Category: Life

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I’ve been putting off getting my car washed for several weeks. Over the weekend, I decided I was going to take it to a nearby car wash Monday morning before work. So I did. It was sunny and clear, with a few clouds off to the south that had made for a very nice sunrise earlier this morning.

As I sat there reading, I noticed the sky was getting darker, clouds moving in front of the sun so that I no longer needed my sunglasses. As I got in the car, I realized it had become overcast, and the owner’s remark about “Enjoy this beautiful weather while it lasts” took on an entirely new context.

As I got on the freeway to go to work, I could see rain falling in the distance straight ahead. A few minutes later, I actually saw a bolt of lightning. I don’t think I’ve seen lightning directly in several years. The occasional flashes out of the corner of my eye, sure (and I saw another of those as I pulled off of the exit), but actually seeing the bolt? It’s been a while.

When I got to work, it wasn’t raining, but it was cold and windy. (And here I was in short-sleeved business casual with no jacket.) It clearly had rained, and looked like it might again. Off to the north maybe 1/4 of the sky at most was still blue.

I could swear that when I looked at the weather report yesterday there was no indication of rain.

Current Location: Irvine, California

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DC Comics recently canceled its Minx line of graphic novels aimed at teen girls, leading to much discussion amongst comics bloggers. I don’t want to talk about why the line folded, but why the line existed in the first place. Why did DC create an entirely new brand in order to go after this audience?

A big advantage to creating a new label: no preconceptions. Prospective readers won’t look at the cover, see a DC logo, and wonder where the super-heroes show up and rip off people’s arms. And they won’t see a Vertigo logo and assume that it’s a “mature readers” book. On the downside, a new label has to build its credibility from the ground up, instead of starting with name recognition.

This got me thinking: an established brand associated with customers of one gender creates a new brand in order to target the other half of the population. Where else have I seen this?

I own a jacket labeled Claiborne, which is of course made by the Liz Claiborne company.

Mervyns sells (or used to) H&H Men clothing, which was clearly a variation on their Hillard and Hanson brand.

All the examples I could think of (other than Minx itself) were companies that had traditionally been aimed at women, but were adding lines aimed at men. It made me wonder: is it the names? Do men feel odd buying a product named “Liz,” while women are used to buying brands named after both men and women? (Sara Lee notwithstanding.) Maybe it’s the stigma of a man participating in something perceived as feminine? Sort of like the assumption in children’s TV that boys will only watch shows about boys, while girls will watch shows about girls or boys (so they make shows about boys instead of girls, figuring they’ll get a bigger audience).

Then Katie pointed out LEGO Belville, the line aimed at girls which entirely misses the point of LEGO by making as much of each set prefab as possible. And pink. On the plus side, unlike Claiborne, Belville doesn’t try to hide the fact that it’s a LEGO product.

That makes it more like Men’s Vogue, a copy of which is sitting in the lunch room at work. In this case they’d have to call it something different (unlike a clothing line) because it’s not just a brand, but the title of the magazine.

I still think the craziest example of this has to be Men’s Pocky. It’s a cookie. One which I’d hardly consider a “girlie” cookie, but maybe it’s more associated with girls in Japan. I still can’t figure out whether it’s a case of cultural translation or deliberate absurdity.

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My desktop computer has been a bit flaky for a few months now. Well, more than that. There’s the problem where it won’t display anything in plain-text mode, but that’s not really a big deal. It was when it stopped running anything higher than 1024×768 that I started getting annoyed.

That turned out, oddly enough, to not be the video card. And not the monitor, since I could display higher resolution from the Windows box perfectly fine. And not my OS, since running a live CD had the same problem.

So I figured it was a motherboard issue. Fine, I’ll upgrade. Eventually. Wait ~4 months, and I’m starting to notice data errors on the hard drive. Great.

You know that old saying about how any project requires at least 3 trips to the hardware store? It applies to computers, too.

I finally got around to looking for a decent mobo/CPU/RAM combo, and a new hard drive. Ordered online. Arrived yesterday. Ran backup last night.

Today I dismantled everything, hampered by the fact that I could not find the box that has all the case components (faceplates so I could remove the ZIP drive which I haven’t used in 3 years, etc.), though I did eventually find the screws. After I installed the motherboard, I started plugging in connectors… only to discover that the power supply didn’t have the right kind of connector.

Off to Fry’s to get a new power supply, after stopping at storage to see if I could find that box with faceplates and stuff. No luck, and power supplies are astonishingly expensive, though I found one that fit my specs and was on sale and had a rebate, so that worked out. (Some of them are 1000-watt monstrosities that cost as much as a cheap computer, and in the words of another customer, “look like they should be in a Chevy.”)

Came back, hooked everything up, moved it back into the bedroom to hook everything up…and couldn’t go into the BIOS to set the boot device. After messing around a bit, determined that the text-mode problem, at least, actually was the monitor. So I’m borrowing Katie’s monitor while I install an actual 64-bit OS. Once it’s at the point where I can let it sit for a while, I’m going to run out to Best Buy for a new monitor. I suspect the resolution problem is different, but at this point I’m no longer inclined to suffer through it.

Still, it’s worth the upgrade (assuming, of course, that everything continues to work once I close up the case), since the old system was single-core, 32-bit, and ran on an IDE drive, and the new system is dual-core, 64-bit, will have more memory, a faster bus, a SATA drive, etc. This should be much faster.

Once it’s done, anyway.

Originally posted at LiveJournal.

Current Mood: 😡frustrated

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If I understand this correctly, it’s apparently okay to compare an entire class of women to pit bulls wearing lipstick, but using a worn-out cliché to compare a candidate’s policies to a pig wearing lipstick is sexist.

So is being called a dog better than being called a pig? Or is it just more offensive to dismiss policies than to make jokes about people?

This is going to be a long two months.

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I was looking at Slashdot this morning and found a link to the article on the original iPod launch back in 2001:

“At an invitation only event Apple has released their new MP3 player called the iPod. iPod is the size of a deck of cards. 2.4″ wide by 4″ tall by .78″ thick 6.5 ounces. 5 GB HDD, 10 hr battery life, charged via FireWire. Works as a firewire drive as well. Works in conjunctions with iTunes 2. Here are Live updates”

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

It’s funny to see all the comments about how it’s a worthless unmarketable product that no one will buy and represents the point at which Apple will finally slide into irrelevance…when what really happened was that the iPod became the leading digital music player (“iPod” is practically a synonym for “portable digital music player” today, in the way “Walkman” was a synonym for “portable cassette player” back in the 1980s). As Apple’s best-selling product line, it made it possible for them to open retail stores and move into new markets. I’d bet the iPhone wouldn’t exist without the iPod’s success. And of course there’s the iTunes music store leading the digital music market itself.

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On Monday evening, I looked out the front window and saw an unusually purple sky. I immediately went out to snap a few pictures, though the camera tried to adjust the exposure too much in most of them, making it really light. This one turned out very close to what I actually saw.

Since then, I’ve discovered (via Bad Astronomy) that it’s the result of volcanic eruptions in Alaska last month. The sulfur dioxide sprayed into the sky has been traveling around the globe, and made it to Southern California by September 1. More photos at SpaceWeather and kbaird.

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