mid-day at the market

April 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

With my renewed bike kick still swinging (it is only day three, after all), yesterday I got it in my mind that I wanted to ride from USC to the Farmers' Market. Today I did that. It's only 6.75 miles, and there's no appreciable elevation change end-to-end, so it's not that bad of a ride. The bikemetro route put me up Vermont to Olympic, west on Olympic to Hauser, up Hauser to Burnside, and then west on 3rd for a block or two. Aside from the fact that Burnside's an apartment complex and not a street these days, that route worked out well. I didn't pay attention to what time I left on the way there, but I clocked the way back at 34 minutes. In any traffic I'd expect it to take 20 in a car.

Wireless internet at the farmers market was down -- the lady at SitckerPlanet said it was out for upgrades -- so I didn't get a ton accomplished. I finished up a paper and did sit and just write for a bit, which was fun. I've put what I wrote up in thoughts as Mid-Day at the Farmers' Market.

tracking it down

April 05, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So I mentioned yesterday that mod_perl and I were at odds. Well, today I took things into my own hands and tracked down what was going on. Basically the xml output module was infecting non-xml content because a tied output wasn't getting cleaned up. I won't really explain more than that, since it's funky perl and pretty convoluted, but if you really care the changes are this patch in the eThreads arch repository. Summary: those ugly visible   should be a thing of the past.

return trip

April 05, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I love getting to work on my bike, because it means that I have to ride back, and the ride back's all downhill. I actually followed the bikemetro directions this time, and they led me on Arroyo above the golf course, park, and a view of the Rose Bowl.

The train was cool, even though I forgot to bring anything to read today. On the Gold Line there was a dad and his son, probably about 7, sitting nearby. They were talking and joking the whole time and one time the kid said something and the dad just cracked up. I enjoyed that. On the Red Line there was a little kid who kept falling over when the train made a stop. The last time he was so convinced he was going to prove he could do it without holding on, and then he got that little jolt when the train comes to a complete stop and his mom/older sister had to catch him.

Riding down Vermont on the way back, negotiating the game that is riding in lanes in LA, I managed to beat the rapid. He passed me first, then I passed him on the right and he honked at me. I don't think I did anything wrong so I ignored him. He passed me again, but then I passed him at a stop around James M Woods or something like that and never saw him again.

My bike was having fun changing gears on me, so getting back I dropped it at Lions Bike Shop, the same place I got my tire put on this morning. An hour and a half or so and $10 later my bike was all tuned up. Little bike shops right near by are very cool.

I need to get some padded shorts. My saddle's definitely a little hard, and I'm feeling it right now. I can't bring myself to wear just bike shorts on the train, but I'd wear 'em under a pair of board shorts.

i'll be in shape before i know it

April 05, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I carried my bike over to the bike shop this morning and they put my new tires on for me. I also picked up a Kryptonite lock cable for my front wheel, so maybe I can hold onto this one. On the back I've got a Kryptolock Combo and I've been happy with that.

Anyway, with all that done I hopped on the bike and headed toward work. I meantioned the other day Metro's site http://bikemetro.com. Today I tried out the route that suggested, and was pretty happy with it (if you want to see the route, click read more and I'll give you a start and destination to use). I missed a turn and deviated from the prescibed route a bit, but on the whole it worked out just fine. It was great riding weather today, nice and cool.

For some reason the first leg, up Vermont, really got me worse than my Pasadena climb. I guess I was just pushing it way too hard, and the sugar cookie I had right before I left didn't help matters at all. My times were right in line with what I was riding it in during the summer, even though I took it lighter for the second leg. — Continue Reading...

Increasing mobility

April 04, 2004 by Eric Richardson

For the last few months I've been stuck walking. Six months or so ago I took the wheels of my skateboard, realized the bearings were shot, and promptly neglected to go buy new ones. A month or two after that the front wheel got stolen off my bike, leaving just me and my car.

