I was reading the USC Hoops message board today and ran across something that sort of made me do a double-take. I had seen the other day that Desmon Farmer signed with the Pacers but today noticed a followup post saying that he was also the number one pick in the CBA draft. I clicked through to that article and had my "what?" moment when I saw:

The Mayhem then flew Farmer to Muskegon on a private jet, which arrived at the Muskegon County Airport at 7:15 p.m., just in time to make it for the draft party's start at 7:30.

Muskegon? Pro basketball? Wha?????

I really hope Des makes it with the Pacers, but the idea of Des playing in Muskegon is pretty crazy. I would definitely chase down some games when I make my annual trip back to Muskegon around Christmas-time.

Walked up out of the subway tonight and into setup for a movie shoot (no big surprise there, this is downtown). Outdoor shot set up to be the exterior of a hotel with maybe a cafe, outdoor seating, etc. Other props included a valet station (complete with keys inside the box) and a newsstand. Walking by the newsstand, here are the two magazines at my eyelevel in what would be a prime selling position: Computer Shopper and Scientific American. I wanted to stop and ask questions. Who thought that was realistic? Who picked these things? I mean, I know you're not trying to portray a real downtown LA, but I've got to believe that's real nowhere.

Crazy movie people.

One of the readings I had to do today on the train down here was a selection from Don DeLillo's short story "Human Moments in World War III." I've mentioned DeLillo before when I read White Noise. Again I was struck by how much I liked his writing, and how I need to check out more of it.

So, uh, yeah... I need to do that.

I rode the train down to Long Beach today (I'll write more about that later). I'm down here for ION GNSS 2004. Don't worry, I don't know what it stands for either; I'm here for work. I've got a little time to kill before on-site registration reopens, so I'm currently sitting at Hooters enjoying Long Beach's downtown wireless zone. I have to write a paragraph on cinema depictions on Utopia to get in to a classmate for a group presentation we're doing tomorrow. Fun fun fun.

My philli cheese steak beckons me to get off the internet.

I went to my second neighborhood council type meeting tonight, this time the Arts, Asthetics, Culture, & Education Committee. I'm not a member of the committee, but I figured that if I'm going to be Area Wide Resident Artist I might as well see what I can do for the arts. A lot of it was what you'd expect of any meeting: motions, procedures, etc. There's always going to be a lot of beaurocratic nonsense associated with any sort of meeting of this size and scope. Neighborhood Council meetings have to follow Robert's Rules, which pretty much assures having to grind through a lot of procedure. At the same time, though, you can quickly see why you have to follow some concrete set of rules. Without it things would just degrade into a mess.

So what was talked about? Arts stuff. A big part of what the AACE is concerned with right now is the business aspect of downtown arts. As the downtown housing boom is occuring there is inevitably upward pressure on commercial rents. Artists aren't really in a position to survive spiralling costs. What groups like AACE can do is work with artists to educate them about the business side of things like negotiating leases, while at the same time working with property owners to identify those interested in bringing arts into the neighborhood and connecting them with tenants.

Next step for me is to start taking advantage of events like the downtown art walk to get out and meet gallery owners and start seeing what's around here.

It's insane how much I'm doing in the next few days.

• Movie due back to the library tonight
• I'm planning to attend a neighborhood council Arts Committee meeting tonight
• Tomorrow I'm in Long Beach 1pm-9pm for work
• I have to do some work for a group project, type a little thing up and get it to a classmate tomorrow
• I've got a short paper due for a class on Thursday
• By Friday we have to have the merch we want to sell at homecoming approved by USC's trademark office so that we can turn in the appropriate forms. Yesterday I got the art to the promo company, now they take it to trademark and we see what happens
• Friday I'm in Long Beach mid-day
• Saturday night I'm attending a screening of THX1138 on campus where George Lucas will be there.
• Sunday afternoon I'm running sound at a wedding

Wish me luck.

So I mentioned earlier that magically a hard drive I thought I had lost in January came back to life. This drive had been my audio drive, so I had been forced to rebuild my collection from scratch (and from cds I had on-hand) when it had gone south.

Now it's back, and it's fascinating to see what I've been missing. Some random tracks I'm glad to see:

• Manic Street Preachers - If You Tolerate This (Massive Attack Remix)
• Gus Black - Cadillac Tears
• Antiloop - Catch Me (with Timbuktu)
• Danielson Famile - Smooth Death
• Joseph Arthur - In the Sun
• Bran Van 3000 - Go Shoppin (Featuring Eek A Mouse)

Good times...

