rollin' along

March 22, 2004 by Eric Richardson

May 20 is Metro's 10th annual Bike to Work Day. I've been bikeless since my front wheel got stolen a couple months ago, but I'm finally getting it replaced and will definitely be rolling again by then. One thing I noticed today that I hadn't seen before is http://bikemetro.com. You enter in route information and it helps you plan the best bike commute. Usually you think of commutes in terms of distance, but as I found out this summer, elevation is perhaps even more important. Their site gives me a Gold Line -> JPL route I hadn't biked before, so it'll be interesting to give it a go once I start heading back to the bike and see if it actually is an easier ride. I'm also taking the opportunity to switch to street tires, so the reduced friction should help my ride as well.

oh no they didn't

March 22, 2004 by Eric Richardson

D4 and I are currently listening to tracks from HVSC. All I can say is: wow. wow. wow. I grew up on the Commodore 64. I love SID music. I still play C64 games on the XBOX. Now all I need is some sort of a DJ'ing talent to mix these together.

carnival music for the soul

March 22, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Blonde Redhead (whose site I haven't checked out because it requires Flash and I don't have Flash installed at the moment) was on Morning Becomes Eclectic this morning. I often forget just how good they are. I bought Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons in 2000 and loved it. When you first hear it, you think it's going to be possibly the most annoying thing you've ever heard. But then you listen for a few more minutes. All of a sudden it's not annoying. All of a sudden you're hooked. But inevitably you set it aside for a little bit, and you forget. You remember that there's a grindingly high vocal, but not that it leaves you in a trance.

But then you hear them again, and you remember it all.

Listen to the set and I think you'll see.

whirlwind tour

March 21, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Kathy and I just dropped her parents off at the airport this morning, but it's been a bit of a go-go-go last couple days. I worked all day Friday, headed back to USC for a 4:30 meeting, and then at 7 picked up Kathy and co and took a little drive up Fig to the Bonaventure Hotel. We had dinner reservations at LA Prime, and got there a little early to sit and take a swing aorund the revolving cocktail lounge. Actually, we only made it about halfway around in the 45 minutes we were there, going from north to south by way of the east. Upstairs at the steakhouse we had a cool south view, which gave me nice visuals for talking about 1100 Wilshire (this google cache contains the contents of a fascinating LA Times story about the property) and the Transamerica Building (which recently got bought by Magic Johnson and will likely become housing). The steaks were great, and the desserts were very odd, but good. I got a cheesecake, and it actually was sort of three pieces of different kinds of cheesecakes, and an assortment of fruit.

Friday night / Saturday morning Kathy and her dad decided they really wanted to go see tennis, so Saturday morning we got up and made the two-hour drive out to Palm Desert to the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. We saw 3/4 of the Saturday matches at the Pacfic Life Open, watching Federer defeat Agassi, Henmen beat Labadze, and a womens doubles match with names I won't even attempt to copy and paste here. weather.com said the temperature was going to be 96 in the desert and I believe it was every bit of that. It was dry heat, though, and we lucked out in getting tickets on the side of the court that got the early shade, so we only really had to endure the heat until 1:15 or so. The people around us were great. The lady sitting next to me offers Kathy a straw hat that she made use of for the next few hours, and the lady sitting next to Kathy knew everything you wanted to nkow about who was ranked what, and who was coaching who. Finally we drove back and then caught dinner at CPK.

Now Spring "Break" is officially over, but my schedule's anything but back to normal. Wednesday I fly out to Arizona to watch my sister play softball in Tucson. I didn't know until I went to look that link up that Taylor was also the Trojans. I'll have to find whatever Trojan stuff I have from here to wear while I'm out there. I fly back from that Saturday and then hop in the car and drive right back to Palm Desert for a weekend of waterskiing.

doh...

March 19, 2004 by Eric Richardson

My web server is a piece of crap. It's a PIII 500 with 256MB of RAM, but the kicker is that these days it's running off a 3.3gig IDE hard drive. I stuck that drive in it in October of 2001, since I was a broke college student and I had it sitting in my desktop. Really the lack of space isn't that big of a deal. While I could probably find good uses for 100gig or so, most of what I do isn't data intensive.

Sometimes, though, you get a random process that sits in the background somewhere, happily writing and writing, gradually filling your disk up with a file you don't even know exists. Today, after running completely out of space, I went on a hunting mission. I found that I had left db_logging enabled in eThreads and that log file was now a good 600MB. That's quite a chunk of a 3gig drive.

My breathing room is a lot more spacious now.