My tripod, on the other hand, seems not to have been as steady as I thought. Or I jostled it a tiny bit, enough to register on Venus but not the much dimmer satellite dish.
Speaking of dimmer, though….wow, nothing like a conjunction to remind you just how much brighter Venus is than, well anything else in the night sky except the moon.
It’s been getting more and more difficult each year to get tickets (not to mention hotel rooms) for Comic-Con International, and each of the last few years I’ve been wondering if this one might be the year I’d be shut out. The current system is a lottery: Everyone who wants tickets signs into a “waiting room” website before the sale starts, and the system randomly selects batches of people to let into the ticketing system, slowly enough that it won’t crash under the load, until all the tickets are sold out.
It took about an hour to sell out on Saturday.
Despite teaming up — you can buy tickets for yourself and up to two other people, so you can make arrangements among a group of three that whoever gets in first will buy tickets for the others — we watched as first Preview Night, then Saturday, then Friday, then Thursday, and finally Sunday each sold out. The official SDCC Twitter account was more timely with that information than the waiting room, which refreshed its message every 2 minutes, but insisted that Thursday was “very low” for at least one refresh after they reported the sellout on Twitter.
It’s going to be the first year since 1990 that I haven’t been to San Diego for Comic-Con.
Oddly, I’m only mildly disappointed.
Then again, the last two times I’ve gone to San Diego, I’ve gotten a first-hand look at the inside of an emergency room. Maybe it’s just as well that I don’t try for three in a row.
They’re finally fixing the elevator problem!
Sort of.
The parking structure near work has elevators at two corners. One set connects every floor, but the other starts at a second floor landing that connects to a flight of steps. That’s not a huge problem for offices, but the structure is also shared with two hotels and an airport shuttle service.
More than once I’ve seen people dragging luggage down the steps, or looking around in confusion trying to figure out how to get to the airport shuttle. On several occasions I’ve pointed out that if you go all the way to the other side of the structure you can take the elevator all the way down. Fortunately, the disabled parking spaces are on the ground floor, but still…
Anyway, one of the office buildings has been under conversion to a hotel over the last year, and they’re almost done. Rooms are furnished, signs are up, a parking turnaround has been built, landscaping is going in…and now they’re going after the elevator.
…But look back up there at the photo. The top of the new column is anchored to the third floor, meaning this elevator only goes up to the second. So if you’ve parked on the fifth floor, you need to take an elevator down to the second, get out, walk around the corner, and take another elevator down to the first.
This seems really inefficient for travelers, but then I suppose it’s more efficient for construction. Maybe it would have been hideously intrusive to extend the existing shafts down another floor. And maybe it wouldn’t have been safe to add an essentially-freestanding seven-floor elevator column.
On a final note: Here’s what that spot looked like last summer.
There are a lot of jacaranda trees in the area, lining the walkways through the business and hotel parks and lining the sidewalks along the street. There are also a lot of these trees, which look so similar that I assumed they were more jacarandas until the first spring I was here, when they bloomed bright yellow instead of light purple. From what I can tell, they’re Tipuana trees, also known as Pride of Bolivia trees, and despite the similarities, they aren’t closely related.
The flowers act the same, though, dropping in thick blankets as spring turns to summer.
Just…somewhere else. Not here.
As of last week, this site is being served to you by a shiny new SSD-backed VPS at DreamHost. I was hoping it would be running NginX as well, but try as I might, I couldn’t get WordPress in a subdirectory to play nice with NginX. Speed Force worked fine, but it’s at the top level of a site. Ramblings and Re-Reading Les Misérables aren’t.
Fortunately, the new virtual servers are faster and cheaper (newer hardware, after all), and with the rest of my sites running NginX I end up with about the same overall memory footprint for two VPSes so that I could put this back on Apache. I suppose that saved me time converting the zillions of .htaccess rules I’ve amassed over the years. And with the faster systems, they’re able to handle more complex/simultaneous actions without timing out or spiking memory.
Two of my fan interests sort of intersected* with a pair of articles I wrote last night, as I found myself looking at the Flash and Les Misérables in the late 1930s/early 1940s.
I review Orson Welles’ Les Misérables radio play over at Re-Reading Les Mis. Last weekend I stumbled on a cassette recording of the 1937 series, but since I don’t have anything portable to play cassettes on anymore, I went looking online, found it at the Internet Archive’s Old Time Radio collection, and listened to it on the way to and from work for several days. (I wish I hadn’t already used the Cassette…now I remember pun.)
A 1943 Flash comic book features Jay Garrick playing every role at once in a stage play, quick-change style, when the entire cast is quarantined for a measles outbreak. I’d recently updated the scans on an old post on the one-man team trope. The Disneyland outbreak made me think of the story, and I’ve posted a few scans at Speed Force.
*They’ve been intersecting all week, actually, since the actor playing Pied Piper on the Flash TV show is playing Marius on Broadway right now, and has been posting Les Mis-related stuff.
Ring around the Target. I found the perfect spot to block the sun and view this ice #halo.
I’ve been watching Venus and Mercury move toward and away from each other over the past week and a half as I leave the office, when I’ve had a clear view anyway. Tonight I caught a different view of the pair of planets, framed by the almost-bare branches of a tree.
