I mentioned several weeks ago that the paperwork for getting a student pass from Metro seems complicated. At the same time, though, the reduction from $52 to $30 is pretty substantial.

Today I ended up getting the best of both worlds. I went down to the JPL intending to get tokens, and found they had February monthly passes in stock. Through JPL I can get a monthly pass for $37. That's not $30, but it's also no paperwork. Maybe I'll get the paperwork figured out in time for the next round of Metro student ids (which are good March 1 - October 31).

The Daily News takes on Metrolink costs today, in an article titled "Transit on the Wrong Track." The piece itself reads more fairly than the head would indicate, though it does include some fun shots at transit spending:

Every day an average of 40,000 suburbanites vote with their feet by climbing aboard Metrolink trains from Ventura County to San Bernardino. They are mostly former freeway commuters, but only a small fraction of the million or so riders who use Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses, trains and subway in Los Angeles County alone , not to mention the millions of others who drive their cars to work and back.

... The average fare for a Metrolink train trip costs passengers about $5, with the public paying an average subsidy per rider of $5.07, money that comes from sales-tax add-ons that support transportation in the region. That comes on top of the $3 billion in bonds that voters approved to create the system.

It's interesting to see commuter rail attacked. It's one of the cheapest transit modes overall and has a high farebox recovery. More thoughts in the body...

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Last night I made my way via the Red Line up to Hollywood to catch a huge night of music at the Hotel Cafe. It was the first of two nights to benefit tsunami relief. I came away feeling like I went to a festival; fourteen bands played fifteen minute sets. As always the musical selections were great. The Hotel really is the best venue in Los Angeles right now for hearing singer/songwriter type music. Erik Penny would go even further; he told me that he thinks that the scene in LA right now, centered around the Hotel Cafe, might well be the most fertile in the world. WIth fourteen acts there's no chance that I can actually review everyone, but it was fun to see favorites Quincy and Steve Reynolds, and well as to hear Jay Nash, who I had met but never heard play.

The scary part: the Hotel's doing the whol thing again tonight, with a totally different and yet still amazing lineup.

I don't know how I do this, but somehow I always forget about The Charlatans. I forget that I really like them, 'cause they're really good. I listen to them, and then I move on to something else and six months or so I'll pop them onto the mp3 player and think, "Oh yeah..."

Anyway, their latest album, "Up at the Lake," came out last May. I think it's good.

My trip to work this morning could easily be used as an example of all the ways transit can go wrong. I won't get into too many details, but suffice it to say that not having one dollar bills turned into being two minutes late for a train, which ended up meaning waiting 45 minutes for a bus. All in all a one hour trip turned into two hours and a little over a half hour standing out in the rain. Bottom line: a bus that runs every 50 minutes is a dangerous proposition when you're trying to get somewhere.

I'm not very happy that I've had to power cycle my DSL twice this evening. It's normally incredibly stable, but twice now today connectivity has suddenly dropped, only to come back when I cycle. If it's going to go out, I'd rather it not be a problem solved through my end via user intervention. I like that it comes back, but I can't approve of having to be here.

So despite the fact that I pointed out so many flaws with the MTA's new TripMaster, I still have to use it to plan getting places. Tomorrow I have to get to work, and the front tire on my bike's a little too flat for that to be an option. It's some funky thin connector, too, so I need to get an adaptor for that before I can fill it up. So that means tomorrow will be a 100% transit trip. Aside from a really tight Pasadena connection, it doesn't look that bad. Despite that, I think it's fair for me to take a few more swings at Tripmaster woes.

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Annenberg has new computers in the computer lab this semester. They're cool little HP's with flat screens and the CPU mounted into the monitor assembly. The screens also pivot, so they can go landscape or portrait. Unfortunately Annenberg doesn't seem to be running the Pivot app on them, so they don't recognize the change automatically.

Don't tell Antonio, but even Phoenix is counting him out of the mayor's race. From the Business Journal of Phoenix:

A new forum for Latino issues will debut on Feb. 2 with a talk from Los Angeles City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, a former candidate for L.A. mayor.

I guess, perhaps, the other explanation is that the 2001 race is simply the last one they've heard about in Arizona.

If you're following along, yesterday I got my Flexcar membership packet. This morning everything's set up and I'm able to access the online reservation system. I haven't actually reserved a car yet, but I figured I would go ahead and post my first observations, given that I'm big on criticizing UI design lately.

