this is it.

December 16, 2003 by Eric Richardson

In twelve and a half hours I'll be done. Finally I'll be able to leave this semester behind for good. Two more finals. Ten hours between them. I'm not really stressed. The first final is a COMM final. This post reassures me. I still can't believe that people make a life out of studying some of this stuff...

car driven society

December 15, 2003 by Eric Richardson

I found my auto insurance card today. I had taken it out of my car a while back to fill out a form and just realized a couple weeks ago that I really didn't know where it was. Though still fully insurance, and just without current record of it, driving around without my card I was close to being part of a large undocumented segment of the driving population. I think I heard in a commercial the other day that something like 20% of cars on the road in LA are uninsured. Trying to support that with statistics, I find this release from 2000 that says "California has an estimated 5.3 million uninsured vehicles, and 2.2 million to 3 million of these are in regular use."

The debate these days has been about licenses for "undocumented workers". Davis passed a law granting them the ability to get licenses, then Arnold came into power saying he was going to take that away, which he promptly did. Now there are protests that have been going on about that. Granted, I'm being a little theoretical about the whole thing, but shouldn't these people be arguing for getting illegal workers legal, and not just for giving them licenses? If you're going to argue that these people are a critical part of the southern california economy, that's a valid argument. But don't take that to say that we should give illegal immigrants licenses. License citizens. Don't work around the real problem to cure a symptom.

But that's just me...

data overload...

December 13, 2003 by Eric Richardson

For a project that I'm working on, I need lon/lat coordinates assigned to every post in my blog. That's about 800 posts right now. Actually, looking a little closer, there are exactly 750 top-level posts, and 50 comments. Though, by the time you read this I'll have posted again and thrown the whole thing off. Oh well.

on this date...

December 11, 2003 by Eric Richardson

Every six hours you have to take a half hour break and I wasn't hungry, so I just spent the last 20 minutes implementing a new "On This Date" feature. Click on This Date next to archives to take a look. This "blog" is a couple days shy of 5 years, two weeks old, so odds are good that a couple years will have a post from this date. Eventually I'll make it where you can input a date, but hey, I only had a half hour.

whew...

December 11, 2003 by Eric Richardson

Paper and final done... Now to not fall asleep at work and I'll be all set.

Tonight I'm headed to Hollywood (King King, specifically, which I've never been to) to see Jim Bianco perform with the Tim Davies Big Band. I've mentioned Jim before. I really enjoyed him then, and I'm really excited to see him now. Just like the end of the last show, it'll be him sans guitar, just having fun with lead vocals. I'll be sure to post a review, and hopefully I can get some pictures (not owning a camera, that relies on getting someone else to bring one).

stuck

December 10, 2003 by Eric Richardson

These days I get stuck on the last page of papers. I don't think it matters how long they are, just that I won't be able to resolve the ending in a satisfactory manner. That last page keeps me up. That last page holds itself away from me. Tonight is no different. One more page and I would be sleeping. But no... It hides. And I sit here, waiting for it.

visual words

December 10, 2003 by Eric Richardson

I feel literary today. In the past few days I've read more than I think I must have in the last year. First it was Beloved, by Toni Morrison. Then yesterday I started White Noise, by Don DeLillo. Today I finished it. 320+ pages in maybe 5 hours.

I'm not sure what it was that engrossed me so in White Noise. It felt like I was watching a movie. This movie was subtitled, and the words didn't really match up with what you know the characters were saying. Yet, the words you're reading on the screen touch you more than those you know are being said. They sound wrong, but they work beautifully.

Now I'm going to do a quick read of The Great Gatsby and then write a paper. The prompt: "Write a short and coherent essay to show how the first-person narrators in the fiction of Fitzgerald and DeLillo serve as a vehicle for romantic displacement and/or a disguise for paranoia." I'm looking for a spark.

talking about music

December 08, 2003 by Eric Richardson

Saturday a friend and I were talking about music at a party. We were asking about different bands we thought each other might have heard of or might like, and the process involved a lot of "have you heard of xxxxx? no." In the end we agreed to make sampler cds to exchange, to more adequately reflect what it was that we each listen to. Today while taking a break from reading I put a little time into putting mine together. I really enjoy the process of selecting songs, balancing out not only the songs that are favorites of mine, but also the ones that accurately portray the musician. Click to find out what ended up on my cd... — Continue Reading...

the long arm of the internet

December 02, 2003 by Eric Richardson

I'm sitting in a discussion section for my cinema class, bored as he rehashes the lecture. My roommate, D4, is giving me a hard time about not using this time to buy Lord of the Rings tickets. I shut him up by ssh'ing to my machine and starting a simpsons episode. Just like a baby with his mobile... Muah hahaha...

It is freaky when all of a sudden a passive computer starts playing something.

mmmm... wireless

December 02, 2003 by Eric Richardson

One of the things that spurred my to get a laptop, as I've mentioned before, was USC's installation of a wireless network on campus (big, but cool, coverage map). I love the idea of working anywhere on campus, free from the restraints of my apartment or a computer lab. Today I feel like I finally sort of got a piece of that. I've been on campus since 9:30am. In that time I've been online in Doheny Library, sitting in a hallway in a hallway in Annenberg, in an Annenberg classroom, back in Doheny (where this time I found a power outlet), and now outside, sitting by a fountain. That's really cool to me.

My laptop battery's been a champ, too. In general I can expect a good 3 hours out of it, a little more if I really crank down power usage. If I got a second battery, I think this thing could really last me all day without having to carry around a cord. I'm fascinated by watching my power usage. Right now ACPI says I'm using 1.1A, which isn't that bad. I can squeeze it to about 0.8A if I'm not using wireless and have the screen brightness down low.

new in verbal

December 02, 2003 by Eric Richardson

So my paper's now done, and The Counter-Cultural Voice of Cinema is now posted in verbal intercourse. Now to print it and head to class, where tonight we're watching The French Connection.

work work work

December 02, 2003 by Eric Richardson

I've written a little over three pages of the paper I mentioned yesterday. I feel like I'm wandering a bit, but on the whole I'm pretty satisfied with how things are going. I headed back to that same room in Doheny to write today, and I really was productive, so I think there might be something to a place like that improving my ability to work. After the class I'm in right now I've got four hours before the class in which the paper is due, so time shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Part of my challenge next semester is to completely overhaul how I do schoolwork. I'm not a good student. I hate taking notes. I have an issue with doing reading, going to class, etc. But I've got three semesters left in which I need to bear down and make use of the advantages available to me. For instance, since I got my laptop I've been trying to figure out how to better take notes. Right now I'm using a program called hnb, which I like but which isn't perfect. I think best in outline format, so an outliner like hnb definitely works best for me. I love being able to export these outlines to HTML, which I can then access easily peruse later. The interface has some things I don't like, but it's the best I've seen for Linux for now.