On Saturday Kathy and I went hiking in the Angeles National Forest, beginning our journey just next to JPL's east lot. I took pictures with my phone, but Linux and bluetooth don't seem to want to help me out with transferring pictures to the computer, so those'll be coming along with a bit of lag. :

Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000068
 printing eip:
c017d857
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0002 [#1]

Doh. Now to build a 2.6.7pre and see if there are any fixes in there. But back to hiking...

It was remarkable to me to be hiking through all kinds of mountain terrain and to be able to say "Hey, I work right here." The trail itself is a fun one that goes through quite a lot of change. It starts as a paved road, turns to a dirt road, turns to a dirt trail, and then turns to a, well, sort of trail. This site covers the route we took pretty well.

Oakwilde Campground was where we finally turned around. Another site lists the round trip at 10 miles. Sitting at the campground for a minute recuperating before heading back we had a bit of a funny experience. We were sitting on a picnic table, and there were several tents set up nearby. All of a sudden I noticed that the tent directly in front of us was the exact same one I had sitting in my trunk at the base of the trail. Kathy had never seen my tent set up, so I was able to show her this one, albeit without rain cover on. The pair who owned the tent were on a one-way hike down from the Angeles Crest Highway to JPL where they would be picked up. Oakwilde was their resting spot for the night, though it was pretty early to be set up there (3pm or so). It would be a nice place to sit and read a book next to the stream, though.

We saw one snake, but it was small and harmless. It made its way off the side of the trail when we got too near.

The trail follows roughly the course of a road that provided access to a resort and some cabins in the teens and twenties. Most of it is gone now, but occasional remains of bridges and slabs of concrete are still to be found, as are the foundations of various buildings.

All in all a great time, and not that crowded back on the trail despite the parking area being completely packed.

I started this post at work the other day, forgot to finish it, and then left it sitting on my screen there. So I've been slow to actually redo it here since I feel dumb for having to redo what I already wrote.

Oh well.

But anyway, Thursday night Kathy and I hopped in the car and took a ride over to Sunset. After sitting in traffic for a while on the 110, we did make it to the Hotel Cafe right around 8pm. It was a bit of a throw-back night: I found street parking, the crowd was small... It felt like the Hotel of the old days.

Julian Coryell was up first, and it was the first time I'd seen him in close on two years. It was fun to see how his music has evolved in that time. When I was seeing him back then he was just beginning to play with a delay petal (ala Howie Day playing solo or Joseph Arthur). Back then he was pretty much only using it for "Living in L.A.", but now it's become an integral part of the whole show and he uses it very well. I've always thought the delay was a great way for solo artists to add depth to their show.

And oh yeah, he has a ukulele with a pickup. And he sang into it.

I'd never seen a ukulele with a pickup before I saw Julian's, but I'm sure they exist. It really is funny seeing his up there playing that tiny instrument with a 1/4" cable looking massive plugged into the back. But wait...

He sang into it.

The song was a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Going to California." Talking to Julian afterward he pointed out that at the end of the original the vocals sound like they're way off in the distance -- "coming out of a well" was how he put it. So Julian's standing on stage at a show, playing this song, and he's thinking "How do I make it sound like I'm in a well?" Now, on "Going to California" he starts with the guitar, lays some loop, switches to the ukulele, and then plays most of the song with that. So he's got this ukulele sitting in his hands. All of a sudden it clicks, "Hey, there's a litle microphone in there." With that the ukulele pickup as vocal in well was born. Now that's pretty clever. Julian's about to go on tour opening for Aimee Mann so that should be good for his exposure.

Gus Black was up next, again playing solo. I hadn't heard or even really thought of his stuff since last summer and it was cool to get brought back to some songs I enjoy. Unfortunately I don't have any ukulele stories about Gus, so his review gets to be a bit shorter. That's what you get when you stick to the traditional guitar.

Actually, funny instrument story... For one song Gus decided he was going to switch over to the electric, so he switches and starts the song. Pretty early into it he stops and says "Ok, that's not as cool as I thought it was." He switched back to the acoustic and started over. I enjoyed that.

It's chilly and overcast today. I was lazy this morning and took the bus in from the parking lot. I didn't feel like trudging 10 minutes up the hill to get to my desk.

Kathy wants me to get my hair cut today, so I guess I'll be going and doing that. It's not that I don't agree that it could use a trim, I'm just ot much for the actual getting around to doing it. Sort of like how my car is still filthy, and has been so since March or so.

Speaking of cars... $34 and change yesterday to put in 14 gallons. Ouch. I think I'll be taking a stop by the JPL Store this afternoon to see how much they sell Metro tokens for these days. I pick the bike up this evening, so hopefully I'll be able to leave the car parked a little more soon.

I know, I'm way behind on putting up any kind of a report about last Friday. That happens sometimes. I get distracted.

We got there about 2/3 of the way through Amilia Spicer's set. To be honest, I don't remember much about it. It takes me a little while to sit down and get focused.

Eric Hutchinson was the 9pm, and Kathy and I both enjoyed his show. She bought a cd afterward, and today compared his voice to Michael Jackson. I can't say that was what struck my mind, but I did think at times he sounded a bit like Justin Rosolino vocally.

Erik Penny rounded out the acts we saw. He played a more sparse set, accompanied only by an electric guitar. It was a lot of the same songs, but often the tempo was changed up to make them more suitable for the smaller show. I missed hearing Ernesto's background vocals and thought their lack made the sound a little empty, but seeing as this was his first "mostly" solo show, I think I can cut Erik a little slack. He's got plans, and I'm sure they'll be good.

