Yesterday I finally got around to doing something about the SGI Indigo I had sitting in my living room. If you remember back to July you'll note that this box had a dead clock battery, which thanks to some smart design work, made it completely inoperable. And, oh yeah, the battery was soldered onto the motherboard.

But that didn't stop me. I used my trusty soldering iron to loosen things up and get the old battery out, and then yesterday I went to Radio Shack and picked up a new 3.6V battery, some paired wire, and some electrical tape. You can see a few pictures on my buzznet site.

So the machine now boots. Here's my hinv output:

clu 10% hinv
CPU: MIPS R4000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.2
FPU: MIPS R4000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 0.0
1 100 MHZ IP20 Processor
Main memory size: 64 Mbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0
Instruction cache size: 8 Kbytes
Data cache size: 8 Kbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision C
  Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0
  CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Graphics board: GR2-Elan
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Iris Audio Processor: revision 10

The cool part is that GR2-Elan line. The three hard drives are all really small (1gig and 2 .5gigs), so that makes life fun (though I installed a clean IRIX inside a gig yesterday). I think I might have some memory lying around that I can try to bump that 64meg up with.

I was driving into work this morning when all of a sudden I had a very "doh!" moment. It occured to me that I had a wedding to go to tomorrow, and that suit that I really needed to take to the dry cleaners was still sitting rumpled in my closet.

No fear, though. A quick look at the now useful google local (dry cleaner near 90014), a few phone calls, and I had soon found Sloan's Dry Cleaners in the Wells Fargo Center. They weren't the closest, but when I called them and asked about getting my suit done before the wedding tomorrow they gave me an unequivocal "No problem." I went with their confidence.

So I left JPL around 3:30, came back to Premiere Towers to pick up my suit, and checked the mail. In it was my North Muskegon, MI, absentee ballot, due back by the close of polling on Tuesday. Now, it's not North Muskegon's fault it's so late; I did just fax them the form late Monday. So I grabbed the ballot, walked over to the dry cleaners, dropped off my suit, and found a place to sit down and make a phone call. I called my mom and told her I knew nothing about any of the Michigan races. Together we went through the ballot and she told me what the Michigan buzz was for each of the races. I didn't vote for regents for U of M or MSU, but I came to a decision on most of the rest. Then I went next door to the Fedex store and sent the ballot back 2nd day. They tell me it'll be delivered Tuesday between 12 and 4.

Now to finish a little of the work I left to come home early, and then to head out somewhere to go pick up a gift for the wedding tomorrow. They're registered at Macy's, so I think we might go see what we can find at their downtown location. I've never been in there.

There's a lot about LA politics I don't know or understand, but there's one thing I'm pretty sure of: Ron Deaton is a powerful man. Now the long-time city hall guru is Hahn's choice to take over as top man at DWP. I first read the story last night on LA Observed (today's followup has links to the Times and Daily News).

My first Ron Deaton experience was at the meeting over the new LAPD headquarters held a month or two ago at City Hall. Deaton was there answering questions and responding to public comments. I vividly remember an exchange after someone had been particularly forceful about asserting that the Caltrans site had been promised as a park. Deaton went to the mic and responded something along the lines of "Go back and look at who negotiated that contract for the city. I did. Don't try to tell me what the contract says. I wrote the contract." Obviously his response was a little more political, but you get the idea. I was standing in the back of the room next to Brady Westwater and I turned and asked him who this guy was. Brady's response: "I'd call him god, but I don't think he'd accept the demotion." (Brady today sent an email to the newdowntown list titled "God to Run DWP!")

From Hahn's email (available at the LA Observed link above):

We all know of Ron's commitment to the success of LADWP, and his even deeper dedication to the City of Los Angeles. Because he began his career at LADWP and has a long record of support for the Department, Ron is perhaps one of the only people who can successfully bring the Department into the City family.

I think that's important. From my limited perspective of just watching through the news it does often feel like DWP is out doing its own thing separate from the rest of the city. It'll be interesting to see if Deaton is the one who can change that image.

We watched the film Blade Runner in my speculative cinema class today. Oddly I hadn't ever seen it before. I liked it.

