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With the Day Wildland Fire (here's the rss feed) still burning on day 14 and the Santa Ana winds kicking up this weekend, things are getting a bit more dangerous. Early this morning the county released an evacuation notice.
The Sheriff’s Department is recommending evacuation of residents living in the north-west area of Fillmore, including Goodenough Road and Grand Avenue, north of Telegraph Road. Sheriff’s personnel will be going door-to-door advising residents of the recommended evacuation. Additionally, residents along highway 150 between the cities of Santa Paula and Ojai will also be advised of the recommended evacuation. Persons who believe their property is in the path of the fire are urged to leave and seek safe shelter.
Sarah mentioned last night that they could see flames in the distance from Sunset Road while traveling north on the 23 freeway into Moorpark. And this release from noon today indicates the size of the fire area has increased to more than 80,000 acres with winds gusting to 60 mph.
Fire is part of life here, but every time it completely captures my attention (not that it has a lot of competition) which brings me back to last falls fire. I found the video below while poking around and thought I'd share. Eli Jarra (the creator) describes it this way:
Firestorm uncovers the fascinating world of altered time to the viewer, allowing a unique look at nature's fury. Shot with 3 cameras over a period of 28 hours during September 28-29th 2005. Firestorm shows a a unique look at the Simi Valley fire which consumed 25,000 acres. Look for Mars, Orion & the Moon rising in the distance...
Click through if you can't see it (I guess I need a Javascript detector). [h/t to Brian Dennert here...]
I also found a QuickTime version of the fire movie (an earlier cut without sound) California wildfire -- 7.7 MB on a page full of nature time lapse movies.
I finally decided early this afternoon that I was going to figure out how make the OmniGraffle geometry pallet work in pixels instead of inches. It's been bugging me ever since I finally upgraded from version 3. I did find the completely non obvious answer but along the way I stumbled onto something quite wonderful.
Graffletopia is a really neat toy for OmniGraffle users. The site (by Patrick Crowley) bills itself as 'Stencils for OmniGraffle'. That's a serious undersell. I've picked up a few templates over the years by picking through collections, but this is the best resource yet for someone seeking (or wishing to publish) templates for OmniGraffle.
I finally found an incantation to get the geometry pallet work in pixels instead of inches, but I'm not too happy about it. Measurement changes seem to be global. You need to view the Rulers (menu View -> Rulers, cmd-R or click on the Rulers icon) which I don't recall doing before. Once the Ruler strip is available, changing the units is simple but as I said, global.
Rats.
The perpetual color of Southern California during the summer is blue. Blue skies, blue water on the beaches (for some, blue cars). It's what everyone who thinks they know something about California knows (with the obvious exception of the Hollywood sign). Heck, that's all I knew about California for the first 25 years of my life.
Odd colors and views abound, most notably in the hills and canyons that are so plentiful here. On Saturday morning I pulled together some photos from this summer to document one persons view on a typical California Season. I pulled a couple pictures to use here.
First we've got the western Simi Hills in their typical summer brown.
On the day after the hottest day of the summer, we had some very weird light effects all afternoon and on my way home from errand I noticed how peculiar it looked. This is one of the shots I took that afternoon.
The last photo was taken last week near sunset. The color bands were a result of the smoke tail from Day (or Sespe) fire up in the Los Padres National Forest drifting down across western Ventura County. The fire continues to burn and I read recently that the area had not burned since the early 60's, leaving plenty of kindling.
Well not quite, but the pigskin is definitely in the air.
The local high schools kicked things off this week, UCLA and USC both struggled a bit early but won going away and the Packers released 19 players today to get down to the 53 man limit for next weeks NFL kickoff.
It is, without a doubt, my favorite time of the year (even if we're in the midst of another heat wave). I've got a pretty big football jones.
I spent a bit of time late this afternoon bouncing back and forth between the UCLA and USC games. Both teams were a bit out of sync in the first half and seemed to do a whole lot better after the half time adjustment. The defense for both looked a bit ragged, but that's nothing new for either team. Ben Olson looked very good in his first outing and John David Booty only slightly less so. Both seem ready to lead their respective teams in the pass happy PAC-10.
Of course it's early, but I can see both being ranked pretty high by the end of the season. The city championship (Dec 2 at the Rose Bowl) looks like it will be pretty competitive again this year.
