Blog 2005

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24268-Macabre_Black_Eagle.html)

The RIAA has proven that the only way the music industry can survive is through suing its customers. In the case of the minuscule drum'n'bass music industry, it can only survive by suing its only customers, and the only customers drum'n'bass producers have are DJs.

The logical conclusion is to sue the DJs so that the drum'n'bass artists can get a slice of the fat pie that the djs are brining in through their highly lucrative mix tape / cd sales. i mean can you name a single dnb dj who isn't totally rich from exploiting the drum'n'bass producers they feature on their mixtapes? if it wasn't for the damn djs out there ruining the market the drum'n'bass producers would be selling thousands, nay millions of pressings of vinyl to your average jungle joe.

The Plame leak case opened up a can of worms that our country may never be able to control. Allowing the court to force reporters to reveal their sources in a case where the leaking of the actual information was a traitorous act may have been the right thing to do in that case, but the administration is going to use that as a reason to do the same thing, this time in their defense. In the current probes the whistle-blowers were doing our country a favor by letting the public know that Bush was spying on the American people without warrants and that they were running torture gulags throughout Europe. Hopefully the probes will go nowhere and the real crime committed by Bush and Co. will be their downfall.

Looks like the ACLU shares my opinion:

The following statement can be attributed to ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero:

"President Bush broke the law and lied to the American people when he unilaterally authorized secret wiretaps of U.S. citizens. But rather than focus on this constitutional crisis, Attorney General Gonzales is cracking down on critics of his friend and boss. Our nation is strengthened, not weakened, by those whistleblowers who are courageous enough to speak out on violations of the law."

Although I am Jewish, my family has always celebrated both Chanukkah and Christmas, some times we only did Christmas. This year I am doing both, and I had a wonderful time with both my family and Penelope's family. On Christmas eve we went to my mom's house in Woodland Hills and had some Chanukkah ham, it was one of those special Kosher hams. Then on Christmas morning we went to Penelope's brother's house for breakfast and to open presents. After that we headed over to her Grandma's house to meet some of her cousins from Texas, and finally we went to my Aunt Jan and Uncle Van's house in Villa park, a city that is famous in Orange county for having neither churches nor bars. We both had a really great time and it was a great holiday.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24162-New_Furby_closeup.html)Yesterday I went and bought the New Furby which just came out in October this year. The new Furby is a pretty darn advanced toy for only $30, if you haven't seen one before they are basically armless Mogwais with beaks. New Furbys are powered by the Sensory Inc's RSC-4128 which is a multi-purpose microprocessor that does everything from voice recognition to text-to-speach to IO to DTMF output. After reading through the white paper for the RSC-4128 I was pretty sure that the Furby would be quite the hackable robot, so I decided to take a look inside and see what hacking would entail.

WARNING : If you take apart Furby it will never be the same once you put it back together, unless you are really good with a sewing needle.

I started by removing the feet which are fastened to Furby with a triangular security screw. The Boxer 62 piece security bit set that I bought at Fry's a few years back contained a triangular bit that was just slightly too large to fit the Furby foot screws, so I filed it down a tad and in it went. After taking off the feet, the clawed under-feet were exposed which were surrounded with little fur booties that just slid off with a little tug. Once I removed the under-feet I could see how the fur was attached to the skeleton.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24158-New_Furby_Robomonster.html)The fur is glued on in 2 places, which i cut with a sharp knife. The fur also has plastic tabs that go into the base of Furby, which can be pulled out with a little effort. Once you have the base of the fur free from Furby you will have to open up the back of his little fur suit, this back is lightly sewn with just a few stitches and opens easily once you free the first stitch, almost like it was made to come open easily.

After you have opened the back of the suit you can slide it over his head, you will have to snip the small threads at the tips of his ears to get it off over his head, don't snip the big white threads that loop through the plastic ear guides, this is used to track the location of the ears. You will also have to snip the thread on the tip of his mohawk support and the thread wrapped around his eyebrow mover.

Then comes the tricky part and that is the last screw that holds the plastic eye and mouth guides onto the center of the face, at first I tried just pushing a screwdriver right between his eyes and turning but I couldn't get a hold of the screw. Next I tried just twisting the whole thing, but this seemed like it was going to mess up the eyelashes. Finally I just pulled hard on it and it the plastic flexed and popped off the screw. Now Furby is hairless and looks like a cyborg version of Mr. Potato head, sans-bucket of parts.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24149-Furby_Exoskeleton.html)Furby's shell is closed by 6 screws and once they are removed you can open it up and see the goodies inside. After his shell is open, you will have to unwind the zig-zagging red and black wires, which I think are some kind of antenna to allow the Furby to communicate with its brethren. After you have released and unwound the wires you will need to cut the microphone, as there is no way to get it out of the shell without cutting it. Once you cut the wires in the middle, you will need to strip off the insulation so that the mic can pass through the grommet. The grommet has two sides, to get it out first pry out the outer grommet from the front of the shell and then push on the leads to drive the mic forward and out of the shell. You can then pull out the the rear grommet and use them together to protect the mic although it isn't really necessary.

After pulling the mic, I stripped the cut leads and removed the old leads from the motherboard, then I soldered the mic back on to the mic traces on the motherboard. I suppose this was the first actual hack. I then screwed back on the under-feet, stood Furby up, and switched it on. He worked fine and responded to my request to tell a joke.

I then removed the silicone mouth which was fastened by two screws to the face, once it was free from the face i had to clip two little silicone loops that attached to the beak and tongue, this will probably prevent the Furby from ever working the same again, although I suppose gluing would be possible.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24154-New_Furby_RSC_4128.html)The next step was to take a look at the motherboard. The motherboard is fastened to Furby with two screws, once you pull it off you will have to remove several snap in connectors, but to really get a good look at it I had to snip the feeding switch leads. Cutting the feeding switch wires was actually a good thing, because it makes feeding Furby much easier (just short the wires together). Here are pictures of the motherboard, the ROM/RAM daughter card and the transistor daughter card. The epoxy blob in the center of the MB is the RSC-4128, I am not yet sure what the other blob is.

[](http://eecue.com/images_archive/eecue-images-24153-Furby_Motherboard__Note_Diagnostic_Port.html)The coolest thing I saw once I opened up Furby was that the board designers were nice enough to leave nice large pads for the RSC-4128 diagnostic interface, which hopefully should allow programming of the Furby. I am not sure, but I think the diagnostic port is a serial interface. I have ordered the development kit from Sensory Inc, and I'm sure this will help answer some of my questions. If I do end up being able to alter the programming / data on the Furby here are some things I plan on doing:

• Give Furby a more colorful vocabulary
• Teach Furby some tasteless jokes
• Change Furby's voice tone to be less cute and more evil
• Give Furby a funny accent and maybe a lisp and a twitch
• Hook up some of the unused I/O ports to control other things (the chips has 24 I/O ports with 10mA outputs)
• Expand Furby's memory
• Utilize the voice recording function of the RSC-4128
• Make Furby a voice controlled DTMF dialer
• Utilize the MIDI synth contained in the RSC-4128

Here is what I plan on doing even if I can change the code or data:

• Add nicer switches to the make the Skeletal Furby easier to
• Pet
• Feed
• Tickle
• Turn off
• LEDs that light up when Furby moves
• Volume control for the speaker
• Put the Furby head on a Robosapien body

Here are some relevant links:

• New Furby Hack photo gallery
• Sensory Inc Furby Press Release
• Sensory Inc RSC-4x Family Info
• RSC-4128 Data Sheet (497k PDF)
• Sensory Inc Dev Kit Order Form
• First Gen Furby Hack Site
• First Gen Furby Autopsy

So I am a sucker for robots and the new Furby looks pretty damn cool, so I ordered one, hey it only cost me $30. The new Furny has an off switch, and we all know you should never trust a robot without an off switch. It also responds to voice commands and has a whole bunch more motors and movement than the old Furby.

The furby also has 6 times more memory (512k) than its predecessor. It is powered by a Sensory RSC-4128 chip which is a "single-chip solution providing all hearing, talking and CPU functions". The Furby uses Sensory’s Quick Text to Speaker Independent™ (Quick T2SI) recognition technology, which sounds like it will make hacking a very interesting possibility as it uses text instead of audio files for its speach, there is also a plethora of developer info on the Sensory Inc website, and you can download an IDE.

I am also going to try and get a dev kit. Did I mention it has an off switch? As soon as I get it I will be removing its fur and taking pictures of the process. I will also see what kind if IR fun I can have with it.

After reading through the white paper for the RSC-4128 I can see this is going to be a totally hackable robot.

So I just joined the New Downtown list-serv, although I hate yahoo mailing lists, and I took a moment to look through their website, specifically the dining section which has to be the most incomplete and out of date directory of food in Downtown. For example, take a look at the Steakhouse section which only contains the Pacific Dining Car and the Japanese section which contains a total of 3 Japanese restaurants... maybe they don't consider Little Tokyo to be a part of Downtown LA, but I do and there are a hell of a lot more then 3 eateries there.

I don't think they are intentionally leaving stuff off, I just don't think the site has been updated for years, for instance there are no milestones in 2005 and the only thing on the calendar is the DLANC meetings (which I've been meaning to attend) so I guess I did get something out of the site. I wonder if they need help keeping the site current? I suppose it doesn't hurt to ask.

I read this piece over on Curbed LA about how Urban Pacific Builders is lagging on the completion of the Security Building Lofts, and I wanted to comment on the post, but alas there is no place to leave comments on Curbed LA and no link to email the author / editor. So here is what I was going to post on their site: I will say one thing for the Security Building Lofts, after they removed the wooden piss soaked sidewalk protection, turned on the street lights and posted security guards around the building the obvious crime on the corner has really decreased, and it doesn't reek of urine anymore.

UPDATE: I sent an email to their general account: [email protected].

Penelope and I watched The Producers tonight, which today was nominated for 4 golden globe awards and was hilarious. Here is the review I wrote.

Microsoft, who I personally don't care for too much, has once again proven itself to be the last in line at the pop stand. First of all they are partnering with MTV to create an online music store / subscription service called Urge, which will offer 2 million songs, but which won't work on iPods or Macintosh computers. The only snag for M$ is that iPods make up 75% of the portable music player market share, so they have engineered their own obsolescence before even releasing the service to the public.

Next they are partnering with MCI to provide VOIP support in their instant messenger program allowing you to make calls from your PC to landlines and cell phones. Gee nobody has thought of this before, oh wait there is Vonage (which I use and it rocks) and Skype, who have both been doing this for years, and of course Yahoo is about to beat them to market with the integration of their messenger and voice calling.

And finally M$ issued a patch for IE that fixes a "critical" security flaw, one so critical that it took them several weeks to issue a patch, during which time exploit code was released to the public. I'm glad I run OS X.

