KCRW has finally put online their podcasting feeds, first announced sometime during this past pledge drive. I haven't looked into podcasting software yet, but I did download the Which Way LA feed and one day's show. They're doing 48kbps MP3, which is a good size for voice. The 128MB memory stick duo I ordered for my phone just came in today, so that means I can easily fit four hours or so of audio while still keeping a good chunk of room for photos.

Now I just need to write a little script to manage sync'ing recent shows over to the phone via bluetooth each night.

It took me a little over two hours to get to work today. The Gold Line is still feeling the effects of the weather and running a questionable temporary schedule which threw me off for my connection to the 50-minute headways on the 177. This is more proof that my route is far too fragile. You may or may not remember that largely the same thing happened to me back in January. I've got a lot to rant about, but I'll throw that in the body so that you can skip it if you're not that interested in transit.

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Transit's all over the news today. The LA Times has coverage of yesterday's MTA subway vote with a variety of good quotes from people saying nice things about the subway system. Nice to see that a West Hollywood Councilmember was there to support the motion as well. Of course the Bus Riders Union showed up to protest spending money on anything that's not a bus:

"We think this is a backward, outdated and financially irresponsible approach," Manuel Criollo of the Bus Riders Union said of the subway plan. "The subway has been a complete and utter failure," he said, citing what he described as lower than expected ridership and the Red Line's $4.5-billion price tag so far.

Once again I point to the numbers I posted yesterday. I think it's ridiculous to try to label the subway a failure.

In other news the California PUC ruled on Gold Line noise relief measures, so the MTA has 60 days to install new bells and noise shrouds. Also from the meeting yesterday comes the Pasadena Star News' proclamation that the "Gold Line extension stays on back burner. Local blog the skunks of los felix asks what Antonovich was trying to accomplish with his "ultimatum" on Gold Line extension. I think it's a valid question.

I got in to work this morning to find that my monitor no longer supported the color red. Oddly I had something very similar happen with the color green back in 1999. I'm now back to the full spectrum using a different monitor, though I lost a bit of resolution in the change (1280x960 to 1024x768).

Wandering through links I happened just now to click on to the GeoURL site, which has been dead for quite a while now. I first heard of GeoURL quite a while ago (June '03) and really liked the idea. In fact I wrote this about why I thought it was important (actually I im'ed this to Alan and he posted it on his blog:

a blog, when it includes real world elements, helps construct the tapestry of life in an environment. to me it's fascinating to see the views of others in my area to understand how they experience some of the same things i experience. geourl helps connect the real world and blogs. (not just blogs, but i think those are the interesting part)

It's odd to see that this has really been an area of interest every since. That concept is why I've been so excited about sites like LA Blogs and blogging.la.

The contact on the temporary GeoURL page is local blogger Ask Bjørn Hansen. Suddenly his recent post about breaking up huge tiff files seems to gain a bit of context.

I bought new batteries for my graphing calculator yesterday, only to find that it doesn't work anymore (it's possible the backup battery is just out and needs replacing). That got me thinking, though, that with a phone that runs java I shouldn't need to carry a separate calculator. Tonight I took a few minutes to search for a java calculator made for cell phones and I found exactly what I was looking for. Calc is a scientific calculator that supports pretty much any function you have use for. The menu system is really easy once you get a feel for where the functions are. It's pretty much a radial menu, except with just five directions.

The one thing that I'm going to have to get to is RPN. I sort of understand it, but I've never had a calculator cool enough to use it.

I missed this yesterday, but LAist ran a piece on the MTA subway vote yesterday. The piece is half on the failed motion from last wednesday that attempted to get subway expansion wheels moving again, and half on the motion that went before the full board this morning. I've expressed my non-excitement about LAist various places before, but this piece sort of brings out some of my bigger complaints.

Update (5pm): It looks like the MTA Board vote passed 11-2.

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In the course of upgrading the kernel on my desktop (which is also the server for the blog at the moment... sorry if you got a Bad Gateway error while it was down) I took a few minutes to tackle a long-standing suspicion that my machine wasn't running as fast as it should be.

Turns out it really wasn't -- in fact it wasn't even close.

