Today one of the buttons on my phone stopped working. The phone was on silent, so I didn't hear it ring. It vibrated itself straight off a pile of papers and over the edge of the table. When I picked it up, the button didn't work. I pushed it hard, but nothing. I turned it off and on, but nothing. I removed the battery and gently put it back into place, but nothing. Then I threw the phone at the floor, and the screen went black. I pushed the power button. It took longer than usual to start back up. The hourglass glared at me. And then it was fine. Everything worked.

If it tries that again I'm throwing it harder. That'll show it.

So in the last post I mentioned it was Kathy's birthday yesterday, but forgot to include what we did. I think the car stuff sort of threading through my tale confused me and got me off track. Anyway...

Mid-afternoon we headed out to Manhattan Beach and hung out there for a few hours. Surprisingly the water was really nice, and we went in for a swim. I think surfreport listed the water temp at 60, which isn't bad at all for the Pacific right now.

After coming back and getting all cleaned up we got in the car and pointed ourselves toward Hollywood (though really southwest Hollywood) where I had made dinner reservations at Citrine on Melrose. Now, looking at the menu on their website you see a "prix fixe" section, with a very moderate price. Uhhh... That's not actually on their menu. Instead they have a chef's tasting menu, which is quite a bit more than that. Kathy's only going to turn 21 once, though, so we went ahead and both got that with the wine selections (I try to be fancy every once in a while). The food was excellent.

Course one was a calamari salad, which really wasn't much of a salad. It was more just calamari with some accompaniments for flavour. I won't even attempt to remember what the wine choices were. Our waiter (who was great) would tell us what each one was, but for me it was really in one ear and out the other. Course two was a soup, a little potatoe cake, and a crawfish. I had to ask our waiter how you eat a crawfish -- I knew you ate the tail but I didn't know the approved way to go about that. Then there was a little sorbet to cleanse the palate. Course three was a fish... I think Halibut? In any case very tender and very good. The plate also had artichoke hearts, and I can't remember what else. Course four was lamb, with some peas and corn. All were very well presented. For dessert we substituted from what had been on the tasting menu. I went for a Baileys souffle and Kathy had the apple tres leches.

Oh... I almost forgot the best part. Before course one there was a cucumber soup, presented in a tall shot glass (maybe double shot sized). I thought that was cool.

It was a Monday night, so the restaurant was pretty empty. They let us choose where we wanted to sit, and Kathy chose a nice corner booth. Since the place wasn't busy it felt like every dish was a bit of a group project where the kitchen was concerned. You'd see a lot of one person preparing a dish while one or two more stood and watched.

My only problem with the evening? The valet guy. He came to my door instead of Kathy's, which I thought was just kind of weird. I thought the first thing they taught you in valet school was that you always open the door for the lady first. Odd.

All in all a very good evening, though my wallet probably won't give me a return trip any time soon.

It feels like forever since I last managed to scribble a few words here, but really it was just Thursday. Let's see if I can put together what's happened since then...

Thursday and Friday we got to hang out with my sister Amy, which was cool. Being halfway across the country I don't get to see her very often, and I don't know when else I would have gotten to see her play softball. I saw her hit her first college homerun and have a game where she went 3 for 3 with 5 RBIs.

Friday night my dad and I went with Taylor to see U of A play the USA Olympic Team.

Saturday morning I flew back to LAX. Kathy picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at my apartment. I went upstairs, grabbed dirty clothes out of my bag, threw a couple new things in, grabbed a pair of waterski gloves and headed down to my car. Waiting to meet me in our basement parking area was the fact that sometime between Wednesday and Saturday my car got broken into, and my cd player got stolen. I had far more important stuff (wakeboards, etc) in my trunk, but those got left untouched. All that got taken was the cd player (6 years old with a tendency to skip), my garage door opener, and a pair of sunglasses (prescription no less, so they'll be fun to wear). More annoying was that they broke the front passenger side lock to get in, and getting a new handle and lock cylinder is about $300 with installation.

