Monthly Archives: December 2008

General

But I’m your biggest fan…

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I bought all your records, clipped every magazine article, videotaped you on Letterman, saw you play at the Roxy, the El Rey, the Wiltern, and the Bowl. I joined the fan club, wrote you letters, and sent you photos. So why didn’t you talk to me that night at Swingers when I came up to you and Malcolm McDowell in the booth in the back?

Thanks to the “life streaming” phenomenon, every Joe can now feel like a pop star when the quietly obsessive Jane comes up to them and starts talking casually about Joe’s life. As I’ve mentioned before, between your various profiles, blogs, Twitter and photo streams, any idiot who bothered could piece together a well defined picture of your life. Your education, where you were last night, what you ate on Sunday, what you saw on your last vacation, who your friends are, your political views, your favorite liquor, what you bought from Amazon, your hobbies, the name of your cat.

Example 1: Beatles, Yoga, Jon Stewart, New Age, sympathetic, Jewish, born in November, liberal, Democrat, alternative, 80’s, classics, Ivy League, no land-based meat, emotional.

Example 2: Netflix, Tivo, born in December, museums, clubs, drinking, food, web 2.0, fashion, spends time with grandma, owns property in AZ, developer, Lessig, Heroes, Britney, SNL, gay, Jewish, tall, karaoke, make that very gay.

Example 3: food, Blackberry, hospital, County-USC, Democrat, alt/indie music, ninjas, music, Obama, AIDS, food, garage sale, Silver Lake, probably hipster, NPR, WBR, Darfur, ACLU.

Bonus points if you recognize yourself in the examples. 🙂

Photos

Downtown Los Angeles last Saturday

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Despite the puking guy and the urinating guy, I managed to get some photos that don’t completely suck.

Old Bank District Holiday Block Party

This was at the Old Bank District Holiday Block Party. They had lights strung up for a single block.

Farmers and Merchants Bank Building, Hotel Barclay

City Hall

The greenish tone on City Hall always reminds me of the Lord of the Rings because I’m a big dork.

Farmers and Merchants Bank Building

Note the detail on the Farmers and Merchants Bank Building; you don’t see that anymore on new buildings. We’ve lost our capacity (budget?) for the little fussy bits.

Los Angeles Times Building

Tribune filed for bankruptcy protection today! I wonder what the Chandlers think.

Financial District Skyline

I like this one the best.

Blog

Revising the Past

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I’ve been blogging on and off for about five and a half years on three different platforms. I started off on Blogger and used their FTP publishing service to push files to my domain, but after I had about a thousand posts, either the service or my domain host was not able to make this a reliable method of posting. Movable Type was great because it seemed to be a “serious” blogging platform, but after a while, it simply wasn’t able to keep up with the comment spam. Hundreds of bots flooded the blog with links for all sorts of porn, prescription pills, and … is there any other kind of spam? WordPress made me very happy despite the rough edges because of the third party plugins like Akismet, and now WP-SpamFree.

Unfortunately, all of this blogging history leaves a lot of loose ends. I have hundreds of posts that link to articles and sites that no longer exist. I also have links to blog posts of mine that refer to the old Blogger or Movable Type filename. And I’ve got tons of posts where I quoted some article or site using an em instead of a blockquote, simply because I was going for a particular presentation rather than trying to convey meaning. This last bit ought to get me at least a year in geek purgatory.

Now that I’ve switched my hosting provider to Dreamhost (they’re awesome), updated WordPress to the latest release, completed the NaBloPoMo thing, and gotten involved in this Blogging Challenge with CJ, I have a renewed interest in my blog. I’ve updated the robots.txt, published a new XML sitemap and told Google about it, installed All-In-One SEO, and have been going over some logs and other things to figure out what’s broken and how to fix it.

As you can imagine, it’s a big pain in the ass.

At what point do you just say “Fuck it” and leave the 404s, stop trying to figure out what to put in the .htaccess file to redirect MT URLs to their most likely WP counterpart, stop categorizing the uncategorized posts, stop fixing the errors in text encoding that happened from backing up and restoring MySQL files, leave the blockquotes as ems, and stop worrying about whether your reader will be able to follow a link to a news article in 2003 on the Boston Globe site that talks about a fireworks accident in Florida?

Now’s probably a good time.

Cool Stuff

Old Bank District Holiday Block Party Tonight

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In case you were wondering, this is where I’ll be tonight.

blogdowntown: 12/6: Old Bank District Block Party to Let Downtowners Play in the Streets

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Food, drink and music take to the streets on Saturday, December 6th, as Gilmore Associates hosts the first annual Old Bank District Block Party at 4th and Main. The 6pm to midnight event will close off two blocks and feature two stages of music, an art bazaar and charity booths.

Old Bank District Holiday Block Party 2008 Flyer

Old Bank District Holiday Block Party 2008 Flyer

…

The evening will see 4th street closed between Spring and Main, as well as Main street shut between 4th and 5th. Local traffic will be allowed through to the garage at 415 S. Main, which will be offering a special $3 flat rate.

Those traveling to the event from elsewhere in Downtown can use the Late Night DASH Holiday service, operating from 6:30pm to 3am.

Little Radio is programming the music and has the schedule and band info on their site.

Little Radio: Old Bank District Holiday Block Party

SET TIMES

06:30-07:00 Restaurant
07:15-07:45 Dawes
08:00-08:30 Rumspringa
08:45-09:15 The Like
09:30-10:00 Whispertown 2000
10:15-10:45 The Afternoons

See you there.

Useful Stuff

Cocktail Recipe: Sidecar

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One of the more expensive drinks you could make.

Sidecar

  • 2 parts Cognac
  • 2 parts Cointreau
  • 1 part lemon juice

Shake with cracked ice; strain into chilled cocktail glass frosted with sugar.

Some notes:

Ingredients matter. Use Cognac, Cointreau, and fresh lemons. Bottled lemon juice doesn’t belong anywhere near your shaker.

Sidecar Ingredients

Don’t skimp on the ice. The little known ingredient in many cocktails is ice melt (water). Don’t skimp on the shaking, either. Count to 30.

Shaker with Ice

Frosting the glass. Run a lemon wedge around the rim of the glass, then rotate the glass upside-down in a bit of sugar.

Sidecar Cocktail