Andy Chase

Sherman Way at Sepulveda Boulevard, Van Nuys, California

This is the same Muffler Man I shot a little over two years ago. Until I got up close, I didn't realize that not only had his kerchief been repainted, but his beard has been painted over with skin color; only the dastardly pencil moustache remains.

From a distance all you can see is his lantern jaw, but up close the flesh colored ridges of his beard look terrible.

Spumoni Restaurant: 14533 Ventura Blvd (near Van Nuys blvd), Sherman Oaks, California, 91423

(818) 981-7218

The problem with Ventura boulevard (and greater Los Angeles area in general) is that there are just too many little stores and restaurants jam-packed next to one another for miles and miles; we've been living in the San Fernando Valley for five years and we're still finding places that we've overlooked all this time.

Such as Spumoni Restaurant. I'm not sure how long it's been there, but it wasn't until I was picking up food from another nearby restaurant that I noticed Spumoni. They had some menus available outside, and I took one for future reference. Last night we decided to give them a try. Kim picked up a couple of entrees on her way back from an errand, so I can't comment as to the "dining experience" at Spumoni, but we were very pleasantly surprised by the food.

It's been my experience at most (affordable) Italian restaurants I've been to in Los Angeles that the pasta tends to be overdone, and sauces nondescript; maybe not straight out of a Smart & Final no. 10 can, but pretty darn close. Another problem when getting food to go from these places is that the pasta and piece of meat (if you get a dish like chicken parmagiana) get all soggy in transit, turning what might have been an adequate dish in the restaurant into a disappointment at home.

I ordered the chicken parmagiana entree; chicken parm is usually a pretty good measuring stick. Kim got a shrimp scampi-type dish, and we used a coupon for a free serving of spumoni ice cream.

Excellent, excellent, excellent! Both dishes used penne pasta instead of noodles, and it was done to perfection; Al Dente, to quote those stereotype-filled television ads. The marinara sauce is definitely made from scratch, the chicken was nice and tender, and the parmagian and mozzarella cheeses were amazing; I noticed buffalo mozzarella in another dish on the menu, and I suspect that's what they also use on top of the chicken parm. The parmesan cheese also tastes like it was made with non-cow milk, although I couldn't say what.

We only ate about half of our portions because the food is so filling; it will be great reheated for lunch tomorrow. We wanted to save room for the spumoni, which we split. The first thing we noticed was the way they had packed the spumoni for us; the slice was placed on a separate piece of plastic inside a plastic container whose bottom was lined with pieces of ice to keep it cold on its way home.

What an obvious idea, and yet I've never seen another restaurant do it... it really feels like you're being taken care of when a restaurant goes to such lengths. As for the spumoni itself, what an amazing balance they've struck between rich flavor and light consistency. The slice of spumi had four separate layers: Strawberry, vanilla, pistachio, and chocolate. The chocolate has a rich, dark flavor nothing like the chocolate ice cream you'd get from a Baskin-Robbins. The pistachio has a very delicate flavor which is actually a little bit difficult to pick up at first if you're used to the strong artificial flavors of American pistachio ice cream or pudding. The vanilla and strawberry layers were similarly delicate but rich at the same time. Even the maraschino cherry in the middle tasted better than most.

Good Italian food just about a mile away! I can't wait to give their pizza a try.

How big of an a-hole do you have to be to drive onto a Christmas tree lot with your big SUV and have the attendant tie it to the top when you're ready to go?Ok. When I saw somebody doing this last year I laughed and shrugged it off as a random incident, bound to happen in a place as saturated with SUVs as Los Angeles.

But this year I've seen it happen three more times (most recently this afternoon), and it's not funny any more.

Now, it's a given that about 99% of the people who buy SUVs in Los Angeles aren't going to actually use them for all the stuff they show in the commercials;

"But if I drive on gravel or dirt I might pit the paint!"

"But if I drive through a stream I might get mud un the undercarriage!"

But for the love of God, if you drive a Sport UTILITY Vehicle with ALL THAT CARGO ROOM and you buy a Christmas Tree from the corner lot, DON'T TIE IT TO THE TOP OF YOUR FORD GODDAMN EXPEDITION!!!! THAT'S WHAT THAT BIG EMPTY SPACE IN THE BACK OF YOUR GODDAMN 5 MPG "MINIVANS ARE BELOW ME AND I'VE GOT MORE MONEY FALLING OUT OF MY ASS THAN I KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH" STATUS SYMBOL IS FOR!!!!

