Downtown Los Angeles Walkabout 1

Now that I'm 30 I've decided it is time to lose some weight. Part of that will involve adjusting my diet to lower my caloric intake. Another part will involve exercise. I am making the exercise part fun by going for an hour walk every day around Downtown and shooting photos along the way. I plan on going a different way each day to avoid monotony, today I walked over to Little Tokyo to drop off a Demand Warrant for DLANC. Here are a few photos I shot along the way:

You can check out the rest of my Downtown Walkabout photos here.

Update I totally forgot to mention that these were shot with my brand new lens, the Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L II. So far I'm really digging it. Also Jim Winstead pointed out the irony of my first choice of photo in a post about losing weight!

links for 2008-02-29

• LOLCat of the Day
  Educated.
  (tags: lolcat)
• 8th Greediest City?
  Clearly Forbe's math is way off
  (tags: avarice, greed, los angeles)

links for 2008-02-28

• The Big Word Project
  You can buy words ($1 per letter) that then link to your site. Scott Beale bought 'laughing' and 'squid'. I bought: bullock, photog, ham, xanthan and zap.
  (tags: thebigwordproject, big.word.project, laughing.squid. bullock, photog, ham, zap)

My 30th Birthday : Donations

Tomorrow is my 30th birthday, but instead of sending me gifts or cards, please donate to Midnight Mission:

http://www.midnightmission.org/default.asp?pg=don

Thanks!

Update: Note that although the donation form appear to not be secure, the from is contained in an iframe and is on an SSL enabled server.

WIRED News : UCLA Nanotech Lab Tour

Last week at UCLA I was given a really interesting tour of Dr. Omar M. Yaghi's laboratory where he and his students have created some amazing nanotechnology that has nearly unlimited potential. The gallery just went live:

I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed shooting them!

links for 2008-02-26

• Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early
  Gotta love the Onion. Sadly this video probably isn't that far off from what will actually happen.
  (tags: diebold election onion)
• Commonly Overused Words
  This is a helpful list of synonyms to commonly overused words. I'm posting this link for my own future reference.
  (tags: synonyms)

links for 2008-02-25

• Fruit Graph
  I'm not sure I agree with the bits about oranges and pomegranates being Untasty, but either way this graph rocks.
  (tags: xkcd fruit graph tasty untasty easy difficult)

links for 2008-02-22

• National Geographic Does CERN
  NG came in the mail today and inside was an amazing piece shot by Peter Ginter. Ginter is my new photographical hero. His photos of SLAC are amazing as well
  (tags: peter.ginter ginter cern national.geographic)

Lunar Eclipse Video

I made this video with roughly 500 shots from my Canon 5D. At some point I need to either buy or build an intervalometer. I have that generic Arduino kit that I need to put together and put to use. Sounds like another project in the making, just what I need.

It looks better bigger, and much better at full size [145MB Quicktime]

Lunar Eclipse from Downtown Los Angeles

I don't think I had ever witnessed a complete lunar eclipse before. It was a cool experience. The weather in Downtown LA cleared up perfectly a few hours ago and it stayed clear until a cloud partially obscured the moon just after totality. Very beautiful:

I'm also exporting a video right now form the 579 stills I shot. Stand by for that. =]

links for 2008-02-20

• MIT professor on How to Talk
  I'm bookmarking this mostly because I want to watch it later.
  (tags: HowToTalk MIT video boingboing)
• CNN Fails
  Wow, not that I watch TV or land on CNN.com, but this is ridiculous.
  (tags: cnn failure chez.pazienza)

Stanford Linear Accelerator Awesomeness on WIRED News

Earlier this year I was treated to a wonderful tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator. As you know, I love shooting photos of geek / nerdy / techy subjects and SLAC did not disappoint. I've been working with my photo editor at WIRED News (http://wired.com) for weeks on this gallery and it just went live:

wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/02/gallery_slac

Update Looks like the gallery has been linked on slashdot.

links for 2008-02-17

• Entire Yahoo Design Team Fired
  Ouch.
  (tags: yahoo fired design)
• Amazon Identifies S3 Outage Cause, Implements Fixes
  I've been thinking about using S3 for a number of projects. I don't think this recent outage has negatively affected my plans.
  (tags: s3 amazon outage fix)
• LOLCat of the Day pt. 1
  LolRam
  (tags: lolcat lolram upgrade)
• LOLCat of the Day pt. 2
  oh noez!
  (tags: lolcat cute)
• Super Smash Brother's Brawl @ The Orpheum
  I will have shot this by the time this posts to my blog.
  (tags: wii supersmashbrothersbrawl orpheum los.angles blogdowntown)

links for 2008-02-15

• LolCat of the Day
  I'll have mine with extra hot sauce.
  (tags: lolcat)

links for 2008-02-14

• LolCat of the Day
  Oh noez... haha
  (tags: lolcat moon.landing)
• Engrish Blocks from China
  That last few are hilarious
  (tags: engrish chinese)

links for 2008-02-13

• A cool story about Hal Bastian's Dog
  And how they both tie in to our Downtown neighborhood.
  (tags: hal downtownla)
• CJ7
  From the director of Kung Fu hustle comes this new movie about a little cute alien. Looks pretty funny.
  (tags: cj7 stephen.chow kung.fu.hustle)