In the last 24 hours that all changed. Yesterday, driving from Santa Monica to Venice to get a little C&O's (heh, little and C&O's should never go together), when I realized I was passing ZJ Boarding House, which is where I originally bought my board almost three years ago. A quick stop there and suddenly my skateboard situation was looking a whole lot brighter.

Then today I dropped by the REI Store in Manhattan Beach and picked up three boxes of stuff I had ordered online. In the boxes were an REI Morph Tent, a set of Continental SportContact tires, a Deore X221 front wheel and a nice light Delta Mega Rack. Tomorrow morning I'm going to pop over to the bike shop at the end of the alley (less than 100 yards from my apartment), buy tubes, and get them to install the tires for me. Then, just like that, I'll be back in the business of mobility.

I set up the tent in my apartment tonight to check it out. First impression? Very cool. It's a 2-person and not super-wide, so if you're sharing it with someone you better want to get close, but it's not like you'd be sleeping on top of each other either. The length is great. Definitely room for me to lay out and still have room at the end for a pack. The whole thing fits in a really small package, and weighs in around 5 pounds. I didn't try putting out the footprint or raincover, but the tent itself was really easy to put together.

This was my first real experience with REI, and I came away very impressed.

movie trailers / pelican info

April 04, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I have searched for some information on movie trailers and your name and pelican productions surfaced; I am trying to find a way to purchase new trailers on dvd or beta formats. If you have any information on this and can sell these please contact me to discuss.

Thanks,

KA

mod_perl v. me: showdown

April 03, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Ok, so a while ago I switched all this eThreads stuff over to mod_perl, to get some of that persistence speed-up goodness. And I did. And I like it.

But if sometime soon I go crazy and end up in a river somewhere (oh, wait, this is LA... the aquaduct?), somebody go blame modperl. It really makes a habit of acting in ways that make absolutely no sense. For instance, one bug that's been driving me batty for a while now is that every once in a while I'll load up this page and modperl will see some   tags and be like, dude, that would be cooler if it was   then it would show up on page when really it's only supposed to be a space. But it only does it sometimes. Just enough to really annoy me, but not enough to actually let me track it down.

Also, at some point modperl decided that it wanted to start double-posted if I tried to post here via it. Sure, the post code only gets called once, but why should that stop it? So I've been posting via a CGI version for the last while, which I really shouldn't have to do.

Stupid computers.

back to the show

April 02, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Wednesday night I finally ended my unintentional little hiatus from live music and wandered over to Hollywood to check out Indie Night 8 at the Hotel Cafe. I didn't make it there until around 9:30, so by the time I showed up Gabriel Mann was already well into his set. Though I didn't catch a ton of his stuff I did like what I heard. Saucy Monky was up next and I've written about them many times before, so I don't have that much new to say. Sally Smithwick from Paper Sun played with them on the keys, which was fun. You get the three girls up front and it's hard to even realize you've got a bass guitar and some drums back there. The Woods, whose website is one of the most barren I've ever seen, followed, and I hate describing music so I'll just point you to the music page on their site, where the one scrap of not "coming soon" is a full-length mp3.

Next up was Joe Purdy. We didn't stay for him, but I feel I need to explain that. It's not that Joe Purdy isn't good. He is. I really like his stuff. But if there's one thing he is, it's mellow. I was there with a friend from high school who had flown in from Michigan Wednesday afternoon, so at this point 11:30pm PST was feeling pretty late no matter what. Joe definitely would have put her to sleep, but in a good way. I've done this same thing before, so I felt I owed a little more than just saying we took off.

The whole night was really cool. Cynthia (from Saucy Monky and OlivoiL Records, who put on the show) had good things to say about what the night meant to her. Paraphrasing, it was a night to celebrate the fact that you can focus on one sale at a time, to one person at a time, and eventually end up with a sustainable career. The people there seemed to agree.

up the corporate ladder

April 01, 2004 by Eric Richardson

(Update: Heh... So, uhhh, it's the first and I'm tired and uhhh... I still agree with what I said.)

