pleonasm:now

Surveying the damage

So, dozens of communities - thousands of homes - are destroyed or damaged. An acquaintance of mine in Alpine (in the mountains east of San Diego) watched his house burn down before his very eyes. Other friends' houses came within yards of the flames. As I write, the town of Julian is still threatened, and may yet perish.

More than anything, I feel incredibly lucky to live where I do. The fire would have had to jump a couple of very wide interstate freeways to reach this area; as one friend put it, the entire city would have to be on fire for this neighbourhood to be burning.

The last few days have been very strange. I've hardly been outside, except to see what the conditions are like. At the weekend, it looked like the photo above, taken by my friend Dan - that's ash falling from the sky. Everything smelt like a bonfire. There was an eerie silence, as there was little traffic on the roads, and most flights into and out of San Diego had been cancelled (I live almost directly under the flight path, so the quietness was particularly noticeable here).

It was dark pretty much all day, the sun a pale, reddish disc straining to be seen through the smoke. The only people walking around were wearing face masks; most people didn't venture out at all.

The air is clearer now. I'm going back to work today; it will be a relief to get out of the house at last. I heard it may even rain today - the first time in six months, I believe.

30 october 2003

Smoke gets in your eyes

This is surreal. The sky is orange, and everything is bathed in a peach glow. The sun is a blood-red orb, so dim that one can look directly at it and see sunspots. The air is thick with smoke; even in the house, it stings my eyes and throat. Flecks of ash drift from the sky like snowflakes, covering cars with a white film.

This morning, when I woke up, I went outside and held my hand out to catch one of these floating objects. It was a leaf, burnt to white ash, but perfectly intact, with every vein visible. I touched it with my finger; it crumbled into a powder and blew away.

The fires are getting closer. I don't think we'll have to evacuate here ... but that's what they all say.

26 october 2003

Duh

What I meant to say in yesterday's post - it was my main reason for writing about PHP in the first place - is that while converting this site to PHP has made it easier for me to maintain it and do cool stuff (e.g. have the logo switch out randomly, as it does now), it has also unfortunately killed all the existing permalinks. (On this site, you can find permalinks to the right of the date by clicking on the little icon.)

That basically defeats the purpose of having permalinks in the first place, but there's not much I can do about it, short of building a dummy .shtml page that redirects to each .php page, and leaving all of those fake pages there permanently. Not too efficient. So, apologies. It does lead me to wonder, though: is there any technology-independent way of coding permalinks, so that they will still work after a site-wide code shift? Anyone?

On a lighter note, on the way home from work today I saw a burly, moustached fellow wearing a stetson, denim shirt ... lycra stretchpants, and flip-flops. Erk!

18 october 2003

Plastic unfantastic

Tales of horror - with photos - abound at Awful Plastic Surgery, a “chronicle of celebrity plastic surgery.” There are some absolutely astounding, horrifying pictures here: Jocelyn Wildenstein and Mickey Rourke have suffered some of the worst botch-jobs I've ever seen. And if the “after” photo of Marie Osmond is genuine, then that's very, very sad. But hey, where's Michael Jackson?

Computer love

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that I have just switched most of this site over to PHP, making it much easier for me to maintain. However, the email form and search engine are no longer available, as I want to recode them in PHP. I don't have to do this, but I really want to get proficient with PHP and MySQL, particularly now that I have finally got MySQL running on a server at work, after three or four aborted attempts (the documentation is far from easy to understand, alas).

Man, I love computers - when they work.

17 october 2003

Digital overload

This morning, on my way to work, I counted all the electronic devices I was carrying on my person. To wit: one CD player with studio headphones; one PDA; two USB drives (128MB and 64MB); a digital voice recorder; and two cell phones (don't ask). That's seven devices, containing countless chips, in my pockets at eight in the morning.

I guess the world has changed since I were a wee lad.

16 october 2003

Unwound

Got back Sunday night from an excellent long weekend in beautiful Idyllwild, a small town in the mountains just south of Palm Springs. It made all the difference: I feel refreshed, reinvigorated, and replenished.

Here I am with Eddy on the front porch of the cabin, taking in the mountain air. (I look happy, don’t I? I was, though.) The cabin was only about a mile from the centre of Idyllwild, with its galleries, stores, and restaurants (some of which are pretty good, particularly the Gastrognome).

