Andy Chase

Well, thanks to a broken dryer I'm still up at 12:30 AM, but I have a lot to show for it. I'm running ROX-filer with IceWM, and so far I'm liking it better than GNOME and KDE... for one thing, it is lightning fast for exploring through system folders. Configuration is easy and sensible, and all in all it promises to be a great desktop environment. I just need to get some basic apps installed now; text editor, a better terminal than Xterm, etc.



ROX is so fast, in fact, that all of a sudden I can see how slow my build of Mozilla 0.98 is. It seems like a good 10 seconds before the browser window even opens. I'm not sure whether or not I can install Galeon without a full GNOME installation... I'll have to see.



I must confess - Glib, GTK, and GDK-Pixbuf all gave me numerous vague errors about not being able to handle shared libraries correctly, but they compiled without any fatal errors. The only problem was that none of the GDK-Pixbufloader shared objects were created. After about an hours' worth of surfing around trying to find a solution, I took the easy way out and copied the libraries over from the old Mandrake partition. ROX started instantly!



What this may mean in terms of installing future apps, I don't know. I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

This is a rant a couple of days warmed over, so it will probably be quick and whiny as opposed to long and forehead-vein-bulging.



What's the deal with "Swap Meets"? They're almost like flea markets, but all the ones we've been to around SoCal tend to be made up of people selling marked-up 99-Cent Store merchandise as opposed to people selling old (and considerably more interesting) junk.



The Saugus Swap Meet was probably the best so far, but even then the ratio of new cheap crap to cool old junk was probably 80:20. And most of the old crap wasn't actually that cool; unimaginably garish 1970's dining room sets and bedframes galore.



I don't think there was a single booth at the Woodland Hills Indoor Swap Meet selling used junk. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, I guess, but it's disappointing when the last big indoor swap meet you went to was Superflea in Cheektowaga, New York.



I know there's the monthly antique show at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, but with an admission price of $6.00 I have to wonder if there's going to be anything in there I can even afford.



Yard Sales have been more fruitful... and one of the cool things about Los Angeles is that people have them year round. I've scored some pretty neat 1950's kitchenware around the neighborhood. Even at yard sales, though, there seems to be a predilection towards offloading ugly 1970's crap more than anything, along with used copies of Valley of the Dolls and early 1980's microwave cookbooks.



I'm sure a big part of it is that there just isn't that much old stuff to go around in southern California... and what old stuff there is seems to stay in concentrated pockets like the cities of Orange and Ventura, which have been around a lot longer than most of the area where we live.



I think I sense trips to Orange and Ventura in the future.

Well, duh. All that time I spent trying to debug my Linux From Scratch installation's networking, recompiling the kernel and modules, and even switching over to a crummier old D-Link NIC was entirely unnecessary.



There's a little file that lives in /etc called resolv.conf, that's kind of necessary if you expect your computer to be able to resolve any domain names that don't happen to be contained in /etc/hosts. I have dealt with this file before, but for whatever reason it didn't occur to me that my problem might be DNS related this time, and so I forgot about it.



Sure enough, I created my /etc/resolv.conf file and I'm out on the internet. I'm typing this entry in Lynx right now, actually.



This just goes to show that it's always a good idea to learn things the complicated way even if you wind up using a tool like linuxconf or netconf in the long run; it really pays to know where all the little config files live, even though it's easier to fill them all out in a configuration tool.

Last night I caught most of the VH1 special "KISS: Behind the Makeup". I saw the two hour documentary when it first aired last year, but I felt compelled to watch it again. I'm listening to their debut album, KISS right now and cursing myself for not having found a way to see their reunion tour in 1996, or the Psycho Circus tour a couple of years later.

Cursing myself.

I was a KISS fan by age 3 or 4 (which would have been about 1977-1978) thanks to heavy exposure from my brother and, of course, the bad-ass makeup and costumes. At age 4, I'm sure it was the whole KISS mystique that really spoke to me.

Age 3? It sounds like I'm trying to out-cool classmates on a third grade playground, but I know this to be true because I remember when the four solo albums came out, followed by Dynasty in 1979.

My parents, being the amazingly cool parents they were, bought me KISS 45's and didn't try to derail my fascination with the phenomenon that was KISS in the original, grand manner. My dad liked their music, and I remember many a car trip (when you live in the middle of nowhere, every errand is a car trip) with KISS playing on the tape deck. When I was old enough to pick up on the innuendo that can be found in just about every song, I was a little surprised... but I think my parents (correctly) figured that what I didn't understand wouldn't hurt me. All I knew was that I was fascinated (and a little bit scared) by those four other-worldly characters who were clearly human (you could see the skin of their necks, hands, chests, etc) but maybe not. Not to a four year old, anyway. I couldn't believe it when 3-2-1 Contact did a segment about a KISS concert, including the only concert footage I had ever seen of the group. It was everything the photos from Alive: II promised, and all too short.

