Tuesday night I got in my car and took a drive over to Venice to check out songwriters on tap, a monthly show put on by OlivoiL Records, which is really Cynthia from Saucy Monky. Lee Beth Kilgore was playing, so she spurred me into finally getting there. I had, to quote Lee Beth, "dos reasons" to be there, since I had told Cynthia a while back that I'd make it out sometime and just hadn't yet.

SoT is the last Tuesday of every month in a back room at O'Briens Pub. The room's great for the size of the event. I'd ballpark 30 people there, but I could be way off. Someone thought they saw Lawrence Fishburn, but I'm in a position to neither confirm nor disconfirm that rumor. The night works in a round format. Four acts up on stage, each plays one song per round, and I think there were five rounds total. Three of the four acts were great. Lisa Sanders' website has a cdbaby link that has some songs on it, so you can check her out there. I can't find a website for Anita Coats, but she reminded me a bit of Heather Nova at times. And I've talked about Lee Beth before, so just search for what I said then and pretend I said it again now.

And now I get to go hang out in class, pretend I'm listening, and probably just get work done online instead.

Sean Bonner recently wrote a blog post titled "Why aren't you using RSS yet?" In it he raves about what RSS -- and more accurately RSS readers -- has done for his experience of the web. I know a lot of people who would agree with him.

I don't.

I don't like viewing a site via an RSS reader. To me it seems that by taking the content out of the confines of the site, and presenting it in isolation, you cut out a large part of the experience. When I put together my site, I don't just think just of the content but also the presentation. I like the way my site looks. I intend that look to in some possibly imperceptible way to alter how you experience the information that I provide. Sure, if you pull my RSS feed into a reader you'll get the things I write. But they'll be orphaned, severed from the contextualization of the environment in which I have placed them.

Maybe this is all egotistical COMM major BS, but to me it means something. When I go to other people's blogs, I prefer to do it via a web browser. Their style colors my perception of their content. I just haven't seen any concessions to this need for context in an RSS reader.

In December I tried to go to Mo' Better Meaty Meat Burgers. The fence was boarded over, and there were no signs of life. I was a bit distraught. Today I drove past again, hoping to see signs that it had been closed for remodelling, or something like that.

No change in condition. Fence still boarded up.

I can't find anywhere where someone has said it's closed. I really hope that's not the case. All physical evidence would seem to point to that, though. If anyone knows any different they better tell me before I go into withdrawl.

So I've had this post sitting on my computer for like three days now and haven't finished it until now. That's pretty sad.

I started off the night Friday heading over into enemy territory to see Magilla's band's first show. The sound was very poorly done -- the guitars were running just off their amps, the vocal was far too low -- but none of this was their fault. I blame the bruins. It's always their fault.

Then it was off for a drive down Sunset to get over to the Hotel Cafe. We got there around 9:20, and Resonant Heads were just going on. They put on a good show. Kathy commented that they had very intelligent lyrics. Lead vocalist Dawn Frinta has a great Cranberries sound to her voice, and Rez Heads put her sound on top of a sort of rock, almost punk, musical style. A good show all around.

Jim Bianco was up next. He's amazing. His band is amazing. They know their stuff cold. Stage presence radiates off of them. Some amazingly funky cool stuff.

Final act of the night was Pedestrian. I was falling asleep at this point, and no amount of loud music was going to change that. They played a little harder stuff than I remember last time, but I'm not sure if that's my memory or really a change in what they do. Still good stuff, though.

I'm sitting at the Original Los Angeles Farmers' Market, enjoying wifi provided by Sticker Planet. It's a bit hard to find power, but other than that it's a great spot to hang out and get some work done. I checked with Alan, and just because your access point is a sticker shop doesn't mean you have to buy stickers. I really don't need stickers.

I did just get blackened catfish and a really good creole mustard potatoe salad from The Gumbo Pot. At $7.50 not the cheapest, but really good.

Yesterday I ran Kismet in my apartment and it found 15 networks. On a hunch today I took my laptop out to our balcony and let it run for a few minutes. This time it found 35 networks. Wow.

The funny part is it doesn't list my network near the top when sorted by signal strength. And yet my network's sitting about 12 feet away from me. Such is the wonder of wireless.

