one of those days

July 13, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Today's one of those days where I just can't seem to wake up, even though I've been out of bed two hours, driven to work, taken a walk in the sun, and listened to music. I just walked down to the cafeteria and got root beer, though, so we'll see if that does the trick despite a lack of caffeine.

Only two more days after this in my shortened work week. Friday my mom flies into LAX, and I'm taking that day off along with the first two of next week. I don't have much of a plan for her visit yet, but I know what some of the pieces will be. Friday night Lee Beth's band Yardley has a show at the Hard Rock in the Beverly Center, so I told her we'd come out to that. Sunday morning I'll be taking her to Bel Air Pres. But that's really it as far as set time things go, I think. I know one of the nights I want to take her out somewhere fancy, I'm going to bring her in to see around JPL, and we've talked about going hiking. That still leaves a good bit of time to plan, but I'm sure things will come together.

waiting their turn

July 12, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Driving up Hill this morning, I passed the Superior Court around 8:20am. Outside was a line of business-suit clad people stretching out the door, down the steps, and around the corner. I don't know if for some reason a lot of extra people needed to be there, or if a security checkpoint was malfunctioning, or what, but that didn't look like a fun line to be standing in.

a evening of many events

July 11, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I did walk over to The Standard last night to check out Sent. I think it was my first art exhibition opening, and it was pretty clear to me on walking in the room that I am in no way part of the art scene. I didn't feel cool enough to be there, and more importantly I was wearing entirely too much color with a muted orange shirt. — Continue Reading...

Sent: a phonecam art show

July 10, 2004 by Eric Richardson

The phonecam art exhibition Sent opens today. You might think, "Phonecams suck, why would you have an exhibition with them?" Caryn Coleman answers that question and explains more of the idea in this art.blogging.la post. The public exhibition is at the downtown Standard Hotel, which is only a couple blocks from my apartment. I'm planning to walk over and check things out in a few hours (after laundry's done and I actually have clothes to wear).

In honor of the exhibition, I've gone through my buzznet photos and selected out a few of my favorites.

— Continue Reading...

what i've been up to

July 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Over the past weeks I've been working on a complete rewrite of eThreads, my forever in progress piece of forum/blog/who-knows software. I posted a bit of a brief history a couple years ago, but I don't think it really does a good job of summing up exactly how long I've been doing this. Let's take a look at codebase versions (not releases, but major changes in the architecture):

April 21, 1998

This is the oldest recorded date in the eThreads revision log. It was actually the third check-in (version 1.3 of common.pl), since I didn't have any RCS tags (yeah, my pre-CVS days) in the initial checkins. Most likely, though, that inital checkin was on or right around this same date. I'm not sure exactly when development began, though.

June 09, 1998

This is the oldest remaining snapshot of the eThreads code, and can be found in http://old.ethreads.com/src/archive/devel/old/. Tonight I actually took a little bit of time to recreate some database syntax and get a bit of that old code running. You can see the resulting test forum here. It's not much to look at, and none of the stuff that requires logging in will work, but I'm kind of amazed it runs at all.

July 14, 1998

This is the date of the first checkin log entry I have for the eThreadsII codebase. It's version 1.4 of shared-code, so the real start must have come a bit earlier. This version gets rid of the crazy BASIC-style syntax=? navigation and brings in the new (and current) /script/function/forum/ style URLs.

September 19, 1998

I use strict; for the first time.

January 20, 1999

First checkin of the shell that will become the new eThreadsIII codebase.

April 18, 1999

This blog post was the first time eThreads was used on this site. Previously I had been using a little app I called eNews.

July 14, 2000

eThreads 1.2 was released. This has been the last major eThreads release for what is it now? four years? Ouch.

August 10, 2001

eTevolution branched off from the eThreadsIII codebase. The eThreadsIII code subsequently died, aside from little bug-fixes, so it was more just a change in direction than a real branch. Oh well.

July 31, 2003

mod_perl_safe branch began in an effort to get a much needed speed boost. Though it never technically merged back into the main branch, this was where all development was. On August 8, 2003, I moved this site over to the newly mod_perl friendly code.

May 14, 2004

First checkin of eTrevolution core. This is a ground-up rewrite designed around mod_perl and a very OO interface.

So it's been six years now, I've released a couple versions, and I'm been promising 2.0 since 2002. I think I'm right on track.

Cole's P.E. Buffet

July 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I've mentioned Cole's before, in the context of it being the oldest bar/resturant in LA. Not only is it that, though, it's also a place that's doing some cool stuff to get people in and engage the community. Last week they started doing free movie nights on a 70" TV. Last week they showed The Princess Bride. This week they're showing The Big Lebowski. They also feature some live music, the occassional play, and apparently sometimes a reading series. I'd love to see the live music side of things pick up. I'd be in heaven if I could walk a block and a half to see shows.