What fascinated me, though, was the footage in the Bradbury Building. On its own this is an amazing building, but seeing it put so artfully on film is amazing. I was particularly captivated by the shots through the roof showing the advertsing blimp overhead. You can see a great example of that shot on the linked site. I can't begin to fathom the lengths they had to go to in order to film with so much water and yet preserve the interior of the building. It's interesting too that they chose to keep the Bradbury name on the building -- making it the Bradbury Apartments and totally redoing the exterior -- and also chose to keep the Million Dollar Theater across the street.

I also correctly identified the police headquarters as the closed off wing of Union Station, and the tunnel as 2nd Street.

Last night I braved the rain to make my way from USC up to 1st and Figueroa for my second DLANC Transportation & Public Works (hereafter T&PW) Committee meeting. Getting to the meeting was more than half the battle.

Tuesdays nights are my latest school nights. I have class until 6:45. Yet somehow all the DLANC meetings I attend (board, AACE, and T&PW) are all Tuesday nights. T&PW is at 6:30pm, so I left class at 5:50 or so to go catch the DASH F and head downtown. I made it to the stop by Jefferson and Hoover around 6pm and waited. And waited. Around 6:10 a guy in a suit showed up and started waiting with me. We made small-talk about how the F always seems to take a little longer than the 12 minute headways (the time between buses or trains) they post on the signs. He waited 10 minutes or so, then gave up to go take the USC shuttle to Union Station.

At 6:30 I decided that I didn't know for sure that the bus was even going to be coming. Sure it rainy and that slows down LA traffic, but I had been waiting about a half-hour for a bus that claims to come every 12 minutes. So I got on my skateboard and started riding, periodically looking behind me to see if a bus was going to catch up to me. Finally, looking back from Figueroa and Washington, I saw an F. The time? 6:42.

So I paid my $0.25 and got on. Downtown traffic was horrid. The bus inched along, and took about 10 minutes to make it 8 blocks to Fig and 11th. Looking at the sea of cars ahead I asked the driver to just let me out. He said it was probably going to take him 20 minutes to make it the remaining 5 or 6 blocks on his route. I figured I could do better, and I did. I left the DASH behind me and rolled uphill on my wet wheels. I finally made it to the meeting at 7:07, 37 minutes late and a sweaty mess.

The meeting itself was a bit of a plannnig session. We didn't have a quorum, meaning we couldn't conduct official business, so we took the time to lay out some priority projects for the upcoming year and to assign oversight for these projects to members of the committee. Now, obviously this "oversight" isn't in the sense of actually getting the project done -- we leave that part of things to the MTA, LADOT, etc. Instead it's more of a reporting role; the committee member "in charge" of a project is tasked with keeping on top of all developments and making sure the committee stays informed on status and issues that need support or disapproval. I came away in charge of keeping track of two projects.

One of the big picture things Metro (or the MTA, if you prefer) is working on right now is a redevelopment of the entire bus system. They believe they can reduce bus traffic while keeping or increasing service by moving from a destination-based system to more of a hub-and-spoke structure. I think the simplest way to picture this is to look at the airlines: I can't fly from Los Angeles to Muskegon, MI, but what I can do is take a flight from LAX to Detroit. From there I can catch a smaller plane to Muskegon. When I walk outside my apartment I see a street that's overloaded with buses. The stop at my corner must get serviced by 8 - 10 different routes. What Metro would like to see is those routes get replaced by one or two that would then feed these other routes at logical tranfer hubs.

The common complaint about a system like this is that people don't want to transfer -- they want a one seat ride. I say that's just not true. Speaking as a frequent transit rider I don't care about a one-seat ride. I care about moving. If you can give me two shorter lines that'll get me where I want to go with a transfer and 5-minute headways I'd gladly take that over a single route with a 20-minute headway.

To a large extent this same complaint carries over to my second project, DASH service on the Figueroa Corridor. Currently Figueroa is served by two routes: the F and the A. If you look at the Downtown DASH system map you'll see that the two follow an identical path between 4th and 11th. Then, however, the A makes a long run off to the Arts District and the F makes a run down to Expo Park/USC. That seems redundant to me.

The initial issue, though, that I want to get addressed is those 12-minute headways. I just don't believe them. I would like to see data showing true measured headway times, and if those headways are different from the 12-minutes I'd like to see that difference shown in their advertising. I think it's a shame that a busy route like the F is only serviced every 12 minutes while the rest of the Downtown DASH system get buses every 5, but I think it would be even more of a shame if the real-life headway was greater than that already sluggish 12 minutes. This is a route that's only going to get more important in the next few years as more USC students move downtown, and I think it's something that can be addressed effectively without massive reworking. Sure, Expo light rail will carry a lot of this traffic in the future, but that's still 6-8 years down the road.