Via Franklin Avenue, I just found out that Fuddruckers bought Koo Koo Roo. Unlike Michael, I have eaten Fuddrucker's ostrich burger and enjoyed it, so I'm looking forward to making my path cross Koo Koo Roo's and picking one up. Perhaps on Wednesday, when I head downtown to the LA Boat Show. Errr... Actually only certain Koo Koo Roo's have Fuddrucker's grill options on the menu. Looks like my possible targets are the Pasadena or Miracle Mile locations.

Over the past few days a bit of a controversy has errupted in the ranks of LA bloggers. LA.com is a new big money backed city guide site, and part of their site is a blog LA.comfidential. LAvoice.org posted a pretty scathing review. This led to an article at LA Blogs. blogging.la got drawn into the whole thing too, formulating a linking policy in response to LA.comfidential pointing to several blogging.la posts in a row. Whew... What a web...

Particularly interesting to me are the comments to both the LAvoices.org and LA Blogs stories. I found the backlash against a corporation trying to enter the sort of LA blogging circle fascinating. If you read through the comments on LA Blogs, you'll find that in the midst of the thread the identity of the LA.comfidential blogger turns out to be Brian Flemming, a local indie writer, director, etc. Even though the bloggers up in arms have nothing against Brian, they still don't warm to his role as blogger for a corporate site. Because his primary objective -- whether he intends it to be or not -- is to drive eyeballs to his site's advertisers, the blogging community sort of eyes him at a distance and is reluctant to treat him as they would another blogger.

All of this matters to me because of a paper I'm writing right now. Instead of looking at a physical location, I'm examining "LA bloggers", by which I mean not just people writing from LA, but more specifically people who structure their online discourse around their location. When the Internet was in the exploding dotcom stage, I don't remember such an emphasis on geographical location as I see these days. Now you have GeoURL, LA-specific Buzznet galleries, and all of the LA blogging meta sites I linked to above.

Now my job is to put all of this together. What significance do LA blogs have? Why is it important to these people to tie their online experience to their physical locale? How is their interaction with the Internet framed by the audience they see themselves writing for? Is it solely an LA audience? So many questions...

I'm sitting right now at the Ragazzi Room, a coffee shop near USC. Near, but really not too near. It's at about Union and 23rd. USC's campus is about 10 blocks south, and "the Row" (where all the frats and sororities are) is about 5 blocks south. I'm making a big deal about pointing this out because I'm confused... Ragazzi Room is a wifi hotspot, but it's a pay one. I'm not all about that. But firing up kismet showed me coverage from USC's wireless network. Granted, it's between 20 - 40% on my signal graph, but it's perfectly usable. What I'm confused about though, is where it's coming from. Is it possible that I'm really picking up signal from the row? I can't believe that. But I don't know of a closer USC building with wireless. There has to be one, I'm just not sure what it would be...

I was looking at my stats the other day and saw a referer that seemed pretty odd. http://www.iletisim.bahcesehir.edu.tr/gep1001/ Now, pretty much I don't get a lot of referers that aren't search engines, and especially not from .edu.anything domains. So I went and checked it out. It's a course page for the University of Bahçeşehir in Turkey. If you look at the URL for the January 8 reading, you'll find that it's a link to an essay I wrote, The Globalization of Hip-Hop Culture. A good essay, if I do say so myself, but I can't say I ever expected it to be the reading at a university in Turkey. This is why the Internet is a crazy thing.

Yesterday Magilla, Kathy, and I went to Grinder for the $2.99 weekday breakfast special (I got pancakes, scrambled eggs, and hash browns). Hitting up their breakfast special is my new thing. I love getting up a little early, heading over there, getting breakfast and a coffee, and getting a start on my day that way.

As we were sitting eating, some FBI agents walked in. Now, normally you see a guy with an FBI hat and you're like, "Somebody got an FBI hat." But I'm pretty convinced that wasn't the case here. About 6 of them came in a big Tahoe, several had combat boots on, and all were earing sunglasses.

Today I read about yesterday's pre-dawn FBI/LAPD raid at a nearby housing project (I saw nearby... maybe 10 miles). Over 400 total officers were involved, so I figure there's a pretty good chance that these guys were heading back to the office after that and stopped by to partake in the special. That's sort of crazy.

