Every so often I wander the bottom of the LA Blogs blogroll. Though the idea of a blogroll is that the sites at the top are the ones who are updating, the imperfections of the internet mean that those at the top are really just the ones smart enough to ping the appropriate spots when they update. Today I ran across a post from amandarin titled "It pours". She chides LA people for being soft when it comes to rain:

People, it's water. WATER. You carry it around by the designer bucketful, is it really so scary when it's loose? You are not going to be trapped in your home for days on end. No one is going to drown crossing the street. The pilates studios, Whole Foods markets, and tanning salons will all remain open.

How true...

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One of the biggest headaches any time you're going to be going to the Rose Bowl is just getting there and finding somewhere to park. The area surrounding the stadium itself has nowhere near the necessary spaces, so people resort to things like parking in nearby neighborhoods and walking in or taking the Parsons shuttle. And then this little storm came along and dropped a heck of a lot of rain on LA, and in particular on the Rose Bowl's adjoining golf course. On normal game days that course holds 14,000 cars. For the Rose Bowl it'll hold a number that's pretty close to zero...

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One last bit for the night, then I'm off to bed: I've just posted three new essays up in verbal intercourse. I think I have a few more sitting on my computer in LA, but it's off right now so I can't get to those. What's new:

• A Slightly Better Future: Visions of Utopia in A Boy and His Dog
• Censorship in the Age of Ratings
• Standing in the Way of Ceremony: Production Code Objections to Bride of Frankenstein

All three are from film classes, as you can probably see.

My normal routine each day is to read the California, Business, and Sports sections of the LA Times. Leaving some sections out means I sometimes miss stories like the one that ran Monday titled "Give Up the Suburb? Yes. Give Up the Car? No Way".

People are moving downtown, all right. But this is L.A. So they're bringing their cars with them.

And now local officials, who just a few years ago stopped requiring developers to build parking spaces in most loft buildings, are scrambling to accommodate automobiles — and their owners — downtown.

The article's interesting, though not necessarily all that informative for those who are already downtown and deal with these sorts of problems everyday...

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Today's (well, yesterday's... I'm slow) absolute understatement of the day comes to us by way of a Daily News piece talking about how the Sepulveda Basin dam handled this week's rain. The article helpfully tells us that:

The Valley's largest recreational park doubles as its flood-control system - one that can hold thousands of gallons of water, then slowly release the flow into the Los Angeles River after the storm has passed.

So, here's the thing: I'm sure the basin really holds somewhere up around a million gallons. "Thousands of gallons" is tiny. This pool site tells me that a 4' deep pool with a 24' diameter holds a touch under 12,000 gallons. I'd really like to think that the Sepulveda Basin holds more than a small swimming pool or two.

I drove over to Grand Rapids, MI, this evening to meet up with Shmuel and Brian Tol. It was a good time, hanging out talking about computer stuff at one of GR's numerous coffee shops with free wifi (It's a Grind/Urban Mill). Afterward, driving across town to go to World Market, I noticed something: Grand Rapids has some horrid lights.

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I was just fixing up the styles for the "On This Date" feature and got curious about how many days of the year I've posted on in the 6+ years this blog's been running. A simple MySQL query later*, I had the answer: 348. So out of the 366 possible days of the year, I've missed 18. The most popular day, with 10 posts:

• December 11

Fascinatingly, I implemented "On This Date" on Dec. 11, 2003. Close behind, with 9 posts:

• March 19th
• April 8th

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So I left LA for a few weeks and missed crazy record amounts of rainfall. You really need to see these pictures of a flooded 110 (linked from blogging.la). Reading stories of 4.3 inches of rain downtown (over 24 hours) I'm amazed that the power in my apartment hasn't been touched. How do I know this if I'm sitting in Michigan right now? Well, the server you're reading this off of is sitting in my living room. That means that our power, phone, and DSL have survived untouched through the downpours.

My old apartment would lose power every now and again just for the fun of it. It's nice to know that's different now.

So the look I bragged about in my last post lasted less than a day. Luckily I made that screenshot, 'cause that's the last you'll be seeing of it here. I give credit for all the good ideas in this new new design to Max (otherwise known as Rev. Fun). I kept pestering him with design questions last night, and woke up this morning to find a mockup of what he thought my site should look like. His was much better than mine, which is probably why he gets paid for this sort of thing and I don't.

