Given the lack of decent radio stations in the LA area (I swear, every frequency is filled, but they’re mostly crap), I find myself occasionally listening to a San Diego station that sometimes comes in clearly. (It’s a step above Star, at least.) It’s about 80-90 miles from here to SD. I was listening to them today, and when the song ended, the DJs came on and announced that they were broadcasting from Disneyland. About 10 miles away. In the other direction.
Blast from the past
Wow. We just turned back on a website account for a customer whose domain was “hijacked” a year ago (IIRC he didn’t renew on time, and someone snatched it up). Apparently he gave up trying to get it back, because he asked us to set it up under a new domain name.
We hadn’t moved the files at all, so all we had to do was change the name in our config. (And fix an error in a CGI script that probably relates to a Perl upgrade, since it presumably worked before.) But the site…
Let me just say it was already old before he lost the domain name. It probably looked old in 1999. Everything’s centered, it’s got blink tags, animated GIFs, a clock and a Java-based music player.
But the thing that caught my attention was the “Netscape Now! 3.0” button.
(Netscape 3 came out in 1996. Windows 95 was still new, IE was barely usable at its own version 3, NCSA was still working on Mosaic and Netscape was still charging money for its browser.)
A ton of batteries
My boss and I just finished installing 1300 pounds of extra batteries for our server room’s UPS* units, more than doubling our previous backup coverage.
See, the power company has decided they need to cut power to our block for 8 hours tomorrow night in order to do work on the local grid. And here we were with only enough battery power for 2½-3 hours. (This was more than enough back in the era of rolling blackouts, since those only lasted an hour or so.) We can shut down everything on the inside network, no problem… but a five-hour outage for all the websites, email accounts, dialups, DSL accounts, etc. that we host is not something we want to be stuck with.
So we got more batteries.
We’ll still have to be here at least part of the time tomorrow night, keeping an eye on things, turning off internal systems to conserve power, etc. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.
* That’s uninterruptable power supply, not united parcel service.
Lactic Acid: A Good Thing?
Heard a story on KCRW this morning. Apparently lactic acid might not be responsible for muscle fatigue after all (as my high school biology class taught). The connection was made because lactic acid was found in fatigued muscles, but recent research suggests that it may prevent muscle fatigue. It turns out that if lactic acid is removed from overworked muscle fibers, they actually stop working.
Of course, it is probably responsible for the burn you get while exerting.
(It’s kind of like when I learned that a fever was actually an immune system technique to fight infection, and not something the infection did itself.)
Flood averted
This morning I stumbled into work and almost screwed up the coffee again. (I usually get in at least half an hour before any other coffee drinkers, although the one mug from home is usually enough.) Except this time, I was ready to start it without putting the urn in place!
Must sleep earlier tonight…
Sinister Ducks
In light of a recent in-joke that most of you probably weren’t even aware of, allow me to introduce you to a bizarre little song called “The March of the Sinister Ducks.”
Numb Skull
I just got back from the dentist, where I had a filling replaced. Strangely, the numbness from the novocaine spread to just under my eye socket, making it feel as if my eyelid was numb!
Woo Hoo!
I found a source for all but one of the missing Myth Adventures books! Of course, it is the website for a store that always has a huge booth at Comic Con, but hey, for all I know they didn’t bring those issues with them.
The things you see on LJ…
sclerotic_rings on prosthetics that don’t just mimic the body, specifically artificial heart pumps designed with the fact the important part isn’t the method by which the heart pumps blood, but the fact that it keeps it circulating. We have plenty of experience with simpler ways to pump fluids than by imitating heart movements, such as, in this case, a constantly rotating impeller. What’s interesting is that people with this pump have no pulse!.
Future Con
Hmmm… a co-worker has informed me that he just made hotel reservations for next year’s Comic Con (this year’s having ended yesterday)… and that some of the nearby hotels are already sold out!
alenxa and I pre-registered for next year’s convention yesterday (avoiding deadline issues and saving $50 over the at-the-door price for a full membership). It might be worth planning further ahead…
Revenge of the Sith
What do you think of the recently-announced title, Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith?
- I love it!
- I hate it!
- Eh, it’s OK, but I would’ve preferred something like Rise of the Empire – 1
- Who cares? It’s Star Wars!
- I wish they had gone with something classy, like Vader Lives! or When Sithspawn Attack! – 3
Re: Starship Troopers
On its own merits, Starship Troopers was a passable, somewhat cheesy action/war movie. Nothing fantastic, but not a complete waste of two hours either.
As an adaptation, though, it was terrible. It was as if someone read the back cover, wrote a script, then skimmed through the book to add in salient details in hopes that people who had read it would be happier. (Hey, it says here that the main character comes from Buenos Aires. Let’s add that in!)
A movie *can* be both a good film and a good adaptation. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a good example. It didn’t stick to the books 100%, but most of what it changed made sense, given the difference between the written word and the moving image. And because it stayed true to the books where it counted most, people who have read them tend to like the movies as much as people who haven’t.
An interesting side note about Starship Troopers: I was actually an extra in the opening scene with the hybrid football/basketball game. They needed spectators, and it was filming nearby (California State University at Long Beach, usually referred to as Cal State Long Beach). It was actually
extremely boring — I assume it’s typical that you spend more time setting up a shot than actually filming it. I spent two days waiting for them to set things up, then cheering or booing for 30 seconds while the cameras rolled, then waiting again. In the end I got: (1) a cast/crew T-Shirt (2) lots of reading time (3) conversations with some interesting people and (4) a girl’s phone number. So it wasn’t a *total* waste of time!
