/mike

The Two Towers is much more enjoyable the second time around. I even liked Samwise's little speech at the end. I'll be sure to set expectations for the last installment to an appropriate level.

I was thinking about how I would like to be remembered when I die, thinking that it would be a good way to gauge whether or not I'm living the life I'd like. I concluded that I had best not die anytime soon. This past friday, Cindy and I attended Nathan's farewell party. In a fashion, he was able to hear what his friends know him as, without having to pass on the next life. Good for him. All the best to you, friend.

A while back, my mum introduced me to this little chinese hair salon/barber shop. The whole family goes now (including one local cousin). $8 bucks a cut ($10 with tip) just can't be beat. The place is packed so you need to make an appointment. Being a bit fluent in chinese helps, but I've gotten by with English. I'm telling you, it's the Golden Deli of barber shops.

Monalisa Hair Design (ask for Tom)
135 S San Gabriel Blvd # C
(626) 309-1369

On average, I pass by one car accident a day. I waddle through the traffic by enjoying my new Trash Can Sinatras purchase, Zebra of the Family (old demos, radio sessions, and previously unreleased material). The car goes about 10 miles per hour with an occasional tap on the brake while I savor the band written liner notes to each track.

And this just in from the website: tcs have now asked andy chase (of the band 'ivy') to remix five additional songs (andy mixed the two mentioned). the next five are "what women do to men", "freetime", "got carried away", "it's a miracle we got anywhere" and "weightlifting." andy will be doing the mixing in new york during the first two weeks of september.

I wonder if I'll ever have the opportunity to see them live.

If I don't blog for a bit, I feel a lot of pressure on my next post. The only answer is a stream-of-consciousness blog.

So I am back from a weekend up north. This makes it twice for two consecutive weeks. I've learned a lot about driving long distances. I’ve learned it’s better to be a bit aloof. Those damn drivers just aren't worth the trouble. I've enjoyed the time spent with Matthew. Why is Berkeley so ugly? Maybe it was the incoming frosh or maybe it was the shit smeared all over the sidewalk, but I preferred walking around SF. I'll bet there are neighborhoods in Berkeley that I will like once I find them.

This second trip has helped put me back on track. I'm more settled. I have some personal self-improvement projects going on but I never allow myself to develop them into habits. It's just an uphill battle until I get sidetracked. If I can just do it long enough to make them habits, oh.... that would be sweet.

Cindy and I had a good weekend enjoying the city and seeing friends. Friends. I want to see more friends. Yes this is my attempt at saying call me email me hang with me talk to me drink with me cuz I want to see you. We ate American style seafood at fisherman's wharf which is overpriced and bland but still a very good time.

Lately I've been thinking about the idea of constraints. Cindy and I talk about the concept all the time. I'm a fan of constraints. It just takes wisdom to know what they should be. That's what urban planning is all about. I laugh whenever people say that they are "free". Yes you are free, but not completely. You can't build a house that we know will fall down. You can't even build specific kinds of structures. You can't build your home above a certain height. But is it going to far to say that you can't build a certain color? Probably. Constraints are important to design too. I got Cindy this book written about a few years back called "The Design of Everyday Things". It's a great book and it makes me even more interested in design. I like intelligent design that fosters aesthetics AND user-friendliness. In fact, I feel like one without the other is no longer interesting to me. My big brother James actually introduced the book/author to me a while back because the guy who wrote it taught cognitive science at UCSD when I was there. Of course I don't remember the conversation. Another funny thing, I've been reading about neo-conservatives and James told me that he talked to me about them long time ago too.

So constraints. I'm all for constraints. I’m for imagination with constraints. America has in general been reluctant to impose constraints, which is a good thing. But sometimes they might not be a bad idea. Where am I going with this? I'm talking about SUVs. I'm not saying I would ban them. I'm just saying that since there already are constraints for vehicles, I don't see why we can't consider constraints on further reducing how tall or wide vehicles can be, or how high their headlights can be. Is taking vehicle design constraints to the point where aspects of SUV's and large trucks become illegal going too far? I'm just saying it’s a worthwhile conversation.