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Today marks a major transition point for me. This afternoon I went over to the body shop I had left my car at after last week's excitement and signed over the title. As of an hour or so ago I officially have no car for the first time in six and a half years. Also today, in a stroke of cinematic timing, I checked the mail before heading over to the body shop and found my membership packet for Flexcar.

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The local community paper Canyon News today has a short piece titled "Downtown Skyscraper to be Built." Fascinating, if true, but I have to think this building isn't to be. As I posted ten days ago on blogdowntown, the PR piece that "unveiled" the building seems nothing more than a ploy for somebody to hire the company.

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So yesterday morning Kathy and I followed the lead of Will Campbell and took a hike in Bronson Canyon Park. The trail Will talks about was easy enough to find, but at times the "trail" was more concept than absolute: at one spot in particular we stopped for several minutes, thoroughly confused, before finding that the trail continued directly up the streambed. A good time, and much thanks to Will for blogging about his hike and thereby giving us the idea.

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I was looking up some transit routes from my apartment to work just a minute ago and clicked on the "Advanced Trip Planner" link on the Metro's home page. It appears they're rolling out a new application here, and feature-wise it seems pretty cool. But when it comes to bugs, good programming, and usability -- egads.

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Continuing my thread on Flexcar... I got a few quick responses to questions I had about the service. William del Valle, their SoCal GM, indicated that most current usage of the Downtown cars is during the day. That leads me to believe it's largely business people using the cars during the day after using transit to get here. It's also good since my usage would be the opposite: nights and weekends. He also said that their LA service is again starting to expand, though more slowly (and I might add realistically) than the first time.

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So I come into my Urban Transportation Planning class tonight (a few minutes late, thanks to traffic on Figueroa that made my 81 bus late) and find a girl from the Bus Riders Union presenting about an upcoming conference they're holding. Normally I'm pretty hesitant to express unequivocal dislike here, but I don't like the BRU. I ride buses all the time, and as of a couple days ago I guess I'm officially "transit-dependent", but when it comes to the BRU... well... I just don't like them. I'm sure they had a place back in the time of the consent decree, but the BRU these days is just a little nuts.

I mentioned Flexcar briefly in my last post as one of the transit options I was looking into. Today I took the next step and signed up with them, so that I can try it out next month and see whether it seems like something that'll work effectively for me. Today I started a little more research into their service.

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So yesterday I got in my first car accident. I hate writing about negative stuff like this; I'd prefer to always just be posting fun things like cool LA trips and bands you should go see. But well, sometimes the unpleasant parts of life are a reality, and I have to write about those too. Just to make sure it's above the fold: no one was hurt, so that's good. But now it's time for me to assess my options in regard to transportation.

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I yesterday mentioned my evening itinerary: gallery reception, dinner, and a movie. For once a plan went off exactly the way it was supposed to. It's far too nice outside for me to stay inside all afternoon, but I figured I'd stop by to fill you in on the details before I wandered back out.

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Plan for the evening:

• Artist's reception at 626 Gallery for the opening of Carol P. Surface's show.
• Dinner at the Pig 'n Whistle in Hollywood.
• Coach Carter at the Chinese Theatre.

The earlier part of my day is up at blogdowntown.

The January 17th issue of the Downtown News includes an opinion piece I wrote in response to last week's DLANC article. You can read my piece online: "Another View of Downtown's Neighborhood Council: Board Member Says a Lot Is Going Right With DLANC." I wrote a little more in my post over at blogdowntown.

I understand that sometimes getting a story out quickly means that writing suffers, but consider a sentence from this AP piece on an evacuation in Riverside County:

However, Corona authorities, defending their decision to evacuate 508 homes, 330 mobile homes and a recreational vehicle park near Prado Dam, about 50 miles east-southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

The parser's definitely going to fall over on that one. ABC News has a cleaned up version of the same piece.

I've mentioned before that Bob Hertzberg's campaign site -- http://changela.com -- is doing a very cool thing with their Daily Digests, a roundup of the day's LA news from both traditional and blog sources. Brian, the Hertzberg staffer who collects the info for those posts, has linked to my site many times now, and I think that's great.

But sometimes you have to wonder, how much is too much? Right now there are five entries on the first page that have to do with me: a link to Sean's blogging.la post talking about blogdowntown, links to parts one and two of my Art Walk coverage at blogdowntown, a link to my post here introducing blogdowntown, and farther up a link to my bit yesterday on the sales-tax debate. If you consider that there are 50 entries on their home page, that means that I am 10% of what's going on in LA today. Even in my deluded fantasies I don't occupy that large a position in LA.