As usual, computer problems strike me when I need them least. Just a few weeks ago I totally rebuilt my machine. Everything was working great. Then yesterday I come home to find console messages saying that the ext3 journal had stopped on /dev/hda3 (mounted as /). The mount had gone read-only. Uh-oh. I try to shut it down cleanly, but I end up having to hit the reset button. On boot-up, the situation starts looking more serious. When the bootloader goes to read its second stage info off the drive, I just get a slow clicking. The boatloader eventually comes up without it's graphics or defaults, and manual boot attempts are fruitless. Booting into a console on a distro install cd I'm unable to mount anything off the drive -- "Input/Output Error".

So it's dead. And that means it's RMA time. The drive's under a year old -- I bought it on January 5th, to replace another bad drive.

HOLD ON... Wow. So my drive from yesterday's still dead, but there's an unexpected twist. The 60gig drive I bought in February, 2002, has unexpectedly come back to life. Just last month I tried to spin this drive up to recover data from it that had been lost since January. No go. It didn't even spin. It just made a faint but ugly clicking sound. Just now I threw it on and got the exact same thing. I powered the machine on only to get that faint clicking sound and no spinning. I got angry at it and smacked it. All of a sudden, it spins up. I boot a recovery cd. I mount the drive. All my data is there. Amazing.

So on the down-side I'm pretty sure my 160gig drive is really dead, and dead with it are a lot of files that I really should have been backing up. On the up side, all the music I thought I lost in January is all of a sudden found.

Stupid computers.

Now I need to craft a custom kernel and initrd to put on a distro install cd so that I can install Linux onto a SCSI drive even though my SCSI card isn't supported by the stock 2.6 kernel. Woo hoo!

I have the same issue with sites showing up as updated/not updated and I do notice that there is a tendancy for the same sites to show as updated, when they are not. If there is a better solution, I'm definitely on board to try it out.

Back in the summer of 2001 Kathy and I took a road-trip that sent us from Michigan to South Carolina, up the coast to New Jersey, and then back to Michigan. While in New Jersey we made the short trip up to New York to catch a Yankees game. We met my cousin Brent at his apartment in Jersey City and he took us into the city. Before we left the apartment, though, I started glancing at a little book he had laying around called Letters to Wendy's. Sometime later (probably that fall, definitely once I was out in LA) I decided to purchase a copy of my own. That was tougher than I expected. The recently deceased Midnight Special Bookstore had never heard of it, even when I got the author's name -- Joe Wenderoth -- for them to search the computer with. USC's bookstore special ordered it for me, but I think it didn't end up coming in until a few months later. In the mean-time I was able to order the book online somewhere.

Turns out the book's gotten a little more popular and a little more available since then (as you can see from the amazon link). Today, listening to KCRW (though it was KCRW Music after noon, therefore it really happened on-air Friday), they mentioned Joe Wenderoth coming to talk at Redcat. I quickly went to the website to check it out. When's he coming? February of 2005. How in the world am I going to remember that long? There's no chance. Somebody remind me in January, if you don't mind.

Blogrolling, the service that many blogs use to keep a list of what other sites have recently updated, has been having some trouble over the weekend. Apparently Thursday they did some maintenance, declared everything working, and then disappeared for the weekend while users showed up and left comments saying that their sites were broken. All I know is that the roll at LA Blogs has been the same for several days now.

This makes a convenient time for me to mention my number one complaint with blogrolls that use blogrolling: why do some sites show up as updated when they haven't changed at all? I'm not going to name names, but there are a few sites on the LA Blogs roll that I find particularly guilty of this. Now, I'm not trying to charge this to malice or an attempt to tweak position to get more traffic. More likely it's just a poor job of implementing something having to do with the pings that let blogrolling know the site has changed.

Basically, blogrolling just looks for a ping to come in saying "this site's been updated." That's it. Now I'll grant you that making sure content has changed is a sticky proposition. You can't checksum the page content, 'cause it could well have some dynamic element that's different for each load. You can't require an RSS feed to timestamp the latest entry without greatly limiting the pages supported. So yeah, I'm complaining without a solution to the problem. But still, there has to be something better. Surely someone with more time to devote to the problem can come up with a smarter solution than I could.

Why does the cool stuff always happen the days I'm not on campus?

7 a.m.: The Discovery Channel films an episode of the television program "Big" until 1 p.m. at Hahn Plaza. The show displays oversized items in order to educate people on how they work. They will be displaying a giant working espresso machine and serving cappuccinos and lattes to passers-by.

