Back in Business

Hey everybody, so guess what, I took my computer to mac Hollywood yesterday to get it fixed and it turned out I needed a new hard drive (again). I was worried it would be worse than that. Luckily it wasn't.

I gave them my computer yesterday morning and asked for a 120 GB hard drive, which he said they had in stock. The guy told me it would take 3-5 business days for the hard drive to be installed, but today at work I got a call, and bam, it was done.

Everything isn't completely back to normal yet, as the cds of my programs like cs2 will be arriving in the next day or so, thanks to Andrew Jarrell who found them in my bin in the basement and shipped them out. As soon as those programs are installed I'll be able to get to work designing a flyer for Mosaic and doing work for the ccm opera, as well.

One of the good things about my computer crashing is that mac Hollywood put the Leopard operating system on it now, instead of Tiger. I'm looking forward to exploring it and seeing how it stacks up.

Anyway, even though it's only been like two days between the last post and this one, I'll give a quick update. Last night I got to do something insanely cool. Last night I got to be part of a small group of people from Crew who went up to the Warner Bros. Studio Lot in Burbank for a screening of a movie we'll be working on.

The movie itself was fairly disturbing and mildly upsetting, and was not the highlight. The highlight was actually getting to go onto the Warner Bros. Lot. We had to stop at the gate and give the security guy our id's, and then he gave us these magical "golden tickets."


The only reason I say that is because once you are past security and onto the lot with a ticket, you can basically do whatever you want and go wherever you want to and no one will care.

We got to the studio about 15 minutes before our screening, so the four of us that were there wandered around the backlot for just a few minutes. First of all, we parked right under the big famous WB water tower, which was great. Once in the backlot, we saw the train platform from E.R. and a bunch of very cool city sets, including a huge city hall. We walked by the beautiful Warner Bros. commissary, too.

As we were walking in, a golf cart drove by with a piece of paper titled "Rory's Death Kiss" on the windshield. For those who don't know, Rory's Death Kiss is the pseudonym for the upcoming Batman sequel "The Dark Knight." No Michael Caine wasn't driving the gofl cart. If he had been I would have stopped him.

Exploring a little of the backlot was kind of like being at Disney at night when the park is getting empty. That was the really cool feeling. It was another great moment experiencing the "magic of Hollywood" that you really can't find everywhere in the sometimes extremely commercialized Hollywood of today. I'm looking forward to going back during the day and hopefully going to another screening there sometime.

Hollywood is pretty wonderful.

On a side note, I do think Newsies would be a great relay for life theme. Either that or Mary Poppins. We need to decide soon.

Sorry this post is a little jumbled together. I hope you all have a great rest of the week. I also hope you all are enjoying the new header image my blog is sporting as of this past weekend. It's not extremely different, but I like it a lot. Anyway, take it easy.

much love,

Alex

The Good, the Bad, and the Ogley

Ok, so after the weekend, I've got some good news, and some not so good news.

First the not so good news:

With everything pretty awesome here in LA, I guess something bad was going to happen. Now don't worry, it's nothing really bad or traumatic or anything. It's just that Saturday night as I was writing my blog post my Powerbook laptop started to slow down. Yesterday morning when I turned my computer on it took about an hour to turn on, and then it was barely working at a crawling speed. Last night, I turned on my computer to find nothing but the really bad news:

The blinking question mark of death.

It sucks but it could be worse. My computer isn't making loud clicks at start-up like it did the last time my hard drive died. I'm hoping all it's going to take is a reboot and re-installation. Thank the computer gods for external hard drives, as mine has everything I absolutely need on it.

I'm hoping I don't actually have to pay for any fixes, since I've had this one for a while and don't know how much longer it is until something really expensive happens to make me buy a new one. I don't want to have to use all the money I've made so far on co-op to buy a new laptop, but the MacBook Pro is pretty freaking sweet. With any luck a reboot will do the trick and my Powerbook will be back in business.

Until I get some kind of resolution, the frequency of blog posts might slow down a bit, as I'll really only be able to write updates while at work.

Let this be a lesson to everyone, that you should always buy as much AppleCare as possible. If I had bought the 3 years of AppleCare it would've paid for itself a year ago.


