the fun of waterski recruiting

August 25, 2004 by Eric Richardson

We had the semi-yearly involvement fair at USC today. Basically at the beginning of each semester all the clubs set up tables out on Trousdale to recruit new members. I was out selling the waterski team, which is always fun and tiring. For a little over three hours you stand in front of your table holding a ski, telling everyone how cool your club is and how they should definitely come out and join. Now, granted, waterski/wakeboard isn't exactly the toughest sell... It's a pretty appealing event to begin with.

Here's the thing about our involvement fair signups... Every year we probably sign up more people at the involvement fair than any other club. This time I walked out with probably eighty names and email addresses. Of those people, though, maybe 15 will ever come out and I'll probably only see 5-8 more than once. What that tells me is that the demand is there, we just aren't selling ourselves properly. Sure, some of those people sign up without having any intention of ever showing up, but I'd say out of the 80 that's probably only 20 or so people. The rest are people who are genuinely interested, and what we need to do is figure out how to get them to turn that interest into action.

Next weekend will be important. It's a football bye week, so we can plan a Saturday trip. We need to go big and get people hooked right away, before classes and other commitments start to tie them up.

Downtown: debating the new LAPD HQ

August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson

As promised earlier, I went to City Hall tonight to attend the meeting about the new police headquarters. It was my fist time in City Hall, so that part of it was cool in and of itself. It really is an amazing building.

I arrived at the meeting about a half hour after it started, so I missed any remarks and presentations that opened. What I was there for, and what went on a good hour plus, was public comment. For the most part you could divide the speakers into two camps:

• Little Tokyo people glad to see the HQ out of their district and into the Civic Center, and
• Higgins Building people wanting the HQ anywhere else but where they want to put it.

A lot of people said the same things over and over, and you get a little tired of that after a while. Brady Westwater, president of the Downtown Neighborhood Council (DLANC), made what I thought was the best use of the two minutes each person was given. Basically what he said was (a bit more diplomatically, but hey, it's my paraphrasing): All of you who want the HQ to not be there: get real. It's happening. People have signed off. That debate's over. The debate now has to be how to get LAPD to use the site in a way that maximizes usable public space.

The architect had some rough shapes on hand to fit into a cool cardboard version of the surrounding blocks. Some of the designs looked like they had real possibility. There will be a long give and take process to balance LAPD's priorities against those of nearby residents, but I think this is the time where that debate can be fruitful.

Some random notes:

• I would suggest against a public speaking tactic that involves trying to show up the public figures on hand. It's not going to work, and it just makes you look bad. Show respect at all times, even when you're attacking their policy.

• Opponents of the HQ played the children card, and had two young girls come read a little speech that talked about how they wanted the chance to grow up like normal little kids and could only have that with a park.

All in all, an interesting and informative time.

end when you're done

August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson

You know what I can't stand? Professors who don't know when to end a class. We're done. We've learned all we're going to learn this week. And yet we're still here, and we're waiting while he finds something online that he wants us to connect to.

Come on... I'm supposed to be at City Hall in a half hour. Let's wrap this up, please.

Ok, granted the class isn't officially supposed to end until 6:45. But we're done, let's go.

i'm not a gamer, but i'll pretend

August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So I have a class on Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games this semester, which I mentioned yesterday. Today is the first class period. One of the "texts" is the game Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. We get a free copy of the game and a 3-month free subscription, which is cool and all, but the hardware requirements are pretty intense. It requires a graphics card capable of hardware texture and lighting, which my GeForce4 is, but it's in a machine with a PII 400, and oh... It's running Linux. My laptop meets all requirements except the graphics card. I guess Annenberg is going to set up some lab computers for us, though, which should make it ok.

Update: For those of you who might be interested, here's a bit of the breakdown of the people in the class: * 6 male, 2 female * a few real gamers, but not all * one cinema-television PhD student

Downtown: the fun of politics

August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So assuming I get out of class a little early today I think I'm going to be making my way down to City Hall to sit in on the meeting on the new LAPD headquarters. The LA Times also has an article today. Now, I don't have a lot invested in the debate so I'm really going more to sit and listen than I am to push any particular agenda. I do feel like it's a bit of a shame that the headquarters can't be rebuilt on the site of the current Parker Center, but I understand the economics of trying to fit a temporary headquarters while construction occurred. I am curious to see the plans for the new space, particularly to see if they do address the neighborhood's desire for a park in anything more than a token way. I don't think the whole space needs to be made into a park: the Civic Center doesn't do all that poorly for green space right now. It would be nice, though, to see the city hold true to what the neighborhood thinks it was promised.

At the very bottom of the LA Times article you get this quote, which doesn't really make any sense to me:

Three years ago, the City Council did approve a plan to make the entire block into "open space" as part of a land swap with the state.

But Perry said Monday the city never committed to a park.

"Open space does not mean park," the councilwoman said.

