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Bins of plastic pumpkins, some colored teal. The Teal Pumpkin Project logo is visible on the bin label.

Cool: Michael’s is selling plastic teal pumpkins for people who plan on offering non-food treats for allergic trick or treaters as part of the Teal Pumpkin Project. You can still paint a pumpkin teal, of course, but this simplifies the setup. (Are we really that close to Halloween already?)

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Round Table: If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it.

Usually they put movie quotes on the sign. This year they’ve taken to posting tributes to recently-passed celebrities. Usually in the form of relevant movie quotes. It’s been a year for that.

In related news, I found a bottle of Snozzberry Soda on Saturday. A few days later, the timing seemed really weird. Continue reading →

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Target Pokéball

I went to Target this morning and found that someone had painted one of their signature red ball traffic barriers as a Pokéball. At first I figured it was a local thing, but I ended up having to make a second run, hit a different Target, and found that they’d done the same thing.

I don’t know if it’s regional or chain-wide, but it’s clearly more than a one-off!

Target Pokéball

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Flowers with moon and jupiter

I spotted this view of the moon and Jupiter bordered by flowers while at the Orange County Fair last week. While I love the look of the shot, it’s terribly grainy and full of compression artifacts. My phone isn’t great at things like zoom or low light conditions. I’ve been using it as my main camera for the past year, since it’s great in bright daylight, and my old camera is riddled with dust I can’t get rid of. But this, plus plans for a vacation where I knew I’d really want a working zoom, combined to be the last straw.

Major criteria:

  • Serious optical zoom
  • Low light
  • Long exposure
  • Wi-Fi would be nice, but not critical

I checked out a bunch of cameras and settled on a Canon PowerShot SX710 with 30x(!) optical zoom. They’ve automated a lot of the mode settings the older models used to have, but there are still a few specific modes you can use and you can still take photos with manual settings. And yes, you can transfer photos over Wi-Fi, to a device, a computer, or a cloud service.

One of the first things I did after charging the battery was go outside to see how it handled night shooting. Then I looked up and saw the moon.

Moon

So far, so good!

Amusingly, this happened the last time I bought a camera too.

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I received a scam email claiming to be from the IMF, all about who to contact if you fell for an advance fee fraud scam claiming to be from the IMF. All you have to do to get your money back is send your info and $150 to Barrister so-and-so to set up an account, just contact this GMail address…