Now for the good news:

The Oscars! The show was pretty good last night. I thought Jon Stewart did a great job. Sure, the only movie nominated for best picture or any of the major awards that I saw was Juno, but it was still a good time. To see all the stars celebrating the end of the strike and the return of the magic of Hollywood was pretty awesome.

I thought all five of the best song nomination performances were great. Can you imagine the pressure on Amy Adams singing that song on stage alone in front of all those people? She's great.

The August Rush song was pretty good. I'd still like to see that movie.

Kristin Chenoweth has the perfect personality to sing That's How You Know, but her voice wasn't as perfect as Amy Adams' in the movie. It's hard not to be biased towards what you've heard thousands of times too, I guess.

Jon McLaughlin gave what I thought was the best musical performance of the night in "So Close."

At first when the song from Once was being performed I thought to myself, "This is the song that's going to beat Enchanted?" But as their performance went on, I realized that it really is a very cool song full of emotion and hope and has made me want to see Once pretty badly. Plus their winning made for a very cool story.

Considering Alan Menken has already won 8 Academy Awards, the third most of anyone ever, I can't imagine he's too disappointed that Once won. Having written three out of the five songs nominated for best song isn't too bad of an accomplishment, especially considering the other musicals and original songs this year. Rob Thomas did deserve a nod for "Little Wonders" from Meet the Robinsons, though.

Anyway, another of my favorite moments from the Oscars was when Jon Stewart said there was a 707 parked on La Brea, because not only was it funny when John Travolta ran out, but La Brea is the street my bus drives up every morning. It's the little things about living in LA that make it so much fun...


Anyway, that's it for now. Hopefully my computer comes back to life soon. Have a great week everybody!

Until next time,
much love,

Alex

And the Oscar Goes To...

Well, we'll find out tomorrow night. But for now here's an Oscar Weekend Update. In fact, it'll probably be mostly pictures, and I'll go as far as to call it a photo update! Enjoy!

This morning the weather was much nicer than I expected it to be, so I decided to go up to Griffith Observatory. However, to get to the Observatory, I had to get on the subway, and that meant either going downtown or catching it in Hollywood. I decided to go to Hollywood, and it was definitely a good decision. I wasn't sure how crazy it would be the day before the Oscars, but at the same time, I was excited to find out. The bus took a detour, but I was still able to get off right at Hollywood & Highland, and this is what I found there.


Hollywood Blvd was completely blocked off between Orange and Highland, and the Red Carpet spanned a few blocks. They covered it in big tents this year with the rain that's expected. Still, it was very cool to be this close to the action of Hollywood's biggest night.


As I was walking along the sidewalk, I saw people crowding together in front of the El Capitan looking toward the carpet. I walked over, and saw what everyone was looking at. There on the Red Carpet getting ready for his Red Carpet hosting duties tomorrow, was the one and only Regis Philbin. How about that for celebrity sighting number 3?


Regis seems like a pretty great guy. I'll admit it was weird to see him wearing jeans, since I've really only seen him in a suit or behind a desk. It was pretty funny that he happened to be standing in the middle of the street right near his star on the walk of fame. How could I not take a picture?


Following the detour along the sidewalk into the Kodak Theatre, you could look back and see the red carpet covered in plastic where the stars walk inside.


Even though you needed a pass to walk on the part above, at the bottom of the "grand staircase" in front of the Kodak, it was possible for anybody to stand on the red carpet, and even though it was covered in plastic, I was excited to stand on the red carpet, so I took a quick picture of my shoes on it.


I walked up to the top of the Hollywood and Highland complex to see what I could see of the red carpet set-up, and in front of the El Capitan and Jimmy Kimmel Studio it was a bird's eye view of the tents.


It started to rain, which was not cool, since I was going to the Observatory to look out over the city, but I got on the subway to go to the Sunset & Vermont station where I could catch the Observatory Shuttle.

In the Subway station under the Kodak, this guy started to talk to me. He was a black guy probably in his mid to late 30s. He asked me how long I had been waiting, made some jokes about following the rules on the subway, and then started to tell me about how he had recently seen the new Larry the Cable Guy movie and how hilarious he thought it was. I didn't really have to do much in the conversation as we talked about comedians and movies and stuff. At first I just had to tell him names of famous people as he described them.

