bird karma

October 15, 2003 by Eric Richardson

California really introduced me to pigeons. I mean, sure, they'd been around before, but never really AROUND. Here, they're AROUND. I was sitting at the Carl's Jr. on campus the other day, enjoying my chicken strips, just people watching. At a table a few feet from me sat a girl, by herself. It was a big round table and she wasn't using much of it. She's just minding her own business, eating, and there's a big pigeon standing on the opposite edge of the table, staring her down. The table edges are rounded, so the bird's having to work a little. Its back claws keep slipping, and it keeps having to adjust, but its head isn't moving. It's just staring at her.

Most people would wave the bird away, thinking its mere presense within feet of their food would bring disease, but she didn't. She just sat there, eating. Freshman year Steve (another favorite) would have said that this was correct, and that the birds would notice and recipricate your kindness. I don't know that I buy that.

An army of crows could make like easier, though. "It'a a murder honey, a group of crows is called a murder."

i blame alan...

October 15, 2003 by Eric Richardson

Alan mentioned RSS feeds, which gave me the urge to get mine working again. I did so, and it can now be found here. I've never had any use for RSS, or RSS readers, but I know some people do and I do support the idea of aggregating content.

time to upgrade?

October 14, 2003 by Eric Richardson

Today I finally got the last $1000 of my fall financial aid package. This means that I can finally look at getting a laptop. My main computer is an old PII-400 that's been through a lot. Since I've been here, USC has added wireless on campus, and that's really made me lust after having something I could pull out anywhere on campus and be online. Now comes the point where I have to find something cheap (under $1000) that has the feature set I want. You wouldn't think that would be a very hard thing to do, since I don't need much.

On a laptop, I care about the screen, wireless ethernet, and not much else. And yet, screen size and CPU speed are intrinsically linked in the minds of manufacturers. I don't want a P4. I want a crap CPU, a 10gig hard drive, and a nice screen.

Right now I'm looking at a Toshiba Satellite A10-S127. It's $899 from CDW, which seems decent to me.

the world we live in

October 07, 2003 by Eric Richardson

On Saturday night I went to celebrate a friend's birthday at the Saddle Ranch at Universal Citywalk. Now, I've ranted about Citywalk before, so you might know already that I think it's one of the biggest rip-offs in the LA area. Parking is $8, which even in LA is pricey. I was making the trip by myself, so I decided to go via a bus and the subway, something I hadn't done since my freshman year (when carlessness meant taking a lot of iffy transit). I like public transit, but I don't like buses, so I was a bit non-plussed about that leg of the trip. Committed as I was to not paying for parking, though, I went for it anyway, and ended up as entertained by my trip as I was by the rest of the night. — Continue Reading...

Yardley - Berlin

October 07, 2003 by Eric Richardson

I go out and find a lot of bands, but it's not as often that a band comes and finds me. I first heard of Yardley, the soon to be band currently mostly consisting of Lee Beth Kilgore, when Lee Beth emailed me a question and happened to casually mention at the end something about having her own band. I checked it out, and was impressed, and made it out to see her play a couple solo shows.

Then, last week, I saw her play with accompaniment, and the experience is totally different. I wrote about that show, so I won't repeat it all here. What I will do, though, is post a link to a live mp3 of Berlin from that show. Lee Beth mailed me links to a couple of songs from the show, and in the days I've had them I don't think they've moved off my playlist.