Actually there is one more thing, it looks like the new Russian government funded TV station Russia Today, is back on the air today after being down due to hacking:

Margarita Simonyan, the channel's editor in chief, said, "There was an attempted invasion of the computer system from outside, which gave rise to viruses, which in turn led to a breakdown in transmission. We apologise to the audience but the channel had to cease broadcasting until the technical malfunctions are mended."

Sounds like bad Microsoft jujus to me, but man are people really running TV station on Windows? Does this seem like a bad idea to anybody but me?

So I am normally not a big fan of anything Microsoft, but the new Bird's Eye View in the Windows Local Live app is pretty cool. I did have to view it in Firefox as it doesn't work in Safari (big surprise) but the view of my building is pretty cool... there is even some kind of movie production going on in the parking lot next door. [Thanks for the tip Eric]

I just finished watching the latest episode of the Boondocks and it was hilarious. I especially liked the voice acting of Samuel Jackson playing a white guy with cornrows and quoting the briefcase recovery scene in Pulp Fiction. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

Randomly in my flickr Los Angeles tag feed I came across this fellow Santa Paul who is one of the many local Santa figures. I especially enjoyed this photo of him on the set of Star Trek from his flickr account.

Jump on your bike every second Thursday and join us on our art gallery tour through the skewed streets of Downtown LA. We begin our ride at 5:00pm at the Downtown Art Gallery on 1611 S.Hope St. There is a free parking lot next to the gallery if you are unable to ride or take public transit from your location. We will leave the Downtown Art Gallery between 5:30 and 5:45 and make our way to all the galleries that take part in the Downtown Art Walk (except MOCA Grand and the Library.) Here is a google pedometer map of the route we will be taking and here is a map of the actual art walk[pdf]. Don't forget to bring a lock and of course your bike.

UPDATE!! I registered a domain and built a quick website for the Downtown Art Ride. I will be adding more info soon along with a great map that Eric Richardson created at his new job.

UPDATE RideArc Still happens, you can read more about it here: RideARc

~~Although I don't have any details as to the theme of the ride, as far as I know, the ride is still on and will be meeting at 9pm this Friday at the SCI-Arc parking lot. I'll see you there~~ (and don't forget, next week is the Downtown Art Ride on Thursday and Midnight Ridazz on Friday)! This just in [thanks to Will Campbell for pointing this out to me]:

Google is now paying $1 for ever person that an Adsense user refers to sign up for Firefox with a google toolbar. Explorer Destroyer has some code (which isn't totally XHTML strict, but you can fix that by adding a couple tags as well as adding a blank src="" and alt="" to the image tags) that will allow you to alert IE users that their browser is muy malo and they should switch. Just say no to IE!

Hey celia I hope you have earplugs! There is a rave tonight at the Alex! I'm so totally there... replete with a drum'n'bass room!

So I finally got around to setting up cacti/snmp on my servers. Here is what I did:

1. Installed cacti on the main monitoring server which we'll call slappy. I used the FreeBSD port of cacti. Slappy already had php/mysql/apache installed.
2. Added a user snmp to slappy and then I generated keys using ssh-keygen for each of the servers that slappy would be monitoring.
3. On each of the servers that slappy would be monitoring I installed net-snmp from the ports tree and configured it to run over tcp on 127.0.0.1 and then I added a user snmp with a nologin shell and without password authentication as I will just be using snmp to create a tunnel to the snmpd process that will be running on localhost.
4. Back on slappy I su'ed to the snmp user and created a shell script that would set up the tunnels to each of the servers using a command like this: ssh -i ~/.ssh/keys/hostname -f -N -L 16101:127.0.0.1:161 hostname and then added the script as a cronjob.
5. Finally I added all the servers to cacti using the basic built-in net-snmp support as well as a couple of qmail and mysql scripts.

So I now have a nice collection of graphs for traffic / disk space / processor, memory and mysql load.

On Thanksgiving I was listening to As It Happens on the CBC via KPCC and I heard a report about the nasty benzene spill in China. The reporter who was an English teacher living in China said that there was some panic about the water supply being turned off due to the spill and also that there was an earthquake predicted [real audio stream @ 11:25 and 12:14] "The government gave a warning that an earthquake would occur" and "People were sleeping in tents outside". The I just read today that there was a big quake in China. I found it very interesting that the Chinese government predicts earthquakes and tells the people about it, and that is turns out to be true. Very interesting.

Yesterday Penelope and I went to the gym and instead of using one of the various machines to get our cardio workout, we decided to try Racquetball. We borrowed some racquets and a couple of balls and hit the court. When we were locked into the court we realized that we had no idea how to play the game we had decided to play, so we just hit the ball against the walls and tried to rally as much as we could. It turned out to be great fun and we decided to get ourselves some racquets and figure out the rules. When I got home I found a page with the basic rules of the game which made sense once I read them a few times. The next step was to look on craigslist for some racquets, of which I found 2 for $20 and I just got back from picking them up. They are in great condition, are nice racquets and I am looking forward to playing a game with Penelope tomorrow.

Penelope and I went to Frying Fish today to have some rotating mechanized sushi, but the conveyor was broken, oh my! No big deal though, the sushi was still great although we did have to order it all from the chef instead of just picking various items off of the conveyor.

A few years back I visited japan, where I picked up a ultra light and thin sharp mebius laptop with a 30gb hd, 512mb ram and a 750mhz piii. It has been sitting in a bag since then as I am mostly a mac / unix user and I have only used it a couple of times to do some random PC stuff. The other day I noticed that PC-BSD had reached its 1.0 mark and today I decided to download it and check it out. The first run through of the install didn't work, but I tweaked some BIOS settings and it booted right up. PCBSD is really easy to install and has a nice GUI installer that anybody can use. Everything works great and I now have FreeBSD running on my Mebius laptop! I threw in a wireless card and everything worked as it should and I now have a nice little portable computer for tasks around the house when I don't want to sit in front of my desk. I set up OpenVPN and got that working in the simple mode after a little bit of toying around. Cool deal.

So I finally got myself some DSL... it has been a few years. Recently I have used a "borrowed" wireless connection, Verizon EVDO, and a cable modem and now I am back on with the nice low-latency DSL. I have a 6mb/768k connection from Speakeasy and so far it rocks, although due to some line noise I don't get the full 6, more like 4.8 or so. Last night I set up the server that is supposed to be my mythTV system as a firewall because for some reason the other 2 systems I had wouldn't POST, I think it has something to do with the power outages we had a few months ago, but they were old systems anyhow, and I have bid on a couple old cheap systems on ebay that will work just fine for the job. I set up the firewall using pf on FreeBSD, with a separate interface for the wireless bridge (which is a bridge to nowhere if you don't connect to the VPN). Everything is working great and I finally have my Vonage box active again, yay.

Penelope and I had planned on going backpacking this weekend on Catalina Island this weekend, but when we got there the town of Avalon was so beautiful we just decided to get a hotel room and hang out. The other problem was that the route I had planned ended up being on a paved road and our campground was a bit further then we wanted to hike in one day with heavy packs, plus I was midway through a cold, which I have just now kicked.

We checked in to the Hotel Villa Portofino, a hotel right across the main drag from the water, dropped off out bags and hit the bar. We had a few drinks and then we decided to rent a golf cart and take it around Avalon, which despite sounding cheesy was actually quite fun. After the golf cart ride we bought some tickets to see Harry Potter in the Casino which isn't actually a gambling hall, the italian word casino actually meant a place of entertainment, back when the building was built by Mr Wrigley.

The Casino is amazingly beautiful and before the movie we were treated to 45 minutes of organ music on a really grand organ, a type of which only 3 exist in the world today. The bass and acoustics of the theatre are really amazing and we really enjoyed both the organ show and the movie.

The next day we hiked over to the botanical gardens and the Wrigley monument and then we headed back in to town to take part in tour of the casino which was really interesting. I took a whole bunch of photos of the whole trip and I will be uploading them soon once I am a bit less busy.

MIT has unveiled their super cool hand cranked $100 laptop at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia. I know they are supposed to be for developing nations, but I want one, or two... actually can I buy 1 for me and 3 for underprivileged children? That would be cool.

Over the past couple of months I have posted only a very small handful of photos on my website. There are a couple of reason for this. First of all I had some disk problems with my server and lost a whole bunch of photos from the site... I didn't really lose the actual photos, I will just have to upload them again. The next problem is that I have had somewhat spotty connectivity at my loft, but this will be remedied on the 16th when Speakeasy installs my 6M/786k DSL, Yay! And finally I have been completely rewriting the code the runs my site, to make it better, faster and easier to use. I am very close to being done with the rewrite and once I am I will start the transition from the current slacker based system to the new dynamony system. Once I upgrade I have something like 10 gigs of photos to sort through and upload.

Here are the posts I have made over at blogging.la in the past week or two:

• Midnight Ridazz
• Downtown ArtRide
• Fun Crap You Can Do!
• No on 73 Campaign for Teen Safety Election Night Party
• Nix the First Six!

A couple of days ago I decided that I really wanted to actually make it to all the galleries on the Downtown Art Walk, but since I only had a limited amount of time that I can spend traipsing about I decided to make the rounds by bike. I posted up about this on blogging.la and Eric Richardson showed interest in the whole idea and decided to come with me. During the day Thursday I was very busy, but luckily Eric had time to plan a route and print out some maps. Using his route I was able to hit every single gallery on the Art Walk and take pictures in those that allowed it (which was almost everywhere). The only 2 spots I didn't hit were MOCA on Grand and the LAPL. I have set up a mailing list for the ArtRide, which I will be doing every month with the Art Walk. If you are interested you can sign up to the list here.

CNN is reporting that both NJ and VA have elected Democrats to be their next governors. Let's see what happens with the mayoral elections in NYC and Boston. I don't see things getting any better for the wingnuts any time soon.

Now that money is involved it will only be a short amount of time before RFIDs are blown wide open as the next huge security problem. All you have to do is excite the card with the right radio freqs and pick up the response and you're in. Record it, replay it and you have pwn3d the money.

I had a blast at the monthly SCI-Arc ride and I wrote about it here on b.la.

The new relatively-low-priced-for-a-10"-truss-dobsonian Meade LightBridge makes me really want to upgrade my sad little 3" refractor. The truss breaks down so you can fit it in your car trunk. And you can pre-order it for around $649 for the standard edition or $750 for the deluxe one and for another $99 your can get a collection of Super Plossl lenses and a 2x Barlow lens.

Next Thursday the 10th of November is the Downtown LA Art Walk. I will not miss it again (hopefully).

I did some research about how to best train for fixed gear riding and I found this great page giving some exercises that you can do to strengthen you legs for the rigors of coaster-less travel. I also researched spinning and found out that spinning bikes are fixed gear stationary cycles so they are perfect for fixie training. So today at gym, Penelope and I spun for 20 minutes doing the Arc Drills, it was a good workout and afterwards I did my resistance training which is always fun. Working out really makes my days better.