Tonight Kathy and I are headed back out to the Hotel Cafe to see Julian Coryell and Gus Black. It should be a good time.

Cingular is selling its share of the CA/NV networks it co-developed without T-Mobile when that latter was working to break into the CA market. As the linked article says, this is probably to reduce duplication and clear some regulatory hurdles in the process of acquiring AT&T Wireless. AT&T has been running their ads about the newly improved coverage on their GSM network, but it'll be interesting to see what the real-world implications will be for Cingular subscribers when they suddenly hop over to a different infrastructure. I did notice that when Cingular started the acquisition process AT&T became a roaming partner and my phone's hopped over to it a few times where Cingular coverage has for whatever reason been unavailable, but none of those instances were around here (that I can remember). I have no clue what AT&T's GSM network feels like in LA these days.

I just took my bike in to the Manhattan Beach REI Store to get a chain skip looked at. Under load, especially in a low gear, the chain'll sort of pop out and then back in. Really annoying when you're pushing it. I thought the chain was old and needed replacing, but they thought it still had some life in it and think a derailler adjustment will clear it up.

They studied my bike pretty hard, though, obviously a bit confused by it. It's a Novara Ponderosa. Turns out it doesn't really have any of the stock gear on it, though, so the shop guys think someone just got a Ponderosa frame and stuck on random pieces they had around. That degrades a bit the deal I thought I had gotten, but really the bike does exactly what I want it to do, so that's what matters. I asked the guy whether the stuff was nice, crappy, whatever, and he said the front wheel was nice. Heh. I bought that myself. I don't know if that means the shifters, etc, are crap or just the front wheel really is that nice.

Anyway, they kept the bike and I'll pick it up Friday.

Wow. Forget the wifi, this root beer frozen custard I'm eating right now at Lickity Split in El Segundo is good.

Really good.

And a cup was a touch over $2. And the wifi works great. Simple to connect, really responsive.

If only it wasn't so far away...

Oh, wait, they're actually opening two more locations, one of which is in Hollywood, easily accessible via the Red Line.

I love that wifi is no longer the exclusive domain of the coffee shop. I'm not in a coffee mood right now, but a little frozen custard hits the spot just about perfectly.

Downtown El Segundo is a lot nicer than I had expected, too. Parking is everywhere, and it's got a nice small city downtown feel.

So my block is New York today. I didn't take pictures, 'cause I was driving after all, put sitting next to the building on the northeast corner of Spring and 7th was a line of NYC taxis. The building it'll have gotten a bit of a coat of paint (although only up to the 12 or 15 foot level... are they going to leave that or just do something different later?) and signage for "NYC Central Bank".

Yesterday I got distracted by film equipment and drove straight past my building, forcing me to circle the block. I really need to get over that. This is LA. They average like two things filming per day downtown.

I have to say that it feels kind of weird going online in the mall food court, but at the same time it's not that bad of a place to sit. Southbay Galleria offers free wifi, and they've got a Chick-fil-a, so there's not a whole lot more you could ask of them. Well, some power outlets would be nice, but there may be one or two lurking on a post somewhere that I haven't seen.

There are times when I absolutely hate computers.

Today at work I had to upgrade my computer to Fedora Core 2. Simple enough. Then I decided to use the system-config-packages utility to install some GNOME software I hadn't installed with RH9 (and it hadn't given me any opportunity to include in the upgrade process). :

"Fedora Core 2" disk 1 needed to install packages

Fair enough... :

"Fedora Core 2" disk 2 needed to install packages
"Fedora Core 2" disk 3 needed to install packages

Still ok... :

"Fedora Core 2" disk 1 needed to install packages

Wha? :

"Fedora Core 2" disk 2 needed to install packages

Ummm.... :

"Fedora Core 2" disk 1 needed to install packages

Wait just a minute... Let's pay a little more attention here. It installs gphoto2... :

"Fedora Core 2" disk 2 needed to install packages

Installs some more packages :

"Fedora Core 2" disk 3 needed to install packages

Install one or two things... :

"Fedora Core 2" disk 2 needed to install packages

Three more packages. :

And now it says it's done. Whoever designed this app, I strongly dislike you at the moment.

I could have gone a whole lifetime without knowing that they planned to make a Miss Congeniality 2. Unfortunately, I didn't, and they are. In fact today and tomorrow they're shooting it on my block and have two lanes closed to traffic on Spring. I know downtown filming is a fact of life, but I wish we could agree for the inconvenience to at least be caused by good movies.

Saturday night Kathy and I went up to Pasadena and saw Strayed (or Les Égarés, if you prefer) at the Laemmle Playhouse. Kathy's taken a lot of French, I haven't; so while she gets to listen to the movie, I read it. It was good.

Anyway, that's not the point of this post. On the way back it was a touch after midnight and Kathy wanted somewhere to buy a soda. The gas stations on Arroyo Pwky. in Pasadena were either closed or sketchy, so we made our way down the 110 and ended up exiting on Hill to head into downtown. On Hill, in Chinatown, there's a gas station that just recently reopened as like USA Gas or something like that after the major chain that was their closed up shop a while back. Not only were they open, the front doors were wide open and the only employee present was a friendly lady who was out sweeping by the pumps when we pulled in.

