| Memetic Rick Semi-regular ramblings from a Los Angeles transplant, science geek, and home-brewer all rolled into one guy. |
Current Terror Alert Level |
| Memetic Rick Semi-regular ramblings from a Los Angeles transplant, science geek, and home-brewer all rolled into one guy. |
Current Terror Alert Level |
Yep, there's finally a new Tori Amos album. I'm finally giving it a listen at work on a Saturday, when I am free to blast sound around the lab. The frantic need to shoehorn a full band into her songs is mostly gone, giving us musical composition that is a nice return to the lushness of the Under the Pink days. One or two songs about her daughter, naturally. A few more digs at the current US government that made Scarlet's Walk so fun. And plenty of little puzzle songs that made her earliest work a mental exercise at times. Me like.
She's playing smaller venues again, too. Her stadium phase was a big disappointment. She's playing Royce Hall right in UCLA in April, but tickets for her performances continue to do that thing where they sell out in two minutes. Grr.
Yeah, so that exam on Wednesday: my computer science midterm (algorithms analysis). The professor started things off by explaining that the first question (of three) was there so that everyone got "at least some points". The next two problems were impressively difficult. I shot for partial credit and filled the page.
I also have been fighting a lab experiment all week. I'm in the lab today, in fact, to try again. It would be nice if it worked.
Why am I chipper at all? Running five miles is no longer a chore, and I finally have been going to the university gym long enough to run into a professor I know in the showers.
Who was it? My comp sci professor.
What do City Councilmember Tom LaBonge, County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, and the city of Beverly Hills have in common? Well, yes, they all think Jamie Foxx is a shoo-in for Best Actor (and who doesn't?), but they're also all in favor of extending the Red Line subway westward along Wilshire, all they way out to Santa Monica.(more from the LA Times)This astounding consensus, which Councilmember LaBonge has tirelessly worked to build, didn't carry much weight for the MTA Planning Committee. The committee unceremoniously rejected the expansion program, saying that subway tunneling would only serve certain "vested interests". We're guessing they were not referring to Los Angeles commuters, who would certainly benefit from a subway that actually went somewhere.
I had an exam today (more on that later, no doubt) so it was nice to stumble upon this Dutch animator/puppeteer's website. Click on GB for the English version, or just on "filmpjes" for some cute little video clips rendered in Flash.
The DJ is my favorite. (Seen first on www.milkandcookies.com)
The Year 2772? "Angular, slightly menacing-looking" characters?
Buzz Bunny?
It's no pizza-shilling Muppet, but perhaps I *am* getting old. Phooey on that. At least I have a nice collection of the original Looney Tunes on DVD, via Christmas, to drown my sorrows in...
(original Post-Gazzette link above via BoinBoing)
I now own my first keg. It's a 5 gallon beauty, all ready for a batch of yumminess. This is the first step in my master plan to build a small kegerator that is suitable for moving to wherever the heck I go after UCLA.
We were thinking of just putting a tap on the kitchen fridge and forsaking half the bottom shelf. LA is weird about including fridges in apartments, so we do own that outright, but that's not as movable an option.
[edited to include the proper negation of fridge as movable in the last line.]
There once was a darned spiffy dive/sports bar two blocks from my apartment. Plenty of colorful, friendly locals and pitchers of Sierra Nevada for eight bucks. Sometime last summer, Jen and I discovered that they had a karaoke night on Wednesdays. I organized a school outing to blow off steam, and a good time was had.
Jen and Craig and I started going regularly... almost every week. Los Angeles has done crazy things to me, not the least of which is converting me to a karaoke fiend. The hostess was, and still is, a hoot. The Wednesday night bartender got to know us and started offering up the occasional free shot. We had fun getting to know the other "regulars." Our song picks changed almost weekly, ever eager to test ourselves and the limitations of the songlist. It was nifty that some of the regulars, who would often rotate through the same two or three songs each week, started to vary their songs, too. I like to think we were a positive influence, even though we never socialize with these folks without a beer and a microphone.
I became known as "Weird Al" (at least to one guy) because of my tendency to sing "Amish Paradise" once a month or so.
Fast forward to November. Word floated around one night that ownership of the bar was changing. There's a backroom, clubish place adjacent, but hardly ever used. That made the whole establishment a classic money pit, despite the often full front bar. People were sprending rumors that it would close down after the Superbowl and reopen as a Mexican restaurant. Tempers flared. Regulars stated they disliked "change." The place closed briefly in December, only to reopen the following week with a fresh coat of ugly cream paint, revarnished bar, and carpeting that changed and/or ruined the acoustics. The place was renamed to something dorkier than the original name, but it appeared that the restaurant was going to be situated in the backroom, with the old bar remaining a lounge. Karaoke Wednesdays ended up on the promotional advertising.
Things were looking up, even. But, the damage was done. Both our favorite bartenders were apparently fired or fled the scene. The locals started to taper off, at least on Wednesdays. New people weren't flocking in, either, so it became a depressing shell of its former glory.
You can probably see this coming. Last night, there couldn't have been more than a dozen people in the place at any given time. And, the karaoke hostess let us know on the downlow that this was her company's last week at that location. We exchanged emails. She does other locations on other nights, but I already miss the excuse for mid-week festivities.
So, to the new owners: Good luck. You managed to lose my business, any recommendation to UCLA friends, and status as a place to bring out-of-town guests. I reckon you also lost the business of at least thirty people who also regularly stopped in, too. All this before the new restaurant even opens fully.
Oh, and $8 burritos in Los Angeles, anywhere in Los Angeles, make me laugh.
I barely noticed that there was a season missing in the first place, but I am waist deep in graduate school after all. Still, I am shocked that the NHL decided to cancel their entire season over a labor dispute.
How did we get to a point where a $40 million salary cap was unacceptable? What am I missing?
Although the new NIN album isn't out until May, the official band website has a little video clip with some new music in it. This site has always been short on usability in favor of visual style, but for now this little taste of the new stuff is at the top of the following link...
I've been following the author's writing and publishing saga through his mailing list for over a year, now, but Higher-Order Perl is about to be released. He promises a complete copy of the book free on his site, too.
What makes this such an interesting book is that it is entirely based on the concept of writing Perl code to generate other Perl code. Your scripts could conceivably re-write themselves using these techniques. I makes my head hurt sometimes, but I look forward to trying this out...
Oh yeah, I have a few minutes still, at least in Pacific Time Zone, but Happy Chinese New Year - 2005 is the Year of Yiyou, popularly known as the Year of the Rooster (They can keep the rest of their cute link title, too.)
I have made little mention to people with whom I do not have constant face-to-face interaction about the marathon, but I am indeed joining Jen (and Craig and Michelle) for some quality time on the streets of Los Angeles on March 6th. I'm doing the run/walk option with the modest goals (in order):
1) Finish
2) Finish in 6 hours
The official course map is a fun and inspirational desktop, but it isn't to scale. So, geek that I am, I fiddled with Google Maps and Photoshop and produced this beauty:
(or a larger version @200kb for spiffier effect...)
I have disabled comments from non-typekey users and disabled all trackbacks, since I am wasting way too much time cleaning up stupid movabletype spam.
If the uptoolate.com webhost ever wakes up and upgrades to perl 5.8, I might give MT-Blacklist a whirl, but my hands are tied at the moment.
This almost makes me want to try a different blogging software package, but I'm doing enough web development for the lab right now to take on anything additional for fun.
