|
|
Tom Hoffarth carries a camera and spends a good deal of his time wandering around Los Angeles in ways most of us can not. One result is billboards from all over LA.
He starts out with "The Los Angeles Luberators of Anaheim." (EZ Lube doesn't seem to have a problem toying with a silly — if sensitive — situation, I wish them well) and goes on from there.
My small contribution comes from a far different place.
On my way up to San Francisco in March, I stopped off in King City to get something to eat. Heading north on 101, I exited at First Street (which isn't really). I wound up trundling along a dusty street at about 19 MPH following a semi in some kind of warehouse district. As we slowly rounded a curve, I saw it. A flurry of thoughts hit all at once: an advertisement using blogging(?), that sign is completely out of place (that's a neat idea!) and I've got to take a picture. There was a lot to turn left into, so I did.
LinksWhile doing some research for an article I might finish eventually, I came upon this awkwardly phrased FTC document.
As gas prices creep higher and higher heading into travel season, the Federal Trade Commission recently conducted an Internet surf to detect and deter the deceptive marketing of products that purportedly save energy. After the surf, the FTC staff sent warning letters to more than 50 companies making questionable gas-saving and other energy-related advertising claims. While most of the warnings were targeted at marketers of automotive gadgets and additives, additional warnings addressed Internet marketers of purported energy-saving products for the home. The letters reminded the advertisers that they need scientific substantiation for their energy-saving claims and provided them with additional advertising guidance.
Yes indeed, they conducted an Internet surf. If the report were written today, I guess it would have said something along the lines of 'recently conducted a Google to detect and deter' which would still be painful.
I now feel better about my painful prose.
Calling our recent weather hot would be a bit like describing Stalin as cranky.
It's an accurate statement, but a woefully incomplete description of the problem.
With the number of breast implants, nose jobs and other plastic modifications done in these parts, some people in the area might literally be melting (has anyone seen Michael Jackson lately?)
It does appear that we broke a minor record yesterday:
Southern California's already scorching July heat wave will get worse over the next few days, forecasters said Friday, straining the power supply and sopping shirts across the region.
July is shaping up to be the third straight month of unusually hot conditions: The latest record fell Friday, when the weather station at Pierce College in Woodland Hills measured triple-digit temperatures for the 16th day in a row.
That record is toast because they hit triple-digit territory without a sweat, pushing past 116 in my erratic monitoring of the valley today. That's bad enough, but the whole west coast is broiling and today was just another day of bad news.
Portland was over one hundred again and Seattle was nearly there. Once or twice a year seems reasonable but they've been having a run of high temperatures this year. It's not quite 'Blizzards in Miami', but unusual. Once again, the jet stream comes up.
The heat wave baking most of the country is largely caused by a high-pressure system centered in the drought-ridden Southwest. The system has acted as a spinning buffer against a cool jet stream that wiggles across the border between Canada and the United States.
"We should have about one more week of this ahead of us, and then that jet stream hugging the Canadian border in the West looks like it will make an excursion south," Patzert said. "By the end of next week, we should get some cool air from Canada."
Jeff Masters of Weather Underground has a lot more:
Record heat has gripped much of the U.S. this week. The heat is currently most intense in the Desert Southwest, where yesterday Phoenix recorded its fourth highest temperature of all time, 118 F. Needles, California hit a record 120 yesterday, and the temperature topped out at 123 F in Death Valley--only 13 degrees cooler than the world record 136 F measured in El Azizia, Libya, in 1922. The heat should continue for another week in the Southwest, before a shift in the jet stream pattern brings more normal temperatures to the region late next week.
...
The National Climatic Data Center reports that the June 2006 was the 2nd warmest June on record, and the first half of 2006 was the warmest in the United States since record keeping began in 1895. The average temperature for the 48 contiguous United States from January through June was 51.8°F, or 3.4°F above average for the 20th century. Globally, June was also the 2nd warmest June on record, and the period January through June was the 6th warmest such period on record.
It could be a worse. We could have storms like these. That's real wicked witch weather.
Update: The high was 119, ouch:The San Fernando Valley turned into a suburban Death Valley on Saturday as the mercury hit a record 119 in Woodland Hills, causing sweaty refugees to hug iced lattes, plop down on tile floors and, in at least one case, plead with a salesman to part with his last remaining portable air conditioner, a floor model.
...
It was hotter in Woodland Hills than previously recorded in Los Angeles County for a July 22 and 5 degrees hotter than ever recorded in the desert city of Lancaster.
Elsewhere in the region, it wasn't exactly a day for a picnic. El Cajon and Escondido smashed through their previous mutual records of 109, the former hitting 113 and the latter 112. The San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park hit 114, 2 degrees higher than its previous all time-record.
In other scattered locations, records were broken for the date: Burbank hit 112, 12 degrees above the previous record set July 22, 1980, and only 1 degree below the all-time high of 113, the National Weather Service said. Laguna Beach hit 94, and in downtown Los Angeles, the mercury climbed to 101.