So I just spent about 15 minutes writing the first few paragraphs of my first ever novel. You can read what I have so far here on my nanowrimo page. I will be writing every day and posting up what I have, be warned the copy has not been edited yet. Thanks to Robert Daeley for inspiring me to do this!

I finished watching the entire Densha Otoko series in the last couple of days and I really enjoyed it, although at some times it was definitely cheesy and overly dramatic. The show was based on a real story of an anime obsessed nerd (otaku) who's chivalry, albeit with shaking knees, saves a woman on a train from a drunken old pervert. She thanks him and asks for his address which he gives her and then he turns to a highly popular japanese message board for advice on what to do. The ensuing 10 episodes follow the young nerd as he is transformed from a geek rife with Ota reek, into a dashing and bumbling hero who wins the heart and hand of a "normal" woman.

About half way through the series he decides to part with his Otaku ways and become a "normal" person, which I thought didn't quite give a healthy message to people (you must have no personal identity!), but towards the end he realizes that he will always be an Otaku and hopes that his love will accept him for who he is, which she does.

I especially like the parts when he is conversing on the BBS in which he interacts with hundreds of people throughout japan and abroad including one of my favorite jp tv personalities Nasubi.

The show gives an interesting look into how the japanese public feel about nerdy people and how they are really shunned by society. It is interesting how nerds are treated differently in the US and how nerds have become somewhat cool in the last 10 years here. Here is a link to the bittorrent of the series (complete with english subtitles) if you are interested in checking it out. I guess there is also a movie out there somewhere which I'll have to check out as well.

This weekend I left BitTorrent running downloading the japanese television show Densha Otoko which I have written about before here. I was hoping it would have english subtitles, which it does. I will be reviewing the episodes as I find time to watch them. =]

I can tell Green LA girl is right on the verge of buying a bike. I will give her some more motivation here: Yesterday I bought Penelope a vintage Schwin girls road bike from the '60s or '70s for a whopping $15. I don't know if she is going to like it or not due to the rust that covers most all of the components, but the frame is pretty much rust free so we have a good place to start! In the next couple of days I am going to take Penelope and the bike down to the Bicycle Kitchen and start converting it into a fixed speed lean mean road machine. Eventually I will send Penelope on her own to Bitchen, which is the girls only night that BK does, but I want to help her with the first few steps.

I think Penelope is going to kick my ass because I also bought another bike via ebay for $36 although this one is an antique single speed. I am not sure if it is legit as the seller has no feedback, but we'll see... I'm going to pick it up in person.

In other news I just noticed that BK has a blog called the Bici Blog.

Last night I went to Club Respect, but for some reason I also brought my bike and as soon as I got there I really just wanted to ride it home and see Penelope so I hopped on and rode the 6 miles home. Here is the route I took. It had some good uphill but nothing to serious. Fun Stuff

So the other night I mentioned that Penelope and I went to IKEA and picked up some home furnishing items of which included a floor lamp. The lamp we bought is made primarily of brushed stainless steel with a frosted glass globe shade. The lamp contains a 35 Watt halogen lamp and a set of 4 computer controlled LEDs that fade through most of the visible spectrum and can be locked on one color. I think it would be pretty cool to mod this thing to light a certain color via 802.11. I can't seem to find the lamp which is also available as a desk lamp on ikea's website.

Update I found the manual for the LED Lamp an it is called the MÅNSKEN.

Last month my site had over 100,000 visits from over 22,000 different people and a total of over 1.2 million hits. You can run an add that runs right over there to the right of this text for $20 a week. Click here to buy an add.

Sony made this commercial in SF using 250,000 superballs and they used no CG at all! That's right they really did this:

So for a few years I have been running a combination of Qmail, Courier-IMAP and Vmailmgr to allow for multiple virtual domains with many users without having to add each user to the system. I was doing some upgrading last night and I found out that the fine folks over at Courier have changed they way their authdaemon system works so that it is now incompatible with vmailmgr. Here is what they have to say about it:

I can only see the following minuses from losing the non-daemonized configuration. I believe the minuses are greatly outranked by the pluses.

There are some third party configuration libraries that only work in a non-daemonized configuration. I'm aware of one such library, vmailmgr. Unless it's been updated to work in daemonized mode, it will no longer work.

Great! So I just had to downgrade my upgrade of courier-imap. I am going to change my whole system soon and stop using vmailmgr and possible even qmail too. We'll see what happens.

So I sent photos of my fixie to fixed gear gallery and they posted them up along with my write up. When I woke up this morning I had a couple of emails asking me questions:

On Oct 25, 2005, at 11:07 AM, Pax wrote:

i have the same frame, but dont know how to get the shift lever mounts off. any help? also, what ratio?

Ok let me see if I can remember how I did this.

1. unscrew the levers.
2. I think I pried up the little plastic ring with my finger nail and then just turned it. One side is fixed and one side is like a nut.
3. After you remove one side the other will just come out after you jiggle it a little.

Ratio:

• Chainring: 42 teeth
• Cog: 14 teeth
• 78.8 gear inches

On Oct 25, 2005, at 10:46 AM, Claes Axang wrote:

I saw you bike at fixedgeargallery.com (very nice by the way) and read that you had used a half link. I am currently building on a old reynold's 531 road frame with horizontal drop-outs so that shouldn't cause any problems but I have been thinking aboout converting my old kona kilauea mountainbike to my everyday fixie. The kona has more or less vertical dropouts so I have been told that the only way to go is the white industries ENO hub but I don't feel that I want to spend that much money on a hub so maybe the half link solution could be the thing for me. How do you construct a half link and if you would have time some day could you send me a picture of what it looks like? Any help would much appreciated.

The thing about the half link is that it may or may not work. You really have to try to know, you might not even need a half link depending on your bike's geometry. The half link just allows you to shorten the chain by half a link. It looks like a short link in a chain, but instead of a pin it has a screw and a flat square nut. It cost me $10 from the bicycle kitchen, I'm sure you could find one online. Sheldon Brown has a shot of a half link here on is great website.

I forgot to mention it, but my lovely and radiantly beautiful fiance Penelope just got a new job at an upscale fine dining establishment on the top floor of a skyscraper in Downtown LA. She has worked for the same restaurant for 6 years and although she is very sad to go, it just didn't make sense for her to commute to Long Beach every day. Her new job pays almost triple what her old one did and her coworkers are much closer to her age if not older, the opposite of what they were at the old job. She doesn't plan to work at a restaurant forever, she has a degree in public health education, and has been accepted to nursing school which she will attend in about a year. Good job baby!

Oh things are starting to get good in the Plamegate scandal. So what exactly did you know and when did you know it Mr. President?

I wrote about my secret to building IKEA furniture that will last here and MAV's crack experience here onb.la.

Check out the write up here on b.la. Check out the photos here.

Update I went for my first short ride on Sunday to go buy a mini kryptonite lock. It was a hoot although I almost crashed into the back of a line of cars, thinking I could slow down fast enough by backpedalling. I swerved and went around and everything turned out ok.

Ok so today I went and picked up 2 bikes from a nice fellow in West Covina named Amer who's bikes had been sitting in his garage for at least 10 years. He wanted $200 for the Cannondale and $80 for the KHS and I talked him down to $174 for both of them. I think I got a pretty good deal and I really like the Cannondale, but it may or may not be the best conversion bike because of the near vertical rear dropouts.

After picking up the bikes and buying some spokes, lights, a helmet and a pump at a bike shop Eagle Rock called Discount Cycles I headed over to the Bicycle Kitchen for my 7:00 wheel building class. Bicycle Kitchen is completely and totally awesome and the people who work there are really cool and down to earth. They taught me step by step how to build a wheel and I built 2 in about 4 hours.

I am really happy with my work although the front wheel still needs a bit of truing. I took a few breaks from tweaking spokes and nipples to take off all the parts from the Cannondale that I won't be needing anymore like the derailers, the rear brakes, all the cabling except for the front break and the old rusty chain. I also bought all the other parts I will need to finish the rebuild. I have scheduled rack time tomorrow and I will hopefully have a rideable bike some time in the afternoon. I'll take some photos of the finished product.

Ok so I really want a bike. I used have a mountain bike and I rode all the time in High School. I now live in the city and I don't think I need a mountain bike at all any more and I really want to build my own fixed gear street bike. I know there is some sort of bike workshop thing in LA, but I can't seem to find a link to info about it. Anybody have any suggestions on where to begin? Comment here or email bike [at] eecue [dot] com. =]

UpdateEric Richardson sent me an email and reminded me that I was looking for the Bicycle Kitchen. I also found thesegreatsites that have a wealth of info about fixed gear bikes.

Update 2 Ok so I just got off the phone with Brian from Bicycle Kitchen and there is room in the wheel building class tomorrow and they even have rims and hubs I can buy for my fixed gear project bike... I just have to pick up 72 291mm spokes and I will be set to go! Oh yeah and I'll need to get a bike too, but finding and old junky 10 speed shouldn't be a problem. Cool.

So as you can see over to the right of this post I have my first blogad. It seems pretty relevant as I live in a loft and write about loft living several times a week. It's funny because if you look at my stats on the blogads website it only shows that I get 1700 hits a week (mostly because the counter has only been on there for a couple of days) but in reality I get about 5000 visits DAILY from 2000 different sites... I assume about half of those are RSS or search engines that don't load the blogad code, but it will be interesting so see how many I get at the end of one week according to blogads.

Here are some photos of one of the bricks there were thrown from the roof of the Alexandria Hotel the other night. I know they're not that great, but hey I have programming to do! I have about a 1387 photos to sort through from the last few months as I have been busy writing the new version of the software that powers this site. I wanted to wait till it was done before adding any more photos, but oh well!

I just swapped out the two failing 80gb drives that were in this server for 2 brand new 160gb drives. It took about 3 hours to transfer the data and now everything appears to be up and running ok. The second drive will be a daily backup of the main drive. In the next few days I will also be upgrading the database server. Enjoy!

[It's a good thing the server is back up because while it was down, 44 spam emails were waiting for me!]

You can now buy advertising on this site by following the link at the right. The prices are very reasonable and the site gets about 5000 unique visitors a day.

I have been using a RIM Blackberry 7100t for the past couple of months and I like it, but what I really want is a Treo. I have grown fond of the excellent messaging capabilities of the Blackberry and it is good news to hear that RIM and Palm have struck a deal to use the BB email client on the Palm. Cool Deal!

I posted about some events including respect tonight over on blogging.la.

As anyone who lives in Los Angeles knows, trees are terrible awful things that we as a city have the G-d given right duty to cut down, smash up, tear out and burn down. And if I may say so, it is about fucking time that our city hall has taken the great initiative to reduce the horrid oxygen producing scourge that are trees which have scarred the great park of Griffith for so many years. Not only has the park experience been lessened over the years by the unchecked breeding of these rooted vermin, but a dearth of pavement has prevented both the young and old from feeling the great comfort only tarmac can bring to the human stride...

Read the rest here on blogging.la.

