Southbound

- I’ve walked to the hardware store, the pet store, the book store and the coffee shop. Other people were walking too.

- Most people are friendly, and not in a fake way.

- People bicycle a lot.

- I rarely drive, when I do it isn’t far and I fill up gas rarely.

- On Groundhog Day I walked to breakfast without a jacket. I’d take four more weeks of this kind of winter.

- I don’t think I’ve had a single dish with cilantro. I did have excellent Lengua guisada yesterday for lunch. I’ve also had a lamb burger with duck confit and Kim Chee tacos.

- I’ve seen one or two smoggy days so far but the only day the air actually didn’t feel clean was the afternoon I arrived in Salt Lake City.

- I learned that people in LA often find it rude when you run your windshield cleaner in traffic. I did not find this put through personal experience.

- Parking will often cost you a couple bucks in meter or valet tips but its never been the impossible situation it often was for me in San Francisco.

- The fresh meat selection at Trader Joes is vastly inferior to what it was in Novato and Petaluma. I guess the restaurants buy all the good steaks.

Unpacking boxes is remarkable exhausting especially when there are stairs involved.  But the majority of it is done.  Now comes the asymptotic behavior of the remaining boxes. The closer you get to having all of them unpacked, the longer it takes to reach full unpacked status, which you will not ever actually reach. It’s the inverse of packing.

Brent Bye came over again this afternoon and finished setting up the lights for the new set. I think we fixed the lighting problems and maybe, just maybe, locked down the HV30 settings we needed to make it look halfway decent.  On JammerB’s advice I also ordered a Logitech C920 as a backup.  Just in case.

Of course the next episode of Tech News Today that I’ll do is from Petaluma.  I fly back north Sunday to do Sword and Laser. I’ll be there until Wednesday. Puts a crimp in the unpacking schedule mind you.

I did finally take some time to walk around in my neighborhood today. Up until today I’d only gone running with my dog Sawyer. So I’d seen some lovely houses but hadn’t walked the businesses on Venice Boulevard yet.  There’s some cool stuff doen there! Sam Johnson’s book shop is glorious. It is a book lover’s book shop and no mistake.  It’s even better than my last favorite bookshop, Chelsea Books on Irving Street in San Francisco’s Sunset District. Sadly Chelsea is no more. But it is so good to be in a neighborhood with any kind of book shop much less a fantastic one like Sam Johnson’s.

I also had an extremely tasty burger at Ed’s Gourmet Grub. Burgers are very fashionable in Los Angeles these days, it seems, so I won’t make an evaluation of how it ranks in the hipster world of meat patties but I will say this. I liked the bun.  I never like the bun. So.. There you have it. Two buns up. Or something.

I also have a music store, where I may be able to get a mic stand, though I didn’t go in. The True Value hardware store looks … like a hardware store. I will be checking that out later. And I spied an amazing dinery looking place in the bowling alley, called Pepy’s.  A little World Wide Web searching and it turns out Pepy’s is a fantastic place with excellent portuguese sausage, run by Giuseppe, or Pepy for short. Yes it’s the bowling alley’s food but it’s not bowling alley food. If you catch my drift. Or lane.  Or gutter.

In any case my walk was fruitful, allowing me to drop a letter in a mailbox and eat a tasy burger and browse amazing books. So far so good.

Yesterday was the first of my TWiT shows from LA. My studio setup isn’t done yet so I pulled some schtick and put boxes behind me to emphasize I’m in transition still. That didn’t stop people from making well-meaning suggestions about how to improve my set.

The bandwidth was plenty though, so the whole thing worked better than I expected, although the HV30 needs some camera tweaks.

Between getting things set for TNT and doing Frame Rate later in the day and then guesting on The Weird Things podcast, I didn’t get a lot done in the house. I did take a mic jog around the neighborhood with Sawyer the Dog, and learned there’s a Staples near us.

That led to a fruitless quest for a new chair. The chair I have isn’t talk enough for the new set, so I’ve been sitting on a box. It’s not very comfortable. I found a drafting chair at Staples but the only one they had in stock was broken. They said another location on Bundy Drive had three. I went there and they said they couldn’t find them. Mind you both locations had floor models. So the guy at Staples offered to order it online for me. Which saved me $30 somehow. It should arrive tomorrow.

This afternoon I had a little more time between work stuff so I took Jango the dog for a walk to Taco Bell and back. Right as we got home we witnessed a neighbor at another neighbors door shouting about a pile of dirt. Inlaid you not. From what I gathered, it had taken up a parking space and the elderly lady being yelled at had left handprints on a truck. Or something. I don’t care what the grey haired lady who can barely walk did, I don’t think it’s ok to scream at her at her front door. But to her credit she kept calm. The other lady yelled something about complaining to the neighborhood association and the senior center. So my neighborhood has an association! Good to know.

I spent a good amount of time unpacking my kitchen boxes after that. The coffee mugs are unpacked! No more paper cups. But bow my legs hurt. But my chair comes tomorrow and I think I figured out how to build my own desk. So things are looking up.

A few more minutes of rest and I think my legs will be ready to try unpacking some clothes.

Yesterday was my first full day living in Los Angeles. I spent most of it waiting in a cold house for Verizon to show up. But it was worth it. Here’s what I learned.

1. People do walk in LA. Maybe not a lot. Maybe not everywhere, but at least near Santa Monica Blvd. west of the 405 nobody looked at me odd when I walked from our temporary house to the UPS store to check Sword and Laser’s new mailbox. And no, the people walking weren’t homeless. They were normal people of all kinds, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans and whiteys like me. One guy even said hello and remark don how stinky the roofers nearby were.

2. Verizon FiOS can be f@)$!! fast. Also Ron my installer was excellent. He was competent and knowledgable and knew enough to skip the things he could tell I knew (like ‘setting up email’) and tell me the things he thought I didn’t know ( like a bit about how their box works). 300 Mbps down and 65 up with .7 ping ain’t bad either. Pricey but not bad.

3. Brent Bye can hang a light. He’s helped a ton at the TWiT brick house in Petaluma. My little setup was child’s play for him and his buddy. They clamped up a kino and a couple back lights without drilling into my landlords ceiling beams. I also hooked up the HV30 Mac Mini and got the bare minimum hardware I need for streaming p and running. Might need a better camera, but we’ll see.

4. Mitsuwa Marketplace makes the best ramen I’ve ever tasted. I haven’t been to Japan. But damn that spicy ramen with extra pork was fantastic.

5. My landlord is on it. As soon as I emailed about the furnace my landlord set the wheels in motion to geton getting it fixed. Hopefully it will be resolved today. This is a temperate climate so it’s not a habitability or survival issue like it would be in some areas, but that didn’t delay the response any.

6. I still hate moving. That’s not about LA. But it’s true. Can’t wait to be done.