It'll be a little quiet here over the next few days. This is the last week of classes, and I've got a whole lot of work due over the last few days. Today through Wednesday night, all I get to think about is paper writing.

Today I wrote a 6 pager. Thursday I've got two due: one's 15 pages and one's only 5. After that I've got one more due a little over a week later, during finals.

It felt good to actually accomplish something writing today. I've had a pretty good brain-lock over the past few weeks that's kept me from getting a whole lot done. So now I've written one paper, and it went ok. Maybe that'll be the jumpstart I need.

I just put a new eThreads snapshot in place, so hopefully things will feel a little faster here. I'm valuing speed over a small memory footprint, so I added a cache in memory. I also rewrote the way internal links work (links within the blog... all URLs stay the same) to do some stuff I couldn't do without good speed.

Most of what I did wouldn't make any sense to anyone but me, but here's the kind of cool stuff the new link structure does: the template being linked to determines what the link looks like. A simple example: From the main page I link post titles to the permanent URL for the post. In the template code on the main page there's this little snippet:

{link "/blog"}{qopt "id"}{$p.id/}{/qopt}{/link}

That tells the link code that we're linking to the /blog template. It then loads up that template and makes sure "id" is an option /blog's looking for. At that point it knows it can link to /blog?id=$id. But it also looks at the /blog template's keys, and sees that it has id defined as a key. That means that it can link a cleaner URL as /blog/$id. That's the one it uses.

Now I just have to keep an eye on memory usage and figure out how best to expire things out of the cache. Fun fun fun.

Yesterday I walked around my neighborhood a little bit and ended up spending some time in Pershing Square watching the people at the ice rink. For the most part it was kids who inched their way around the walls to start. Of course there was also the girl who brought her own skates and had the t-shirt that said "If figure skating was easy they'd call it hockey," so I guess some people do skate here in socal. I hadn't skated in a really long time, but I got it in my head that it would be fun to do, so I talked Kathy into going back with me later in the afternoon.

The rink's little: I think 50x30 or so. But it is outside at Pershing Square, and that's a juxtaposition that still seems pretty odd. It took me a little while to get a basic fell back for not making a fool of myself, but I think I ended up ok in that regard. Kathy, despite growing up in Michigan, has never ice skated much, but she showed definite improvement from the start of the session to the finish.

At $6/hour (and $2 to rent skates) the ice time isn't all that cheap, but it's one of those things that's just kinda cool to do. This is California, after all: you're not going to find a whole lot of ice alternatives.

There's a good article on Mozilla in today's LA Times. It's been amazing to see the positive press that has accompanied the release of Firefox 1.0. This is totally representative of the stuff you've been seeing all over the place:

Firefox's advantages over Explorer make its rapid acceptance unsurprising. Among other virtues, it's faster, more resistant to viruses and spyware and full of useful features that Microsoft, complacent in its near-monopoly, has never provided for Explorer.

You couldn't buy the good press they've been getting, and it's absolutely deserved.

When I was a lot younger someone brought me a broken fax machine once to see if I could fix it. Needless to say, I couldn't... What did I know about fax machines?

Well the other day our friendly Town Crier brought me his digital camera to fix. It had dropped, and now was making a really friendly grinding noise before giving an error and shutting off. Grinding noises are good -- they signify it's something mechanical, and that gives me a lot better chance to fix it. Don also brought a really good guide to fixing a couple problems with the Nikon Coolpix 950. Yesterday after work I took the camera apart. That's easy enough... I'm good at taking things apart. The symptoms matched the second repair on that page, the lens coupling issue. Long story short, don't ignore the warnings on that page that say things like "High Voltage" -- there may not be the amps to do any damage, but the cap on that flash unit will give you a real good zapping.

I gave myself two.

Today, though, I finished, put everything back together, and -- wonder above wonders -- it's working. I consider myself more lucky than skilled.

Nice to see this morning that the eastside Gold Line extension got its funding passed in Congress. I haven't looked at the design docs much, but here's to hoping they've learned a lot from dealing with the South Pasadena folks and can actually make a line this time that doesn't slow to a crawl for half the time.

I read "Lunch in L.A.? Car Beats Train as Meal Ticket" in today's LA Times and thought pretty much the same things Will Campbell did. He posted his thoughts on blogging.la, while I contented myself to just sort of scoff and move on.