Now, this wouldn't be that surprising in Michigan, or Nebraska, but this is LA. In LA you get used to talking to gas station attendants through glass once the night becomes late enough. But here she was, in the middle of Chinatown, happily tending her wideopen store in the wee hours of the night. I thought that was cool.

So I started this post Friday and didn't get around to finishing the research I wanted to do on it until now. Oh well.

Browsing the blogs at the bottom of the list at LA Blogs (the ones that don't ping updates to blogrolling) I happened across the Advice Goddess blog, whose latest entry mentions House Bill 4239, the "Parents Empowerment Act". Basically it allows parents to sue if their children come into contact with "obscenity".

You can see the press release on Rep. Hunter's site. The text of HR 4239 is also online. The law itself isn't worded to deal specifically with the Internet, but you can see from the press release that they do indeed have that in mind.

First thoughts: The case you have to compare this to is the CDA, which the Supreme Court shot down in Reno vs ACLU in 1997. The new bill looks to have learned some lessons from the CDA. First, it does include a definition of obscenity instead of relying on just the one prong from Miller.

The battle lines are going to be drawn over what constitutes measures that would prevent "a reasonable person [from expecting] a substantial number of minors to be exposed to the material." The CDA decision dealt with credit card verification systems as a method of keeping minors out. The Court ruled that requiring such a system would be overly burdensome for non-commercial sites. This law only applies itself to

any person who knowingly sells or distributes in interstate or foreign commerce an entertainment product containing material that is harmful to minors

To me that seems to only apply to commercial sites, and the Court's been a lot more favorable to imposing restrictions on commercial speech.

If this passes, I'm sure it will be challenged. If it is, it'll be an interesting opportunity to see how the mind of the Court has evolved in the six years since the CDA decision.

And if I hadn't been browsing the bottom of the blogroll, I would never have known about it.

Doing a bit of spring cleaning and noticed two papers I wrote and neglected to post here. Both were written for my Writing 340 class.

The first I titled Indecency in the 21st Century. It looks at the historic model of broadcast regulation and argues that this model can not and must not be carried forward to cable, satellite, and the Internet.

The second is The Train's Coming, but will USC Students Care?. We had to do a poll and write a paper on the results, so I asked students about their usage of public transportation. The results? They don't use it. You could have guessed that.

So this post is the 171st one I'm made this year. If you look at the archives you'll see that this ties 2004 with 2002 for most posts in a year. The key difference, obviously, being that 2004 is a little less than halfway over.

I took 15 minutes or so and wrote a little tool to run a couple stats on the blog. Before this post there were 975 total posts. A rough word count (stripping HTML and then splitting on whitespace) gives me a touch over 105,000 words.

Kathy and I will be heading back over to Hollywood tonight to spend a little more time at the Hotel Cafe than we did on Wednesday. Tonight Erik Penny is playing the first show of his new "(mostly) solo" career. Erik always puts on a good show and he's a cool guy on top of that, so I'm sure that'll be a fun time. The plan tonight is to get there early and chill for the rest of the acts on the lineup as well, so I'll be sure to report on that tonight or (most likely) tomorrow.

Looking at the rest of the Hotel's may calendar I see Jim Bianco and Joe Purdy back on stage next Wednesday, in a show I already mentioned I wanted to get out and see. The next day the Hotel brings another hardball lineup, with Gus Black and Julian Coryell. I haven't seen Gus play since the summer and it's been a lot longer than that since I've seen Julian.

The Hotel needs to sell like a monthly pass. I'd be there almost every night.

Just came out to the living room to grab some food and there was a police chase on tv. A maroon station wagon was careening through west LA, flying recklessly down city streets. And then all of a sudden it disappears into the parking structure for the Beverly Center. Now reports are really uncertain. Possibly shots fired in the structure, possibly a suspect in custody, possibly just people not knowing what they're talking about.

Traffic in that area is going to be screwed up for hours.

Slashdot links to a CNN article about grocery delivery services right now, and that got me curious to see if anyone offers the service for 90014, my zipcode. Sure enough, Safeway/Vons does. The delivery charge is $8 for a 4-hour window or $10 for a 2-hour, which I think is really reasonable. You could spend that much right now just driving to the grocery store.

Sometime this year Ralphs is supposed to open a store in the Gas Company Lofts complex at 9th and Flower. This is very cool, and a major development for downtown, but it remains to be seen how this will actually help residents other than those living in the very immediate vicinity of the store. From my apartment the walk to Ralphs will be about .85 miles. That's worlds better than the distances present now, but the question you have to ask is what's the magic distance at which people will make the frequent trips required to do their grocery shopping on foot. Once you're in the car it doesn't really matter whether you're going one mile or ten.

With delivery, though, you can place a big order without worrying about how you're going to get it back home. Sure, it's not convenient for the little trips or the trips to run out and grab a single item, but I could easily see delivery becoming a staple of my grocery shopping process.

Magilla and I are sitting here watching TV and I've now decided that Globe Trekker is now my favorite show on television (well, at least the television we get... ABC, NBC, Fox, UPN, 6 spanish channels, and two PBS stations).

A little while back I watched Ian Wright explore Norway and learned about people who live off only reindeer meat. Today we're watching Justine Shapiro explore southern Italy. Educational... but more really entertaining. Justine's a funny girl.

I need to pay a little attention to the KCET schedule and see when all this show's on.

I've ridden the subway for two round-trips in the last 24 hours, which I think is cool. An odd thing, though... Today, twice, I had the train stop outside of a station, apparently waiting for space to clear.