After the meeting got out Don and I got soaked walking back toward our places of residence. We ended up holing up under the overhang of the building on the southeast corner of Broadway and 1st. After deciding it wasn't going to let up I called Magilla and he drove my car over to pick us up.

I didn't eat dinner tonight.

I think it's probably too late for that now.

Just for the record, if you ever find yourself thinking

Hey, I bet I could just go write my own blog software. It would be cool.

ignore that part of your brain. It's not cool. Especially when you have crazy grand notions you get in your head and decide to implement. Just keep telling yourself that other people have probably already done it better.

If you've tried to visit this site in the last two weeks or so, you might have noticed that things aren't exactly up to speed at the moment. Here's the message I put up on the front page:

2004-10-19: Just to give a little better feel for what's going on, the hard drive on my web server gave up last night and is done for. First it started making some noises and the ext3 journal stopped (causing the drive to remount read-only). At that point I was able to copy off some data (most of my web stuff and my email), but not all. Notably messed up were some important mysql files. I have a backup that will cover up to about three weeks ago, but it's up in the bay area at the moment.

I hope to have at least a limited version of the blog back online later tonight.

Moral of the story? Don't forget your backups, even when you're just in a transition phase.

Well, it's taken a little longer than that night to get any kind of a blog back online. Some of this was technical, but some was that I took this downtime as motivation to get serious about doing work on the next version of eThreads. What you're seeing right now is being served off the new code. It's not done yet -- comments, categories, archives, the "this date" feature, and RPC pings all still need to be supported. But it's a start, and I still like the code, so I think that's good.

Different pieces of functionality will continue to roll in at different times. Currently this blog is missing a nice big 4 month chunk from June 11 to October 11. I've got June - September 25 in backups that'll be coming online within the next week or two, but if you happen to have Sep 25 - Oct 11 stuck in the cache of an RSS reader or something I'd love to know it.

I've been warily eying this rain, dreading when I have to make the run to my car. Not only is it rain, it's cold rain, and I'm ill-prepared for it (in short sleeves and sandals). I just found out, though, that there's an extra umbrella stashed in a cabinet in my office. I got the go-ahead to abscond with it today and bring it back Wednesday. My afternoon just got less chilly.

Talking about this weekend's Artistsalon event I mentioned that there was a painting I really liked. I found today that there's an image of it online, so go check out mOoBeTTah and continue to mourn the loss of mo' better.

The Downtown News this week includes a story on Groundwork, a coffee house in the art district. Particularly of interest is the fact that Groundwork roasts their own beans. My whole bean coffee supplies are running a little low, so I plan to head over and pick some up to try out in the next few days. I figure if I'm buying beans roasted about a mile away and then grinding them myself, that's got to be about as close as I can get to just-in-time coffee making.

Also in the Downtown News this week, two mentions of happenings from our last DLANC meeting.

• "Financial District Goes Hawaiian" says that

Last Tuesday, the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council approved a liquor license for Roy's (the council does not have authority over the license, but acts in an advisory capacity to the city).

• Then the oddly titled "DLANC Gets Keyed Up" talks about how we're looking to hire someone to take minutes at meetings. I don't really think the position we're hiring is quite looking for a "court room-style" transcription, but hey, that would be nice.

I've watched a Google news search for "alma mahler" with interest since September 30, when the roaming play Alma opened at the Los Angeles Theatre. After a decent number of pre-opening articles it's been hard to find good reviews to go off of. This reuters piece pretty much sums up what I've seen:

The main problem with "Alma," however, is Alma. All three of the younger Almas appear to be rather ordinary Viennese hotties ... The venue itself is the best part of the evening. The baroque interior of the theater is filled with bygone splendor ... Along with preshow drinks, there is a three-course Viennese dinner buffet and wine at intermission included in the $125 tab. Improvement here would be welcome as well.

I would love to go see the show, but for $125 I'd like to be confident I'm getting more than just a cool tour of the Los Angeles . The play runs through Dec. 5, so I think I should be able to make up my mind by then. It would be a shame for something like this to be visible out my bedroom window and not to check it out.