I currently get two weeks of vacation a year. When I worked overtime at my last job, I built up a healthy stash of 58 additional hours off, choosing time over cash for the overtime worked. You see, I like to hoard my hours and dream of traveling overseas or doing another short term mission trip. Ah but I got a bit of a surprise today. The overtime hours didn't transfer from job to job (even though it is technically still within the City). LA cashed my hours in and paid it all off. Getting a second paycheck today was nice and I can always think of it as cash for my future travels, but I still prefer the time.

New jobs are rough. ROUGH! On the brighter side of things, I got my new business cards. It don't mean much, but it means a lot to me.

Paris is burning. NY is pitch black. There's always something going on.

My Dad blames all energy problems on deregulation, but he might be projecting LA's problems on NY.

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Much of zoning's roots have an exclusionary nature, especially when it comes to preserving single family communities. This perspective is called Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY). Ordinances have been drafted to restrict a variety of things: height, density, noise, architecture, religion, race... anything. Well, based on an interesting article in The New York Times (requires registration), for some communities the new public nuisance is children.

The problem for those neighborhoods is that the high density growth they are incurring means more children, which means higher school taxes. While it is officially illegal to exclude familes with children through zoning, constituents can request that planners legally do the same thing by encouraging elderly developments, commercial buildings, and single family homes with large lots. This kind of pressure can present a troubling situation for a planner.

The issue is complicated. The core problem stems from the extremely high (and growing) cost of education, and who has to pay for it. That's a whole other mess.

Last night, I had an interesting dream. I was with Cindy and some past coworkers. We were chatting it up and having a good time, but I started to annoy everyone. I was being very dominant and forthcoming in my comments and opinions, often telling people what to do, or bragging about my accomplishments. I then had some sort of epiphany sent down to me. It was in the form of a cheesy Latin proverb. Translated, it said "do loud, listen loud". Implicit in the message was "stop talking loud".

Ralph Nader discusses a number of different public space issues in his commentary, Selling Out: Our Public Space, Universal Services Under Assault. In general, he warns against current and potential changes in the way public facilities like post offices, libraries, schools and services are used. GFOs, which provide the public with government documents, are closing down because they now offer their service online. Libraries are being proposed to be part of mixed-use developments. Post Offices are being considered in shopping malls. Last, schools have been suggested to be on floors of office buildings.

Many of these ideas are far fetched to me too. Nader opposes these ideas in order to protect a role rooted in nostalgia. He comments on post offices:

For over two centuries, free standing Post Office buildings have anchored communities of all sizes. In small towns and rural areas, it is a vital force, a place to access all kinds of government information and notices, a gathering spot to chat briefly and meet your friends and neighbors, a place to send and receive mail and parcels. This is something both tangibly and intangibly different than going to an enclave in a sprawling corporate Mall. People in small town-rural America see the Post Office as a symbol of Uncle Sam, of what the New York Times called “the national community.” It is hard to imagine people rallying to save the Postal enclave in a Mall, as they do to save their little Post Office.

The idea of a meeting place fascinated me. Communities are not as cohesive as they used to be. Instead of a town where everyone knows each other, we have friendster lists of people scattered throughout the continent. I don’t use the post office in the way Nader speaks. The last time I ran into a bunch of peers was at a Coldplay concert. The day of the old civic building is dead.

As shallow and materialistic as this sounds, malls are the new post office. Putting one in there isn’t some horrible hateful decision, but is instead a distasteful, yet natural extension of our culture. Yet I think that with a little work, the old ideal can be attained. In fact, part of the solution may be to incorporate some commerical in there (or have it very easily accessible). My preferred answer is already being done in a lot of places. I like the idea of a civic campus, kind of like the one in Van Nuys. Urban design principles can be applied to provide an appealing space. A little open space, some shops, some services, and a Starbucks.

Brittany Murphy is the new Alicia Silverstone. They've come a long way since Clueless.

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According to today's LA Times, first time buyers should consider Montebello and Long Beach.

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The Angels are clearly done, but I'm still enjoying summer baseball. There isn't any tension to Halo baseball. I just relax and form my opinions on minor leaguers called up to finish the season.