This morning it was on the Red Line coming into Union Station. We sat still for a minute or two waiting for a train to clear the platform before continuing on. As we began to move you could see the other train waiting to use the cross-over and get back to the westbound side.

This afternoon the stop was high above the LA river, directly above the Gold Line maintenance facility. We were at a complete stop for 45 seconds to a minute, and then continued as normal into Chinatown. What I found odd about this stop was that it's a good ways from there to the Chinatown station, so if we were indeed waiting for a train to clear there it would have seemed we could have gotten closer first.

Funny story about the stop above the LA River: Because of riding with the bike, I end up in the single seats right up against the drivers compartment (though not in the front car). This gives me a view to face sort of back, toward the rest of the passengers. In the first few rows was a Asian family with two small children, a boy and a girl. The boy was fascinated by the views, and he really enjoyed getting to stop up so high. With nothing else to do, I was sitting there watching him study our surroundings: the river, the buildings, etc.

"Look!," he said, "A drain! A big drain!"

Or that was what I thought he said. Then I realized he actually said train, and was pointing at a freight train parked alongside the river. Both, I think, were apt for our location.

So I was at the Hotel Cafe for about a half hour last night, which is a story I'm not going to get into here. Anyway, I caught the tail end of Joe Purdy's set and all I can find to say is, "Where did this guy come from?" I've seen Joe Purdy before. I'm heard the tracks on his site. He's really good. But, he's also put girls that were with me to sleep on two separate instances (ok, so in the second one I didn't go out and say it, but that time we left early so Kathy didn't fall asleep).

But not last night.

Last night Joe Purdy was playing with one or two electric guitars (depending on the song), a bass, a drummer, and who knows what else. It was upbeat, but it was still definitely his music.

Very cool stuff. I'm hoping to get back out next week and catch the whole show.

Today is Metro's Bike To Work Day. Even though my bike's been messing with me lately I hopped on and headed over to 5th and Hill to catch the red line. I got downstairs just as a train was pulling out, so I got to wait the full 5 minutes for the next one. That's the second time in less than 24 hours I've had my hand on the door of a train just after the doors closed.

At Union Station I was about to pick up my bike and climb the stairs when I got approached by a girl working for Metro's PR department (I think she actually said the MTA... isn't that verboten these days? "Call us Metro"). She was looking for bike to work day stories, and asked me the usual questions of whether I knew what today was ("yes"), if I rode specifically because it was bike to work day ("i made a point of it"), and why I did this rather than drive ("because it's more fun"). She also took a picture, which featured me standing in front of a gold line car next to my bike, helmet on, hair flowing out from underneath, and wearing a "Westside Baseball" half-sleeve. I hope they use that for something. I'll have to keep an eye on the site.

As I tend to do when I switch from car to bike, I forgot my JPL badge today, which means I get to walk around with a temporary printed badge sticker on my shirt. I even had the badge in my hand this morning, when I went to grab it and my headphones. The headphones made it here, the badge didn't.

Got up and drove into work today, and realized it was the first time I've ever driven north on Hill. Multiple times I had to think about whether I was on the right street, since downtown just looks so different depending on which direction you're coming at it.

In general the plan is to ride my bike into work, but today I drove so that I could run something by Pasadena City College to finish my application process and try and get accepted to take Spanish there. This language requirement's been after me since I first got to USC, so this summer I'm going to try and wipe it out all at once. It's going to be interesting. My last Spanish of any kind was half a semester of Spanish II my first semester here. Before that it was Freshman and Sophomore years of high school. The curve to get back up to speed might be rough.

Last night Magilla and I were trying to figure out options for late night food downtown, but ended up giving in and driving back to USC to grab Del Taco. That sort of acclimation to the new place is going to take some time.

I've started three or four posts here in the last day or two and haven't finished any of them. Oh well.

Saturday we finally got all moved out of City Park. Cleaning and the last bits of moving out took all day, starting at probably 10 and ending just after 5. It ended up well, though: our inspection went fine and we'll be getting all of the deposit back. Now I'm officially a resident of downtown.

Saturday night the Lakers won, as everyone knows by now. I watched the game over at Kathy's, but on the way back couldn't resist driving by Staples. It wasn't the best route time-wise, but it was fun to be surrounded by people honking their horns and generally being excited about the game.

Today my ethernet transceiver got here, so I booted the old Personal IRIS up with that. I've been messing with a handful of utilities I want to get installed on it to try and figure out a way to make the machine at least fun, if not useful. None are really wanting to compile cleanly on a 15 year old OS, though. That'll take some work.

I put up a picture today showing a bit of what my desk currently looks like. Last August D4 and I went about building ourselves a set of full-sized bunk beds and a 8' long table for a desk. The beds actually came out really well, and just the other day we cut the legs in half to make them into separate beds as we go our own ways.

The desk, though, was troubled. We never did get all the wobble out of it, even through two iterations of the legs. I've now got it in the new apartment, and there was no way I was rigging it back how it was.

And so I ended up with my current solution, which may be temporary or may be permanent. On the right I've got an SGI Personal IRIS, which has the solid metal framing to withstand much more than the weight of a desk and monitors. On the left is my desktop, an old PII 400 in a Gateway 2000 full tower that originally shipped as a PPro 200. To bring both up to a height of 26 1/4" I'm using a bunch of books that would otherwise have sat on my shelves. The Deeds of Frederick Barbarosa have never been so useful.