He told me he was a big fan of Mr. Bean and recommended I check out John Cleese's tv show, Faulty Towers. I told him my favorites were the people that made the Naked Gun and Airplane. He asked where I'm from, I told him Pittsburgh, and he said I seemed like I'm from the Midwest, and I told him Pittsburghers don't really like to think they're in the Midwest and we like to consider ourselves in the Northeast, but that in actuality we probably are more Midwestern.

He asked me why I was out here and I told him, and he asked if I thought I could ever live out here. I told him I had no idea, and he told me he was from Michigan but that he thought LA was a great place to visit but a bad place to live, and that people from here never strike up conversation with each other. That they only care about themselves. I definitely haven't felt that way, but didn't really have time to tell him, since this was my stop. He told me his name was Miguel, I told him mine, we wished each other good luck and I got off the subway.

I went outside to wait in the rain for the observatory shuttle. Luckily I had an umbrella, but I contemplated leaving and going back to Hollywood to just see a movie or something. Still I stuck it out waiting for the shuttle and eventually it came. By some crazy string of luck, as I rode the shuttle up to the top of the hill in Griffith Park, the rain stopped and the sun started to peak out.

Although it stayed relatively overcast, it was a lot better than rain, and I was excited when I got up to Observatory. Just to explain, Griffith Observatory is a planetarium, observatory and museum on Mount Hollywood that looks out over all of Los Angeles. The building just opened last year after a massive 5 year restoration and it looks beautiful.


Some of you might recognize the building as one of the places where the robots land at the beginning of Transformers. Apparently it featured prominently in "Rebel Without a Cause" as well. In fact there's a stature of James Dean because of it. Even with the sky cloudy, visibility was pretty good. The observatory had a great and very naturally beautiful view over to the Hollywood sign.


Here's a shot looking down into the heart of Hollywood. It's not easy to make very much out, but you can see the huge Oscars poster on the side of one building, and you can see the giant orange and yellow iPod billboard on Santa Monica Blvd right near where I work.


Here's the view back to downtown Los Angeles. Very cool.


This is from the roof of the observatory, over the front lawn back toward the sign.


With Hollywood on the bottom left, Century City standing tall in the middle, and Santa Monica behind and to the right of Century City, the sun reflects off the ocean in the distance.


Who knew Los Angeles was so beautiful? Here's some sunlight peaking down through the clouds onto the rolling hills out towards the Pacific Ocean.


After checking out the view, I went into the Observatory, which was just as beautiful inside and had a lot of cool exhibits. I decided to see the Planetarium show, which was very cool. Surprisingly, the voice-over wasn't provided by a celebrity like Patrick Stewart or Leonard Nemoy, but rather by a guy standing and walking around inside the planetarium. He was pretty good and had a voice similar to J. Peterman. There was a line about the big bang that just about blew my mind. He said that it "wasn't an explosion into space, but rather an explosion of space itself." Awesome.

After the planetarium, I went outside to wait for the shuttle. As I was waiting, I tried to see if it was possible to look all the way to Anaheim and Disneyland. I couldn't see it. I could however see the mountains and make out the snow-covered mountains in the distance. I love it!


I took the shuttle and subway back to Hollywood and Highland, because I needed dinner, and was feeling like I should have Crepes. I had been in California for too long without having them, so I went to The French Crepe right next to the Kodak. I didn't realize they made crepes with real food, but my craving was for something sweet, so I got a Napoleon with strawberries, nutella, and chestnut spread. I call this picture "The Grandma Shot." Grandma loves to take pictures of meals, and look at me, I'm doing it now myself.


I know my crepe was more like dessert than an actual meal, but you only live once, right?

So I walked along Hollywood Blvd. and waited for the bus. It was a great day, full of good decisions. Not to mention celebrity sighting number 3!


I'm excited to watch the Oscars tomorrow, especially with 3 songs from Enchanted being performed. Although I won't be headed back to Hollywood for it, it'll be too crazy and probably raining, it was very awesome to witness the set-up firsthand. The observatory was awesome, too. There's a lot of stuff in this city.

I hope the weekend finishes up great for everybody! I really do miss you all and am really looking forward to Spring Quarter! It's going to be filled with so much awesome stuff. It's the little things I'm excited about, too, like UC baseball. Let's go to some games, ok?

much love,

Alex

Saluting the Presidents

Another three day weekend here in Southern California, and it was quite a good one. Brace yourself for a potentially long post.