Amazing. (From the DT's Upcoming Events)

The Rail Volution conference is going on right now, and there were a few press items that came out of the weekend. Most, like this article in the Pasadena Star-News focused on current development happening around LA rail stations. An article from Friday hits a lot of the same topics. Gold Line development gets most of the Star-News buzz, but there are also several Red Line projects taking place right now.

The conference sounds interesting, but the $400 registration fee was enough to keep me on my side of town.

Another set of Friday Insight questions from LA Blogs.

• How many hours a week are you stuck in your car?

Probably six or so. Maybe more once you count in random errands. Not much more, though.

• What music is in your car, right now?

UNKLE - Psyence Fiction

Over the course of the day today I listened to:

DJ Andy Smith - The Document II Jim Bianco - Handsome Devil Saucy Monky - Celebrity Trash

• What do you do while stuck in traffic? Eat? Sing? Primal scream?

Usually my time in the car is my time to call people. I consider myself very good at driving while talking on the phone.

• If you could give citations to other drivers for bad behavior, who/ what would you ticket?

People who go slow in the carpool lane. Don't ruin it for everyone. If you want to go slow there are other lanes for that.

• What's your favorite place/freeway to drive in LA?

The carpool ramp between the 110 and the 105 that sweeps up into the sky and gives you a great LA vista.

• What's your least favorite?

Anywhere on the 405.

• What's the craziest thing you've ever seen another driver do?

Ummm... Apparently nothing all too crazy. I'm having a bad time thinking of anything.

Actually, the other day I was driving home and a pickup truck had a bunch of wood in the back. It accelerated after a light turned green and basically half the wood came off the back. The guy obviously knew -- you could see him deciding what to do. He ended up just keeping on driving.

• What's the craziest thing you've ever seen left on the side of the road?

Maybe I don't spend enough time on the freeways or pay attention to the shoulder too much. I suck at this question.

Out in the sun again today, wakeboarding out at Canyon Lake. It was great. We got there at 9:30, when it was still a little overcast. The lady at the gate assured me it was going to burn off, and burn off it did. By the time we got off the water at 4:30pm we were all well-done. After accidentally trying a back roll last week, I tried them for real this time. I didn't land one, but I had two that were landable. My rotation's there, I just need to do the little things like keeping the handle on my left hip so that I land facing forward. Next week I'll land it.

I had the weirdest thing happen once we got back. A girl rode back from the lake with me and came over to help me carry the equipment up to my apartment. So that we could unload I parked my car in the little lot next to the building. After unloading we went back to the car and went to back away. Something felt weird. "Are we dragging something?," I asked. She didn't think so. "I think you're just turning the wheel too far." I backed up a little more. "No, we're definitely dragging something." She got out, went to the front of the car, and just sort of laughed. "What is it?" She didn't say. "Just come here."

I stuck the car in park and walked up front. Wedged under the frontend was one of the little concrete bars that are supposed to keep you from running into the wall. Well, it turns out the bar was too short for my frontend to hit it, but a little metal bar on one end wasn't. It had gotten itself jammed into something in the undercarriage.

I tried to pull it out. No deal.

Marieke tried standing on it while I tried to back up. She and the bar moved with the car.

We were standing there trying to figure out what to do when a guy walking down the sidewalk stopped to try and help. The three of us figured the answer was probably picking up on the frontend while someone pulled the bar out. As we were about to try this a hispanic family was walking by. Without even asking any questions the man stopped, walked over to the front left wheel-well, and got set to lift. I got the other wheel-well, and our first passer-by friend pulled the now-free bar out and back to its original position. The hispanic man headed off. The first guy turned out to live a floor above me in my apartment building.

A random predicament, and within minutes all sorts of people are coming to my aid. I love that. That's why this neighborhood's cool.

Hits probably went up because of the History Channel documentary featuring Caltrans District 7 new headquarters. Check it out: http://you-are-here.com/los_angeles/2004_caltrans.html

Sometimes I wake up and thing google has taken over the world. Then I just relize I recently woke up from a wonderful dream. Dang that chick was hot. I am getting out of this computer lab before i go crazy

Apoligies if this posted twice. I had a 'Netscape moment' and the box I was typing into went byebye suddenly.

You don't know me but I ran across your site when I was looking for something else and thought I would stop & comment.

I played SWG when it first came out but then I gave it up...perhaps 6 months ago.

Awesome game. I love the graphics & the atmosphere.