But here I am, commenting...

• The author of the article has ticket machine problems. I've never had any troubles of that kind, but maybe I've just been lucky (and I largely use tokens instead of trying to mess with bills or quarters).

• Metro's trip planner tells me that if you caught Metro bus 444 outside the Times at 12:32, you'd be at Union Station at 12:37. I understand wanting to limit your report to the trains, but for a one mile trip like Civic Center to Union Station you need to really think about how a smart person would go about something like this. And a lot of times that option is the bus, unless you're able to find routes that very cleanly work for the existing rail options.

I could go on, but I won't. This morning I got on my 38 bus at 6th and Spring. It took 10 minutes for the bus to come, and then 20 minutes later I was getting off at USC. Try to drive there and park in that time. Maybe you can do it in around that time (but not much quicker), but it's going to cost you a lot more money.

So I went to a meeting last night about streetscaping on Spring and Main. Now if you're like me you hear the word "streetscaping" and say "They've already got trees out there." Turns out the CRA thinks streetscaping is a little more than I did.

The process of drafting a set of guidelines for streetscaping on these streets has been going on for quite a while and I've come into it pretty late. My impression at this stage was that the scope varied from general guidelines to very specific projects. The general guidelines covered streetlights, sidewalk paving, etc, and that's all well and good.

The more specific projects interest me more. For instance, who knew that there was an art gallery -- Mickey Kaplan Fine Art (note, some of the art isn't work friendly) -- coming together in my basement. The CRA put in money to help rehab the space, and now after significant delays and negotiations it looks to be finally opening. Several elements of Premiere Towers fit into the design of the site. The splash page doors are those to the left of the main entrance to my building. The main page image is a fairly realistic look facing out through the gallery doors. Funny side note: Last night I took the elevator down to the basement to take a look at the space and that couch in the picture was sitting there. I wondered why it was there; I wondered if someone had just left it there temporarily. Well, turns out it's at least been there long enough to make it into the website design.

Another component of the project is a goal of turning some of the closed off alleyways downtown into a network of pedestrian walkways. One of the few highlighted in the documents handed out last night was the alleyway directly beneath my window. I think it would be great to see it happen, but one thing they'd have to figure out is what to do with those garbage trucks that rumble through there every single morning. They'll also have to convince the property owners that a pedestrian walk is better for them than the revenue from the filming that regularly occurs there.

And that's the rub... This is a good plan, but it needs money before it ever gets implemented. That's always the rub...

I've been downtown for six months now, and I've explored a lot of downtown, but one area that I haven't much ventured into is the east side: Central City East, Little Tokyo, etc. Today I took a very small step in remedying that.

First I needed to pick up some DLANC business cards from our office on 1st street, so I grabbed my skateboard and headed north. They were set up for some sort of a shoot around the new Caltrans building. I saw one vehicle and a couple set pieces that really gave off a Bladerunner vibe. Sort of dirty retro-futuristic.

From there my goal was to head over to Groundwork and buy some coffee beans. That turned out to be something that required a little more in the way of directions than my quick look at the map before leaving. I was talking to my mom on the phone, so I ended up getting her to pull up mapquest and get me where I needed to be.

I got a mix of several different types of beans, which was really a bit of a cop out from having to make a decision. The first ground beans are in the coffee maker right now; they smell good, I'm sure they'll taste good as well.

On the way back I was really struck by how much I need to explore all the little shops over that way. If I go more than two miles to buy Christmas gifts there's something wrong with me.

Salon's running a story today about SkyWeb Express, a personal rapid transit (PRT) concept from a company in Minnesota. The article presents a lot of cost numbers that make the technology seem vastly more economical than traditional transit concepts. For instance,

SkyWeb Express may also be the answer to the seemingly impossible quandary that every environmental advocate faces: how to make green technologies cost-effective. Taxi 2000 estimates that installation of SkyWeb Express would cost $10 million per mile -- nearly five times less than the cost of light rail and 10 times less than heavy rail. And operating costs at 38 cents per passenger mile (compared to $3.43 for heavy rail and $1.42 for light rail) mean that SkyWeb Express could operate on a break-even basis -- and therefore without the government subsidies that mass transit, which operates at a loss, relies on.

