Google Old News
June 30, 2005 by Eric Richardson
One of the searches I do regularly to see what's happening is a Google News search for downtown "los angeles". Just now I had quite a start when I clicked that link, sorted by date, and found the seventh story to be:
11 Die After Train Hits SUV KABC, CA - 1 hour ago ... That train had left Union Station at 5:48 am bound for downtown Burbank. ... Rick Godinez of the Los Angeles Fire Department said early on. ...
It was quite a relief to go to the linked story and find "last updated: 1/26/2005". I don't know what tripped Google into thinking it was a new story, but it scared me for a second there.
KCRW Podcast Listenership Up; Technical Problems Follow
June 30, 2005 by Eric Richardson
Several different sites, including LA Observed have noted that the launch of podcasts in Apple's iTunes store has led to a huge jump in the number of people listening to the KCRW streams.
Unfortunately it also seems to have led to some technical issues on the station's side. My download speed has roughly been cut in half, but more importantly files are showing up in the podcast RSS before they show up on the server. Yesterday morning the 6/28 files for both Which Way LA? and To the Point gave 404 errors even though they were in the respective feeds. Today the 6/29 file for Which Way LA? did the same thing. As of right now, that's still the case.
Update (3pm): I just noted from the file timestamps that To the Point's 6/28 and 6/29 shows both appeared around the same time: 6/29 @ 3pm. Which Way LA?'s 6/28 show appeared 6/29 @ 5pm. In contrast, other shows have appeared on their air date, at approximately 6:30pm.
LAist: A Little Too Full of "Theirself"
June 27, 2005 by Eric Richardson
I know, I beat LAist up a lot. But I swear it's just that "they" constantly give me a reason. Today the object of my ire is a piece on the LA Times' coverage of the slumping box office.
A story in the paper today which talks about the slump in box office for films in the USA and worldwide. The article blames the slump, in large part, on the poor quality product coming out of Hollywood. Too many sequels and other junk. Sounds familiar. Are we the first to say that most Hollywood films are not very good, especially lately? No. Have we been saying it recently and quite a bit? Yep. Does that mean the LA Times is reading LAist? Who knows?
Here's the thing: I'm pretty sure that everybody who's covered the "slump" has laid that out as a thing people are complaining about. In fact I bet you could go out on the street and poll people and come up with "poor quality product" as one of the top two answers. And I guarantee you that 99% of these people would have never heard of LAist.
Thirty seconds on technorati searching for box office slump found me plenty of month old entries blaming poor product. For instance, how about this one from 5/27:
As time goes on, Hollywood films get more and more inane, and as globalization continues, people are being exposed to films of a different, non-Hollywood nature. I think the public is beginning to get the idea that Hollywood sucks. It's time the movie industry adapted.
Or maybe this one from 5/12:
From other entertainment options to a lower quality of flicks to way too much Ashton Kutcher, all of the theories have been, well, theorized.
A month and a half later, LAist trys so desperately to hint that even though, yes, other people have mentioned the idea, the fact that the LA Times deemed fit to print it could just possibly mean that its reporters read LAist and found the not-so-unique idea there. Please, get off it. You're a group blog obsessed with the editorial 'we' that loves ads. Let that be enough.
Making the Grauman Rounds
June 25, 2005 by Eric Richardson
We went and saw Batman at the Chinese tonight. Only at the Chinese can you sit four rows from the back and still be amazed at just how big the screen is.
Beforehand we ate at the Pig'n Whistle. Though it's a little overpriced when it comes to drinks (I ordered Coke and it turned out to be a $3.50 glass bottle), the food's really good and you can't beat the interior for character.
Again, A New Look
June 25, 2005 by Eric Richardson
Ever since I did the redesign of blogdowntown a few weeks ago I've grown ever less enchanted with how this site looks. I'm not going to claim that that's why I've been so bad at updating lately, but it probably contributed a little.
In any case, the other day I started messing around with some mast ideas based on a couple sunset pictures that I took on Tuesday. Today I got serious about making something work and put my ideas into HTML. There's still a lot of cruft in the code that needs to be cleaned out, but I like this look a lot better than the old one.
Sometime in the near future I'll find examples for the different iterations the last look took (I think it had three distinct lives all as look 20.x) and post them up to my eWorld looks page (speaking of stuff still broken... those blockquotes are nice).