I bought a new soundcard last night. My old one came with my computer in 1997, so it was getting up a bit in years and I couldn't find any up-to-date support for it. Since they're cheap and pretty standard, I picked up a SB Live!. Installation was a breeze. I stuck it in, compiled the right kernel module, modprobed it, and there it was. The mixer shows 32 elements with volume sliders. I have no idea what most of them are.

It'll be good to have sound out of my computer again. I was getting kind of lonely without it.

Last night I finally rid myself of a month long absense from live music, heading out to the Hotel Cafe in order to see Steve Reynolds. I don't know if it's just that I'm starting to go on heavier nights, but each time I go to the Hotel it seems like its more and more crowded. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing -- the Hotel's an amazing place and it's great to see it doing so well -- but the crowd does make things a little less convenient. Kathy and I showed up around 10, and the doorman was having to not let anyone more in until some of the crowd from Coby Brown cleared out. It was packed for Quincy, and then we managed to get seats at a table for Steve's set. Moral of the story? Go early, stake a claim, and enjoy a full night of music.

But on to the music...

Steve was on at 11, so we got there in time for the 10pm, which was Quincy. I knew it was going to be a good night when I saw that Cisco DeLuna was playing with her. I first saw Cisco playing with Steve a couple years ago, and his lap steel has mesmerized me ever since. Quincy has a powerful voice and a sharp stage presence. The clips available off her site give a pretty good feel for what the live show sounds like. I especially enjoyed Afraid. Quincy would do this lateral head move a lot that I thought was pretty hot. When I was a freshman we called the corresponding front-to-back motion the pigeon. I guess hers would qualify as a sideways-pigeon.

Steve Reynolds played at 11, and it was a little bit of a throw-back show. Cisco (along with the drummer and bassist from Quincy's band) stayed up to play. That was definitely cool, since it'd been a while since I'd seen Steve and Cisco together. Steve's vibrating leg was back in high gear, which it hadn't been the last few times I saw him. And then, to top it all off, he played an instrumental Passport of a Minstrel at the end. When Steve plays instrumental, I go into shock. He and Rodney Branigan are the two guitarists I've ever seen that just make me sit there shaking my head in awe.

Friday I'm planning to head back to the Hotel to catch Jim Bianco and Pedestrian.

ESPN's top story image caption after our upset of Arizona:

Wow. That line's so bad, yet so funny, that it reminds me of one of my favorite jokes:

A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel attached to his crotch. The bartender looks at him and says, "Hey... Did you know you've got a steering wheel attached to your crotch?"

The pirate looks at him in that pirate way and says, "Arrrr! It's drivin' me nuts!"

I took the long way between classes today. I wanted to see people I knew, and the more people I walk past, the more chance I have to run into them. I'd say it's chilly out, but really it's about 65, so I don't think that would fly. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt, I wished for a half-sleeve.

I feel like a student this semester. I'm a week in, and I haven't skipped a class. You would think that's not an accomplishment, but then you wouldn't know me.

I'm sitting at the Annenberg patio, just enjoying the weather and getting a little work done. A girl across the way is talking on her cell phone. "Do you want to go to the basketball game? It's the number seven team." She probably hasn't been to another game this year. Maybe she'll come again when we play Stanford, and to the UCLA game. That would probably be about it.

USC is a football school, obviously. You would like to think, though, that a football school would still be able to garner a decent amount of support for its basketball team. That's not the case here. Sure, USC's team has struggled this year and last, and the students I talk to are definitely aware of that. Beyond, though, they know very little. They care very little. We're not good so they're not going.

At the last game before Christmas break someone got pissed at D4 and me for standing during the game. In the student section. That's ridiculous. Show some pride, people. If you're going to go to a game, show some support. Otherwise, don't come, and I won't miss you.

So yesterday I spent a couple hours hanging out on campups, signing people up for the waterski/wakeboard club. Someone from the Daily Trojan came by and took my picture, so I figured there was a fair chance of getting in today's issue. How odd to instead take a look and find that they used a picture of D4, my roomate.

