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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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To Trade the StarsYesterday I finally had time to finish reading To Trade the Stars, the final book in Julie E. Czerneda’s “Trade Pact Universe” trilogy. Now I’m ready to pick up The Briar King again, since the final book of Greg Keyes’ fantasy quartet, Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, comes out at the end of the month. When the second book came out, I didn’t reread the first. But when the third book came out, I found it extremely helpful to reread the first two books.

The Born QueenI was hoping to time things so that I’d be done with The Blood Knight just in time to pick up The Born Queen, but I was in the middle of the Trade Pact books and didn’t want to break up the trilogy. Then there was the trip to San Francisco, WonderCon, and New Frontier, and I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to post things while they’re still current.

On a related note, I stumbled across Ringworld’s Children in Borders the other day. I read a lot of Larry Niven in college, mostly the classics plus a few from the 1990s, but after The Burning City bored me to tears—I never finished it, which is rare for me—I stopped following his new releases. I’m going to have to return to Ringworld at some point, though.

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One of the cool things I discovered at WonderCon was this T-shirt with the emblem of the Black Flash, the personification of death for speedsters and the only Flash villain that Davan MacIntire likes. Okay, it’s just the regular Flash logo with the colors changed, but it means I’ll actually wear it.

Black T-shirt with a white circle on the front, bisected by a red lightning bolt.

I’ve never really liked wearing bright colors, especially not bright red. I have a standard red Flash T-shirt that may be 15 years old, but I’ve probably only worn it 5 or 6 times (mainly at cons), so it still looks almost new. The silk-screen printing is only just now starting to crack. But black T-shirts? Never had a problem with them. At one point, I had so many that I declared a moratorium on getting any new ones.

At the last 3 or 4 cons I’ve been to, I’ve been idly looking for a black T-shirt with the Flash logo, but hadn’t stumbled across any until last month. This will do nicely.

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Another Geek Hierarchy [dead link]. This one, instead of focusing on how geeks of all stripes rank themselves [another dead link], portrays the way “mainstream society” ranks geeks. I appreciate that it includes sports geeks. I’ve never understood why it’s considered acceptable to paint yourself blue, wear cheese on your head and giant foam gloves for a sports team, but wearing a Star Trek uniform makes you an outcast. (via sclerotic_rings [yet another dead link])

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Sun HaloWhenever there’s a light layer of cirrus clouds in the sky, I keep an eye out for halos. I catch the occasional iridescent cloud, or a faint sundog that’s only visible through sunglasses. Today I spotted a 22° halo as I walked back to my car after lunch, around 2:00pm on March 6.

It’s not as sharp as the one I caught 2 years ago, but there was more color. It was clearly reddish toward the inside and bluish toward the outside. Like last time, I didn’t have the good camera, just my cell phone, but at least this time it was a better phone!

This reminds me, our trip to San Francisco a few weeks ago was through patchy clouds, sun, and rain—perfect for rainbows. We spotted several, including one which was not only extremely bright, but actually showed supernumaries inside the band.

Rainbow along US 101

We saw this on Thursday, February 21, somewhere between Paso Robles and San Jose along US Highway 101. Katie remarked that it looked almost double-layered, I looked over, and said, “Grab the camera! It has fringes!”

I’d never seen, or never noticed supernumaries before. I’d never even heard of them until I was reading through Atmospheric Optics a few years ago. If you look on this color-enhanced picture (actually from another photo of the same rainbow), you can see several extra bands inside the violet arc, alternating green and pink.

Zoomed rainbow with supernumary bows.

The really weird thing? Classical optics doesn’t explain them. Refraction and reflection can only explain the red-to-violet band and the secondary bands that sometimes appear outside the main arc. These are actually wave interference patterns that occur if the water droplets are small enough.

On a related note, last Sunday (March 2) I saw what I’m fairly certain was a lenticular cloud, except it didn’t look remotely like a lens. It was just a long, narrow flat cloud floating above the Santa Ana Mountains. I noticed it around 3:00 in the afternoon, and a couple of very thin, also flat clouds above it, and thought it looked like the beginnings of the stack formation. What clinched it was the fact that the cloud was still there, 5 hours later (visible at night by reflected city light), despite the high Santa Ana winds. You know, after spotting two sets last summer, it looks like they form in Orange County a lot more often than I thought.

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Internet ExplorerInstalled the first Internet Explorer 8 beta. Some thoughts:

I’m impressed that it can import settings from Firefox & Safari.