See back in September when I bought new parts and built myself the bulk of a new machine I had a few issues with the motherboard and had to reset the CMOS settings. Somehow that meant I ended up with the frontside bus speed set to 100mhz. The computer then saw my Athlon 3200+ as a 1300mhz CPU. I've now bumped that up to 166mhz (I didn't try 200mhz yet) and the CPU now shows up as a 3000+. I know, it's still not at its full potential, but it's enough of a bump to get almost a 2x speedup in eThreads benchmarks.

I sort of like the idea of a progressive upgrade. Now it's like I just got a new CPU, even though I paid for it back in September.

So I got a new phone today. I've been anxiously awaiting the release of the Sony Ericsson s710a for quite a while now, so when it finally appeared I couldn't hold off too much longer before ordering it. I placed the order yesterday around noon via cingular's website. The phone was delivered this morning at 9am. That's what I call good turnaround. I can't say I'm an expert just yet, but I've played with the phone enough by now to be able to give a first impression type review. Summary: good, not perfect.

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I was walking from my apartment to the bus stop today when I noticed that the guy in front of me had the same bag I do. Now, this was kind of a weird experience, since I've never seen anyone that even had a bag by the same manufacturer I do (Arkel). But this guy had the exact same model. I said hi and found that he works for the LA County Bike Coalition, which I had no idea was headquartered on my block.

My Dad's in town right now, so after my morning class I came back Downtown, met him for lunch at the Yorkshire Grill, and then we took the DASH over to Union Station to pick up a Flexcar. If you remember back to my first trip I was disappointed to not get a hybrid. Well this time I made sure and reserved ahead of time to get one of the cars at One Gateway Plaza (two cars, both hybrids). I've actually still got the car right now since we're heading back out in a bit for dinner, but I thought I'd drop by the blog for a midway update.

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For my careers class we took the Myers Briggs Type Indicator test before last week. Today we got our results, which say that I am an INTP. In general I think that seems about right. This site tells me I have the same type as Einstein. Another INTP explanation seems to nail me:

you can be an under-achieving but very capable student... A relentless learner in areas that hold your interest... you might seem "lost in thought" to others... you tend to connect unrelated thoughts... you would rather be the architect of a plan than the implementer of it...

It's almost eerie how true that all is.

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I have to be honest with you... I'm not the best of students. That's why it's not too surprising that I got up this morning worried I might have some assignment coming up that I had forgotten about. I checked my syllabi and sure enough, I had a midterm today in my earthquakes class. The downside was I hadn't at all studied for it, but the upside was I actually knew about it before the test itself. In the body I'll give you an encapsulated version of how not to go about preparing for a midterm, but yet how to get off lucky and hopefully get away with it.

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I'm reviewing for a midterm that I think I might have today, and came across this from lecture notes explaining stress vs. force.

For example: considering the effect of a fat woman wearing flats vs. one wearing spiky heels. The total force on the floor is the same. But the normal stress on the floor is much larger right under the spiky heels because the acting surface is much smaller. The spiky heels will clearly do more damage to a wooden floor (want to try it on your feet??) when the floor gets stepped on.

Political correctness has not yet completely taken over our lives.

I'm trying something new here to speed the blog up. Basically with the server issues I had to downgrade the processor, so for now (until I go buy new hardware for the server) I'm actually proxying requests here and to blogdowntown through to my desktop machine, which is a fairly fast Athlon with 1gig of RAM. Apachebench says that tripled how fast requests are served, so that seems like I good change to me.

More in my series of computer problems... I noticed something weird going on with my server late last week. Then today, well, things got weirder. Like a load over 3.0 with 98% idle CPU and a zombie kswapd. I know that doesn't mean much to a lot of you but to me it means something seriously weird is going on. So I tried to reboot, and got the ever fun Kernel Panic. Right now I'm running again on a different motherboard and CPU, so it looks like the cause may have been hardware. I'll try to break the whole ordeal down more later, but for now I'll just let this load average graph scare the UNIX folk among you:

I realize my cropping cut off the legend. The high step is about 10. First step about 3, second about 6.

I got campaign emails this morning from both Antonio Villaraigosa and Bernard Parks (not personally... just as a "neighborhood leader"). I don't think at this point I want to make much of a comment on the politics of the race, but I've fine to instead take a minute to look at the technical merits of their email solutions.