You'll notice that the expand/collapse that reappeared yesterday is gone. In it's place on posts that have a body you'll find a Read More link below. That'll expand the post body in-place...

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After spending a few hours tonight hacking on them, I've just put up some new CSS for the blog. Like any good work it consists of elements lifted from here and there. The little frame elements in the top-left and bottom-right are loosely adapted from a rounded corner guide here, and the little calendars are lifted from mezzoblue (though in fairness I'm not presenting quite the same). The goal was to de-clutter and reduce the number of colors I'm using. I don't think it's perfect (or even close), but it's a start.

Now, those of you using Internet Explorer are sitting there saying "what frame elements?" and "what calendars?" That's why I gave you the little screenshot to click on and see what you're missing. There's no excuse not to be running a browser from Mozilla these days. You deserve a better browser than IE.

That said, the calendars should work in IE and I'm not sure why they don't. I need to look into that more.

So a slew of "new" features should be coming on right now. I'm testing as I copy things from the dev setup to live, so if something doesn't work in the next half hour or so that won't really surprise me. So what's "new" (and why the quotes?):

• Comment support is back.
• The expand/collapse navigation is back.
• "This Date" is back.

As you can see, I say "new" 'cause I had all these before. But they're all genuinely new to eThreads2.

This quote comes from an article in the NY Times:

But in our security-obsessed age, the [Caltrans] building's spirit of openness makes it exceptional. Its vast "urban lobby" is carved through its core, sucking surrounding street life inside.

What?

If you wanted to suck street life inside the "lobby", you'd have punched a hole through to Los Angeles St. and the New Otani. As it is I don't even feel like I should be mounting the front steps. As is habit in LA, the plaza doesn't have anywhere to sit. It's concrete, with metal. That sort of an environment doesn't really suck many people in.

Hopefully the public eatery that's supposed to go in will change some of that.

The LA Times today comes back to the Caltrans building, talking about how some occupants think the fancy exterior led to skimping on the inside. I have heard that before, that the project's limited budget led to the bulk of the design money going into the shell of the building, leaving little imagination to the office space inside. I don't really have a take on the water fountain situation... If Caltrans is giving people free bottled water that seems fine, but I don't really know what the case is. I haven't taken much opportunity to come back and address the Caltrans building now that it's occupied...

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Blogging on Christmas? About actual news? Tisk tisk... Oh well.

The LA Times today has an article on neighborhood council spending. It paints a (favorable) picture of how councils use their money, and quotes several council members who say that the system needs more funding. That's a complicated issue.

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It's Christmas here, though I know those of you on the west coast have a couple more hours until the calendar flips over (and indeed the timestamp on this post will be Dec. 24). I still have to wrap two presents and finish up one more, but other than that I'm set.

Being back here in the snow and the cold really does remind me just how glad I am to be out in warm California. Say what you want about the place, but the weather is tough to top. The snow I just had to brush off the car tells me it's going to be a white Christmas (well, as does the snow already on the ground and the forecast high of 21). I'll take that, for a week or two, but as soon as possible I'll be back on that plane headed to LA, where tomorrow it's supposed to be 67.

All I want for Christmas is for the MTA to understand that NextBus is a really cool thing, and that not all of its buses run so frequently that it's not needed. I've just missed the 38 a few too many times for me to believe you on that one...

I've spent most of the day today battling eThreads2, working on comments support and a couple other things I want to roll back out ASAP. Comments are getting really close... I still need to figure out a couple things, but I'm really hoping to have them up for Christmas.

Jonah over at LA Blogs named this blog one of the Notable Blogs - 2004. I join the other commenters on that post in saying that I really don't deserve the distinction. I've always figured I was the majority of my readership; I can't tell you how many times I've "remembered" something by looking up what I wrote about it here...

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I'm sitting in the Detroit airport right now, taking full advantage advantage of the wireless access I paid $7 for. We're here about two hours, though, so it's really not that bad of a deal. The flight LA -> Detroit was good, though the Northwest food was nothing to be happy about (a very dry sandwich, a tiny bag of chips, an apple, and a little water).

