Andy Chase

It's way too late on a weeknight to be getting a cup of coffee, but here I am. Some time last year Starbucks opened a store on the same as block as The Coffee Roaster here in Sherman Oaks. The Coffee Roaster happens to have the best coffee and beans in Los Angeles, or anywhere in my experience.

As much as I hate patronizing the store that is obviously trying to oust the independent, I still wind up coming here every once in a while at night, after The Coffee Roaster has closed - that's the justification. Well, that plus the fact that Starbucks has ample seating if you want to stay for a while. The Coffee Roaster recently got some nice tables and chairs that sit in the front of the store during the day, but the only seating inside the store is two seats at the counter that also serves as a display for the muffins and scones.

All of which is great, if you have the time to linger a little bit in the morning before work. It's a very cozy place, and when I worked at Stan Lee Media I would often delay the trip to the office by fifteen minutes to hang out... fifteen minutes earlier or later to work didn't matter at SLM.

But it's not really a place to whip out your PDA and folding keyboard and start writing; there are only so many tables, and I would have the constant anxiety of people waiting behind me, which is just the reason I'm so terrible at golf.

So, Starbucks it is, for a couple of reasons:

• Megacorporation or not, it did become a neighborhood fixture pretty quickly - It's nice to see customers being greeted as regulars, and see some of the same people I've seen around the area over the last five years.
• The Horseshoe Cafe, which was further west down Ventura Boulevard next to the Tower Records (which itself is moving further west down Ventura to the new Galleria), reopened under new management sometime last year as 'The Groove Cafe'. At about the same time, the music skipped from good old coffee house jazz to hip hop, and got a whole lot louder. The age of the average customer also seemed to drop by about 10 years to 15-17, and it's no longer a relaxing place to hang out.

I didn't go to the Horseshoe very often, but one of my fondest memories of the place is the night two years ago when Chris and I were there until about two o'clock in the morning.

I think we were both still working at Edmunds.com at the time, and much of the conversation that night revolved around how miserable things were getting - even Chris, who had only been there for four months, had seen a dramatic decline in the corporate climate in that short time. I had been there a year and a half, and the change was terrible to behold. (But that's a tale for another rambling blog entry.)

We had always gotten along at the office, but we hadn't particularly 'hung out' after work until we wound up at the Horseshoe. It was, for lack of a phrase that hasn't been overused into ineffectiveness, a bonding experience.

One of the things that came out of my bitter departure from Edmunds.com was a web site called Intercrap.com... born of anger and frustration with the now universally reviled Dot Com culture, Chris and I cranked out about one essay per week targeting some new harebrained business plan or pointy haired boss management philosophy.

After the bottom fell out of the whole industry last April, the pace on Intercrap.com slowed down; we were finally preaching to the choir, but writing those angry pontifications had become depressing rather than cathartic.

Still, it felt good to be writing something, and my work on Intercrap actually got me some work at Webmonkey. In May I landed my job with Stan Lee Media, and I used part of my signing bonus to purchase a Stowaway keyboard for my Visor. I got into the habit of getting out of the apartment to write, usually coming to this Starbucks or sometimes the cafe at the newly opened Borders Books further down the boulevard. Intercrap limped along at a gradually slowing pace until late last year, when neither Chris nor I had anything more to say. I haven't gone out for the express purpose of writing since early this year; I think the last time was probably early this last March, in the weeks following the loss of my job at Webcamnow, and I don't think anything ever came of it.

But now I've got this here web site that I'm forcing myself to update everyday, and after a crazy day followed by an afternoon nap, I felt like I had to get out of the apartment to get rid of that post-nap fuzziness. I figured (and rightly so) that a small cup of coffee would nudge me back into consciousness, at least enough to do a write up of the day's events. Look what I came up with instead.