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I wasn't so impressed when I first tried to check them out and nothing showed up, but now that my technical glitches are worked out I have to say that Google's new mapping feature is amazing. As many others have said, Google is doing incredible things with building rich web apps, and the map images they generate are gorgeous. Check out this map of my apartment. The only thing I don't see is any map indication of which streets are one-way, but their directions get things right.

Of course, their browser tricks mean not everyone's going to be supported. Sean's still trying to get it to work for him.

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I had a little time to kill this afternoon so I took the DASH up to Union Station to check out the Flexcar car there. Again I found a regular Civic -- nothing hybrid about it. At least this one looked to have a cd player, though. Only one of the two Union Station cars was in when I was there.

I couldn't find where the Gateway Transit Center cars were supposed to be (though I wasn't sure if they were going to be there). Looking back at the directions I think I could have found them. I'll probably take a look Friday.

Somewhere there's got to be a hybrid. Their site still proclaims that

Flexcar's Los Angeles program offers members a fleet comprised entirely of brand new Honda Civic Hybrids, a car powered by a combination of gas and electricity.

If only that were true.

Update (9:30am): I've just been informed there are currently three non-hybrids in the LA fleet. The cars move around a good bit, but as of right now they're at the Bonaventure (6921), the Union Station car I saw yesterday (6912), and the Holly St. car in Pasadena (6927). Now my goal is to next time get the other Union Station car or one of the Gateway Transit Center cars.

Coming to class this morning I walked over to Hill to catch the 81 down Figueroa. I missed the bus I really wanted, but ten minutes or so later made it onto one that got me here right on time.

There were six or seven people on the bus when I boarded. Four of those were a younger black lady, probably mid- to late-twenties, her mom, and two little boys. The lady and her mom were engaged in an excited conversation, so I couldn't help but listen in. It turns out they were headed back home after being in court successfully fighting some sort of an eviction attempt by a shady landlady.

Too often you hear about all sorts of bad situations where tenants get evicted so that landlords can end up charging a new tenant higher rents. It's fun to hear about people who trust in the system to protect them from that sort of thing.

I know, I've been a bit quiet here over the last few days. That happens sometimes...

Taking public transit to work is starting to become a comfortable routine. This morning I walked to the corner at 9am to catch the DASH D, rode that to Union Station, took the Gold Line to Pasadena, and then caught the 177 to JPL. Not quite clockwork, but it's a workable life.

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I'm thinking about buying an mp3 player. I never have because the places I listened to music were either my car or a computer. But these days, well, I don't have a car and I spend a lot of time sitting on the bus or the train. So I think it's time. The trendy choice is obviously the iPod, but I don't know if it's necessarily what I'm looking for.

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I took my first trip with Flexcar tonight. Kathy and I headed out for the evening, getting some food at the Koo Koo Roo on Wilshire (by the Tar Pits), stopping to buy a pair of shoes at The Grove, and then watching A Very Long Engagement at the Laemmle Music Hall 3 farther down Wilshire in Beverly Hills. There was no particular reason for me to drive, but I figured tonight was as good of a time as any, so I walked over to the Bonaventure and picked up the car.

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Is it funny that it took noticing that people were finding my blog by googling for mta tripmaster to actually make me think of that for finding more info? Weird how that works sometime...

So according to a July report from last year (PDF), the TripMaster was developed internally by the MTA with the goal of eliminated an expensive outside contract. That's a goal I absolutely agree with, and I think they've got the right idea.

But when it comes to implementation... Well... You know how I feel.

I rode my bike to school today. It was the first time in a while that I'd pulled it out of the closet and given my legs a stretch. And, well, they felt it. It's not a bad ride from my apartment: it's about two and a half miles, and it's mostly flat.

I need to get in shape. It's sad when I get tired halfway through a twenty minute bike ride.

Back in October, when CA passed its law saying that solo hybrid drivers could use the carpool lanes, Mack Brown posted that the law had a big problem: Congress had to pass similar legislation. I replied in the comments saying basically that this had been part of the deal the whole time, and that no one should have been surprised by it.

Well, it turns out people still were surprised. The LA Times today has an article about the still waiting hybrid drivers.

It has been a long and frustrating delay, said Lorusso, 46, who moved to Toluca Lake from Ventura last year.

"It was part of the sales pitch, and I've been waiting ever since," she said. "I've been going online every month to see if it's gone through."

I guess lesson number one is don't believe everything they pitch you...

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