Nobody walks in LA

The Driving Date, it's you and me and the car makes 3

A lot of people hate driving around in LA with a passion, but when I was sixteen and broke it was all there really was to do (check the blog archives for my ode to Veronica). LA's got a lot of great things to do and see, but no cohesive downtown like New York or San Francisco. We have freeways connecting everything, so from one attraction to the other there's a lot of driving to be done. This fosters a kind of love/hate relationship with the one's car and streets of the city. I thought I'd look a little bit more on the love side of the scale since I'm trapped up in silicon valley where it's just plain different (I suppose it's like the valley with less burger joints, less sushi, less porn, and a lot more tech) The great thing about LA driving is the scenery, it's tough to beat the LA variation from city to beach to oilfields to canyons, while never being more than 10 minutes from an in-n-out or a fatburger. A driving date is something you can really only do with someone who gets it. But for those who do understand, there just something compelling about cruising around on a sunny day,windows down, roof open and good music blasting. I've always liked it because it's pretty cheap, and all you need to make it work is a date that's up for it and decent loop. I personally like the trip from mulholland to malibu canyon, to piuma (the overlook is a good place to stop and picnic), back out to PCH, grab drinks and dinner in santa monica and close off the loop in west LA, but the city's full of good ones. So for any angelinos reading this, throw your favorite drive loop into the comments

Mellow Ride playlist coming soon

Free eBooks and a little rant

manybooks.net - Free eBooks for your PDA
Lately I've taken to downloading ebooks for my palm, and carying my palm with me whenever I know I might be waiting somewhere for a while. Project Gutenberg is a great way of getting tons of free texts that I should have read by now. What I really need is a good epaper (for the reduced eyestrain), ebook reader with a digital pen that lets me annotate books and save my annotations in a seperate file that can be loaded over the ebook text.

If the big publishers came together with a few platform companies and got a general standard ebook format decided on, the rest of the software vendors would follow. Granted the standard would end up being strongarmed by microsoft and palm most likely, but at least then there'd be one general standard. It would have to allow for freeform pagination because of different display sizes and preferences, but it would be really easy to have some xml based format, or just require that ebooks follow one specific xml schema and then let vendors parse them however the hell they like.

I can envision myself in 5 years going to a kiosk at an airport bookstore, slotting an sd card in and picking up the newest clancey type junkfood bestseller. I'd never carry a paperback again

Acronym Server

Acronym Server Simplified Another useful one from the aunt, just type in your acronym for a list of common possibilities. It's actually pretty good for standard computer and telco acronyms.

DIY waste of time

SCIENCE HOBBYIST: Ten dollar Infrared Goggles Scroll down to goth-ray supervision and it becomes really funny

infoporn

base26: Built with Processing So I've been looking into a bunch of interesting ways of visualizing information and come across a few cool ones like that link above. There have to be some good ways of visualizing massive sets of information for access and retrieval, or at least for finding patterns. Plenty of sci-fi hits on this, but no one really describes a good way of doing it. Clearly for different sets there will be different schemes and maps, so I'm gonna start periodically blogging the ones I find (also check the newsmap link in the sidebar). If anyone who reads this has a good infopr0n link add a comment.


Now Playing
Red Elvises- Boogie on the Beach
surf around the site for more mp3s, this one's a classic from the six string samurai soundtrack