January, 16, 2005 archives

as reported by the los angeles downtown news, the city council has passed a measure preventing new bail bond businesses from opening in little tokyo. while the article cites community concern about the “negative air” such business bring, the people best served by this measure are the existing bail bond business, who will now face less competition. it makes me wonder who spurred jan perry to put the measure up before the council.

the new york times has a long article on thom mayne, the los angeles-based architect who designed the new caltrans building in downtown los angeles (which they also reviewed recently).

walking back to my apartment from chinatown the other night, i had a discussion with a friend about how dull the cathedral of our lady of the angels is. i’ve only been on the inside one time, so i can’t say much about that, but the exterior of it is utterly uninspiring.

speaking of chinatown, i’ve really been lame in not heading over there more often. using the red and gold lines to get to it from my apartment is overkill, but it is easily reached via bus (and probably the dash on weekdays). and the walk isn’t bad at all. it was only when we were leaving chinatown and i saw how close city hall was that it really connected that my apartment was just a few blocks further than that.

eric meyer wrote up his experience with teaching his daughter (now thirteen months old) sign-language using baby signs. very cool.

so i sort of understand the fascination with tags (although i haven’t provided any way for browsing my entries here by tag), but it seems a shame that the common implementations eschew spaces within tags.

one thing that is fun about tags is that they can provide a bit of meta-commentary about an entry, sort of like a title sometimes does.

obviously my furious pace of work-related blogging tapered off pretty quickly. i’ve still been fighting the good fight against bugs (two swatted today).

something i’ve always been very flexible on is coding style, so i haven’t had much trouble adapting to the coding style for the mysql server, although my brace-placement reflexes need some re-training. one rule it has that i haven’t run across before is how assignment is handled, with the equal sign next to the variable name, like so:

lower_case_table_names= arg;

this makes it easy to use basic search tools (like grep or vim’s / command) to find where assignments to a particular variable happen, without also getting hits at equality tests, which should always have a space between the variable name and ==.