So if you've been here before you'll notice there's a new look. The old one was starting to bug me; we'll see if this one fares better. The previous one lasted since May 2nd of this year. This look should be a lot friendlier to you Safari users. As always, you can check out past looks in the look archive.

Last night Kathy and I headed up the block to check out Artistsalon's event "the big picture". I was impressed. Jason and crew put on a great event with a little something for everyone. We had to leave a little early since we were both tired (I had gotten up at 5am to go waterskiing before the football game) and I had movies to return to Hollywood Video, so we didn't get to check out the music that was lined up. We did spend some good time walking around checking out all the art up on the walls.

Were I someone who had $750 sitting in his pocket I would have loved to have gotten a piece called "Moo Bettah Meaty Meat" (bringing back good memories of the deceased hamburger stand). But instead I'm a broke college kid, so I just admired it for a few minutes and moved on.

We ended up spending a good bit of time talking to people I've met through the neighborhood council, including my #1 commenter Don Garza (whose blog I will soon be setting up). It was cool to be able to introduce Kathy to a good number of the people in this newfound part of my life, since otherwise I just end up talking about people she doesn't have a face to connect with.

I think I might walk over to the Grand Ave. Festival in a little bit, though I forgot and got some Del Taco for lunch. Oh well.

One year ago today I created this site's first RSS feed. That still makes me very late to the party, but I thought it was kind of random that I happened to notice while it actually was the anniversary.

So the CRA awarded the Pershing Square wifi contract a little over a week ago. I didn't know until I saw this little Downtown News blurb. From the DN:

City officials last week selected Verge Wireless Networks to provide wireless Internet - or Wi-Fi - access at Pershing Square. The Baton Rouge-based company was hired for $25,000 by the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Recreation and Parks Department, which manages the block-long park bounded by Fifth, Sixth, Olive and Hill streets. The Wi-Fi service will be free during the day, with additional subscriber services available at a cost in evening hours.

Oh, great, pseudo-wifi. It's "free" but your "free" service is "limited." What does limited mean?

Allows you to surf web sites on the Verge Wireless Hotzone, surf web sites on the Internet, and check e-mail using the Hotzone AirMail system or your own e-mail program. Requires a user name and password to login. Restrictions include: 128K bandwidth, no VPN access allowed, no MP3 downloading or high bandwidth video.

That's the description for their FreeConnect service, which I assume is what will be offered during the day in the square. Now, the during the day part is kind of odd. I don't know if they really scouted out the area before they decided to throw that into the contract. Pershing Square is closed at sunset (I think sunset... at night, though).

But aside from that, I read the limitations on the free service to mean that they're going to be restricting your outgoing ports, probably to just 80 (http), 443 (https), 25 (smtp), 110 (pop3), and 143 (imap). If they aren't the only real limit they can have is the bandwidth (which is completely legit... I don't mind people doing that). Also it would appear they're filtering web content (to a small extent... they claim not to be able to restrict access to specific sites, etc) to be able to block mp3 downloads and video.

All this to say... I won't be going to Pershing Square to use the wifi any time soon (err... assuming this is January and test service is there). I told you just a few weeks ago how the library's wifi service was worthless. This appears to be little better. I just hope they don't suck the Biltmore into their web of restrictiveness and charging.

Michael Moore spoke on campus last night. I didn't go. Partially, that's because I was still just knocked out exhausted from being up most of the night writing, but mostly it's that I just don't really care about what Moore's got to say. Kathy went to some of it, and thought he wasn't really a good public speaker. He stood up there and made fun of Bush, made fun of the protesters, and said republicans win because they get up in the morning and work hard while the democrats have only seen a morning in they're still up from partying the night before.

Of course most of the people there lapped it right up.

Sometime in the next month the school's bringing in General Wesley Clark. Now that's someone I would go see.

There's a lot going on downtown this weekend, so I thought I'd take a second to point out a couple things:

• Saturday and Sunday the Brewery art complex is having their Autumn Artwalk. Kathleen at blogging.la posted a good tease for event. I've never made it up that way, but it should be cool.
• Saturday night Artistsalon is hosting "the big picture" in the Spring Arts building, just a couple blocks up the street from me. It's art, it's short films, it's music -- basically it's a crazy amount of cool stuff going on in one place on one night and it's all just a $5 cover. Come out and help Jason lose less money.
• Sunday is the Grand Avenue Festival, taking place on, uh, Grand Avenue, outside the Disney Hall. Food, music, and much much more. Hey, they're shutting down a big section of street. We might as well get to use it for a change, instead of just getting annoyed at having to take a detour.