How big of an a-hole do you have to be to drive onto a Christmas tree lot with your big Jeep/Ford/Chevy/Honda/Toyota* SUV and have the attendant tie it to the top when you're ready to go?

I mean, if you didn't buy the damn thing so you can at least use the cargo space, what did you buy it for? Where do you draw the line for what you'll deign to allow in the back of your SUV? Lumber? Nooooo, you might get a splinter in the upholstery. Potting soil? Nooooo, the bag might burst and get dirt everywhere! A big screen TV? Nooooo, a staple from the carton might snag the carpet!

What the hell is wrong with people? It's shit like this that gives Los Angeles (and California in general) its flaky reputation.

* Lincoln/Cadillac/Lexus/BMW SUV owners are excluded from the list because the act of buying a "Luxury SUV" is in itself an act of supreme assholery, and I'm sure no self-respecting Luxury SUV owner would ever let anything so crude as a Christmas tree see the inside of their vehicle; it might get pitch on the Corinthian Leather!

An infected e-mail message and web server (I'm assuming they were running Microsoft IIS) tried to send me the "Happytime Worm" virus at work today, and thankfully my anti-virus software caught it. I have no idea what it does, but I do know that it exploits a big ol' Microsoft Internet Explorer security hole of some kind, since the virus was contained in an inexplicably hidden .VBS (Visual Basic Script) file.

For whatever reason, it looks like the good folks up in Redmond decided that what you probably want to do with a hidden, client-side executable script from an utter stranger is execute it automatically.

Mozilla doesn't pull stuff like that... you can configure Mozilla to prompt you to download images if you want to, and it would never execute anything without asking you what to do with it first.

And the Gecko rendering engine really does run circles around Netscrap 4.x, so don't let the "classic" skin fool you. It's a much better browser than NS 4.x ever was.

Back when I started this site, my intention (aside from trying to keep up daily entries and seeing how much traffic I can generate) was to build out a personal blog system that would give people a simpler alternative to Slash or PhpNuke.

Well, at the end of this month it'll be three months since I started the site. I've done a lot of tinkering, but I have to confess I haven't kept other hypothetical blog administrators in mind. I'm guilty of a couple of kluges here and there, and documentation is poor at best.

An e-mail from a friend yesterday got me thinking about cleaning this thing up for public consumption once I get around to finishing the photo thumbnail indices. For one thing, I had an OOP epiphany a couple of weeks ago - I've been using PHP classes for some time now, and I've written a few of my own, but I was still thinking of them in terms of clumps of functions (which they are) as opposed to properties and methods of an "object".

I've been struggling with the whole "object" thing since I picked up a "Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days" book about 5 years ago, when the most recent language I had programmed in was C64 Basic. I read the examples and understood them on a basic level, but it wasn't until this year with PHP that I stopped wondering "Why would I want to write a program to turn a motorcycle on and off?" Such is the life of a self-taught programmer.

Even after that, the classes I wrote myself weren't really very useful in OOP terms; object methods would depend on global variables rather than object states, or they would be so specific as to limit the class' usefulness in future projects.

But, I think I get it now, and I should probably go back over the scripts that make up this page and see if I can't simplify things a bit with a nice blog class.

The other thing I've been kicking ass with lately is authoring in DocBook, which you may recognize from HowTos of the Linux Documentation Project. DocBook itself is a piece of cake to learn, actually; Norm Walsh's O'Reilly book on the subject (including complete tag reference) is freely available in its entirety online, and if you learned to code HTML by hand, jumping into a text editor and using the DocBook XML spec is no big deal.

Where things get hairy is when you go to set up a processing environment to transform DocBook into HTML, LaTeX, RTF, or whatever. I wound up using Jade, and it took me the better part of a day to get Jade, the DocBook DTD, and the DocBook DSSSL stylesheets to play nicely together... and I still don't fully understand what's going on. But I do love that whole XML separation of content from presentation thing.

So, at work I've been writing a new PHP class for some database operations, and doing it properly this time; the class will be easily reusable by future projects, and make code easier to follow. At the same time, I've been documenting the class in DocBook as I go. So far this seems to be a much better methodology than trying to pound out documentation after the script itself is finished. When the next big project is looming around the corner, documentation tends to get the short end of the stick. By documenting as I go I can be a little more thorough, and sometimes the act of thinking a function through will help me see a better way it can be implemented.

Anyway, I'm thinking maybe I should take a similar approach to this blog system... put commonly performed tasks into a properly formed class, and document it so that people can use the API (wow, am I actually talking about designing an API?) to easily extend its capabilities if they want to. And of course release it to the public.