On the way back from lunch today I wasn't paying attention and walked straight past the front door to my building. Yeah, I'm still new here.

I was feeling boring and hungry, so I just wandered over to the Subway on Hill/Fifth to get something to eat. This also sent me straight past the BofA ATMs on Hill between 5th and 6th, which was convenient. Across the street there is Pershing Square, a park that now sits on top of a parking garage and sometimes doubles as a concert venue. And around Christmas time it's the site of LA's downtown ice rink, something I didn't make it to this past holiday season but definitely plan to next year.

They were doing a fire alarm test in the new building just now. I swear it felt like I was back in the Commodore 64 days playing Silent Service and I just gave the signal to dive. Better turn off the diesels, we're going under...

Hmmm, I didn't realize until I was looking for a link for Silent Service that it was done by Sid Meier of Civilization fame.

Internet's now working! I'm writing this via my Speakeasy DSL from the floor of the new apartment. The floor because we haven't actually gotten to the setting up furniture stage, just the moving the pieces into place one. I forgot to bring over the screws that go to my bed, so for tonight I'm sleeping on the mattress on the floor.

It won't matter, though, I'm going to be out like a light. Today flat out wore me out moreso than I can remember in a long long time. My legs are done. My knees hurt. My arms have random scratches.

A neighbor invited us over to hang out tonight, so we got a chance to (after showering) sit, cool down, and have some really good food. We already got invited to another "get-together" next weekend. I went two whole years never really knowing anyone I lived around at City Park, and I haven't even slept a night yet and already know people here.

8:30am, I get up, get dressed, and Magilla and I head over to the U-Haul center that's conveniently just like a mile away. We're getting a 17' truck for $29.95. Plus $5 handling fee to reserve it. Plus $14 for their insurance. Plus $10 for an appliance dolly. Plus mileage.

So really not at all the $29.95 they advertise. But that's ok. I knew that going in. So we've got a truck, and we've got it until 4pm.

We get back here around 9:30. It's street cleaning day, so my side of the street is off-limits until 11. We park at a meter just a little bit away, but not at all bad. Normally my side of the street would have been pretty empty on street-cleaning day, with maybe 4 or 5 cars with tickets. Today, though, probably 20. That was kind of weird.

Magilla had a 10:30 interview downtown for an internship, so he heads off for that and D4 and I start taking things apart. That takes a while. 10:50 or so everything's disassembled, and we take a couple pieces of bed downstairs and move the truck in front of the building. Loading begins in earnest. It takes forever. Magilla gets back around 11:30 and starts helping. It still takes forever.

12:55, truck is finally loaded and we're on the road. Not to downtown, but to Covina, a good half hour away. We need to pick up two couches from Magilla's house and saw in half the 4x4's that were the legs for the bunk beds D4 and I made in the fall.

1:30 or so we pull into Magilla's driveway. His Dad has gotten us pizza, and we're starving, so we eat that. We then load up the couches, and Magilla goes to look for the electric saw. He doesn't find it. We end up sawing through those 4x4's the old-fashioned way.

2:40 we're on the road again, but again not to Downtown. This time we have to go to Whittier and drop off D4's bed, dresser, etc, at his brother's house.

At this point I'm getting nervous. The truck's due back at 4, remember, and there's no chance we'll make that. I call U-Haul, and they give me until 5.

3:00, get to Whittier and unload D4's stuff.

3:30, back on the road. The 605 to the 60.

4:00, pull into downtown. Problem is, you can't park downtown at 4. 4-6 on Spring is no parking, no stopping, no even thinking about it. Driving up Main at 4:01 we saw tow-trucks cruising to take cars sitting on the street a minute too long.

There are two parking lots next to Premiere Towers, one on each side. We ask the first one if we can park there to unload. He wants $6, and isn't real nice about it. Between us we have $4 in cash. The next lot lets us park for the normal after 4pm car rate, $4. We park, open up the back, and get busy. We're talking a 17' U-Haul full of mattresses, couches, bed parts, a dresser, and a refrigerator, and that truck's still due back in an hour.

4:40. At this point the pace is feverish. We're loading everything into the lobby, trying to empty the truck as fast as possible. The truck still needs gas before it's returned.

4:55, Magilla pulls out of the parking lot with the U-Haul, leaving me and D4 to take all the stuff upstairs and into the room. We're already dead tired.

5:40, D4 and I finally finish. We can hardly move. We both fall asleep on couches.

Magilla ends up back to the U-Haul place a bit after 5, but they don't care. Mileage ends up costing $56 (at $.8/mile), so the whole thing runs around $110.

But it's done. And that's what matters.

Less fun is all the littler stuff that still needs to go, and all the cleaning this apartment needs before we turn it back in.

You learn all kinds of crazy things taking a computer apart. My machine had been up for 64 days, but tonight I shut it down in anticipation of its big move downtown. Tilting it forward, I learned some things:

• My floppy drive was not screwed in or connected to any cables.

• I had a hard drive sitting on a static bag on top of the cdrom drive.

At one point I'm sure I knew both of those things. Tonight, though, they were all new to me.

Kobe Bryant can never leave the Los Angeles Lakers. Kobe Bryant can never find another Shaq. This is where Kobe is the man. Yeah, Shaq's the man too. LA's big enough for two teams, so the Lakers are big enough for two stars.

2-2. Next game's Thursday at 5.