It's always nice to start things off with a picture. Here's one of the tallest building in the US west of Chicago. It's the US Bank Tower, (I don't know why they've got their name on such a huge sweet building out here and on such a sucky arena in the nati), also known as Library Tower, or as I know it, the L.A. building the aliens blew up in Independence Day.


I had to go to bed early on Friday night, because Saturday morning I got up early to do some volunteering with Mosaic. This guy Ben was happy to pick me up from my apartment and he was a very awesome guy. Ben and I drove down to the Union Rescue Mission's warehouse south of downtown. There we met up with 5 other guys from Ben's Mosaic small group out of the Pasadena Mosaic community. Ben was probably in his late 20s, and the rest of the guys with him were all in their mid-to-late 30s and 40s. Still, they were very cool guys, and although I couldn't really join in conversations when they talked about their kids, it was a lot of fun.

We spent an hour or so packing up 1000 kits of stuff like shampoo, toothbrushes, socks and combs that will be part of the 3000 that Mosaic and Union Rescue Mission are handing out to the homeless in the city next month. The sheer number of homeless people in this city continues to amaze me, so it was awesome to be doing a little to help them out. I'll be looking forward to more opportunities to reach the homeless here, as much as it might take me out of my comfort zone.

After we finished packing all 1000 kits in 1/3 of the time we had planned on (we couldn't do any more because they wanted other volunteers to be able to help with more packing next weekend) the men of the small group decided to head out for some Breakfast/Lunch, and it was decided that we'd go up to the Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles in Pasadena.

Roscoe's was quite an experience. I know I've heard of Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles in some movie or tv show or something, but I don't know where exactly. But apparently it's very famous and is exactly what the name makes it sound like. I had fried chicken and waffles. It was actually really good, especially the waffles.

Although I was really young compared to most of the guys in Ben's small group, as we were talking and all, I was really struck by how good and solid the guys were. They were all really supportive of each other and definitely had a lot of life experience and knowledge that I was learning from.

As we were leaving the restaurant, one of the guys told Ben to make sure he gave me the info about their small group. I don't know that it would be possible for me to ever make it up to Pasadena to join them, but I am really looking forward to being able to spend some more time serving alongside them. Ben was a really cool guy, too, and it would be great to be able to hang out sometime. He was already hoping things work out and I'm able to come back here in the summer.

Since I was in Pasadena at Roscoe's, I gave Alli a call to see what she was up to for the afternoon. Before I do go any further, Pasadena itself was pretty awesome. The place was very nice and looked full of stuff to do, plus there are really tall mountains right next to the city. As you hopefully know from reading this blog, I really love these California mountains.

Anyway, Alli and I took the beautiful new Gold Line light-rail/subway back downtown to check out the MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum has like 3 different venues around town, we only went to one, but it was very cool. I continue to be amazed at how many seriously famous and really cool pieces of art are in this city, and I haven't even seen the Getty yet!

So the museum was cool, but there was this guy outside it that was giving me some serious 'tude. He and I came really close to fighting, but eventually he just backed off.


Let's see, ohh yeah, I also bought this cool shirt from the Walt Disney Concert Hall that has the silhouette of downtown LA reflected below it so that it looks like sound bars like you'd see them in an equalizer or something. If that doesn't make sense, you'll see it when I wear it, it's cool.

On the way home, I caught the bus at Union Station, Los Angeles' equivalent of Grand Central Station. Here's a hall in the beautiful old Train station that is no longer in use. I love the mood and the light from the sunset and everything. The train station really captures what I imagine was the emotion and excitement of Los Angeles in the 30s and 40s.


Sunday morning I went to Supercuts across the street and got a haircut from Alfredo. A man has never cut my hair in Supercuts before. Alfredo did nice work though. I was surprised, the regular supercut out here was $16.95, isn't it just $12.95 or $13.95 back east? I was not too thrilled about that. Maybe I should get my hair cut in the barber shop inside Launderland, the laundromat on the corner. Probably not.

