Downtown: Arts, Asthetics, Culture, & Education

September 21, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I went to my second neighborhood council type meeting tonight, this time the Arts, Asthetics, Culture, & Education Committee. I'm not a member of the committee, but I figured that if I'm going to be Area Wide Resident Artist I might as well see what I can do for the arts. A lot of it was what you'd expect of any meeting: motions, procedures, etc. There's always going to be a lot of beaurocratic nonsense associated with any sort of meeting of this size and scope. Neighborhood Council meetings have to follow Robert's Rules, which pretty much assures having to grind through a lot of procedure. At the same time, though, you can quickly see why you have to follow some concrete set of rules. Without it things would just degrade into a mess.

So what was talked about? Arts stuff. A big part of what the AACE is concerned with right now is the business aspect of downtown arts. As the downtown housing boom is occuring there is inevitably upward pressure on commercial rents. Artists aren't really in a position to survive spiralling costs. What groups like AACE can do is work with artists to educate them about the business side of things like negotiating leases, while at the same time working with property owners to identify those interested in bringing arts into the neighborhood and connecting them with tenants.

Next step for me is to start taking advantage of events like the downtown art walk to get out and meet gallery owners and start seeing what's around here.

a fun next few days

September 21, 2004 by Eric Richardson

It's insane how much I'm doing in the next few days.

  • Movie due back to the library tonight
  • I'm planning to attend a neighborhood council Arts Committee meeting tonight
  • Tomorrow I'm in Long Beach 1pm-9pm for work
  • I have to do some work for a group project, type a little thing up and get it to a classmate tomorrow
  • I've got a short paper due for a class on Thursday
  • By Friday we have to have the merch we want to sell at homecoming approved by USC's trademark office so that we can turn in the appropriate forms. Yesterday I got the art to the promo company, now they take it to trademark and we see what happens
  • Friday I'm in Long Beach mid-day
  • Saturday night I'm attending a screening of THX1138 on campus where George Lucas will be there.
  • Sunday afternoon I'm running sound at a wedding

Wish me luck.

oh the memories

September 20, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So I mentioned earlier that magically a hard drive I thought I had lost in January came back to life. This drive had been my audio drive, so I had been forced to rebuild my collection from scratch (and from cds I had on-hand) when it had gone south.

Now it's back, and it's fascinating to see what I've been missing. Some random tracks I'm glad to see:

  • Manic Street Preachers - If You Tolerate This (Massive Attack Remix)
  • Gus Black - Cadillac Tears
  • Antiloop - Catch Me (with Timbuktu)
  • Danielson Famile - Smooth Death
  • Joseph Arthur - In the Sun
  • Bran Van 3000 - Go Shoppin (Featuring Eek A Mouse)

Good times...

the trouble with hard drives

September 20, 2004 by Eric Richardson

As usual, computer problems strike me when I need them least. Just a few weeks ago I totally rebuilt my machine. Everything was working great. Then yesterday I come home to find console messages saying that the ext3 journal had stopped on /dev/hda3 (mounted as /). The mount had gone read-only. Uh-oh. I try to shut it down cleanly, but I end up having to hit the reset button. On boot-up, the situation starts looking more serious. When the bootloader goes to read its second stage info off the drive, I just get a slow clicking. The boatloader eventually comes up without it's graphics or defaults, and manual boot attempts are fruitless. Booting into a console on a distro install cd I'm unable to mount anything off the drive -- "Input/Output Error".

So it's dead. And that means it's RMA time. The drive's under a year old -- I bought it on January 5th, to replace another bad drive.

HOLD ON... Wow. So my drive from yesterday's still dead, but there's an unexpected twist. The 60gig drive I bought in February, 2002, has unexpectedly come back to life. Just last month I tried to spin this drive up to recover data from it that had been lost since January. No go. It didn't even spin. It just made a faint but ugly clicking sound. Just now I threw it on and got the exact same thing. I powered the machine on only to get that faint clicking sound and no spinning. I got angry at it and smacked it. All of a sudden, it spins up. I boot a recovery cd. I mount the drive. All my data is there. Amazing.

So on the down-side I'm pretty sure my 160gig drive is really dead, and dead with it are a lot of files that I really should have been backing up. On the up side, all the music I thought I lost in January is all of a sudden found.

Stupid computers.

Now I need to craft a custom kernel and initrd to put on a distro install cd so that I can install Linux onto a SCSI drive even though my SCSI card isn't supported by the stock 2.6 kernel. Woo hoo!

Same issue

September 20, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I have the same issue with sites showing up as updated/not updated and I do notice that there is a tendancy for the same sites to show as updated, when they are not. If there is a better solution, I'm definitely on board to try it out.