I keep walking past this empty storefront at the Irvine Spectrum, and I have yet to spot anything indicating just what is going in. The phrasing kind of implies that something specific is opening soon. It makes me wonder if I’m supposed to recognize the pattern or something.

Any ideas?

When did “Black Friday” change from a behind-the-scenes retail term to a plastered-everywhere marketing term? #

Thoughts on some movies I’ve seen in the last ~2 months.

Seen for the First Time

• The Big Lebowski – I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. It should have been funny, but was just tedious.
• Slumdog Millionaire – Fascinating, both in its exploration of poverty in India and in the theme of showing how seemingly small and unrelated events can all contribute to someone’s future.
• Superman/Batman: Public Enemies – Had its moments, but overall was pretty much a standard superhero film.
• Clerks 2 – Kevin Smith seems to hit about 50/50 with me. I loved the first Clerks, hated Mallrats (except for the “Jedi Mind Trick” payoff), liked Chasing Amy and Dogma, but Jay and Silent Bob was mostly annoying (though it had its moments). Clerks 2 was mostly gross-out humor wrapped around a Broken Aesop in which the happy ending is for the indecisive guy to let the a—hole make his decisions for him.
• Battlestar Galactica: The Plan – They did a decent job of trying to pull together a consistent story from elements that were originally unconnected, but it still ended up playing too much like a clip show — especially the segments in the Colonial fleet. The segments on Caprica worked much better, though I did find it interesting that they re-cast the Cylon infiltrators as a tiny, isolated guerrilla force rather than the tip of an iceberg of espionage. It relied way too much on the audience remembering what happened in the series.
• Liar, Liar – Pretty much what I remember from the previews, except longer. Funny. Worth seeing at least once.
• Synecdoche, New York – A metafictional examination of living life vs. imitating it that doesn’t quite live up to the scope of its ambition…but then, part of the point of the movie is that it can’t. (Note: not a good choice for watching while eating.)
• Evil Dead 2 – Nice camera work, but I’m not a horror fan. Also, this makes absolutely no sense as a sequel, but works just fine as a remake. You can explain Ash’s actions at the beginning with evil-enforced amnesia, but the timeline with the professor’s discovery of the book just doesn’t mesh with the first movie. I posted some thoughts on Army of Darkness last week.

Rewatched

• Up – Second time, watched in a second-run theater. Holds up, even without 3D. Bring tissue.
• Batman & Mr. Freeze: Subzero – still a better Mr. Freeze movie than Batman And Robin. Not that it would be hard.
• Coraline – Third time, but first time on small screen or in 2D. Still works, though of course not nearly as impressive visually. Still, great animation & story. Kind of like Up in that way.
• Conan the Destroyer – The first movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger was very good and holds up well almost three decades later. This one was almost self-parody.

The major problem I see with the new retweet feature in beta on Twitter is that (for now) the posts are invisible to API clients. Since I do most of my Twitter activity through Twidroid (on my phone) and Twhirl (on the desktop), that means if someone I follow retweets a post using the new feature on the website, I won’t see it.

Update (Nov. 20): That was fast! Twidroid has released a new version that supports the native retweet capability, so now I can see them on my phone. It also lets you choose whether to retweet the classic way (open a post pre-filled with the original, so that you can edit it) or natively. If you use the native version and have multiple accounts, Twidroid Pro is smart enough to use the one that’s following the original poster. I haven’t quite figured out how it decides which account to use when retweeting someone you don’t follow, though.

Caltrans (and other road crews), please remove the old lane lines COMPLETELY when you re-stripe the freeway. This morning I almost got sideswiped by a driver following the old ones in the glare. #

One minor rant, and one success story, sort of connected.

The rant: My internet connection is acting kind of flaky tonight. Actually, the connection is fine, but it isn’t talking to some content delivery network(s). All the small-time websites load perfectly, but a lot of the larger ones either aren’t loading at all or are taking ridiculously long. I can load the Facebook timeline, for instance, since that’s dynamically generated…but it took 20 minutes for it to load a handful of static 16×16 pixel buttons for things like sharing links. *grumble*

On the other end of things, I had a great experience with Best Buy’s mobile website earlier today. I’m not sure I’ve ordered anything from BestBuy.com in years. The last thing I can think of was my first decent digital camera…in 2003. Usually if I’m going to buy from them I just walk into the store.

Meanwhile, despite owning my G1 for almost a year, I’ve never actually used it to buy anything that I can recall. Lots of research (ShopSavvy, plus various stores’ websites), but no actual purchases. I decided I wanted to see if I could place an order using just my phone, and it was extremely easy to:

• Find the item
• Add it to the cart
• Select a store for local pickup
• Update my billing address
• Place the order

The only real sticking points were:

• Store locations only listed cities. Fortunately, I could just hit a “map” button and they loaded in the phone’s Google Maps app.
• I had to reset my password, since it had been so long. Since I have POP access to that account, that meant waiting a few minutes for the whole mailbox to download before I could open the message with the new temporary password. Then I had to write it down because K-9 doesn’t seem to support copying text from incoming mail.

Other than that, everything was not only possible using the Android browser, it was streamlined. If I hadn’t needed to update my address and reset my password, I could have been done in two minutes flat. Maybe three once you factor in typing in the credit card info.

I had a harder time posting a link on Facebook tonight — on my desktop — than ordering something on my phone!