Potato. Hot.
The challenge: A piece of any genre, 200-350 words or thereabouts, in incomplete sentences. Also questions under six words.
Without further ado:
Catching up
This morning alenxa asked me if I’d posted anything on comic book time (the effect by which Superman and Lois Lane are roughly the same age now as they were in 1938). I’d actually started writing about it a while back, but never finished it.
Around lunchtime I took a look at the Drafts folder on my keychain drive, and I found it — a lot shorter than I remembered, and a lot more recent. I also found an epic I had written ages ago based on another of our conversations — one wondering about the dearth of sci-fi art films. This thing is several pages long, deals with defining sci-fi, fantasy, and related genres, and doesn’t even get to the art film issue, and predates our group blog by several months. In fact, it’s old enough that the first line starts off, “My girlfriend and I were having a conversation about movies….”
There was a footnote about popular derision of science fiction vs. popular consumption of it that I thought was worth posting on its own, although since it dealt with top movie grosses, it needed a bit of updating. This piece of weblog history can now be seen at Viewing the Impossible.
I dashed off some thoughts on several other half-finished pieces (including the time issue), as well as a new one I’d been thinking about while drifting off to sleep last night (or maybe drifting off to consciousness this morning). I figure on finishing and posting them over the next few days. Maybe I’ll start breaking up the epic and post that too. With a new opening line, of course!
Nanofire
A bit of excitement at work today. There was a small electrical fire over the weekend. Fortunately someone was working on Saturday, noticed one of the servers wasn’t responding, went into the server room and saw the plug on a heavy-duty extension cord glowing slightly, with smoke coming out. He unplugged it from the wall, made sure it went out, then rearranged some power cords so he could get back to work.
We’ve bypassed the UPS involved until we can be absolutely sure that (a) it didn’t cause the short and (b) it wasn’t damaged. There’s charring on the outside of the plug where it was in contact with the extension cord, though nothing like what we found inside the other plug. The hot wire had burned clean through, leaving charcoal dust all over the inside of the plug. The cable and the circuit breaker are both rated for 20 amps, so the most likely explanation (since the UPS wasn’t belching flames) is that the cable was faulty – and an extension cord is a lot easier to replace than a 130-lb power supply!
You know you’ve picked the right person when…
I was just looking through web traffic statistics for K-Squared Ramblings, had just finished reading the top 20 search terms people were finding us with, and started on the list of individual pages linking to the site. I muttered “Ah, direct hits,” and then, at the same time, alenxa and I both started saying “Krakow! Krakow!” (old “Calvin and Hobbes” joke).
Does this sound remotely familiar?
alenxa and I were driving back from lunch when something reminded me of David Bowie’s “A Space Oddity.” This in turn reminded me of a previous conversation — with somebody — about a story or story idea I had read or thought of. The key issue here was the repeated “Major Tom” theme. There are at least the two songs, and I recall hearing that there is at least one more somewhere.
Anyway, the story idea was this: suppose there was some seriously traumatic event – maybe not 9/11 level, maybe more like Challenger, or any of several celebrities who died before their time – that everyone knew about, and everyone was affected by. Now suppose that all memories and records of this event disappeared. But it’s still sitting there, in the back of people’s minds, and every once in a while there’s a song, or a TV movie, or something about this event that no one remembers really happened.
Imagine “Candle in the Wind” without Marilyn Monroe, for instance. Or imagine that an early astronaut really did drift off into space to be lost, and no one remembers Major Tom except a few songwriters, and even they don’t realize they’re remembering his story and not making it up.
Has anyone read a story like this? If not, would anyone like to?
Protected: Jumping on the Bandwagon
Dinosaur Flambe
Here’s an interesting theory: What if it didn’t take months of impact-caused “nuclear” winter to kill off all the dinosaurs? A new report suggests that the impact itself would have released so much heat, it would have flash-burned all life on land within hours. Only those animals protected by, say, the ocean (fish), or rivers (crocodiles), or underground burrows (small mammals) would have survived.
It doesn’t explain the death of aquatic dinosaurs, or (to my mind) the survival of birds, but it’s at least interesting. (As with all fly-in-the-face-of-accepted-theory theories, some skepticism is required. But hey, people used to think that the idea of asteroid-impact extinction was far-fetched.)
It’s a scary idea. Most disaster epics are at least in part about what comes after the disaster. Who lives, what they have to face, how they go on. From Noah to the Day After Tomorrow. Human beings can survive a nuclear winter. Not in as large numbers, not necessarily with civilization intact, but it’s at least possible. If you’ve got only minutes to hours, you’d better have Jor-el and a rocket – or a hell of a lot of bomb shelters – because the world is going bye-bye.
Oh, if you have a chance (and can turn on the sound), check out the DAT link: NPR did a review, but they decided it would be more fun to send their science correspondent than a movie critic!
That New Computer Smell
I picked up the PowerBook! It took me most of my lunch break to get up to the UPS center to pick it up and get back home to drop it off, so all I’ve done is open the box. It looks like I’ll be eating at my desk today.