My Personal Cell Phone Lot
January 07, 2005 by Eric Richardson
LAX recently opened a cell phone lot, where you can wait for free until the passenger you're picking up gives you a call and tells you they're ready. It's a great idea, but I prefer something a little friendly. So that's why I'm sitting at Panera Bread right now, waiting for Kathy's flight to come into LAX. Her plane has started its initial descent; the tracker says it's at 28,000ft and 20 minutes out.
Driving past the airport on the way here it appeared that planes were taking off and landing in opposite the normal direction. Since the prevailing wind in LA comes off the ocean, typically planes both take off and land facing the sea. Our abnormal weather right now must have brought atypical air flows.
Spam Strikes Again
January 07, 2005 by Eric Richardson
It amazes me that just a week after re-adding comments, I'm already getting comment spam. One I deleted yesterday, and one today. I had long thought that such posts were enabled by so many sites running standard tools like Movable Type, etc, and that by doing my own thing they would have to manually account for my site.
Well, either the comment spam tools are more thorough than I had imagined or the spammers are pretty bored. In any case I just added IP address logging to comments, so I think my solution for now will just be to start banning IPs that produce comment spam. If that doesn't work I'll get a little harsher.
Update (4:06pm): The first spam to have its IP logged came from a dynamic IP pool under http://interbusiness.it.
It's Wet Outside*
January 07, 2005 by Eric Richardson
So it started raining this morning. Not hard yet, but even just walking across the street to pay (cash) for my parking was frigid thanks to a whipping wind. The little image to the left is a thumbnail of what our local radar looked like when I pulled it up just now.
To really understand how much rain LA's gotten recently, take a look at these pictures from USC's Facilities department. That's a lot of water, in a lot of places it shouldn't be. City Hall's having the same problems, according to an article in today's Daily News.
Update (12:21pm): I just walked to the little market next door to pick up a 2-liter of Coke, and they were working to move merchandise and cover up items near a couple nice drips from the (very high -- 20ft?) ceiling. There was a decent amount of standing water on the floor.
Doh
January 06, 2005 by Eric Richardson
One of the things I needed to do before I left for Michigan was pay ahead for my January parking, since I wouldn't be back until today. I went down to do that the morning of the 21st, but they weren't really prepared for people to do that, so they told me just to pay when I got back. That's cool. So what do I do? I leave my checkbook in Michigan. And I should have extra checks around here somewhere, but I can't find them for anything.
So now I need to figure that out in the morning, before the rain comes.
It's Good to Be Home
January 06, 2005 by Eric Richardson
As good as it was to be back in Michigan for a few weeks, it's definitely nice to be back in LA, sitting at my own desk, about to sleep in my own bed.
The flights were uneventful. On the Detroit to LA leg I sat next to a guy who's running the Bentley exhibit at the Auto Show. He was cool; we talked some during the flight and then ended up giving him a ride to his hotel since it was right downtown. I need to get over to the Convention Center sometime to check out the show. I went a few years ago and enjoyed it, but haven't been back.