Of course my Saturday is going to be dominated by ASU coming to town to put their #15 ranking on the line in the Coliseum. 12:30pm start, and it's an ABC regional game. I'm afraid I'll get out of that too late to hit up the Brewery event on Sat, but I might try to squeeze both that and Grand Ave. in Sunday. We'll see.

I went to my second neighborhood council meeting last night. My first meeting was a good gentle introduction to the whole concept. Last night, though, was for real.

A big topic of the night was conflicts of interest and the question of whether a paid lobbyist should be allowed to have a position on a neighborhood council. Now, this was all in the comment section, so there wasn't a vote or anything (not that I'm sure we would even have the authority to do so). That said, the position that I think many people agreed with was that you can't go around saying people can't be on the board for this or that reason without getting to the edge of a very dangerous slippery slope. Yes, a person should recuse themself from any vote in which they or a company they represent has a financial interest. Yes, they should be very upfront in revealing when they're being paid to lobby for something. No, they should never take money to lobby their own council. But of course they can still be very valuable members of the group. If they're stakeholders in downtown they need to be allowed to have a voice.

Whew...

In other news:

• Roy's Restaurant is looking to open a location downtown at 800 S. Fig. It's an old bank branch location that's been shuttered for many years.
• We get business cards. I need them.
• We had a big debate over whether to spend money on someone to take minutes at board and executive committee meetings. The money had been approved previously, but a motion was made to reverse that decision. Here we actually had a vote with role-call. I voted no to keep the money in place. I like seeing good minutes. It makes me have less to write down during the meeting.
• I have to turn in a "professional bio" for the new DLANC website. It should be fun making that up.
• During discussion Ed Marzec used some word I didn't understand, so I wrote it down. I don't have my notes with me here, but I'll post an update on that when I get back to them and can look it up.

Next week is the next AACE meeting (here are my notes on the last one). Tuesday, 6:30pm, City Hall. Check out the AACE yahoo group if you're into that sort of thing.

I posted this picture of my hacked together server last night and LA Town Crier Don Garza left a comment wondering what it was he was seeing. His confusion isn't all that surprising. From the picture all you see is a jumble of stuff sitting in a corner. What could that be?

hey eric is that your computer?

Dude . Or what . IS this your server/

What the heak is this ?

It's a fair question. The "box" -- strike that; let's call it a conglomeration of components -- you see if what's currently serving up my web site and email, as well as acting as a NAT box providing apartment internet to Magilla's and my computers. There's not a whole lot to it, really. When I replaced most of my computer early last month I was left with some leftover pieces. Most importantly, I had a motherboard (with processor and memory) and a power supply. From that right there you could pretty much built a computer if you wanted to (and I used to do a fair bit of that when I was scrounging cycles for distributed.net). The confluence of several events meant I had some parts and needed to build a server in my apartment, so I figured why not. That's how this beast was born.

Let's take a look at the pieces individually:

• The power supply is an 180W ATX that originally shipped with a Gateway 2000 Pentium 200 in March of 1997. The fan has died twice, and the fan I've got on there doesn't quite fit the hole but it gets the job done.
• The motherboard is from July, 1999, and houses a PII 400 and 384MB RAM (I just installed 128MB the other day that I rescued from Kathy's dead computer).
• The 60gig hard drive has had a troubled history. I bought it in February, 2002, and it worked great until January, 2004. Then I tried to spin it up in August and nothing happened. But then in September I smacked it and it came to life. Now it's running like a champ.
• The two ethernet cards have to be separated or they'll manage to short each other out somehow. There's a Bank of America mailing sitting between them.

And, well, that's it. The motherboard is sitting on top of the static bag my new one came in while the other two components are just chillin' on the windowsill. I just noticed the video card fan is dead, so that might be trouble in the future. For now, though, it works great.

I finally got around to reinstalling qpsmtpd yesterday. In and of itself that doesn't do a lot for me, but what revolutionizes my email is greylisting. The first time around the installation process I talked about how it worked, so I won't re-explain that here.

