Archives for May 2004
shoes?
May 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.
Music: Saucy Monky @ The Gig
May 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.
Music: Yardley - Berlin
May 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.
still fun with moving
May 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.
Live Music: Jim Bianco & Blues at the Viper Room
May 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.
catching up
May 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.
must need more sacrificing...
May 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.
fc2test3 comments
May 05, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.
worst. taco night. ever.
May 04, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.
Fedora: First Impressions
May 04, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.
starting fresh
May 03, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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?
That's really about it.
The Palace
May 03, 2004 by Eric Richardson
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.