But I didn't really worry about any of that on Saturday. Saturday I wanted to waterski. So I cleaned things up a bit, stopped by campus to pick someone up, and headed out to Mecca, CA -- the absolute middle of nowhere. Private ski lakes are always out in the boonies, and this was no exception. This was a pre-season warmup/fundraiser for the USD Waterski Team. We skiied Saturday, stayed up late, and then the sun woke everyone up for a bit more skiing on Sunday.

Got back to LA mid-afternoon Sunday, laid down for a bit to recover from four straight days of sun, and then headed to Chili's and then to church. There were two new Simpsons on Sunday night, but I only watched one. I'll download the other and add it to my collection, which currently stands at around 275 episodes (there have been 320 or so total, I think).

Monday -- yesterday -- was Kathy's birthday. Before I could do anything about that, though, I had to take care of actually filing a police report and such for my break-in. So a nice little chunk of my morning was spent sitting at Southwest Division. Generally you'd just do something like that over the phone, but I got a couple busy signals and figured I'd just head down and take care of things in person. It wasn't an unpleasant process at all. Next I took my car to Toyota Central, conveniently located under the 10 on Fig. As I knew they would, they found a bunch of other things that really needed to be done to my car. Leaving the lake on Sunday the USD coach asked me, "You got a supercharger in that Camry?" Turns out, no, it's just a head pipe falling apart. That the kind of thing that's fun to hear on a Tuesday morning.

So now I'm working on catching up on all the things that got left a little behind -- like school, for instance. I think life will be a little more normal for the next while, though, which is good.

Sitting in Tucson, AZ, catching up on some email at Ike's Coffee & Tea. I'm here in Tucson for a few days watching my sister play softball, but this afternoon my dad and I both needed to catch up on some work, so we headed here. This is definitely what a wifi coffee house should be like. I counted seven laptops when we walked in, most plugged into four-outlet boxes scatterred along the walls. Connectivity is plenty responsive, though I'm not thorough enough to actually run a speed check like Alan would.

Two more games tomorrow and then Saturday I fly back to LA, hop in a car, and head out to Mecca, CA, to go waterskiing.

Fixing a bug in my this date function I ran across a post from four years ago talking about porting stuff to CSS. It's crazy to think that it's been that long, but at the same time I can't imagine what life was like beforehand. Sure, this is a horse that's been beaten to death, but CSS is amazing. I ran across the CSS Zen Garden yesterday. The idea's very cool: take one HTML file and show how different it can look using just different stylesheets. Most of the looks are a little graphics heavy for doing list heads, etc, but still it's a cool demo.

I mentioned the other day that I'm headed to Tucson tomorrow for a few days. While there I still need to keep up on some work and such, so I took a minute to google for free wifi there today (not Google's local search). It seems there are a good number of wifi-enabled coffee shops around, so getting Internet access shouldn't be that big of a deal. Also of interest is that downtown Tucson will be getting a wifi network. I can't find a timeline for this, though, so I don't think that it's something that's functioning yet.

May 20 is Metro's 10th annual Bike to Work Day. I've been bikeless since my front wheel got stolen a couple months ago, but I'm finally getting it replaced and will definitely be rolling again by then. One thing I noticed today that I hadn't seen before is http://bikemetro.com. You enter in route information and it helps you plan the best bike commute. Usually you think of commutes in terms of distance, but as I found out this summer, elevation is perhaps even more important. Their site gives me a Gold Line -> JPL route I hadn't biked before, so it'll be interesting to give it a go once I start heading back to the bike and see if it actually is an easier ride. I'm also taking the opportunity to switch to street tires, so the reduced friction should help my ride as well.

D4 and I are currently listening to tracks from HVSC. All I can say is: wow. wow. wow. I grew up on the Commodore 64. I love SID music. I still play C64 games on the XBOX. Now all I need is some sort of a DJ'ing talent to mix these together.