I miss it sometimes but it just takes too much attention & everything needed more credits than my 'toons could manage. Plus trying to help run a city on Lok turned into a dramafest and I get quite enough of that sort of thing doing the 8-5, thank you very much.

Careful with the Scout stuff: I hate PVP, loved scout and next thing you know I'm 2 boxes away from Master Bounty Hunter!!! Sneaky little game; it sucks you in :P

It's very true you can't really do it on your own. If for nothing else than you can only level your character so far without teaching other people and getting those apprenticeship points [or so was the case when I played it]. I had lots of problems finding the right group. I ended up [and I hate to admit this] actually having TWO accounts that I played at the same time. One BH and one Master Doctor. And some people just take the game way too seriously [I'm sure you have noticed thislol].

Truly awesome game. I miss it but I just don't have the time:( I read posts like yours and wish I did, however.

Oh what server did you end up on? I was on Wanderhome. Not the best ping from our Coast (I'm north of you on the map) but I hadn't realized that until it was too late and I was already established there.

grin Let me end this novel now :)

Just a fun little graph from data I track in googlefun: this is a visual representation of a huge spike in caltrans building related google hits that happened on the 6th.

Not sure what caused that. I'll have to pump out some other cool graphs soon. There's fun stuff to see when you can see the numbers like this.

It seems today the LA Times caught up with the ongoing back and forth over the Toluca Yard subway portal. I thought I had talked about this last month when Preserve LA did their call to action, but I can't seem to find anything in the archives. I guess I sort of half-responded in my head and the words never made their way here.

Anyway, the Times story -- "Old Tunnel May Be Tagged as Landmark" -- focuses on the idea of the site as an "art park" for graffiti.

The land has sat for decades as a sort of no-man's land — a place for homeless people to sleep, taggers to use as a canvas and drug addicts to shoot up. Then, earlier this year, the new property owner proposed tearing down the tunnel and replacing it with a 276-unit apartment complex.

The plan has sparked a growing movement to preserve the tunnel, not as a relic of the past, but as a monument to Los Angeles' underground graffiti culture. Today the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission is scheduled to vote on whether to grant cultural landmark status to the tunnel — a key step in efforts to save it.

Now, here's my first question: How do you "tear down" a tunnel? You can fill in a tunnel, or dig up a tunnel, but tear it down? That's some poor word choice there, especially since I seem to recall that the developers intend to do no such thing, even leaving the tunnel portal intact as a feature of the site. I can't seem to find the details I remember reading previously, though, so take my memories with a grain of salt.

The article gives mention to the history of the site. Originally running from downtown's Subway Terminal Building to the Toluca Yard, service stopped in 1955 and in 1967 the tunnel was interupted by the construction of the Bonventure Hotel. Since then it's just sort of been sitting there, for the most part unsecured.

Sort of as an aside, the Belmont Art Park website is really good looking. Definitely a site you should check out, if just for their very comprehensive set of links to tunnel related sites.

People have mentioned several different uses for the site, including the aforementioned art park and putting the tunnel back to use for a new light rail line. Of course the reality of the situation is that the developer owns the site and the area needs housing.

As much as I think the reuse of the tunnel for transit would be a great thing, I don't think I've ever seen any hard information on exactly how thoroughly the Bonaventure cut off the tunnel. Knowing that would be pretty important to knowing if what you've got is a dead-end hole or something that could be worked back into a tunnel with two ends.

With the site being discussed at meetings both yesterday and today, you'd like to think that we'll get a slightly clearer picture of what's up in the next little while.

As I mentioned in advance yesterday, last night was my first Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council meeting (DLANC, from hereafter). The meeting was at the DWP building on Hope, which I hadn't really ever noticed before. To get to the meeting I had to leave my last class at USC early and catch the bus back to my apartment. From there I jumped in my car and headed northwest (it's like 10 blocks or so, maybe, but I was in a hurry). I got to the meeting right on time, re-introduced myself to a few people, and then took my seat in the audience. I hadn't yet been sworn in, so at this point I was still just a commoner attending the meeting.

Second or third on the agenda was the special election I won. They announced the results, introduced me, and then moved into the next item: the swearing in. Three of us read the DLANC pledge from a sheet of paper and then took our seats in the front of the room.

The rest of the meeting was more a chance for me to sit and listen than to contribute anything to the discussion. Items discussed included creating a committee to work through issues related to filming downtown, and trying to get an accurate count of downtown's homeless population.