Kathy and I headed downtown tonight, driving by Staples Center around 7:35 and seeing all the people with tickets finding their way inside. We didn't have tickets, so we headed for a sports bar. We parked at my apartment and then headed west on sixth. First we tried the Grand Ave. Sports Bar, in the Biltmore Hotel. It was packed. We couldn't find a single open seat.

So we took to the road again.

We ended up at the Bonaventure, taking seats at the Bonaventure Brewing Co. They normally close at 9, but they kept things open late for the people watching the game on their 6 or so tvs. After the crowd at Grand Ave, it was great. Plenty of open seats at the bar, $4 pints, and a really good stout brewed in-house.

Kathy's sandals were bothering her feet, so we took a cab back to the apartment. That pretty much evened out the $5 or so we saved parking at my place, but you can't beat the flexibility of just walking around downtown to find a place.

I've been reading pretty much non-stop over the last few days to try and catch up for my final in Religions of Asia. I made it through most of the assigned reading for the semester, but I really don't know how much any of that is going to help me. We'll find out in 55 minutes, though.

The good side is that no matter what all of this will be behind me by 4pm, or probably sooner.

Then I get to focus exclusively on moving for a day. Beds need to be disassembled, a refrigerator needs to be emptied, and a whole lot of random things are going to need to find their way downtown.

On a positive note, I just got an email this morning saying that DSL should be in place in the new apartment tomorrow. That should mean no significant disruption in service as I move, which is very nice.

All this moving business has to be done soon, since Saturday is the last day of our lease here at City Park. Today I finally got around to reserving a truck from U-Haul for Wednesday. From this apartment we'll be taking the fridge, a couple mattresses, bed frames, desk, etc, and then we get to make the fun drive out to Covina to pick up a pair of couches from Magilla's parents.

Where the fridge is there I will be also, so Wednesday also marks the day I'll really make the move into the new place.

I'm excited.

First, though, I need to learn all there is to know about religions of asia before 2pm tomorrow. I've also made it through India, next come China and Japan.

Last night, while writing my concert recap, I thought I felt a bit of an earthquake. My trusty quake map didn't show anything, though, so I chalked it up to me imagining things.

Turns out it was indeed an earthquake, just up near Santa Barbara.

(noticed on doc's site)

I keep hearing sounds tonight, like someone walking around up above me. Being on the top floor, that puts them on the roof, which City Park this year put off limits. They threaten a big fine if you're caught up there, and for the most part I think that's stopped people who in the past would go up there to lay out, read, etc. Typically neither of those are night activities, and the security guard does make his rounds, even if these days they're a little less frequent. He has to spend most of the night sitting in the parking area, keeping an eye on the gate that has been stuck open for the last three or four days.

An elevator's also not working. That broke yesterday.

I'm glad to be leaving here.

Middle of last month I mentioned that a pair of pigeons (well, I said "pidgeons") was building a next on our balcony. They did so, and promptly laid eggs. Aside from not knowing how to spell, I also didn't know anything about, for instance, how long pigeon eggs take to hatch. Today I finally looked that up, and according to this page the answer is 18 days. "18 days," I asked myself, "shouldn't that make it about right now?"

The answer, yes. I just walked out to the balcony and noticed some movement under the mother pigeon. Sure enough there are baby pigeons under there.

Another thing I ran across tonight was the Aldo liquidation store on Melrose. I love the shoes I bought from them in Vegas in January, so I'll definitely be taking a trip to check this store out.

So many times I start to write these things and then get sidetracked and end up mentioning a show I went to like three days later. Well, tonight's not one of those nights. Tonight I just got back.

Saucy Monky was at The Gig tonight, so Kathy and I hopped in the car around 10:15 and took a little trip toward Hollywood. Never Never Land by UNKLE was on the cd player, and I was happy. After a slight detour where I convinced myself Beverly was actually Melrose, we made it just fine and found a free parking spot a block away.

We got there around 10:40, and Saucy was supposed to be on around 11:15, but the curtain was closed between acts so I knew they were either running behind or running early, and, this being LA, I figured it likely wasn't the latter.

Sure enough Tishara started playing around 11. Now I looked around her website earlier in the day, and I saw things like she was a Ms. Hawaiian Tropic, some scary looking dance photos, and an about page that includes text like "Tishara is undoubtedly the new country rock's up-and coming artist." When people say that on their own sites I tend to not believe it. So did the show change my opinion? Ehhh, sort of. She's got a great voice; there's no question of that. The performance was hampered by guitars that were mixed too high, drowning out the vocals. She had good stage prescence, and the band playing with her was good. I guess I'd just like to see a set where she played a little toned down, and it didn't seem like she had to sing as loud as she could to keep up.

Saucy was up next, taking the stage sometime around 10 after midnight. Sally Smithwick from Paper Sun was again on keys, playing a Wurlitzer Electric Piano and adding a great touch to the sound. Dawn Thomas also came on stage for one song, which turned into a bit of a round with Dawn, Cynthia, and Sally all participating in turn. Ann Marie, meanwhile, just hung out in the middle playing her guitar. A good time was had by all. Cynthia showed off her voice more than I think I've seen in the past.

Next up for me? Tuesday Lee Beth has a show at Masquers Cabaret and I'm hoping to make it out that.

I finally got a copy of the album from Lee Beth last week when I made it out to O'Briens for Songwriters on Tap. Seeing as when I first met Lee Beth last August, I'm pretty sure the album was due out any time back then, it's taken a while to finally get it out. It's good stuff, though. "Berlin" was the first song of hers that I really liked, and it's still my favorite. "My Apologies" and "Get There" are fun faster songs, while "Everything We Depend On" is a beautiful slower piece.