Blonde Redhead (whose site I haven't checked out because it requires Flash and I don't have Flash installed at the moment) was on Morning Becomes Eclectic this morning. I often forget just how good they are. I bought Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons in 2000 and loved it. When you first hear it, you think it's going to be possibly the most annoying thing you've ever heard. But then you listen for a few more minutes. All of a sudden it's not annoying. All of a sudden you're hooked. But inevitably you set it aside for a little bit, and you forget. You remember that there's a grindingly high vocal, but not that it leaves you in a trance.

But then you hear them again, and you remember it all.

Listen to the set and I think you'll see.

Kathy and I just dropped her parents off at the airport this morning, but it's been a bit of a go-go-go last couple days. I worked all day Friday, headed back to USC for a 4:30 meeting, and then at 7 picked up Kathy and co and took a little drive up Fig to the Bonaventure Hotel. We had dinner reservations at LA Prime, and got there a little early to sit and take a swing aorund the revolving cocktail lounge. Actually, we only made it about halfway around in the 45 minutes we were there, going from north to south by way of the east. Upstairs at the steakhouse we had a cool south view, which gave me nice visuals for talking about 1100 Wilshire (this google cache contains the contents of a fascinating LA Times story about the property) and the Transamerica Building (which recently got bought by Magic Johnson and will likely become housing). The steaks were great, and the desserts were very odd, but good. I got a cheesecake, and it actually was sort of three pieces of different kinds of cheesecakes, and an assortment of fruit.

Friday night / Saturday morning Kathy and her dad decided they really wanted to go see tennis, so Saturday morning we got up and made the two-hour drive out to Palm Desert to the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. We saw 3/4 of the Saturday matches at the Pacfic Life Open, watching Federer defeat Agassi, Henmen beat Labadze, and a womens doubles match with names I won't even attempt to copy and paste here. weather.com said the temperature was going to be 96 in the desert and I believe it was every bit of that. It was dry heat, though, and we lucked out in getting tickets on the side of the court that got the early shade, so we only really had to endure the heat until 1:15 or so. The people around us were great. The lady sitting next to me offers Kathy a straw hat that she made use of for the next few hours, and the lady sitting next to Kathy knew everything you wanted to nkow about who was ranked what, and who was coaching who. Finally we drove back and then caught dinner at CPK.

Now Spring "Break" is officially over, but my schedule's anything but back to normal. Wednesday I fly out to Arizona to watch my sister play softball in Tucson. I didn't know until I went to look that link up that Taylor was also the Trojans. I'll have to find whatever Trojan stuff I have from here to wear while I'm out there. I fly back from that Saturday and then hop in the car and drive right back to Palm Desert for a weekend of waterskiing.

My web server is a piece of crap. It's a PIII 500 with 256MB of RAM, but the kicker is that these days it's running off a 3.3gig IDE hard drive. I stuck that drive in it in October of 2001, since I was a broke college student and I had it sitting in my desktop. Really the lack of space isn't that big of a deal. While I could probably find good uses for 100gig or so, most of what I do isn't data intensive.

Sometimes, though, you get a random process that sits in the background somewhere, happily writing and writing, gradually filling your disk up with a file you don't even know exists. Today, after running completely out of space, I went on a hunting mission. I found that I had left db_logging enabled in eThreads and that log file was now a good 600MB. That's quite a chunk of a 3gig drive.

My breathing room is a lot more spacious now.

It's really foggy out today here in La Canada. I could barely see the tops of 5 story buildings walking in from my car. Today was a short walk, since I actually got here early for once. 7:10 and I was at my desk. Kathy's parents needed to be in Hollywood for a medical conference that started at 7:30, so I picked them up at 6:35 at the USC Radisson, made the short drive up to 7th/Figueroa, and dropped them off with subway tokens. Hopefully they figured everything out ok. The LA subway's a funny thing... I think it's the nicest subway I've ever been on -- if it goes where you're going. For me, it's really only useful between Hollywood and downtown.

