new in verbal

November 20, 2003 by Eric Richardson

I just put up a couple new things in verbal intercourse. It's two seperate works, but they're actually tied together. For what's basically a debate class, I had to give a speech proposing policy change, so I wrote one defending the public domain. I also had to write a rebuttal paper, which felt pretty wrong.

stuck in a quandry

November 17, 2003 by Eric Richardson

I feel bad when I let the days go by without posting something here, but too often I don't feel I have the energy or insight to be interesting. How weird is it that I first posted here on November 30, 1998? I'm under two weeks away from my "blog" (I still hate that word) being five years old. whois says I registered my domain on April 9, 1998, and even before that my site existed at Gospelcom. And yet I still don't feel like my site actually contains much that's useful.

With all that said, let's recap my weekend. Thursday, I made it back to the Hotel Cafe to catch PENNY. They were great as usual. I've talked about them before, and I don't really have a whole lot new to say. They're taking some time off for the next six weeks or so to focus on putting out a new album, which I'm excited for. Next up after PENNY was Jim Bianco. I wasn't really quite sure what to expect when he started. In fact, I really don't know what to call his music. Just check out his site. Two or three songs before the end of his set, Jim broke a string and set the acoustic aside, letting the upright bass and electric lead the rest of the way. Something about that made the version of "Two Birds" that he did at the end incredible. I plan to head back to the Hotel this Thursday to see him again.

Friday night I made one of my rare treks up to the valley, where Lee Beth Kilgore was having a bit of a get-together to celebrate fall (and pumpkins). I went knowing no one but her, and came away not only knowing new people, but also getting into a few conversations that proved pretty educational. For instance, Murray Williams brought homebrewed mead. Until I tried it, I thought I had never before encountered mead -- aside from something alcoholic and old-timey, I really couldn't have even told you what it was -- but the taste reminds me a lot of a random drink a resturant owner brought to our table in Italy (I went to Italy for dinner during Spring Break, but that's a different story). So now I'm not so sure.

Saturday night Kathy, D4, and I went out to see Master and Commander. I thought it was decent -- I wasn't bored but it wasn't great. As we went to leave, someone nearby remarked, "Another movie that would have been better with Mel Gibson in it." I just thought that was funny.

Sunday I spent a good bit of the day out on the water at Lake Elsinore (about an hour away from USC). I'm a little sore from that but that's all part of the game. Two weeks ago a friend from UCSB took this picture of me doing my flip off of the wakeskate, so I think it's pretty cool. My objective off the wakeskate is simply to go big, forget the board, and get air. The picture does seem to show good form, I would think...

eThreads? A Release?

November 11, 2003 by Eric Richardson

So today I released eThreads 2.0 Alpha 2. The last eThreads major release was 1.2 in July of 2000, so to say that I'm a little slow between versions would be a huge understatement. This release adds so many features that I don't really know how to list them all. Coolest of the last few months is the conversion that took place to make eThreads mod_perl safe. That made a huge speed improvement. I think I said 250% when I made the change. Hopefully a full 2.0 release will follow in the next few weeks.

weekend wrapup

November 10, 2003 by Eric Richardson

Not a lot of sleep this weekend (and with that I'm actually including back to Wednesday, just for good measure). Wednesday I went and saw the Matrix. Friday the USC basketball team played its first exhibition game. Saturday and Sunday were spent down in San Diego at a waterski tournament. Click to read more about all of those. — Continue Reading...

Getting a little fresh air...

November 04, 2003 by Eric Richardson

Yesterday I wandered out to the La Quinta Resort to watch a little golf. A friend from high school, Colby Beckstrom, plays golf for TCU and was in a tournament there. I like to get out and see him when he comes to the area, so I drove out for the first 36 holes of the tourney. Colby shot rounds of -1 and -4 while I was there, making some pretty crazy shots. His short game was on fire. That put him at -5, in second place and 5 shots behind the leader. And yet to hear him talk afterward, he didn't play well at all. Well, he must have in the final round, because tonight I look online and what did he do? He won it, dropping a -5 in the third round. I borrowed a digital camera and took some pictures yesterday. I'll be putting those up as soon as I can transfer them to my computer.

Update (2003-11-10): I have the pictures online at /images/colby/. No thumbnails, but they're cool pictures, so they're worth checking out.

finally

November 04, 2003 by Eric Richardson

So I'm now sitting outside Carl's Jr. on campus, typing this via a wireless connection under Linux. For some reason this seems to be the only access point that will let me connect at the moment, but I'm hoping that's just a propagation issue that'll take care of itself (you have to register your ethernet card to connect). Now I'm off to class, one small victory won.