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Had lunch at South Coast Plaza yesterday. (And yes, they had the ceiling stars of doom up again.) When I was a kid, it was just a mall, but over the years it’s evolved into an über-trendy mall full of designer stores that supposedly attracts tourists from all over. A few months ago they opened a Bloomingdale’s.

At said Bloomingdale’s, I saw a T-shirt with a list of things one can do to protect the environment. Recycle, use less water, turn off electronics when not in use, drive less, etc. Just for kicks, I looked at the price tag: $62.

So basically, it’s a shirt that discourages conspicuous consumption, but buying it is conspicuous consumption.

Oddly enough, when I wanted to show it to Katie, I couldn’t find the display. The floor is divided into tiny little nooks for each designer, all identical except for contents, and while I probably just couldn’t find the right section, I had the disturbing sense that someone had come in behind me and replaced the T-shirt display with a shelf full of jeans. ($175 jeans, of course.)

I was able to find the display of T-shirts with Transformers, various super-heroes, Ghostbusters and other graphics that ran from about $38 to $45. These would go for $15–25 in most places. I also saw several people wandering around the mall wearing these Ghostbusters T-shirts, and I had to wonder how many of them were wearing them because they had fond memories of the film or cartoon, and how many were wearing them because they were on sale at Bloomingdale’s.

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Official NaNoWriMo 2007 ParticipantWell, days 2–3 of Nanowrimo haven’t gone quite as well as day 1. Thursday night I found myself stuck, unable to get past about a paragraph for hours. I was convinced that what I had wasn’t really a story, wasn’t interesting, that all I had was a weird concept and a bunch of people who would be doing research for 50,000 words. Finally I decided to just pick up another section of the story. That got me through 3,401, putting me just over the baseline goal, but not until 1AM.

Then on Day 3 I tried to do some Flash updates before picking up the novel. I needed to look up a URL, and got distracted by the TV Tropes Wiki. It’s just as insidious as Wikipedia, and I lost several hours just reading through it. In the end, I only got one of the two Flash updates I’d wanted to post, and with dinner and grocery shopping, I didn’t get started writing until around 9:30.

Because Nanowrimo measures your daily progress by the time you update your word count, it’s possible to write several thousand words in a day but have it show as nothing because you managed to post it after midnight. I actually got bitten by that once last year, so I make an effort to update whenever I finish a session, and several times in an evening. Unfortunately, the site was down yesterday evening. I kept checking, and was lucky that it came back up around 11:30, at which point I kept updating every 10 minutes as I got closer and closer to 5,000. I finally hit it just at midnight, so depending on how closely their clock matches mine, I may have been officially back on track for day 3.

Word count: 5009

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Official NaNoWriMo 2007 ParticipantI actually managed to get started on time for National Novel Writing Month this time instead of forgetting until day two. I’ve set myself a goal of 1700 words per day, just slightly more than the 1,667 needed to reach 50,000 by the end of the month. This way I’ll build up a bank of extra words so that if I have a bad day, it won’t throw me totally off.

I managed to put together 1,859 words on day one, so I’m actually ahead of schedule!

I’m going to have to start writing earlier in the evening, though, so I don’t end up staying up until midnight every day.

Word Count: 1859

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I appreciate that Apple offers a single software updater for all its free Windows software. But one thing annoys me about it.

It opens a window, then opens a message box showing a progress meter as it checks for updates. Only one problem: It fills out the “New software is available” caption before it actually checks.

New software is available from Apple.... Your software is up to date. No updates are available.
New software is available… oh, wait, no it isn’t.

This isn’t an issue on Mac OS X, because the progress meter is shown as a sheet, which drops down from the top of the main window and obscures the caption. But on Windows, that caption is visible from the moment the window appears, saying that you really do have something new available, raising your hopes that maybe, just maybe, Apple has finally gotten around to releasing that new version of Safari, or that security fix for the flaw you heard about a week ago, then dashing them to the ground.

