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.

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.

Movie Turnover

There was a story on NPR today about the evolution of the term blockbuster from simply meaning a movie that’s very successful to meaning a particular type of movie (the overblown summer action flick). It got me thinking about the increased number of movie theaters in the area, and then is it really that big an increase, or is it just in line with population growth?

Then I realized: nearly every movie theater I’ve been to in the past couple of years, I remember being new. And all the ones I remember going to as a kid are gone or, if they’re lucky, converted into art house cinema.

  • AMC Orange Mall? Gone. I think it’s part of the Wal-Mart parking lot now.
  • Edwards Town Center? I think the building is still there, but I’m not so sure.
  • The Cinedome? Long gone, and whatever replaced it was also recently razed to the ground.
  • Those theaters across the street from South Coast Plaza? Finally closed down a few years ago.
  • Edwards Woodbridge? Sold off and became a second-run theater.
  • Edwards University? Art-house.
  • South Coast Village? (Not that I remember going there much, if at all.) Art-house.

In fact, the only one I remember going to regularly that’s still first-run is Edwards Hutton Center, and I have a vague feeling it might have been new at the time. At least, I think it was still there the last time I drove past it. With so many other theaters around, I’m not sure I’ve actually been there since high school.

Big Newport has escaped the encroachment of the new, mainly because it’s, well, the biggest screen this side of the Rockies (according to legend, anyway). And I’ve probably been to University and South Coast Village more often since they became art houses than I did “back in the day.”

Don’t touch that tract, you don’t know where it’s been!

I already find it disturbing that someone decided it was a good idea to leave a religious tract—really, an ad for a particular church—in a public restroom stall. (Imagine the circumstances under which someone will read it. Or better yet, don’t.) I find it more disturbing that the church it advertises is located in Temecula, at least 60 miles away, in another county, on the other side of a small mountain range, and a minimum one-hour drive in good traffic. But most of all, I find it disturbing that it’s the second time it’s happened.

I suppose if there are people in the building who commute from Riverside, they’d be closer, but still…a bathroom stall? If you’re going to advertise in a public restroom, the least you can do is use a sign, or a one-sided postcard—something people won’t have to touch to get the details.

GPL Enforcement Squad!

I dreamed I was working on a Mac version of the Dillo web browser*. But I mixed it with some sort of commercial code, and the resulting program violated the GPL**. The next thing I knew, someone was shooting at me with a machine gun. I kept trying to walk out of a (hotel?) lobby, but every time someone started shooting. At one point they were in a helicopter, at one point they may have just been up in a building across the street, and at one point they were definitely in a hot air balloon. I’d duck back inside, or put up my hands to get them to stop shooting, but every time I walked back out, they started up again.

* An ultra-small, ultra-fast browser that’s low on features, but runs well even on old hardware.

** About the GPL

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.)

Current Mood: 🤔contemplative
Current Music: the drone of the tape drive that I eventually want to get off my desk and into the server room

From the department of… huh?

Last night I dreamed that John Ashcroft was following me around the cereal aisle in the grocery store. After a bit he introduced himself: “Hi, I’m John Ashcroft. We met briefly in a shopping mall in Washington, DC ten years ago.” And since this was a dream, I started remembering the previous meeting. Which was essentially the same as the other one. Just about the point that I started to say “Oh, yeah, I remember now!” he was gone.

Current Mood: 😕confused