How the heck do you do color correction for pictures taken at night?
While coming back from a cruise up to Lake Piru this evening (I went to drive a new road which turned out to be dirt, so I passed) I eventually caught a pack of slow folks near the top of Grimes Canyon leading me to stop.
I had the camera and a tiny tripod I keep in the camera case, the full moon was rising and I figured I'd give it a shot. I setup the tripod on the trunk and took about a dozen shots. It worked! (now I need to go back and get some tail lights, I caught just a whiff) Using various exposure times between 1.2 and 4 seconds and f-stops between 2.8 and 5.0 I caught a lot of shots that look a lot like day light. Except they're really blueish purple, like this:
That's the window of my car on the bottom right. I'm sure there's some tinting but it's definitely not normally blue. And just to prove that I can't get things right even with light, here's a shot of Lake Piru taken just above the dam about 35 minutes earlier.
I hate image manipulation software, it makes me feel so stupid.
The convertible is the ideal vehicle for cruising on a summer evening. That too small slice of the day when the heat drops off and the shadows creep into everything is a great time to just go wandering around, everything down. Listen to the world around you or just something you like, it works both ways. Catching the first light of the day is darned cool too.
Owning the perfect vehicle for one task is great, but has a downside. Consider this a list of miscellaneous observations about owning a convertible that won't appear on most check lists.
Anyone who buys a 'vert in the off season winds up running around in weather that is less than ideal. Even in season when reasonably dressed, roads have shadows. Around here we've got our wonderful canyons and significant altitude changes.
Just because it's 70 and sunny in the San Fernando Valley doesn't mean you'll see the same by the time you cross a mountain range and hit the coast (more often, it means you'll drive through some cold fog somewhere along the line if you are driving early in the morning). I saw a twenty degree temperature drop last week on a trip of fifty five miles to the Oregon coast, typical of the drop you can see in SoCal. Is that applicable to the whole west coast? The summer differential isn't usually that large on the right half of the country but it's easily ten to fifteen degrees at times.
Finding the most efficient way to warm your wide open car is going to pay dividends. Back in late March I had a wonderful run through Big Sur on PCH; great road conditions, wonderful view, wearing a long sleeve T-shirt with Beethoven and Cheap Trick in the air. Bit by bit, it got colder. Over a couple hours (I finally caved somewhere south of San Simeon when I was chilled to the core), I learned a few tricks, none of which are ideal. Mostly I learned that indirect heat is better than direct heat (unless your hands are the problem, in which case short bursts of direct heat only make them more sensitive — I may need to rethink driving gloves).
Even in the summer you still see lots of windows up when the top is down. Why?
The noise from traffic can be significantly reduced. It can be startling to put the windows up after the noise level becomes bothersome. Like a -10 dB button on the world. Casual conversation at freeway speed isn't really possible without some help.
Unfortunately, anyone in the back seat is pretty much out of luck either way.
Based on numerous experiments conducted with my usual headset and cellphone combination, the boom mike doesn't introduce much noise (but isn't silent) and does so only when I talk (+ a second or so). I was prepared to lose that ability with the top down... ah well. I'll have to see what happens when the Santa Ana cross winds get rolling in the fall.
And if it's really hot you can turn on the air conditioning and still get rather effective cooling by recycling the air and directing the flow down. What works for heat also works for cold. Just remember that the air flow doesn't adjust itself like the sound system, when you slow down it can get cold quickly down around the nether bits.
I can not emphasize enough how truly bad tunnels (and even really long freeway underpasses) can be. Fetid air and the din of your fellow travelers. Trucks and buses are cursed beasts. And what is it with people honking their horns? Is this the first time they've ever encountered an echo?
On the flip side, catch a tunnel alone in the early morning after a cleansing night and it can be a vastly different experience; that rumble is you. Bridges also offer a completely different auditory perspective.
The materials used for the tops of convertibles just keep getting better. It's not the same as a hard top, but it keeps getting quieter.
People who wash their windows because they just noticed a problem (driving into the sun at one of the perfect times of day) and don't look behind them get moved from 'fiends' into a whole new category. Thanks so much for bathing me in a chemical shower and messing up my windshield to boot.
Rogue sprinklers suddenly become important. I dread the day I get stuck in front of a busted sprinkler head, it's going to happen. Thankfully, random rainstorms aren't a problem here.
I don't follow baseball too closely but it's hard to ignore in baseball crazy SoCal. Even so, it was hard to understand why Nomar Garciaparra wasn't going to the all star game. I was really glad to hear that he's in now.
I read a few feeds (Dodger Thoughts, more recently Dodgers Insider and of course the Dodgers feed from Yahoo which has easily accessed results and the AP story) that help keep up. Garciaparra (and the rookies) have made the Dodgers quite stimulating to follow this year.
