I get a lot spam. Typically it's on the order of 330 or so a day. July of 2002 I installed SpamAssassin, and that definitely made email bearable again. Over the last week or so, though, all of a sudden many more messages are getting through than were before. I've gone from getting up in the morning to see 1 or 2 spams that trickled through to seeing 17 this morning.

Because of this, today I decided to get CRM114 a shot. Aside from having the cool Dr. Strangelove name, it's also been getting some good press lately. I'd say it's too early to really know how it's doing, since it involves a training process, but already it's grabbing most of my spam and throwing it into a seperate box. It mis-classified one message as spam, but it's allowed to do that before it has any built up data to work with.

I'm cautiously optimistic this'll help me out.

I got a copy of Justin Rosolino's new cd Wonderlust the other day. It's been quite a while since Justin's last album, so it's good to see something new coming from him. A lot of people come to my site looking for justin since his entry in whatsplaying shows up at #4 & 5 (3 & 4 until justin just put his site back online) on google.

The album is a mix of new songs and new versions of some older songs. I was really excited to hear his studio versions of songs like "Legacy" and "Anyone". Justin has an amazing voice and writes some really honest songs, and these still resonate with me like they did when I first heard them three and a half years ago. "Oprah" is a fun up-tempo new track. There's also a hidden instrumental track (track 29) which really struck me for how much it sounds like something that could be off a cd by Rodney Branigan. Definitely a cool cd, and worth picking up. Justin's going to be out here in LA in April, so we're working on hooking him up with a show then.

Over at LA Blogs they mention that the mayor of Hermosa Beach is going to be at tonight's SoCal Wireless Users Group meeting talking about his plan to have city-wide wifi.

Now, I don't know how much of a pipe-dream this is, or if he's really got the power to pull it off, but I think this would be amazing. I've gotten pretty spoiled having wifi access on campus at USC, and it's starting to be one of those things where I'm surprised when I go somewhere and can't find an access point.

It used to be my plan to move to the beach next year for my senior year. That's not going to happen (it'll be downtown instead), but I definitely intend to end up at the beach for at least a year or two after college. Wifi in Hermosa could definitely tilt the balance in its favor. Not that getting me to move there really means much, but I'd like to assume I'd not so abnormal that others wouldn't have sort of the same thought process.

Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing linked to the paper. I had never heard of Marshall McLuhan, but he Bruce says I ask "some McLuhanesque questions about the nature of blogs." All I have to say is, that's one crazy bio.

It's interesting to start seeing online response to my paper on blogs and corporations.

Sean Bonner instigated a lot of the spreading, on his site, blogging.la, and Suicide Girls.

Onlineblog.com, a blogging site "produced daily by the Guardian Online team," has a very well-spoken take. I responded in the comments there, so be sure to give that a look.

MEMORI is in Dutch(?), so I can't really read it, but they gave mention as well.

I don't at all consider myself an expert, just the one who wrote the paper, so I'm really interested in seeing the debate continue from this.

It's interesting to watch USC preparing for the democratic debate to be held here Thursday. Kerry, Edwards, Kucinich, and Sharpton will be here, debating live on CNN. Business Wire has an interesting release giving all the media instructions. Annenberg will be the post-debate location, so we've been getting emails with moved classes and limited access instructions for the building that day.

From the release, Soapbox will be be providing wifi and voice access to media during the event. I'm curious if that's just an indication of USC's limited involvement (clearly the USC bandwidth could handle adding reporters for a night), or just that it's easier to contract everything out rather than worry about setting up one-time systems. $350 for a press member to get a phone line for the evening. $145 for wireless internet (a steal compared to the $350 for hard-wired ethernet).

The DT had an article today about how USC's putting protestors in a little bit of Trousdale just south of the auditorium. You have to register two weeks in advance to protest, so it'll be interesting to see if a lot of groups did or if people will show up intending to protest and then get the boot from DPS.

I have classes Thursday afternoon, so it'll be entertaining to see the swarm of satellite trucks that descend on campus then.

My dad sent me a link today to a 'blog post' (it's a magazine. it's an editorial. we just went over this.) on ChristianityToday.com entitled "The Web and the Exaggerated Demise of Geography". This is sort of what I was talking about in my paper I didn't write.

I think the global aspects of the Internet are amazing. Right now I'm working on a project with one developer in Spain, one in Michigan, and me out here in California. The other day all three of us were in an IM chat, talking about what needed to be done, sharing files, and doing things that pre-Internet were simply unattainable.

But the global Internet isn't what excites me right now.