Cole's also has a collection of really old stock listings books (or at least we'll say that's what they're called... I can't really remember off-hand). Last time I was in there Magilla, another friend, and I made a fairly tedious, but entertaining, game out of picking stocks and seeing who was in the best shape at the end of a couple months. I won.

WIFI: LA Central Library?

July 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I just noticed that the Central Library website lists wifi in their computer center. I can't seem to find, though, if the coverage is specific to the computer center or if it covers the entire library. I could really use a good place to go with the laptop; all the cool ones I've been to are far from downtown. Something outside, like the coverage that should someday blanket Pershing Square, would be excellent.

just my luck

July 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Third time in a row that I've pulled up to the steps at the Memorial Park Gold Line station and looked down to see the southbound train starting to accelerate out of the station. I end up leaving the office at different times every day, so in the end it's just that I'm unlucky.

The bike ride into work today about killed me. I swear some days that ride's a lot tougher than others. I just keep telling myself it's good for me.

random vegas bits

July 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I went to Vegas with D4 and Magilla over the weekend. Not a lot in the way of big stories, but one random anecdote:

Traffic was pretty bad driving back to LA on Monday. Somewhere around the CA/NV border a Jeep pulls up next to us and the driver's making some hand motion. D4 thinks the guy's blinker is broken and he's trying to get us to let him over. When I look over, though, that's not at all the case. Instead he's got his right hand up and pointing with his left at the left side of the palm. I immediately recognize this as someone from Michigan telling me where they're from. Turns out he's from Spring Lake, about 15 miles south of North Muskegon, where I went to high school. Random.

fun with numbers

July 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Just for fun I grabbed the html from LA Blogs, stripped it down to just the blogroll, and then ran some stats. It had seemed to me that there were a lot of blogspot users. I particularly notice them because blogspot likes to do weird things to my browser (not load the site for a couple tries, etc). So I wrote some quick perl to parse through the roll and what do I find? Of 641 blogs, here's the major hosting provider breakdown (as counted by comparing domain names):

155 blogspot.com
22  typepad.com
12  livejournal.com
10  xanga.com
8   diaryland.com

That's a pretty high percentage. Of course if a site is using a provider but doing it through a vanity domain name, that won't count here so the numbers could be different in reality. Still, just an interesting first glance. If anyone wants to play on their own, I've put the Perl up as host_stats.

Music: Eric Hutchinson - That Could've Gone Better

July 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Near the end of May I mentioned seeing Eric Hutchinson (whose site is empty if you don't have Flash installed) at the Hotel Cafe. I said that Kathy and I both enjoyed his set, and that she bought a cd. A week or so later she brought the album over and I gave it a listen. I didn't like it. Then in Minnesota I listened to it again, and liked it a bit more. Today I listened to it again. Three times through and I feel like I can comment.

I don't dislike his songs. I like "Breakdown More." It's catchy. My problem with the album is that it's short and fast. Short in that the total run-time is a very scant 23 minutes and change. Fast in that most of the songs feel like they're rushing. Those 23 minutes include seven songs. The one 4:35 track feels epic when compared to track times like 2:47, 2:38, and 3:11.

Now, I'm no musician, but if I only had a couple songs (which is absolutely understandable for a young artist) and I wanted to put out an album, I'd probably pad the songs out instrumentally a bit. As is, the album just feels like each song's a drawn out teaser. You just start to get into it and it's already gone.

famous for being famous

July 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson

One of the top google searches bringing people to my site over the past month or two has been people looking for Anna Nalick. Just over a year ago I mentioned seeing Anna Nalick play at the Hotel Cafe (sorry about the cheesy last name reuse there, just hoping that post will get into the results and clear things up a little). I really enjoyed her set, but was confused that google listed zero results when I searched for her name.

Today the results for that same search stretch out to two pages, but manage to do it without being any more enlightening. Looking at the google results you'll see that the current top two results are both hits to my googlefun tracker (basically just recording what google queries bring people to my site). Unlike other occassions where googlefun has made it into query results, these results don't even mention last year's post that started this whole chicken and egg scenario. Other results are just as meager. She's listed in one of two events calendars, but there's no good source of other information. It's a shame... I'd like to get back out and see her again.

Slight update -- From google I can gather that she's got an album in the works with Columbia, which Mark Endert's discography lists as being titled Wreck of the Day. It was recorded this spring. No listing of any sort of a release date.