So part of the fun of apartment life this year is figuring out how to make food, something I've really done none of previously in life. Currently my meals are definitely on the plain side, with my big adventures only going so far as buying ground beef and making hamburgers. That's as much a limitation of budget as cooking daring, though... Hopefully I'll be getting more creative soon, though, there're only so many times you can eat 4/$1 burritos.
It's that time of the year again... 300+ google queries in September for student council speech, and 100+ for national merit essay. This is after my leading query last month won with 5 hits. Sometime I'll try to compare this to last year... Student council speech is far and away the most popular query to get here, with well over 1500 all time queries once you add in derivatives. That's about 1/4 of all queries leading people to my site.
I've been able to find very little on the web for this band. Their website hasn't been updated in two and a half years, and mentions on other sites are sparse. Yet, one song is available for download and I love it. I found Bowery Electric after seeing them mentioned on a Portishead site, and fans of Portishead may well also like Bowery. Their cd, Lushlife, is on my list of things I would buy if I had money (right after food).
So the 400 acres of yesterday has turned into 1200 this morning, and left a large layer of smoke over most of the area north of downtown. The picture sucks, as those from this camera usually do, but you still get a little of the sense of the haze over downtown.
Another wildfire, this time with a KCAL9 news link. The smoke from this one looked bigger, even though it was farther away.
The fact that I went about exactly a week without posting should tell you about what kind of week it was. It really feels like I just wrote that last post, and yet it was a good 7 days ago. Crazy. I have a job interview tomorrow. Details are contingent on how it goes...
So it's a crappy picture, but this is the kind of entertainment we get here in south central. Yes, that's a helicoptor with a spotlight. Yes, it's LAPD. We think it was breaking up some type of party, because it kept circling a house on the next block. While the helicoptor was circling, a limo pulled in to (most likely) pick someone up.
I'm trying to get a hold of the USC Student Health Insurance Office to figure out why our vision care provider doesn't have me in their system. TO start off with, the number for the office connects me to a generic USC menu ("Press 1 for admissions," etc). Not a big deal... Hit 0, get the operator, get transferred... It rings for a bit and then I find out I can't leave a message because "the mailbox is full, please enter another extension." Oh, great. That sures seems like the way to run a system.
Gang of Song (featuring Jeremy Toback and Julian Coryell among others) will again be at the knit this Friday (the 13th). Show starts at (or around) 8pm. I loved the last show, and plan to be at this one as well.
I can't find any URLs just yet, but this is the view from my apartment of the brush fire that just started burning in glendale. A quick newsreport on TV said the fire started at 12:15, and is currently at about 10 acres.
I first got introduced to Clutch at an AVP tournament. They were playing music between matches, and all of a sudden the lyrics to one of the songs caught my ear. "But enough about you, lets talk about me and how single-handedly i redefined the science of radio astronomy, making nobel prize winners question their notions of reality." I was really confused, and found them later from remembering parts of that line. Spacegrass makes no sense, but hey, it sounds cool. And in the end, isn't that all we're really looking for?
So my car is sitting in the parking lot of the McDonald's on Figueroa right now with a dead battery. Not just needs to be jumped dead, but dead-dead. This means I get to buy a new one, which is exactly what I needed to be spending money on right now. That's far more important than, say, food or something like that. Gar...
I just watched the last half of One Day in September on HBO. I originally watched this documentary in Australia, and at that time it was my first exposure to what had happened in Munich thirty years ago. Documentaries such as this get so little exposure in our country, and yet can be extremely moving. This one won an Academy Award, in fact, and yet I would wager that most people have never heard of it.
Something tells me there's a better way than cleaning out my mouse with a pair of big needle-nose pliers. Hey, it's functional.
Now that I've got IP masquerading set up with linux and netfilter, what I really want is for tools like etherape and ethereal to be smart enough to show me sources and destinations on both the inside and outside of my network. For instance, both tools can show me packets coming to my box on both interfaces, and where my box sends them, so why can't a tool be smart enough to show me a source and destination with my box removed? Then I could do nice things like determine who hogs bandwidth and for what.
I mentioned earlier that I was going to see gang of song at the knit on saturday. I did, and it was definitely worth it. We were the for the last three songs of Tom Freund's set, and then for all of Julian Coryell and Jeremy Toback. The alterknit lounge is really, really small, and there were probably about 25 people there most of the time. This kind of size breeds a lot of informality and interaction, both of which I love to see in a show. Definitely some of the most fun I've had at a show.
Checking back on the Interpol site, I found that they've announced Sep 18 & 19 as their LA dates. They'll be playing at The Troubadour with various bands I've never heard of. Tickets are $10. Interpol's CD is also out now, and on sale for only $9.99.
So we have internet now... And what do I do the day after cable is installed? I break my computer. It's fixed now, but click to read of my fun.
So today the recorded high at USC was 101. Tomorrow the forecast is a high of 100. Definitely a day for the beach. It's going to be an absolute scorcher for the football game.