November, 3, 2005 archives

okay, since everybody else has finally tossed a link their way, now i have to point out the new curbed la, a blog about los angeles real estate and neighborhoods. they’ve gotten off to a great start.

it finally dawned on me what the building was in their header — it’s city hall. you’d think i would have picked up on that sooner considering i can see city hall from my desk.

i got a blood donor card after the blood drive a couple of months ago, and it’s been staring at me from my desk reminding me that enough time has passed so i can donate again. so searching for a local blood drive, i ran across one at the los angeles public library on november 21. because i already have a reason to be there that day (to observe a children’s tour), that works out really well.

something i learned from my blood donor card is that my blood type is a positive. i remember that we tested our blood to figure out the type in a science class in junior high school, but i could have sworn that i had b positive blood.

this wired article about myspace is interesting, but what really caught my eye was justin’s comment about it: “interesting, MySpace has evolved into "indie music + SNS", like Flickr is "photos + SNS"; also, each of the SNSes seems to have found a niche.”

i was thinking almost the exact same thing this morning, but in relation to yahoo! groups. where the groups concept is “form a group, here’s tools for them to use,” the new model appears to be “here’s a tool, form some groups around their use.”

hear that lonesome whippoorwill
he sounds too blue to fly
the midnight train is whining low
i’m so lonesome i could cry

i’ve never seen a night so long
when time goes crawling by
the moon just went behind a cloud
to hide its face and cry

did you ever see a robin weep
when leaves begin to die?
like me, he’s lost the will to live
i’m so lonesome i could cry

the silence of a falling star
lights up a purple sky
and as i wonder where you are
i’m so lonesome i could cry

— “i’m so lonesome i could cry,” by hank williams from 20 of hank williams’ greatest hits (among other hank williams albums)

not a happy song.

producing open source software by karl fogel (hardcopy) looks to be a very good book about the human side of producing open-source software.

culture clash, an “infamous chicano performance group,” will be at the central library as part of the zócalo series on december 14. you might think i’m mentioning this early, but someone beat me to it a long time ago. you can actually make (free) reservations now.

the zócalo event earlier this week at the national center for the preservation of democracy in little tokyo, with los angeles times editor dean baquet and moderated by l.a. observed’s kevin roderick, didn’t really light any fires. but baquet did make it pretty clear that he was concerned about making sure the times reclaims more of a los angeles voice.

something i don’t think i’ve seen noted anywhere else is that the new blogs from the times, like gold derby and the movable buffet, are being hosted by typepad. and they’ve got rss feeds. now if only the actually news site did.

spartan is a david mamet film starring val kilmer as a special ops officer trying to track down the daughter of a high-ranking government official. (it’s sort of implied it is the president.) it’s not at all flashy, but i think it also fails to spark. the dialogue is classic mamet, of course.

i stumbled in getting discs in the mail the last few days, so now my flow of movies to/from netflix is all screwed up, and i’ve got one movie to last through the weekend. (i only have one book from the library, too.)