May 21, 2002
I will learn to trust the weatherman. Yesterday, he said that it would rain that day. I looked out my sliding glass door to my patio and saw no rain coming down. It looked like it had sprinkled a bit, but nothing too bad and had definitely passed. I put on my dress clothes for work, threw on my leather jacket, grabbed my helmet and messenger bag and left my apartment. About 1 minute into my ride to work, it started to rain. Then it started to rain harder. My pants were soaked, the rain made it through my jacket and soaked my shirt. Even when a rain doesn’t feel very cold when you’re standing in it, it’s awfully cold at 40 miles per hour. To top off the experience, L.A. traffic gets absolutely treacherous after a rain. All of the road grime, bits of tire, and oil sit on the roads for months, and then when the occasional rain shows up, it forms one of the slickest substances known to man. It will suffice to say that yesterday when I made it to work i was uncomfortable and unhappy. It took almost four hours for me to fully dry. Here’s hoping the next rain will be months away. When it does happen, I’m taking the car!
May 18, 2002
Spent the morning riding through the canyons just north of Malibu with my cousin Randy. We stopped at the Rock Store, which had an interesting visitor. Take a look at the pictures I took here.
May 17, 2002
As the television seasons wind down, there is one jewel remaining that will keep me entertained through the summer. A&E’s near-perfect Nero Wolfe. My parents had dog-eared copies of nearly all of Rex Stout’s novels in the mystery section of their library, and I read my way through all of them. As far as adaptations of books go, this television show is about as good as it gets. The show is colorful, fun, witty, and smart. Timothy Hutton is absolutely perfect as Archie Goodwin, and while rough at the beginning, Maury Chaykin has matured into a wonderful Wolfe. Toss in a rotating cast of regulars, that make the show feel more like a stage production and less like a television show, and it is without a doubt one of the best shows on television. I leave you with a couple of choice quotes from Mr. Wolfe that should give you an idea of how the books and the show work:
Mr. Goodwin’s professional reputation and competence have been challenged, and by extension my own. You invoked respondeat superior; I will not only answer, I will act.
Mr. Kearns, an irate visitor : ‘I demand an explanation! I intend to hold you to account for alienating the affection of my wife.’
‘Affections,’ Wolfe said.
‘What?’
‘Affections. In that context the plural is used.’ He lifted the glass and drank, and licked his lips.
Kearns stared at him. ‘I didn’t come here,’ he said, ‘to have my grammar corrected.’
‘Not grammar. Diction.’
May 14, 2002
Today I recieved what could, quite possibly, be the best piece of mail ever. In with all the other mail was a bubble mailer, just exactly the size of a CD. I didn’t recognize the return address, it simply said it came from Domination Distribution in Connecticut. I opened up the package and it was the Kompressor record. Whoever out there in the mysterious land of the internet sent this to me, please accept my thanks. And if you’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Andreas K. and his german industrial might, have a listen.
May 13, 2002
Recently, my website has been crawled by a web spider from plagiarism.org. Apparently they’re trying to build a database of text that educators can compare students’ work to. While I don’t have a problem with the idea behind this, Andy correctly pointed out that they’re wasting an enormous amount of time and resources to build this database, when it will never been as comprehensive as google. All the functionality they’re trying to build could be created a lot more effectively by just licensing some of google’s technology.
