dreary days

February 19, 2004 by Eric Richardson

LA's not doing too well on the weather front right now. Yesterday was chilly and rainy. Saturday and Sunday weather.com is saying we're going to get more. And then again next week. Normally when it's nice I'd be setting up shop in my office on campus, enjoying the sun while getting some work done. But that's hard to do in this weather. I end up working from my apartment instead. What I really need is something like Founders in GR.

LA has a lot of great old bar/resturants (I went there for lunch on Monday) but what I can't seem to find is that same kind of place, but with wireless. Alan's list of free wifi in Grand Rapids is pretty extensive. Where's that same list for LA?

skipping as usual

February 17, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I'm skipping out on watching Bullets over Broadway right now in my Post-Modernism class in order to check out the Veritas Forum at USC. Dallas Willard is speaking tonight. So I figure in a choice between him and Woody Allen, the former is a little more important. Add this to the films I need to rent in the next few weeks.

and i'm back

February 17, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I took a trip to nowhere for the last week or so. I think I got busy, but really the time just sort of disappeared and all of sudden I was here now and it was gone and ... uhhh... yeah.

Saturday the waterski team took its first trip out for the semester, braving the 54 degree waters of Lake Elsinore. Weather was crappy in the morning, but cleared out for the afternoon leaving sunny skies and glassy water.

Saturday night Kathy and I went to Tesoro Tratteria for Valentines dinner. OpenTable was my best friend in the hunt for a resturant, along with the Downtown News resturant guide. They were out of the crab cakes in the second course, but other than that I was pretty satisfied. Off their special Valentines menu I had the PUREÈ OF GOLDEN CHANTERELLE SOUP, the AHI TUNA TARTARE ON TOAST POINT, the SAFFRON FETTUCCINE WITH LOBSTER AND MUSSELS, and finally the RASPBERRY CHOCOLATE MOUSSE HEART (sorry about the caps... i'm just copying and pasting).

Sunday night we hit up Genghis Cohen to see Yardley, which is now starting to actually look like a band with the addition of drummer Stuart Johnson (formerly of the New Radicals). Lee Beth had to fight through having an unplugged monitor and not being able to hear herself, but she did just fine.

Monday Magilla and I walked around downtown, looking for an apartment for next year. Our leading candidate right now is Premiere Towers, on Spring between 6th and 7th. They have 2br/2ba for $1300, which would be ridiculous a lot of places, but is cheap in LA. City Park wants $1820 next year for less space and crappier facilities.

And I think that brings us up to date. Whew.

coding philosophies

February 11, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I'm doing some contract work these days, just really getting started into it. We were going through some stuff on the phone last week, with them just giving me a bit of feel for the context of the code I'll be working in. The code's broken up into layers, with layer 4 being the user interface and layer 1 being the database. Layer 2 is low-level db calls, etc, while layer 3 is sort of layer 2 glue. Yadd yadda yadda...

Anyway, what I found interesting was that they wanted me to start in Layer 2, building all the low-level db calls, and then only once all of that was done to start on level 3.

There's nothing wrong with that approach, I guess, but it just struck me that it was completely backwards of how I tend to write software. The first thing I do is prototype the GUI, be it on the web or something in Glade. Once I have the GUI I'll stub functions underneath to understand flow. Only once all that is filled out do I actually write any of the code that does anything.

I think this is why I'm a communications major and not computer science. I've always told people I want to be just as technical as I need to be to get the job done.

I'm curious how other people look at this? What way do you approach something like this? Big picture, or foundation?

Portishead - Undenied

February 11, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I recently reaquired a couple Portishead albums. I first got into them in 1998 when Roseland NYC was coming out. My introduction was actually by way of NPR, which was a lot more random for me then than it would be now. Sitting here right now, on a sunny socal day but in the shade with headphones on, something just makes this absolutely the right song to be on. Beth Gibbons vocals are hauntingly beautiful. Of the Portishead albums this one, Portishead, is probably the least of my favorites, but I just love this song. In the same vein is "Roads", off of Dummy.