I spent most of the flight working on some eThreads2 stuff, and I think ended up confusing myself more than actually accomplishing much.

I hate that last minute panic of trying to figure out if you've remembered everything you need to take on a trip. Normally I forget my phone charger, but that's already packed. I need to doublecheck that I grab both my wifi and bluetooth cards, but other than that I can't think of anything I'm missing at the moment.

And that worries me. I'm always missing something...

But for now all there is to do is throw on some RL Burnside, pack up the last bits, and get ready to head downstairs.

Update (10:35): Of course, right after I wrote this I remembered two things I had forgotten. Those are now taken care of.

I have to be quick this morning, since it's 8:35, I leave for the airport in two hours, and I haven't packed...

The trip to Vegas was good. Traffic especially agreed with us; both trips were around 4.5 hours.

Now I have to empty my bag and pack my suitcase all at the same time. And then I have to go take care of getting a check to the place where I park since I won't be around for the first couple days of the new month.

I'll have ample Internet access (and will likely be using my computer for warmth... high of 13 on Friday), so no downtime this time.

It's going to be quiet here for a few days. Kathy and I are headed to Vegas for a few days to meet up with some of the people she spent a semester in France with, and Vegas and I don't seem to get along when it comes to finding free internet. It seems the Tropicana has it poolside, but I'm not too convinced I feel the urge to make it all the way there just for that. I'll be bringing the laptop to maybe pound on eThreads2 stuff in the downtime, but I have a feeling it won't be connecting up with the outside world.

Then Tuesday I fly back to Michigan for just over two weeks. It'll be my first trip back in a year. I can't say I'm looking forward to the weather, but it's always good to take a trip back to family.

I just hope the wind stays down tomorrow. Otherwise the mountains could get exciting.

The Daily News today has a story talking about a big raid yesterday on cd counterfeiters (the LA Times has a short bit on the same topic). The numbers claimed in the story are pretty big:

In the largest counterfeit movie and music bust in U.S. history, pirated DVDs, CDs and video games representing potential losses of $200 million to companies were confiscated Wednesday in raids in Los Angeles and Orange counties, officials said. ... In Wednesday's raids, law enforcement officials seized approximately 120,000 music CDs and 79 unauthorized CD stampers valued at approximately $50 million, according to the RIAA's preliminary estimates.

Now, I'm never one to trust the numbers the RIAA, MPAA, or the software industry like to put out for losses. They never miss a chance to drum things up. That said, this is exactly the type of piracy that they need to be stopping.

One thing in the article caught my attention...

"Each stamper has the capability of producing more than 50,000 CDs and DVDs," Lopez said. "We're talking about every kind of music and video you can think of. The quality of this merchandise was very high." ... Spertus said the investigation, culminating a lengthy undercover operation, was particularly difficult because the probe focused on companies with stampers capable of producing a disc every three seconds.

I know vaguely the difference between stamping and burning, but the article makes it sound like the stamper is a piece of machinery. So I did a little googling. I found several good sites explaining the cd making process (this site is one, though a little technical). Basically these stampers are negative plates that are inserted into stamping machines in order to get the proper data onto the disk. You need a negative, obviously, since a ridge on the stamper will put a pit in the cd, etc.

So these "79 stampers" are really just 79 metal plates. Still illegal, but a lot less massive-sounding.

Over at herbie the love blog (why am I so boring at naming?), kenny has good piece on the fortresses that are the Medici and Orsini.

There are a pair of luxury apartment buildings in downtown LA, with more on the way, built to look like vaguely Italian-type buildings, except that they're massive castles. They're impenetrable from the outside except for the small openings for visitor parking (where visitors can't actually park, unless they're there to see a leasing agent). A couple of my friends live in such buildings. Let's call them The Medici and The Orsini, because those are the silly, pretentious names that they actually have.

I have friends who live in both buildings, but I've never actually been inside them. I've walked and driven by, though, and definitely agree with the analysis of their street presence.