In early 1983 my dad took my brother and I to see Kiss at the Worcester Centrum, when they were on the Creatures of the Night tour. This was after Ace Frehley had left the band, and long after Peter Criss (My original favorite, probably because the cat makeup was the least frightening) had left; Eric Carr was on drums in the Fox makeup, and Vinnie Vincent was on guitar with that goofy Ankh face. I remember being disappointed even back then at having missed the original act, and a tiny bit of the mystique was taken away when I watched a stagehand put a swatch of carpet under Gene Simmons right before he did his blood-spitting act. I don't think there were any pyrotechnics, either, what with the Centrum being an enclosed auditorium. Still, it was KISS, and one hell of a first rock concert for a 10 year old.

It was also in 1983 that I bought a used copy of Destroyer from a classmate acting as agent for his older sister. It was the source of much derision among my classmates, though maybe not quite as much as the time I proudly brought my copy of Deep Purple's Made in Europe in for show and tell.

When KISS abandoned the makeup, it was like seeing Darth Vader without his helmet at the end of Return of the Jedi... unfortunately, much of their hard rock sensibility disappeared with the makeup. KISS soldiered on into high-80's pretty-boy glamdom and left their one of a kind stage presence behind. I received a copy of Lick it Up for Christmas in 1983, and that's still the most recent KISS recording I own... the singles that came and went in the 80's and 90's were sad reminders of what once was.

I never stopped listening to the classics, though. As much as I've gone on and on about the theatrical aspect of the band, KISS was also a balls to the wall rock & roll band. When I started playing guitar in 8th grade, Ace Frehley was my guitar god, and retains a high seat in my guitar god pantheon to this day - he may not be as technically proficient as someone like Steve Morse, but his style is inimitable.

Even through high school and college, I never encountered anyone my age who would admit to being a classic KISS fan... the further away the 70's got, the less cool it was to admit to having liked them. Imagine my surprise when, in 1996, it was suddenly hip to like the good old KISS in makeup again. The reunion tour was literally a dream come true, but being fresh out of college and earning $300 a week in Los Angeles, there was no way I could justify the cost of a ticket at the time. Still... I should have eaten ramen that month and just bought a ticket.

Well, despite my comments earlier this afternoon that I didn't think I was up to debugging my new Linux From Scratch installation, I've been back at it for most of the night. It's 10:30, and I'm going to bed.



I took care of the worst of the boot errors; the biggest (and easiest to fix so far today) error was a simple misplaced line break in one of the main startup scripts - a cut/paste glitch from GNOME/Mozilla on the other partition.



Most of my time has been spent pulling my hair out trying to get networking running correctly. So far I can ping and even telnet to the gateway, but I can't get at anything beyond it, and nothing I've tried seems to work. I probably need to go back into a GUI environment to do some more searching on the matter; Lynx is great as a plain-text browser, but sifting through search engine results, even from Google, is difficult.



The other problem I'm having is with the proper loading of modules. That's not such a huge concern; if worse comes to worst I can just make a hardcoded boot script for the modules I know I configured the kernel for.



The network thing is really cheesing me off right now, but overall it's been fun, and I've already learned a lot more than I did about boot scripts. I think part of the enjoyment comes from the way everything else gets tuned out when I'm zeroed in on a particular problem.



Of course, this'll be nagging at the back of my mind all day at work tomorrow.

...And a new refrigerator, and a dishwasher, and a few more kitchen appliances - practical ones that will be used all the time; I'm not talking about salad shooters.



I've been watching Good Eats religiously since my friend Jason clued me in to the show, and I've made a few of the recipes featured on the show. It's a testament to Alton Brown's excellent research and communication skills that each one has been a success on the first attempt. (A note to anyone considering making the "40 Cloves and a Chicken" recipe - you may want to go easy on the actual eating of all those cloves of garlic unless you've got at least 8 people there to split the dish. That's all I'm going to say.)



Just the other day I found that Alton Brown has a web site apart from the recipe section at FoodTV.com. Not surprisingly, this web site can be found at AltonBrown.com. It relies a little bit too heavily on the cryptic icons, sliced graphic table layouts, and popup windows for my tastes - after half a year spent at Stan Lee Media, all I can think of when I visit a site like that is what a pain it must have been to build, and what a pain it would be to update. But unlike many such eyecandy sites, there's some good stuff there - and it definitely leaves you wanting more.



