LA Times on NextBus

November 02, 2004 by Eric Richardson

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

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

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

Hopefully LA will be getting to this party sometime soon.

indigo magic

October 31, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Yesterday I finally got around to doing something about the SGI Indigo I had sitting in my living room. If you remember back to July you'll note that this box had a dead clock battery, which thanks to some smart design work, made it completely inoperable. And, oh yeah, the battery was soldered onto the motherboard.

But that didn't stop me. I used my trusty soldering iron to loosen things up and get the old battery out, and then yesterday I went to Radio Shack and picked up a new 3.6V battery, some paired wire, and some electrical tape. You can see a few pictures on my buzznet site.

So the machine now boots. Here's my hinv output:

clu 10% hinv
CPU: MIPS R4000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.2
FPU: MIPS R4000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 0.0
1 100 MHZ IP20 Processor
Main memory size: 64 Mbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0
Instruction cache size: 8 Kbytes
Data cache size: 8 Kbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision C
  Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0
  CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Graphics board: GR2-Elan
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Iris Audio Processor: revision 10

The cool part is that GR2-Elan line. The three hard drives are all really small (1gig and 2 .5gigs), so that makes life fun (though I installed a clean IRIX inside a gig yesterday). I think I might have some memory lying around that I can try to bump that 64meg up with.

big city efficiency

October 29, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I was driving into work this morning when all of a sudden I had a very "doh!" moment. It occured to me that I had a wedding to go to tomorrow, and that suit that I really needed to take to the dry cleaners was still sitting rumpled in my closet.

No fear, though. A quick look at the now useful google local (dry cleaner near 90014), a few phone calls, and I had soon found Sloan's Dry Cleaners in the Wells Fargo Center. They weren't the closest, but when I called them and asked about getting my suit done before the wedding tomorrow they gave me an unequivocal "No problem." I went with their confidence.

So I left JPL around 3:30, came back to Premiere Towers to pick up my suit, and checked the mail. In it was my North Muskegon, MI, absentee ballot, due back by the close of polling on Tuesday. Now, it's not North Muskegon's fault it's so late; I did just fax them the form late Monday. So I grabbed the ballot, walked over to the dry cleaners, dropped off my suit, and found a place to sit down and make a phone call. I called my mom and told her I knew nothing about any of the Michigan races. Together we went through the ballot and she told me what the Michigan buzz was for each of the races. I didn't vote for regents for U of M or MSU, but I came to a decision on most of the rest. Then I went next door to the Fedex store and sent the ballot back 2nd day. They tell me it'll be delivered Tuesday between 12 and 4.

Now to finish a little of the work I left to come home early, and then to head out somewhere to go pick up a gift for the wedding tomorrow. They're registered at Macy's, so I think we might go see what we can find at their downtown location. I've never been in there.

"God to Run DWP!"

October 29, 2004 by Eric Richardson

There's a lot about LA politics I don't know or understand, but there's one thing I'm pretty sure of: Ron Deaton is a powerful man. Now the long-time city hall guru is Hahn's choice to take over as top man at DWP. I first read the story last night on LA Observed (today's followup has links to the Times and Daily News).

My first Ron Deaton experience was at the meeting over the new LAPD headquarters held a month or two ago at City Hall. Deaton was there answering questions and responding to public comments. I vividly remember an exchange after someone had been particularly forceful about asserting that the Caltrans site had been promised as a park. Deaton went to the mic and responded something along the lines of "Go back and look at who negotiated that contract for the city. I did. Don't try to tell me what the contract says. I wrote the contract." Obviously his response was a little more political, but you get the idea. I was standing in the back of the room next to Brady Westwater and I turned and asked him who this guy was. Brady's response: "I'd call him god, but I don't think he'd accept the demotion." (Brady today sent an email to the newdowntown list titled "God to Run DWP!")

From Hahn's email (available at the LA Observed link above):

We all know of Ron's commitment to the success of LADWP, and his even deeper dedication to the City of Los Angeles. Because he began his career at LADWP and has a long record of support for the Department, Ron is perhaps one of the only people who can successfully bring the Department into the City family.

I think that's important. From my limited perspective of just watching through the news it does often feel like DWP is out doing its own thing separate from the rest of the city. It'll be interesting to see if Deaton is the one who can change that image.

Blade Runner

October 28, 2004 by Eric Richardson

We watched the film Blade Runner in my speculative cinema class today. Oddly I hadn't ever seen it before. I liked it.

What fascinated me, though, was the footage in the Bradbury Building. On its own this is an amazing building, but seeing it put so artfully on film is amazing. I was particularly captivated by the shots through the roof showing the advertsing blimp overhead. You can see a great example of that shot on the linked site. I can't begin to fathom the lengths they had to go to in order to film with so much water and yet preserve the interior of the building. It's interesting too that they chose to keep the Bradbury name on the building -- making it the Bradbury Apartments and totally redoing the exterior -- and also chose to keep the Million Dollar Theater across the street.

I also correctly identified the police headquarters as the closed off wing of Union Station, and the tunnel as 2nd Street.