Archives for October 2002

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this is LA, after all

October 30, 2002 by Eric Richardson

Just heard from the loudspeaker of the LAPD helicoptor circling just on the other side of Vermont:

Surrender now, or the dog will be used. You have one minute to surrender.

There was a little bit more that I didn't catch, but that was the gist of it. The helicoptor is still circling with the spotlight on a couple minutes later. Now back to writing about law enforcement...

paper time in the big city

October 30, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So it's paper time again, and I'm definitely running a little bit later of a schedule than I would like. The prompt for tonight is:

Craft an analysis exploring the relationships, however fraught and contradictory they might be, between discourses of law & order, urban space, and hip-hop creative culture.

googlefun

October 29, 2002 by Eric Richardson

I finally got around to autologging my google hits into a db, so googlefun will now be constantly up to date. Eventually I'll flesh it out to provide some more interesting stats and graphs, but I think even now it's a fun little view into how people find my site.

stupid video card

October 28, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So I've been having sporadic video problems for the last two months or so, and recently they've started happening all the time. I run XFree86 with the NVidia drivers on an old TNT card (Diamond Viper 550, I think), and recently I've been getting absolutely atrocious performance from things that previously had run fine (transparent Eterms in particular). It's like the lag of a slow remote connection, even when typing in a local window. The only thing I've found to make it go away is switching back to the stock nv driver (and losing Xv acceleration). I'm really at a loss to explain this. It started happening with really nothing relevent changed.

Living in The Diamond Age

October 23, 2002 by Eric Richardson

I just saw an article on Wired about "walls" of radiation detection around major cities. Immediately I thought of the dog pod grid in The Diamond Age. Granted, the implementation isn't exactly the same, but the idea is really similar and it's only a matter of time before modern technology catches up and implements similar aerostats.

wow... that was easy

October 23, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So I was doing a little browsing, and came up with a topic that I think should be really interesting. The semi-anonymous communication of the Internet enables much of a person's physical identity to be hidden. What I want to explore is whether this can truely lead to genderless communication, or if gender will inevitably work its way into Internet communication. I found some sources that look interesting, though I'll readily admit I've read a good two paragraphs or so of each of them.

a prospectus? huh?

October 23, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So for tomorrow I need a prospectus for my COMM 395 paper. This would be fine, except I have no idea what I want to write about, and the prospectus needs to have scholarly sources. So right now I'm sitting in the computer lab, browsing journals online. Woo hoo... At least once this is done the paper itself shouldn't be that hard (it's not due until late next month).

favorites: websites

October 20, 2002 by Eric Richardson

I just redid the websites part of my favorites section, and updated it to show the collection of sites I visit regularly. Check it out. It's a little slanted toward USC sports stuff, but you had to expect that...

Joseph Arthur at Largo

October 20, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So Thursday night I went and saw Joseph Arthur at Largo. I sort of expected a quiet show, my only exposure to Joseph being a solo MBE set and the song "In the Sun." That wasn't what this was, but what it was was great. I'm terrible at describing musical styles, but there was a lot more electric guitar than I was expecting. He also did some on the fly sampling and looping (much like what I love about Howie), and did it really well. I totally recomend that anyone who has the chance goes out and sees him.

i hate gtkhtml

October 15, 2002 by Eric Richardson

In order to get gnucash to compile, I need gtkhtml. I think at this point it's fair to say that gtkhtml is the worst library I have EVER tried to compile. First off, the dependancy list is big. It directly requires GAL, libcapplet, and some other obscure gnome libraries. These in turn require other things (pkg-config? what the...) And then, after all the dependencies are figured out, I try to compile it without GConf, which it says is entirely optional. But, no... It's not. When you try and compile --without-gconf, it then just decides that you really want it anyway and the compile bails badly. I would like this package shot. Now. This is just poor.

great Clutch quote

October 9, 2002 by Eric Richardson

During their show from 2000-12-21, the lead singer from Clutch made this comment between songs:

Hey ladies, it's really no big deal that you have breasts. Half the people in the world have breasts, and I'm not impressed.

Ahhh... Clutch is cool.

div widths and padding in mozilla and IE

October 8, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So I've been bothered by this problem for a while, and in particular it was biting me today when I was working on a bit of a site for the USC Waterski Team. I looked around a bit, and this document described my problem exactly and told how to fix it. Beautiful.

On Defining Urban

October 8, 2002 by Eric Richardson

We got our papers back yesterday for Hip-Hop, so I figured I would go ahead and post mine up in verbal intercourse. It's titled On Defining Urban, and in my opinion came out pretty well. The quotes could be integrated better, but the main points are good.

Vonda Shepard - Baby Don't You Break My Heart Slow

October 8, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So this is a little bit different than most songs I post here. I have an Indigo Girls show from July 13, 2002, and toward the end it contains this song, performed with Vonda. Apparently the song is from an Ally McBeal soundtrack. Just try to ignore that. Go to Furthur and download the show. It's a great show, and an even better song.

still writing

October 2, 2002 by Eric Richardson

I just got onto page four, and have used three of my four main points, and four of the five sources I need to use. All in all, I'd say I'm right on track. I'm actually quite happy with how this is turning out for a piece that as of this afternoon I had no idea what it would be about. My main points came to me as they usually do, while away from the computer. Tonight it was while riding my skateboard to Del Taco, normally it's while taking a shower. Oh the weird rituals we create...

paper writing time

October 1, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So it's paper writing time once again, the first of this new year. This time it's a 5 - 7 pager for my Hip-Hop Nation class. As of right now, I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to be writing... I've done all the reading (unusual for me), I've read the prompt many times, but inspiration and organization just hasn't really struck yet. Hopefully that happens at least reasonably soon, or it'll be a long night.