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Returning from a record-long 44 days without blogging.  Welcome back, Joz.  Thanks very much!

I didn’t know space had a smell, did you?

Yes, I know, Fox News article link, I sin, I apologize.

If you are ever feeling down or want some comedy, you can always read the reviews for the Belgrave House Hotel.

As blue states across the union adopt gay marriage in a satisfyingly faster-than-expected pace, Maine being the latest as of two days ago, I had meant to make a post when this happened in Iowa a few weeks ago, but hadn’t found the time to write it.  I’d just like to make a big point of this, to once again exemplify that Iowa is awesome.  I wanted point this out because I still feel that many coastal urbanites regard Iowa, one of our most rural states, with conservatism, hicks, and an unsafe environment for liberals, non-whites, or gays.  Not so my friend, them cornfields are friendly to ya!  Those hicks are now responsible for Obama and the largest gay-friendly geographic slab of America.

States in the Northern-central Midwest, regardless of low population, should not to be culturally associated with rural states in the South.  The Midwest (minus Missouri & Kansas) is NOT where the bible belt is.  Iowa is rural, friendly, and though true that not definitely not everyone is going to agree with you, there’s not a sense of hostility to difference.  There’s a lot of really nice people in Iowa.

Tambien, if you haven’t seen The Straight Story, I highly suggest it.  It’s one of my favorite movies.

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Well I finally got around to sorting/de-red-eyeing/tagging up our pics from when we went on our great road trip to the Northwest, all the way up into Canada, and back down through the mountain states.  Check out the pics on flickr.  They be geotagged and captioned.  Or go straight to the slideshow!  <– I just now really played around with the slideshow feature, how cool is flickr!?

There’s a few pics in there that I think are pretty cool from an artistic standpoint, here are my favorites from that category:

On a road trip last year we stopped by Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.  We took one picture with my iPhone and some others with our normal Canon camera.  iPhoto ‘09 has the cool Places feature where it’ll read geotags in your photos and find out where pictures were taken.  The picture I took at Apple with my iPhone (which has geotagging) shows that they got the proper location identification for those GPS coordinates:

So of course I want to add that same location to the rest of my photos taken with my Canon (non-geotagging) camera, but oddly enough, they don’t have “Apple Inc” as an option!!  They have tons of Apple Stores, a sales office in Ireland, but not Apple Inc, the name that iPhoto gave for my geotagged picture.

How strange of an oversight is that!?  Damn, just noticed the address of that Apple Store in the screen shot there too.  Anyway, I figured out that you can get “Apple Inc” to show up as the location if you add a new place (at the bottom up there), and do a Google search for Apple.  Crazy omission though.  I pity all the fools taking pictures inside the Apple offices.  Actually they probably can’t do that, hah!

It was ten years ago on this day that I started life in California.  As I’ve known that this anniversary was coming, I was thinking back over these ten years for the past couple days, remembering everything that’s happened and also asking myself the question of what I would have done differently… and I couldn’t really think of anything.  I mean, there are always minor things, and perhaps I would not do the OC life part 1 again, but there are no real major changes I would make.  All-in-all, it’s been a great time and I’m really happy with how it all turned out.

The L.A. Times is doing a pretty awesome project in which they map out L.A.’s 87 neighborhoods based on official borders that they can find but molded by user-input.  You can draw/modify boundaries as you see fit, and take part in conversation and debate regarding them.  It’s quite fun.  *sigh*, L.A. has soooooo much more culture than the O.C.  I mean, to even raise a comparison between the two is a pretty hardcore joke.

This map is particularly interesting to me because coincidentally every place I’ve lived in L.A. has always been borderline with me never fully sure of which neighborhood I lived in.

1. Firstly, I lived in what I thought for a long time was Los Feliz, as the apartment complex was even named Rancho Los Feliz, but it turns out as I suspected and thought later on, that it is really in Atwater Village.
2. Then I lived in Van Nuys, right?  But I always described it as really being right on the border of Van Nuys, Panorama City, and Sun Valley.  The zip code always resolved to Panorama City though and turns out according to the current map that I lived in the bottom right corner of Panorama City.
3. The last place I lived was in Sherman Oaks, but the main zip code would resolve to Van Nuys.  Turns out according to the map that I loved… (I meant to type lived but I really did love there!) indeed in Sherman Oaks, as it seems pretty settled that Burbank Blvd. marks the border between Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys.

Yep, definitely miss it.

[Update] This map also validates the problem I’ve had with associating an identity with the South Bay area (visual representation).  Perhaps part of the problem is due to the fact that so much of that area is removed from the City of L.A.  Most other cities that are not technically part of L.A. have often broken away and are either almost completely encompassed by L.A. (Santa Monica, Hollywood, Burbank, Glendale, Beverly Hills, Inglewood, etc) or are still super close to L.A. (Compton, Lynwood, South Gate, Huntington Park, etc).  I suppose the same issue exists for the San Gabriel Valley, around which I did live before living in any official L.A. cities… but if I hadn’t, and actually even though I have, I can’t really describe a look/feel/culture to it.

It’s official: Circuit City is going out of business, closing all their stores.

* Joz does his best old-man teary-eyed with snot running and says: “Dog-gone, they done went and took it away from me.”

This was one of my favored stores.  I thought it was a good experience when in there, and they had some of the best customer service.  I guess I didn’t go there enough though

I’ll miss the big red plug, where service is state of the art oohhhhh *sobs*

Obvious on a personal level… damn it’s so cold!! This is like, I don’t think it’s ever been this cold here, look at this shit:

And it’s going to keep cold, getting down to within 5 degrees of freezing on Wednesday night!?  In LA!?!?  Dog-gone, five less degrees, some precip, and we’ll have snow.*

* I totally expect to be corrected by a weather/climate expert regarding snow not happening due to warmer precip off the ocean water or something.