February 2007

My mom and dad both love taking photos with their cell phones and then texting them to me. As much as I enjoy receiving them, I hate the way they take for-freaking-ever to display on my phone. I also hate having photos on my cell phone. (You can’t do anything with them there!) Today I had an idea. “I wonder if you can send camera photos via email instead of only via SMS?” I gave it a shot and it works! I don’t know about all carriers, but if you have Cingular, you can text a cell phone photo to an email address instead of to someone else’s cell phone. That is extra cool.

Click “Store”, then “Send in Message”. Instead of selecting a name from your address book, just enter an email address. It’s that simple. Now I can save all these pictures of my dad golfing and my mom’s cats on my computer. I can Photoshop them and crop them and send them to my friends and archive them and treat them just like … well … real digital photos. All I have to do is convince them to do this …

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I really like my gym, LA Fitness. It’s inexpensive, it has lots of great amenities, and there are enough of them scattered around Los Angeles that I never have to travel very far to find one. I have a laundry list of complaints about the place, of course: one of the ergs is almost always broken, the hinges on the doors of the lockers are constantly malfunctioning, the sauna seems to be out of order every few days, stuff like that. But in general I like the place.

One of the things that keeps me motivated while I’m there is the music. It’s some sort of cable system, like “LA Fitness Radio”. There weren’t any commercials until a few months ago, and even now it’s just a short promo for the gym about once an hour. (This makes little sense to me. I’m already a member! Why are you trying to convince me of how great the place is?) They play seriously great music. The last time I was there I heard “Panama” by Van Halen, for example. Sure, they play a ton of Top 40 bubble-gum garbage, but it’s nothing obnoxiously bad. And they somehow manage to squeeze lots and lots of deep cuts into the mix.

A few days ago I heard “Get Off This” by Cracker. The album Kerosene Hat had one hit — “Low” — and, as far as I know, I am the only person on Earth that actually bought the CD. It’s one of my all-time favorites. (The entire CD is great, by the way. If you don’t have it, go buy it.) Hearing a track like that while lifting weights was quite a surprise and, like I said, one of the reasons I dig LA Fitness.

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Recently I saw a commercial for Sylvan Learning Centers. This is a company that is selling products to help your children do well in school. The ad showed a teenage girl gabbing on the telephone. The voice-over said, “Sally sure can talk fast. We can help her read fast,” or something like that. Apparently grammar is not one of the subjects that Sylvan covers. How does a company that claims to help educate children manage to let a commercial with such an egregious grammatical error get all the way to the television screen? There must not be any English majors working in the marketing department over at ol’ Sylvan.

Fast is an adjective. You don’t do things “fast”. You do things quickly.

For at least a year or two I’ve been waiting for someone to build a web service I could use to map running routes. This morning I drove to my buddy’s house at 6 and we went on a long run around Beverly Hills. With less than three weeks until the LA Marathon, it’s time to get serious about hitting the pavement. It took us about an hour and ten minutes, but — once again — I had no reliable way to determine the distance other than driving the route and watching my odometer. This is simply not practical in Los Angeles; at 7:30 in the morning there is so much traffic it would have taken me another hour of driving to do that. When I got to the office I figured I’d try searching for a Google Maps mashup. With the Nike iPod for runners and all the other cool mashups I’ve seen for everything else lately, I figured there must be one for running by now.

And there are two! At USATF (USA Track & Field) some brilliant souls have built a perfect route-mapping tool. We ran 6.72 mi (10.81km) this morning. How awesome! And now I can map the other five or six routes we take all the time to see how far I’ve really been going. Awesome. (There’s also one by Nike, but it’s not as cool.)

When the LA Marathon first announced its new point-to-point course last summer, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke to the significance of transporting participants for free on the Metro on race day. Yesterday, L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina, in her capacity as MTA Chair, said in a committee meeting that marathoners should not be provided with free race day transportation and withdrew the agenda item from next week’s MTA board meeting. Mayor Villaraigosa plans to take this matter directly to the MTA board meeting on February 22, 2007.

Please email Supervisor Molina and ask her to explain herself. Let her know that runners are going to be making traffic hell enough already without taking away this free pass!

Update: I sent an email a few hours ago and recently received a very interesting response. Continue reading for Supervisor Molina’s email reply.

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If you get an email with the subject line “Valentine’s Day eCard !” that looks like it came from AmericanGreetings <services@americangreetings.com>, it’s most likely a virus. I’m not even going to take a chance by clicking the link. The link appears to be to the americangreetings.com domain, but if you hover your mouse over it you’ll see that it’s really going to a different URL. Trickery!

Generally I am sitting at my desk by five-thirty in the morning. I am always completely startled by the alarm at 4:45, as if it’s the first time I’ve ever had to get out of bed. “What the hell?!” I think, although I’ve been waking up at quarter to five since I graduated from college. I chug a glass of orange juice, throw on my gym clothes, and hit the road. I get to the office by 5:15 or so, boot my laptop, and decide if I should go directly to the LA Fitness a block from my office or reply to email for a little bit first. It’s a good way to start the day. Except for a few times when I’ve fallen off the workout wagon for a week or so (or, like, all of 2004), I’ve been doing something along those lines ever since I rowed crew at the University of Florida from ‘94 to ‘96. This morning I had to be somewhere in Westwood at 7:30 so instead of going to the gym I took Buddie for a run around the block. But most of the time I have the same routine.

