Hey, check it out -- I just found out that Transmission's new owners have a web log of their own! Cool...

I went over and checked out their space tonight: there was a good party there called Dark City. (Of course, I knew I'd like it once I saw the flyer, and saw that it was half of our thursday CODE residents!) It sounds like they have some good events coming up. I'm so glad to see another club reopening on 11th street after so long! Today someone said something like, "uh oh, competition," but I so don't see it that way at all: the more clubs there are, especially in this neighborhood, the better off we all are. There are a lot of people in this city, and it could support a lot more clubs than there are today, if there were good venues and events that people wanted to go to. It's not that any particular club has been suffering, it's that the whole club industry (or "scene" if that's the terminology you prefer) has been suffering major attrition, and the only way to fix that is to give people more options.

I think they really made the right decision in opening before doing any major remodeling of the place. I just kept looking around and noticing things that made my heart sink; it took me back to 2000 when our contractors and inspectors were telling us just one expensive thing after another that we were going to have to do before we'd ever be allowed to open. But as I looked around at Transmission, it was like I was able to see the invisible maze of consequences connecting everything. Like, if they ever want to change this thing over here, that's going to trigger the need to make that thing over there "accessible", and once they try to get a permit for that, they're going to find out that they need to pass just one little noise inspection test... And they can't pass that with the front wall being a wooden garage door. And suddenly it's two years later.

Our big mistake here at DNA was definitely, definitely, definitely that we closed at all. We should have stayed open the whole way through and found a way to do our improvements in stages, no matter how complicated that seemed at the time.

Ah, hindsight.

But on another subject entirely: on The Tick the other night, the one where Arthur gets committed to an asylum, his cell had our toilets in them! They gurgled. That was cool.

I spent four days last week upgrading the kiosk network from Red Hat 7.0 to 7.2. I did this crazy thing in the hopes that it would make the NFS server stop crashing once a week. My friends on the various Linux IRC channels assured me that everything would be sweetness and light with a 2.4 kernel, since "all that stuff was rewritten." Yeah, that's confidence-inspiring. Anyway, the upgrade of the server only took an evening and went fine, but then it took another three days of screwing around with it before I could figure out how to get the kiosks to boot again. It was pure pain. Why do I do these things to myself? Only time will tell whether the crashes are gone, but the machines do seem to start up almost 30% faster now, so something got better!

The kiosks are still configured to run Netscape 4.7whatever, because Mozilla crashes before it even manages to put a window on the screen. (It's been four years now! You complete losers!)

Oh, and Barry got custom molded earplugs made, and got a radio headset attachment that plugs into them. It's a really cool looking plastic air-tube that goes through the earplug and down to a speaker-bulb inline on the cable. Plus now he gets to talk into his sleeve, just like a Fed.