(Thanks to Jonah and the great LABlogs digests for the pointer)

I just put the HTML version of my paper "Gaming in the Metaverse" up in verbal intercourse (there's a much more readable PDF version there as well). This is the cause of my current tiredness and lack of sleep, but I'm happy with the outcome. Here's the thesis, for you to scan before deciding the paper's not worth reading.

While Second Life provides a fascinating platform for study and experimentation, inherent limitations in the programming model seem to dictate that for now its in-world creations will be unable to match up to dedicated games.

Now that I'm done with that, Second Life can actually be a game.

So apparently while I was snowed under working on my project the MTA had some discussions about future subway building on Monday. An LA Times article from yesterday about busway funding included a good bit on subway talks. Tom LaBonge is the one who's really doing the pushing right now.

I agree that it's proper for the MTA to pursue making sure all its options are open. Light rail has done some good things in LA, but there are going to be corridors in Los Angeles that can not be serviced via a ground-level mode. The expansion down Wilshire to the west is just such a corridor. Whereas you can run the Expo Line down a former rail right-of-way, you don't have that option on the highly dense Wilshire corridor.

And that's why I absolutely disagree with Gloria Molina's contention that westside subway expansion is racist. The eastside Gold Line extension will run about 6 miles, and the budget is listed at a touch under $900 million. That's about half the cost, or double the length, of the similarly priced plan to extend the Red Line 3 miles to Wilshire/Fairfax. Of that 6 miles, 2 is in fact subway. If I'm on the eastside I'm just happy that I'm getting something built in the current funding climate.

Subway, thanks to its costs, is currently relegated to a solution of last resort in the city of Los Angeles. That's life. Push for full grade separation before you fight for subway.

It's been quiet here over the last few days as I've been absolutely enveloped in this last paper for the semester. I'm writing about game development inside Second Life, and it was supposed to be due at 6pm, errr, I guess that's yesterday now. But I got that extended. The professor wasn't coming in until tomorrow morning to pick up the papers, so he said as long as mine was in his box by then it would be fine.

And so I'm sitting here at my laptop at 2:30am, one paragraph into the 11th page of a 12 page paper (12-15, but for me, 12). I haven't written a conclusion yet, but my last point sort of culminates the argument raised in the previous three so I don't think my conclusion's going to be that long.

I hate finishing papers. I've said pretty much all I want to say, but now's the time where I just have to wrap it all up, and I don't think I'm very good at that.

I put section headers in this paper. I don't usually do that. One of them is:

Scripts in the Hands of an API

I hope my professor gets the Jonathan Edwards reference. I thought it was clever.

I'll post the paper up in verbal in an hour or two. Sometime over break I need to post all the other things I've written this semester.

I just made a joke on Second Life about Swatch internet time and no one laughed. That's pretty sad.

Dude, Swatch says it's 431.

So why am I up at 4am playing a computer game? Because I have a paper due on it Tuesday afternoon, that's why. The game is Second Life, and to be fair it's really not a game so much as it is a virtual world. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to the metaverse in Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash. Aside from eating up any and all system resources you give it, it really is a cool deal. Today I finally got Windows running on my desktop so that I could get this up and make the final push for this last paper.

What I wanted to point out right now, though, is how absolutely out of place I am at a late-night Goth party. The first shot shows my arrived-in attire against that of the others. The second shows my attempt to be a little more appropriate for the setting.

The funny part is that in real life I tend to show up to parties dressed just like that top shot. I guess Second Life is a good reflection of reality.

My computer freaked me out a bit a few hours ago. It started just randomly turning itself off a little while into a run. I think what happened is that when I pulled an internal hard drive this afternoon the SCSI cable lodged itself against the CPU fan, meaning that when the box got repowered the CPU was running heat sink only. Some internal temp controls were probably shutting everything down when the CPU got too hot.

Now I've got a mess I've got to get back together, and I still need to get Windows running correctly.

In my living room I have a 10Mbit hub. It connects the computers in the living room, my room, and Chris's room. For normal traffic the fact that it's old and 10Mbit doesn't matter. But today I've been copying a partition's worth of data between my laptop and my desktop. I want to say it's around 10-12gigs worth of data. I didn't think about that when I started, but now a good two and a half hours later I can definitely say that I need to go out and buy a little 100Mbit switch. My transfer rate has been right around 1MB/sec the whole time, which is consistant with being about 80% of the potential for a 10Mbit connection (and 80% utilization is about what you expect to peak at).