I'm still not entirely comfortable with keeping a daily blog; I'm very aware of the fact that most of the stuff I read on other peoples' weblogs annoys the hell out of me, and that makes me feel like a hypocrite. It also makes me worry that somebody who finds this page while searching for a source for good coffee in Sherman Oaks will read this mess and think to themselves "What an a-hole... why does he think I would give a shit about his old friends or going to Starbucks to write?"

But I guess the reason I'm sticking with it this time is that I don't give a shit... I just want to build a site out and see how many hits it gets, while playing with new PHP and database stuff along the way.

The problem with Intercrap and the much earlier 'Randomonium' site I tried to run back in 1998 was that every update had to be a finished Article with a capital A. It seems fun at first, but it quickly becomes a chore. This stream of consciousness format takes the pressure off, and turns site updates into more of a meditation/hobby, giving me the same satisfaction that other people get out of activities like gardening and crossword puzzles.

So that's it, I guess. As longwinded as this wound up being, I'm glad I wound up writing about writing instead of writing an hour by hour account of my hectic day.

Lonesome George sits near the entrance of Cleveland Park at Los Angeles Pierce College in Woodland Hills, California. If you think he looks creepy in this shot, just imagine him sitting there on that bench in the dead of night, still staring his glassy stare into the darkness. George is a part of the Old Trapper's Lodge installation which inhabits the park.

Ahem. Who pissed in my Cheerios yesterday? When I read that last bit this morning I was taken aback - I haven't written with such vitriol since Intercrap was at its zenith. But you get the idea... it's October, and the temperature is in the 90-100 degree range. October is when the leaves turn orange, red, and yellow, and it gets cold enough to have a fire in the fireplace, if you're lucky enough to have one. October is when you go to a pumpkin patch and pick out a blank canvas for the Jack 'o Lantern you'll be bringing to the festival. October is not when you have to leave the AC on 24 hours a day just so the temperature inside your apartment will stay in the 80s.

For the most part, I've made an uneasy peace with Los Angeles... there really are things here that I actively like and will miss when we finally move away. Unfortunately the things I don't like outnumber the things I do, and the unbearable heat of the last week has skewed the like/dislike ratio far to the dislike side, resulting in gems like "smog-ridden cesspit". Maybe I should sleep in the pool tonight.

I can't be the only person out there who just wants a single-user blog that they can host on their own boxen without wading through all the extra features that come with the portal-style systems.I'm hardly an authority on Weblogs, seeing as I seem to abandon every single one I try to set up or maintain after about 5 entries, but I think that's largely because I haven't been happy with any of the ones available at Sourceforge and other free software sites; systems like Slash and its PHP equivalent PHPNuke are fantastic, but way, way more than I need to run my pissant little waste of bandwidth. I don't need polls, or Slashboxes, or a message board, or 8 dozen pre-defined topics that I'll never use, or the bad, bloated HTML that always winds up in the predefined theme templates. Sure, they're heavily customizable, but to effectively design your own theme you have to learn a whole new API and chances are you'll have to use nasty, crufty HTML to make everything look right and align properly. For that matter, I don't need an extensive user registration or comment moderation system. If (God forbid) I should ever find myself getting enough traffic to warrant a comments and moderation system, I'd just as soon build it myself.

So it comes down to this: It's time to roll my own. I've made abortive attempts at this before, full of convoluted, poorly commented code that I can't even figure out myself six months later, but this time I'd like to approach it as a project that might be of use to somebody else... I can't be the only person out there who just wants a single-user blog that they can host on their own boxen without wading through all the extra features that come with the portal-style systems. It will need to be well-written, easily customizable, and extensible. It will defintely be written in PHP, and it will probably use MySQL for its database, as much as I'd like to use PostgreSQL. (mmmmmm, foreign keys.) Lots more people use MySQL, at least at the time of this writing.

I've learned quite a lot about programming style and programming in general since I started tinkering with PHP at Stan Lee Media, and I've used one hell of a lot of free (as in speech) software in the process. The nagging voice in the back of my mind that tells me I should give something back has been growing steadily, and since I haven't really learned C yet it looks like PHP will be the way I can do it.