tomorrow, today, whatever

December 09, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Don correctly pointed out to me via email that at the time I said "tomorrow" in the last post, it was in fact today. Details, details.

I just finished my first final. I felt really good about it, so that hopefully means something. Every time midterms or finals come around I get reminded just how much I dislike having to write with a pen. It hurts after a while. My poor little hand and wrist isn't used to it.

I've got one more final in an hour, and then there'll just be one paper between me and really being done with the semester.

tomorrow will be a fun day

December 08, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Tomorrow morning I've got a final at 8am.

8am.

Yikes. I get to go write about censorship for a couple hours. Four essay questions. Number one will be about violence. We watched Natural Born Killers in class, but I skipped it. Number two will be about porn. We watched Deep Throat (which I also skipped... even if I was about porn -- porn in the morning? that's just not right), Body Heat, and Bitter Moon. Questions three and four will be about political correctness. We watched Year of the Dragon (which I'm watching right now) and read Nation of Victims and Bias. I feel ok about the final as a whole, but 8am is so early. I'm going to watch a bit more of this film and then just go to bed.

Oh, and I also have my other final tomorrow at 11am. That's 40 multiple choice questions about communications and sports. Lots of stuff about how the media creates the story of sports, etc.

changing LA, 14 pages at a time

December 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So Bob Hertzberg's changela.com has linked to my blog a couple times now. If you're an LA person and you haven't seen Hertzberg's site yet you really should check it out just to see the great job his staff's doing with their newslinks. They're very comprehensive in rounding up what's going on in LA.

That said, though, I don't think that all too many people are reading. The five or six mentions I've gotten have led to a total of 15 click-throughs. I get far more referred traffic from Jim winstead's blog (with 47 referred visits last month... I know, I'm big-time, eh?). On the non-blog-side, the most referral traffic I'm getting right now (not counting search engines) is from somaweb.org, linking to my four year old senior english paper comparing visions of the future in the books Snow Crash and Brave New World.

movies and food

December 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I put together a pretty successful little trip this evening. I needed to pick up some food and a pair of DVDs that I was supposed to have watched in class during the semester. So tonight, after finishing up a paper, I made the rounds of hollywoodvideo.com and blockbuster.com to see what I could do. One of the problems with my neighborhood (and the area around USC, oddly) is a lack of good video rental shops, so anywhere was going to be a bit of a drive. Blockbuster these days allows you to check what stores have what titles, and as luck would have it no one store in my area had both the titles I needed. But I think I did well for myself...

From my apartment I headed west and went 110N -> 101N. Exit Santa Monica, head north a few blocks up Western to Hollywood. At the Blockbuster there I picked up the DVD of Bitter Moon.

From there I headed east on Hollywood, and not far down the street at the three-way intersection of Hollywood, Sunset, and Virgil, I stopped and picked up the DVD for Body Heat. Oddly, these two Blockbusters have different pricing. A week rental is $3.99 at Hollywood/Western, while the same at Sunset/Virgil is like $4.30. Odd. Both get tax added on after.

From there I headed a block or two back west on Sunset, turned south on Vermont, and headed down to the Little Caesar's at Vermont/1st. $6.50 for a large pizza and an order of crazy bread, and I was headed back downtown.

Total trip time: a little under an hour.

i moved out here for a reason, you know

December 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Ok, this crappy weather in LA thing has gone on long enough. It's cold, and cloudy, and they're calling for rain, and that's really just not what I agreed to when I moved out here. Today: high of 58 and rain. Tonight: low of 50 and showers.

Yesterday's low temp was 42 degrees, just two degrees off the date's record low. December 3 the numbers were reversed, with 40 as the actual and 42 as the previous record.

That's just not cool. I like the clean air from the rain, but these clouds and I aren't on speaking terms.

Dec. 21 I fly back to MI for a few weeks, but there at least the crappy weather is a part of the deal.