The Leather Factory sign was missing a few letters one night:
So whose factory is it, exactly? She Who Must Be Obeyed? Can guys even buy stuff there?
Infinite Crisis as Metafiction
I read Infinite Crisis #2 today, and everything—including DC’s turn toward the dark over the past few years—is starting to make sense. Infinite Crisis isn’t just following up on plotlines from Crisis on Infinite Earths, it’s actually making a statement about the past 20 years of comics.
Potential spoilers ahead! Continue reading
Uh, that’s a negative
The Los Angeles Times website had an interesting way of describing the results of yesterday’s state election:
It’s hard to believe that all eight propositions failed. Even the four Orange County measures failed. Every item on the ballot in our district was rejected!
On a related note, I still don’t like the voting machines we have in OC. The interface is cumbersome and the display is godawful slow. The controls consist of a dial, which moves the cursor, and a button, which selects the current item.
The display is so slow you can watch it redrawing the title and summary of a ballot item when it highlights it. First the rectangle turns blue, then it redraws the text, line by line, in white. It’s like watching print preview in Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS on a 386. You just don’t see that kind of performance on modern computers unless they’re massively bogged down.
As for trying to use the machine, it’s kind of like entering your name in the high score list on an arcade video game with only a trackball and a fire button. I’m sure they chose it for durability reasons—a touch screen would be much more usable, but much easier to break—and went with the low-powered processor to keep the costs down.
I actually liked the punchcards we had before. It was so much more satisfying to slam down that lever.
Holy Ozone!
A recent post on What Were They Thinking? reminded me of a panel from the original Teen Titans series. In it, Robin and Wonder Girl have just been gassed and tossed out of an airplane, waking up in mid-air.
Yes, Robin once uttered the words, “Holy ozone!” And, like the “holey rusted metal,” the words proved accurate in an entirely different way. This was Teen Titans #7 (1967), the issue which introduced the Mad Mod. (Think of him as Austin Powers as a villain.)
Who knew comics could be so prophetic? 😉
Mandriva: Dual Upgrade
I just updated a system running Mandriva Linux 2006 and in the release notes I discovered that not only will it upgrade a Mandrake system, but it can now upgrade a Conectiva system. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, given that both used RPM as their package format/database, but I really had the impression that Mandriva was primarily Mandrake with some extra stuff from Conectiva. It’s nice to see that there really is a true upgrade path for both distributions.
Two to Go
Woke up early (well, early for me) so we could get out and hit the polls before work. I was amazed that there was only one person in line ahead of us. Not only that, but there was only one line, not three or four broken up by last name.
Well, it’s a mid-term election. Plus it’s morning, and the last few years we’ve gone in the evening. (There was one year that I voted at lunch, but I had to drive Katie to the poll after work anyway, so it’s easier if we just both go at the same time.) It must have been last year that the line was so long that we got there at 6:30 or 7:00 and didn’t finish until after the polls “closed” — meaning they didn’t let anyone else get into line. (Sensibly, they allowed anyone who was in line by 8:00 to vote.) And there were a lot of people waiting behind us!
Now on to programming for a few hours until Microsoft kicks their patches out the door.
Vote!
If you live in California and you’re a registered voter: vote!
If you like the initiatives on the ballot, vote them in.
If you don’t like them, vote them out.
If you’re disgusted with the way the initiative process has been subverted by the very political machines and special interest groups it was supposed to circumvent, protest it by voting them down, not by abstaining.