So today blogging.la announced its sale to LA.com, and therefore to some conglomeration of Gannett/MediaNews/whatever they are (hereafter BigMediaCo). Sean and co. get an office, paychecks, etc, all in exchange for a few more ads. The announcement comes straight out with plans to expand the concept to other BigMediaCo cities.

I'm not sure I like this.

Looking back, it's not that hard to see the signs leading up to this. Back when the la.com thing all went down, one of the main b.la responses was "hey, we're already doing this."

But I don't think they were.

la.com's "blog" has a paid staff. b.la's write because they can. A month or two ago the sentiment I heard was that if anyone's going to make money off of people's writings, it should be the people themselves. Now b.la's making money, does that mean they're going to start kicking a little of the wealth back to the people that are powering the boat?

Tell me how this whole thing is different than a record label. You can go do your own writing, doing your indie thing off in some corner of the web. That's all good and well. Or you can sign up with the big dogs, putting your work on a site where BigMediaCo is going to pimp it out and use a flashy ad budget to pull in more eyeballs. And if BigMediaCo happens to make a little cash for the stockholders along the way, all the better. Sign your deal and sure, maybe you'll make it big, but what you're really doing is just putting a little more money in a few more pockets that most definitely aren't your own.

I'm not anti-money or anti-corporate, that would be stupid. I'm all for making money doing cool stuff. I just paid my rent today, and I most definitely would prefer to continue to keep doing that. What bothers me is the trend toward finding ways to let other people make money for you. It's like, hey, let's create/buy/put in place this framework and then sit back and watch as these unpaid people create our product for us. I mean, what is b.la? Well, it's a movable type installation. But BigMediaCo isn't buying that. They could get that themselves. Ok, so it's a name, and a URL people already know. Ehhh, sort of. BigMediaCo already bought a name, and their ad budget can get people there. So then really it's the people writing. BigMediaCo comes in and buys "the rights" to the site's writers so that it can make money off their content.

Which is cool, I guess. I don't know that I'd want to keep writing, but seeing as I wasn't one to begin with, that's really neither here nor there and my opinion on the matter doesn't mean much.

I guess the success story for this model would be Slashdot. When Rob and co. sold the farm to OSDN, people made a bit of a stink. But then life went on, the site really didn't change any, and by now people just accept that that's the way that life always was. But will it be the same as the corps assimilate blogs? Gregory Block made this comment on onlineblog:

That hits the nail on the head, pretty much. While we're all happy that blogs are a big success, we've already watched one medium - the WWW - turned on its head by money. Unlike last time around, more people use blogs today than used the web then before it went commercial - so a commercialization of the style and scale that reshaped the WWW from what it was then to what it is today would affect a lot more people than the aforementioned transition.

I don't know how this plays out. The money's coming, but are the right people going to be getting it?

cutting spam

April 01, 2004 by Eric Richardson

On my server I've been running a SMTP server called qpsmtpd. It's cool because it's written in Perl and supports some good hooks for connecting in plugins. The other day, fed up with the amount of energy the server was putting into accepting and bouncing spam, I decided to see what was out there ease the situation. I ended up installing the denysoft_greylist plugin, which implements the greylisting concept found here. The basic idea is that messages are soft-failed the first time around, so that the sending server has to retry. If the server retries after a set grey period, the message is accepted, and the server is flagged white for the next couple weeks (so that it's imediately accepted). Basically what this does is attempt to prey on the fact that most spam solutions are doing a fire-and-forget, trying the message once without waiting to see what happens or follow appropriate RFC's for how to deliver.

The result? My daily spam has gone from about 450 messages/day to maybe 15, most of which are bounced over by speakeasy's mail server from my account there (and which I really could just filter into a blackhole if I wasn't lazy). I'm happy.