Right now I care about the local Internet. I care about local food reviews. I care about local music. I care about local pictures. These things have a context that's important to my everyday life. It excites me to think about people all across my city adding content to their websites, content that can then find its way to my screen and help me understand the things around me. That's what's cool about the Internet. It's instant access to the information that is relevant to me.

The global stuff's cool, too, just in a less relevent to my day to day life sort of way.

This is the paper I thought about, got more confused about, wrote something totally different, and then finally managed to get my head around. I think it came out pretty well, and I've finally got it online in verbal intercourse. So check it out: Can Blogs and Corporations Co-exist?

Today my phone appears to be working like a champ. An hour plus outside exposed to the rainy elements, and it comes away with no noticable ill effects. That's crazy.

Tonight, getting out of my car at church,I heard a sound of gravel as my feet hit the pavement. It was dark and raining, and I thought the sound to be just some loose stones underfoot.

In reality, the sound was my phone hitting the ground.

At the start of the trip I had been on the phone with Kathy, figuring out where to pick her up. I had eventually placed the phone in my lap, it being awkward to put it back in my pocket while seated. There it had stayed until my arising bounced it out into the cold and wet outdoors.

I found it sitting there when we returned to the car. By that point it didn't surprise me. I sort of figured that had been the case. My phone was lying on the ground, face up, button-illuminating lights shining but nothing on the display. I picked it up, removed the battery, and set it down in my car.

The parts of the phone I can touch feel pretty dry now. When I put the battery back into the phone and press the power button, it does indeed turn on, find the network, alert me that the time needs updating, and can even tell me that I'm receiving a call. As of yet none of the buttons work, and it doesn't seem to want to vibrate.

August of 2001 I got pushed into a pool with an Ericsson T28 World in my pocket. It vibrated as I hit the water, then went dead. I got out, toweled it off, and gave it a shot. I think it vibrated as if it were turning on, and that was it. The next day I went and got a new phone.

The T28 wasn't done, though. A day or two later I tried it again, and it went a little farther. A couple days after that, it would start up completely. Eventually the phone ended up working just as well as it did before, and a friend used that phone for months.

Hopefully the T616 shows the same resilience.

So I did my taxes today. My taxes are made infinitely more complicated than they should be by the fact that I have a little contracting income, and also have income in both Michigan and California. I used H&R Block's free service to do my federal, which made life a bit easier. I did the states by hand, though.

Good to have it out of the way. It's not that I'm really this ahead of things (last year I definitely mailed them on April 15th), but I need them for a USC financial aid deadline next week.

Getting out to Ground Zero last night to see Saucy Monky reminded me how hard it is to run a successful music room in LA. Sure, GZ may get packed out a few times a year, but most of the time it's just as it was last night. There were probably around 20 people there most of the night, in a room that's sized to accept 60 sitting or who knows how many if it was standing-room. I get the feeling GZ doesn't know if they're a big room or not. The main seating (that people choose to use, at least) is a bunch of couches, but these couches are a good 25 - 30 feet from stage. So you end up with the few people you do have sitting far away from the stage, and nobody else up front. If I were in charge I'd take those couches 15 feet closer to the stage, turn down the mains and run the place like a coffee house instead of a rock club. But I'm not in charge...

Saucy was good, as usual. The sound guy was in love with reverb, possibly wanting to cancel out the effect of the dampening tiles in the ceiling and bring out the room's natural cement qualities. The band played some stuff that I don't think I'd heard before, which is always cool. Hopefully the next time we get them back to USC it'll be under much better circumstances. I really want to see them play one of the spring noon-time concerts that we have out in front of Tommy. I think they'd really be able to catch some walk-by traffic.

Saucy Monky, an LA band I get out to see whenever possible, is going to be playing a show at USC's Ground Zero Coffee House tomorrow night at 9pm. It should be a really good time, and it's free, so if you're in the area definitely check it out.

Alan wrote today about Google's new search by location and how you can use that to search for wi-fi access. Theoretically, that may be the case, but results for my area show that things are far spottier than they appear in Grand Rapids. Let's look at this search for wi-fi near 90007:

LA's not doing too well on the weather front right now. Yesterday was chilly and rainy. Saturday and Sunday weather.com is saying we're going to get more. And then again next week. Normally when it's nice I'd be setting up shop in my office on campus, enjoying the sun while getting some work done. But that's hard to do in this weather. I end up working from my apartment instead. What I really need is something like Founders in GR.

LA has a lot of great old bar/resturants (I went there for lunch on Monday) but what I can't seem to find is that same kind of place, but with wireless. Alan's list of free wifi in Grand Rapids is pretty extensive. Where's that same list for LA?

