New SouthThe single drawback to transferring to SCIArc was the twofold increase in Gen Ed requirements, which amounted to an extra semester of college. Because SCIArc is a specialized university, Gen Eds offered are nil. Having let my Gen Eds slip until the last minute, I had to attend the spring semester at Valley Community College. More than a decade ago, around SAT time, Rosen and I referred to this place as UC San Fernando. Humbling. Tending to these classes has understandably been the bane of my existence for the past four months. The beginning three weeks of SCIArc overlapped the CC semester, and right at finals and project deadline time no less. So, for the past three weeks, I've effectively had eight classes. At 28, the workload of community college is ridiculously easy, however it still requires some time, a scarce commodity in architecture school. Couple this with the spanning distance of the 101 between coldwater and downtown, which can take twenty minutes or an hour to traverse between some classes. Additionally, The Horse Drawn Horse has been stalling lately.

Opportunity Cost The internet is the bathroom wall. I got my first cell phone four months ago. Planned obsolescence keeps me from an ipod. This here pretty pretty Vaio laptop is the cat's pajamas. My internet is free, compliments of Boaz, the populist Israeli upstairs neighbor, broadcasting the two unsecured ports, “ShareItAll”, and “ShareThePort”. Signal: Six bars of crunk, eleven on the amp. Hold my gold; I got wifi raining down on me. 80 plus gigs of Boaz' itunes dirty south collection later, and I'll offer Lil' John top dallar to come up with a better colloquial truncation for the word, “weblog”.

Prevention of, Fire Deo does broadcast design. Although a recent convert to the sonic cabaret of the Dresden Dolls, purely because of the lavish design of the Dresden Dolls website did Deo sign up for their fan club. As a result, he got tickets to the Dresden Dolls Nine Inch Nails show in a tiny shanty of a warehouse in San Diego a week before they went on sale. The Dresden Dolls are my world. I'm the last guy to join a fan club for any reason. Deo bought me a ticket. A month prior, I Bought Deo a ticket for the Dolls in LA. They rocked his world. June 1, DD NIN SD. Tiny warehouse. Oh darn. I have an Evening Economics final that got pushed to June 1 because my Monday night professor forgot about memorial day on the syllabus. One community college class later and here's the net stats: the tickets cost more than the econ class. The drive to San Diego is longer than I spent studying for the exam. The time I spent taking the exam was shorter than the round trip to and from the Valley. Cost of missing the greatest concert of my life to take the easiest final of my academic career? Rosen's mom and a crate of Bushmills.

Quality Control Deo gave my ticket to a friend of ours. His mustang caught fire in his garage with his camera gear and portfolio in the backseat this past Sunday. Having the recipient of the ticket of a lifetime be a friend whose car is a molten mass at his parents' Canoga Park home put me back in a place where I could simply be glad the damned class is over. Clearly in the case of Community College, the attendance policy is the bane of my existence. I wish the Horse Drawn Horse would explode.

resource With photoshop, often the base info is lost or filtered or plugged in so much, the base info disappears. The monkey then is the quality of the base source of information. My cell phone has the world's worst camera, covered by an even worse clear plexi shell. Consequently I love the quality of the pictures it takes. Pictures that post here properly are all taken haphazardly around LA with this phone. Any picture that looks too good taken by a crappy cellphone probably wasn't. Captions if they need explanation.

sage the most unexpected outcome of my film class with visiting Harvard Prof Jeffry Inaba has been the invaluable criticism of my rough cuts by my studio professor Sam Hall Kaplan. In addition to the critical inspection of Inaba, the roughs can be ripped to pieces and shat upon by a legitimate film maker deploying a design professors irreverence. I missed school.