Yardley has a website, and the cd's also available (with samples) over at cdbaby.

I helped a friend who's going to be living in the new apartment over the summer move his stuff in today.

I figured, oh, it's saturday, downtown won't be busy.

I was wrong.

But we made it to the apartment ok, and successfully used the loading zone right out front for getting his stuff up to the fourth floor. We met one of our neighbors, a friendly hispanic woman. I'm in love with the idea of living in a building that's not 100% college kids. I'm done with that, I want to be out in the real world. Now I'll be living in a building that's got a little bit of everything. The manager says it's about 10% students, and I've already seen old people, little kids, and people in between.

I moved the Personal IRIS over there today, and after not picking that thing up in about a year anm reminded just how heavy it is (122 pounds for though of you too lazy to click the link). I never did get that thing reliably connected to my network this year. In the page I linked above I talk about how I connected it up via a little fiber run since a fiber transceiver was all I had handy. Well, I still have that, but the fiber media convertor on the other side had a chip disconnect from its heat sink so it's out of service until I get that fixed up. I really just need to buy a ethernet transceiver off ebay. I guarantee it would be under $5.

Someday I still need to figure out how to get the rest of my SGI gear out here. Sitting at home I've still got two Indys (although I think a drive died in one) and a dual-chassis Origin 200. They aren't really useful for much these days but they're fun toys. The problem is that combined (with monitors for the Indys) they probably weigh a good 250 pounds. That's a lot to ship.

Last night Kathy and I decided at the last second to head over to the Sunset Strip and catch some music at the Viper Room. Jim Bianco was up first, and was the reason we went. His shows are always a great time. I first saw Jim play back in November at the Hotel Cafe. And then I saw him again in December, and then again in January. You can see a pattern forming here. People have asked me what kind of music Jim plays, and I can't tell you. I'll just say it's good.

After Jim was Ellis Hooks. He said his band couldn't make it, so it was just him and an electric player. What the sound lacked in fullness, though, he made up for in energy and a great voice.

Headlining the night was Robert Bradley's Blackwater Surprise, who were actually from Michigan. Bradley may be blind, but he puts on a show. Two electric guitars, a bass, keys, a drummer, and an old black guy singin the blues. I don't know what else you can ask for.

Tonight we're headed to The Gig (flash site) to see Saucy Monky, which should be fun as always.

Whew... Disappeared a little there. Busy and exhausted and it all adds up to me thinking about posting things here, but it never actually happening.

SBC turned on the dial-tone at the new apartment yesterday and today I called Speakeasy to put in an order to get DSL turned on. That should take about a week, which works out fine since Wednesday is when we'll be doing the actual heavy moving. Wherever the fridge is is where I'm living, so it'll be Wednesday when I actually take up residence downtown. I had ordered the phone service Wednesday, but forgot the number they told me, so last night I had to run over there with a phone to call myself and see what came up.

I sent in my application to Pasadena City College to take Spanish there over the summer. That should be interesting, seeing as my last real spanish classes were Freshman and Sophomore years of high school. I started to take it fall of my Freshman year here, but that didn't quite work out. So this summer I'll be taking Spanish 3 at PCC and playing furious catchup to work to pass it.

The graphical boot never came back for me, so I'm not sure what I did to cause that. In general practice, though, I'd say 90% of my boots are after unclean shutdowns, since any other time I'm usually just leaving the machine suspended (to mem... to disk doesn't like me yet). I have done a clean shutdown and reboot with no graphical goodness, though, so I don't know what's up with that.

Yeah, the system-config-* scripts should pop up a password box, and they did, but they also crashed right after that. I think it was a combination of the SELinux stuff and a bug in the scripts. Upgrading to all the latest RPMS helped, but with the new kernel I just turned off SELinux.

1. The graphical startup screen should be the default, unless you have errors in your startup stuff. In the latter case, the graphical doodads go away so you can read and fix the errors. Fedora also defaults to text after an unclean shutdown. Should that happen, go to your local temple and sacrifice a baby lamb to become clean again.

2. The admin thingies should all pop-up a root password prompt. Sounds like something is wonky.

Magilla and I went to Del Taco tonight for Taco Tuesday. 6 tacos for $2.14 (counting tax), and as usual I paid with dimes, nickles, and a few pennies. Tonight, though, two different groups in front of us were buying tacos for a whole house. I don't know how many the first group had, but the second one was a guy getting 300 tacos. That'll definitely slow things down, and it did. Ridiculously. So slow.

On the plus side, I am now watching Coupling -- the British one, obviously. Season 1, Episode 6, The Cupboard of Patrick's Love. Funniest sitcom ever.

Last night I got everything installed, played for a minute, and then ran off to do other things, so today is really my first full experience. First impressions, though, are pretty mixed. Note that I am using FC2 Test 3, so I expect a bit of abnormality related to that.

The first-time bootup interface, which scrolls the system messages in a nice GUI, was very cool. But then for subsequent boots it disappeared. What's up with that? I liked it.

In FC2 Test3 all the system-config-whatever tools are broken unless run as root. That's annoying. I'm running up2date right now and it better fix that.

acpid is installed by default, but not really set up to do anything other than call shutdown on power button press. Lid events would have been pretty clutch.

