I was proud of myself today for riding my bike in to work. I didn't even feel all that winded afterward.

And so, tonight, I thought "why not?" and proceeded to ride from JPL to Downtown. bikemetro gives a route that's 14.43 miles long for that trek, so I'm sure that's about what my ride was. I made it in about 70 minutes, which sounds a lot more impressive before you hear that I had 837 feet of elevation loss to push me onward. Still, though, it was a good workout.

The first five miles or so are along the Arroyo Seco, which makes that by far the best part of the trip. After that I sort of meandered through South Pasadena, Highland Park, and finally Chinatown. I generally picked whichever route looked like it was heading downhill.

bikemetro says the average cyclist would have burned 566 calories on my trip, which really doesn't seem like that much, but I guess every little bit counts.

I could really use some sort of a cheap power box that's controllable via serial. When the internet goes out in my apartment, 99% of the time it can be fixed by just cycling power to the DSL bridge. I'd love to have some way to let my server ping out every five minutes or so, and if it sees the connection go down let it try cycling the bridge. If that doesn't work it could just hang out for someone else to fix it, but it would be a good first line of defense for when I'm not around.

In fairness, I haven't done any googling to see if anythiing exists for a reasonable price. I'm just writing while it's fresh in my mind.

I just wanted to brag that I'm posting this from my seat on a Gold Line train, travelling back from Pasadena to Downtown. I had to go up to Pasadena to pick up a document from the city transportation department, so I grabbed the laptop and my bluetooth adaptor and hopped on the train. My connection through the phone has worked perfectly for looking up the facts I needed while writing a paper whose draft is due this evening.

So far in the month of March my three main sites (this blog, ericrichardson.com, and blogdowntown have served a combined total of 23,884 pages and used 723.86MB of bandwidth. Not a ton, but I can't hope for too much and still serve the site from my living room ceiling. I'm sure the site could be a little snappier on a better connection, but I haven't noticed any peaked bandwidth spikes. And since everything goes through the server, I still have quality of service things I could do to prevent apartment Internet usage from interfering with the web if it comes to that. For now, though, I'm satisfied.

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It's not that I set out to take issue with LAist, though obviously it does happen. Today "we" look at "their" coverage of Chico State, in the aptly named post, "What's Up at Chico State?."

While everybody else tries to figure out where the severed foot came from, we've got our eyes a little further east. KESQ in Palm Springs reports that Phi Kappa Tau has been suspended at Chico State for participating in a porno film.

Issue number one: Chico State is west of Los Angeles, and really more distinctively quite a bit north. Perhaps "they" are just indirectly looking at Chico through the lens of Palm Springs, but I still find it to be sloppy writing.

Maybe we should worry a little less about the sex and a little more about the violence.

Perhaps if "they" kept up with more traditional news sources, such as the oft-maligned LA Times, LAist would know that the news is doing exactly that.

As proof that newspaper typos aren't just confined to the Daily Trojan, I present this from page 1, front section, of today's Pasadena Star News. In the story on eminent domain we find the following:

From the construction of Pasadena car dealerships, to an ongoing lawsuit over a Temple City office building, eminent domain -- or the threat it -- has been a major tool for economic stimulation in the San Gabriel Valley.

The story led the print version of the paper, running above the fold, front and center. I found the typo while scanning the little bits of paper visible inside the paper boxes waiting for my bus.

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I almost forgot to mention that riding the Green Line westbound at about 1:40pm I saw a guy getting arrested on the eastbound 105. His car was stopped in the right lane, and two police cars (didn't see if they were LAPD or CHP) were stopped a short length behind him. The man was out of his car, kneeling on the freeway with his hands up in air. We passed too fast to get a picture, but not too many seconds later we were passed by two more units rushing to the scene.

Even though I had a decent amount of work I probably should have been doing this afternoon, I decided to get a little exercise and head down to the south bay area for a little food and shopping. I first hit-up South Bay Galleria to get some Chick-fil-a, and then went from there up to REI to talk to the bike people. It's a good trip with a little bit of exercise, a little bit of sun, and a good dose of LA's public transit.

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The Blue Line's had a bad run over the past few days. First catenary troubles suspend operation Wednesday and then about twenty-four hours later service is again interrupted when a Sherriff's deputy and a robbery suspect are both wounded in a shooting. Interesting about the second story is the fact that deputies were even on the train.

I think I'm going to have to join others who are beginning to complain that these deputies are rarely around. Wednesday night around midnight I walked over to the Pershing Square Red Line station and then took the Gold Line up to Pasadena. The only time I saw deputies was when I saw a group of four of them relaxing on a southbound train. Many days I never see them.