What I will say, though, is that in the day before installing greylisting I got at least 700 spam emails. In the 18 hours or so since: maybe a dozen. Most of those were then caught by spamassassin.

Ah, sanity has once again returned to my email.

It's nice to see the Downtown News getting a scoop with their interview of Anschutz Entertainment Group President Tim Leiweke. In the interview Leiweke says that the Clippers might not be back at Staples next year:

We actually would make more money if, instead of having 40 Clippers games, we had five concerts. So, those are some of the decisions we're going to have to make. The Clippers issue is in negotiations now. Their lease is up after this year. And ironically, shockingly, we've got to make a decision as to whether we even want them back. We're not sure.

Today the Times runs a piece quoting the story and I saw a report today on one of the local news shows doing the same thing.

The interesting question to me is where might the Clippers go if Staples doesn't want them back? There was talk of the team playing some games in Anaheim if Kobe had been signed, might this be the development that moves all their games there? It would seem to me that the OC might be good for the Clippers in terms of attendance numbers, with less local competition. I really don't see the team going back to the Sports Arena; it's hard to go back after you've tasted an arena as nice as Staples.

Just looking through the stats today and noticed a ton of hits for a random post mentioning Joe Purdy. Turns out he got a song into the last episode of the new ABC show "Lost" and that looks to have really spiked interest in his stuff. Very cool; he's an amazing musician and it's good to see talent like that get rewarded.

I took the bus to campus today. I've done that a half dozen or so times now. A couple times I've gotten lucky, and the bus has been there right after I got to the stop. Today was not one of those days. I walked down to the bus sign and checked my clock: 10:24. A DASH D passes. And another. And another... 5 in all before my Metro Line 38 finally shows up at 10:42.

A couple hours later I needed to head back downtown to go to the Central Library. I was going to borrow Kathy's car, but then thought better of it and walked over to catch the DASH F. Unlike the D, the F has 12-minute headways -- or so they say. I sat down and 18 minutes later the bus showed up, and within the next stop or two was packed. I don't really understand why LADOT makes such a big deal about 5-minute headways with most of the rest of the downtown DASH lines but stays with optimally 12-minute headways on the Expo Park line. Every time I've been on this bus it's been packed, and with the number of USC students being forced to move downtown it's only going to get worse.

There was an LADOT guy on the bus having people fill out little surveys. I registered my complaints, or at least as much as could be registered via marking the "Frequency of Service" box poor.

My cousin Brent and his wife were in town from New York this weekend, and yesterday afternoon I brought them downtown to take a little walk around and see the sights.

We started out from my apartment in Premiere Towers. Standing in the hallway I was telling them how the two buildings were joined together in the apartment conversion process. Brent noticed that even the windows were different in the two. A few minutes later, standing in my apartment, the lightbulb finally came on: that's why my apartment has two styles of windows. The windows in the living room and my bedroom swing out, while the window in the other bedroom opens vertically. I hadn't put the pieces together before that this is because the two were historically in separate structures.

From my apartment we walked over to Broadway and then headed north. Well, actually first we swung through the Arcade Building so that I could tell them about the old chocolate shop and talk a little about the renovation going on there. Outside, standing in front of what was the Arcade Theatre, I was telling them about how if you walked back through the electronics shop currently occupying the storefront you'd find a theatre largely intact and used for storage. This story was made more difficult by the homeless guy who came up, asked for money, and then sort of laughingly continued to ask while sticking his finger under his shirt and pretending it was a gun. We ignored him and he went away.

Further up Broadway our little tour came to Grand Central Market, but what we really wanted to see was the Bradbury Building: plain on the outside, but absolutely amazing on the inside. Unbelievably the security guard took us up the elevator to the top floor, a place that you normally never get to see (on account of LAPD and Internal Affairs having offices in the building). I don't really have words for how unique this building is.

A block or two more up Broadway, and then we walked a couple blocks east to the Caltrans Building. Brent was more a fan of the building than I am, though I will say that the Main St. side looks much better now that the plaza is open and the fencing removed. We also saw the building in the late afternoon sun, when windows could actually be spied through the omninous sheathing.

Next we headed the other direction on 1st and made our way to Disney Hall. After admiring the building from the front we walked through the park on the structure's rear, hidden up above the street.

From there we walked south and crossed Grand to make our way through the Watercourt. South another block, across Pershing Square, and soon enough we were right back where we started.