December, 15, 2005 archives

a mail boxes, etc. or generic equivalent. i spent way too long today trying to find a (stocked) fedex drop box. there is supposedly a fedex kinko’s at 110 e. 9th street, but i couldn’t find it. i finally found a drop-box in the back of the los angeles law center after an elevator repair guy pointed me in the right direction. the first place i went is the post office at california plaza, which also has a fedex drop box, but it was out of envelopes.

i played with hanging my camera from a pipe over my desk, with the idea of capturing another self-portrait. the shots with me didn’t turn out like i wanted, but this is a reasonable picture of my desk and chair. if you click on the picture, you can my silly obsessive annotation of the picture.

when the medallion gets built across the street from me, i suspect i’m going to miss this view. actually, i may still be able to see city hall after it is built, but the wider view will be less exciting.

as eric has covered over on blogdowntown, the light on top of city hall is the lindbergh beacon that was used to help pilots navigate, but is now just switched on for the holidays.

i was playing around with some longer exposure times, and took a thirty-second exposure of just the traffic on main street.

i also grabbed another close-up of the full moon. it might be fun to get a telescope with a camera mount to get some really good close-ups of the moon, but it would be such a one-trick purchase that it’s not high on my list.

there are only a few hours left in my work year, so i did a little crunching to see what i accomplished this year. since i started the year with a new position on the maintenance team, there is really one major metric — how many bugs that were assigned to me are now closed. as of this instant, that’s 224. it will go up by another few when some additional fixes are documented. here is the search to see all of the server bugs i have closed. “server bugs” includes bugs in the command-line clients.

that works out very close to one bug per working day. whew!

of course, i’m just one step in the process. sergei golubchik is listed as the reviewer on over 300 of the bugs that were closed this year!

i’ve finally caught up with the first five seasons of oz, and now join the list of people waiting for the sixth and final season to make it to dvd. so far, season four has been my least favorite (aging pill? wtf?), and the first season is probably the strongest. but at this point, i’ve committed enough hours to watching that i definitely want to see how it all ends up.

there are a lot of great characters in the series, and some good story arcs, but sometimes the episodes are a little too disjoint, with storylines that are so distinct that there’s little reason for them to be in the same episode. that’s made even more clear when listening to the commentary on the last episode of season five, where they talk about how one of the storylines in that season was originally part of season four, and some of the scenes actually shot during that season but held over until near the end of season five.