You have to love the rules of order for meetings such as this. For instance, the filming motion being discussed was simply a yes or no for creating a committee. What inevitably discussion tried to turn into, though, was how to balance the interests of the filming companies, downtown residents, and the creation of jobs for those downtown (particularly the homeless and/or jobless) who really want to be working. That discussion is fine to have, but it's very much a tangent to the motion that was actually on the table. The board recommends the committee, the executive board creates it, and then only once the committee is constituted can this discussion have any meaningful purpose. In fairness I thought procedure was handled well. Some discussion was allowed, but in the end order was steered in the right direction and those who had a lot to say on the issue were shown as good candidates to be involved on the committee.

Several board members have USC connections, including Jason Waters, who I had met before at the Artistsalon.com studio warming party. Another board member / USC grad was taking headshots of everyone for the website, and I'm pretty sure that in like 10 shots we were unable to get one with my eyes open. I don't know why, but the flash on that camera just really got me.

So what now? I guess the next step is to get myself onto a committee or two, since that's where the real action goes on. I know there's one that involves transportation, and that's always been an interest of mine. Also I figure that since I am "Resident Artist" I should probably get involved in helping out the arts community, so we'll see where that goes.

After the meeting a guy from the Downtown News asked me some questions, so there's a chance I'll get my name in the paper. He asked me if I had any aspirations in politics. I said no. Only the future will tell if that's true or not, but at this point I have to believe it is.

I have my first Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC) board meeting in about an hour. If you remember, last month I was elected Area-Wide Resident Artist. Tonight I get to go see what that actually entails. I'm fascinated by the concept, so I'm looking forward to it, even though I understand that anything like this is bound to be wrapped up in a lot of politics and rules. I'll be sure to make a full report afterward.

As I mention in the category description, we're playing the game Star Wars Galaxies. Yeah, we have classes like that. Be jealous. This is why I'm a COMM Major.

Once getting my computer up to date enough to play the game and shaking my fist at Microsoft when they tried to tell me that an OEM version of XP is only allowed to be used on the computer it ships with, I got started. The game looks amazing, as you can see in screenshots on their website.

I chose to be an Artisan, since I'm really not that interested in just fighting all the time. Once in the game, though, I couldn't quite focus as clearly. So I am an artisan, but I'm also working on bits in Scout, Marksman, and Brawler. Scout because I wanted to be able to harvest hide and bones from animals, marksman because I wanted to shoot a gun fairly straight to hit said animals, and brawler because I wanted to be able to use the knife they give you. I think this is partially a result of my typical style of play: as self-reliant as possible. What takes a little bit of time to understand in a game like this is that you can form a group of players that each have a specialized skill to bring to the table. Maybe, though, this grouping is better suited to non-newbie players, people who can actually bring something useful.

I find myself having to fight the urge to play the game like it's single-player. When you come into the game you have a choice; you can either start talking to people or you can just go do something. I tend to just go do things. I don't think that's the right strategy here. It takes a long time to do things yourself. It goes a lot faster if you make friends.

I'm not very good at making money. I wander around, I survey, I kill the easy animals -- that's about it right now.

It's a pretty obvious conclusion, but the people who play more advance faster. It's odd leaving the game on a Thursday and seeing someone at a certain point, and then coming back after the weekend to find that they've massively passed you by.

Eh, that's enough for now. More later tonight.

So today I made a step most kids made a dozen years ago. I took the bus to school today. It's a little odd to be able to say this in your fourth year of college, but I think this is the first time I've ever done that. Ever. I was home-schooled up through seventh grade, and then when I was in North Muskegon I lived too close to the school for the bus to be available to us.

But today I took the bus: the 38 South to be specific. I caught it at the corner of Spring and 6th, and it dropped me off right in front of campus. I have a neighborhood council meeting tonight, so I didn't want to bike here dressed in board shorts and a t-shirt, have to go back to my apartment and change, and then get in my car and drive from my apartment to the DWP building. So I took the bus.

Impression number one? It's not faster. I got on the bus on 8:16, and got off at 8:36 or so. I can bike door to door in that time. I'd arrive a little hot and sweaty, but I'd save the money for a token.

The bus was well used, but not crowded. Boardings picked back up once the bus passed LA Tech, and it never really got empty.

I think the DASH will be the next leg of my journey. That's for later, though.

Kevin Roderick over at the great LA Observed made mention of the new Caltrans Building today. He links to a Daily News story asking how Caltrans can get this building done on-time and on-budget when they're unable to do the same for freeway projects.

