May, 31, 2004 archives

i now have only four items in my personal inbox: three mails mentioning various books to read (two were comments here), and one about getting blogdrive.com to do an authenticated ping of blo.gs so it doesn’t need to fetch the page to verify it was updated. (something i suggested but haven’t gotten around to implementing and documenting how to do.)

the minimum financial requirements for a blockbuster franchise are a net worth of $400,000 with a liquidity of $100,000. a useful number to know as a benchmark.

i’ve mentioned the ralphs that will be opening downtown before (drawing a comment from one of the folks who spearheaded the deal — gotta love people who google their own name). of course, where there’s a big grocery store, other retailers will follow. according to this december 2002 press release, blockbuster will also be opening a location in the same complex.

i picked up the latest issue of los angeles magazine last week, because it features several articles about downtown. one of the things that was particularly interesting is a map of the downtown area with all of the loft developments either already open, under construction, or planned. one thing that is noticable is that the gas company lofts (where the ralphs and blockbuster will be) are in the southwest corner of all of the development, and the number of developments is actually weighted towards the northeast corner of the map. it may look different if you plotted the number of lofts — the developments near the gas company lofts are generally larger than those on this side of downtown. (and southwest/northeast is just using the top of the map as north. it’s actually closer to being the west and east sides of downtown, which is on a diagonal grid.)

according to yahoo! maps, the location of the ralphs and blockbuster is 1.1 miles from the old bank district. i haven’t been to that end of town for a while. i wonder how close they are to opening. i guess i should make the trek out there some day.