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Here's a little taste of what my schedule often looks like: Tomorrow morning I wake up, take a trip down to USC to attend a 10am class and take a midterm in another class at 12:30. That midterm's scheduled to go until 2pm, but I can't stay that long. I've got to be in and out in an hour to make my way up to North Hollywood to attend a 2pm meeting. I was planning to attend a CCA event at lunch, but had to change those plans once I realized I had a midterm.

I know that ostensibly I'm supposed to be a college student right now, but it's hard to keep that as priority one these days.

I really like the current blogging.la, especially the header that rotates in random LA snapshots from the Metroblogging LA flickr pool. With my last look I wanted to do a similar thing with changing the out-the-window picture to show current conditions. The b.la idea is a lot simpler and cleaner, though, and works well.

What I wanted to point out, though, is that in the current masthead (linked above so it doesn't change on me) seven of the fifteen pictures are ones I've taken. My pictures are the fourth, fifth, nineth, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth. And yet if you look at the Metroblogging pool I've only submitted twenty-five pictures (of 210). My pictures must just have good karma. One was also used as the mast photo for a blog (which I fully allow in the Creative Commons licensing).

Sean's posting about circles now but I need to correct his timeline. LAist made their original post on Sam Woo back in February. Then Jonah, who's a bit behind these days, quoted that on LABlogs just two days ago. Then yesterday at 6:51pm Sean made his great retort post on blogging.la. I followed with my accolade for Sean at 8:01pm. Then, sometime last night, a much quicker Jonah made a post quoting both Sean and my posts, thereby completing the circle. Sean kept the circle going at 7:56am and, well, I guess I'm doing the same right now a little before 9am. Whew.

But explain to me this... Originally my stated purpose in this post was going to be to say that I posted before Jonah put the full circle post up on LA Blogs, but then I noticed that LA Blogs doesn't include a time on posts. For the circle post it just says 3/22/05. Finally I got smart and said "Duh, I can just check the RSS." That says the post was made this morning at 5:30am. Which is it?

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I don't think I've said this lately, but Sean Bonner is a funny guy. Take, for instance, this post on blogging.la (which quotes from LABlogs, which quoted from LAist, which... oh, wait, that's all...). From the LAist:

"LAist was unsuspectingly whisked off to the wilds of Alhambra the other day for what was promised to be some of the best Chinese food in the city, taken under wing to Sam Woo BBQ by some folks who swear by this hole-in-the wall place for chowing down on some chow mein."

To which Sean replies:

I have say it's damn cool of someone to take everyone who writes for LAist out to eat and just want to put out there if someone is looking for another website full of bloggers to buy dinner for blogging.la is always interested.

Dude. He just zinged the editorial "we"...

Good on him for also making a pass at how everything's so wonderful and new to the LAist singular collective, no matter how long ago others in the blogosphere caught on.

Via Camworld I just read the article "A Coder in Courierland" over on kur05hin. I think that spending time as a bike messenger would be fascinating. Alan agreed:

that has always been my alter ego dream job

Speaking of odd jobs, I've also given thought to applying to be a part-time bus driver. The MTA is in desperate need of drivers, and it would definitely be a way to learn about transportation issues. My lack of Spanish would hurt me, though that's not listed on the job requirements.

Last of my sort of leftover posts from travelling... Yesterday at the Charleston, SC, airport I managed to really confuse the x-ray guy. As requested I pulled my laptop out of its case and sent it through seperately. Even so, my bag had lots of interesting shapes for the guy to get confused with. The screener took three or four minutes looking through every pocket and ended up pulling out my little bicycle pump. I hadn't intended to bring it along, but I had forgotten to take it out after giving the bike a spin on Tuesday. Running that and the bag through seperately seemed to satisfy him, but it definitely seemed more trouble than was warranted.

This isn't the first time that bag's given me x-ray troubles. One time going into City Hall the security guard never could figure out what a shape he was seeing in the x-ray machine was. He looked through everything in the bag and ended up baffled, but at least satisfied I was harmless.

So yesterday afternoon Kathy and I drove up 17 to the new mall in Myrtle Beach, SC. I bought a pair of Gamecock color Adidas warmup pants (on sale, $25, garnett with three black stripes). It's a nice new mall, with space for two more anchor stores. We walked the length of it, and then on the way back passed a few people huddled by an older lady being attended to on the floor. Especially in the off-season Myrtle Beach has a large retiree population, so I'd imagine this isn't too odd of a sight. But this part was: two of the people attending to her were clowns, in full get-up. That was just a little odd and surreal.

I've mentioned before that the fire alarm in my building sounds like you're on a submarine that's about to dive. This afternoon the alarm went off, and I imperiled myself for thirty seconds or so to record a little sample for you to hear (mp2 file).