Listening to Roger Lodge on 1540 this morning, all they could talk about was how the Dodgers raised parking prices to $10. This summer I tried to get a job with the Dodgers, but they didn't have anything available. I talked to the VP of HR, and he looked around, but didn't come up with anything. Now he's resigning, part of an exodus/firing of most of the executive staff. This kind of thing makes me glad for a job with stability, even if the commute is longer.

It's funny, now that I've got support for Markdown syntax, the thing I'm most excited about is now I'll actually have my paragraphs wrapped in p tags instead of via my ugly excuse for turning line breaks into
tags. The simple things...

Kathy and I just picked her parents up at Union Station. They rode the train out here from Chicago, a trip that started Wednesday. They enjoyed it. After dropping their luggage in the car we walked across to Olvera St and ate at La Golondrina Cafe. I had carne asada tacos and enjoyed them.

It's way too nice to be inside, but that's where I am. You can't have everything, I guess.

I'm putting this post in place of the test post I had because I'm not testing any more... The new code's now in place.

Yesterday Brian Tol was showing me the new version of http://wiremine.org, running on his new bliki system. I still don't think I quite understand exactly what he's getting at, but he's a smart guy so I'm just goign to wait and see what happens. What I did think was cool, though, was the wikiformatting stuff he's using.

That got me thinking, and today I was talking about formatting stuffs with Shmuel. He mentioned Markdown, which struck me as cooler and more natural than the other things I was looking at. Tonight I took the markdown code, made it into a module, and added support for it into eThreads. Now I can get all the formatting I want through a nice simple syntax. Very cool.

I need to think harder about how to integrate format hooks into the code better, but it's up and running after I only heard about the thing this afternoon, so I really can't complain that much.

I just got this beauty from Perl:

Unknown error
Compilation failed in require at eThreads/core.pm line 226.

It fails trying to require a module. "Unknown error" really helps out your debugging, now doesn't it?

I woke up today and the LA haze was still in full effect. Even driving through it downtown was blurry. But then I emerged into Pasadena, and the air was clear. I'm still not used to LA's crazy differences in weather that depend solely on which side of the hills you're on. Yesterday it was 15 degrees warmer leaving work than it was twenty minutes later riding through downtown. It makes sense if you look at the air flow and the hills and all that, but it's still kind of weird to me.

Sunday was really nice, even downtown. Kathy and I took the DASH up Fig and walked around for a bit. We at lunch at the Angelique Cafe, wedged in the split of Spring and Main. It's only open for breakfast and lunch (unless you eat dinner before 4, I guess), but it's cheap, good, and the sandwich I got had a lot of turkey on it. Kathy made note of authentic French touches, I just liked the food.

The mouse on my desktop gave out the other day. I was sad to see it go. Originally it came with an SGI Indy in 1994 or 1995, so it had served its time well. My keyboard is still one of the old Indy clunkers, and aside for an Insert keycap that I broke off somehow, it's still the only keyboard I'd want. You hear of people having Model M obsessions, but I think this thing holds its own. If it ever dies I've got another sitting at home ready to replace it.

It's a little after midnight, and I'm on campus. In sixteen hours I have a paper due. In thirteen hours I have to be ready to present code on a conference call for a contract job I'm doing. In a little over nine hours I'm supposed to go in and get my stitches out. And right now, sitting here, I don't want to do any of it.

It's amazing how quiet it is. There's a fountain nearby, and I hear that. There's a low rumble that might be from air-conditioning in a building somewhere. Occasionally I can hear a car, far away from here. Other than that, nothing. The other night we could hear birds chirping outside our apartment. It was one in the morning. No birds here, though.

Freshman year I could write all night. I would start papers after midnight and turn them in the next morning. Then I went home for the summer, came back, and couldn't be productive past two. I don't know what changed. Now I write in the day, but not this time. I wonder if I can even do it.

