More Caltrans Building coverage

September 13, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Kevin Roderick over at the great LA Observed made mention of the new Caltrans Building today. He links to a Daily News story asking how Caltrans can get this building done on-time and on-budget when they're unable to do the same for freeway projects.

Kevin also links to an Archinect thread that has some photos of the building. In addition to just being better photos than my Caltrans Building photos, they also give some shots of the building interior. I don't think they do the exterior justice, however, since they don't back up enough to convey the building's mass, or the intimidating presence it presents to the street-level.

Forget the debate about the building's environmental features or whether Caltrans should have thrown so much money into it (both the green features and the money are good things in my book), let's just get right down to what's important: who really thinks all this Thom Mayne stuff looks good? The only other work of his I'm seen up close is the new LAUSD Science Center school in Exposition Park, and while the interior of the redone Armory building looks very cool, the exterior of the new classroom space just looks like typical Mayne, without really having any regard for all the classic structures the park contains.

once again, blame the drivers

September 13, 2004 by Eric Richardson

While talking about a Blue Line accident two weeks ago, I mentioned that Houston has a lot of similar problems. This misc.transport.urban-transit post quotes from an article showing that the only thing new about these accidents is that they're car/train instead of car/car or car/solid object.

Between 1998 and 2000, nearly 8,000 crashes were recorded along the 7 1/2-mile corridor where Metropolitan Transit Authority light rail trains now travel. Almost 2,000 were on Main and Fannin alone, two streets that make up most of today's rail route. The pre-rail crash total averaged about 51 incidents per week, or roughly 7 1/2 per day. ...

Metro police have kept busy working numerous incidents along the rail corridor that did not involve trains. About 15 cars have driven into the Main Street Square fountain downtown.

Police reports also detail such mayhem as several cars careening off Main Street into adjacent buildings and running into light and utility poles.

One driver ran over pedestrian barricades near Preston Station, and another rolled through flower beds before crashing into the train station at Main Street Square.

I know, I quoted like 75% of the post, but I just couldn't pass it up.

I have a question about some lyrics

September 13, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I absolutly loved hearing Anna Nalick's 'Breath (2am)', By Wreck of the day....but when I was looking for her lyrics I could not find anything about her except this lone site. When I was listening to her I loved how she really put her heart on the paper and I would like to find out more aobut her, and maybe even catch a copy of her CD, but no store that I am around holds it. Could anyone send me information? Thanks, I appricate all of your help. Rachelle

the fun of connectivity

September 13, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Thanks to the generosity of a friend, my server's been colo'ed in various places in the Bay Area for five years now. By the end of the month, though, that's finally going away. Now I get to figure out what I plan to do next. I think my choice is between running my web stuff off my DSL and buying a Linode. I really want full box access, so a shared hosting plan like dreamhost wouldn't quite cut it for me. My usage isn't really all that great -- I maybe push out 40meg of web traffic daily -- so I'm not in a position where I need a ton of outbound bandwidth.

Currently my DSL is 1.5m down, 384k up, but Speakeasy has a 6.0/768 plan for about $100/mon. That's pretty tempting, considering I currently pay about $60. If I'm going to put money into connectivity, why not have it be connectivity that I'll use and enjoy? I could throw two ethernet cards in the webserver and do a little traffic shaping to ensure some bandwidth is reserved for the web site.

I think that's probably the direction I'll head. While making my decision I need to build a box to use as my temp webserver. I have all the components lying around my bedroom, except a case. I don't think that's going to be a problem. I love scrappy computing.

Friday Questions, beating the heat

September 12, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So Friday I wasn't anywhere near a computer, and missed the week's Friday questions at LA Blogs. Since my Friday morning activity was a bit topical to the question, though, I think I deserve a little leeway for my late response.

• What is your favorite beach to cool off on? When do you go to beat the crowds?

I'm a big fan of just heading down to Manhattan Beach. If I think it'll be crowded I'll head more for the middle ground between Manhattan and Hermosa, but otherwise I'll stick nearer to the Manhattan pier.

