Archives for February 2004
music comes to me
February 19, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Saucy Monky, an LA band I get out to see whenever possible, is going to be playing a show at USC's Ground Zero Coffee House tomorrow night at 9pm. It should be a really good time, and it's free, so if you're in the area definitely check it out.
mapping wifi, but not really
February 19, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Alan wrote today about Google's new search by location and how you can use that to search for wi-fi access. Theoretically, that may be the case, but results for my area show that things are far spottier than they appear in Grand Rapids. Let's look at this search for wi-fi near 90007:
It's a cool idea, but yeah... Not really functional yet. It looks like having a lot of addresses on the same page just throws it for a loop. It's google, though, so I know they've got people a lot smarter than me trying to figure this out.
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.
getting out to see those events
February 11, 2004 by Eric Richardson
I link to flavorpill LA off of my web favorites, but haven't ever gotten around to mentioning it here. It's not any sort of a comprehensive listing, but it does highlight cool events happening in LA.
Today my context for actually making mention is that the current issue talks about Overwrought, an art show occuring in Venice on Friday. While I'm not generally the art show type of guy, Erik Penny's electronic/ambient solo-sideproject, Maxy Wango, is the soundtrack for the evening. Now, let's take a second to say... That's one cool name. How do you go from naming a band after yourself to coming up with a name like that? Second note... Right now there are no google results for "Maxy Wango". Will I be the first?
virtual servers... mmm....
February 10, 2004 by Eric Richardson
I'm somewhat in the market for a hosting provider right now. I say somewhat because I don't have a firm timetable on when I need to make a switch, and might end up getting colo space on the barter system. Anyway... Were I to be purchasing hosting at this moment, I think I would be going with Linode. I hadn't heard of them until today, but they offer exactly what I need. I've been spoiled by having my own box in a colo. I run qmail, I play with console apps, I do whatever. With Linode you get a virtual Linux server, so you can do all that. You get to pick a distro to install, and user-side everything behaves like it's your own box. Pricing is pretty good, and the ability to remotely reboot and reinstall with confidence is very cool. Definitely something I'll be keeping in mind.
one backwards day
February 10, 2004 by Eric Richardson
Today's running really backwards. I'm waiting for UPS to bring me a pair of packages (memory and a battery for my laptop), and as of 1pm they haven't come yet, but normally they'll all about morning delivery. On the other hand the mail, which never comes before 3:30pm or so, was here at 11:45am. I'm confused.
The mail brought me a copy of Bennett Mosier's 2000 solo album, so I'll be writing about that sometime soon.
it's not like this is their job...
February 10, 2004 by Eric Richardson
So today the spring installment of my National Merit scholarship came in. It's February 10, which means that it arrived pretty close to a month after school started. Now, I don't know exactly what processes are involved in actually getting these out, or even really who the money's coming from, but it would seem to me that if all you do is send out scholarship checks, you would make a point of being able to get them there around when school starts. That is usually when they're needed, after all.
On the plus side, I can head over to the cashiers office today and pick up a $1000 check. Last fall I used that check to buy my laptop. This time it'll be going largely toward paying some bills and paying off several hundred dollars worth of books I had to buy at the beginning of the semester.
and there went that week
February 10, 2004 by Eric Richardson
So, uhhhh, it's been a week since I posted. I really didn't intend that, it just sort of snuck up on me. Granted, a chunk of the time was spent in Vegas, so you can't take Internet access, or really even caring about the Internet, for granted there. This weekend was the Western Collegiate Water Ski Association's captains meeting, and I was there representing the USC Waterski Team. Since I was the only USC person going I ended up hitching a ride with the bruins. That would be a tougher thing to bring myself to do if we didn't absolutely own LA sports these days. You almost feel sorry for the little cubbies...