And then I take a look at the syllabus and wander to the section on late papers. What do I see? An automatic five day extension, that's what. Amazing. I'll sleep tonight after all.

Standing on my balcony today you can barely see downtown.

Downtown is about 2 miles away from here, so that's something that gives you a little pause. Just a few days ago I could see the mountains, which are probably at least 60 miles away. That's quite a swing. Downtown and the Hollywood sign are our apartment air quality guage. Can't see the Hollywood sign, but downtown's pretty clear? That's a moderate air quality day. Both looking good? That's good air quality. But downtown's disappearing? Uggh.

In what was probably just a stroke of programming luck, Howard Stern's movie Private Parts was on Cinemax last night. I watched the last two-thirds or so of it and was struck by how topical it seemed. As you should know by now, Howard's in some hot water, as usual, but this time it looks like it could be the last straw. BuzzMachine (via blogging.la) has a good recap of the situation, and takes the controversy to its logical frightening extension:

But here's the doozie, folks: By a one-vote margin, the committee defeated an attempt to extend FCC censorship to cable and satellite.

Listen: The First Amendment should prohibit what the FCC already does to TV and radio but, of course, its regulation and censorship is kept in place by the flimsy tissue of the idea that these are the scarce "public airwaves." Well, cable and satellite are not public property; they are private property. If the government goes in to regulate and censor what happens there, then there is nothing stopping them from regulating and censoring books, music, concerts, comedy clubs... and the Internet.

Yesterday I took a picture of a building getting demolished at the corner of Vermont and Washington. I had wondered for a while what was going in there, but today I finally figured it out. After wasting time on google for a while, finding nothing, I eventually made my way over to the City of Los Angeles site. There I used the very cool Automated Zoning Information System to take a look at information for the plots around there. Hidden deep in there was the info I was looking for... The plot will be the site of Central LA Area New HS #2.

I really should have expected that. LAUSD is building everywhere. It'll be interesting to see the site develop over the next two years and see how they fit a school into the surrounding neighborhood.

I guess the real moral of the story is that there's a lot of cool stuff on the LA site.

The official opening is April 8, but I just noticed in this downtown news article that the revamped Casey's Irish Bar & Grille will have wifi. It sounds like a very cool place. It's in the 600 block of Grand, so only a few blocks west of where I'm looking to hang my hat starting this summer. Definitely somewhere I'll be checking out.

Ping-pong (or "table tennis", if you prefer) was on ESPN when I woke up this morning.

Current conditions? 87 degrees. Humidity, 26 percent. A nice variable 6mph breeze. No disrespect to those of you in other climes -- 'cause that's your choice and all, and I respect that -- but, why? Saturday I was waterskiing and wakeboarding. Yesterday I spent the afternoon getting work done at the beach. Today I'm hanging out in the shade, sportin' the pulled down low baseball cap to keep my gash from scarring, and it's amazing. In the shade you get that magic temperature where you really just sort of forget that there's weather around you. It's not hot, it's not cold, it just is. Then you get a breeze, or a little burst of a/c from an opened door, and it reminds you that you haven't lost all feeling and it really just is that nice outside.

I do have a midterm today. I do have to figure out what classes I'm taking next semester before I have advisement tomorrow. But you know, it's a whole lot easier to not worry about those when it's this nice outside.

Apparently the lag is traffic to the webcam. The "streaming" version is actually a reloading jpg straight off the webcam.

Still not great, but I noticed things seemed a little faster so I checked it out and now I'm seeing an average around 300ms. That's the type of thing that makes me think these big ping times were just an aberation.

I'm hanging out at Hennessey's Tavern in Hermosa Beach, online via free wifi provided by Hermosawave. The location is amazing, right on the end of Pier Ave (where it's just a pedestrian walkway). The ocean is maybe 100 yards of beach away. They have outdoor seating, and also rooftop seating, but to avoid the glare I set up at a bar-type table inside. There's a great breeze wandering in, and they're even playing good music. The staff's great, very friendly. A full battery is pretty essential: I can't really see a power outlet anywhere. I had a full battery, though, and wasn't expecting power, so that didn't faze me.

