Quartz City

There’s not much to Soviet-era automobiles. There’s the oddball Trabant from East Germany and a handful of Russian builders, but none of them really built anything that stood out to be something other than “generic sedan in old background photo.” Volgas were fashionable (Yuri Gagarin drove one!), but the company never really designed and built anything outside of basic utilitarian sedans. And c’mon, if James Bond gets to drive a Aston Martin do you really think that a stylish KGB agent would want to drive a box?This “what if” was answered by Russian custom car manufacturer A:Level who took a BMW 850csi and created a new body based on the 1957 Volga. The end result is the Volga V12 Coupe which is the coolest looking car I’ve seen in years. There’s only one and A:Level refuses to make any more, but it’s making the rounds of the European auto show circuit. Car And Driver magazine has the complete rundown.

Anil Dash asks:

Most of the people I know are geeks, and some large number of geeks are obsessive to one degree or another. (This can be verified by anyone who’s ever mumbled “Asperger’s…” under their breath while watching me arrange my Windows desktop.)

Perhaps the ultimate example of this sort of dorkiness is the fact that almost every one of my friends has, at one point or another, made at least one Excel spreadsheet to document some arcane aspect of their lives. The number of consecutive sunny days, the types and prices of the cups of coffee they drink, or just straightforward charts about their boss’s mood. There’s no end to the ways one can misuse desktop applications in one’s personal life.
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Thus, it’s time for a bit of market research. Have you ever made a spreadsheet for your personal life? Talked to your kids using PowerPoint? Share your geekiness, and maybe it’ll justify the creation of an exciting new community of dorks.

As much as I would like to hop from one foot to another and whistle idly, I have to confirm that yes I’ve documented part of my life in Excel. To be precise, I calculated mileage and the total amount of money I spent on gasoline on my big 1994 “loop the USA” road trip to see the remaining states I hadn’t yet been to. You can download the Excel file if you wish, but for the record my trip looked like this:

This was all done in a rented 1994 Buick Skylark. Some pictures from that trip are also posted.

Prior to last weekend, I’d spent maybe a hour or two total in Portland, Oregon and those stops were pretty much limited to the I-5 corridor for refueling and a literal run through Powell’s. I was really looking forward to our visit over the weekend and after logging forty-eight or hours in the 503 area code I’m ready to load up the car and relocate after I get the NYC bug out of my system.

To enumerate:

• Public transportation that makes sense: I’ve noted this before, but it needs to be repeated: Portland’s rail and bus system just makes sense. It’s low cost. It goes places where people want to go. It’s relatively inobtrusive.
• Montage: Home of the best macaroni and cheese I’ve had on this or any other planet and a bread pudding that can make stronger mortals weep. Yes it’s that good. Ultramega bonus points for being open until 4am on the weekend.
• Powell’s: Sorry Tattered Cover, Powell’s is the best bookstore in the world.
• The Governor Hotel: Every city needs at least one hotel that would be the location for a David Lynch movie.
• The Cup And Saucer: Punk rock breakfast is urgent and key.
• The Paradox Cafe: Especially when you can have a punk rock breakfast anywhere in town

Vaguely progressive trustafarian granola cities are plentiful, but it’s nice to see a largish city actually put the political and social beliefs of its population into practice.

Just got back home after flying up to the northwest to crawl around Portland and Seattle to consume mass quantities of coffee, records, and food, culminating in the Kraftwerk show at the Paramount in Seattle. For a music genre that demands constant rejection of the “same old stuff”, Kraftwerk in 2004 really hasn’t changed much in twenty years. Presumably the software on their otherwise featureless laptops has been updated, but their show is even more retro-futuristic with all the Tron-level graphics intact and the robots once again dusted off. I haven’t ever seen them before, but I imagine it’s like going on an old, beloved Disneyland ride: there might be a fresh coat of paint and some minor adjustments here and there, but you expect a certain amount of familiarity to remain. The show was terrific, and I’d go see it again without thinking twice. Sort of like racing out of the exit and running back in line to get on the ride again?

The defining moment of the show came during the break in between encores when the cheering audience held up their lighted cell phones in lieu of cigarette lighters. Totally classic.