The company's web site offers a cost breakdown. Take a look at this cost analysis. What particularly interests me isn't their capital cost numbers (though I'd never believe capital numbers on paper until I saw the system implemented somewhere), it's their farebox numbers. Their first example system has 33 million passenger miles per year on an eight mile loop. Ok, I can see that. But from that passenger load they get a farebox intake of $29.3mil. Since they give passenger miles and not boardings I don't know exactly what fare they were using, but I'd say the minimum is about $1 (I don't see that number of people using transit for trips much shorter than a mile). I don't see people paying that.

I think what really bothers me about PRT is the sell they use. Consider this from the opening paragraphs of the Salon article:

What really makes PRT different from mass transit is that it combines the convenience and luxury of a taxi with the efficiency of subway and bus travel: Rather than packing into a large carriage with a hundred smelly strangers, with PRT you get a private car.

The sell is isolation from other passengers. You live in the city, but you don't want to have to endure the presence of others. That should sell well in LA.

For my games class we're supposed to be checking out Second Life. I'm really interested in doing that, since it seems to be the closest thing I've seen to Stephenson's metaverse.

I haven't had much luck yet, though. My only working Windows installation is on my laptop, which doesn't really have the horsepower to keep up with a game so intend on doing everything the intensive way.

Last night and today I've messed with trying to get the game to work under wine. I've tried regular wine, winex (err... cedega), and Crossover Office, and none have really done anywhere. On my desktop it liked to black out X and leave it in some funky dead state, while on my laptop it refuses to even get off the ground without 32-bit color, which my graphics driver doesn't want to support.

Computers and I have again reached an impasse. Nothing was gained, but nothing was lost.

I rearranged my room today (and you thought I was going to post something people would care about). Since May my desk has blocked access to half my closet -- that's fixed now. The change also consolidates open space in a more usable configuration.

Most importantly, though, I took a piece of sandpaper to the edge of my particle board desk. My wrists can already feel the difference.

My room's still a mess, though. I just have too much stuff and not enough to organize it into. My number one priority needs to be to get a filing cabinet.

I messed around a little today with X.org 6.8.1. That probably means nothing to most of you. If talk of x servers and xinerama just leaves you confused, feel free to click the screenshot link and then move on. Sometimes I need to do a little talking about Linux, as much for me to go back and look at later as for your benefit.

Getting the server itself up and running was no problem. I compiled it yesterday and just ran make install today. It plays well with the nvidia drivers. Getting xcompmgr going was similarly no problem, though it's definitely a little flakier -- when I first go to a desktop it'll be all garbled and I'll have to drag a window around to clear things up. But after that things seem to mostly work.

Right now the drop-shadows and transparency you can see in the screenshot only work on the root desktop, not on virtual desks (in e16 terms "multiple desks"). The drop shadow does work on tooltip-style popups on all desks, though, and looks really nice on things like the firefox auto-complete url drop-down.

Obviously the real fun starts when people start integrating support for this into window managers and apps.

The one problem that was almost a show-stopper was some conflict between Xorg's xinerama support and mplayer. When playing a widescreen movie mplayer would throw part onto the other screen instead of making full-size only one screen. My solution for now? Switch to xine.

Several times over the last week or two I've thought about the fact that I hadn't seen my tickets for UCLA or Notre Dame lately. I knew they were somewhere in the apartment, so I wasn't too worried, but it was just a nagging little thought in the back of my head.

Today I had that thought again and decided to look for them. I vaguely remembered the last place I had them being the couch, so I went and looked under it. There they were.

Does that count as organization? I knew where they were.

Driving down Fig an hour or so ago I saw a large formation of helicopters heading east to west. Some chopper I didn't recognize in front, then five or six LAPD birds, and finally five or six Sherrifs department choppers (which I don't think I've seen before). I'm suspecting it was for filming; there's something going on over on the other side of downtown involving tanks and gunfire and such (or at least that's what was billed in the filming announcement), so it might well be that.

So yesterday I got my server back from the Bay Area and lugged it up to the apartment. Tonight I shut down my homebrew caseless wonder and moved some of the guts over to the rackmount case. The rackmount server's a P3 600, so I kept that instead of the PII 400. I also discovered that PC100 ram won't work in a PC133 motherboard. It's the same size/shape...

Anyway, everything's now running fine. The only problem is that the enormous fan in the case is a little too much noise to leave sitting over the entertainment center. I need to investigate where I can move that to.