I noticed the other day that all of a sudden a lot of spam (6-8 messages per day) was getting through SpamAssassin and getting to me. I get a lot of spam, but usually SA does a really good job in filtering it out and keeping it from my eyes.

The spam that's been getting through appears to be part of one campaign that's intent on tricking SA's HABEAS_SWE check. I had never heard of that, so I looked into it. Apparently Habeas is a company that gives their headers to companies that warrant their email is legitimate. They're well aware that someone has been forging their mark.

I'm upgrading SA to 2.6.1, which should be able to check Habeas's blacklist before believing their mark, so hopefully that'll put a stop to this, at least where I'm concerned.

I'm still working on getting things back up to speed on the new drive. I haven't gotten anywhere with data recovery, but it is nice to have up-to-date versions of all the libs.

Last night I got Evolution syncing with my phone via MultiSync (which I've mentioned before). In Evolution I can manage todos, calendar info, and my contacts, and then sync them all to the phone via Bluetooth. It's very slick stuff.

Right now I'm working on getting my soundcard working under ALSA. I've used the OpenSound drivers forever, but now that ALSA's the sound standard in 2.6 it's time to make the change.

Sitting in 9am discussion for REL131. We have a Dr. for a TA, which is a change of pace. He's the Episcopalian chaplain on campus, and is TA'ing the course because apparently the Religion department has a lack of doctorate students at the moment.

Right now we're talking about plagarism. I've got a little experience with that... USC likes to talk about how it can be plagarism even if you're copying yourself. I've always found that funny.

This semester I'm making up a few gen-ed classes I passed up when I first started here at USC. I really didn't want to take them the first time through -- so I didn't -- and I really don't desire all too much to take them now.

GE classes aren't like other classes. They think you're a Freshman, so they're strict. Strict attendance policies, mandatory discussion sections, pop quizes... GEs have them all.

I'm in Religions of Asia right now (both for the semester, and as I write this). If you follow that link and click through to the requirements, you'll find that they "tolerate" one discussion section absense. Well isn't that generous...

I used to tolerate being a student. It was one of those things I had to do -- and I guess it still is -- but now I'm just ready to be done. I want to get out into the world, to do something cool.

How am I supposed to do anything cool when I'm stuck in a room on a Wednesday morning with a bunch of freshman talking about the stuff that we've already gone over in the lecture?

Sitting waiting for class to start... This class is BISC 230: Brain, Mind, and Machines. Hopefully this will go short so that I can go get some food. I loved not starting until 12:30 today. I got up around 9:30, read about 30 pages in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. I'm on page 300 or so at this point, so I won't write anything about it until I finish. At about 915 pages, that could be a little while. So I read a little, messed around on the computer for a while, and then got ready around 11:45. All in all a relaxing morning.

Classes start today. I basically have just Tuesday/Thursday classes again this semester (minus one discussion on Wednesday morning), and today I don't start until 12:30. Granted my day today does run until 10pm, though. My classes today: Brain, Mind, and Machine: Topics in Neuroscience, Writing 340 (Advanced Writing for Social Science), Religions of Asia, and History of the American Film, 1977-Present. You know, actually that's all of my classes.

I need to figure out a new routine for having my laptop battery charged up going into my 6pm class. I either need to not use it much in the classes before, or find an outlet during one of my classes. My only real break today is 5:30 - 6, and that's not going to be enough for anything more than a bite to eat.

I'm trying to figure out if Toshiba even sells a second battery for the Satellite A10. I can't seem to find one. They sell the primary battery for $100, though, so that might not be a bad idea to pick that up and just carry a spare to swap in.

I bought a new hard drive today... 160GB IDE drive from Staples for $140. The 120GB was $130, so 160 seemed to be the sweet spot in the price curve right now. Since my computer refuses to boot from cd, I took the drive over to Kathy's, popped it in the place of her drive, and installed Linux on it that way. That part went fine.

Then I grab the drive, bring it back to my place, and throw it in my computer. Success, it boots up just fine. But now a 60GB IDE drive I have music on doesn't want to be recognized. The BIOS had never detected it right, but before Linux picked it up just fine. Now, though, it doesn't.

