July, 15, 2005 archives

we’re well into the thick of the summer television season, when network news divisions roll out their documentary-ish limited series, like abc’s hooking up. it follows a bunch of single women as they date by using online dating sites. so you get the seriousness and production value of a news documentary, but on a topic that fits with all of the other reality schlock on television.

as to the actual content of the show, it left me wanting to curl up into a ball under my bed. that probably explains a few things.

this week i gave a restaurant that is apparently just called “cuba” a try. it’s located in the building on the west* side of spring between third and fourth. it’s a little on the expensive side for what i would consider for a regular lunch stop if i ate lunch out every day, but the food is quite good. it made me miss going to versailles for lunch regularly.

• i think it is on what people consider the west side of spring. downtown los angeles is on a diagonal grid, which i find enormously confusing to translate into map directions for some reason. it’s actually the northwest side of spring.

according to the los angeles downtown news, the judson c. rives building on broadway has been acquired to be turned into lofts. based on the address and size, i think this is the building with the heineken mural on the north* side. i wondered what was meant by “6-unit tomahawk lofts on main and spring streets” because those are parallel streets, not cross streets. but the tomahawk lofts are at 812-814 s. spring — where main and spring to intersect. i guess that shows how often i head that far south(west) on main or spring.

loftification would be a great name for a blog about all the development in the downtown area.

• i’m getting better.

i’m in the midst of upgrading my server to ubuntu and it’s causing some upheaval. my incoming email is currently offline, but should be back in a few hours at most.

first annoyance: php5 is not included in ubuntu, so i still have to rely on an unofficial apt repository for that.

update: my mail works again. i switched to running qpsmtpd with postfix instead of qmail, so it took some time to beat into shape. i’m also now running the latest development version of qpsmtpd from the subversion repository. i hope it explodes spectacularly — i was imagining a life without email earlier today, and it didn’t seem like a terrible thing.

the washington post writes about sites that let users design their own shoes like nikeid.com, but one thing missing from these sites is being able to order different sizes for each shoe. as long as they’re being manufactured on-demand, i wonder if there’s a reason not to do this.