As it is lid events are troubling. I shut the lid and it turned off my screen, but then it didn't turn it back on when the lid was reopened. It seemed to do the same thing later when it was left sitting long enough to cut off the screen.

Like I said, I'm running up2date right now and am also compiling my own kernel so that I can have suspend to disk and such. We'll see how that does.

I'm waiting right now for Fedora to install on my laptop. It had been a Redhat 9 box since I got it last fall, but a number of nagging annoyances prompted my move. Instead of upgrading I decided to install fresh and avoid building up the cruft I usually tend to accumulate in a Linux installation. I'm curious to see how a number of the things that have been most annoying to me of late work out:

• Random hangs, particularly related to hot-swap type behaviour with PCMCIA and USB. The PCMCIA part seems to have gotten better now that I destroyed my old wireless card, but yesterday I got pretty ticked when I pulled my USB bluetooth adaptor out and it hung the machine solid.

• Suspend to disk. When I upgraded my memory to 512MB it got bigger than my swap and I was no longer able to suspend to disk (since on linux you write the mem image to swap). I upped the size of the swap this time, so I'm curious to see if things have gotten better between the early 2.6 kernels and now (2.6.5?).

It used to be that I was all about the challenge of getting things to successfully work. I remember spending hours figuring out dependencies, compiling stuff, etc. Now, though, I get angry at things with dependencies. I'd much rather just use something that's already installed on the box.

What are apps that I'll install on top of a new installation?

• wlan-ng drivers
• kismet
• firefox
• enlightenment
• Eterm
• lyx
• Gimp 2

That's really about it.

So at the new digs today I checked and it is the Palace Theatre, as I had guessed when I looked at the picture I took out my window. Some of the old Broadway (the street in LA, not the place in New York) neon was relit earlier this spring. Cinema Treasures posted some good pictures showing the front sides of the Los Angeles and the Palace.

Went down to the new apartment today to drop the first small load of stuff off and see if the power was turned on, etc. Each time I'm there it's the little things that strike me about how much I'm never going to miss City Park, the apartment building I've called home for two years now.

First off, it's ridiculously hot right now. In City Park, the hallways reflect that. They're open to the outdoors, so while they do get a little shade, that's it. Premiere Towers, though, has the air on in the hallways.

The City Park elevators are some of the slowest, sketchiest elevators you could imagine. There are two of them, but often one's out of order. Premiere Towers has three or four elevators, with dark wood panelling and framed black and white pictures. Their elevators are about twice as fast getting to the 4th floor.

I checked my mailbox there today and it was full of ads and credit card offers for the last tenent. I'm sure that'll keep up for a while. There was also a lady sitting in the lobby who started talking to Kathy and not making sense, and I don't think she stopped once we got on the elevator. You have to use a key to get in there, though, so she's either pretty sneaky or a crazy lady with means.

I hate revising papers. I never feel like I can jump in and change things up but still keep a coherent point or flow. When I write a paper I pretty much write, and then am done. When I finish my conclusion I run a spell-check and turn it in. I don't even read back through it.

I don't know if that's really the USC Writing Program approved approach.

When I go to revise, though, I feel lost. I feel like I need an outline just to tell me where to get back in. The scope of the paper just sort of unnerves me. It's as if the little section that fits on my screen is insufficient for me to understand what it is that I was thinking. My papers aren't made up of words or paragraphs, they just are. Going back and tampering somewhere in the middle just feels so awkward, like I'm trying to make the paper fit a role it was never meant for.

That doesn't change the fact that I've got two papers that have to be revised by 1pm tomorrow to be turned in as a "portfolio." My papers and I are going to just have to learn to get over our dislike of each other and get serious.

So this new look makes nineteen, at least since I started counting. I wanted it to include my new downtown residency, and the only pictures I had were phone cam images, so that's what you get. I've got plans for this look in the future, so consider this draft one.

It looks good in Mozilla and IE, but is still a little broken in Safari and Konqueror. I don't consider that my fault, though. Safari/Konq use the Mozilla box model, but don't support max-width (though that will be changing), so the hack for making padding not screw with the widths screws them double. I consider this their problem, not mine.

You can see all the old looks in the eWorld Look Archive, if you're interested.

The other day I saw a Film Radar email talking about Last Remaining Seats, a yearly set of events put on by the LA Conservancy. They show classic films in some of LA's historic theatres, places the general public really doesn't get much access to these days.

Kathy and I are going to be seeing three of the films, two of which will be right around the corner from me in the Los Angeles Theater. There we'll be seeing Some Like It Hot on June 2, and It Happened One Night on June 30. In between we'll be seeing Sunrise on June 9 at the Orpheum Theatre.

I'm excited.

See, this is why I need to document more of the things I do here in the blog. Not for other people, but for me.

Today I'm working on grabbing some pictures I took today at the new place off my phone and uploading them to Buzznet via the computer instead of via GPRS. Over Christmas I had managed to do this, and it was cool, and I was happy.

Well, since then I forgot how.

I'm slowly figuring it back out, but it would be a lot easier if I had just left myself good notes the first time.

The Downtown News has an interesting article on the Los Angeles Theatre Center. There's a fight going on right now to see who's going to manage the struggling complex, with a lot of politics as usual. Normally I wouldn't really care about something like this, seeing as my nights out don't usually include catching a play, but the Theatre Center is just a block up Spring St. from my new apartment. Pictures I found online don't do any justice to the Bladerunner-esque feel of the building.