I don't want to bore this space with a litany of details, but if you're interested click to read on...

Continue Reading...

So my desktop is pretty much down for the count. I don't know what caused the drive to go screwy -- it most likely had something to do with the power supply shutting down quickly when it overheated after the fan died, but I don't know for sure -- but whatever it is must have done its job well. The computer also refuses to boot from a CD, even after trying multiple boot cds and two cd-rom drives, so it's entirely possible the motherboard's not all with it.

So that's cool. I don't really have a sure plan of action yet. I think I need to buy a new hard drive (which I really needed anyway), install Linux on it in another computer, transfer the drive over to my computer, pray that it works, and then try to recover data from there. We'll see how that goes.

My laptop hard drive hasn't died yet, even though I think it's about to every time it makes a noise. I think I'm going to need it to last another week while I figure this other unpleasantry out.

Computers obviously don't like me. I'm back in LA now, and came back to find that my computer here wasn't off because anybody turned it off, actually the power supply fan just fried. For those with a long memory, I've actually had this happen before.

So I went down to Radio Shack and bought a new fan, rigged it in the same way I had done the last fan (which also didn't really fit the spot), boot it up, and leave.

I come come back, with a new wireless router -- since they're so cheap these days I figured it was time for my computer to not play that role -- and start to work setting that up. I hop over to my computer to change some network settings, and... no /etc (the directory where most settings are). Apparently it's just vanished. I tried rebooting, to see if something funky just happened on boot, and... no grub (my boot-loader, the thing that makes the operating system go).

Right now I'm downloading a system rescue cd to see what I can figure out from that. I'm doing this via my laptop, which I'm still convinced could lose its hard drive at any moment.

Maybe this is a sign.

Kathy's house got a cable modem installed today, so I just came over to get it all configured (they just installed the modem itself). Installation went fine, we've got the cable modem and a little Linksys wireless router sitting in the living room, and then a PCI wireless card in the computer upstairs. Running cable upstairs would have been a pain in their big old brick house, so wireless was just easier.

Their computer is a bit older, PIII era, running Windows 98SE. I noticed that as it was booting up, it just churned and churned, so I figured there were probably things running that really needn't be. I downloaded Ad Aware, ran it, and it found 400+ objects. Granted, some of those are harmless cookie files, but there's definitely some Gator floating around as well as some other nefarious crap. Time to get those blown away and see if things speed up.

In the name of keeping things up to date, I just went through and redid my web favorites page. Now it's a bit more up to date in terms of LA related sites I read and links to bands that I've seen around town. I need to rethink most of the stuff under favorites and try and see how all that can integrate into the site better.

Sitting right now at Founders, in Grand Rapids, MI, with Alan and Joel. Places with free wifi are very cool, but something I've never really gotten into in LA. I need to find more cool places to sit, have a drink, and get some work done. It's much cooler to sit at a place like this than it is to sit on the couch in my apartment.

My laptop taunts me. It wants to work. It boots up. It pretends to be fine. And then the drive's like, "well, maybe I don't want to work. maybe i'll just take my time getting your data." Any time you're getting percentages in the iowait line in top -- when you're not really doing anything, mind you -- that's not a good thing. But, as of right now, it's running. If I can nurse it back to California, my life will be a lot better.

Wimpy machine... Just suck it up and work.

My laptop is in agony. The hard drive might as well be toast. Nothing runs, just a lot of I/O errors. I appreciate that it died slowly, but I really would have preferred that it hadn't died at all. Tomorrow I get to brave snow-covered roads to drive over to Grand Rapids and see about getting the drive replaced. Then, joy of all joys, I get to go through the entire process of reinstalling everything. Just what I wanted to do during my last few days at home.

I think the drive might not even be spinning any more. The apps that have themselves all in memory are still up (which really is just the browser now). Everything else disappears when I touch it.

Now to post and kill this thing once and for all. Or at least until tommorrow, when I should get a new drive...

I don't know how long it's been since I've made changes to the look of this blog as I've made over the course of the last few days. Today another small addition. Entries older than the first day are now collapsed by default, and you have to expand them to see the full text. The idea is that this makes it easier to scan the entries and also allows me to have more posts on the page without making it a mile long and unwieldy.

