this is it.

December 16, 2003 by Eric Richardson

In twelve and a half hours I'll be done. Finally I'll be able to leave this semester behind for good. Two more finals. Ten hours between them. I'm not really stressed. The first final is a COMM final. This post reassures me. I still can't believe that people make a life out of studying some of this stuff...

car driven society

December 15, 2003 by Eric Richardson

I found my auto insurance card today. I had taken it out of my car a while back to fill out a form and just realized a couple weeks ago that I really didn't know where it was. Though still fully insurance, and just without current record of it, driving around without my card I was close to being part of a large undocumented segment of the driving population. I think I heard in a commercial the other day that something like 20% of cars on the road in LA are uninsured. Trying to support that with statistics, I find this release from 2000 that says "California has an estimated 5.3 million uninsured vehicles, and 2.2 million to 3 million of these are in regular use."

The debate these days has been about licenses for "undocumented workers". Davis passed a law granting them the ability to get licenses, then Arnold came into power saying he was going to take that away, which he promptly did. Now there are protests that have been going on about that. Granted, I'm being a little theoretical about the whole thing, but shouldn't these people be arguing for getting illegal workers legal, and not just for giving them licenses? If you're going to argue that these people are a critical part of the southern california economy, that's a valid argument. But don't take that to say that we should give illegal immigrants licenses. License citizens. Don't work around the real problem to cure a symptom.

But that's just me...

data overload...

December 13, 2003 by Eric Richardson

For a project that I'm working on, I need lon/lat coordinates assigned to every post in my blog. That's about 800 posts right now. Actually, looking a little closer, there are exactly 750 top-level posts, and 50 comments. Though, by the time you read this I'll have posted again and thrown the whole thing off. Oh well.

on this date...

December 11, 2003 by Eric Richardson

Every six hours you have to take a half hour break and I wasn't hungry, so I just spent the last 20 minutes implementing a new "On This Date" feature. Click on This Date next to archives to take a look. This "blog" is a couple days shy of 5 years, two weeks old, so odds are good that a couple years will have a post from this date. Eventually I'll make it where you can input a date, but hey, I only had a half hour.

whew...

December 11, 2003 by Eric Richardson

Paper and final done... Now to not fall asleep at work and I'll be all set.

Tonight I'm headed to Hollywood (King King, specifically, which I've never been to) to see Jim Bianco perform with the Tim Davies Big Band. I've mentioned Jim before. I really enjoyed him then, and I'm really excited to see him now. Just like the end of the last show, it'll be him sans guitar, just having fun with lead vocals. I'll be sure to post a review, and hopefully I can get some pictures (not owning a camera, that relies on getting someone else to bring one).