I went back to church at 2:30 to help with set-up again, only this time I got a ride there from Meg (making friends is a wonderful thing). I spent most of the afternoon helping Justin sweep and mop the second floor, which wreaked from the smell of spilled alcohol and dirty bathrooms.

Right before the service I was on flavor of the week duty, but I got a little discouraged, because there weren't as many people alone in need of free drinks and conversation as last week. Still, I was able to talk a little to a guy named Deacon, and talked to a middle-aged guy named Matthew. Matthew was a businessman from DC, in town for work. He told me he had come to town for business last year and checked out Mosaic and was back now and made sure to come back, even though he's only here for a week. I thought that was a cool story. When I told him I was from Pittsburgh, he told me a friend of his from his church was actually going to Pittsburgh to plant an urban contemporary church like Mosaic there. I told him that was an awesome idea, and that Pittsburgh didn't have anything like that from what I know.

Still, like I said, I was feeling discouraged because I didn't find as many people as last week. The service itself was awesome as always. They had the same girl singing as last week, and she had a pretty unique, sort of Avril Lavigne-like voice which was cool. Erwin McManus' message was about streets named after Martin Luther King, and he challenged us with the question "what kind of a road will they name after you? Will it be a cul-de-sac just going in circles, or a dead end, or will you actually go somewhere?"

It was great, and then at the second service for flavor of the week, I had some amazing caramel hot chocolate to hand out and I went inside and found a guy sitting alone. I offered him some hot chocolate and sat down and we immediately started talking. The guy, Ryan, was also a third year student in college up in the Valley and was orginally from Northern California. He said Northern and Southern California were totally different. He's History major and is hoping to be a High School American History teacher. It was a lot of fun talking to him, and reminded me how awesome it is to talk to new people.

It's amazing how more often than not people are thrilled to talk and open up. I'm definitely learning a lot here by taking initiative and hopefully I can remember and use all of this in other places in my life.

Let's see, today I got up, went for a run around the block, and did some prep work for the ccm opera I'm helping out with. Then I took the bus back downtown because I wanted to exchange my medium LA Philharmonic t-shirt for a large so it wouldn't shrink too small. Back at the gift shop in the concert hall, a guy told me the large was a good idea because the shirts do shrink. I was happy to hear that.

As I walked from the Concert Hall to the subway stop, I saw this. It looked like they were filming a car commercial or something. Just proving my point that the Walt Disney Concert Hall is in every car commercial on TV. Just watch for it.


I took the subway to Hollywood and Vine, because I decided I wanted to find Erwin McManus's book, Soul Cravings. I had seen there was a Barnes and Noble or Borders on Vine somewhere, but I got off the subway and couldn't find it. I could however, find the Capitol Records Tower.


I got on the bus and rode it to the West Hollywood Target where I looked for Erwin's book. They didn't have it, so I got on another bus and decided to go all the way to Santa Monica Beach, where I knew there was a Barnes and Noble. The bus ride was long, but I made it.

The Barnes and Noble was at this place in Santa Monica called the Third Street Promenade. It's a few blocks of a street that is closed and lined with all these cool stores and restaurants. Musicians play music all along the promenade and singers perform as well. I stopped for a little while to listen to an amazing violin player, who was hooked up to speakers that were kind of laying down a kind of beat that he was playing classical music with a modern flair to it. It was very cool.

Anyway, I found a border's on the promenade, but they didn't have Soul Cravings. So I grabbed a panini for dinner and was about to head home, when I noticed a barnes and noble further down the promenade. I went in there and found Erwin's book! I was excited and got a moleskin sketchbook too. Now my day was a success.

Then I waited, got on the bus, and came home.

It was a lot of Metro riding in one day. Probably more than I will ever do again. I essentially went in a big circle around West L.A.


Well, I don't have too much other big news from the weekend.

Aaron Sapp told me the theme for Relay for Life this year is Disney movies. I'm pretty excited about that. Should be lots of fun. I love relay. Usually in my mind I forget about the part that isn't as much fun, like getting really tired and cold. Still, the fun and the greatness of the cause makes up for all of that.

That's about it for now. I'm starting to read Soul Cravings by Erwin McManus now and I'm really looking forward to it. Have you read it? Maybe you should.

Alright, I hope you have a great rest of the week. Call me, it'd be fun to talk.

much love,

Alex