User Interface work is always interesting because you never really know how people are going to come at what you're doing. The preconceptions and style they bring to browsing your site determine how they're going to use it, and you can't really predict that fully. Read on to get more of my UI thoughts.

Continue Reading...

I just had one of those moments when you go, "Wow. Technology is pretty crazy." I've been toying with bluetooth stuff all day, and just now I took a shot at setting up bluexmms. I had my moment of awe while standing across the room adjusting the volume on my computer via my phone.

For those of you unfamiliar with the technology, basically what happens is the computer (via software like bluexmms) sends out a signal over the air that says "I am a phone accessory providing this functionality." The phone sees that and adds it to its Accessories menu. Once it's there you can then use it just as you might use any built-in functionality on the phone.

I've also figured out how to transfer images to my computer via bluetooth, something that is very handy.

I just backed up all the contacts on my phone to my computer, via bluetooth in Linux. I bought a bluetooth USB adaptor the other day, and then used MultiSync to transfer the data off and back it up. Now I just need to figure out what I can do with it locally, and I need something for transferring files via bluetooth so that I can use Linux to get pictures off my phone.

Spirit has landed. I was at a movie tonight, so I wasn't around to watch the live feed during the tense moments. JPL looks to be a happy place right about now. It's pretty crazy to think that a couple months ago I was standing in the observation area of the assembly building looking down on two packages getting wrapped up for a flight to Florida. One of those is now sitting on the surface of Mars. Mars! Even as I'm saying that, I don't know if I can really grasp the scale of it.

Two new features premiering at once here. First off, you'll notice that posts now have a listed location. I wrote in some support for creating locations and then each time I post I assign it to one of those locations. I have some really cool plans for this, but right now all that this gives you is the ability to limit your view to posts at a location. Kind of cool for seeing where I am at a glance, but not real useful for anything else yet. The important word there is yet... Hopefully soon...

The second feature was inspired by the layout of Marc Canter's blog. As I've mentioned before, I really like outlines, and I loved the ability to expand/collapse posts on his site. His navigation appears to come from activeRenderer, but I wasn't sure quite how any of that played together, so I ended up just writing my own javascript to do it. Nothing overly complex, but I think it's a really cool effect. I'll try to put together some step-by-step instructions later, but it's pretty easy to figure out if you just open up my html and the javascript file included.

One of the things I like least about laptops is the lack of a full 101 keys and getting stuck with two buttons. Today I got around to doing something about it.

There are two things that annoy me most about using my laptop. 1) No middle mouse button. 2) No right-hand Ctrl key. In Linux, which is what I use on the laptop 99.9% of the time, I use the middle button to paste and also an alt-middle drag combination for resizing windows. I use ctrl-(left|right) for desktop navigation, and tend to do this with just the right hand.

Thanks to some handy instructions found here, changing my keyboard mapping around to solve both of these problems was pretty easy. I won't bore the main page with the technical solution, but click to get it.

Continue Reading...

I haven't mentioned football very often here, which is a bit odd, since each fall the college game comes very close to being atop the list of things taking my time.

Yesterday USC capped off the college football season with a win against Michigan. Everyone knows that. Anyone who watched the game or has read the articles realizes that Michigan had given up 5 passing touchdowns all year. Yesterday they gave up four. Everyone knows that Michigan had given up 15 sacks all year. Yesterday they gave up nine.

I don't know what can or should be done to fix the BCS system. What cannot be denied is that this system does not pick the two best teams in the country as participants for its national championship game. It didn't a couple years ago when Florida St went over Miami, it didn't when Nebraska went over Oregon, and it didn't this year. In my mind, no system at all is better than a system that so consistently fails at the explicit goal for which it was created.

I loved the Rose Bowl. I loved the matchup. I would rather have had USC play Michigan than either of the two teams that will line up Sunday night in New Orleans. I have no problem with the old system that produced occasional split national championships. If USC this year proves the catalyst for the dramatic change or removal of the BCS, I will be pleased.

Speaking of USC football, I have to mention right now the one site that got me through the football season. Garry and the rest of the staff of WeAreSC have done an amazing job all year, and I don't know what I would have done this summer without their daily practice reports.