Kevin also links to an Archinect thread that has some photos of the building. In addition to just being better photos than my Caltrans Building photos, they also give some shots of the building interior. I don't think they do the exterior justice, however, since they don't back up enough to convey the building's mass, or the intimidating presence it presents to the street-level.

Forget the debate about the building's environmental features or whether Caltrans should have thrown so much money into it (both the green features and the money are good things in my book), let's just get right down to what's important: who really thinks all this Thom Mayne stuff looks good? The only other work of his I'm seen up close is the new LAUSD Science Center school in Exposition Park, and while the interior of the redone Armory building looks very cool, the exterior of the new classroom space just looks like typical Mayne, without really having any regard for all the classic structures the park contains.

While talking about a Blue Line accident two weeks ago, I mentioned that Houston has a lot of similar problems. This misc.transport.urban-transit post quotes from an article showing that the only thing new about these accidents is that they're car/train instead of car/car or car/solid object.

Between 1998 and 2000, nearly 8,000 crashes were recorded along the 7 1/2-mile corridor where Metropolitan Transit Authority light rail trains now travel. Almost 2,000 were on Main and Fannin alone, two streets that make up most of today's rail route. The pre-rail crash total averaged about 51 incidents per week, or roughly 7 1/2 per day. ...

Metro police have kept busy working numerous incidents along the rail corridor that did not involve trains. About 15 cars have driven into the Main Street Square fountain downtown.

Police reports also detail such mayhem as several cars careening off Main Street into adjacent buildings and running into light and utility poles.

One driver ran over pedestrian barricades near Preston Station, and another rolled through flower beds before crashing into the train station at Main Street Square.

I know, I quoted like 75% of the post, but I just couldn't pass it up.

I absolutly loved hearing Anna Nalick's 'Breath (2am)', By Wreck of the day....but when I was looking for her lyrics I could not find anything about her except this lone site. When I was listening to her I loved how she really put her heart on the paper and I would like to find out more aobut her, and maybe even catch a copy of her CD, but no store that I am around holds it. Could anyone send me information? Thanks, I appricate all of your help. Rachelle

Thanks to the generosity of a friend, my server's been colo'ed in various places in the Bay Area for five years now. By the end of the month, though, that's finally going away. Now I get to figure out what I plan to do next. I think my choice is between running my web stuff off my DSL and buying a Linode. I really want full box access, so a shared hosting plan like dreamhost wouldn't quite cut it for me. My usage isn't really all that great -- I maybe push out 40meg of web traffic daily -- so I'm not in a position where I need a ton of outbound bandwidth.

Currently my DSL is 1.5m down, 384k up, but Speakeasy has a 6.0/768 plan for about $100/mon. That's pretty tempting, considering I currently pay about $60. If I'm going to put money into connectivity, why not have it be connectivity that I'll use and enjoy? I could throw two ethernet cards in the webserver and do a little traffic shaping to ensure some bandwidth is reserved for the web site.

I think that's probably the direction I'll head. While making my decision I need to build a box to use as my temp webserver. I have all the components lying around my bedroom, except a case. I don't think that's going to be a problem. I love scrappy computing.

So Friday I wasn't anywhere near a computer, and missed the week's Friday questions at LA Blogs. Since my Friday morning activity was a bit topical to the question, though, I think I deserve a little leeway for my late response.

• What is your favorite beach to cool off on? When do you go to beat the crowds?

I'm a big fan of just heading down to Manhattan Beach. If I think it'll be crowded I'll head more for the middle ground between Manhattan and Hermosa, but otherwise I'll stick nearer to the Manhattan pier.

• If not the beach, where is your favorite cooling-off spot outdoors? indoors?

Outdoors? Being out on a lake. Friday the destination was Canyon Lake, a private lake community out in Riverside county (right by Lake Elsinore). We took a trip there as the Waterski Team and Wakeboard Club. The water was absolutely perfect.

Indoors? Wherever there's air-conditioning.

• Where is your favorite spot for ice cream/sorbet/gelato?

Lickity Split in El Segundo. Amazing frozen custard.

• What is your favorite flavor?

We had pumpkin once when it was freshly coming out of the machine. That was great. I've gotten the root beer flavor a couple times.

• Stuck at home? What are you making in your blender?

I'm stuck at home wishing I had a blender.

• Got any original concoctions you want to share?

Not really.

• Favorite winter-themed video or book?

My family always had a soft spot for White Christmas. Either that or the Muppets' Christmas special.

• What was your favorite water-themed activity as a kid?