From the old drive I've loaded up some missing posts from June - September. You can find those through the archives.

New York Times writer Janelle Brown today has a piece on 36 hours in downtown LA (found via LA Observed). The choices are good... I don't really understand why the NYT has thrown so much love to the Golden Gopher, but whatever, it's a trendy choice. I absolutely concur with the recommendation of Conservancy walking tours. That's something I need to take more advantage of myself.

At the very end of the piece, though, she gives a recommendation to the Hotel Fig.

The Figueroa Hotel (939 South Figueroa Street, 213-627-8971) opened in 1925 and is still a destination downtown. Its eclectic Moroccan-themed spaces are filled with ottomans, pink bougainvillea and Moroccan tile. Its 285 rooms are $98 to $225.

Now I have to admit that it's been four years since I was last there, but here's the impression I got back then: the lobby and bar are nice, but the hotel itself is just not. During the summer of 2000 I spent a week there while working a conference at the convention center. I shared a room that was tiny: two single beds, a crappy old tv, a chair, and a bathroom. We called it Camp Figgy. If they've remodelled in the last couple years I'd like to hear it, but if people are paying $100 for the kind of room I got that's just ridiculous.

So I'm pretty sure that between 6:30pm or so and now something dramatically changed with cell phone coverage in my apartment. Living downtown, indoor cell reception isn't always the greatest. In my apartment it's been really bad, basically where you needed to stand next to the window to have a decent conversation.

Tonight I went to plug my phone in to charge, and the first thing I noticed was a new "AT&T/Cingu" network tag. Hmmm... Merger's finally taking shape.

Next thing I notice: I have five bars of coverage sitting at my desk. I call voicemail and walk around the apartment. I get down to 3 bars at our door, but no lower.

This could be a beautiful thing. Maybe those AT&T commercials where the people had bars over their heads weren't a lie.

Update (a few minutes later): It looks like what's happened is the AT&T network tag has been changed to be dual, while the Cingular one still just says Cingular. The AT&T one gives me a lot better coverage in my apartment right now, though, so I've moved it up my network priority list.

Can I just say now that for how creative they're all supposed to be, some of the gallery people around me are getting pretty lazy with their naming schemes. Across the street from me and appearing out of the blue Tuesday is 626 Gallery (ok, they probably didn't show up out of the blue, but I left for school Tuesday morning and when I got back there was a gallery there). One block down is Gallery 727.

I understand how to read your address, ok? Put a little more work into it.

In class today we watched the short 'George Lucas in Love' (google for it, you'll find a copy somewhere). Take the title jabs there and insert them here.

In related news, Downtown Art Walk is right now. I think I might cruise the neighborhood for a little bit and get baffled some more by the art scene. I'm telling you, I don't fit in at galleries.

Have I mentioned before how much I dislike the Daily Trojan? If not, consider just a few words in this article:

In addition to these endeavors, the university is working on a master plan for the campus that involves land north of Jefferson Boulevard and east of the Intestate 10 freeway, Williams said.

Note:

east of the Intestate 10 freeway

1. It's "Interstate"
2. It's the 110 freeway. The 10 runs east-west. That is unless USC has some land in North Carolina I don't know about. We do have a campus in Virginia, so who knows...

I swear I can't read a single edition of the DT without finding some typos or shoddy journalism to get mad at.

Via a comment on my buzznet site I just got what could be wonderful news if it pans out. User golden (who hasn't posted any pictures as of yet, but I'll link you just in case she does in the future) had this to say in response to an image of the closed Mo' Better Meaty Meat Burgers location:

Actually, to prevent you from going into withdrawal I would like to pass on some info about the late Mo Better Meaty Meat Burgers. To make a long story short, the original owners of the stand decided to take a break from Mo Better for a while, because of being a bit over worked w/out reliable help. So they sold it back in late 1998, to someone who actually ran the business into the ground. Fortunately, the original owners are looking for a new location to open back up sometime soon...

I have indeed been in withdrawl, and would love to be able to get out of it.

This Daily News article talks about a shared-cost plan for sidewalk repair. The "WHA?!?" moment is at the end, when we get this gem:

This year, the City Council set aside enough money to replace 52 miles of sidewalks, but with a 4,600-mile backlog of damaged sidewalks, the average wait is about 80 years, Robertson said.