I'm skipping out on watching Bullets over Broadway right now in my Post-Modernism class in order to check out the Veritas Forum at USC. Dallas Willard is speaking tonight. So I figure in a choice between him and Woody Allen, the former is a little more important. Add this to the films I need to rent in the next few weeks.

I took a trip to nowhere for the last week or so. I think I got busy, but really the time just sort of disappeared and all of sudden I was here now and it was gone and ... uhhh... yeah.

Saturday the waterski team took its first trip out for the semester, braving the 54 degree waters of Lake Elsinore. Weather was crappy in the morning, but cleared out for the afternoon leaving sunny skies and glassy water.

Saturday night Kathy and I went to Tesoro Tratteria for Valentines dinner. OpenTable was my best friend in the hunt for a resturant, along with the Downtown News resturant guide. They were out of the crab cakes in the second course, but other than that I was pretty satisfied. Off their special Valentines menu I had the PUREÈ OF GOLDEN CHANTERELLE SOUP, the AHI TUNA TARTARE ON TOAST POINT, the SAFFRON FETTUCCINE WITH LOBSTER AND MUSSELS, and finally the RASPBERRY CHOCOLATE MOUSSE HEART (sorry about the caps... i'm just copying and pasting).

Sunday night we hit up Genghis Cohen to see Yardley, which is now starting to actually look like a band with the addition of drummer Stuart Johnson (formerly of the New Radicals). Lee Beth had to fight through having an unplugged monitor and not being able to hear herself, but she did just fine.

Monday Magilla and I walked around downtown, looking for an apartment for next year. Our leading candidate right now is Premiere Towers, on Spring between 6th and 7th. They have 2br/2ba for $1300, which would be ridiculous a lot of places, but is cheap in LA. City Park wants $1820 next year for less space and crappier facilities.

And I think that brings us up to date. Whew.

I'm doing some contract work these days, just really getting started into it. We were going through some stuff on the phone last week, with them just giving me a bit of feel for the context of the code I'll be working in. The code's broken up into layers, with layer 4 being the user interface and layer 1 being the database. Layer 2 is low-level db calls, etc, while layer 3 is sort of layer 2 glue. Yadd yadda yadda...

Anyway, what I found interesting was that they wanted me to start in Layer 2, building all the low-level db calls, and then only once all of that was done to start on level 3.

There's nothing wrong with that approach, I guess, but it just struck me that it was completely backwards of how I tend to write software. The first thing I do is prototype the GUI, be it on the web or something in Glade. Once I have the GUI I'll stub functions underneath to understand flow. Only once all that is filled out do I actually write any of the code that does anything.

I think this is why I'm a communications major and not computer science. I've always told people I want to be just as technical as I need to be to get the job done.

I'm curious how other people look at this? What way do you approach something like this? Big picture, or foundation?

I recently reaquired a couple Portishead albums. I first got into them in 1998 when Roseland NYC was coming out. My introduction was actually by way of NPR, which was a lot more random for me then than it would be now. Sitting here right now, on a sunny socal day but in the shade with headphones on, something just makes this absolutely the right song to be on. Beth Gibbons vocals are hauntingly beautiful. Of the Portishead albums this one, Portishead, is probably the least of my favorites, but I just love this song. In the same vein is "Roads", off of Dummy.

I link to flavorpill LA off of my web favorites, but haven't ever gotten around to mentioning it here. It's not any sort of a comprehensive listing, but it does highlight cool events happening in LA.

Today my context for actually making mention is that the current issue talks about Overwrought, an art show occuring in Venice on Friday. While I'm not generally the art show type of guy, Erik Penny's electronic/ambient solo-sideproject, Maxy Wango, is the soundtrack for the evening. Now, let's take a second to say... That's one cool name. How do you go from naming a band after yourself to coming up with a name like that? Second note... Right now there are no google results for "Maxy Wango". Will I be the first?

I'm somewhat in the market for a hosting provider right now. I say somewhat because I don't have a firm timetable on when I need to make a switch, and might end up getting colo space on the barter system. Anyway... Were I to be purchasing hosting at this moment, I think I would be going with Linode. I hadn't heard of them until today, but they offer exactly what I need. I've been spoiled by having my own box in a colo. I run qmail, I play with console apps, I do whatever. With Linode you get a virtual Linux server, so you can do all that. You get to pick a distro to install, and user-side everything behaves like it's your own box. Pricing is pretty good, and the ability to remotely reboot and reinstall with confidence is very cool. Definitely something I'll be keeping in mind.