So tonight Magilla, Kathy, and I hopped on the freeway and took a quick trip up to Hollywood to catch Jim Bianco and the Tim Davies Big Band at King King. Amazing. I saw these two perform together just over a year ago, and all the good memories I had weren't just my imagination. My poor little brain can't understand writing and arranging for a 19-piece big band, but Tim does it unbelievably well and creatively. I need to make it out to one of their monthly shows sometime.

I moved Downtown in May, 2004. Since then I've spent a lot of time writing about Downtown Los Angeles, and people have started coming to my blog as a site for info about what's going on there. Eventually I decided that I should probably really have two blogs: one for Downtown stuff and one for whatever else I'm thinking about. And that's exactly what I've set up. blogdowntown will now hold all the Downtown-related content I had previously been writing. My blog, blog.ericrichardson.com, will revert to being just about my life, computers, music, USC, etc. I'll try not to post the same things both places, so if you're interested in both my life and Downtown you'll just have to read both. Both have RSS feeds, so keeping up really shouldn't be that hard.

I missed yesterday that the Daily News had printed a piece on how the proposed city sales tax to pay for cops has been presented to neighborhood councils. We just addressed this issue at the DLANC board meeting on Tuesday. A representative from LAPD was there (I can't remember his name... I'm bad at those) and presented, and he was introduced by a girl from the Mayor's office.

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The LA Business Journal (whose website is now much more useful, thanks to more free articles) has a great piece today on the downtown housing market. You sort of know this stuff, but sometimes it doesn't really hit you over the head until you see it in black and white:

Resale asking prices at the Flower Street Lofts near Staples Center are higher on a per-foot basis than the median prices for condos in Brentwood’s 90049, Beverly Hills’ 90210 or Marina del Rey’s 90012. Only beach cities such as Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Malibu and Santa Monica’s 90403, along with Century City’s 90067, are priced higher, according to DataQuick Information Systems.

I don't know Flower St. Lofts specifically, but all these units are selling. The question, as always, is whether this kind of market is sustainable. I don't think you can even pretend to answer that question right now.

My last class to meet this semester is "Urban Transportation Planning and Policy." The class is taught by Michael Kodama, who is a transportation planning consultant. Interestingly, he's one of the consultants on the CRA's Downtown Parking Study, so I'll get to pester him for the next couple months about that. Jeffry Carpenter, who's in charge of the project for the CRA, is on the DLANC Transportation & Public Works Committee with me, so I get to pester him there.

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I had my first class this morning. It's titled "Public Service in an Urban Setting," and is taught by Dr. Richard Sundeen. It's the first of my two classes this semester from the School of Policy, Planning, and Development. It looks like it'll be interesting. Part of the class requirements is that students go get involved in some sort of volunteer service, and my participation in DLANC will count for that.

After just finishing my chicken strips from Carl's (who now once again serves Coke products on campus, ending a ten month or so flirtation with Pepsi) I'm sitting at Annenberg for another twenty minutes or so catching up on email before I head out to my next class. I then go straight through for five hours.

Update (1/12 1am): It turns out the Coke deal is university-wide. I definitely approve.

This is my eighth semester at USC. Understanding that you would probably think that by now I'd have a feel for the land, know where buildings are, etc. And yet for my classes this spring I need a map. One building I'd never heard of (and never been inside of); another got renamed. And two others I've been inside once or twice. And to make things even better, I get to cover pretty much the entire campus on Tuesdays, usually with 10 minutes between classes. For all the finagling I do to my schedule, this easy transit between classes thing is one I seriously neglected.

I got woken up this morning by something strange shining into my room. I was confused, and then realized it was the sun. But this wasn't just the sun peeking out from behind a cloud: this was the sun shining through a blue sky that you only get out here after a lot of rain. If it weren't my first day of classes, this is the day when I would start calling people and telling them to skip classes and follow me to the top of Mount Hollywood, where we can take in the entire Los Angeles area, likely including Catalina.

I now have a data center in my ceiling. You see, I've had this server (the one running this site) sitting on my entertainment center for the last few months. The problem is: it's a bit loud. I didn't have a great other place to put it though... or so I thought. Then I realized I have this drop ceiling, the area above which is conveniently accessible from the window ledge. Sitting on the couch I can now hear a hum, but it's a whole lot fainter than it was a couple minutes ago. Running up to the ceiling are a power cable, a phone line, and an ethernet cable. All in all I'm happy with the results. I'll try to post a picture when it's light outside; I don't have any good means of lighting the area up there right now.

