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

Dangers of game playing

Man dies after playing computer games non-stop - smh.com.au So this story is a couple years old, but I thought I'd put it up anyway. A 24 yearold in korea was up for 86 hours straight playing some comptuer game without food. He collapsed then woke up and went to the bathroom where he was later found dead. Natural selection is back, I wonder why this guy never won a darwin award

You've been had

MilkandCookies - The Truth About Japanese Restaurants Comic quicktime about Japanese cuisine. Audio recommended but not required.

Sweet Plywood Chair

Ben Wilson's great plywood chair. The chair is made out of a single piece of routed plywood and assembled with only a mallet (eat your heart out ikea). Not clear when it will be available, but definitely something to add to my inflatably furnished apartment.

War for Unique User Views

The OS, then the browser,then the portal, now what?

So Yahoo has now responded to the ludicrous amount of gmail storage by upping their accounts to 100mb. One has to wonder how long it will be before microsoft will step up to the plate and deliver a better free email service. The real power with delivery of information is controlling the channel. 10 years ago that meant controlling the desktop, 5 years ago that meant controlling the browser, now it's controlling the content delivery channels to deliver targeted content/ads. Between MSN, Yahoo, Google, and the dying aol, Google is quickly becoming the 500lb gorilla with the best search engine, the best email, the best news search, the entire usenet archives, a blogging service (this one), and an affiliated social/business networking community ( orkut). Granted MSN and yahoo have their answers to most of these, but by coming in later as player with a less commercial and stronger technical reputation, I certainly trust google more. MSN and Yahoo come off as pushing content too much, through google I search what's out there and get a less biased view of things. My one gripe is that google has decided not to bundle services under one login, but to provide most services as standalones. It would be nice to have one login/session for orkut, gmail, and blogger, but since I managed to land the same username for all I guess I'm happy

Playlist WBER- The only station that matters

The ugly litigious American

Dating In Manhattan: An Exercise In Contract Law Man how badly off are we that someone actually thought that this was okay to do. The funny thing is that given that we're Americans, he can probably successfully take this to small claims. Of course that would ensure he gets the kind of publicity that will prevent him from ever getting a date.

MoCoSanFrancisco - Modern contemporary design & architecture

MoCoSanFrancisco Another design blog, this one with an SF focus. Link courtesy of mocoloco.com

DEJA VIEW, Inc.

DEJA VIEW, Inc. This is going on my want list, combined with a good near eye display for replays this thing is sweet. it's a little too big right now for people not to get freaked out if you have one on while talking to them, but it's getting down to the right size. 5 years or so and I'll be able to get myself into real trouble with one of these

Project Gutenberg humor find

Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary A collection of witty definitions worth appending to email sigs. I received many quality links from my aunt this week, but I thought I'd go for a little classic content today.
This one is filled with such gems as:
AFFIANCED, pp. Fitted with an ankle-ring for the ball-and-chain.

Unusual string of events

It's 8000 miles to Melbourne, I got an HD full of code, half a pack of gum, it's dark ouside and I'm wearing sunglasses...
So the last week or so has been interesting, I saw a couple old friends and exes I haven't seen in a while. I went to a kickass "A Perfect Circle" concert. I attended a birthday party of someone who I had never met before the party. Kobe hit a clutch 3 tonight so the lake-show could win it in overtime. Today I found out that I will probably be doing a month or two stint in Melbourne for work, great opportunity, but man 2 months on the other side of the world. It's a good thing I'm single

Playlist
April 4 sounds eclectic

Transformer Breakdancing

Badass Transformer Video A great transformers b boyin flash link from uma. Worth the wait for the download.

Craigslist Comedy

Best of Craigslist Hilarious postings from craigslist. worth a readthrough. All text so SFW.

Double-Tongued Word Wrester

Double-Tongued Word Wrester Another one of these online slang dictionaries. Takes words used in articles etc. and defines them explicitly (another one from my aunt)

Hilarity from a guy with a mac instead of a girlfriend

The Fishbowl: The Mac is a Harsh Mistress Disturbing post but funny metaphor