The US Iraq administrator Paul Bremer remarked that “The French have never forgiven us for liberating them.” What’s the story behind that comment? For the majority of the war, the United States had intended that France be part of a post-war American protectorate without national sovereignty once the Germans were defeated. The United States went as far as to begin negotiations with the pro-Nazi Vichy government before reversing it’s intentions and officially recognizing De Gaulle as head of the French government in October 1944. Read on…

Defense Tech reports on a DARPA project that’s so weird, I can’t make a snarky comment

Darpa, the Pentagon’s research arm, has already started to investigate ways for soldiers to fight without sleep or food. Now the agency wants to see if G.I.s can carry on without most of their blood.

“The vision for the Surviving Blood Loss (SBL) Program is to develop novel strategies that delay the onset of irreversible shock and allow an injured warfighter to survive with significantly reduced oxygen delivery for extended periods of time,” a Darpa solicitation reads.

I absolutely adore Los Angeles and will always defend it from the same stupid attacks that have traditionally been the targeted at it, but recent news items have emphasized just how well, things suck right now. And I’m not just referring to yesterday’s earthquake prediction…

First of all, 1 million people have moved to Southern California in just the past three years. Transportation infrastructure has not increased to match that. You do the math.

The second news story is a heartbreaking story about my beloved Union Station.

For several weeks now, the front parking areas of the station (obscured from Alameda by high hedges) showed the occasional glimpse of heavy equipment. Most people just assumed the parking lots were being repaved or perhaps that an underground garage was in the making.

So it came as quite a jolt to make my twice weekly pass-by the Station before jumping on the 101 onramp on Alameda to see that the south lot had sprouted a three-story (so far) matrix of steel girders! Goodbye, unobstructed view, approaching from the south.

The Downtown News published a story a couple days ago to the effect that the next shocker would be in the north lot, on the southeast corner of Alameda and Cesar Chavez.

A few hundred lucky yuppies with bucks to burn on trendy living spaces and a few more in a just as trendy office building (that’s the best scuttlebutt so far) will have exclusive views of Union Station that used to belong to all of us.

Last week I saw the Anthony Mann double-header of Raw Deal and T-Men at the Egyptian Theater. T-Men specifically was chock full of old vistas of Los Angeles, including Union Station and the Farmer’s Market at 3rd and Fairfax and though there’s obviously been lots of changes over the 50 years, it was remarkable to see what hasn’t changed - including the Union Station area. Sigh…

And in insult to injury, Aaron Spelling discovers LA hipsters ten years too late:

It’s the same old story. Move into a down-on-its-heels neighborhood for cheap rent, boho charm and like-minded camaraderie. Then - WHAM! - gentrification, and the whole vibe starts to change. Next thing you know, Aaron Spelling’s army moves into a house two doors up the street, and Silver Lake, the TV show, is upon you. Please move your car before we tow.

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The idea for the show, from what I could glean from others on the set, is something along these obtuse and convoluted lines: Main-character guy Dennis, played by Kerr Smith, starts seeing ghosts as a kid, and since no one believes him, he is forced to take medication to prevent these trite and hackneyed cinematic visions from ruining his life too much. He gets older, a family member dies, and our protagonist comes into some money, with which he buys not just a record store but “the No. 1 used-record store” in Silver Lake. Dennis gets a great product-filled haircut and a cool 1970s Citroën, which, this being Silver Lake, gets booted all the time (not cool). He goes off the medication, moves in with his twin sister, Julie (Hedy Burress), who also has great hair, and then he starts to see them ghouls again

There’s a hollow voice echoing underneath Southern California and in true Amityville fashion it’s intoning “GET OUT,” “GET OUT” at me.

Is this thing on?

Still in the middle of moving everything over to the setup at John Companies. I haven’t had to deal with Red Hat since version 3 or so and I’m still fumbling my way around here. I still wish I had a place to park my G4, but what are you going to do?

First up is this headline: “Recordings Banned As Scalia Accepts Free Speech Award“.

Second is this bit of testimony from the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on cable television rates. Consumers want to be able to pick and choose what cable channels they subscribe to in a “a la carte” fashion instead of in packages which contain channels consumers might not want.

George W. Bodenheimer, president of ESPN and ABC Sports, owned by Walt Disney Co., told the senators that forcing cable companies to remove ESPN channels from packages and offer them a la carte would be a “consumer disaster.”

“We need competition,” Bodenheimer said, “not regulation.”