Land of Nuclear Enchantment : My first solo gallery show

This summer I took a road trip to my old stomping ground in New Mexico. Along the way I toured some of my favorite places including Los Alamos and shot photos of some beautiful scenery as well as cool nuclear equipment. I have put together a show that includes a juxtaposition between the lovely natural wilderness and the cold technology that has been a key part of the nuclear weapons industry that is peppered throughout said wilderness.

All of the photos were creating using an HDR / Tone-Mapping process and have been printed with my Epson Stylus Pro 3800 on Ultrasmooth Fine Art Matte paper which has an estimated archival life of over 100 years.

The show will be taking place at the Niche Video Art gallery (although there will be no video involved) and the opening is on Thursday during the Downtown Art Walk between noon and 9pm. Please come down and take a look at the prints if you get a chance! Here is the address:

453 S. Spring St. #443 [Google Map]
Los Angeles, CA

links for 2008-02-12

• Church Throws Hooker Party
  The titles it totally misleading, but the article is actually kind of touching.
  (tags: hookers prostitutes church birthday party)

Biophysics Gallery on WIRED News

If you like crazy robots that automatically do all types of cool tests on individual cells you'll enjoy this gallery I shot for WIRED earlier this week:

links for 2008-02-08

• Oh noez!
  Cat hunting robot... ok it just follows your cat, but still.
  (tags: robot cat)
• LOLCat of the Day
  wake up time.
  (tags: lolcat)

links for 2008-02-07

• TSA Listens to Bloggers
  Wow.
  (tags: tsa blog bloggers)

links for 2008-02-06

• LOLCat of the Day pt. 1
  mawwige...
  (tags: lolcat)
• LOLCat of the Day pt. 2
  Oh noez!
  (tags: lolcat)
• RIP Sheldon Brown
  His website was an inspiration and a great tool for me when I built my first fixed gear.
  (tags: sheldon.brown obit fixed.gear cycling)
• LoLCat of the Day pt. 3
  Palindromes FTW
  (tags: lolcat palindrome)

links for 2008-02-05

• Dreamhost Offers Mongrel Hosting
  It's about time!
  (tags: mongrel ruby dreamhost)
• LOLowls of the Day
  lol
  (tags: lolcat)

PMA08 Wrap-up on WIRED News

I covered PMA08 for WIRED News. The final gallery just went live:

You can find my complete coverage here.

links for 2008-02-04

• Cory Doctorow's New Baby Is So Cute!
  And what a cute name: Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow
  (tags: baby doctorow posey)

Social Networking Madness : I Can Has Updates?

Over the years I've been using various social networks here and there, but for the most part I've been posting my content directly to this site, eecue.com. I spent a few hours today going through all my profiles and updating my bio, tags, links and whatnot. Here is what I updated my bio to:

Dave Bullock / eecue is the offspring of a photographer and a programmer. He has been sifting through bits on the internet since he was young and along the way has taught himself programming, UNIX and photography. Dave is a frequent contributor to WIRED News and a member of the San Bernardino Sheriff's Search and Rescue Team. When he's not shooting photos of geeky stuff around Los Angeles, you can usually find him crawling through a cave, out in the desert or rescuing a wayward hiker.

And here is my one liner:

Programmer / Photographer / Admin / Human

And my tags:

programming, photography, downtown los angeles, los angeles, cooking, desert, search and rescue, SAR, electronics, ham radio, microcontrollers, hacking, computer security, wired, photojournalism, hiking

Here is the daunting list of social networking sites I have profiles on, along with a short description of what it is all about. [If you want to join a site that is invite only, let me know and I'll make with an invite]:

• 43 Things - A fun list sharing sit for goals.
• Bebo - Bebo is a blogging site, they really need to add RSS importing though.
• Blip TV - A social video site, which allows you to upload content in HD with no size limit. I use it for both my personal movies and D2LA footage.
• Delicious - This is a social bookmarking site. I've been using Delicious frequently, and their site posts my links to eecue.com on a daily basis.
• Digg - Digg is a great social news site, the only problem is that the more friends you have the slower the site loads. SQL optimization time guys!
• Dopplr - Dopplr is a pretty cool social travel site with very a simple feature-set and interface.
• Facebook - Facebook is currently the best social network IMHO. It has plenty of great features. Some of the application invites get really annoying, but they recently added a feature to ignore certain apps.
• Good Reads - GR is a reading list / book list sharing site. My next project is to catalog the hundreds of books I own and upload them to GR and Library Thing.
• Jaiku - Jaiku is a pretty cool social aggregation site. Although, it seems to have some RSS importing issues right now.
• JungleScene - JS is a site I run about drum'n'bass and jungle in Los Angeles. It's a fairly active forum site that I started in 1999.
• Last.FM - Last FM is social music site. I haven't installed the app yet, but I will soon.
• Library Thing - LT is another book list social site.
• LinkedIn - Linkedin is a social network for professionals. I have my resume up there, although I'm not currently seeking employment.
• MeFi - Metafilter is an old school social new site. I've been a member for some time now, but I actually rarely use it anymore. I'll have to check back more often.
• Ning - Ning is a site creation platform that you can use to build a complete internet community. I wish they would allow you to use 5 character site / user names!
• Tribe.net - Tribe is a social networking site that some of my hacker friends used. I never really did much with it.
• Pownce - Pownce is another social network site that you upload files, photos and text to.
• Xanga - A blogging platform. I'm not sure about this one, will probably kill my account at some point.
• My Yahoo Profile - Not really a social networking site, but yahoo does allow for a profile.
• Reddit - Reddit is a cool and simple social news site. Full-disclosure: I am a frequent contributor to WIRED News who's parent company owns Reddit.
• Slashdot - I used to spend a lot of time on Slashdot, but I mostly just use digg now and my RSS reader. I do still subscribe to an RSS feed from Slashdot.
• StumbleUpon - SU is one of my new addictions, I can seriously waste hours finding new and cool sites by hitting the stumble button. Unfortunately it only works in Firefox and I've been using Safari since the Leopard updates.
• Tailrank - Tailrank is a meme aggregator. You feed it an OPML file and it give you a listing of what people are talking about that day.
• Technorati - Technorati is a massive blog aggregator and link tracker.
• Twitter - Twitter is a great little site for posting short thoughts online. It's like instant messaging that all your friends can see.
• Upcoming - Upcoming is a social calendaring site.
• Vox - Vox is a blogging platform, but also includes cool RSS aggregation features as well as linking to your other social profiles.
• YouTube - I've only uploaded a couple movies to YouTube, but one of them has over 100,000 views. I need to get an ultracompact digicam that has better video capabilities and use it more often!

Update:

• Virb - This is a cool site for artists and musicians.
• Myspace - Totally forgot I had this. I updated my profile, but I don't have any friends. =]
• Blogger - I've actually had this page since 2002, but I've always just used my own software for blogging. I updated the page with my RSS feed and profile.
• Naymz : I can't tell if this is really a legit service, but it seems cool enough. Could just be a personal detail data mining site.
• Yelp - I've been meaning to use Yelp more often.
• ClaimID - This seems like an interesting aggregator, will have to set it up with my other sites.
• Mugshot - A social network aggregator that may actually be useful.
• Profilactive - Another aggregator.
• Ziki - YASNR
• Uber - forgot about this one as well.
• Wink - Seems like an interesting social contact site.
• LiveJournal - I totally forgot I had this.
• MyBlogLog - I also forgot I had signed up for this.
• Deviant Art - I'm going to upload some of my better photos to here at some point
• Tumblr - Another microfeed site. I think I'm going to write a tool to post to every one of my social sites at once.
• Twitxr - Scott Beale set this up today so I figured I'd give it a try.
• Buzznet - I uploaded a few photos here once... someday maybe more.
• Friend Feed - Another social feed aggregator.

links for 2008-02-03

• LOLCat of the Day
  LOLicide!
  (tags: lolcat kills)
• MarsEdit 2
  I just updated to MarsEdit 2 from version 1. It has some great new features including the ability to post to your blog in draft form. Finally!
  (tags: MarsEdit Mac Apple Blogging)
• 33 Cent Per Box Tax Results in 94% Usage Reduction
  Dublin is doing it, step up to the plate Los Angeles! I can see that fixing out city's budget deficit.
  (tags: dublin green plastic.bags wishlist)

PMA08 : WIRED News Gallery

Here are some selects that I shot for WIRED at PMA:

SPAWAR Robotics : WIRED News Gallery

Two weeks ago I drove down to San Diego and took some photos of SPAWAR's robotic research department. Check em out:

links for 2008-02-02

• FlickrFS for Backup
  Given the recent news of a possible merger between Yahoo and Microsoft, I think it's a good time to back up my flickr photos!
  (tags: flickr flickrfs)