See, here's the thing: apparently the city doesn't technically own the sidewalks, so for a long time they just didn't do anything about them. They left it up to the property owners to take care of. Well, that didn't work out so well and now there's a lot to catch up on.

I've always wondered about the trees planted alongside streets. You always see the sidewalks where they've been there too long and the roots have pushed the sidewalk into all sorts of not flat shapes, but then you see streets that have been freshly landscaped with smaller trees. Do they have new ways to do it now where that same thing isn't going to happen in a couple decades?

I've been doing some eThreads2 coding this afternoon. I had to set up an Apache2/modperl setup on my laptop to do development now that the real installation's running live on this site. You would think there would be a way to partition namespaces in modperl to have live and devel versions of the same libs in memory, but I can't seem to come up with a way. Is it weird that I'm coding on my laptop just because I really like how the transparent terminals look on top of a background I'm using? Take a look at that shot, though... Isn't that just amazing? The background's from deviantart; I don't have a more specific URL handy at the moment.

My roommate Chris and I were counting up the other day and totalled up that we've got ten computers in the apartment -- and 9 of them are mine. To be fair, though, two of those are the XBox and the Tivo. Both are in reality PC's, but you can count or not count them as you wish. The list aside from those two:

• My desktop
• Chris's computer
• My laptop
• 2 SGI Indys
• SGI Personal IRIS
• SGI Indigo
• My homebrew caseless webserver

I should be getting my former server back this weekend. At that point I'll retire the homebrew, though, so the numbers will stay the same.

The Pasadena Star News today has an article about the MTA studying the possibility of a tunnel to complete the 710. When I first started working up here at JPL two years ago I was confused by the short little dead-end spur of the 210 that I would get onto off of California. I later read that this spur had been intended to connect to the 710 (and occasionally the 110), but that connector had been blocked by the fact that it went through South Pasadena. From the article:

MTA officials came to West Covina City Hall to brief the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments' transportation committee on the tunneling proposal. SGVCOG, a 30-city organization, almost unanimously supports closing the 710 gap.

The city of South Pasadena, however, has battled the freeway project since 1964. The 710 Freeway goes as far north as Valley Boulevard, on the Alhambra-El Sereno border.

I know I've written before about the fuss South Pasadena people have made over the Gold Line, but I can't seem to find where at the moment (perhaps it's in my soon to be resolved June - October blackhole). A website called 710gap.com is a little less diplomatic on its "Truth" page.

This Website is intended to address the war of misinformation, distortion and outright false claims made by a small but intensely committed group of 710 Freeway opponents. This group composed primarily of South Pasadena residents, operates from the premise that their South Pasadena's interests outweigh staggering impacts, traffic congestion and pollution that their City forces upon residents of other Southern California cities. In essence, their message is that it is OK to subject others to vehicles and air pollution because "our community" is a "more special place" than all others.

My basic take is that something has to be done, and South Pasadena needs to get with the program and work on an amenable solution instead of taking a complete blocking stance. Just understand that this project at some point is going to happen, and it's a lot more likely to be pallatable to you if you're a part of the solution rather than continuing to be the problem.

I haven't been out for music in a couple weeks, but tonight I'm going to wander west on Wilshire (like that?) to check out "Artistry" at the Conga Room. I got emails about the event from Yardley, and I definitely am excited about getting out to see them again (it's been far too long), but I'm also really looking forward to Joe Purdy and Quincy.

My musical attention of late has been focused on some cool stuff downtown, but I don't want to count any chickens before they hatch, so I'm not going to talk about that yet.

On Tuesday afternoon I ordered a new laptop hard drive to replace my ailing one. That turned out to be a good move, as my loveable drive quickly turned from correctable drive ticks to a mindset where it would hit something it didn't like and lockup solid.

Here's why I love CDW: I ordered the new drive Tuesday afternoon, probably around 3pm PST. CDW's in Illinois, so that's 5pm or so for them. This morning my drive arrived. It shipped from Iowa yesterday morning and made it to my door 24 hours later. And that was with the cheap shipping (which ended up being UPS 2-day Air... $13 or so).

I never understood how small laptop hard drives were until today. These things are tiny. A credit card almost covers the entire surface of one.