If it really is 10gig, it should finish soon. If it's 12 I might still be waiting a while.

From a little blurb in the Downtown News about Ed Reyes getting appointed to the MTA board:

The MTA oversees more than 73 miles of bus and railroad lines in Los Angeles County.

That 73 miles is just about right for rail, but since what they wrote includes bus -- well, there's only so much you can include in "more than".

According to the fact sheet, the MTA has 189 bus routes, 18,500 bus stops (isn't that high? almost 100 stops per route?), and 2,100+ buses in service on any given weekday. I really hope all those aren't on the same 73 miles.

I know it's just bad editing, but that's what I expect of the Daily Trojan, not the Downtown News.

Technical stuff to follow. Avert your eyes if you'd like...

Even though you haven't seen much change out front here, there's been some cool stuff happening on the eThreads2 backend. I mentioned earlier in the week that I had added a memory cache. Well, since then that's been rewritten and reworked to be a transparent part of my normal cache structure. There's still some work to do, but I'm going to throw that after the break.

I just got ping support working again, so now my #1 target is comments. Alan's been getting on me about that, letting me know how I've missed his wisdom without them.

Click the post title to read more...

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Don emailed me last night and accused me of having an attitude on the blog lately. Well, I'll try not to carry that over to this post, but...

I just absolutely confused some poor Cingular customer service rep. I knew so much more about how things work than she did that it wasn't funny. Here's the deal:

Kathy and I have a familytalk plan with Cingular. We've had a 1250 minute national plan to share between us, but over the last several months we've built up quite a stash of rollover minutes (1800 of them, to be precise). I figured we might as well use those instead of just letting them sit around, so I called up 611 to bump our plan down to 850 minutes (and save us $20/mon until we need to bump back). Here's where it gets complicated. I wanted to go ahead and make the change now, since why wait until our billing cycle flips on the 6th to start saving money? So I asked the CSR to check if the minutes on the pro-rated old plan would cover our usage already this cycle.

Right about there I lost her.

She said she would recommend waiting until the end of the cycle, to save some money. I asked her where that savings would come from. If I made the switch today the first 5 or 6 days of the month would be on the pro-rated 1250, basically giving us either 208 or 241 minutes (depending on if the change would pro-rate 5 days or 6) and costing either $12.90 or $15.48. The rest of the month would be on a pro-rated 850, giving us 712/685 minutes and costing $50.32/$48.39. So the effective plan for the month would be either $63.22 and have 920 minutes (pro-rate at 5 days), or be $63.91 and have 926 minutes (pro-rate at 6 days). Either way it's well under $80. So what I wanted to know was basically if right now would split at 5 days or 6, so I'd know if we'd be under the minutes for the first part of the month.

She asked if I would hold on a second while she went to check.

She came back and said they didn't do that.

"You don't do plan changes mid-month?"

"No, we do, we just don't do the pro rate and the minutes and that stuff."

At that point I cut my losses and had the change be effective 1/5/2005.

Yesterday's Downtown Art Walk was great. If you missed it definitely plan to make the rounds next time, on January 13th.

I started my walk a little around 5:45pm, when I looked at the map one final time and headed for #3, the M.J. Higgins gallery in the former Inshallah building. As with several other galleries this go 'round, they're very newly opened. Good stuff, both paintings and some "found objects" type furniture and other decorations.

Next I hit up #6, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, which features high quality prints of digital work. What's fascinating to me is that if I walked into the gallery off the street knowing nothing, I'd have had no idea the works were digitally produced and then printed by the printer sitting in their back room. Part of that was the particular exhibition, but also it's a function of what an amazing job their Epson Stylus Pro 10000 does.

Next door is #7, the future site of the El Nopal Press. As of last night they were featuring what they called the "show before the show". On display were a printing press and some architectural drawing for what the finished space will look like.

Across the street is #8, Bert Green Fine Art. Largely it was the same stuff I saw last month, with a few new pieces here and there to replace what's been sold. Very good stuff, and there's one piece in there that I absolutely love (the "Coming Soon"/"American Hero" piece that I can't seem to find on the gallery website). I also really like the Devon Paulson pieces he has up.