So I've lost a large portion of my photos from this site. I still have them in a backup somewhere and hopefully I have a backup of the actual files from this site... I will work on finding that backup but be warned that the whole section may come down and I may have to reload them all from my desktop. Joy.

Just got this from the ACLU:

I'm not sure if you will be able to stomach the language and brute humor on this website but to me the Rude Pundit is fucking hilarious.

Do I hear a country song a brewin'?

So as you may or may not know, I have been recoding slacker from scratch. Slacker is the software that, along with phpreactor, powers all my sites including this one and junglescene. The whole thing is written in procedural php and the new rewrite which I have named dynamony, is completely object oriented. So far I have rewritten nearly every component of the backend system: the db abstraction class; the "slacker" base class which is a class that allows one to add/edit/update/delete from a database and provides the forms to do so along with limiting, sorting, searching by words or date; the blog class; the album class in which i used a much better tree algorithm that avoids the memory/processor intensive recursion i had used in the past; the ACL class; using Pear::Log for all error and debug logging; a comment class; a category class; a frontend controller system that loads requested classes after checking the ACLs; the signup class; image output class; the login/logout classes; the image class; the gallery remote class; the xml_rpc class; the dynamony class which allows me to create new classes within the web application instead of through a separate website; and today I created the forum class where I have seen my greatest decrease in load time nearly 10x faster than how the forums currently load (i tested it with several hundred thousand posts from junglescene.com)

The whole thing is really going to be leaps and bounds better than what I have now and going over my old code is really embarrassing. The amount of reused code was insane and made upkeep nearly impossible for one site let alone the dozens of sites that slacker powers. So far all the data is completely separated from the html/xml/csv that it will parsed using... I just use arrays of data and print_r() as my current output method which works great for prototyping. I have decided to completely program the backend before I even start any of the output classes. One important thing to me is to create rewrite rules and functions that will take the old links to content and forward them to the new content as not to break the thousands of links out there... It's a big project but once it is all done it will make my life so much easier.

Here are the posts I have made this week over on b.la:

• Second Annual Grand Ave Festival This Saturday
• Help The South Central Farmers
• Embarrassing Architecture

You can read more about our wedding plans over on Penelope's blog. She has been posting even more than I have!

One of the artists on my roster is running in the Honolulu AIDS marathon and needs your support... Here is the email he sent me:

The other day in my post about reality show deaths I mentioned the Japanese TV personality Nasubi who was basically kidnapped and locked in a room for a year without any clothes, money or food with his only means of survival being giveaway forms. Well I wanted to know what he was up to now so I emailed Ed Jacob who runs the site that had the Nasubi info on it and he told me he was in a Japanese TV Drama called Densha Otoko which actually sounds pretty cool. The show is about a shut in nerd from the Akihabara District of Tokyo who saves a woman on a train from being accosted by a drunk and in return she takes down his address, which is a first for the man who has never had a girlfriend his whole life. The story actually happened in real life and the otaku, Tsuyoshi Yamada, didn't know what to do so he posts his quandary to a huge internet discussion board and millions of people follow his courtship of the woman. It is actually pretty touching in a nerdy kind of way. Nasubi just has a cameo appearance in the show which is also a movie. I may have to download a few episodes and check it out.

Here is the info I have posting to different dnb message boards today:

I am sad because after reading about Organic Express on this cool and environmentally conscious LA blog, I rushed over to the Organic Express website and tried to sign up, but lo and behold they don't deliver to my area.

UPDATE: So I heard back from a Organic Express rep and they totally copped out saying they only deliver to residential neighborhoods and we all know that nobody lives downtown:

As I sit at my desk programming away I just saw a veritable swarm of swallows fluttering about the downtown sky in a somewhat chaotic cloud. The don't seem to be migrating as they are flying every which way with not apparent direction of travel. Very strange... I don't think I've ever even seen a swallow in downtown LA.

I'm probably going to sound a bit codependent here, but today was my first solo workout at the gym. For the past month or so I've been working out at least 3 times a week with Penelope, mostly at the Ketchum YMCA gym that we belong to, but today Penelope had to go visit her mom and then go to work so she didn't have time to work out with me. It was still a good workout, but I admit I do enjoy her company when I am at the gym and I missed her today. At the Y today they are re-flooring the weight room so all the super cool computer connected resistance machines were not accessible so I used the machines that are in the Curves style circuit training machines that normally have the annoying woman's voice that prompts you to "MOVE TO THE NEXT STATION," which, thankfully, was not turned on today. I am especially proud of myself because each time I workout I have been adding 5 minutes on to my cardio training on the LifeFitness Arctrainer in Hill Interval mode and today I did 55 minutes on it. Anyway time to jump in the shower and then get back to my weekend programming project which is the next iteration of my open source project slacker that I have completely rewritten to be object oriented and which I have renamed Dynamony.

When I was growing up we learned about the Bible at Sunday School (actually it was called Hebrew school, but you get the idea). I am a firm believer in the separation between church and state and I think all this hoopla about a new textbook that will teach about the bible and its religious implications in school is not only unneeded but will alienate people who's religion is not based on the bible. From the AP article there is no mention of any other holy books like the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao-te-ching, the Upanishads or the Veda. If I was a Hindu, Muslim, a Taoist or anything other than a Christian or a Jew I would feel pretty left out.

I have always loved malt-o-meal and for the last few weeks I have been enjoying it several days a week thanks to Penelope's wonderful breakfast cooking skills. She even introduced a new way of eating it to me, Savory style with butter, fresh ground pepper and salt. Mmm good stuff!

My sweet lovely and beautiful fiance has been posting like a mad woman today over on her blog. Stop by and read her reviews about various local eateries along with some trip reports from the zoo and the gym.

So normally I talk nothing but bad about television and although I do own one I have never bothered to hook it up to any broadcast connection or cable. I use it primarily to watch DVDs and that's about it. There is pretty much only one time when I watch TV and that is at the gym. If you work out on the third level of the Downtown YMCA you can watch one of the four televisions that are hanging from the ceilings, the one I like is always tuned to CNN and is in front of one of my favorite cardio machines the LifeFitness ArcTrainer today I spent 50 minutes on that thing watching CNN... I felt all slimy afterwards, but I think that was mostly from the sweat.

Here is a message I have posted to the Apple support page:

Recently I have decided to simplify my email life and in doing so I have for one thing stopped my subscriptions to the hundreds of security and programming related mailing lists I once subbed. Doing this allowed me to get rid of the hundred or so folders I had called "FreeBSD security" and whatnot and I have created one folder called "Old Mail" and several sub folders called "2004", "2003" and so on. This has worked very well for me as I no longer need folders to keep things sorted out and I can Spotlight whatever I am looking for.

THE PROBLEM:

The mail I have placed into my "Old Mail" folder only shows up on the system that I have archived it on... When I go home I only see the archived mail from earlier that morning before I went to work and vice versa. I am using IMAP and I have verified that the email DOES EXIST on the server which is a good thing. I have tried the "Synchronize" function and it does nothing to solve my problem. I am not too worried as I know my email does at least exist on the server, but it is very annoying to only have access to half of my archived messages at any given time.

So what should I do?

I'll keep this page updated as to what happens.

UPDATE I had to take the link off of here because apple's stupid discussion board website isn't smart enough to convert "&" to the non-XHTML compliant & character which it needs to be able to do in order to allow people who care about being XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant (like me) to post a link to their board from a website.

Today I was writing about the reality show suicide and I remembered poor Nasubi... wonder what ever happened to that guy!

I just looked at my Apple Weather Widget has a really cool rain graphic on it that spills down from the top and is raining on the rest of the widget... Apple design is amazing I tell you.

I just heard on the radio that the government is planning on buying 300,000 mobiles home for around a billion dollars to house the million or so homeless people from Katrina. This has to be the most twisted and backwards thing I have ever heard... let's do some math here. If we house all of the people who are now homeless in motor homes spending 1 billion of the 200 billion of the relief fund that leaves us with 199 billion dollars to spend on demolishing all the old homes of the poor and creating nice condos for the rich built by Haliburton. I am also greatly troubled about what the money is going to come from. I have a feeling that any and every social program still left intact in our government will be dismantled to pay for this instead of stopping the tax breaks for the rich that will cost our country 1.6 trillion in the next 10 years.

I just picked up an Inka Pen via a pro deal for our Search and Rescue team and so far I am really happy with it. The pen fits inside its own case and can be used quickly in the short version or converted to a full size pen with nice weight and balance. It also has a built in PDA stylus. The pen is pressurized like the space pens so that it will write upside down, in water etc. I like it so much I want to order another one and it looks like they are coming out with a titanium version in a few months!

This pen has a built in receiver to detect wireless cameras that may be spying on you and is called the Security Pen.

The power went out in Downtown LA about an hour ago. I was right about to get on the elevator in my building when I decided instead to go back and give my fiance a hug and kiss goodbye and when I walked back to the elevator the power went off. It took about 10 seconds before the emergency generator in our building kicked in, but when it did, the hallway lights came back on and one of the elevators powered up (although not the one I almost got in). When I went down to the street it was in chaos as all the stop lights were turned off and people were being stupid and running lights and pedestrians were just walking across the street with abandon. Luckily my servers in Downtown are all on generator power so my sites are still up for now.

Penelope and I had to leave to go to work and the parking attendants broke the gate open so we could get out of the parking structure. The drive out of the city was a bit dangerous due to the lack of stop lights. On the way out I listened to several public radio stations which for the most part stuck to their normal programming and didn't have any news about the power outage until about 1:45 and even then the coverage was very limited so I switched over to AM and KNX 1070 had nonstop detailed coverage of the outage, which I am now listening to here in OC. LAtimes has some info about the outage.

UPDATE: I just got word that power is back on in Downtown and possibly the whole city.

Not that they are going to guess any of my passwords with this scanning (as I use difficult, non english, symbol filled passwords) but it still pisses me off:

Jim just reminded me through his blog that today is the Art Walk. I am working from home today so I get to go check it out! Photo time! Also after the walk is the LAVoice party. Fun times.

I saw an add in Jointz Mag the other day about a music / fashion / art festival in Downtown LA called the Six Degrees Festival. The show features a couple Ninja Tune artists, the Breakestra, Phoreyz and more, looks pretty cool despite the flash website. Here is some info from the press release [1.2MB pdf]:

The Art Murmur Gallery in my building is having a reception this Saturday the 10th for the new show iPop which starts at 10pm. I will be on a Search and Rescue 24 hour pack and minimal rescue training. The training on San Jacinto, involves staying overnight with just what we bring out in our 24 hour packs (no sleeping bags / tents) and rigging a rescue raise and lower using only our personal callout ropes and climbing gear. Anyway go check out the opening!

So I've been thinking about getting some kind of portable storage to I can carry around various file with me. I had a little 64meg flash drive that just recently stopped working and now I see the new iPod Nano came out. The thing is pretty amazing and wonderfully small and I really want one! Not sure if I need one, but I do want one!