• Whenever my site gets hits from Google’s Italian site, my brain insists on reading it as “Google It!” #
• Fedora 12 is out today. I’d actually lost track of the schedule. With any luck, PulseAudio will actually work. #

Don’t you love it when your “Sorry, you sent your complaint to the wrong company” email bounces because the complainer left a bogus address? #

Brush Fire Smoke, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Smoke from a brush fire near San Juan Capistrano, seen from the parking structure at the Irvine Spectrum. I wouldn’t have caught this if I hadn’t checked Twitter when I sat down to lunch and seen an update from @LATimesfires. (As it is, I still had to make do with the camera on my phone.)

The picture was taken around 1:30. It’s about 3:30 now, and I don’t see a plume anymore (though it could be behind a building) — just a smear of haze to the south and west.

According to the LA Times, the fire started when a tractor crashed into a power pole this morning.

My iPod ran down its charge over the weekend, and I had to plug in the car charger this morning and start over at the beginning of a playlist. I usually leave it on shuffle on a reaaaaaally long list so I get lots of different songs.

It started up with “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Bohemian Polka,” which was a fun, off-kilter start to the week. When it followed up with “Jurassic Park,” I didn’t think much of it. Twofers by artist, and even by album, aren’t that uncommon.

When “Living in the Fridge” started up, I got a little suspicious.

Sure enough, when I stopped the car and checked, shuffle was set to “off.” I figure the playlist must have been sorted by album the last time I synced, with Alapalooza the first on the list.

I’m still not sure whether it switched off shuffle when the battery ran down, or I just had it off before and didn’t notice because the last playlist I was listening to was pre-shuffled. Still, it was — appropriately — weird.

Listening to Dark City soundtrack while scanning a roll of old photos. Just picked up a photo of the sign for Shell Beach. #

Subject: An old G4 PowerBook laptop which locks up after several hours of use.
Goals:

• Test the memory so that, if it’s good, we can resell it instead of recycling it.
• Wipe the hard disk so that we can recycle the computer.

Tools:

• Tech Tool Pro 4 disc
• Tech Tool Pro 5 disc
• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard install disc
• Mac OS X 10.3 install disc (came with laptop)

You’d think this would be easy…

Sunday

I spent a couple of minutes looking for the Tech Tool Pro 5 disc, but couldn’t find it, so I figured I’d try version 4 since I knew where it was. I’d forgotten that TTP4 doesn’t like this display. The colors were so messed up I couldn’t read it.

So I figured I’d use the Leopard install disc to wipe the hard drive first, and look for the TTP5 disc in the meantime. I spent at least an hour and a half looking through my CD rack and a messy pile of paper and had no luck. Meanwhile, the laptop froze while zeroing the disk. The screen had turned off, so I have no idea how much it actually wiped.

Then I found the TTP5 disc between two CD boxes.

At this point I figured I’d let the machine cool off overnight and deal with it the next day.

Monday

I got home from work, then set the laptop up on a cooling rack with a floor fan next to it. Booted to Tech Tool Pro 5 — no problem. The memory test options are time-based: do you want to test for 15 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc. I figured I’d start with 15 minutes and see what it did. It passed. Just in case, I ran it for another hour. Again, it passed. *whew!*

Not wanting to risk damaging the RAM, I powered the laptop off, unplugged it, removed the battery, opened up the access panel and removed the RAM extension. I closed everything up, plugged it back in, and tried to boot to Leopard.

10 minutes later, with the DVD drive still chugging away and the beach ball still spinning, I thought maybe I should take another approach.

I dug out the original install discs, which I’d found while looking for TTP5 the day before, and tried booting to that. 2 minutes, tops. That’s when I checked the Leopard box and saw that it required 512 MB of RAM. The G4 PowerBook only had 256 MB built-in. You’d think the boot loader on the disc could maybe tell you “This requires more memory than you have” instead of sitting there trying to load everything without any swap space.

Anyway, from the 10.3 installer I fired up Disk Utility, told it to zero the drive, and waited. 10 minutes later, it still said “Preparing to zero drive.” The day before, it had only stayed in that state for a few seconds before starting to show progress.

Great. Maybe it needed the memory. Power down, open it up, plug the RAM back in, close it up. This time it after booting to the installer, I couldn’t even get the menus to respond.

I figured it had managed to overheat (or whatever is going on) despite the fan and cooling rack. So I closed it down and put everything away to try again the next day.

Next Sunday

I picked things up again a few days later. First I pulled battery out in case it was overheating. So, with the extra RAM, I booted to the Leopard install discs and tried to zero the drive. After about 10 minutes, a message popped up that the computer needed to restart. So I tried again. Same thing.

Since I half-suspect the drive itself is part of the problem (though it could be a fan), at this point I decided it was probably as close to wiped as it was going to get. So I pulled out the RAM again and set it aside to sell, and figured I’d just send the machine back.

Then I remembered I should drain the battery.

What could I do with a machine that had no OS to drain the battery?

Of course! I could run Disk Utility! So I left the computer unplugged, booted to the 10.3 discs (since I’d already removed the extra RAM), and started to zero the drive again, figuring it would either freeze or run out of power.

About half an hour later I looked over…and as near as I could tell, it was done. There was no message, but there was also no progress gauge and no error…and Disk Utility showed an empty Mac OS filesystem on the drive.

Great! It finally worked! But I still needed to drain the battery, so I figured I’d start a second round. This time it froze, and the computer made grinding/clicking noises until it ran out of power. But the mission had been accomplished.

Aftermath

I sold the RAM on eBay last week. Now I just need to send the computer back to be recycled. End of an era in some ways, but we haven’t actually used it in almost a year.