Of course I got downstairs (via the stairs, mind you) to find that the alarm was due to water leaking onto the control panel on the ground level. Sort of an anti-fire.

So I'm back. Even though the weather wasn't that great I had a blast being back down south and just spending a week hanging out with family and seeing some old friends. This morning we left the house at 5:15am (EST), which meant getting up at what is 1:30am out here. So I don't know how long I'll last tonight. It's nice out right now, so I think I'm going to walk around for a little and take a few pictures.

It's fun to be back down here spending time in South Carolina. I've had a good chance to spend time with family, and Kathy and I are getting in the tourist things here and there (tomorrow we're heading down to Charleston for the day). No trip to the south, though, can help but center around food.

Monday night I had a fried chicken breast, mashed potatoes, biscuits, corn, and collared greens. Tuesday night I had fried shrimp, a baked potato, and hush puppies. Wednesday night I had stew beef on rice with peas and a biscuit, and peach cobbler for dessert. Tonight I had fried flounder, fried shrimp, and hush puppies. And of course, sweet tea.

So what if it's not healthy? It's good.

I just looked out the window and saw three A-10 Warthogs buzzing low down the beach here in South Carolina. It's been a long time since I lived near an air force base and saw those planes all the time.

I'm now in the Charlotte, NC, airport and again I'm online via my phone. Access where I'm sitting is a little ugly, though:

--- 206.124.64.1 ping statistics ---
576 packets transmitted, 410 received, +141 duplicates, 28% packet loss, time 575426ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 433.710/6312.642/73431.795/12311.383 ms, pipe 74

What's up with the duplicates? I get those everywhere on this connection.

I'm sitting in LAX Terminal 1 right now, waiting for our plane to board. I don't know if it's just me, but we're flying US Air this time and I'm finding the whole process just confusing. First of all, always avoid airlines in the same terminal as Southwest. Their lines invade everything. But then US Air has multiple gates clustered in the same area, and people line up when nothing says that any particular flight is boarding. So our flight might be starting to board, or it might not. I just don't know.

I'll warn you ahead of time, this post's geeky.

Before I head out east tomorrow morning, I wanted to get email working on my phone. Like Sean I don't plan to recieve email on the phone, but I do want to be able to use it for sending photos. The s710a actually has pretty much the same email configuration any normal email client would have, so most of the settings were easy enough to configure. But authenticated SMTP (sending mail) was failing, and I needed to figure out why...

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Kathy and I took a fun little trip last night. Originally we were going to go get an assignment for my transportation class out of the way. That involved riding a rapid west on Wilshire, the Red Line to Hollywood, the Gold Line to Pasadena, and two stops on the Blue Line down toward USC. Well, that wasn't what we ended up doing. We still ended up with a good little public transit journey, though.

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So yesterday I'm walking across campus to get on my bike and head home, and I pass a girl, probably seven or so years old, selling girl scout cookies in the center of campus. Now, that's nothing unusual. But this girl had a whole setup going. She had a table, a chair, and next to them she had probably a dozen boxes of cookies. Not the little for-sale boxes, but the boxes those boxes get shipped in. Either this girl is the ultimate in little girl scout businesswomen, or she had some help.

It's quite possible that the coolest thing about being able to have this anywhere Internet access via my phone is that suddenly I have connectivity on the roof of my apartment building. I have some laundry in the dryer, so while I'm waiting I grabbed my laptop and headed up here to hang out for a half hour or so. It's so nice just to be outside after all the crappy weather we've had lately.

Speed wise, my connectivity is testing at about 120 - 140kbps. That's not as fast as EDGE is advertised as being capable of, but it's good enough for me. The one thing I do need to lessen for this is my dependence on ssh. The latency times (600 - 900ms) are just high enough to make interactive typing less than appealing. It's workable, just not fun for email.

Success came quicker than I might have thought... I'm now posting this via a GPRS/EDGE connection through my cell phone. I'm using my phone as a Bluetooth modem to give connectivity to my laptop.

Enough technical terms for you?

In layman's terms: My cell phone -- a Sony Ericsson s710 with service through Cingular -- offers internet access, in the form of Cingular's MEdia Net functionality. The phone offers the functionality to act as a modem, and in fact can connect wirelessly to the laptop as a Bluetooth modem. My laptop doesn't have Bluetooth built in, but I have a little bluetooth adaptor that plugs into the back of the computer (USB). So, to get internet access on my laptop the computer sees the phone as a modem and "dials" the internet (really it just tells the phone to use a certain profile). The phone connects to the internet and returns the connection information to the laptop. Voila, I'm on the internet.