• If not the beach, where is your favorite cooling-off spot outdoors? indoors?

Outdoors? Being out on a lake. Friday the destination was Canyon Lake, a private lake community out in Riverside county (right by Lake Elsinore). We took a trip there as the Waterski Team and Wakeboard Club. The water was absolutely perfect.

Indoors? Wherever there's air-conditioning.

• Where is your favorite spot for ice cream/sorbet/gelato?

Lickity Split in El Segundo. Amazing frozen custard.

• What is your favorite flavor?

We had pumpkin once when it was freshly coming out of the machine. That was great. I've gotten the root beer flavor a couple times.

• Stuck at home? What are you making in your blender?

I'm stuck at home wishing I had a blender.

• Got any original concoctions you want to share?

Not really.

• Favorite winter-themed video or book?

My family always had a soft spot for White Christmas. Either that or the Muppets' Christmas special.

• What was your favorite water-themed activity as a kid?

Waterskiing. I guess I'm still a kid.

The Thing in the morning

September 09, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I mentioned a little while back that watching movies in the daytime feels a little odd. Today we watched The Thing from 11am-1pm. It's really weird to come out of a movie like that, stepping from a pitch-black theater to the middle of a really nice day. It just doesn't feel right.

if i had a time machine, it wouldn't be 1:45am

September 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Have you ever watched a movie that had time travel, and watched a whole complicated plot unfold that could have all been averted if the guy with the time machine just went back five minutes before everything started? Right now I'm writing a short paper / expanded journal entry on why that's ok for my speculative cinema class.

Update, 2:41am: The finished product is here, in PDF form.

thursday art walk

September 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Kathy and I went to the beach yesterday. I picked up a copy of the Downtown News in the lobby on the way out and read it through out in the sun.

One item of interest was the little blurb on Thursday's Downtown Art Walk. Being Area-Wide Resident Artist for Downtown, I figure I should start checking things like this out. The DN article made it sound like this was something that started just at noon, but Sean Bonner (and the downtownartwalk site) tells me it's really 12-9, so I think I will be checking it out. Also a little deceptive in the DN article is the claim that this is a walking tour. Yeah, you could walk the whole thing, but it's quite a hike.

it's break time

September 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson

You may have noticed that I've started posting less on the weekends. It's not intentional, but it's good to get away from the computer for a while, especially when you're around oneas much as I am.

Enjoy the weekend. Don't spend it online. After hitting up the beach this morning, Kathy and I are about to head over to Griffith Park and take advantage of the clear air today.

Mount Hollywood, here we come.

ah, the joy of having a fast computer again

September 03, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I mentioned Wednesday that I was finally going to update my computer. Well, that evening I went to Fry's and got scared by how many different motherboards there were to choose from. I finally ended up with a Shuttle AN35N-Ultra motherboard, an AMD Athlon 3000 processor, and 1gig of RAM. Of course I got it all home and realized that my power supply was too old to power it all... who knew that in the last 5 years they went to ATX12V power supplies?

Yesterday I picked up a $30 power supply at Staples and got the whole setup powered up. It took me a while to track down some performance issues (APIC and nforce2 don't play well together, or something), but last night I got that all settled out and got Linux running great.

Then, I had to go and try to get Windows XP running. Now, first off this got complicated because it turns out I don't actually have any XP installation media. I got XP with my laptop, but Toshiba only ships a recovery DVD that has a ghost image of the factory-setup drive on it. So I have XP on my laptop, and I want it on my desktop... How do I accomplish that? Here's how (on the laptop, in Linux):

dd if=/dev/hda1 | ssh 192.168.1.2 dd of=/dev/sda1

Now, you'll notice that I'm putting XP on a SCSI drive on the desktop (since that's what I had lying around). I don't run SCSI on my laptop, obviously, so first go round it presented an issue to try to boot off SCSI. I'd just get the boot menu and then it would reboot. But this morning I thought to install my SCSI driver on the laptop, then copy the drive over.

That worked like a charm. I now have a dual-boot desktop for the first time in like four years.

