, we havent rehearsed this part, but I know most of the song anyway…), and for some inexplicable reason I’ve been cast as Gaston (it didn’t make sense in the dream, either), and I’m running through the song, when I realize… who’s playing LeFou? I start asking the other actors, and nobody knows. I ask the stage manager, and he doesn’t know.

Did I mention I have the vague sense throughout that this is the theater troupe from Something Positive?

So the audience is here, the lights (room lights, we don’t have any actual stage lighting) are up, and people are out there starting to sing, and we don’t even have the entire show cast yet, never mind rehearsed! I’m trying to figure out just how much I can muddle through the opening scene without someone to play off of, and I’m not even certain we have anyone playing Belle out on stage…

…and then I woke up with “Going Through the Motions” running through my head.

Current Mood: 🙁restless
Current Music: Going Through the Motions

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.

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.