The weather forecast tells me that we're going to get sun this week, but the view out my window gives no hints in that direction. I opened up the windows this morning to listen to the sound of waterfalls cascading off of nearby buildings and down into the alley. In a little bit I need to make my way out to go make an ATM deposit, but it looks pretty quiet out right now, so that shouldn't be so bad. A couple days ago I mentioned that I couldn't find my extra checks. Funny thing, that... Turns out they're supporting the webcam that took the above shot, sitting on top of our drop ceiling.

Kathy and I went over to the Auto Show this afternoon, after wading our way down the 405 to get back from church. We were only there for a couple hours, so we didn't get to be very thorough checking everything out, but it was a good time. First impression: packed. I don't care if you've read the stories talking about how many people this thing draws or not, you don't understand the numbers until you're in there trying to move around.

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The new issue of the Downtown News is out, and the lead story (at least online... I haven't picked up a paper copy yet) is titled "Success and Growing Pains: The Downtown Neighborhood Council Learns That It's Hard to Escape the Politics." At first I wanted to blast the piece as negative to DLANC, but I'm not going to do that. It's not really a bad piece; author Chris Coates is routinely at the DLANC board meetings and I think he has a good feel for what he's writing about. That said, the article feels to me a bit sensational, making good reading but not really telling the whole story. Click read more to get a more in-depth breakdown...

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LAX recently opened a cell phone lot, where you can wait for free until the passenger you're picking up gives you a call and tells you they're ready. It's a great idea, but I prefer something a little friendly. So that's why I'm sitting at Panera Bread right now, waiting for Kathy's flight to come into LAX. Her plane has started its initial descent; the tracker says it's at 28,000ft and 20 minutes out.

Driving past the airport on the way here it appeared that planes were taking off and landing in opposite the normal direction. Since the prevailing wind in LA comes off the ocean, typically planes both take off and land facing the sea. Our abnormal weather right now must have brought atypical air flows.

It amazes me that just a week after re-adding comments, I'm already getting comment spam. One I deleted yesterday, and one today. I had long thought that such posts were enabled by so many sites running standard tools like Movable Type, etc, and that by doing my own thing they would have to manually account for my site.

Well, either the comment spam tools are more thorough than I had imagined or the spammers are pretty bored. In any case I just added IP address logging to comments, so I think my solution for now will just be to start banning IPs that produce comment spam. If that doesn't work I'll get a little harsher.

Update (4:06pm): The first spam to have its IP logged came from a dynamic IP pool under http://interbusiness.it.

So it started raining this morning. Not hard yet, but even just walking across the street to pay (cash) for my parking was frigid thanks to a whipping wind. The little image to the left is a thumbnail of what our local radar looked like when I pulled it up just now.

To really understand how much rain LA's gotten recently, take a look at these pictures from USC's Facilities department. That's a lot of water, in a lot of places it shouldn't be. City Hall's having the same problems, according to an article in today's Daily News.

Update (12:21pm): I just walked to the little market next door to pick up a 2-liter of Coke, and they were working to move merchandise and cover up items near a couple nice drips from the (very high -- 20ft?) ceiling. There was a decent amount of standing water on the floor.

One of the things I needed to do before I left for Michigan was pay ahead for my January parking, since I wouldn't be back until today. I went down to do that the morning of the 21st, but they weren't really prepared for people to do that, so they told me just to pay when I got back. That's cool. So what do I do? I leave my checkbook in Michigan. And I should have extra checks around here somewhere, but I can't find them for anything.

So now I need to figure that out in the morning, before the rain comes.

As good as it was to be back in Michigan for a few weeks, it's definitely nice to be back in LA, sitting at my own desk, about to sleep in my own bed.

The flights were uneventful. On the Detroit to LA leg I sat next to a guy who's running the Bentley exhibit at the Auto Show. He was cool; we talked some during the flight and then ended up giving him a ride to his hotel since it was right downtown. I need to get over to the Convention Center sometime to check out the show. I went a few years ago and enjoyed it, but haven't been back.

Things are a bit slow in this last day before I head back to LA. I'm still a little in shock over the game last night. My heart told me we would win big, but all the things the "experts" were saying were starting to convince my head it would be close. Moral of the story: If the media ever picks USC to be out-physicalled in a bowl game, put all your money on SC.