Down at the end of the block and up the elevator was #9A, Duarte Photo. Their works are much better than their website, which is Flash only with no accomodation for those who don't have it installed (like me, here at work). By now you should know how I feel about Flash. Anyway, cool work and a huge space in Spring Arts Tower.

At Duarte I ran into Jaime Green, and walked with him down Spring a few blocks to #11, 727 Gallery. They're displaying a very nice collection of photos centered on the community gardens southeast of USC.

By the time I left 727 it was a little after 8:30 and I was tired of walking, so I walked the block back to my apartment and put my feet up for a while. It's always good to leave some places for next time.

One thing that really stood out this month is how the area on 5th street between Spring and Main (which lacda's Rex Bruce told me has been appointed "the nickle", first by the homeless and now by the galleries) is really becoming a vibrant center for Gallery Row. Last month there was one gallery -- Bert Green's. This month there were three. Next month there could be two more. That's amazing.

I got a mass campaign email from mayoral candidate Bernard Parks yesterday. It was announcing the opening of his new campaign headquarters, to take place Saturday. I was going to write a post about how I didn't sign up to get emailed, and wonder how he got my address, but then I realized it's listed on the DLANC contacts page. I'm guessing they got the address through that page or another DONE (Department of Neighborhood Empowerment) list.

In that case, I approve. I am an elected official (I still laugh when I say that, even though it's true), and as such I should be accessible by those who have LA issues, especially those relating to downtown. And as someone who works in City Hall, isn't Parks a DLANC stakeholder?

Real quick before I pop out to the Art Walk... Today in less than two hours I successfully took the subway to two Blockbusters and to a Borders, where I bought a book I'd been looking for.

I left my apartment at 3:25 and walked over to 5th/Hill. There I caught the N. Hollywood red line, and took that to Hollywood/Western. Walked upstairs, crossed Hollywood, and dropped off a dvd. Crossed again, back downstairs, got to the platform just as the train was arriving. Went back SE to Sunset/Vermont, walked upstairs, went a block east to Sunset/Virgil, and dropped off my other DVD. Then I decided I wanted to get System of the World, so back down at the platform I again caught the N. Hollywood train (which happened to show up at exactly the right time) and took it to Hollywood/Vine. Walked one block south to Sunset/Vine, and bought the book at the Borders there. Then back to the station, wait for the absolutely packed Union Station train, and ride back to Pershing Square. I arrived back at my apartment at 5:15.

This month's Downtown Art Walk is tonight, and is definitely worth checking out. Last month I got around to 5 or 6 galleries, and I'm planning to hit up a few more tonight.

To me the coolest thing looking at that map is to see the amazing concentration of galleries opening up just north of me. Look at what 5th street is becoming right there. And from what I hear, there's still another place or two to come. A few months ago all those storefronts were dead, now they're springing back to life.

I especially want to see the new exhibition at 626 Gallery, directly across the street from me. Their first show was really good, even for me, Mr. "I don't understand art."

Don correctly pointed out to me via email that at the time I said "tomorrow" in the last post, it was in fact today. Details, details.

I just finished my first final. I felt really good about it, so that hopefully means something. Every time midterms or finals come around I get reminded just how much I dislike having to write with a pen. It hurts after a while. My poor little hand and wrist isn't used to it.

I've got one more final in an hour, and then there'll just be one paper between me and really being done with the semester.

Tomorrow morning I've got a final at 8am.

8am.

Yikes. I get to go write about censorship for a couple hours. Four essay questions. Number one will be about violence. We watched Natural Born Killers in class, but I skipped it. Number two will be about porn. We watched Deep Throat (which I also skipped... even if I was about porn -- porn in the morning? that's just not right), Body Heat, and Bitter Moon. Questions three and four will be about political correctness. We watched Year of the Dragon (which I'm watching right now) and read Nation of Victims and Bias. I feel ok about the final as a whole, but 8am is so early. I'm going to watch a bit more of this film and then just go to bed.

Oh, and I also have my other final tomorrow at 11am. That's 40 multiple choice questions about communications and sports. Lots of stuff about how the media creates the story of sports, etc.