In particular, I was excited to see that they're selling (or will be, once they can catch up with demand) a salt cellar very much like the one Mr. Brown uses in just about every episode of the show. I've taken to using kosher salt for cooking, and pouring it out of that big square box is really cumbersome - I'm looking forward to that wide mouth and flip top.



I'm also looking forward to the 'plunger' style measuring cups they're promising later this year; talk about your union of form and function!



I like cooking, and the more techniques I pick up from FoodTV (mostly Good Eats, but I glean stuff from other shows now and then) the more adventurous I'd like to get... but our kitchen is so cramped and bereft of core appliances (mixer, food processor) that there's only so much you can do in the space provided.



It doesn't help that our refrigerator, which came with the building, is about 30 years old and has a hard time keeping anything frozen come summertime; you can't freeze meat you haven't used yet, nor can you freeze leftovers. Plus it's probably responsible for about 50% of our outrageous electric bill.



:::sigh::: In the meantime I can watch and file nuggets of information away for the future. The kitchen of wherever it is we eventually move to will receive careful scrutiny.

Hmm, February 12 and it's apparently springtime in Los Angeles - the temperature has been in the 70's over the last few days, and when I went out tonight it was actually still too warm for long sleeves after dark.

But the real indicator was the scent in the air - something somehow green, with a hint of the jasmine which grows all over the place in our neighborhood.

These pleasant evenings where it's not quite warm and not quite cool are actually something I quite like about southern California - the jasmine on the breeze is what really makes nights like this feel a bit exotic, giving you a small window into the promise Los Angeles must have seemed to offer at the beginning of the last century.

It's quite a contrast to the February night in Rochester when Kim and I "started going out" (that's got to be one of the most awkward phrases in the English language) up 9 years ago. Exactly nine years ago, as a matter of fact. It was a hell of a lot colder, and I'm pretty sure there wasn't a hint of jasmine anywhere, unless it was the incense coming from under the stoners' door across the hallway.

Until earlier this week, I hadn't seen so much as a billboard or even a bus stop poster promoting this movie.Three or four days ago I saw a television spot for The Man Who Wasn't There, the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, my two favorite filmmakers.

The last time I had heard anything about the movie was when the title was officially announced, which was a while ago. I knew it was the Coen brothers' black and white take on film noir, and I knew that parts of it had been filmed in Old Town Pasadena, but that was about it. I was really, really looking forward to this movie... I love the noir style, I love seeing black and white on the big screen, and I love the Coen brothers; needless to say I was pretty excited when I saw the ad.

Much to my surprise, the ad said "Now Playing", and so earlier this afternoon I decided to see where it was playing here in the valley.

The movie doesn't even show up in the listings for a couple of the big movie showtime/ticket sites, and after some more digging I managed to ascertain that it's only playing in two theaters in all of greater Los Angeles, and one of them is a discount-type place. Neither one is particularly close.

According to IMDB, The Man Who Wasn't There had been out since last November, at least in limited release. Even if I decided to drive to Pasadena or Seal Beach to see the film, the print would probably scratched to hell, and showing on a postage stamp screen.

Until earlier this week, I hadn't seen so much as a billboard or even a bus stop poster promoting this movie. I guess I've been watching the wrong television stations, because that one run of the TV ad was the first I'd seen it.

What the hell? I had TV ads for Kung Pow rammed down my throat every ten minutes for a month before that piece of crap was released, and the Coen brothers' latest has been out since November without my even noticing a review of it somewhere? I'm guessing that even when it was newly released here in Los Angeles, it was only playing at a few theaters... I certainly didn't see it on any marquees here in the Valley.

I guess the only consolation is that now we have a kick-ass sound system at home for when it's released on DVD. Good sound really does make a world of difference even if your TV screen is only 19" across.

02/09/2002 - Pink Motel

San Fernando Road (Near Sheldon) • Sun Valley, California

As you drive north into the San Fernando Valley, the grimy suburban sprawl gives way to an industrial wasteland... instead of tract housing the streets are lined with small businesses; foundries, auto shops, special effects shops.

It's a peculiar place, and when I went back there for the first time in a couple of years I was reminded of why I used to hate the Valley so much; I used to work up there, and I grew to hate the drive from the relatively green and shady Sherman Oaks to the sun-baked, dusty Sun Valley.

Even more peculiar is the Pink Motel, which sits on the edge of the most industrial zone. There's nothing up there worth staying in a hotel for (I mean, a hotel that doesn't have hourly rates :P), yet the Pink Motel looks clean and well-maintained, and by the looks of all the cars in the parking lot, well-occupied.