My friend will be having an exhibition of his SkullPhone art on October 15th. I will post more details about the show when I have them, but keep that day open if you are in to skulls with cell phones.

Every time I walk to the gym (every other day) I have been tempted to stop by the new healthy sandwich bar called Organic to Go which I think is on the ground floor of the Library Tower. I didn't realize it was a chain from Seattle. Here is a quote from the press release:

Anybody know where I could check out some Moleskin notebooks in or near Downtown LA? I want to pick one up for taking notes on the run but I'm not sure where to go. Thanks!

So yesterday I got my new BlackBerry 7100t in the mail after winning it on ebay for $135. I bought the missing sync program for it from PocketMac and got it all synced up.... sort of .... PocketMac's software didn't sync any of my calendar items. That was the first in a series of problems I have had with the 7100t. The next problem was that although it is supposed to support IMAP it really doesn't... you just get sent a copy of all your mail. When you read your mail on your Blackberry it doesn't appear as read in your inbox... same with sending and deleting. It also doesn't support IMAP folders and only checks your email every 15 minutes. The next problem came when I recieved a new email from my fiance and tried to read it but instead deleted it... the delete key is right on top of the enter key and are both pretty small. Once you delete a message it is gone forever... no trash can. The next problem is that the screen sucks in the sun despite what the product description on Blackberry's site says. And maybe I just haven't learned all the shortcuts yet but it is extremely unwieldy to get around the different menus from phone to IM to mail... lame. Bluetooth also only works for headset and hands free... no serial no syncing. I don't know how long I will keep this thing, but I am thinking the TREO 650 is the way to go.

UPDATE

Ok so i've RTFM and checked some shortcut lists and I have found there are easy ways to get around the bb... I'll keep delving deeper into this phone. I really want to like it, I swear!

Looks like I may be going to help with the rescue efforts in Louisiana. The details are a bit sketchy from the email I just recieved from the team commander:

I don't have a bike, although I used to mountain bike all the time and I would love to have a nice new mountain bike, but not as much as I want a street bike! Anyway there is a cool downtown 14.5 ride to benefit the American Heart Association on Sunday September 18th. If you're in Downtown LA and have a bike (eric) you should totally go check this out! You can register here by clicking on the button that says "I will be participating in the Bike ride to the Walk."

During my adult life, I have alternated between getting way too little sleep (<4 hours) and way too much sleep (>8 hours). Call me strange but I have noticed that if I get sleep in 2 hour blocks, like 4 hours, 6 hours, 8 hours I feel well rested and refreshed, but if I sleep an odd number of hours I feel like I'm being robbed of sleep. I'm not sure if this is a mental thing or if it is my body's biological clock telling me to feel rested. Anyway, I've decided that 6 hours of sleep is the perfect amount for me to feel well rested and also to allow me to get more done in the day. I have been trying it out and it really does make me feel good and I don't even need to set my alarm as I tend to just wake up after sleeping 6 hours. Another nice benefit is that at night I actually feel tired when it is time to go to bed.

Launch Party Pictures. At first I thought it was hipster dogs from Sunset Junction.

I just got in to GTD last week, my book hasn't even arrived yet via Amazon but I have read dozens of web pages about the process and I have my @action lists / projects / goals etc and it works great... put a whole bunch of tasks in to my dead and done file so far in the last few days.

My next step is to create a nice php/mysql interface that will sync with the text lists on my home/work desktops and my blackberry (which is on its way). So far I am using a combination of tar, openssl and scp to keep my lists synced, archived and encrypted. Fun stuff!

When I moved back to LA after living in OC for a year I hit up two of the local LA group blogs and asked if they needed or wanted any writers. Sean from blogging.la was the first to get back to me and let me know that the site was currently maxed out as far as writers went and to get back to him later to see if anything opened up. A few weeks later Jason Toney emailed me and let me know that there was room on LAist for writers and so I wrote a handful of articles for them. A few weeks ago I checked back with Sean and he informed me that a couple of spots had opened up on b.la, and as that was the group blog I had originally wanted to write for I retired from LAist and moved on over to b.la. So after finally getting my bio together I am now writing for blogging.la. My first post about the Chinese Food Festival is here.

Today after going for a run in Griffith Park and visiting out favorite baby sifaka at the LA Zoo, Penelope and I met up with Jim and Shannon at Union Station and then walked over to New Chinatown to partake in some serious Chinese food sampling, with some soul food and Seoul food thrown in for good measure. Jim took some photos of the festival which can be found in his flickr pool. I am uploading the photos I took now, but it is going a bit slow as I am just borrowing my neighbors internet connection, thanks neighbor! My photos for the most part can be found here.

Today Penelope and I walked a few blocks to the Civic Center to hit the YMCA and meet with our trainers to get set up on the FitLinxx system. Fitlinxx keeps track of your workout routine and lets you track your progress online. All the weight machines and most of the cardio machines are linked up to the network. It is pretty high tech and is included with the membership fee. I am going to be working out at least 3 days a week and doing 30 minutes of cardio and my sets of resistance training. Fun stuff!

Looks like some woman named Amanda doesn't quite understand the whole humor thing and was totally offended by Sean's minpin page where he talks about how minpins eat cars and people. Then to top it all off she posted this on an unrelated post on his blog: "what a total moron!!! I'm glad you had a good laugh you also gave all my friends one with your stupidity!!! Have fun pissing people off!!!!" classic!

So I read this article over on Robert Daeley's blog about making your desktop more sensible, toned down and work oriented. I am taking some of his advice about hiding notifications / the dock and toning down the color scheme on my desktop as well as trying out quicksilver [quicksilver totally rocks!]. I don't really like the idea of one huge text file for a number of reasons and as I am currently converting my CMS system slacker to be object oriented I am going to expand the features I already have to be my PIM, task manager, goal watcher, notes, etc all trackable with RSS feeds and editable with XML-RPC. It will include a backup dumping utility that will create encrypted text files that I can put in various places. I have written most all of the code for this in the last few years and I am looking forward to objectifying it! I am even considering upgrading to PHP5 to make use of the expanded object functionality.

I have been using a 1Ghz titanium powerbook (2nd or 3rd gen) for the past couple of years for my "desktop" at home and about 6 months ago the screen went on the fritz. The system is still covered by an Apple Care warranty so I am sending it in for repair. While I am without my laptop I have a loaner system... Dual G4 866Mhz. It is pretty cool except for the fact that I can't use my Verizon EVDO card with it, although I did by a PCI to PCMCIA adapter that doesn't work. Right now I am borrowing one of the many open wireless signals in my building. At first I was just browsing normally and it was quite slow, thinking it was my ssh tunnel and proxy server I checked my settings and low and behold I wasn't using my proxy/ tunnel... oops! I turned it on and it is actually much faster now. Go figure.

I am currently buying old books on ebay that (mostly) are in the public domain. These books are about Los Angeles. Thisshould be interesting. They come with maps... the mashup possibilities get ever cooler!

Penelope and I joined the best gym in Downtown LA today, the YMCA. The place is really amazing, with a pool, a full wood floored basketball court, tons of cardio machines, tons of weight machines, free classes, racquetball courts, a padded track, sauna and steam rooms, and a great view. It is only 3 blocks away from out loft and compared to the other gyms in downtown it is very affordable and has better hours. We worked out for a short 30 minutes today, starting on the elliptical machines, then moving on to the stair machines with the actual moving staircase and then spent 15 minutes running around the padded track and then sprinting the last lap. Next time (tomorrow) we will do strength training after our 30 minutes of cardio.

After the workout we headed over to the Downtown Farmers market on 5th street between Flower and Olive (I think). The market was packed with people from both the neighborhood and the local businesses. The stands sold everything from clothing to the usual staples of organic veggies and fresh baked goods. We ran in to Gary Leonard, the Downtown LA News photographer, who I had previously met at the Is California Governable talk. The market is really quite expansive and puts the Silverlake Farmers Market to shame.

On our way back we stopped for lunch at Saisai, the sushi bar located in the Biltmore Hotel and we each tried one of the lunch specials which had hearty portions, delicious fresh fish and beautifully presentations. I look forward to going back for dinner some time in the future. Penelope and I are considering having our wedding and reception there

LA Times (via KTLA) has an interesting History of the Skid Row in Downtown LA that goes all the way back to the late 1800s.

UPDATE

Looks like Dan Garzila has a different take on Central City East is really all about. I'm not surprised that LAT got their facts wrong.

I just logged on to the google talk jabber server:

• talk.google.com
• login: [email protected]
• password: yourpassword

I am using Apple iChat. Say hello if you log on too: eekyou [at] gmail [d0t] com. More details can be found here. [thanks for the tip sean

UPDATE

Google just sent a message to me on my iChat Jabber session saying that they have updated their page. There is no Mac client but they give directions on connecting from a mac/linux.

UPDATE 2

My friend set up jabber and his iChat crashed and then killed all his preferences. It seems to keep crashing on him. It is sort of working. Eventually we got both text and Audio chat working in iChat even though the chart on google says voice chat doesn't work.

UPDATE 3

Well Sean seems to have gotten it working too, but when I tried to reply to his message he disappeared and now I am seeing "Jabber Error" popups when I try and talk to him... can you say buggy!

I will no longer be writing for the LAist group blog. It has been fun and I have enjoyed writing the articles I have written for the site. I want to thank Jason Toney for giving me the chance to write for the site and wish him and the rest of the folks on LAist the best of luck in their adventures. Here is a link to the articles I wrote.

LABlogs has been changing their site up in the last few weeks and it looks like they are going to add the ability for people from the community to post.

Blogs can be a very personal insight into people lives as is evidenced by these two posts about a man (William Campbell) reunited with his estranged daughter after not seeing her for 5 years. Sean Bonner said yesterday if you only read one blog today read this and I will echo that again for the second part of the posting.

Check this post from the excellent LANL insider blog called LANL The Real Story.

I just posted up the 5th part of the LA From an Auto series over on LA Voice. You can check out the new google map with many more locations here. Here are the first four parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Last night Penelope and I were awakened by the sounds of the first gun shots we've heard in our neighborhood (we shoot my guns all the time just not outside of a shooting range in the city). Right down on the street in front of our house where the dealers and users hang out all day and night, we heard about 10 shots in rapid succession. It didn't sound fast enough to have been an automatic weapon, more likely it was a semiautomatic pistol somewhere around 9mm. A few seconds later we heard it again a few blocks down the street so it was probably fired from a car. I didn't even bother to get out of bed and look but Penelope said she saw a bunch of people huddled around somebody on the ground and a few minutes later the police showed up along with an ambulance. We're on the top floor of the 7 story building so it would take some horrifically bad aim to hit our loft accidentally, but I'm curious to see if any of the rounds hit the lower floors.

UPDATE

I just used the trusty 311 service to talk to my local police department (central) and they informed me that the two incidents are under investigation and the person who was shot was not killed and is doing ok.