So Bob Hertzberg's changela.com has linked to my blog a couple times now. If you're an LA person and you haven't seen Hertzberg's site yet you really should check it out just to see the great job his staff's doing with their newslinks. They're very comprehensive in rounding up what's going on in LA.

That said, though, I don't think that all too many people are reading. The five or six mentions I've gotten have led to a total of 15 click-throughs. I get far more referred traffic from Jim winstead's blog (with 47 referred visits last month... I know, I'm big-time, eh?). On the non-blog-side, the most referral traffic I'm getting right now (not counting search engines) is from somaweb.org, linking to my four year old senior english paper comparing visions of the future in the books Snow Crash and Brave New World.

I put together a pretty successful little trip this evening. I needed to pick up some food and a pair of DVDs that I was supposed to have watched in class during the semester. So tonight, after finishing up a paper, I made the rounds of hollywoodvideo.com and blockbuster.com to see what I could do. One of the problems with my neighborhood (and the area around USC, oddly) is a lack of good video rental shops, so anywhere was going to be a bit of a drive. Blockbuster these days allows you to check what stores have what titles, and as luck would have it no one store in my area had both the titles I needed. But I think I did well for myself...

From my apartment I headed west and went 110N -> 101N. Exit Santa Monica, head north a few blocks up Western to Hollywood. At the Blockbuster there I picked up the DVD of Bitter Moon.

From there I headed east on Hollywood, and not far down the street at the three-way intersection of Hollywood, Sunset, and Virgil, I stopped and picked up the DVD for Body Heat. Oddly, these two Blockbusters have different pricing. A week rental is $3.99 at Hollywood/Western, while the same at Sunset/Virgil is like $4.30. Odd. Both get tax added on after.

From there I headed a block or two back west on Sunset, turned south on Vermont, and headed down to the Little Caesar's at Vermont/1st. $6.50 for a large pizza and an order of crazy bread, and I was headed back downtown.

Total trip time: a little under an hour.

Ok, this crappy weather in LA thing has gone on long enough. It's cold, and cloudy, and they're calling for rain, and that's really just not what I agreed to when I moved out here. Today: high of 58 and rain. Tonight: low of 50 and showers.

Yesterday's low temp was 42 degrees, just two degrees off the date's record low. December 3 the numbers were reversed, with 40 as the actual and 42 as the previous record.

That's just not cool. I like the clean air from the rain, but these clouds and I aren't on speaking terms.

Dec. 21 I fly back to MI for a few weeks, but there at least the crappy weather is a part of the deal.

CRA/LA (Community Redevelopment Agency) just posted the RFP (Request for Proposals) for their downtown Red Car study. Basically, this is will be a $100,000 study to "provide recommended development approaches for the resurrection of downtown red car trolley services." The RFP going out means that the study is about eight months away from completion, figuring two months to choose a proposal and then six months or so for the study. The tasks listed in the RFP look good and comprehensive. They ask a lot of the same questions I've been wondering about recently (curbside vs. median, traffic impacts, etc).

The interesting parts of the RFP don't come until page 19. Feel free to skip up to that point (unless you're someone actually considering putting in a proposal to do the study, I guess). On page 20 the tasks start, and as I said they seem very comprehensive. Quick vocabulary for you, since I had to look it up: [kinematic envelope](http://www.devilsguide.com/back.asp?page=kin00_00.htm§ion=Infrastructure engineering).

The next thing you'll want to look at is the 7 page conceptual design doc done by Korve Engineering in 2001. That's Exhibit C in the RFP doc list.

Perhaps most interesting to me right now is the question of what lane you run the trolley in. The Korve docs call for curbside running, but the problem there is that you lose any possibility of curbside parking on that side of the street. The other mentioned alternative is center median running, but that's problematic as well (left-turn backups as well as the problem of needing a safe passenger space out there). What I would see is a solution that put the trolley only on one-way streets (to give us a few more lanes to work with). I would then let the right lane be all-hour parking (1 hour during the day, but not a 4-6pm no stopping zone, etc). I would make the second lane a peak-hour bus lane and run the trolley tracks there. When it came time for a station, I would just cut the tracks into that right lane and board curbside. Obvious problem is that people would need to learn to be good parallel parkers or they'll slow up the bus/trolley traffic, but you could just make the parking spots big to cut down on the pressure there. But that's just me talking; I haven't done my homework yet to see what other true street-running systems have done lately.