My installation procedure is pretty much down to a science. From the blank drive I restored Windows XP using the Toshiba rescue DVD. That's just a ghost image that throws the factory default installation onto the drive. Then I booted into a Knoppix cd and used qtparted to resize the Windows partition down to 12gig or so. Then I booted the Debian netinstall cd, and Debian's currently downloading and installing.

Hopefully this will bring some closure to my laptop and drive issues.

For a long time now I've been using a keyboard that has a broken-off Insert key. Not a big deal: I don't use insert that often. But then just now something clicked and my mind said, "Hey knucklehead, you've got two keyboards identical to the one you use but without a broken key sitting right out in your living room."

I guess I'm going to switch.

Update (a minute or two later): Whoah... This keyboard's a lot cleaner than my old one. The keys are an entirely different shade of grey.

I just totally freaked myself out into thinking I had been hacked. I logged onto my server and saw a last login line I didn't recognize at all, at a time last night when I didn't think I was anywhere near a computer. I didn't need this.

Then I realized I actually ssh'ed in from Kathy's apartment then to check my email.

Whew...

I should keep a more active eye on the logs, though. I do see stuff like:

Nov  2 05:46:51 bit sshd[31463]: Illegal user patrick from 137.48.138.228
Nov  2 05:46:52 bit sshd[31465]: Illegal user patrick from 137.48.138.228
Nov  2 05:46:58 bit sshd[31478]: Illegal user rolo from 137.48.138.228
Nov  2 05:46:59 bit sshd[31481]: Illegal user iceuser from 137.48.138.228
Nov  2 05:47:00 bit sshd[31483]: Illegal user horde from 137.48.138.228
Nov  2 05:47:01 bit sshd[31486]: Illegal user cyrus from 137.48.138.228
Nov  2 05:47:02 bit sshd[31489]: Illegal user www from 137.48.138.228
Nov  2 05:47:03 bit sshd[31491]: Illegal user wwwrun from 137.48.138.228

That one goes on for another 20 names or so. I feel pretty good about my security, but always better safe than sorry.

Last night I had class until 6:45 and then a meeting until 9, but after that I got sucked into watching the election coverage. We bounced around the different coverage a good bit, but mostly stuck to CBS. Dan Rather's had his issues of late, but how can you argue with lines like:

But as we always say, if a frog had side-pockets it'd carry a handgun.

And:

Now let's catch you up. Maybe you just put the baby to bed, or went and popped the cap on a beverage, adult or otherwise.

Adult or otherwise.

Beautiful.

Can I just say that 2004 for me has been the year of the vengeful computer? Obviously the whole server drive debacle is pretty fresh, but that wasn't at all the beginning of it.

It started January 6th, when my laptop started its death spiral. The spiral slowed, though, and must have started pretty high, 'cause after its near-death experience it didn't completely succumb. Instead it committed itself to a life of torture. It's been in that life up to today. If you leave it on too long it'll start to kill itself. The clicking begins, but oddly you can prolong the suffering by tilting the machine a little. It's like the data gets stuck, and you need to loosen it up and help it find its spot on the platter. Eventually though you're waving the laptop like a fan just to keep it moving and it's really not keeping up. That's when you have to shut it down for a day or two and let it recuperate.

January 11, of course, I got back to LA to discover that my desktop drives had been traumatized by a power supply fan failure.

At times I've thought my laptop was getting better, but over the past few days it's put that idea to rest. I think it's finally time for it to be dealt with. Of course now that it struggled out so long the warranty has expired, so any new drive will be on my dime.

I need a profession dealing with something friendlier, like snakes.

Update (4:00pm): I just ordered a new 40gig drive from CDW. It should be here end of the week or so. For now I've set drive spindown timeout as short as possible to give it rest.

The LA Times today has an article on NextBus in Ventura. Basic gist is that GPS sensors on the buses allow people to hop online, see where the bus is, and see a dynamically computed time for the bus's arrival at their stop.

That's cool stuff, and it's something you have to have for buses that have long headway times. For example, this morning I took the Metro 38 from 6th/Spring to USC. The bus runs roughly every 20 minutes. To make it to school for a 9am class I have to catch the bus at around 8:34. I'm always right on the edge, and until I see that bus show up I always assume I've missed it. As the article says,

"It makes a big difference whether you're there a minute before a bus arrives or one minute after it leaves," Schmier said.

Hopefully LA will be getting to this party sometime soon.