The connectivity, though, is all over the place. I'm getting some normal ping times, but more often than not I'm getting times in the 3500ms range. The first time I ran a bandwidth test it showed me 450kbps, the second time 50. I'm hoping this is just an aberation. I dropped an email to Hermosawave, so we'll see what they have to say.

If the latency issue resolves itself, this is definitely a place I could see myself frequenting. They've got Guinness, the ocean, and free wifi. What else I'd need, I just don't know.

(Update: see the comments for a little more info on the latency issues.)

It's hard to complain about life when it's 80 degrees and clear blue skies outside. Standing out on my balcony I have a clear view of west LA, the Hollywood sign, downtown, and snow-covered mountain peaks off to the east. The microwave is beeping at me to let me know that my leftovers from the best resturant in LA are ready. Sure, I've got a midterm and a paper that should be weighing me down this week. Sure, I've got to change up my schedule to get into the health center Monday to get my stitches checked on. But you know, I really don't care. It's too nice out to care.

Seven stitches. I was thinking three, but uh, I was wrong. That's why she's the one doing the stitching and not me. I went to Good Samaritan Hospital, which I didn't realize it, but is actually affiliated with USC. I got there about 4:30, got triaged about 4:45, and then got called in at 5:15 or so. I was out by 6, so really the whole process wasn't that bad. The lady who stitched me up (who stitches in an ER? A nurse? A doctor?) and office staff were very friendly. She said I was her third set of stitches above the eyebrow today.

So I was wakeboarding today. It was great out. I had even skied first. And then I had to go and put a gash right above my eye. Either my knee or the side of the board did this, and I really don't understand the dynamics of either. So now I'm off to the ER for stitches... Woo hoo! Just how I wanted to spend my Saturday evening.

Yesterday Topher outlined features he wants in a future version of the software he's written to run his blog. The first comment echoed my thoughts while reading: why? Why go to all the work of writing your own software when other packages already exist and do a great job? Then I went, oh, wait... I do that.

Granted, my reasons are a little different. I moved this blog to eThreads on April 19, 1999. Movable Type 0.1 wouldn't be released until September 23, 2001. Blogger predated that, but still didn't launch until August, 1999. So there really wasn't much else out there when I first made the changes to customize a version of eThreads to do news instead of forums.

But the core question is one that I still ask myself, a lot: Why should I not port what I'm doing to something like MT and just get in with the trends?

I think really my answer is that I just don't see a reason to. eThreads is for me a perfect platform. Over the years the architecture has evolved into something that's really fun to work with. When there's a new feature I want I can use some nice hooks to be able to plug in and make things happen really easily. A couple weeks ago I wanted support for XML/RPC pings to be able to ping blogrolling. Writing the code to do so in a clean, extensible way took a couple hours.

Were I starting from scratch, I'd definitely get on the MT bandwagon and start developing extensions onto it. I think they're doing some really cool stuff. But I'm not starting from scratch, or even looking at a situation where I need to add a lot of things at once. And in that case, I'm perfectly content sitting where I'm at.

I was sitting in "my office" on the Annenberg patio for several hours yesterday. While there I overheard a Daily Trojan reporter conduct the interview for this story about rings from the 1984 Olympics being restored. Other coverage in the LA Times.

The pastels look lasted November through February, but it was time for a change. The image is from this picture. To answer the obvious questions, yes, that's me, and yes, I did mean to do that. You'll notice that my form is quite good.

This look, for no apparent reason, is titled style.

Walking to Carl's, I noticed two facilities people looking at a TV monitor. I thought that was kind of odd; while there's always filming going on at USC, usually it's not the maintenance people doing it. Looking closer, though, they were using a tool called a SeeSnake. Aside from the monitor, they also had a spool of cable, one end of which was stuck down into a presumably clogged drainage pipe. That end contained a camera and a light, and they were using it to scope out the source of the blockage. That's cool stuff. I want one.