Just for posterity, the grub commands to boot windows off my SCSI drive:

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1
boot

i fought the train and the train won

September 02, 2004 by Eric Richardson

The Blue Line struck and killed a pedestrian yesterday. The Times report says that brings the line's body count up to 62.

Including Wednesday's fatality, more than 22 occupants of vehicles and more than 40 pedestrians have been killed along the Blue Line since it began operating in 1990, making it the deadliest of the MTA's four rail routes.

That number sounds a lot worse than it is, and the people who like to use this as fodder to hold against Metro are really abusing the facts. These accidents are almost exclusively the result of people failing to obey the appropriate warning signals. Everyone thinks they can beat the train, but the truth is you really can't. It's really big, and it moves pretty fast.

All the warning systems indicating an approaching train — including blowing whistles and flashing lights — were working, Ubaldo said.

With a rush-hour crowd gathering at the station, the woman joined a group of people, including her companion, in racing across the tracks in front of the oncoming train, Ubaldo said.

She was struck near the entrance of the platform and died at the scene, Ubaldo said.

Now, first off, let's all ask ourselves who's editing the Times. If I ended three straight paragraphs with "Ubaldo said," I'd get a lot of red ink on my paper. Maybe the Times doesn't grade so hard, though.

Los Angeles is in no way unique in this problem. Any time you have a rail line operating at street grade, especially in the roadway, you're going to have accidents. Drivers are dumb; pedestrians are dumb. These are just facts. If you look at coverage of Houston's light rail, you'll see that they've had 56 accidents since January. And most of these accidents involve drivers making illegal left turns into the path of a train.

Bottom line: Don't try to outrun the train, and don't blame the train when you try to outrun it and fail. Yes, grade-separation is wonderful, but the expense means it's not going to be a universal reality. Drive (and walk) smarter, and you won't die.

the life of a computer

September 01, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Kathy's computer died yesterday. She awoke to a blue screen, and then after restarting it just blacked out while she was working on something. I'm pointing my finger at either the motherboard or the video, but seeing as they're one and the same it's a good target. Yesterday I grabbed the drive out and threw it in my roommate's computer to get a couple files off. Now this evening I'm going to run over to the Burbank Fry's and pick up the guts of a new system.

I hate the fact that when a motherboard dies it's so hard to just replace it and keep the same CPU and RAM. Specs are always changing, CPU slot types are changing, and by the time something dies the industry's moved far along to something else.

I think I'm also going to take this opportunity to update my desktop machine. On July 27, 1999, Gospelcom upgraded my machine to a PII 400 with 256MB RAM. That same setup has been in my computer for five years now. The case and power supply are even older, dating back to 1997 (I think... possibly late '96). Here's a history of a piece-meal machine:

• Late '96/Early '97: Gospelcom buys me a PII 200, 64MB RAM, 3.4gig HD. 17" monitor. s3 Virge video card.
• Sometime in '98: Upgraded to 128MB RAM
• 07/03/1999: New video card, a Diamond Viper V550. 16MB, NVidia Riva TNT chipset.
• 07/27/1999: Upgraded to PII 400, 256MB RAM. Had picked up some SCSI drives by this point to bring total HD space to 40gig.
• 09/30/1999: I got my first CD burner. 16x read, 4x burn.
• 09/04/2001: My power supply fan died leading to some fun makeshift computing.
• 02/08/2002: New hard drive: 60gig.
• Summer of 2002: New CD burner to replace my dead one. 40x read, 24x write.
• 12/25/2002: New video card: NVidia GeForce4 with 128MB RAM.
• 06/24/2003: Bought a second monitor.
• 01/11/2004: Power supply fan died and needed to be replaced.
• 01/12/2004: New hard drive, 160gig.
• 01/14/2004: My ancient sound card no longer worked with Linux, so I bought a Soundblaster Live.
• 03/14/2004: My original mouse died. I replaced it with a Microsoft wireless Intellimouse.

I'm not sure exactly how complete that is, but it's close. It's also kind of cool to see how much this blog serves as my collective memory.