Besides, the Dodgers can make the postseason, and in general, there is a lot of great ball being played. Just tonight, I enjoyed Sunday Night Baseball with the Braves vs. the Cardinals. There was an unassisted triple play, and a bottom of the eighth comeback, highlighted by Albert Pujols hitting a dramatic home run off John Smoltz. Nothing is more pleasureable than hearing the Braves lose (except maybe a Yankee's loss).

Cindy and I have been watching the Last Comic Standing marathon on and off all throughout the day. I didn't like the reality-tv portion but found the standup face-offs very compelling. Good job Dat, you crazy vietnamese psycho.

One of the best and the brightest of the Planning Department is leaving LA for Texas. I was amazed when she told me that they don't have zoning! So I picked a city (Houston) and did some research. I sorted through their website and while they certainly do planning work (Long Range Planning, Community Planning and Main Street Revitalization to name a few), they have also repeatedly voted down zoning ordinance proposals. Seems you can build a skyscraper next to a single family home next to an industrial plant next to a park over there!

On the topic of zoning, I perused through a report put out by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, which included articles on housing and land use regulations. It posited that the purported housing affordability crisis in many US regions is not a cause of land shortage (as typically assumed) but instead is the result of overly stringent zoning (and other land use regulations).

The data suggest that increasingly stringent land-use regulations have been the primary driver of the house-price inflation in recent decades. A clear implication is that building small numbers of subsidized housing units will probably contribute negligible to solving the overall problem of housing affordability. Regulatory reform, on the other hand, could have a massive impact, unleashing the normal tendency of markets to increase supply in response to increased demand. Affordable housing advocates, take note.

-taken from the Taubman Center Report

Interesting. Definitely good food for thought, eh? I tend to believe there is an element of truth to this. If you know anyone who is trying to build a home in LA, I'm sure they can tell you all about it. Overlapping ordinances, laws that contradict each other, or processes that can hold projects up for years, all need to be reformed to synchronize together. In other words, one house doesn't need three different building height limits from three different laws. Regulatory reform is a good idea, but as with most things, it's the implementation that is hardest.

There is a possibility that I have found a room to rent near San Pedro. The arrangement would be that I stay there on work days and spend the weekend at home. In many ways, it presents an ideal situation. The commute is good, the price is right, and it doesn't require a long term commitment.

Surprisingly, I find myself feeling a tad reluctant.

James E. Moore II writes in the LA Times that the Gold Line Is Just Glitter. He accuses the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) of misrepresenting the impact of light-rail and playing budget games to bankrupt the department in order to complain for more money. As an alternative, he champions a variety of bus proposals that he argues would be more cost effective, flexible, and hold more passengers.

Currently, I don't use either, since both are not practical alternatives to my commute. While I support light-rail and would love to ride the Gold line, I am also an example of criticisms against it. Even though I live in Pasadena, I'm not within walking distance of a station. I also balk at the idea of driving there and paying for parking, just to get on mass transit.

Still, on a larger scale, I think that it is too early to make any substantial judgment. There is still a lot of work to be done. But it is important to have the right expectations. As long as LA remains a vibrant economic force, nothing will completely alleviate the traffic situation. Nothing. Buses will play a vital part in the region's transportation plans, but even with sparse resources, I do not think that it is an either/or proposition. The core need is to move people from one place to another, but I believe that buses and light rail also can provide different things (and serve different people) too. Perhaps this is a bit optimistic, but maybe it can support aggressive planning to develop new places that people can live, work, and play. Can the glitter play a role in bringing in the gold? Hopefully.

Our good friends, Victoria and Jacob, got married this past Saturday. I had the honor of being emcee, which I actually quite enjoyed. Cindy got to wear her H & M dress and I sported my new birthday watch and tie.

The ceremony and banquet were true to the personalities of the bride and groom. Victoria read her vows as a poem and Jacob said his on bended knee. There were three musical acts and a hip hop dance. It was quite an experience.

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Cindy and I decided that we like Pootie Tang. A lot.

Metrosexuals: It's a Guy Thing! An emerging breed of man, the metrosexual, shows his soft, sensitive, feminine side.

-taken from article on msn.com

I dunno, seems to me that the softness is only on the outside.