It’s a rare day that I’m not the first one in my office. I am also, interestingly enough, almost always the last one in the office. So not only do I turn on all the lights every day, but nine times out of ten I have to roam around this huge building turning off all the lights every night. Turning on the lights in the morning never bothers me. I enjoy it, to tell you the truth. But when I’m tired and I want to go home, I hate — I loathe — the fact that nobody else ever turns off the lights when they leave a room. The conference room light is almost always left on. All the lights in the main sales rep area are left on. There are two or three managers who leave the lights on in their office every.single.day. The lights in both of the ladies’ restrooms are always always always left on.

It’s not huge. It’s not the end of the world. I don’t even care so much about the wasted electricity. I just hate having to walk through the building every night. When it’s time to go home, I just want to leave, y’know? </rant>

Just how long, do you think, until OscarTorrents gets slammed by Hollywood? They’re making it a snap to download all of this year’s Oscar-nominated films. Stuck somewhere without internet access? There’s a company named FON that’s giving away wifi routers in the hopes of blanketing the country with free wireless internet access. Already own one of the DVDs? LifeHacker has instructions that show you how to load a DVD onto your video iPod. Hell, don’t stop there! Why not host your own radio show — for free, of course — to discuss the films? You could also write about them if you want. Then use some free software to convert your text to a PDF document. Welcome to 2007!

Now … where’s my damn jetpack?

Now that the dust has finally settled, I’m prepared to pontificate on what I consider the top five songs released in 2006. I think last year was kind of a “down year” for new music; there just weren’t that many great new tracks added to my iTunes library, especially compared to the previous two years. Normally I would post an mp3 of each one for your downloading pleasure, but lately whenever I do that my site is slammed with thousands of leeches. (If you don’t have one of songs, let me know and I’ll get it to you.)
So, without further ado …

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Last week my girlfriend and I had dinner at Cucina Paradiso. It’s a great little Italian restaurant that shares a building with The Palmer Room on Motor Ave. The Palmer Room is a bar / club with a tiny stage for live music; Their website is fairly bland, but the bar itself is quite cozy and a perfect spot to catch a show. We were there to see Landon Band perform. We got to the bar a bit late and only managed to catch the last three or four songs, but I liked what I heard. The lead singer has definitely got some pipes and she put on a helluva good show even though there were only maybe a dozen other people in the audience. It’s tricky because the whole thing is done in Flash, but if you work at it you can download three of the seven songs from their debut album from the official band website.

When my mom was in college she had a part-time job as an usher at a movie theater. The only film shown the entire time she worked there was The Sound of Music. She must have seen it hundreds of times. I’ve caught pieces and bits of it over the years, but have never actually seen the whole thing. All I know is that it’s about a nanny and Nazis. Whatever. My mom always has had a soft spot for Julie Andrews, so it’s little surprise that one of my all-time favorite movies as a kid was Mary Poppins. I loved the singing. I loved the songs. I loved Dick Van Dyke as a chimney sweep. (I think there were penguins, too.)

This morning I found a link on TheBrad’s site to a story about Julie Andrews participating in a promotion for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I mean, even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious, how great is is that the word they gave her was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? (video)

You have to get out of bed pretty early to pull one over on the local coroner in Los Angeles.

Southern California kicker Mario Danelo was drunk when he plunged over a cliff to his death, but the cause of his death was “undetermined,” according to a coroner’s report released Monday.

He’s a football player in excellent physical health. He got really, really drunk. He climbed a large wall and fell over 100′. I don’t see the mystery here. Tragedy? Yes. Mystery? No.

The author of The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook, writes a weekly column for ESPN.com called Tuesday Morning Quarterback during football season. I didn’t get a chance to read it Tuesday because I was still in Vegas. I love Easterbrook because he’s not afraid to tackle social issues in the middle of discussing the merits of good run-blocking. Buried in the middle of this week’s football news he wrote the following:

Last week the British Medical Journal, a technical publication, released a survey in which physicians said sewers, not antibiotics or vaccines, were the greatest public health advance of the past two centuries. Those who live in the favored cities of the West should never take sanitation for granted. The construction of sewage systems in European and American cities, beginning in the late 19th century, dramatically lowered rates of disease, to say nothing of making cities more livable; lowered disease in turn helped Western nations grow more productive and affluent. Today much of the developing world is held back by the fact that its citizens are often sick, and thus not productive. Open conduits of sewage run down the streets of many large developing-world cities; raw sewage pours directly into the Ganges, where bathers are supposed to go for purification rites. In many developing nations the No. 1 need is clean water: clean drinking water, buried sewer systems and modern wastewater treatment plants. The United States appears to have wasted nearly $1 trillion in Iraq. That sum could have brought modern public sanitation to the 25 largest cities of the developing world, and made America the hero of the world’s poor for generations.

Everyone knows that I own the davidgagne.net domain name. I also own the davidgagne.org and the davegagne.org domains. Here’s my question: Should I configure those two domains to redirect to this one? Or should I set them to be mirrors of this one? Dreamhost gives me both options, and I’m trying to decide which one makes more sense. I know some screwball side-effects can arise if you redirect. But creating mirrors seems fishy, too. Your thoughts?