The weather was gorgeous all weekend, and we went on two hikes, neither of which were very long because Eddy’s getting old and can’t walk very far, and we couldn’t very well leave him in the car in the heat. But we saw some incredible scenery from the trails.

Sadly, bark beetle is infesting trees all over the area, and thousands of trees are being cut down. The Idyllwild Nature Center seems particularly hard hit, with stumps and felled trunks littering the forest.

Anyway, back here in San Diego, it’s nice to have decent water pressure and Internet access again, but I can’t wait to return to the woods. Maybe next month!

[Yes, I know the photos are a little fuzzy, even after judicious use of Unsharp Mask. Looks like that camera is due for retirement.]

14 october 2003

Weekend getaway

I’m going up to the mountains for a long weekend - honestly, I so need a vacation. I can’t wait. Looks like it’s going to be a beautiful weekend for hiking: partly cloudy, so not too hot (low 70s), and no forecast of rain.

I’ll be back late Sunday.

10 october 2003

I feel the earth move under my feet

I have finally experienced an earthquake. Well, it was more of a rumble than a quake, but regardless of its size, it was most definitely a seismic event.

I’ve always wanted to feel an earthquake. The closest I ever came to it before was in 1999, when I was visiting San Diego (from Atlanta, where I lived at the time), and was staying with some friends, who told me one morning that they had been woken up during the night by a fairly large quake. It wasn’t of the jolting kind, but made everything sway from side to side. Books had fallen off shelves, the walls had creaked and groaned, and the dogs, terrified, had barked and cowered. Of course, I slept through the whole thing, just like I slept through the UK’s “Great Storm” in 1987, as trees were literally uprooted and hurled around right outside my bedroom window.

Anyway, two days ago - as I wrote my last post, oddly enough - I was at home, sitting at the computer, when I felt a strange rumbling, as if the whole house were being shaken. It was enough to make me walk to the front of the house and look into the street; I had assumed that a huge truck or something had pulled up in front of the house, but there was nothing there. I thought nothing more of it until yesterday, when I read that there had been a 3.6 earthquake, with its epicentre just south of the border with Mexico, about fifteen miles south of my house. Apparently it was a really deep one, as people reported feeling it as far away as Los Angeles.

So, that was my earthquake experience. Not very dramatic, but I’m so glad I finally got to feel one. Maybe I’ll just consider it a “starter earthquake” - one that’s got me warmed up for the real thing one day.

Here’s hoping for bigger things in the future.

9 october 2003

High-rising

skyscrapers.com is an amazing database of high-rise buildings worldwide. I got totally wrapped up in it the other day, reading about skyscrapers I’ve been to or seen over the years.

I’ve always loved skyscrapers. I have no idea why. There’s just something exhilarating about going to the top of one and looking out (and down to the street, if possible), or standing at the foot of one and looking up to the impossibly-distant peak. I know I’m far from alone in this feeling. In Atlanta, I had an acquaintance who got so physically charged by skyscrapers that at night he would break into ones being built, go as high up as he could, sit on a window ledge, and ... erm ... well, I won’t go into details. Let’s just say you wouldn’t want to be standing on the street below. That’s a little extreme, but skyscrapers are undeniably thrilling places.

The most successful skyscrapers, on a civic level, I feel, are those that are physically imposing, yet at the same time do not obliterate humanity at the street level. Far too many skyscrapers fail at this most basic task. So, for example, while Atlanta’s Georgia Pacific Tower is architecturally astounding (like a thick, jagged copper shard from some angles, but bizarrely two-dimensional from others), its ground level consists of nothing but solid walls, apart from the lobby entrance and a couple of ugly loading docks. As a result, the streets to the side and back are desolate, windswept (literally: the corner of Peachtree and John Wesley Dobbs is one of the most consistently windy places I’ve ever been to), and pedestrianless. By contrast, the shorter Equitable Building, a hop and a skip across the street, has a coffee shop, a newsstand, a flower shop, and other stores at street level. People sit on chairs outside, and the streets all around are always busy. The building itself is far less dramatic than the Georgia Pacific Tower, but it’s far more successful on a civic level.

Unfortunately, buildings in San Diego cannot be taller than 500 feet from grade, so there are no really tall buildings. I miss going to buildings like Bank of America Plaza (which I will always fondly remember as the NationsBank building) in Atlanta, standing beneath it, and gazing up at the huge bulk of stone and glass towering above me.

Is that weird?

7 october 2003