It's been a long time since it was nice outside... Finally yesterday and today have brought some sunshine and nice temps. I'm sitting here in the shadow of Annenberg (to prevent glare on the laptop), enjoying the smell of outdoors. I'm listening to Martina Topley Bird's Quixotic, which I'm addicted to right now.

I recently picked up a box of Penguin Reds, and I think I'm getting re-addicted to those too. Way back when (over five years ago now? Crazy) I was involved in a little controversy over these mints. They are good, especially the cinnamons.

Now it's off to Carl's Jr. for my regular five piece chicken strips meal with honey mustard and a bottle of coke. USC's a Pepsi campus, and the Carl's on campus recently switched to Pepsi products for their fountain drinks, but they still carry bottles of Coke products that they'll give you for a little bit more. I can't stand Pepsi, or Pepsi products (Mountain Dew excepted, but I will say that it's not that great as a fountain drink).

Speaking of things I don't like: I don't like Taco Bell. I love Del Taco, though, and I thought it was really funny that Jack Black and Wil Farrell used Del Taco in their song during the Oscars. Of all the national chains or products they could have mentioned, how funny is it that they instead use a very regional chain that most of the country has never heard of? I just found that interesting.

Whenever I've been putting off work or bored lately, I've been wandering over to LA Blogs and clicking around to some of the most recently updated sites on the blogroll. Trying to figure out why my site didn't show up updated there was even the impetus behind writing XML/RPC ping support for eThreads. The blog part of LA Blogs might not update all that often, but the site is invaluable if just for that blogroll.

In the 5+ years I've been doing this site, this is the first time I've made a post on a March 3rd. That got me wondering how many days of the year I have covered and how many I've missed. I didn't have to wonder long, though... In 5+ years I've posted on 322 of 366 possible dates. The next upcoming gap? March 13 and 14, and then the 17th and 18th. I missed a big-time chance on Sunday, neglecting to post on Feb 29. That one will take a while now.

CRM114 training is going well. This morning it had missed two spam and marked a Speakeasy invoice incorrectly. It filed 100+ spam correctly overnight, though. It's still not to the point that I would go without checking my crm-spam folder, but it's getting better and is already doing better than spamassassin was at the end.

I've been "writing" a paper all morning on "extra-cinematic cultural products and leisure acitivities" in postmodern Hollywood cinema. The only thing I've managed to do well so far is use a Simpsons reference as my intro:

A recent Simpsons episode opened with a movie inside the Springfield Googolplex. Soldiers are seen landing on a beach, gunfire flashing around them. A storming soldier stands over a slain foe, and then reaches into his foe's pocket and pulls out -- a buzz cola. Voiceover tells the audience, "Buzz Cola -- the taste you'll kill for." The dead soldier leans up to add in a German accent, "Available in ze lobby!" Lisa is appalled. She asks, "Do they really think cheapening the memory of our veterans will sell soda?" Almost before she can finish her question Homer is rising from his seat: "I have to go to ze lobby!"

Lisa is objecting to a central element of post-modern cinema. Though present to some extent in other eras of film, postmodern cinema has made extra-cinematic elements integral to all aspects of the movie-making process.

Went missing from here over the weekend. Not sure how that happened.

Saturday we went wakeboarding at Elsinore. The water was 10 degrees warmer than it was two weeks ago. The water was beautiful until right after I went, and then a big wind kicked up, but I didn't care 'cause I had just gone.

Today I spent the day on a golf course hanging with Colby Beckstrom. He didn't really shoot the lights out today, but the weather was against him (and everyone else). It was really cold, really wet, and by the end really dark. If it keeps raining tonight I wouldn't be surprised to see the final 18 holes rained out. USC is in first, which is cool seeing as it is their own tournament and all. I spent most of the day wearing a USC hat and TCU jacket, which I'm sure was confusing to people.