eWorld: the pink sun look

October 17, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So if you've been here before you'll notice there's a new look. The old one was starting to bug me; we'll see if this one fares better. The previous one lasted since May 2nd of this year. This look should be a lot friendlier to you Safari users. As always, you can check out past looks in the look archive.

Artistsalon: The Big Picture

October 17, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Last night Kathy and I headed up the block to check out Artistsalon's event "the big picture". I was impressed. Jason and crew put on a great event with a little something for everyone. We had to leave a little early since we were both tired (I had gotten up at 5am to go waterskiing before the football game) and I had movies to return to Hollywood Video, so we didn't get to check out the music that was lined up. We did spend some good time walking around checking out all the art up on the walls.

Were I someone who had $750 sitting in his pocket I would have loved to have gotten a piece called "Moo Bettah Meaty Meat" (bringing back good memories of the deceased hamburger stand). But instead I'm a broke college kid, so I just admired it for a few minutes and moved on.

We ended up spending a good bit of time talking to people I've met through the neighborhood council, including my #1 commenter Don Garza (whose blog I will soon be setting up). It was cool to be able to introduce Kathy to a good number of the people in this newfound part of my life, since otherwise I just end up talking about people she doesn't have a face to connect with.

I think I might walk over to the Grand Ave. Festival in a little bit, though I forgot and got some Del Taco for lunch. Oh well.

woo hoo for anniversaries

October 15, 2004 by Eric Richardson

One year ago today I created this site's first RSS feed. That still makes me very late to the party, but I thought it was kind of random that I happened to notice while it actually was the anniversary.

Wifi: The post in which I preemptively diss Pershing Square WIFI

October 15, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So the CRA awarded the Pershing Square wifi contract a little over a week ago. I didn't know until I saw this little Downtown News blurb. From the DN:

City officials last week selected Verge Wireless Networks to provide wireless Internet - or Wi-Fi - access at Pershing Square. The Baton Rouge-based company was hired for $25,000 by the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Recreation and Parks Department, which manages the block-long park bounded by Fifth, Sixth, Olive and Hill streets. The Wi-Fi service will be free during the day, with additional subscriber services available at a cost in evening hours.

Oh, great, pseudo-wifi. It's "free" but your "free" service is "limited." What does limited mean?

Allows you to surf web sites on the Verge Wireless Hotzone, surf web sites on the Internet, and check e-mail using the Hotzone AirMail system or your own e-mail program. Requires a user name and password to login. Restrictions include: 128K bandwidth, no VPN access allowed, no MP3 downloading or high bandwidth video.

That's the description for their FreeConnect service, which I assume is what will be offered during the day in the square. Now, the during the day part is kind of odd. I don't know if they really scouted out the area before they decided to throw that into the contract. Pershing Square is closed at sunset (I think sunset... at night, though).

But aside from that, I read the limitations on the free service to mean that they're going to be restricting your outgoing ports, probably to just 80 (http), 443 (https), 25 (smtp), 110 (pop3), and 143 (imap). If they aren't the only real limit they can have is the bandwidth (which is completely legit... I don't mind people doing that). Also it would appear they're filtering web content (to a small extent... they claim not to be able to restrict access to specific sites, etc) to be able to block mp3 downloads and video.

All this to say... I won't be going to Pershing Square to use the wifi any time soon (err... assuming this is January and test service is there). I told you just a few weeks ago how the library's wifi service was worthless. This appears to be little better. I just hope they don't suck the Biltmore into their web of restrictiveness and charging.

ah politics

October 15, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Michael Moore spoke on campus last night. I didn't go. Partially, that's because I was still just knocked out exhausted from being up most of the night writing, but mostly it's that I just don't really care about what Moore's got to say. Kathy went to some of it, and thought he wasn't really a good public speaker. He stood up there and made fun of Bush, made fun of the protesters, and said republicans win because they get up in the morning and work hard while the democrats have only seen a morning in they're still up from partying the night before.

Of course most of the people there lapped it right up.

Sometime in the next month the school's bringing in General Wesley Clark. Now that's someone I would go see.

weekend events around downtown

October 13, 2004 by Eric Richardson

There's a lot going on downtown this weekend, so I thought I'd take a second to point out a couple things:

• Saturday and Sunday the Brewery art complex is having their Autumn Artwalk. Kathleen at blogging.la posted a good tease for event. I've never made it up that way, but it should be cool.
• Saturday night Artistsalon is hosting "the big picture" in the Spring Arts building, just a couple blocks up the street from me. It's art, it's short films, it's music -- basically it's a crazy amount of cool stuff going on in one place on one night and it's all just a $5 cover. Come out and help Jason lose less money.
• Sunday is the Grand Avenue Festival, taking place on, uh, Grand Avenue, outside the Disney Hall. Food, music, and much much more. Hey, they're shutting down a big section of street. We might as well get to use it for a change, instead of just getting annoyed at having to take a detour.

Of course my Saturday is going to be dominated by ASU coming to town to put their #15 ranking on the line in the Coliseum. 12:30pm start, and it's an ABC regional game. I'm afraid I'll get out of that too late to hit up the Brewery event on Sat, but I might try to squeeze both that and Grand Ave. in Sunday. We'll see.

DLANC: Meeting Number Two

October 13, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I went to my second neighborhood council meeting last night. My first meeting was a good gentle introduction to the whole concept. Last night, though, was for real.

A big topic of the night was conflicts of interest and the question of whether a paid lobbyist should be allowed to have a position on a neighborhood council. Now, this was all in the comment section, so there wasn't a vote or anything (not that I'm sure we would even have the authority to do so). That said, the position that I think many people agreed with was that you can't go around saying people can't be on the board for this or that reason without getting to the edge of a very dangerous slippery slope. Yes, a person should recuse themself from any vote in which they or a company they represent has a financial interest. Yes, they should be very upfront in revealing when they're being paid to lobby for something. No, they should never take money to lobby their own council. But of course they can still be very valuable members of the group. If they're stakeholders in downtown they need to be allowed to have a voice.

Whew...

In other news:

• Roy's Restaurant is looking to open a location downtown at 800 S. Fig. It's an old bank branch location that's been shuttered for many years.
• We get business cards. I need them.
• We had a big debate over whether to spend money on someone to take minutes at board and executive committee meetings. The money had been approved previously, but a motion was made to reverse that decision. Here we actually had a vote with role-call. I voted no to keep the money in place. I like seeing good minutes. It makes me have less to write down during the meeting.
• I have to turn in a "professional bio" for the new DLANC website. It should be fun making that up.
• During discussion Ed Marzec used some word I didn't understand, so I wrote it down. I don't have my notes with me here, but I'll post an update on that when I get back to them and can look it up.

Next week is the next AACE meeting (here are my notes on the last one). Tuesday, 6:30pm, City Hall. Check out the AACE yahoo group if you're into that sort of thing.

serving off the big iron

October 12, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I posted this picture of my hacked together server last night and LA Town Crier Don Garza left a comment wondering what it was he was seeing. His confusion isn't all that surprising. From the picture all you see is a jumble of stuff sitting in a corner. What could that be?

hey eric is that your computer?

Dude . Or what . IS this your server/

What the heak is this ?

It's a fair question. The "box" -- strike that; let's call it a conglomeration of components -- you see if what's currently serving up my web site and email, as well as acting as a NAT box providing apartment internet to Magilla's and my computers. There's not a whole lot to it, really. When I replaced most of my computer early last month I was left with some leftover pieces. Most importantly, I had a motherboard (with processor and memory) and a power supply. From that right there you could pretty much built a computer if you wanted to (and I used to do a fair bit of that when I was scrounging cycles for distributed.net). The confluence of several events meant I had some parts and needed to build a server in my apartment, so I figured why not. That's how this beast was born.

Let's take a look at the pieces individually:

• The power supply is an 180W ATX that originally shipped with a Gateway 2000 Pentium 200 in March of 1997. The fan has died twice, and the fan I've got on there doesn't quite fit the hole but it gets the job done.
• The motherboard is from July, 1999, and houses a PII 400 and 384MB RAM (I just installed 128MB the other day that I rescued from Kathy's dead computer).
• The 60gig hard drive has had a troubled history. I bought it in February, 2002, and it worked great until January, 2004. Then I tried to spin it up in August and nothing happened. But then in September I smacked it and it came to life. Now it's running like a champ.
• The two ethernet cards have to be separated or they'll manage to short each other out somehow. There's a Bank of America mailing sitting between them.

And, well, that's it. The motherboard is sitting on top of the static bag my new one came in while the other two components are just chillin' on the windowsill. I just noticed the video card fan is dead, so that might be trouble in the future. For now, though, it works great.

email sanity returns

October 12, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I finally got around to reinstalling qpsmtpd yesterday. In and of itself that doesn't do a lot for me, but what revolutionizes my email is greylisting. The first time around the installation process I talked about how it worked, so I won't re-explain that here.

What I will say, though, is that in the day before installing greylisting I got at least 700 spam emails. In the 18 hours or so since: maybe a dozen. Most of those were then caught by spamassassin.

Ah, sanity has once again returned to my email.

the downtown news gets the scoop

October 12, 2004 by Eric Richardson

It's nice to see the Downtown News getting a scoop with their interview of Anschutz Entertainment Group President Tim Leiweke. In the interview Leiweke says that the Clippers might not be back at Staples next year:

We actually would make more money if, instead of having 40 Clippers games, we had five concerts. So, those are some of the decisions we're going to have to make. The Clippers issue is in negotiations now. Their lease is up after this year. And ironically, shockingly, we've got to make a decision as to whether we even want them back. We're not sure.

Today the Times runs a piece quoting the story and I saw a report today on one of the local news shows doing the same thing.

The interesting question to me is where might the Clippers go if Staples doesn't want them back? There was talk of the team playing some games in Anaheim if Kobe had been signed, might this be the development that moves all their games there? It would seem to me that the OC might be good for the Clippers in terms of attendance numbers, with less local competition. I really don't see the team going back to the Sports Arena; it's hard to go back after you've tasted an arena as nice as Staples.

surging up the charts

October 11, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Just looking through the stats today and noticed a ton of hits for a random post mentioning Joe Purdy. Turns out he got a song into the last episode of the new ABC show "Lost" and that looks to have really spiked interest in his stuff. Very cool; he's an amazing musician and it's good to see talent like that get rewarded.

bus bus bus bus

October 04, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I took the bus to campus today. I've done that a half dozen or so times now. A couple times I've gotten lucky, and the bus has been there right after I got to the stop. Today was not one of those days. I walked down to the bus sign and checked my clock: 10:24. A DASH D passes. And another. And another... 5 in all before my Metro Line 38 finally shows up at 10:42.

A couple hours later I needed to head back downtown to go to the Central Library. I was going to borrow Kathy's car, but then thought better of it and walked over to catch the DASH F. Unlike the D, the F has 12-minute headways -- or so they say. I sat down and 18 minutes later the bus showed up, and within the next stop or two was packed. I don't really understand why LADOT makes such a big deal about 5-minute headways with most of the rest of the downtown DASH lines but stays with optimally 12-minute headways on the Expo Park line. Every time I've been on this bus it's been packed, and with the number of USC students being forced to move downtown it's only going to get worse.

There was an LADOT guy on the bus having people fill out little surveys. I registered my complaints, or at least as much as could be registered via marking the "Frequency of Service" box poor.