Waterskiing. I guess I'm still a kid.

I mentioned a little while back that watching movies in the daytime feels a little odd. Today we watched The Thing from 11am-1pm. It's really weird to come out of a movie like that, stepping from a pitch-black theater to the middle of a really nice day. It just doesn't feel right.

Have you ever watched a movie that had time travel, and watched a whole complicated plot unfold that could have all been averted if the guy with the time machine just went back five minutes before everything started? Right now I'm writing a short paper / expanded journal entry on why that's ok for my speculative cinema class.

Update, 2:41am: The finished product is here, in PDF form.

Kathy and I went to the beach yesterday. I picked up a copy of the Downtown News in the lobby on the way out and read it through out in the sun.

One item of interest was the little blurb on Thursday's Downtown Art Walk. Being Area-Wide Resident Artist for Downtown, I figure I should start checking things like this out. The DN article made it sound like this was something that started just at noon, but Sean Bonner (and the downtownartwalk site) tells me it's really 12-9, so I think I will be checking it out. Also a little deceptive in the DN article is the claim that this is a walking tour. Yeah, you could walk the whole thing, but it's quite a hike.

You may have noticed that I've started posting less on the weekends. It's not intentional, but it's good to get away from the computer for a while, especially when you're around oneas much as I am.

Enjoy the weekend. Don't spend it online. After hitting up the beach this morning, Kathy and I are about to head over to Griffith Park and take advantage of the clear air today.

Mount Hollywood, here we come.

I mentioned Wednesday that I was finally going to update my computer. Well, that evening I went to Fry's and got scared by how many different motherboards there were to choose from. I finally ended up with a Shuttle AN35N-Ultra motherboard, an AMD Athlon 3000 processor, and 1gig of RAM. Of course I got it all home and realized that my power supply was too old to power it all... who knew that in the last 5 years they went to ATX12V power supplies?

Yesterday I picked up a $30 power supply at Staples and got the whole setup powered up. It took me a while to track down some performance issues (APIC and nforce2 don't play well together, or something), but last night I got that all settled out and got Linux running great.

Then, I had to go and try to get Windows XP running. Now, first off this got complicated because it turns out I don't actually have any XP installation media. I got XP with my laptop, but Toshiba only ships a recovery DVD that has a ghost image of the factory-setup drive on it. So I have XP on my laptop, and I want it on my desktop... How do I accomplish that? Here's how (on the laptop, in Linux):

dd if=/dev/hda1 | ssh 192.168.1.2 dd of=/dev/sda1

Now, you'll notice that I'm putting XP on a SCSI drive on the desktop (since that's what I had lying around). I don't run SCSI on my laptop, obviously, so first go round it presented an issue to try to boot off SCSI. I'd just get the boot menu and then it would reboot. But this morning I thought to install my SCSI driver on the laptop, then copy the drive over.

That worked like a charm. I now have a dual-boot desktop for the first time in like four years.

Just for posterity, the grub commands to boot windows off my SCSI drive:

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1
boot

The Blue Line struck and killed a pedestrian yesterday. The Times report says that brings the line's body count up to 62.

Including Wednesday's fatality, more than 22 occupants of vehicles and more than 40 pedestrians have been killed along the Blue Line since it began operating in 1990, making it the deadliest of the MTA's four rail routes.

That number sounds a lot worse than it is, and the people who like to use this as fodder to hold against Metro are really abusing the facts. These accidents are almost exclusively the result of people failing to obey the appropriate warning signals. Everyone thinks they can beat the train, but the truth is you really can't. It's really big, and it moves pretty fast.

All the warning systems indicating an approaching train — including blowing whistles and flashing lights — were working, Ubaldo said.

With a rush-hour crowd gathering at the station, the woman joined a group of people, including her companion, in racing across the tracks in front of the oncoming train, Ubaldo said.

She was struck near the entrance of the platform and died at the scene, Ubaldo said.

Now, first off, let's all ask ourselves who's editing the Times. If I ended three straight paragraphs with "Ubaldo said," I'd get a lot of red ink on my paper. Maybe the Times doesn't grade so hard, though.

Los Angeles is in no way unique in this problem. Any time you have a rail line operating at street grade, especially in the roadway, you're going to have accidents. Drivers are dumb; pedestrians are dumb. These are just facts. If you look at coverage of Houston's light rail, you'll see that they've had 56 accidents since January. And most of these accidents involve drivers making illegal left turns into the path of a train.

