random vegas bits
July 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson
I went to Vegas with D4 and Magilla over the weekend. Not a lot in the way of big stories, but one random anecdote:
Traffic was pretty bad driving back to LA on Monday. Somewhere around the CA/NV border a Jeep pulls up next to us and the driver's making some hand motion. D4 thinks the guy's blinker is broken and he's trying to get us to let him over. When I look over, though, that's not at all the case. Instead he's got his right hand up and pointing with his left at the left side of the palm. I immediately recognize this as someone from Michigan telling me where they're from. Turns out he's from Spring Lake, about 15 miles south of North Muskegon, where I went to high school. Random.
fun with numbers
July 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Just for fun I grabbed the html from LA Blogs, stripped it down to just the blogroll, and then ran some stats. It had seemed to me that there were a lot of blogspot users. I particularly notice them because blogspot likes to do weird things to my browser (not load the site for a couple tries, etc). So I wrote some quick perl to parse through the roll and what do I find? Of 641 blogs, here's the major hosting provider breakdown (as counted by comparing domain names):
155 blogspot.com
22 typepad.com
12 livejournal.com
10 xanga.com
8 diaryland.com
That's a pretty high percentage. Of course if a site is using a provider but doing it through a vanity domain name, that won't count here so the numbers could be different in reality. Still, just an interesting first glance. If anyone wants to play on their own, I've put the Perl up as host_stats.
Music: Eric Hutchinson - That Could've Gone Better
July 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Near the end of May I mentioned seeing Eric Hutchinson (whose site is empty if you don't have Flash installed) at the Hotel Cafe. I said that Kathy and I both enjoyed his set, and that she bought a cd. A week or so later she brought the album over and I gave it a listen. I didn't like it. Then in Minnesota I listened to it again, and liked it a bit more. Today I listened to it again. Three times through and I feel like I can comment.
I don't dislike his songs. I like "Breakdown More." It's catchy. My problem with the album is that it's short and fast. Short in that the total run-time is a very scant 23 minutes and change. Fast in that most of the songs feel like they're rushing. Those 23 minutes include seven songs. The one 4:35 track feels epic when compared to track times like 2:47, 2:38, and 3:11.
Now, I'm no musician, but if I only had a couple songs (which is absolutely understandable for a young artist) and I wanted to put out an album, I'd probably pad the songs out instrumentally a bit. As is, the album just feels like each song's a drawn out teaser. You just start to get into it and it's already gone.
famous for being famous
July 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson
One of the top google searches bringing people to my site over the past month or two has been people looking for Anna Nalick. Just over a year ago I mentioned seeing Anna Nalick play at the Hotel Cafe (sorry about the cheesy last name reuse there, just hoping that post will get into the results and clear things up a little). I really enjoyed her set, but was confused that google listed zero results when I searched for her name.
Today the results for that same search stretch out to two pages, but manage to do it without being any more enlightening. Looking at the google results you'll see that the current top two results are both hits to my googlefun tracker (basically just recording what google queries bring people to my site). Unlike other occassions where googlefun has made it into query results, these results don't even mention last year's post that started this whole chicken and egg scenario. Other results are just as meager. She's listed in one of two events calendars, but there's no good source of other information. It's a shame... I'd like to get back out and see her again.
Slight update -- From google I can gather that she's got an album in the works with Columbia, which Mark Endert's discography lists as being titled Wreck of the Day. It was recorded this spring. No listing of any sort of a release date.
could you be any more wrong?
July 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson
I'm working from my apartment today so that I can try and fix a car window (which I'll talk more about later). That means that I was home just now to hear our apartment phone ringing. I answer it, and a woman's voice asks:
Hi, is this the Standard, in New York?
I said no and she said she must have a wrong number.
Now, there are multiple problems with this question. First, there is no Standard in New York, the only two are Hollywood and downtown. The downtown one even has a phone number that's very close to ours (same area code and exchange, two numbers the same in the final four). But if that's what she was looking for, where in the world did I get New York? How does that make any sense? What can you confuse with New York?
Weird.