Today's running really backwards. I'm waiting for UPS to bring me a pair of packages (memory and a battery for my laptop), and as of 1pm they haven't come yet, but normally they'll all about morning delivery. On the other hand the mail, which never comes before 3:30pm or so, was here at 11:45am. I'm confused.

The mail brought me a copy of Bennett Mosier's 2000 solo album, so I'll be writing about that sometime soon.

So today the spring installment of my National Merit scholarship came in. It's February 10, which means that it arrived pretty close to a month after school started. Now, I don't know exactly what processes are involved in actually getting these out, or even really who the money's coming from, but it would seem to me that if all you do is send out scholarship checks, you would make a point of being able to get them there around when school starts. That is usually when they're needed, after all.

On the plus side, I can head over to the cashiers office today and pick up a $1000 check. Last fall I used that check to buy my laptop. This time it'll be going largely toward paying some bills and paying off several hundred dollars worth of books I had to buy at the beginning of the semester.

So, uhhhh, it's been a week since I posted. I really didn't intend that, it just sort of snuck up on me. Granted, a chunk of the time was spent in Vegas, so you can't take Internet access, or really even caring about the Internet, for granted there. This weekend was the Western Collegiate Water Ski Association's captains meeting, and I was there representing the USC Waterski Team. Since I was the only USC person going I ended up hitching a ride with the bruins. That would be a tougher thing to bring myself to do if we didn't absolutely own LA sports these days. You almost feel sorry for the little cubbies...

I was talking to a professor today and he asked me where I worked. I told him JPL, and it didn't ring a bell. "The Jet Propulsion Lab," I tried. "Is that on campus?"

No, it's not. And it's only been in the news pretty much constantly in the past month for having a pair of rovers operating on the surface of Mars. But who would have heard of that?

Last night / this morning I wrote a paper on blogging. It was for the assignment I mentioned a week ago. Nothing from this draft will end up in the final. I've mulled this paper for a week and a half now having no clue what it was that I was actually going to write. I thought I had a good idea, but the step that turns that magic idea into a bit of reality with a thesis was nowhere to be found.

So I wrote this draft. It's a decently written piece, but it's not this paper.

Then I took a shower, and instantly knew what I wanted to write. My real problem was that I had two papers fighting in my head.

In one, I would write about how I felt that the first few years of the Internet were us sort of doing things just because they could be done. "Wooo! The Internet's global!" we said, and we reveled in the fact that we could now order cds from Sweden and chat with people in Spain. The global information economy ruled. Then a couple years later we looked around and saw that 90% of our lives weren't global. When I go grab a bite to eat it's here, in LA. When I go to a movie it's here, in LA. When I go see music it's here, in LA. And my thesis would be that sites like blogging.la and LA Blogs and others like them are a response to that 90%.

I'm not writing that paper either.

My second paper would couch itself in a narration. It would look at the LA.comfidential controversy and say, why are these bloggers so uptight about a corporation trying to sneak into their club? What is it they're trying to protect or worried to lose? Why can't a corporation write a blog? Tony Pierce seems to always be talking about wanting to do it. Yeah, sure, he sees the downsides, but when has that ever stopped anyone?

This is the paper I'm writing. It'll go better now that we have that out of the way.

I have a draft due tomorrow for my blogging paper I mentioned a few days ago. As of right now I couldn't really tell you much about where it's going. I feel like I'm right on the edge of the thesis that sparks the entire paper.

But I don't have it yet.

First off, I need to make a case for why blogs are significant. Then I need to say why it's important that a bunch of bloggers are centering their sites around their real-world location. Here are the type of notes I keep writing myself:

Geography contextualizes what you have to say into a frame of reference where I can relate to it and understand it.

It'll be interesting... After tomorrow I have a good week and a half before the final's due, so I'm sure there will definitely be a lot of revision and realignment between now and then.

I'm looking to buy an extra battery for my laptop. Right now I get about three and a half hours from one battery, so I figure getting into the 6 - 7 hour range will basically free me up to go unplugged all day. My laptop doesn't support having two batteries in at once, so it would be a deal where I would have to suspend to disk and swap them, but other than the hassle of switching them out to charge, that's not too big of a deal. Toshiba has the battery I need for $99. That's not bad at all. What's surprising is that their price is by far the lowest I can find. CDW, where I normally look for low prices, has the same battery for $140. Odd. Toshiba also has 256MB of RAM for $79, so if it turns out I've got an open slot (which I'm pretty sure I do, I'll most likely pick that up too.