Tuesday, 13 August 2002
11:59pm

S

ome of you have been wondering why I haven't made any updates from Vegas, or you haven't seen anything about Vegas. Well, first of all, I didn't get back home from Vegas until last night. Secondly, I didn't have any internet access from friday on. Saturday morning, we were rather unceremoniously evicted from the house we rented. The landlord came pounding on the door, fuming about how the police talked to the neighbors about our noise and whatnot, and that we violated our lease agreement.
This is very fishy for a number of reasons, #1 being -- if we were so loud the police had to respond, why did they talk to the neighbors, but never talked to us? #2, we actually called the Las Vegas Metro police department, and asked if anyone had been sent out to our address or even our neighborhood... and no unit had been sent out. #3, he referred to this neighbor as a "buddy" that was "really cool" -- yeah, really cool to him I'm sure.
We are starting to suspect that this is some kind of scam to keep the rest of our money... so we will be fighting them keeping our money for the rest of the time we were not in the house. I was afraid this was gonna put a real damper on the rest of the trip, but fortunately, we were able to get everyone placed into hotel rooms, and everyone still had a rockin' good time on Saturday.
Sunday night, most of the rest of the people who were supposed to be staying in the house until Monday got rooms at Las Vegas Club in downtown Las Vegas, for $29 a room... they were definitely not fancy rooms or anything, but they were a damned good deal for that price!
I also managed to see Helen some on friday and saturday throughout this crazy, hectic weekend, and as always, it was good seeing her and being able to hangout with her for what little time we did.
Monday, I returned to San Diego with my friend Adam from Seattle, and Darren from Australia in tow. Adam headed back to Seattle earlier this evening. Darren is staying with me through Friday until I deliver him to another friend's house in LA. He's still gonna be spending a couple weeks here in California with us before returning to Western Australia.
You're probably wondering why there are no pictures. Well #1, because I was mostly shooting video for the big video I'm going to be editing, and #2, on Sunday my beloved Nikon Coolpix 880 camera was rendered disabled under the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign by a freak gust of wind that knocked the tripod over and smashed the camera into a pile of dirt and rocks. Now it just says "SYSTEM ERROR" when you try to turn it on. The lens itself is also toast. Well, that's a good excuse to get an even better camera though, so I'm not too sad.
The video, however, will take weeks to edit, and I don't want to be spending all the time Darren is staying here on this video, so to satisfy the appetites of people (or maybe increase their appetites for the upcoming video), I have created this one minute teaser trailer. I would say this trailer is rated PG-13, just so you know. Also, you need Quicktime 5 to see it. The final video will be in some sort of MPEG format however.
Anyway. Nitol.

Friday, 16 August 2002
11:59pm

T

oday, I drove Darren, my australian friend, and myself up to the L.A. Times building to meet up with another RBPer, Zak (not to be confused with my long-time friend, Zac), who works at the Times. We got to wear little security name tag badges and Zak gave us a phat tour of the L.A. Times building. We got to see the editorial offices of a number of different departments, including the Food department, which has a huge (like as big as my whole apartment) kitchen with a whole lot of fancy fixtures and stuff where they do cooking tests and shoot photos. We saw a guy in there with a big lighting rig taking photos in there.
We also passed by the photo department. Somewhere in the hallway they have a display case full of "historic" photographic equipment that they don't use anymore, ranging from like 100 year old cameras... to IBM Microdrives (which I guess are too old for them to be using now!). I definitely wouldn't mind getting ahold of some of their "outdated" equipment!
Afterwards, we headed out to Zak's house where we had a little jam session in his studio with me on guitar and Zak on drums, and also some dinner which was prepared by Zak and his wife. It's always nice to meet RBPer's that I haven't met already in real life, and this was no exception.
After leaving Darren at Zak's place (Darren is gonna be in LA for a while, then he's heading up to the Bay Area, and then to Seattle before returning to Australia), I headed to my parents house. My mom had found an old roll of film (like, 13 or 14 years old!) that I had shot, and had it developed recently. The film was highly deteriorated, but we were able to salvage some images from the film, and you can see this pics by clicking HERE.
Welp, that's about it for today's update. Eventually I'll get around to posting up the last pictures ever taken with my Nikon 880.

Saturday, 17 August 2002
11:59pm

L

adies, help me out here. Why would you go to a party, and ogle a guy, and then let him talk to you all night... if you already have a boyfriend? Cuz I tell ya, I went to a housewarming party tonight, and for the first hour or two I'd pass by this cute girl, who would look back and smile at me every time we passed, and after a while, I found an opportune time to talk to her.
I found out her name, where she was from, that she had just graudated from college, and what kind of job she was looking for. I learned about her family, about who our mutual friends were, what her plans were for the immediate future, and we even exchanged compliments on our appearances. Yep, she basically told me everything there is to know about herself, except for the fact that she had a boyfriend, who wasn't there.
Well, I did find out, eventually, after I had caught up to her again at a later time, and we started talking again. I asked her about what some other things she does in her free time are, and she talked about how she spends a lot of time with her family, and her friends, and somewhere, she just barely squeezed in "and my boyfriend"... AUGH the kiss of death! Of course I just sat there and pretended like I didn't even hear that, but seriously... how could it take so long for her to divulge this information? That's just messed up, I tell ya, messed up.
But, I still had fun tonight, and I guess that's all that really matters.