It turns out I broke authentication on Tuesday afternoon while putting some code changes in place. Oddly, I was still able to post Tuesday evening after the DLANC meeting, but the code was broken so I'm not sure how that worked. Something still looks to be a little wacky, but it should just affect authenticated access, so none of you should see it.

That doesn't have anything to do with me not posting yesterday, though. I didn't notice until this morning. Yesterday I was just busy studying for my last midterm before spring break. Now I have classes today, work tomorrow, and then Monday Kathy and I fly to South Carolina for six days.

I'm working on getting internet access working through my phone. If I can get that going I'll use that while I'm in SC. I have my laptop able to make the phone connect to network and from the console it looks like the ppp connection starts up correctly, but something still isn't working right through kppp. I think I'm close, though.

When KCRW started podcasting I mentioned I wanted to write a script to manage downloading the files and getting them over to my cell phone each night. Well, I haven't quite done that yet. But I have written the first steps, and put my perl podcast app over at eScripting. This is the first thing I've put up there in a bunch of years. archive.org last shows a change in July of 2002. I'm using the URI::Fetch CPAN module that jim mentioned a few weeks ago.

CSI:NY is shooting in my alley today, which is fine. We got the notifications a couple days ago and they did a really good job of detailing what would be happening when. Here's the problem, though: right now they're grilling some really good smelling meat directly below my window. Delicious aromas are wafting in through my windows. That's just unfair.

This weekend I actually used Flexcar quite a bit. Kathy's car is in the shop, so I first picked up car 6926 (which Flexcar's site at the moment lists as a mini-van... I assure you it isn't) on my way back from work Friday and we made our way over to the west side. Then Sunday I again got a car -- though this time car 6925, just for variety -- for church and errands. I'm really enjoying the Civic hybrid, and I finally noticed that the trip odometer would let me get a MPG number for my time in the car. Average MPG's for the two trips: 38.1 and 38.6.

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This weekend I was introduced for the first time to Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area in Baldwin Hills. For a big city, Los Angeles keeps surprising me with these massive parks that you don't really understand the scale of until you're there. Griffith Park is amazing, and I've been there many times, but I had only driven by Kenneth Hahn SRA before Saturday. The site was home to the Olympic Village for the 1932 games, and then did some time as an oil field before the state bought the hilltop in 1983 and made it into a really nice looking park. There are pictures in my flickr gallery.

You may remember that a little over a week ago I criticized Scott Garner over at LAist over a piece he wrote on the committee subway vote. Garner at the time wrote this:

Regardless, Labonge and his subway-lovin' wrecking crew will take their fight straight to the man tomorrow, going before the full MTA board to make their case that a subway that actually relieves traffic is a pretty darn good idea.

What are the odds that they'll be successful? About the same odds that Jamie Foxx will go home empty-handed on Sunday, but good on 'em for trying.

Of course the next day the board passed LaBonge's motion 11-2.

Today Garner has another piece on the subway, of course making no mention of his previous piece. And then he goes on to criticize the MTA's art program...

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The LA Weekly is running a good interview with Henry Waxman. Waxman is the congressman who's famous (or infamous, depending on how you want to look at it) in transit circles for getting a law prohibiting federal funding be used on tunnelling under portions of Wilshire known to have methane gas pockets. I recommend reading this interview, but you'll have to get past this right at the beginning:

Ever wonder why a leg of the Red Line ends at Wilshire and Normandie, miles short of the museums and office buildings that would make it worthwhile to thousands?

Well, see, here's the thing... I've never wondered that, since the Red Line goes to Wilshire and Western, which is a bit farther down the street. Sometimes I wonder if people actually fact-check these things.

I haven't mentioned much about school here lately. Today, though, I have two midterms. The first one was this morning, in my class Public Service in an Urban Setting. Questions dealt with Los Angeles' widening "two-tier" economic structure (expansion of the poor and the rich while the middle-class sort of disappears), philanthropic practices of different ethnic groups, service learning, and one more that I can't remember at the moment. I felt like I did pretty well. Of the four essays two had multiple options and two were mandatory. I lucked out with feeling comfortable on the required ones while having a definite favorite in the choices.

And now in an hour and a half I have a midterm in my anthropology class, Exploring Culture Through Film. This one I don't feel at all as comfortable about, but my saving grace will be that it's (at least largely... I think all) multiple choice. I like multiple choice.

I'm getting lazy in my old age. There used to be a day when I would write my own mp3 players, but these days I just want something that works and that I don't have to fuss with. I've run xmms since 2000/2001 or so (before that I ran a little perl client called smartplay for a while), but I really do want something more these days. Particularly I want something with easier/smarter playlist handling. So just a few minutes ago I decided to give a shot to rhythmbox on the GNOME side and juk from KDE. The short answer: they're both good starts, but both have issues.

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