Should be interesting.

So I've started watching hockey again, and actually rooting for the Los Angeles Kings. This is another disturbing milestone for me, like starting to say "It's cold" instead of "It's cold -- for Los Angeles".

Back when we lived in Massachusetts, there were a couple of years where my Dad got season tickets to the Boston Bruins, for the purpose of entertaining clients. Once in a while, there would be no business contacts for him to take, and us lucky family members would get to head into Boston and take in a game at the Garden (this was pre-Fleet Center.) It was a pretty good deal, and got me into watching hockey on a fairly regular basis, thanks to the Bruins games broadcast on pre-UPN channel 38 and ESPN.

I don't think we went to any games after moving to New Hampshire, although I still watched the Bruins play when I had the chance. When I went to school in Rochester, New York in 1992, that was pretty much it for keeping up with the Bruins; Rochester only has a minor league team called the Americains, and I don't recall games ever being televised. The closest NHL team was the Buffalo Sabres, but I never really got into them because, after all, I'm supposed to be a Bruins fan.

Since arriving in L.A. in 1996, the only time I've really watched hockey has been on the infrequent occaisions when the Kings or the Mighty Ducks play the Bruins, or maybe the Sabres; again, I'm supposed to be a Bruins fan, right?

I should note here that I'm mostly baffled by the whole sports fanatic thing. I got caught up in the big Patriots Vs. Bears thing for the 1986 Superbowl. ("Berry the Bears", remember that one?) That fall was the only time I've ever watched a whole World Series, because the Red Sox were playing the Mets. As a kid I always admired Larry Bird in the various TV spots he did for the Boston stations, but for whatever reason I've never gotten into basketball at all. I do wish I had invented those dopey Lakers car flags that seem to be mandatory for every citizen of Los Angeles County if the Lakers make it to the NBA championship. I'd be able to afford to move back to Celtics/Red Sox/Bruins/Patriots country. :)

1986 was fifth and sixth grade for me. In a town where most of the other boys start out with tee-ball in first grade and play in Little League until they reach the upper age limit, the only sport I had ever played outside of school was soccer... and I didn't particularly enjoy that. Those Patriots and Red Sox championship games were fun to get caught up in, but usually baseball and football have been the sort of things I watch if I happen to be in the mood when a game happens to be on. But for the most part, I just don't understand how guys (and some girls) get so into sports that they can rattle off not only names and stats for every player on this year's team(s), but also those of teams from 20 or 30 years ago. Or let their favorite team's defeat ruin their entire next day or week. Or let their favorite team's victory cause them to riot and loot their own damn city.

I run screaming when people start talking sports, because the most I can hope to contribute is "Yeah, I saw most of the game." It's alienating and a little bit creepy to me how passionate people can be when they get to trash talking other teams and reminiscing about their own teams' glory days. I sometimes have the impulse to yell "IT'S JUST A DAMN GAME!" at them, (I also wanted to yell this at the bellowing parents on the soccer sidelines of my youth.) I just can't get interested in learning everything about players on teams other than the ones I root for, or keeping tabs on who are the hot prospects coming up from the minors or college teams, or who's getting traded for who, blah blah blah. I watch, I hope my team wins, I get on with my life whether they do or they don't.

Nevertheless, I've noticed myself watching the Dodgers more and more often over the last few years. Like a lot of people, I got all misty about baseball as an old-timey, all-American institution back in 1998 when Mark McGuire broke Roger Maris' home run world record. Combine that with my increasing need to find something that can connect me to this place, and you've got me watching the Dodgers on KTLA fairly often during the season. I still haven't been to Dodger Stadium, though - that's one of those things I've been meaning to get around to for a few years now.

Hockey has taken longer, because I really do feel this silly loyalty to the Bruins. But over the last month or so I think I've watched at least one Kings game per week, and I'm getting that gratifying feeling of having memorized a lot of their names and getting familiar with their styles and strengths. After taking the subway for the first time last month and finding it to be a great way to get downtown, I'm keen on getting down to Staples Center for a Kings game this season.

Dear God, I'm adapting to this place. If Ray Bourque ever reads this, I hope he can find it in his heart to forgive me. I promise I'll come back to the Bruins camp just as soon as I find myself living within broadcast range of Boston or a reasonable trip to the Fleet Center... but in the meantime I've decided to get the hell on with living in L.A. without devoting every ounce of my energy to hating the place for not being everything that a city like Boston is.