Posted on
by

Seen from near LAX through an office window. The Santa Ana winds have cleared away the smog, making the view unusually clear (until the dust takes its place).

The sundog near the top of the frame was definitely in the sky and not on the window, and was visible no matter where I moved — I actually had to adjust the angle to avoid a reflection on the window that would have drowned it out! Timing is everything, though: I went to grab a cup of coffee from the break room right after this, and it was already gone when I got back.

Posted on
by

Five episodes in, The Flash has turned out to be a lot of fun. There are a few things that still bother me (the dead-mother plot being in every.single.intro., for instance, but it kind of has to be), but so far nothing has pulled me out far enough to stop me from enjoying the action and characters.  I love that they’ve gone all-in on it instead of dipping one toe in at a time like Warner Bros. usually seems to do.

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. seriously leveled up this season. I’m a couple of episodes behind, but damn, this show has been knocking it out of the park. And I like that they’ve (mostly) been avoiding Idiot Ball tropes — if someone does something stupid, it’s because it makes sense for the character, not because the plot requires it. For example: So many shows would have had Coulson trying to keep his mental issues under wraps from everyone for half the season, but you find out right away that he’s told May, has her documenting it, and has Skye investigating it.

Grimm really needs to decide whether Wu knows about Wesen soon, or things are going to blow up. Or maybe that’s what they’re going for.

Castle almost lost me during the season premiere with the disappearance/amnesia mystery, but they pulled back from the brink by giving us (and Becket) solid evidence to support his story. They’ve managed to avoid falling into frog-eating clone territory. Still, since the show is mostly a standard police procedural, the only reasons to watch it are (1) the characters’ banter, which is still intact, and (2) the occasionally crazy plots. Speaking of which, “Meme is Murder” just barely managed to avoid being a Very Special Episode about how Snapchat Can Kill You! (tune in at 11). Barely.

Once Upon a Time….I want to like this season more than I do, but it’s just been dragging on.

Weaving the past and future from Frozen into the OUAT mythology has been interesting, particularly the way the Snow Queen was set up. Anna is probably the best cast — she’s absolutely the same character as in the movie, and even when her actions or speech *should* seem affected, it comes off as being natural for her. Elsa comes off as a slightly different, but still valid, interpretation. Kristoff just comes off as awkward.

But remember that thing I was saying about the idiot ball? Most of the time, characters do things because the plot requires it…or stand there not doing something because the plot (or a commercial break cliffhanger) requires it. Regulars, side characters, and guest stars alike. Except when the character motivation is the plot motivation, in which case rather than show it through action, they announce it loudly like a character in a fighting game.

(And they are totally wasting the Knave of Hearts. He was great in Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, but so far he’s been nothing but a one-note joke here.)

Posted on
by

Camo Cookies

The kiddo wanted to know how Baskin Robbins made their Veteran’s Day themed camouflage ice cream, so we made cookies to demonstrate. Each color is a different flavor, too: The brown is chocolate, the tan is maple, and the green is vanilla.

Make the three kinds of dough, then pack globs of them together into a cylinder. Straight plastic tumblers are helpful for this step.

Camo Cookie Dough

Cut into slices, set the slices on the cookie sheet, and bake!

Camo cookies - slicing.jpg

Posted on
by

Let’s face it: This is the first live-action Star Wars movie in ten years, and it reunites the original cast on screen for the first time in thirty. Nobody really cares what it’s called: it could be “Star Wars VII: The Search for More Money” and those of us who grew up on the original trilogy would still go out and see it opening weekend.

Just not at a midnight showing. We’re getting too old for that sort of thing.

Posted on
by

Late Halloween night, the first rainstorm of the season blew through town. By morning, it had mostly passed over us, but there were enough clouds around to make things look interesting after I dropped off my car for maintenance. With a couple of hours to kill, I walked to downtown Manhattan Beach for breakfast. I kept going all the way to the pier first, and was glad I did — otherwise I would have missed this:

Rainbow over El Segundo

One straggling cloud continued to drop rain on the coast a few miles to the north. A rainbow fragment neatly arced from the cloud down to the El Segundo power plant. (I thought that was kind of ironic.) Continue reading →

Posted on
by

Teal Pumpkin

The idea behind the Teal Pumpkin Project is to offer alternate Halloween treats that aren’t candy, so that kids with severe food allergies can still go Trick-or-Treating. It started last year in Tennessee, and FARE picked it up and promoted it nationwide this year.

When I was a child, I always had to either decline or discard some of my Halloween candy because of my peanut allergy. Fortunately it wasn’t life-threatening for me at the time (that came later), so I could separate them out at the end of the night. A lot of kids develop severe allergies younger than I did, and a lot of them are sensitive enough that the risk of cross-contact — whether in the candy bowl or at the factory — is a major issue.

So in addition to candy, we picked up an assortment of pencils, plastic dinosaurs, hair ribbons and more, and kept them in a separate tray. We painted a fake pumpkin so we could keep it around (though we’ll have to go over it again with better paint or maybe a coat of primer next year), and set it out front where it could be seen from the street. (Update 2021: You can buy plastic pumpkins in teal from a lot of stores these days!)

I’m not sure how many of the kids who chose the toys over the candy did so because of allergies, but we had enough of both to go around.

Posted on
by

Here’s a fascinating look back at the spam wars by former Gmail spamfighter Mike Hearn.

I was involved for most of the previous decade as (among other things) the email admin for a small ISP. We used a mix of public blacklists, a private blacklist, virus filtering, SpamAssassin with both shared rules and local custom rules, and various other tools all tied together, some at the Sendmail level and the rest through MIMEDefang. It worked tolerably well, though of course it wasn’t perfect. I find it amusing that Gmail declared victory on spam in 2010, the same year that I changed jobs to a position that was more software developer and less sysadmin.

Privacy is a growing concern these days, so he also talks about the impact that widespread end-to-end email encryption would have on spam fighting. If you’re the mail handler, you can’t filter on, say, links found in the message, or characteristics of the writing or formatting, or anything else in the content. You can’t even run statistical analysis on all known spam and non-spam to see which the new message fits better. All you can do is look at where it came from and where it’s going.

Moving the spam filter to the client lets you do content filtering on your own mail, but you can’t take advantage of the larger volume of data that an ISP can, which means your filtering isn’t going to be as effective. And if your main email client is your phone, that’s really going to slow it down — and chew up battery.

Encrypting more of our communication is probably the way to go, but we’ll have to come up with new approaches to some previously-solved problems like this.

It got me thinking: Most of us not only accept that our email providers will look inside our mail to filter spam and viruses, we expect it. That’s weird. The idea of the post office looking inside our letters is so abhorrent that even tracking programs raise concerns. The idea of an actual person reading our email in transit creeps us out. Many people have problems with the idea of automated systems (like Gmail) reading our email for purposes of targeted advertising. But spam filtering? We get upset if it’s not happening!

That says something interesting about our priorities, and about how big an impact unfiltered spam has on our email.

Via ma.tt.