Interesting stuff. It'll be fun to watch this study develop, and to see if hard numbers can do something to counter the built-in resistance from people who think a trolley will make far worse downtown's already bad traffic (or whether the numbers instead validate these fears).

Not much here in the way of updates lately, but that'll happen come this time of the year. I thought that things would be lighter after last Thursday, but it turns out I'm still going to be busy straight on through the end of finals.

So USC's in the Orange Bowl... And in an orgy of bad planning my flight back from MI is scheduled to arrive into LAX right as the game is supposed to begin. I'm going to need to be seeing what can be done about that.

The water's been non-potable (ie. undrinkable) in my building here at work for a week and a half or so now. I'm not sure exactly the details of how it happened, but the word is "ruptured pipelines." That doesn't really affect me, since I don't generally drink from the water fountain anyway, but until the lines are fixed the contracting firm is providing bottled water on each floor.

That means that while I wouldn't normally be drinking water out of the fountain, I now have free bottled water today to help me get myself a little more hydrated.

So I haven't watched last night's debate yet -- I went to sleep at 4pm yesterday and didn't wake up until 9am this morning. I did tivo it, so I'm planning to check it out this evening. That said, I saw an interesting tidbit in today's LA Times coverage.

Villaraigosa, who represents an East Los Angeles council district, said he would extend the Red Line subway to the beach.

Did he really?

If so, do these candidates even listen to what they're saying up there?

I would absolutely love to see a Red Line extension to Santa Monica, but the logistics are absolutely breathtaking.

• Let's say it's 13 miles down Wilshire from Wilshire/Western to the end. Right now the estimated costs for the 3 mile Red Line extension to Wilshire/Fairfax are running around $300 million/mile. So a 13 mile project would cost $3.9 billion.

• You have to get the no tunnelling under Wilshire law overturned, or waste time going around its boundaries.

• You have to get the sales tax restrictions on subway spending overturned.

• And maybe most importantly, the city doesn't control the MTA. The MTA is a countywide agency on whose projects the city of LA gets a voice. A big voice, certainly, but still just a voice.

Hopefully what he really said, or at least what he really means, is that he'll do what he can to get the process started. Because no matter what there's no way a line, even one approved today, would be running before a newly elected mayor termed out.

I would think it might be cheaper to just build a beach at Wilshire/Western.

Updated (2pm): Revised my distance estimate to a more realistic 13 miles down Wilshire.

So one more paper is now done, and another will be turned in late. I finished my big paper for speculative cinema in just the nick of time this morning (after working on it for about 20 hours straight... I think that's a record for me. no clue why so slow). I then went to two classes, almost fell asleep in both of them, and now I'm back here. It's 3:50pm and I'm ready for a nap. I've been up since 9:30 yesterday morning.

That said I'm not the only one going through this right now... my roommate Magilla didn't sleep last night either; he too spent his night paper writing.

We had a meeting at my apartment on Monday, and one of the attendees brought with her some coffee and a box of Mousse Pocky sticks. I now have a new appreciation for the culture around me and a desire to go explore more of its tasty treats.

This coffee she brought wasn't normal coffee: it was cold. Now iced coffee isn't that weird of a concept; while I haven't much drank intentionally cold coffee, I do see it on menus at coffee shops. It's my understanding that usually iced coffee is sweetened, but I drink my coffee black so I was perfectly happy that this was black. In fact the name was "Drink It Black" (third item on the page). Apparently canned coffee is a pretty common thing in Asia. I had never heard of it.

Having now corrected that lack of knowledge, I made another radical discovery. Japan has black cold coffee in a keg can. Look at this. Amazing. Given the college lifestyle, what better to accompany an all-nighter than a six-pack of coffee keg cans? It's like you're halfway to the weekend, but you're staying awake.

My new mission is to explore Little Tokyo until I find such a wonder. I don't know, though, if it'll happen before my all-nighter that's set to be held tonight.