Today Penelope and I walked up the hill a few blocks to check out the Basquiat exhibit at MOCA. The collection is vast and supposedly the largest ever in one place. We very much enjoyed the vivid and tumultuous paintings of the young deceased artist, our favorites of the bunch being Grillo, Now's the Time (a Charlie Parker record) and the various Gray's anatomy inspired paintings, which were obviously inspired by the thick anatomy tome (even though that bit of information was unknown to us).

This continues after the fold...

I was just wondering if the live focus feature in the Canon 20Da is a hardware change like the different IR filter is or if is purely software... you would think it would be software. You can download the 20Da firmware but it appears to be in Japanese.

UPDATE

It won't work because the mirror on the 20Da is semitransparent, allowing simultaneous viewing through the eyepiece and the LCD.

She posted twice today on her website... once about the horrible service she got from the Carson Saturn dealership and then about the good experience she had with the mechanic she and her family have used for years.

Yesterday I took one of the LAC's Downtown LA Summer Evening walking tours. I wrote about it here on LAist. Photos can be found here.

This is a pretty funny Engrish label.

So far I have taken over 10,000 photos with my Canon EOS 20D. I really love the camera and the photos I have taken with it. Of those 10,000 photos I have thrown about 9,500 or so... having a great camera has inspired me to take many shots but only keep what is good. I think my photography has come a long way, but there is always room to improve!

Photos and words coming soon.

UPDATE!

So believe it or not I have been slammed at work since I got back from the con and I really haven't had any time to sort my photos and write about my experiences at DEFCON, or at the parties I attended. I just got back from the walking tour of Downtown LA focusing on the Art Deco buildings in the area. I took some photos and I'm going to both sort those and the DEFCON pics and upload tonight.... oh and another thing... if I have time tomorrow I will be releasing a few more pages of LA from an Auto.

UPDATE 2

Oh my it must be a chilly day in hell as Penelope posted two entries on her site!!! One is a review of defcon... good job sweetie!

I just posted up my story about the Zocalo Sponsored talk at the Dorothy Chandler Music Hall here on LAist.

A few months ago I received an email from flickr poster No Name No. 5 asking permission to use this photo of Penelope's eye in an art project. After consulting with Penelope we agreed to let him do it and here is what he created! Cool deal!

Ok so I am glad to see that network solutions are offering cheaper domain registration than $40 a year, but as I was checking out their new pricing, I saw a terrified helmeted dog who seems to be riding a skateboard with a jet turbine attached to the back with some rope. Beneath the ad was a link enticing readers to "Read My Blog. Click Here" and when I did click there I was taken to a marketing travesty consisting of one part typing dog and one part blog. Rapid Rocco the Rocket Dog is quite possibly the most annoying web based advertising campaign I have ever seen.

Once a year hackers, crackers, geaks, freaks, drunks and gun toting maniacs get together in Las Vegas for the security convention known as DEFCON. Although the con has many speakers and events in the past I have gone to eat, drink and be merry in LV and this year will be no exception as thoughts of Nobu, Bellagio Buffet and Habeñero Rum dance through my head. 23b.org (which I host / am a member of) is a great spot to find photos from the con both past and present. If you're going, I'll see you there!

Penelope just pointed out to me the top downtown blog from LA Downtown News was Eric Richardson's blogdowntown and in the write-up they mentioned our Downtown Jogging (Urban Jog?) idea as one of the topic on his blog... cool! We are still planning on doing this, we are just very busy, this weekend we are going to DEFCON and then in the next few weeks I am taking an advanced rope rescue class on the weekends. Penelope is just finishing her internship and when she is done and when I am less busy we will create the flyers and put them up around Downtown. If you are interested in jogging along with us send me an email and let me know what time / day is good for you: urbanjog [at] eecue [dot] com.

This edition in the series of scans from the 1906 electric coach tour guide entitled Los Angeles From an "Auto" takes us deeper into the Old Chinese Quarter and then to the original heart of the city, when it was just a tiny Spanish pueblo. This portion of the book is less of an advertisement for the hotels of Downtown and more of a glimpse into the unique history of the City of Angels. In case you missed them, the first three sections can be found here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Check out the google map which shows the locations of the buildings shown in the guide along with a few (soon to me many) photos of the buildings as they exist today. The engravings from this section will be posted soon thanks to the historical address finding wizardry of Eric Richardson, who has already helped find several of the addresses for the map.

UPDATE The story has been boingboinged~~[oops they said 1909 instead of 1906]~~ fixed... thanks Cory!

Looks like it has also been picked up on blogging.la and gridskipper

When I came back from my training in San Bernardino this weekend I was turning left on to 5th street off of Los Angeles and I heard singing, a very loud and beautiful rendition of Amazing Grace echoed off the buildings and to my surprise was emanating from a group of about 40 people who, to me looked like Quakers or Amish folks . They were dressed all in black suits except for their white shirts and they were wearing wide, straight brimmed black hats. It was very surreal and not something I am used to seeing on the street here in Downtown.

Google maps just got even better as they have added a feature called Hybrid that combines street maps with sat footage! Check out the new feature on any Google map, like my Historical Cultural Monuments map. I am really tired from a long day of Search and Rescue training. I will write more about it soon.

UPDATE I have updated to LA from an Auto maps and the HCM maps to use the new hybrid maps. The new type isn't documented yet, but it is pretty obvious: setMapType(G_HYBRID_TYPE);

Ok I just got an email from the Grand Performances group that puts on free concerts at the California Plaza... and next Thursday starting at 8pm the Shaolin Monks will be demonstrating kung-fu techniques! The info is not on their website, but here is the pertinent info from the email:

A friend of mine who lives in the mountains near Big Bear just had hail the size of marbles. He said his neighbor's windows were broken. Crazy weather for July, but this year, almost the wettest on record ever, has been generally strange when it comes to the weather department. I especially enjoyed the wildflowers in the desert that was more like a paradise after the torrential rain that fell this year.

Penelope and I went to the Carson IKEA last night and picked up most of what we've been needing for our loft. We picked up 2 more Roger chairs for our dining room table, bringing the total up to four. We also scored an 72" Expedit, the ultimate bookshelf. We were going to buy a couch, but we couldn't find any we really liked, so instead we bought two Poang chairs and ottomans. Everything we bought matches our kitchen wood which IKEA calls black-brown and the fabric is a gray microfiber that feels like suede but is actually polyester. To top it all off we picked up some new lamps, picture frames and coasters.

It was a good haul, and soon we will be ready for our loft-warming party! Did I mention I just finished putting it all together? It took me about 4 hours to do everything, and as usual there was a problem with one item, the Expedit had 2 holes that the pegs went all the way in to, but it wasn't a structurally important connection so I don't think it will matter.

This is just a partial update. I am going to make it look less boxy when I have some free time, hopefully tonight.

My photos and extremely short review can be found here on LAist.

I want to thank Eric Richardson for taking the time to research the locations from my LA From an Auto scans that I don't know the addresses of. Eric has access to the ProQuest database and has been really helpful in finding where business used to be located a hundred years ago. Thanks!

I use iPhoto to upload photos to my website using Gallery Remote. I don't actually run gallery on my site, but I like the way the gallery remote works so when I programmed my website I included the GalleryRemote protocol which is nice because I can use any of the third party Gallery Remote programs out there.

I really don't like iPhoto because it is way to slow to handle the 200 photos I take every time I go out shooting. I have been using Adobe CS 2 Bridge for the initial sorting and then when I have about 20 photos I like, I transfer them over to iPhoto and upload them using the remote.

The Gallery Remote can be a little buggy some times and today it crashed iPhoto while it was pulling down a list of my albums. When I reopened iPhoto all my photos and settings where gone, joy! When I quit iPhoto asked if I wanted to use my old settings, which I did and then when I reopened it everything was OK. That was a close one!

I have posted the third part of my scans of the 1906 electric coach tour program guide: Los Angeles From an "Auto" over on LA Voice. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that the first two portions were painstakingly converted from photo to text manually by yours truly; I have stepped into the modern age and used an OCR program to aid in the task. I added the new photos on the google map.

I spent some time today updating the HCM google-mashup and enabling it to search by either zipcode and distance or name, address and monument number. Just a note of warning, if you increase the distance searched by too much you will end up with a google map that contains hundreds of points which, in Safari at least, ends up dogging your system. Eventually I'd like the system to get the location of the current view and show the HCMs that exist on that map. Tonight I am going to add the rest of the locations from LA and possible the ones from Long Beach if I feel so inclined.

UPDATE I have reimported the database of LA HCMs and this time I changed to code to work with ranges and multiple addresses for the most part and I also imported ALL the regions of LA. I am currently geocoding all the information once again so it may be a few hours before it is all on there. I also added a link to the flick tags for each map point... thanks to the folks in the LA Historical Cultural Monuments Group!

Boy am I tired from a long day of training... but hey that won't stop me from going to Create:Fixate for a couple hours and taking some photos!

UPDATE Create:Fixate was packed with hipster art folks, beautiful photography and strong drinks. I will upload the photos tomorrow and post a review consisting of more than 100 words, but it won't be on here... look out for it on LAist and some more of LA From an Auto on LAvoice.org. I have more training tomorrow, and more training next weekend, then DEFCON, then 2 more weekends of training, but after that I will be eligible to be Technical Rescue instructor for SAR, I haven't really ever taught before, but I think I will enjoy it. G'night!

Just read this post from Eric on blogdowntown about his little journey through downtown today... He took a kick ass photo of the sunset, the sun was really big and orange today. He went to the Music Center for Dance Downtown and got his dance on... looks like he had a good time.

Tomorrow is the start of a 2 weekend course I am taking for Search and Rescue called Technical Rescue Basics Course. I have read through the course material and none of it is new to me, but I am sure I will learn something from the course. I am bringing all 3 duffel bags of my SAR gear with me because there are always call outs during trainings; some sort of strange Murphy's Law deal. This weekend is all classroom time and next weekend is the field training which should be fun.

They're filming a movie across the street from my loft, I was watching the production drones scurrying about on the roof of the Hotel Alexandria. The yellow signs say Romco which to me sounds like a play on the infomercial master Ronco, but IMDB turns up nothing. I wonder what Celia's take is on all the action in her building, I'm sure it's nothing new to her.

I remember when I was younger, there used to be a crapload of raves at the Alexandria, and I also recall speaking to my Aunt at one point, mentioning I was heading to a rave in downtown at the Alex, and she told me about when she was young they used to party there in the splendidly decorated ballrooms which are now used solely as music video and movie backdrops.

I wrote a story about the Downtown Art Walk and posted it here on LAist. Here are the photos from the story.

Eric Richardson posted about the walk as well... he had some nice things to say about my photography (thanks) and I kept showing up at different galleries where Eric had just left. A few people whom I met on the art walk have been reading the LA From an "Auto" [part 1 : part 2] series I have been posting and Bert Green was forwarded a photo of the Edison Buliding by Eric, which he said he has always wanted to buy, but didn't know anything about the actual building, not that the photo gave much information.

