September, 16, 2005 archives

i am, of course, powerless to go to amoeba without picking up some music. surprisingly, they didn’t have the two albums i was looking for. i didn’t pick up the dengue fever album because i had to bail out quickly, but the part of their appearance that i caught was great.

• blinking lights and other revelations by eels
• pressure chief by cake
• comfort eagle by cake
• yesterday rules by mtx

i think i forgot to check my mail on wednesday. so this may be two day’s worth:

• invitation and reservation form for the literary odyssey dinners benefitting the los angeles public library (starting at $350/seat)
• solicitation from the carter center
• invitation and reservation form for “a season for sharing dinner” benefitting the los angeles regional foodbank (starting at $500/seat)
• solicitation from acción international
• newsletter from la’s best
• thank you letter and receipt from la’s best

the literary odyssey dinners sound kind of cool — it is a bunch of 16-40 person dinners with various authors in different sponsor’s homes. a few authors that caught me eye: michael eisner, gil garcetti, larry gelbart, thomas keller, and stan lee. each of the dinners has a different dress code. here’s the varieties:

• business casual
• cocktail attire
• casual elegant
• relaxed cocktail
• business attire
• rumble seat attire
• informal attire
• california evening casual
• comfortably festive
• casual
• napa casual
• black tie (this is for stan lee!)
• coat and tie
• festive attire
• dressy casual
• sports attire
• jeans and jewels

i want to host one of these just so i can specify “pants optional.”

oh, and my regrowth charity t-shirt arrived, too.

matt sergeant’s article about using qpsmtpd is noteworthy for reasons other than it has my name in it.

i’m still running a pretty minimal set of qpsmtpd plugins since i upgraded by server to ubuntu. my main source of spam is my old college address, which is so ancient that it is deeply embedded in the mailing lists that spammers swap. and apparently they aren’t running very good antispam software at hmc. (i think they expect each user to set up spamassassin on their own.)

here’s an interesting tidbit i picked up from the hmc cs department site: a co-inventor of sql, don chamberlin, is a fellow alum.

cnet news.com reports on the results of the pew internet study that says for nearly half of the bloggers surveyed, blogging is a form of therapy.

that doesn’t surprise me. a lot of what i’ve been blogging recently has been motivated by that.

kathryn maese’s article in the los angeles downtown news happens to mention why building the garage at metro 417 took so long — they found “lots of foundations that we didn’t know were there” and an oil well. metro 417 looks nice, and the location is great, but it is quite expensive. (and since my lease is ending at the end of next month, i just got notice of my new lease or month-to-month terms — no change from this year. excellent.)

i’m surprised that a health club is one of the possibilities for ground floor development there — they already have what looked like a pretty decent exercise room for tenants. they’ve covered the windows now, but i used to get taunted by the empty exercise room on my way to the gym each morning.

according to the big list of development projects, groundbreaking on “medallion,” the project at 4th and main (across the street from me) will be this fall.