Category: Highlights

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I think anyone who’s been to a panel at a con in the past few years will appreciate Mark Evanier’s remarks on opening the floor to questions.

An open mike at a public event has increasingly become a magnet for people who should not be allowed near open mikes at public events. Audiences have begun to dread that portion of the program and to regard it as the signal that the event they came to see has come to an end. Thereafter, they can either leave (many do at that point) or sit there and cringe as control passes from the person they wanted to hear and goes to some stranger who, but for this opportunity, would never be speaking in front of a real audience and/or to someone of importance.

He goes on to mention the warning signs, like “On behalf of everyone here…” The people who, instead of just asking a question, need to turn it into the longest. public. statement. of. support. evar, as they pontificate about how this show changed their life, or that show inspired their writing, and can you please answer this stats question about my home-made Star Trek Role-Playing game after I read you a poem I wrote aaaaaall by myself?

No, really. I am not making this up.

As an example, at the Serenity panel at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con, one “fan” took the floor to make a long rambling comment on behalf of fans who lived in Norway, London, England (“Both London and England?” “He’s got multiple personality disorder.”) etc. and explained that they thought Joss Whedon was “the best thing to happen to television since aerosol cheese.” Then he asked some question about the end of Angel and how they should handle some issue with the RPG. Joss tactfully handed it off to another panelist rather than tell the guy flat-out that it was a dumb (or at least inappropriate) question. (We’ve collected some more quotes from that panel.)

But this sort of thing happens all the time.

(via The Beat)

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Back in October, shortly before the Santiago Fire, I went sightseeing in the Tustin Foothills and snapped a picture of Peters Canyon, the hills behind it, and Saddleback in the background. A month later, I took a picture of the same view after the fire and posted the two as a before and after comparison.

Well, we’ve had several months of normal (for SoCal) rain, and the hills have turned green. Mostly. It’s clear that the scars from the fire are going to take at least another season to heal. The last couple of days have been very clear, so I went back to the same spot to take a “four months later” photo.

Mt. Saddleback seen from Tustin foothills, March 2008
March 10, 2008. Click for a larger version

Now compare it to the November (post-fire) and October (pre-fire) photos: Continue reading →

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We went to The District on Saturday afternoon to catch Cloverfield and check out the Auld Dubliner. I took the Warner exit to go in the back way, and noticed someone standing out on the shoulder of the ramp, taking photos. I looked out past the wide expanse of empty fields and was astonished to see the entire San Gabriel mountain range covered with snow!

Not just the tops of the mountains on the eastern half of the range, but everything, even the lower parts you can just barely see by the Cajon pass, and this huge expanse north of Los Angeles that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen covered.

San Gabriels (mid-range) covered with snow

I pulled over as soon as I found a spot I considered safe, then walked back up to the top of the ramp. I talked briefly with the man I’d seen taking photos, and he said he’d lived in the area for 50 years and had never seen the mountains like this. He also mentioned he had a friend who had served at the base*, and he was going to send him the pictures.

I ended up taking a 12-photo panorama (zoomed) spanning at least 120° from the blimp hangar on the left, across the San Gabriels, past the hills above Orange and Tustin, the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, on to Saddleback, which had a few bits of snow clinging to the mountainside.

San Gabriel Snow Panorama
Click to view panorama (424 KB 6648×500 JPEG)

*This is the location of the former MCAS Tustin. The Marine base was closed in the mid-1990s, and the land is only just starting to be developed—notably The District in one corner, which is what brought us to the area yesterday.

Update December 18, 2008: This post is getting a lot of traffic today, but it’s from last winter. If you want to see photos from this week’s snow, check out Misty Mountains: Another San Gabriel Snow Panorama from the same spot on Tuesday, December 16, and my Snowline photoset on Flickr, for those pictures and several of Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains today.

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Found this while wandering around the Lemon Heights area a few weeks ago, looking for scenic viewpoints. It’s on the Skyline trail, near Peters Canyon park.

Yield sign with 3-way diagram with icons and arrows.

It seems to be saying this:

  • Cyclists* yield to pedestrians and horses.
  • Pedestrians yield to horses.
  • Horses yield to no one.

But if you’ve never seen it before, the meaning isn’t clear at a glance.

Apparently the idea is to make everyone stop and try to work out the diagram, so that they can start moving again in the right order.

*Or perhaps only bicycles, since there’s no rider in the picture.

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Had lunch at South Coast Plaza yesterday. (And yes, they had the ceiling stars of doom up again.) When I was a kid, it was just a mall, but over the years it’s evolved into an über-trendy mall full of designer stores that supposedly attracts tourists from all over. A few months ago they opened a Bloomingdale’s.

At said Bloomingdale’s, I saw a T-shirt with a list of things one can do to protect the environment. Recycle, use less water, turn off electronics when not in use, drive less, etc. Just for kicks, I looked at the price tag: $62.

So basically, it’s a shirt that discourages conspicuous consumption, but buying it is conspicuous consumption.

Oddly enough, when I wanted to show it to Katie, I couldn’t find the display. The floor is divided into tiny little nooks for each designer, all identical except for contents, and while I probably just couldn’t find the right section, I had the disturbing sense that someone had come in behind me and replaced the T-shirt display with a shelf full of jeans. ($175 jeans, of course.)

I was able to find the display of T-shirts with Transformers, various super-heroes, Ghostbusters and other graphics that ran from about $38 to $45. These would go for $15–25 in most places. I also saw several people wandering around the mall wearing these Ghostbusters T-shirts, and I had to wonder how many of them were wearing them because they had fond memories of the film or cartoon, and how many were wearing them because they were on sale at Bloomingdale’s.

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I had an interesting thought looking at the Blog Action Day, um, blog, which remarked on what, for me, was Sunday:

And so we come to it at last… Blog Action Day has now officially begun for the first countries closest to the International Dateline.

I realized that it wasn’t going to stop after 24 hours the way that, for instance, Slashdot’s April Fools days run (GMT midnight to midnight). The event was designed to be October 15—not October 15 in a particular time zone. If you start with the first zone to reach a date, and run through the last zone to finish it, “October 15” would last about 48 hours.

I’m too sleepy to do the math myself, so I’ll trust Wikipedia’s entry on Time Zones:

Because the earliest and latest time zones are 26 hours apart, any given calendar date exists at some point on the globe for 50 hours. For example, April 11 begins in time zone UTC+14 at 10:00 UTC April 10, and ends in time zone UTC-12 at 12:00 UTC April 12.

So there you have it: a worldwide event tied to a calendar day but no time zone lasts 50 hours.

And here you thought things moved faster on Internet Time!

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Warning sign by road: Icy. Everything’s green.

I rediscovered this photo while looking for the UCI Student Center pic. One of us took it on the way back from a camping trip with UCI’s Campuswide Honors Program in the Angeles National Forest in April 2000. IIRC it was along Angeles Crest Highway.

A permanent sign isn’t necessarily the best way to indicate a transitory condition.

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