On the same day as our whale-watching cruise (April 6), we took a submarine tour of Kailua Bay from Atlantis Adventures. The tour started at the Kailua pier, where a boat ferried us out to the submarine in the middle of the bay. The sub itself went down to around 80-90 feet by the end of the trip, and we got to see all kinds of fish and coral.
It didn’t look nearly so blue to us, of course, since our eyes were adjusted to it. Continue reading
My regular comic store, Comic Quest, didn’t get any copies of Peter David’s Spike: Old Times. Yesterday I checked at Comics Toons and Toys. They were also sold out. Today I started looking around more of the Orange County area.
First step: Mile High Comics. I figured it was a long shot, since they’re the most well-known comic store on the internet, but I wasn’t in a hurry to read it, and it would save me the trouble of driving around the county. Naturally, they didn’t have it.
So I started calling stores I knew. As I was about to start, I noticed an email on SuperHeroNews saying, “Mile High Comics in LA, burned down last night, more information as we get it.” The first store on my list was Netherworld Comics, which used to be a Mile High store, but is in Garden Grove, not Los Angeles. Their phone isn’t picking up. And they’re still listed as an affiliate on Mile High’s website. And there aren’t any other Mile High stores in southern California. This doesn’t look good for Netherworld. Edit Sep. 7: Yes, it was them [archive.org]. Figures. I’d only been in there a couple of times, but it was a nice store.
Okaaay… Next step: Diamond’s Comic Shop Locator. Unfortunately it only lets you search by ZIP code, and only shows the nearest three. Since I’d already been to two of the stores, I only got one phone number out of it. No luck there.
Time to do it the old-fashioned way: the phone book. (Katie remarked, “There’s nothing wrong with being old-fashioned, especially about a book called Old Times.”) There are surprisingly few comic stores in central Orange County. I only got three more numbers out of it, and one of them specializes in vintage comics. Not surprisingly, none of them had any copies either. (One offered to order it for me, but I simply declined rather than pointing out that it was already sold out at both the publisher and distributor.)
Next stop: eBay…
Finally, something light-hearted in the news: A bunch of people decked out as zombies crashed the American Idol auditions in Austin, Texas last week, groaning things like “Television rots your braaaaaains!”
Reportedly the contestants didn’t get it.
Ironically, the event organizers had read about the protest in advance on Craigslist, and quickly got the “zombies” to sign release forms to appear on the show.
(via Cognitive Dissonance)
This is incredibly bizarre. Today I’ve started getting spam which is clearly coming from zombies and using fake return addresses and forged headers, but the content is a plaintext message encouraging hurricane relief donations and linking to the legitimate Red Cross and FEMA websites. There’s one further link, to arc.convio.net, but the ISC reports that the site is legit.
It literally looks like some spammer decided to encourage donations to the relief effort, picked an organization he figured most people would recognize, and plugged the message into his usual spam software.
I can’t decide what to do about them! On one hand, they’re spam. They’re unsolicited, they’re using spammer techniques, and they’re clearly not associated with the Red Cross. And we’ve always said the issue is “consent, not content.” But if the ISC is right, they’re not trying to pull a fast one like the scams and spyware installers that are leeching off of the catastrophe.
I keep thinking I should train the filter on them anyway, just like I would add political or religious spam, or an everyday charity that decided to start spamming for donations… but for some reason I just can’t bring myself to do it.
The SANS Internet Storm center, which has found itself dealing with the fallout on the Internet from a quite literal storm, is reporting that a vulnerability in Dameware (apparently a remote admin system for Windows) is being exploited. Ordinarily the solution would be to tell people to download the update… but the Dameware website is in New Orleans. Fortunately, the UK-based site is up.
Not everyone in New Orleans has gone offline. Netcraft reports that domain registrar DirectNIC has held on through Katrina and its aftermath. Being located 11 floors up in an area that hasn’t flooded yet probably helps. That, and having three weeks’ worth of backup power.
A quick question for people who discount the idea that global warming could be caused, in part, by human activities on the basis that we can’t possibly impact the climate as much as natural events and cycles affect it.
Do you also discount the well-documented depletion of the ozone layer by interaction with CFCs and similar chemicals? That seems to be a major environmental impact, and one that clearly has an anthropogenic component.
Nearly two decades after we cut back on CFC use, it looks like the ozone layer is finally starting to recover—or at least it’s stopped shrinking. Of course, it’ll take time. The whole reason we started using CFCs is that they didn’t seem to react with anything, so they’ll stay in the atmosphere for decades. UCI’s Sherwood Roland (who won a Nobel Prize for research on this topic) is quoted as saying, “This problem was a long time in the making, and because of the persistence of these chlorine compounds, there is no short-term fix.”
Opera Software celebrates its 10th anniversary today with an online party and free registration codes for a day.
I first discovered the Opera web browser in college, probably 1998 or back in 1999. A friend who worked with me at the Artslab showed it to me, and I was impressed by how fast it was and that the installer fit on a floppy. Opera was shareware only back then, with a 30-day trial period, and I had no objection to paying the $15 or $20 $18 it cost with a student discount. (I remember scanning my student ID and emailing them a JPEG to prove I was a student.)
By the time Y2K rolled around, Netscape 4 was showing its age, and Mozilla was still early in its development cycle. IE—well, IE had won the browser war, and was arguably better than Netscape at this point, but as far as I was concerned they had cheated to do so instead of winning solely on merits. Opera was a lean, mean browsing machine.
Things changed during 2000, though. Opera 4 and 5 started getting cluttered, and Mozilla was starting to stabilize. Side projects like Galeon started branching off of Mozilla. Pretty soon I was using Mozilla all the time on Windows and Galeon on Linux.
I kept up with new releases, though, and the latest version of Opera is excellent—on both Windows and Linux. I mostly use Firefox these days, but I’m using Opera a lot more than I used to—and not just for testing!
Check out Opera, grab a free reg code while they’re still available, or just drop in on the party.
Seen in rounds at WaSP Buzz, Slashdot, and Opera Watch.
Also interesting: the Opera 10th Anniversary T-Shirt reminded me of Joi Ito’s comments on wearing Firefox (via a*dot). I wonder how people would react if I wore a Firefox shirt and an Opera hat, or vice-versa?
(Other notable tens this August: Windows 95 and Internet Explorer)