Well, ok, but I'm pretty sure open space doesn't mean police headquarters either.

ah, classic cinema

August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So in the first installment of my censorship class we watched two films: Baby Face and Belle of the Nineties. Now before today I was only vaguely familiar with Mae West. I knew who she was, and I knew a bit of her reputation. That is what it is, but here's what I couldn't get over:

Mae West is a female Rodney Dangerfield. Their acts are exactly the same. Mae West here is Rodney Dangerfield from Caddy Shack. Think about it. If you watch for it it's pretty eerie.

senior living in downtown

August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson

The LA Times today has an article on Angelus Plaza, the senior housing project right in the middle of downtown. I've wondered about how such a large project can survive in the midst of the renewed development taking place right now, and this article gets a little into its history. I had no idea that Angelus Plaza was 24 years old. The articles quotes a lady who's lived there since the project opened:

"Nothing was built here. I saw all these buildings grow," Medina said, recalling that when she arrived, workers hadn't even finished the sidewalks.

Downtown, including the skyscraper developments of the 80s, have grown around Angelus Plaza. The new development and the resurgence of downtown as a destination have happened around Angelus Plaza. Though I don't like the sprawling footprint or the somewhat blank look of the Plaza, I'm perfectly ok with having such a project downtown... how could I not be? They're people who came to downtown when no one else was coming. We came later. We can't try to drive them out, they want what we want. They want the best for the neighborhood. They want revival, they want people on the streets.

When I moved away from USC and moved downtown, I became excited about living out in the real world. What makes it the real world? A mix of ages and social classes. I don't want to live in a downtown comprised entirely of young loft-dwellers. Yes, there's a lot of downtown that needs to change, but this isn't one of those parts.

from the neighborhood

August 23, 2004 by Eric Richardson

One of the things I've been meaning to do since I moved downtown is to put some effort into looking around for cool historic pictures from my neighborhood that I could get prints of to hang in the apartment. Today I noticed that USC has a Digital Archives that includes a bunch of pictures taken by AAA (or the Auto Club of Southern California, if you prefer to be technical). The collection includes some good candidates for making it to the wall.

This 1930 image was taken from almost directly in front of my building facing north. Of course my building was built until a year or two after that, so I'm not sure what was there at the time. The intersection in the image is 6th and Spring. The Hotel Hayward still has that same neon. It's amazing to note the pedestrian traffic in the area. The 1932 guide film I saw at the Natural History Museum named either Broadway and 7th or Spring and 7th (can't remember which) as the busiest pedestrian intersection in the country.

getting set to go back to the grind

August 23, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Classes start today at USC. I'm on campus to take care of a variety of little things, even though my first class isn't until 9am tomorrow. I'm actually looking forward to what I'm taking this semester, which is a good change. I've got two cinema classes, and two COMM classes, with an extra 2-unit improv theatre class thrown in for good measure.

First thing tomorrow is Censorship in Cinema, with Casper. I mentioned a few months ago that this was the class endowed by Hugh Hefner. Books for the class include Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

My second cinema class is the generically titled Film and/or Television Genres. This is a class that each year or so switches professors and genres, going from westerns to musicals to who knows what. This semester it'll be on speculative cinema, basically films that paint a picture of the future. Books include Ender's Game and The Man Who Folded Himself.

My two COMM classes are Sports, Communication, and Culture and Massive Multiplayer Online Games. Oddly enough, I'm not a gamer. I play NCAA Football on the XBox, and that's about it. Though the class sounds a little dorky, I'm interested in seeing how it addresses community building in online worlds and seeing how transferable the concepts are to other online venues. And it fit my schedule and seemed sort of easy.

So there you have my semester, minus the random improv class.

stupid kinkos

August 20, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Anyone know when Adobe released Acrobat 5? 'Cause I'm pretty sure it was a while ago, and all the Kinkos around here still have 4. Now, when you try to view a file that uses 5 features in 4 (particularly alpha in the objects) you get some nice blocky non-transparent objects that look nothing at all like what your nice design did in anything recent. I know, if I was smart I would have saved my pdfs only using 4.0 features, but who would have guessed Kinkos is at least two years behind the times. I mean, come on, Acrobat 6 is out, and has been for a while.

i'll become a graphic artist yet

August 20, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So I'm stuck on campus this evening, not wanting to make the drive home in between being here for my multiple hour stay in the financial aid line and an event I'm recruiting waterski people at tonight. I've been passing the time pretending I knew how to use Adobe Illustrator, messing around with a signup sheet and a sign for the waterski locker.

What I've come to realize is that Illustrator is really cool. I'd used Photoshop plenty, PageMaker enough, and Premiere many times, but until today I'd never fired up Illustrator. Even non-artist me (civic title notwithstanding) was able to create something that looked pretty good.

Now I'm off to Kinkos to see if I can get these printed.

going to need that padded furniture...

August 20, 2004 by Eric Richardson

How ridiculous is this? Somehow I managed to injure myself last night while sleeping. I know it happened last night because it woke me up (and really hurts this morning). But who hurts themselves enough to draw blood while sleeping?

I don't know what time it was, but I had been in bed for a while. I must have gotten too near the left side of my bed, because all of a sudden I thought I was rolling off. Instincts sent my left foot shooting down to catch me. The left foot must have been a little tired, though, because instead of finding the ground it smacked into my bed's side-board, ripping at my toenail and cutting a nice flap of skin from the front of the toe.

It hurts.