Found this on the side of the road when I went out to take the “snow” picture.
Actually it reminds me of some broken amulet in something I read, or something I watched. Not the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, but something else. I can’t quite place it.
Category: Life
Legality Links
Organization for Transformative Works – dedicated to protecting the expression of fan fiction, fan art, etc. (via Naomi Novik)
Open Standards, One Web, and Opera – Just why are standards important, anyway? (via Opera Watch)
Speaking of Opera, their EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft has been making waves. Responses at CSS3.info, Web Standards Project, Slashdot (edit: more Slashdot), Asa Dotzler, Opera Watch, plus a Q&A w/ Haarvard. My take: Good luck on unbundling, but if they can force Microsoft to catch up with the rest of the market in terms of standards support, I’m all for it.
Nissan vs. Nissan. On my way to work I saw a bumper sticker on an XTerra that said “In support of our freedom, it’s my last Nissan.” Huh? There was clearly a web address below it, but it was too small to read at that distance. So I looked up the phrase, and apparently there’s been a long-running dispute over the domain name nissan.com, between a small computer business named after its founder, Uzi Nissan, and the Nissan car company. The dispute was eventually resolved (correctly, IMO, since he has a legit reason to use the name) in favor of the little guy. On the other hand, I don’t see why the site makes such a big deal about Nissan’s “French Connection” to Renault.
Saddleback Snow: Don’t Blink
There was a little snow on Mt. Saddleback on Sunday, but not much worth mentioning. Sometime early Tuesday morning, though, a freak storm seems to have hit the mountain… and only the mountain. We certainly didn’t get any rain down here in the flatlands.
At 8:20, the mountains were still shrouded in clouds:
By 9:00, the clouds were starting to burn off, leaving behind a coat of snow, not just on Santiago and Modjeska peaks (still behind clouds), but on the lower peaks to the northwest.
By noon, most of the snow had melted. There’s still some in the shadowed crevices.
UPDATE DECEMBER 19, 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 my Snowline photoset on Flickr
Yes, Snow!
After the last few days of rain, today was clear and windy. I finally dragged myself out to a vantage point where I could see something of the mountains… just at sunset. This is looking northeast toward the San Gabriel Mountains from the edge of a vacant lot on the former MCAS Tustin. (You can see one of the two blimp hangars at the right.)
Update: Monday morning I went back to the same spot before work and took some photos in daylight. Katie said it looked like someone had sifted powdered sugar over the mountains.
Back to Sunday evening, I crossed the street and got some more pictures without the fence and saplings in the foreground, and stayed out until the light had faded. The view was clear all the way west along the range to Mt. Wilson. I also looked back toward the sunset, which lit up the edges of a cloud with a red-gold glow.
Snow!
Okay, so it’s ~40 miles away (and likely to stay that far, barring a freak storm or new ice age), and it’s not much (compare this April 2006 view)…and I half-suspect it’s all melted by now (this photo was taken Monday morning, and it looked lighter by Tuesday), but still…
Say, all those places that are getting flooded—we’d be happy to take some of that extra water off your hands.
Before and After
On a clear day in early October, I went driving up into the Tustin Foothills to see what I could see. I took a bunch of photos at a turnout, and also stopped at an intersection that gave me a nice view of Peters Canyon, the hills behind it, and Saddleback in the background. I used this photo a few weeks later for my drought post.
After the Santiago Fire, I waited for another clear day (which took several weeks), and set out to do it again and see just how far north the fire had reached. I managed to get a great pair of before and after photos from the intersection of Foothill and Lemon Heights.
October 6, 2007. Click for a larger version
November 24, 2007. Click for a larger version
While the orchards seem to have been spared, you can see the field in the foreground looks scorched, and most of the trees making up firebreaks seem to have died. More dramatic are the hillsides. Before the fire, you can see expansive dark patches of scrub, wide expanses of lighter dried grass, and occasional dark green bushes. Now it’s all dirt, except for the blackened remnants of the bushes. There are several gullies whose sides were hidden and softened by the ground cover, but are now starkly visible. And after this week’s rain, they’re probably eroded even more.
A few notes: The air was somewhat clearer for the “after” photo, and it was earlier in the afternoon, so the angle of the sunlight helped pick out terrain features a bit better.
Proportionate Response: You’re Doing it Wrong
Yesterday, Colleen Doran wrote about several recent human rights abuse cases, including that of Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher in Sudan who was sentenced to 15 days in prison and deportation for “insulting religion” because she allowed her students to name a teddy bear Mohammed, after one of their fellow students. And she could have gotten a lashing for the “crime.”
This morning I heard on the radio that there were Sudanese protesting the teacher’s sentence— “Good for them, ” I thought, briefly. “At least someone has sense.”—and demanding instead that she be executed. “Wait, what?”
Seriously, what kind of thought process leads you to believe that killing someone is an appropriate response to that person letting someone else name a toy? This should have ended with her apology. That’s it. Execution? I guess life is cheap when you’re busy killing each other anyway, and a foreign infidel woman’s life must be even cheaper.
I hate to say it, but in that climate, deportation is probably the safest thing that could happen to her.