Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains got an amazing amount of snow yesterday, and I went out to a couple of spots this morning to take photos. Check this Flickr set for more.
Tag: Irvine
Seeing LA From Irvine?
It’s an amazingly clear day morning today. So clear that I suspect I saw part of the outline of Catalina Island off in the distance, between trees and buildings, on the drive to work. So clear that I decided to drive up to the park at Quail Hill in Irvine where I once spotted what I think thought was Downtown Los Angeles at a distance of ~40 miles (same as the “contrast” shot in last year’s Spring Haze post). And this time, I had a better camera.
First, here’s the view from the camera, at 3x optical zoom, to give you some context. This is looking northwest from the park. (It occurs to me I could probably have checked the direction with my phone’s GPS info.)
Everything’s flattened out near the horizon. Near the right you can see the MCAS Tustin blimp hangars, with Santa Ana beyond them. The area I’m looking at is too small to see at web size, on the left side right near where the hill cuts in front of the horizon.
Here it is zoomed in and enhanced.
I gave it a shot with the digital zoom out to 12x, but it was way too fuzzy. It worked out better just to crop the file and look at its native resolution. Someday I’ll save up and get a nifty digital SLR that will save raw images instead of JPEGs, and let me swap out lenses for serious telephoto work, but for now, this is what I’ve got.
Actually, looking at the picture, I’m no longer convinced that it’s actually downtown Los Angeles. What I can see doesn’t look clustered enough, and the buildings look shorter than I’d expect. But I can’t think what else has a bunch of buildings tall enough to see at that distance and in that direction.
It could be that only the tops of the building are visible, in which case that black rectangle bordered in white, roughly in line with the top of the light pole, could be the top section of the Aon Center, the second-tallest building in the city and the one that’s mostly black with white corners and white around the top. But in that case the US Bank Tower (the tall round one) must be completely faded into the haze.
Or it could be Century City, which is a few miles to the west of Downtown LA, and has a couple of similar buildings (black with white outlines). If that’s the case, though, downtown should be somewhere to the right and taller, and I just don’t see it. And Century City would be closer to 45 miles, rather than 40. Maybe the smog’s just thicker around downtown? Edit: This does seem more likely (see comments).
Anyway, I took some more pictures to make a panorama, which I’ll stitch together at home when I have a chance and see if it’s worth posting.
Starbucks Overreaching
A couple of years ago, Starbucks bought all 30 or so company-owned Diedrich Coffee stores. There were a couple of franchise locations left (well, kiosks, really) in Orange County, and one of the Texas stores, but that was it. Most of them were converted or shut down, with only two keeping the Diedrich name and menu (both in Irvine, oddly enough). The one across from UCI eventually got converted.
The Diedrich nearest where we live was always busy. After it had been assimilated, though, we never saw it full. People didn’t go there just because of the location, they went there because it was a Diedrich.
Now it’s on the list of stores that Starbucks is closing, along with a newer one that opened about a quarter-mile away. (They haven’t updated the web page yet, but it’s on the PDF.)
In essence, Starbucks bought an (apparently) successful business and ran it into the ground. I really hate when that happens.
Obviously the place, when it was a Diedrich, wasn’t taking money that would have gone to Starbucks, since their customers didn’t stick around when it was converted. And the one store that does still have the Diedrich name and menu always has customers whenever I end up in the area — so it’s not just people avoiding the parent company. It’s people who don’t like the Starbucks coffee and atmosphere. (And possibly the name.)
I have to wonder how that other store would have done if they’d kept it intact instead of homogenizing it.
Update: Martin Diedrich picked up the empty storefront after Starbucks left, and opened his second Kéan Coffee in March 2009. Once again, it’s always busy. Funny, that!
iPhone iLine
I went by the Spectrum for lunch, and the line to get into the Apple Store for the new iPhone was still stretched past several storefronts into the nearest courtyard, right up to the fountain by the carousel — even though they’d launched that morning. Actually, I had several co-workers who were late today because they went down at opening for the launch.
From what I hear it was fairly chaotic, at least in the morning. Apple’s new policy of making you activate the phone in the store was causing delays, especially factoring in the fact that iTunes’ servers got swamped. That would explain why the line was still so long several hours after opening.
Usability note: One of said co-workers got tripped up trying to sync music to his new phone, because the default is to not synchronize music, and the “Sync only checked songs” box looked close enough to being the right option that he didn’t dig deeper.
Under Construction Indefinitely
We went to Wayzgoose* at UCI on Saturday, which meant getting our annual taste of what’s changed about the college campus. I’d caught the new Student Center last fall, but Katie hadn’t been back since last year, before it was finished.
Some of the meeting rooms buried in the hill still remain from the previous building. In a food court next to the bookstore, I found a window looking down on this familiar-looking atrium.
Through the glass paneling is a stairway that leads up to the ring road entrance. Clone Copy and Clone Notes used to be on the lower floor to the right (off-camera). In the mid-1990s, the area below the overhang to the left was a pool hall whose name escapes me. I think they converted it to a study area when they remodeled the upper floor to create Zot Zone (which has since been demolished and relocated). The area where I was standing used to be an outdoor walkway connecting the main courtyard to the bookstore.
What was really odd was the west food court, where my brain kept trying to overlay the old layout even though I’m sure they ripped out and replaced that section of the building entirely.
The sad thing, though, was that they’re tearing up the large grass area in the middle of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and putting in another building. Everything in the quad bordered by the Claire Trevor Theater (formerly the Village Theater), the Studio Theater, the scene shop, Studio Four, and the drama offices is a big fenced-off area of dirt.
Aside from the usual uses for a lawn, it was a great place for people to rehearse. It’s not clear how much of the fenced-off area will actually be turned into a building, but they may have finally finished paving the entire school.
I found it a rather ironic discovery to make at this time, considering that Wayzgoose/Celebrate UCI is also combined with Earth Day.
*Update 2019: Since the link seems to be dead, some context: Wayzgoose was part of Celebrate UCI, a combination festival, open house (for prospective sutdents and parents), and club fair. It started with a medieval theme in the 1970s, though by the 1990s that was already fading. Once that was gone, there was a slow shift of emphasis away from Wayzgoose and toward Celebrate UCI as far as branding went, presumably because nobody knows what a Wayzgoose is, but everyone knows what a celebration is.
Affluent Flowers
When I first spotted this sign, I just couldn’t believe the name of the florist at the bottom.
Okay, I’m sure people with more money send more flowers, but it seems a little tactless to point it out in the shop’s name.
Of course, it is Irvine…
Wild Things of Irvine
The Village, a disturbingly-named apartment complex across from the Irvine Spectrum shopping center, has been advertising in the nearby area for a couple of years using the slogan, “A new meaning for…” with various images and phrases. For a while, the following photo and caption seemed to be everywhere:
A New Meaning For Heated Pool
A not-terribly-subtle example of the advertising maxim, “sex sells.” Somewhere along the line I decided she looked like Rebecca Romijn, and dubbed her Mystique.
Eventually I realized what the photo reminded me of: the promotional images for the movie Wild Things:
The apartments have removed the image from their website (you can still find it on the Internet Archive), but it’s still all over the shopping center kiosks. So while watching Beowulf there, it seemed somehow appropriate when Grendel’s mother struck the same pose:
