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.