Photos from the real world

Photos from the real world

Yep, it's another snarky image post. Hang onto your hats...

This one is on the Oracle campus in Santa Clara which is also a park of sorts where a mental hospital used to be.

Remember the '90s, when "... and stuff" was a common thing to append to sentences? "Yeah, we went down to the mall and stuff." They apparently do.

Obviously, this one should be "... death of 117 patients and staff", but "stuff" passes the spell-checker, so... ship it!

I actually helped make this next one happen.

Back in 2007, there was this ill-executed publicity stunt for an animated show which involved putting a bunch of weird-looking electronic devices all over Boston. The bomb squad got involved and a bunch of people online reacted to their seeming over-reaction.

This is how we reacted to it in Mountain View:

That's the side of Google's building 46, and specifically the windows on the "bullpen" where my pager monkey team worked. I bought a whole bunch of colorful Post-It notes at an office supply store, and we set up some pixel art based on one of the characters.

It stayed up for a good bit after we moved and then moved again, but it's since come down. If you're one of the subsequent occupants of our former space, well, now you know how that got there. It was me!

As a side-effect, I still have a mighty stack of colorful note pads.

One of my usual pizza haunts in Santa Clara has a Chicago theme. They have pizzas like "The Ditka" and "The Loop". There's one line on the menu which always makes me wonder.

"Sorry, we cannot put sausage in your calzone".

No? Damn!

There's a shopping center in Santa Clara which is being rebuilt. As part of this work, they built a new Walgreens to bring it right up to the street frontage. It used to be set back almost two blocks back in this shopping center and was hard to find.

When they did this, they also redid the corner where the shopping center's access road reaches the city streets. This corner had a stop sign which had been a bit out of place for a while (Anna at McCormick, if you want to look it up), but now it's just ridiculous.

I call this one "stop where, exactly?":

The sign is now set back so far that there's enough room to have a hydrant, a drain grate, and an entire driveway between it and the actual intersection and stop line. It's practically far enough back to create another intersection!

Is this all because they didn't want to install another pole for the sign?

Finally, I caught this vanity plate in Mountain View over the weekend:

If you don't see the problem with this one, back up from your computer or take off your glasses. Also imagine what happens when you see it from slightly below and that chrome license plate cover occludes the bottom of the letters.

From a distance, this one is surprisingly hard to get right!

Naturally, there's an xkcd for this.