Or, less dramatically, it’s jumping to conclusions, providing potentially false information.

And then, even if it turns out there isn’t anything new, the caption stays in place…leaving you with two contradictory statements as to whether any updates are really available.

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Mac OS X LeopardThe new Mac OS X disc arrived in today’s mail. I opened it up to make sure everything was there, and was surprised to see that Apple has really cut down on packaging. Instead of the ~8×10″ box with folds to keep the disc and manual in place, they’ve gone to a small box the size of a cardboard CD case. Just enough room for the DVD and the “manual” (which is mainly a “Look what’s new!” booklet).

“So,” I said. “I have to ask myself. Do I feel lucky?”
“Well,” Katie replied. “Do you? Punk?”
“What the heck.”

I’d done some research on application compatibility earlier this week, and the PowerBook looked ready. Katie’s desktop is going to need further study. The Mac Classic environment will no longer run under Leopard, and she’s still got a couple of Classic apps she pulls out occasionally. Also, Photoshop 7 is reported not to run under Leopard, and Adobe isn’t testing or updating anything older than CS3.

But the laptop? No critical data to back up (it’s all duplicated from the desktops), and everything we actually use on it has been tested on at least a pre-release.

So I fired up Netscape 4 for old times’ sake (and discovered that this theme is completely unreadable in it; then I switched the CSS around so that Netscape 4 won’t even try). Then I popped in the disc, selected some options, and let it install during Pushing Daisies.

No problems so far. Disk space is running low, but it’s a 3-year old laptop (so the drive is small) and I did an Archive and Install, so it has a backup of the old OS. Once it’s clear that everything works, I can free up ~6GB right there. It may also be time to wipe the Yellow Dog Linux partition. I haven’t used it in over a year.

Some highlights: I really like finally having virtual desktops (what Apple calls “Spaces”). The new search highlighting, previously seen in the Safari 3 beta, appears in other apps as well. Heck, Safari 3 is a big jump itself. (Hey, Apple, where are the Windows and Tiger releases?)

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Things are starting to get back to normal, at least for those of us not directly affected by the Santiago Fire. There was a layer of haze coating the mountains Monday morning, but the air smelled normal, and the sky, when the clouds broke up, was blue.

Layer of smoke in front of backlit Saddleback

My co-worker who stayed behind in Silverado came back to work today, and had all kinds of stories about everything from rescuing kittens from burning houses and repairing a radio repeater to holding off advancing flames with a length of PVC pipe (using it to break apart the brush ahead of it).

The air was clearer even than usual, affording a detailed view of the hills and Santa Ana Mountains. The clouds made patterns of light and dark on the landscape. The hills looked better in sunlight than in shadow, with the light brown (dirt?) dominating over the charred stubble. In the shade, the hillsides simply looked blackened.

The mountains, on the other hand, looked better in shadow. As silhouettes, they looked no different than on any hazy day (except for the one plume of smoke still rising). In sunlight, however, they looked gray (normally from this distance they look brown) from all the ashes. From what I read, there are places where every bit of vegetation for acres has burned. My co-worker said areas of the mountains looked like a moonscape.

Gray mountains covered with ash

I actually saw, from a long distance, a helicopter (presumably) dropping red flame retardant on the mountains to create a fire line.

Red flame retardant dropping into the mountains

Late in the afternoon I actually spotted some faint Anti-crepuscular rays (think Thomas Kinkade, but in the direction opposite the sun) looking out the window. They were too faint to get a decent photo, though.

Sometime, maybe this weekend, I plan on driving out to see the landscape more closely.

Golden Sunset

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Losing a tree to last weekend’s Santa Ana winds means there’s no more shade in the afternoon. Not an issue most of this past week, but Sunday was both sunny and hot, and with the window closed and the blinds open, all that heat went straight into the living room.

On the other hand, it does have its compensations:

Orange clouds at sunset