Bottom line: Don't try to outrun the train, and don't blame the train when you try to outrun it and fail. Yes, grade-separation is wonderful, but the expense means it's not going to be a universal reality. Drive (and walk) smarter, and you won't die.

Kathy's computer died yesterday. She awoke to a blue screen, and then after restarting it just blacked out while she was working on something. I'm pointing my finger at either the motherboard or the video, but seeing as they're one and the same it's a good target. Yesterday I grabbed the drive out and threw it in my roommate's computer to get a couple files off. Now this evening I'm going to run over to the Burbank Fry's and pick up the guts of a new system.

I hate the fact that when a motherboard dies it's so hard to just replace it and keep the same CPU and RAM. Specs are always changing, CPU slot types are changing, and by the time something dies the industry's moved far along to something else.

I think I'm also going to take this opportunity to update my desktop machine. On July 27, 1999, Gospelcom upgraded my machine to a PII 400 with 256MB RAM. That same setup has been in my computer for five years now. The case and power supply are even older, dating back to 1997 (I think... possibly late '96). Here's a history of a piece-meal machine:

• Late '96/Early '97: Gospelcom buys me a PII 200, 64MB RAM, 3.4gig HD. 17" monitor. s3 Virge video card.
• Sometime in '98: Upgraded to 128MB RAM
• 07/03/1999: New video card, a Diamond Viper V550. 16MB, NVidia Riva TNT chipset.
• 07/27/1999: Upgraded to PII 400, 256MB RAM. Had picked up some SCSI drives by this point to bring total HD space to 40gig.
• 09/30/1999: I got my first CD burner. 16x read, 4x burn.
• 09/04/2001: My power supply fan died leading to some fun makeshift computing.
• 02/08/2002: New hard drive: 60gig.
• Summer of 2002: New CD burner to replace my dead one. 40x read, 24x write.
• 12/25/2002: New video card: NVidia GeForce4 with 128MB RAM.
• 06/24/2003: Bought a second monitor.
• 01/11/2004: Power supply fan died and needed to be replaced.
• 01/12/2004: New hard drive, 160gig.
• 01/14/2004: My ancient sound card no longer worked with Linux, so I bought a Soundblaster Live.
• 03/14/2004: My original mouse died. I replaced it with a Microsoft wireless Intellimouse.

I'm not sure exactly how complete that is, but it's close. It's also kind of cool to see how much this blog serves as my collective memory.

Today Steve Lopez picks up for the LA Times the bit on Perry Kurtz that ran in this week's Downtown News.

Did you hear the one about the stand-up comic who tried to make a go of it at downtown L.A. night spots?

It's no joke to 53-year-old Perry Kurtz, comedian by night, mattress salesman by day. And it's been a test of his good humor.

Skipping ahead slightly...

Kurtz also held a comedy night in a community room at the downtown Premiere Towers, where he lives, and it drew four tenants.

Like I said two days ago, the numbers in the article are slightly misleading. As I recall, four tenants did turn out (well, three and Kathy), but so did three other non-tenants (who were there to see a comic who didn't show up). But again, maybe people just knew in advance that it was going to be an awkwardly unfunny show.

I rode the elevator with Perry this morning. I'm glad to see him getting publicity for his efforts, and hopefully someday I will make it out to see how the Blue Bongo show is working out.

It was a bit nuts around my apartment last night. I mentioned two days ago that there were lights set up throughout the alley, and last night they got their use. Around 9:30pm they started shooting a scene where five black urban assault SUVs (mostly Hummers) roar around the corner from the parking lot to the south of our building (knocking a dumpster out of their way) and speed down the alley (which really is only 200 feet or so).

The action on Spring Street was just as intense. I drove over to Kathy's to pick up a hard drive last night, and getting out of and in to my area was a bit of a challenge. Coming out of the garage I had to wait for a water tanker truck to clear (they were doing a lot of hosing down the streets) and then a cop waved me over and told me to proceed the normal way south on Spring. To do this I drove by a giant Hummer (like they aren't big enough all ready... This one was bigger) with a left side riddled with bullet holes. Getting back 6th was closed from Broadway, so I had to go up to 4th, head south on Spring, and then tell the cop at 5th that I was going to my apartment. He let me through the roadblock there, and that put me on an empty street from 5th to 6th. 6th was closed, like I said, but the light there was red so I started to sit and wait for it to turn. The cop at that barricade, though, waved me through, so I got official sanction to run a red light.

I don't know what time filming ended, but a scene in the alley woke me up at 3:45am, so I Know they were going most of the night.