The big question mark tomorrow is the weather: how's the snow situation going to look both here in Muskegon and in Detroit? And then from there it's back to LA and to several days of rain. I'll take it over the snow. It's too cold for me here.

I spent all afternoon today at Gospelcom, where I used to work here in Michigan. I went out to lunch with some of the tech guys and then sat around at the office keeping people from working. My time was sort of split between talking about eThreads and talking about downtown. The downtown part's what I want to get into here, though.

One of the things that I've really wanted to do since May, but haven't, is develop my ideas on a very localized community site. This sort of extends back to the blogging paper I didn't write: while the Internet's a global medium, my life is local. Most of what I do online these days centers around LA. I read LA writers, LA news, LA weather, listings for LA shows, etc. I'd love to localize that even more, and create a hub not for LA, but just for downtown. The challenge is to figure out how you make this interface ordered enough to navigate sporadically, but also make available enough continuity to involve people in a running sense of community narrative.

That probably doesn't make sense... Hang with me, though. I want to develop this further.

Right now, though, I need to eat dinner before watching USC win the Orange Bowl.

I went to see The Aviator with Kathy and her parents tonight. The moral of the story? All geniuses are crazy. Therefore: It's ok to be a little crazy if you think there's a decent chance you're a genius.

I think that's a good thing to keep in mind.

Starting next Monday I'll be going from downtown to USC and back three days a week. This semester it was two, and I used the bus most of the time. Since I was adding a day, and on one of those days I would most likely be making multiple trips (I have a six hour break between classes), I thought I'd look into getting a bus pass. Metro offers a reduced fare pass for college students, and even though it would be a few more dollars than I'd be putting into transit otherwise I figured the convenience might be worth it. Looking at the application, though, this assumption might need to be rethought...

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One of the things that annoy me most on the web is sites that ping when they haven't in fact updated. I've talked about this before, back in September. In eThreads' blog module I try to be smart about it and only ping when a post happens that is going public for the first time. However it appears sometimes that's not how it happens. I was just updating a spate of old posts that had bad links in them and afterward found the blog had pinged as if I had made a new post. Oops. It's not good to participate in the things you dislike.

I was looking at blo.gs yesterday, and it appears that it might be smarter about this problem (by going out and getting the page and doing an md5 sum). I need to ask jim more about that.

At my house there's a cat that my Mom got when us three kids had gone off to school. It's crazy. In fact I was too lazy to take a new picture of it, so I'm reusing one I took last year (when it was a good bit smaller). What did I caption it then? "crazy cat" And it still is. As I type this the cat is hurtling around the room, trying to burrough under my laptop case, and seeing how far it can go hopping from furniture piece to furniture piece without touching the ground -- pretty much all at once. Or at least they're fast enough that I can't tell.

I was wandering the stats today, as I do most days (I don't know why... They never have anything interesting to tell me). A new referrer had popped up for the main site: Abortion and the Rights of a Child. I'm a little fuzzy on how the dates are working for this, but in any case a paper I wrote Freshman year -- Refuting Judith Jarvis Thompson -- ends up in the footnotes.

That sort of thing's always struck me as a little funny. I put my papers online, but I don't usually expect people to actually read them. Every now and again, though, I find myself quoted or referenced in a well-reasoned work. That always trips me out a little. It's cool, I'm just not used to it yet.

Every day I have two google news searches I check out: downtown "los angeles" and "los angeles" mta. Today the top story for the MTA query deals with the rain and taking transit to the Rose Bowl. One of the stories grouped as related is an LA Times piece that google lists as being titled "Going to Rose Bowl Game? Take a Bus and an Umbrella." However if you click the link you'll find a story titled "Going to Rose Bowl Game? Take a Bus and a Raincoat." Hmmm... I wonder if it was a little late in the day when the editors at the Times realized that umbrellas are prohibitted at the Rose Bowl?

The January 3rd issue of the Downtown News is now up, and one paragraph mentions this blog as one of Five Sites to Bookmark in 2005. Here's their blurb on my site:

Downtowning With Eric: Eric Richardson, a USC Communications major and a representative on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, is a fresh voice in a crowded field of urban bloggers. Richardson articulates views on the media, urban planning and local politics (blog.ericrichardson.com). But the bulk of his details focus simply on what it's like living Downtown.

Good stuff... I wrote a lot more in answer to the questions they asked me, so I'll stick that in the body in case you're interested.

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