So I've been playing more with google maps API and have created a page that lists all the Historical Cultural Monuments in Downtown Los Angeles and a few surrounding neighborhoods. This phase is pretty buggy and due to the raw addresses from the HCM database being nonstandard, some of the addresses are ranges. I will have to hack my code up a bit to fix the range listings... also the geocoder I am using doesn't have every address in it, so it is not very precise. The geocoding is still going so not all 600 of the locations are on the map yet, but there are still many points so be careful it may tax your system to view this page. Next I just have to integrate photos and descriptions! [If you have a slow computer try this search for "broadway"]

People seem to be enjoying what I have started here. Tonight I hope to work on some custom icons and the xml-rpc.

If you are in the Downtown area tomorrow, make sure you get out on the street and check out the Art Walk... I missed it last month when we first moved in, but this time I'm going to go to every gallery I can, plus take photos and write about it. Thanks for the reminder Eric.

I just read this post over on LA Cowboy about the engraving I posted of the Hotel Alexandria. I didn't even notice, but it is obviously not a real photo and is actually the architect's drawing... the real thing is much smaller.

Is now online over at LA Voice... check it out! The new buildings are now located on the google map. I will spend even more time tomorrow photographing buildings and this time I will shoot the parking lots where there were once buildings.

Yesterday I posted the first few pages from a book I am scanning on LAvoice.org and last night, as recommended by Mack Reed, I finished a Google Maps API mashup showing the buildings from the scans so far... check it out here.

So last night Penelope and I walked the whole 3 blocks to the Golden Gopher to meet some blogging people from the interweb. We missed the free sushi, which was proven to exist here, but we were there in time for a few stiff drinks. We met and photographed Sean Bonner, Mack Reed, Uccellina and her husband and the losanjealous crew. Uccellina's husband whose name currently escapes me just got a job in the animation department at Disney (in the magicians hat). Penelope and Uccellina talked the whole time about weddings, but I'm pretty sure she didn't feign interest!

Apple just updated Tiger to 10.4.2! Cool a bunch of bug fixes in this one.

UPDATE: Since I ran the update Safari has already crashed once and has just stopped loading pages twice.

I have begun posting a series or scanned engravings and text from Los Angeles From an "Auto", which is an old tourist guide to LA from 1906. The tours took place atop motorized electric coaches and stopped at all the Downtown Hotels. After each installment I plan to follow up with a current photo of the buildings that are mentioned. Here is the first in the series on LAvoice.org, the current photos are coming soon.

I had no idea you could get a map of Downtown LA surface street traffic in real time... Cool!

Penelope and I just got back from another jog, this time we drove up good ol' Glendale Blvd (the 2) to Griffith Park and jogged along the horse trail. We thought this would be a nice scenic run, which it was, but the scenery involved was the freeway, a trash dump and a golf course. The terrain was sandy dirt which is probably great for horses, but it wasn't the best running surface. I think in the future we will run in Downtown and Echo Park and if we go back to Griffith we will start our jog at the north end of the park.

Penelope and I are going to finish up the Weekly Communal Jog in Downtown flyer tonight so keep an eye out for it around town.

When I was in Japan several years ago I made it a point to try many different types of Japanese food and one of them I haven't had since I was there is Okonomiyaki. Oko is a sort of like a savory crepe but thick with the filling infused into the pancake. As you can see here it starts off as a bowl of raw eggs, oil, noodles, flour and veggies with meat, seafood or tofu and it ends up being a giant delicious pancake that you can then cover with japanese mayo, unagi sauce and bonito... mmmm bonito. The fun part about it is that you get to cook it yourself on the table in front of you somewhat like shabu shabu. The whole reason I am writing about oko is this flickr photo and I found a place in greater LA (Torrance) called Tombo that serves the greasy delicious fare. Google led me to Epinions which had a review from 2001 so I gave the number a call and a nice lady answered and she told me yes, they did still serve okonomiyaki, just not on Mondays which is the day they are closed. Photos and review coming soon!

Penelope and I had a great time at the Lotus Festival this weekend. I took some photos and wrote a short article that should be popping up on LAist some time today. In short the food was good, the weather was great and the people were out in force. If you have never been to the Lotus Festival, I recommend you mark your calendar now for next year!

UPDATE: Here is the post on LAist

All the fan mail and positive feedback that meter maids receive on a daily basis obviously inspired the city of LA to install the new parking meters in front of my building on 6th street. I hope nobody tells the city about the wily homeless meter hackers who poke the no-armed bandits and cajole them to give you time without actually placing change into their slots. No wonder Joe's successor is one of the wealthiest people in the city [that is pure speculation on account of nearly every freaking parking lot in Downtown being owned by Joe's]

Penelope is a runner. She ran cross country in college on a scholarship. She is one tuff cookie. I ran a bit in Jr. High and High School, and until recently I hadn't run more than a block in about 10 years. Penelope has been taking me jogging, we started when I was living in Fullerton on the horse trails and we made it about 15 minutes and then I was exahuseted and had to walk the rest of the way. We have been steadily increasing the runs and now as of today we are up to 40 minutes without a break.

Today we did a run in the city and we started at the lofts, went straight up 6th street into the civic center, through a maze of stairs which belong to the parking lot across from the disney concert hall and the up the stairs of the concert hall, through the garden and up on to the chandler catwalk (beautiful view from there!). We then wove through some buildings and then back down to the loft. It was a good run and I feel great now!

Penelope had a wonderful idea to organize a semi-weekly jog through downtown for the residents of our loft. We're going to make some flyers tonight and put them up throughout the building.

Posts about our return trip to the zoo and the Lotus Festival coming soon...

This weekend I visited the zoo and I wrote about it on LAist.

I have just launched my new drum'n'bass booking agency, Granular Music. My roster is not yet complete, but so far I have nearly every OG jungle DJ from LA. The site will have more information soon including: bios, photos, mixes, booking calendar, online booking negotiation, booking contracts and more! The main point of granular is to help our local DJs get exposure around the US and the World. Just in case you were wondering, all our artists are nonexclusive so if you already have a deal worked out you can choose to go directly with that artist or whatnot.

Hexodus posted about this new LA blog feed aggregator called losangeles.cityfeeds.com. This is a one stop shop for news on LA related blogs.

Here are the Drum'n'bass events in LA that I have photographed in the last few months. I don't normally post about them on this site... that is what junglescene.com is for! Here are the latest music galleries

• DJ Lee @ Respect
• DJ SS @ Soundwavez
• JoS @ Respect
• Muse 51
• Electric Daisy Carnival 2005
• Silver @ Respect
• Phear @ Soundwavez
• DBridge @ Respect
• Mampi Swift @ Adrenaline
• Junglist Platoon @ Soundwavez
• Stareyes @ Metric
• Science Night @ Respect
• Herbin @ Soundwavez
• Deacon and R.A.W. @ Soundwavez

Enjoy!

The view from our loft constantly inspires me to take long exposure photos at night. A few days ago after Soundwavez, I clicked my camera onto its tripod and grabbed my remote and shot a few exposures ranging from a few seconds to about a minute. I also shot the first photo that I have taken of the inside of our loft. I love my EOS 20D! I just need some more lenses... right now I have the Canon EF-S 17-85 and the Canon 100mm USM Macro. I want to buy a TS-E and maybe a 300mm telephoto.

So I am trying to send some of my photos to a group on Flickr and I'm getting an error in safari. AJAX rocks 100x more than Flash, but please test your code in the common browsers!

[UPDATE]

Wow that was quick! They fixed it, thanks guys.

In the last few days there have been extremely loud, earth shaking explosions that have rattled our lofts at early hours in the morning. At first I though it was something real blowing up, but I waited for the sounds of fire engines and police cars racing to the scene of the crime, yet there was no sign of an emergency response. Penelope and I have surmised that the sounds we were feeling and hearing were part of a Hollywood production being shot somewhere near our loft. Hopefully they will wrap soon!

As it turns out, maintaining roadside phones for stranded motorists isn't very cost effective, especially when 90% of drivers carry cell phones with them. Starting July 1st, Metro and the Los Angeles County Service Authority for Freeway Emergencies (LA SAFE) will begin a non-emergency road side assistance cell phone number (#399) for LA County highways. If you already have AAA the operator will forward you there and if not you will receive assistance from the Metro Freeway Service Patrol.

This weekend I went to three very different musical gatherings in the greater LA area. I wrote about it for LAist.

I wrote an article for LAist, the sister site of Gothamist about the tobacco pushers at clubs with their fancy schmancy handheld computers.

This week's Onion is an edition from the future and as usual there are some hilariousarticles and opinions, but the "What Do You Think?" section takes the cake.

This past weekend Penelope and I drove up to the Bay Area to visit Merrilee and Keith. We attended a traditional wedding in Old Town Orange on Friday before we hit the road. The service was beautiful and the church (St. John's Lutheran) was lovely. We had to leave early in order to make it to Oakland at a semi-reasonable hour (2am).

Penelope and I woke early and went for a strenuous jog in the Oakland hills, man those are steep! After the jog, Keith and I surveyed the area in the back of the house where a stairway is to be built. We measured once and cut twice... oh wait did we get that bassackwards? Well anyway we planted stakes where we planned to drill holes for the load bearing members of the stairway. When we were done surveying it was time to pick up Merrilee who had just ridden 62 miles in training for the Death Ride. We prettied ourselves up and headed to the Pagan Re-Wedding of our caving friends Bill and Peri Franzt and Ethan and Courtney Frantz

I have never been to a Pagan Wedding or Re-Wedding and I didn't know what to expect, but the ceremony was really quite beautiful. There were about a hundred people in attendance and after drinking a variety of home made brews we all joined hands in a circle and started singing a short chant which I now forget the words to. The circle doubled back on its self and everybody kissed everybody on the cheek. The ceremony the involved the 7 couples who were remarrying drinking some wine and eating some bread and then spinning a wheel of life which we all also had the chance to spin.

The next day Penelope and I went for our hilly run again, then we all went to the Montclair Farmers Market where I scored some cheese and organic baby greens that had edible flowers mixed in. The edible flowers were really tasty and a bit spicy almost like horseradish. Merrilee and Keith picked up some fresh non-farmed salmon for dinner wich they later BBQ'd after soaking in a delicious Pernod marinade.

Penelope, Merrilee and Josh headed to Berkeley to visit the Sake Factory and buy Jim a father's day present and Keith and I headed to the lumber yard (Not Home Despot!) to pick up some tubular cement forms for the staircase. With the forms in tow we proceeded to the rental company and rented an auger with a 12" bit.

Neither Keith nor I had ever used an auger before, but we weren't too worried and as it turns out, using an auger is pretty straight forward. The only problem we ran in to was spilling a little bit of gas when we improperly laid the auger down on the ground, but no harm no foul. It took us a little over an hour to drill 6 holes and we even had a chance to take a break and have some water before we returned the auger.

