Untangling that stylish mess

February 09, 2010 by e;

It's amazing how crufty a CSS file can get over time.

I went through blogdowntown main CSS file this evening looking for code that was no longer used on the site. I ended up cutting the file down roughly 250 lines, or 14%.

At the same time I ported the stylesheet over to LESS, a CSS processor that allows you to use fun things like variables and nesting that really should be in the CSS spec itself. — Continue Reading...

pretending to still be a geek

January 04, 2010 by e;

Eric Richardson [Flickr]

If you look back through the archives here, you'll find a lot of intense geekery. I ran Linux as a desktop OS for nearly a decade, administered servers, etc. I enjoyed it.

These days, though, I just tend to do less of it. Needs and situations change, and I don't end up doing as much geeky stuff as I once did.

Today, though, was an exception. Today I had to rebuild a home Linux server, migrating 350gb of data over to new drives before adding those same old drives into a logical volume. — Continue Reading...

Back in the Cold

December 28, 2009 by e; — 2 Comments

Eric Richardson [Flickr]

Looking across Bear Lake from Kathy's house in North Muskegon, MI. Not pictured: 40mph wind gusts.

Kathy and I are back in Michigan for the holidays, which means we're getting our annual dose of cold and snowy weather. Christmas Eve brought freezing rain, which turned the roads into sheets of ice. Saturday and yesterday it was snow, and today's weather is characterized by 40 mile per hour wind gusts that are whistling around the house.

People complain about not having seasons in Los Angeles, but I just don't get it. I'm perfectly happy with 70 and sunny.

Joe Purdy at the Hotel Cafe

December 15, 2009 by e;

A friend and I took a trip up to Hollywood last night to see Joe Purdy at the Hotel Cafe and, for once, no one fell asleep.

It's a long story.

The night marked at least the fifth time I've seen Joe play, four times now at the Hotel Cafe and once at an event at the old Conga Room on Wilshire. Combine that with the fact that I own three of his CDs, and you can get a general sense of my impression of his music.

It was my first time out to the Hotel Cafe in a long while, and it got me thinking about the venue that really defined my taste in L.A. music. Way back when the Hotel Cafe was half its current size and still just an all-ages coffee shop, I used to say that if the venue offered a monthly pass, I would have been there two or three times a week.

Looking through the artists on my iTunes, Eric Hutchinson, Erik Penny, Jay Nash (though I had met him before, actually at that Joe Purdy Conga Room show), Jim Bianco, Joe Purdy, Pedestrian, Quincy Coleman and Steve Reynolds were all acts I first heard at the Hotel Cafe. That's a nice little chunk of my music collection to have come out of a then-40-seat venue.

Importing Old Music

December 12, 2009 by e;

If you dig back through the 11 years of archives here (11 years!), you'll find a lot of posts where I wrote about music: what I was listening to, what shows I had seen, what I had rediscovered...

That last one seems to be a recurring trend for me. I have a song or an album and somehow it gets misplaced, but then I pull it out a few years later to realize I still think it's great.

I'm doing that right now, converting some albums I had sitting around as .ogg files. At the moment I'm being reminded how much I liked Massive Attack's Mezzanine, and a few minutes ago I was doing the same with Blonde Redhead's Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons. — Continue Reading...