Not only did Nomar come back home, but he'd been struggling the last three years and he was asked to change positions along the way. The Dodgers have a recent history of this not working out well for either the player or the team. Since I can't really include Eddie Murray, we'll say it started with Darryl Strawberry and ended with Shawn Green.
It has worked out amazingly well. His skills as a short stop (he got dinged a bit about his fielding at short) have translated to first in a way that seemed unlikely a few months ago (I'm not sure why... the job is mostly fielding throws by teammates in a relatively stationary position, which is a lot easier than shagging line drives in the middle infield) and he's just been flat out smacking the heck out of the ball. A few weeks before the voting finished, he finally qualified for the league leaders list (being hurt early in the season kept him off from the start) where he's still leading in average.
I blame it on Albert Pujols, as the runaway National League MVP also plays first base. You had to be in a coma not to vote for him. The votes for other players were a fan effect caused by a need for fans to vote for everything. I could vote competently on only two positions this year (I'll always be a catcher) I can't pick and choose (the league claims that people randomly pushing buttons better represents the view of the fan) so I don't vote.
I did vote for the final player and it really annoyed me. Monster, the 'final vote' partner (sponsor, people in charge) wanted certain things that enhance their ability to put people together (email, zip and birthdate). That's far too much useful information to be handing out (along with everything else they could already determine) but there it is (along with a captcha).
So I lied. I really hope everyone did.
Some bad ideas never seem to die. For instance; hiding or obscuring the version number so that customers won't know some information about the product. It's usually driven by some naive belief held by product management or marketing. Here's a case where they got together.
I got a giggle out of this quote from the email thread:
We can't be at all accessible to the client, we'll just have to find another way.
The reason is simple: when they see "Version 2.8 (build 448)," they will think that it took us 28 releases and over *four hundred* builds to get right.
Every time I run across one of these stories I think back to my own experience with Norton Utilities for Macintosh (known to many as NUM). For version 1.0, we had several point releases (including one major recompile with a Think C patch to make it work on the new 68040 Quadras) for which we used version numbers using a normal 'vers' resource. On NUM 2.0, we had six or seven point releases and were never allowed to change the version number. Every release was set to April 22, 1992 at 2:0x PM.
As I recall, sales had the final say on it. They were afraid that we'd need to flush the channel (that was their term!) if word got out that we'd had an update. This was in the days before online updaters but it was still annoying because I wound up with the job of updating our build process to stick the 'official' version resources into pieces that were already built and had proper version data. The compromise made to keep everyones sanity (not quite everyone; just developers, QA and support) was to tinker with the time. The version 2.0 gold masters were set to 2:00 PM. Version 2.0.1 was set to 2:01 PM (I don't remember if we changed both times?), and so forth.
Along the way to version 3, we'd finally convinced the powers that be to pay for norton.com (a 48 KB/s dedicated link from Netcom to the Symantec offices in Cupertino that was backhauled to Santa Monica using the inter-office T1). That rather quickly evolved in an official online presence for Symantec. The anachronism that was norton.com eventually went away as the last identifiable bits of Peter Norton Computing were absorbed. But for a while, everyone who desired one could have a shell account and unfettered access to a version of the Internet which only existed for a short while. You'd hardly recognize it today. It was small enough to still be pretty well organized.
The online presence of companies with utility products grew incredibly quickly. Support forums on AOL and CI$ (maybe GEnie, I'm not sure) and a set of Norton USENET groups saw amazing traffic growth. Geeks were flooding online and changing a lot of business requirements as they became more obviously noisy. The business quickly began requiring updaters and a new company came along to help with the Mac update problem.
Internal problems were quickly quashed with an admonishment to go explain it to the customers and press who were demanding updates. The fight then escalated into who to tell (and how and when) should a new update occur. It likely continues to this day.
I took a bit of extra time on Thursday morning to walk over to the downtown Seattle public library to grab some pictures (and run a couple network tests) before leaving town and heading south to Oregon.
Mostly the effect of wonderful weather, great morning light and a fantastic subject, they turned out quite well.
My favorite photo is linked from the picture but others seem to like this view better. Both were taken on the A frame walkway behind the library (on 5th avenue).
The interior shots don't quite do the library justice, tending to be a bit subdued from what the human eye sees. One day I'll learn how to capture that kind of light correctly.
The building itself is terribly difficult to describe. The best I've come up with is a glass chef's hat, but even that is only a feeble attempt to describe a building which is all angles and glass. Any description is complicated by the location (it's sits on a hill, the back entrance on 5th avenue is the third floor and the front entrance on 4th avenue is the buildings ground floor). It becomes even more complex because the structure is different on every side. Any verbal description of a side if invalidated by the others.
I do wish I'd taken a bit more time on 5th with the A frame walkway shots. I'd noticed the interesting view earlier in the week and planned to get a picture. Unfortunately, I had a schedule and a lot of shots I wanted so it turned into more of a fly by than a detailed study.
