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Most cities in Orange County have banned the sale and setting off of fireworks to and by the general public for safety reasons. Of course, fireworks are an Independence Day tradition, so most cities also put on professional displays on the Fourth of July.

But a lot of people like the hands-on experience of setting off fireworks themselves. This leaves them with three choices:

  1. Go somewhere where setting off your own fireworks is legal.
  2. Shrug it off.
  3. Sneak around and hope you don’t get caught.

#1 is getting harder all the time as more cities clamp down on fireworks. #2, I imagine, is unsatisfying. #3 is stupid, because chances are pretty good that you’ll either get unsafe fireworks, or use them unsafely (because you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re setting off explosives), and end up burning someone, or burning their house down, or starting a 75-acre brush fire because you went out into the boonies in hopes that no one would catch you, but didn’t think about the fact that you were surrounded by dry grass.

So here’s my proposal:

If you’re going to ban fireworks, instead of banning them outright, set aside a designated area where people can set them off themselves.. Fairgrounds and/or large parking lots would be good for this. The Great Park, perhaps? Keep fire crews on standby. Limit the number of people so that you can evacuate safely if something goes wrong. Limit the types of fireworks people are allowed to bring in so that it’s hard for them to bring in homemade crap that’s more likely to blow off their hands than make a nice show.

It will never happen in today’s litigious society, of course. The first time someone broke the rules and someone else got hurt, people would start suing the city because it should have been safe! Even if it was a private company running the event, they’d get sued, along with the property owner for allowing it to happen, and the city for allowing them to run it in the first place.

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I am so tired of “critiques” that boil down to one of the following:

  1. I have no use for or interest in this, therefore no-one does or should.
  2. Pop culture was so much better during my formative years than the crap they put out today.

These are, to put it mildly, a load of bull.

1. So you don’t have a use for it. Other people have different interests than you do. They also have different needs than you do. You might not need a roto-rooter, but a plumber is going to find it very useful.

This one really infuriates me when it comes from supposed techies. So you don’t have a use for a touchscreen with your giant desktop setup with a wall of six monitors. That doesn’t mean touchscreens can’t be useful on, say, handheld devices, or a small wall unit in the kitchen. There’s a reason this xkcd strip rings true.

2. There was plenty of crap back in the day, too. You’ve just had time to forget the mediocre, while the good stuff has stood the test of time. Not everyone who wrote plays during Shakespeare’s time was a great playwright, and not every movie produced before Star Wars was a great work of art.

Plus, y’know, they were your formative years. Of course you’re going to like stuff from that era better, because that’s what shaped your tastes.

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The parking lots at The District in Tustin, and the streets that run through them, are just plain horrible. They’re bad enough, in fact, that the last time we were there*, it wasn’t clear at first that the reason traffic was moving so slowly was that it was working around a car accident.

As I slowly drove past the crashed Lexus, we both looked toward it…and burst out laughing.

I felt awful for it…but the license plate was DIMWIT1.

Bonus in-joke: Katie asked me where the other two were.

*June 13, for the record.

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Firefox has been testing a new release that detects and closes crashed plugins (instead of letting them crash Firefox entirely) for several months, carefully making sure everything was working before they released Firefox 3.6.4 last week.

Within days, they released an update. I couldn’t imagine what they might have missed in all the beta testing. Katie wondered if the beta testers hadn’t been testing the limits.

You want to know what convinced Mozilla to issue an update so quickly?

Farmville.

Apparently Firefox was detecting Farmville as frozen and closing it. It turns out that on many computers, Farmville regularly freezes up the browser for longer than 10 seconds, and its players just deal with it and wait for it to come back. Mozilla decided that the simplest thing to do would be to increase the time limit.

What this tells me is that the type of person willing to beta-test a web browser these days is not likely to be playing Farmville — or if they are, it’s likely to be on a bleeding-edge computer that can handle it without 10-second freezes.

In more practical terms: Mozilla needs to convince a wider variety of users to help test their software!

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Whenever I see spam that starts out with a subject or greeting like “Hey, friend,” I think of Fluffmodeus from the webcomic Something Positive:

TV Tropes describes the grotesque cute character as being “like an ’80s cartoon character who Care-Bear-Stared a little too long into the abyss…” Rippy declared him to be “the most annoying thing that’s ever existed.” Hmm, maybe he’s a spammer when he’s not haunting Kharisma? 😀

Oh, and the archives…definitely not work-safe.

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You know you’re a geek when you take a photo with your camera and zoom in on the display instead of looking for a magnifying glass:

Broken Watch Pin
OK, perhaps a bit overkill, but now I have this cool close-up picture of a broken watch pin.

Incidentally, it’s harder than I expected to buy just a replacement pin. I can find watchbands easily, but just the pins? I’m going to need to do some more looking. Not that it necessarily matters, since I seem to have misplaced the unattached half of the watchband — I may need to replace the whole band anyway.

If I do, this time I’m making sure I keep the remaining pin as a spare.