Brad Barrish

You know, I've been wondering where our president has been while all of the news is unfolding about the crisis in South-East Asia. I find it somewhat distasteful that we haven't seen Bush speaking out about the tragedy. The Washington Post says it much better than I could.

I've been watching the news since I saw the story break online. In case you've been living under a rock, there was a 9.0 magnitude earthquake in the Indian Ocean, just off the coast of Indonesia. The disaster has been catastrophic for the region and death tolls are reaching near 60,000 people. Make sure you check out the Wikipedia entry as well as The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog. It's a very informative place to start with links to everything you would want to know. If you donate to a charity that is helping with the relief efforts, make sure your money is going where you send it.

If you are inclined to offer up your time to volunteer, there's a thread that people are posting their information on at SEA-EAT.

Happy birthday, Corina.

If you don't have a Gmail account yet and you want one, just post a little something in the comments and I will get an invite to you. You must be one of the first 10 people. Make sure you leave a valid email address otherwise I won't know where to send it.

I was walking back home from the bank and decided to take the long way home and see what was happening on the boardwalk and at the skate park. There weren't many of the regulars around, but I got a couple of decent photos. As you can probably guess, the kid wiped out.

Those indier-than-thou kids at Pitchfork have posted their top 50 albums, singles and reissues of 2004. I haven't even heard of at least half of the stuff and I don't feel bad about it. Not one bit.

I just wanted to wish everyone happy holidays and a peaceful new year. As a little gift to you, I am making my year-end, 2-CD mix available to you for download (look to your right). The caveat is that they come in two rather large chunks, so if you have a dial-up connection you're out of luck. The first file contains the cover art as well as a readme text file. I decided to go with MP3s, if for no other reason most of the digital music players don't support AAC and some people may not have iTunes installed on their computers. Shame on you. Because of space limitations, the files are recorded at 128 kbps, so the sound quality isn't fantastic, but it's certainly listenable. Enjoy the music and thank you to everyone that keeps visiting the site, or at least reading the posts via RSS.

Susan Mernit was kind enough to post an excellent article written by Mark Pesce that explains BitTorrent and why the movie industry has recently sealed their fate. It's lengthy, but if you're interested in this sort of thing, it's worth a read.

I haven't listened to it yet, but someone has gone and done a mash-up of the Beatles and The Beastie Boys.

For as long as I have lived in Los Angeles, I don't think I have ever seen the Hollywood sign as close as I did today. I looked out of a window at work and this is what I saw.