It detected Firefox extensions and even offered to look up similar add-ons. Unfortunately it was a big long search string with all the titles, and therefore a useless list of results for things like cameras (yeah, how am I supposed to install a $1000 Nikon D80 on my web browser?) and the hint book for Splinter Cell.

Activities: My first thought was, “hey, they’re doing stuff with microformats!” Which is key to the underlying support (recognizing types of data and only offering relevant services, like maps for locations but not for book titles). But on the face of it, it’s a lot more like the way Flock integrates with various web services: Set up your blogging provider, and you can easily send stuff to your blog. Though right now they mostly have Microsoft-hosted services.

“Emulate IE7” appears to involve restarting in an alternate mode right now. I assume automatic switching is something planned for later betas.

Other than that, the UI seems about the same as IE7 so far.

It does indeed pass Acid2 (assuming the page isn’t swamped when you try to load it).

So, how else does its rendering differ?

Minor visual glitch: I have CSS-based banners on some pages (W3C validation, for instance), using spans with borders. If it’s on the last line of a page, IE will cut off the bottom border, because it extends past the end of the page. Other browsers show it. I’ve gotten around this in the past by adding a blank paragraph afterward, but now IE8 collapses the empty paragraph. That’s probably the correct thing to do, but it does mean adjusting things a bit. Not a big problem, though, because I’ve just noticed that it handles other pages fine, without the <p></p> workaround, which means that I’m probably already using a better solution elsewhere.

Several cases of re-styling UL lists seem to confuse it. The tabs running across the top of my Flash page, for instance, or the sidebar on the Alternative Browser Alliance. Others appear just as they do in other browsers (including IE7). This will bear investigation. (Edit: 2 different problems; see below.)

Still no sign of generated content. Beta 2? Please? Edit: according to CSS3.info, it does support generated content, but images don’t work (yet?). I’d been using this, progressive-enhancement–style, to add icons for outgoing links on my Flash site. It works in, well, everything else current.

Additionally: I’m surprised to see it so early, and to see it as a public beta and not something that required an MSDN login. And they had the sense to release a version for Windows XP! I was half-expecting it to be a Vista-only release, which would’ve been seriously annoying.

Further updates will be added below as I think of them.

It turns out the problem on the Alternative Browser Alliance menu wasn’t related to lists as I’d thought, but to a change in the CSS parser. For whatever reason, IE8b1 is susceptible to the Caio Hack (/*/*/ place code here /* comment */) normally used to hide CSS rules from Netscape 4. At this stage I should probably be able to remove it and not worry about NS4 anymore. (And it turns out that since I added media types to the link a while back, NS4 doesn’t even read the stylesheet in the first place!)

On the issue with the tabs on the Flash site, it looks like IE8b1 isn’t extending backgrounds beyond the text line on inline elements (oddly, also like NS4). This is probably what’s really going on with the CSS buttons I mentioned above. I’ll have to check which behavior is correct, but my money would be on the Gecko, Opera and WebKit interpretation. If so, this will probably be changed before the final release. If not, I’ll use inline-block instead. Which perhaps I should be doing anyway, except for the annoying fact that Firefox 2 doesn’t support inline-block and Firefox 3, which does, is still in beta.

I’ve reported the Caio Hack issue to Microsoft using their “Report a Webpage Problem” tool. The form emphasizes that you shouldn’t send anything that could identify you, so instead of reporting the problem on one of my own sites, I sent the page describing the hack. This probably means I reported it in the wrong way. 😕

It looks like Activities isn’t actually context-sensitive yet, since it’s offering to show me a map even when I’ve selected random prose instead of an address.

Having messed with it more than I probably should over the last 24 hours, I’ve come to a decision: During beta 1, any rendering problem I encounter in IE8b1 that works the way I want it to in Gecko, Opera, Safari and IE7, I’m going to assume is a bug in beta 1. I’ll try to narrow them down & report them when I have a chance, but I won’t actually change my sites’ code (except for retargeting IE-specific workarounds) until at least beta 2.

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I think this was at an Albertsons grocery store. All the vegetables on this particular shelf had little signs like this identifying their uses.

Habañero: Good source of capsaicin

Habañero peppers, a good source of capsaicin? No kidding!

I remember when I was younger, “jalapeño” was practically a synonym for “hot.” I had no idea it was barely the beginning. Jalapeños are only 2,500–8,000 on the Scoville scale—far below the 100,000–350,000 quoted for habañeros.