After we were all done and the auger was returned I suggested to Josh, who is a photographer, that we head down to San Francisco to take some photos of the Golden Gate Bridge. We drove in to the city and made way to the Persidio where we parked near Fort Point and took some Bridge photos. I also photographed some sea gulls who were mugging it up for me.

We headed over to the Palace of Fine Arts where the Exploratorium is located and shot that famous landmark. Finally we stopped at Treasure Island to shoot the city from afar and while I shot a few pics, Josh sketched the San Francisco skyline.

When Josh and I pulled up to the house the coals were getting hot and the drinks were flowing. We ate, drank and were merry and in the morning it was hard to get up and leave, but we had to get back to LA. Penelope and I both had a great trip, albeit too short, and we look forward to the next time we make it out to the Bay.

Last week I posted that I noticed LAPD was increasing their presence in my neighborhood and hassling drug dealers (as I type this I have seen LAPD cruisers and motorcycles roll by twice). I guess it wasn't just random and they have added an actual beat through gallery row according to this article on LA Downtown News.

Downtown Central City East Blogger asks the following questions:

What is homelessness? Why are people homeless? And how is it, that this city is the homeless capital of the world?

To which I responded:

Homelessness is the state of living in which you have no home to hang your hat in. People are homeless for a myriad of reasons ranging from extreme poverty to drug addiction to mental problems. Urban sprawl over a hundred miles of coastline has concentrated the homeless problem into a very small area where they are tolerated. Greater Los Angeles is a huge population center in a state where mental care funding was cut under then governor reagan. Drug addiction is treated only as a crime and not as a disease and thus the war on drugs has created self-imposed internment camps for the hardcore addicts.

Obviously not every homeless person requires the same kind of help. Some need mental health care / medication and counseling, others need drug counseling and rehabilitation, many just need help finding work and affordable housing.

My fiance updated her blog... it is an honest to goodness miracle I tell you! Soon she will have her photos up there too and post on a more regular basis! Wow! Go Penelope!

I just saw this hilarious (and insulting if you are a street artist) photo on Hexodus' flickr stream. It has a link to a site called streetartblows.com which is somewhat of a protest site created by an anonymous graf artist (I'm guessing). Here is what s/he has to say:

This one felt stronger than the one in Anza... and it was closer. It always takes the map a few seconds to update after the quake.

There was a 7.0 Magnitude earthquake off the coast of Northern California. There is a Tsunami Warning in effect. The Tsunami wave (if it exists) is schedulued to touch down in San Pedro at 10pm.

When we first moved in to our new loft a few weeks ago, we noticed that scores of homeless and drug dealers hung out at a bus stop on Main St, which we had a perfect view of. We have spent many hours watching people sell, buy and smoke crack down on the street below our house.

Every couple of days we would see an LAPD cruiser pull up and watch as the people scattered like so many cockroaches. During the past week, LAPD has upped their patrols to every hour if not twice an hour. They also have bike cops patrolling, and these are real LAPD officers, not the purple-shirt-wearing security guards. This is having a good effect, as there are much fewer people hanging out and I see far fewer crack deals and crack smoke-a-thons. Thanks, LAPD!

That being said, I do feel that chasing people off and/or arresting them is not the solution to the problem. Our country and her war on drugs makes problems like these worse by treating them as a crime and not a disease. Drug addiction is a disease and it should be treated like a disease. Locking up addicts does not cure their addiction.

I already volunteer a good portion of my time to Search and Rescue, but I realize that there is more I can do down here. I want to interview the people on the streets, to learn their stories and to record them for posterity. I also think volunteering at the Midnight Mission would be a positive use of my time, so I have contacted them and offered my time and services.

In Downtown LA there are not many places to relieve yourself if you are not a paying customer. If you are homeless and roaming 6th Street and suddenly hear nature calling, you can't just use the public restrooms provided by the city, as there are none. There is no reason you can't just squat down and take a crap on the sidewalk, well no reason other than human decency and/or self-respect.

Just in case you didn't realize that you could use the street as your own personal toilet, local artist Richard McDowell[via blogdowntown] has made wonderful signs that let you know you can. Don't forget to Bring Your Own Paper. According to the rumors on blogdowntown, the signs are part of a film that the artist is making. There are also drugrelated signs in case you have trouble finding a drug dealer in Downtown.

UPDATE:

I didn't mention it, but there are actually portapotties a few blocks to the southeast on 6th.

One of the more resourceful homeless fellows who frequents my block has come up with quite the ingenious money making system. When a car arrives to park at a meter he offers another plan... give him what change you have and he will trick the meter into thinking you paid. He will even hang out for more than an hour (he always hangs out anyway) and keep "feeding" the meter. The trick is he doesn't put money into the slot, but instead uses a bent paperclip to trick the meter and give you time. Pure genius I tell you.

We just woke up to an earthquake... a 5.6 near Anza Borego. Here is the info.

I am really loving the view from our loft. I can see almost all of my favorite buildings... all except One Wilshire... oh well. I took this photo on Thursday night after Respect with my Canon EOS 20D. I think it was about a 20 second exposure.

Today I walked a few blocks to Little Tokyo to meet my mom for lunch. We ate at the Curry House, which is located next to the New Otani hotel. I love the sweet, savory flavor of Japanese curry. I could tell from a block away that I was going to enjoy the fare just from the rich curry aroma that wafted down the street.

I ordered Beef Katsu with extra curry (hot of course) and my mother had the seafood curry. The portions were prodigious and pleasantly arranged and the curry was hot and delicious. The large portion I ordered came with a supplemental bowl of curry to smother the rice and beef katsu in once I finished what was on the plate. I washed it all down with a can of milky sweet Calpico (which in Japan is call Calpis, which sounds somewhat like Cow Piss).

If you find yourself craving curry this is the spot to appease your needs.

Penelope and I are all unpacked and yesterday we hit IKEA and scored a dining room table, chairs, some shelves and other assorted items. I have been walking down to Grand Central Market every day to buy produce and meat and cooking dinner every night. I love cooking and I really love our new kitchen. It is very open and well designed with brand new appliances and granite counter tops.

The city is full of energy and life during the day and the streets are bustling with activity. Broadway is a great place to buy cheap clothing and electronics as there are hundreds of discount shops in the Historic Core.

Today Penelope and I walked the two blocks to the LA Flower Market and picked up some star gazers and some other purple flowers for the loft and we also bought a bouquet of assorted flowers and lei for my mom. Her birthday is today and we are meeting her in Little Tokyo for lunch in an hour.

Once things are more organized I will take some photos of the loft and our wonderful view. I also plan on taking photos of the flower mart and other places around our loft.

Yesterday my superstar, amazing, wonderful fiance and I moved. We woke up at 6AM and drove to my storage unit in Redlands where we rented a truck and emptied my storage unit. Then we went to Penelope's house and loaded up her boxes and furniture and then to my house where we did the same. The 14' U-haul was totally filled up. We then drove to our new loft and moved in. Just the two of us! What a trooper Penelope is! I really love her. Boy am I tired.

Tomorrow we move in to our new loft on Gallery Row in Downtown Los Angeles. I am almost all done packing, probably 2 more boxes to pack. In the morning we are picking up a rental truck near my storage unit, which contains my dishes, assorted cookware and utensils. Then on to Penelope's house to pick up her stuff, then on to my house to pick up my stuff, then on to my office to pick up some boxes of books and my speakers then to Downtown.

Today I got a new system at work... Dualy 1.8Ghz G5 with 2gb ram and 80gb + 250gb drives. Finally Tiger actually works well. On my laptop which is a 1Gz powerbook (2nd or 3rd gen I think... it is Titanium) Tiger crawls and tends to keep the processor fan running. I think there may be a problem with the Laptop apart from the burnt out screen that luckily is still covered by the Extended Apple Care Warranty. Spotlight is much more responsive as are all my applications.

I transfered over my existing setup from my laptop and everything worked flawlessly including all my apps and all my settings... what a time saver. I wish Apple would come out with a G5 powerbook so I could carry my Tiger around with me.

Betalevel, the electronic cock fight ringleaders, will be host to a data swapmeet that focuses on sneaker-netting and socializing through first person peer-to-peer networking. It should be a fun time and a good source of new music for my collection. The event takes place at the Betalevel underground lair in Chinatown this Friday evening. Bring your karaoke voice.

After my apartment of 3 years in Hollywood filled up with raw sewage, I upped and moved in a personal-record-breaking 24 hours. One of my friends was nice enough to offer me a room at his house in tree covered hills of Fullerton and I took the offer. I didn't plan to stay very long, but then I met a sweet, wonderful woman named Penelope who happened to live a few miles down the street from me. So I have lived here for over a year, during which time Penelope and I have engaged to marry next year in May.

I have always wanted to live in an artists loft in Downtown LA and I have been following the loft market over the last 4 or 5 years as it has grown. I didn't think Penelope would want to live in a loft in downtown, but surprisingly, she was open to the idea. I scheduled a tour filled day where we visited 7 or 8 different communities that we were interested in. Out of the 20 lofts we toured, we really only liked a couple of them.

It was hot and we were tired when we parked in front of the Santa Fe Lofts on E 6th street. We were an hour early and our guide was giving a tour, but the security guard let us in after asking if we were there to see the lofts. We sat down and waited and soon enough our guide came in with her current tour who took the credit check forms and left.

She began the tour with the standard model unit with it's very standard looking furniture and the requisite granite counter tops and new appliances. The windows were huge and original (single paned) and the model was on a fairly low floor. The street traffic was quite noisy and the view was non-spectacular. We continued the tour and saw 3 more units.

The third loft we saw was high above the city floor with a beautiful view of Downtown. It had a nicely separated area for the kitchen and dining area on one side, a bedroom on the other, and a nice living area in the middle all with gigantic wide windows that covered the the longest wall of the loft. The loft was filled with natural northern light and we instantly fell in love with it.

After we toured the roof we went down to the office, did a credit check and put down our deposit. We sign the lease on Thursday and we will be moving in very shortly after that!

This new camera from Sony (apparently only available in Japan) looks pretty cool... not exactly sure how it differs from the T1/T3. There is more info available in Japanese if you can read it (google may or may not help).

I got a response to my open letter to MOS Burger:

Once again, to nobody's surprise, Matt Drudge has proven that he is unable to read a story that he links to from his home page. Drudgereport links to this NY Times story about a break in that happened A YEAR AGO. Way to go moron!

Dear MOS Burger,

I am writing you because I feel there is a great untapped market in California for a healthy Japanese style burger joint. We in Los Angeles have few choices for healthy fast food and your restaurant would be a welcomed treat. There are over 10 million people in the greater Los Angeles area who love to eat new and unique styles of food. I personally believe that opening one or two MOS Burgers restaurants in the LA and Orange County areas would be highly profitable and rewarding for your company. Please let me know if and when you decide to open a new location in greater Los Angeles.

Thanks!

A David Bullock

This year I did some programming for Golden Voice for their Coachella event. I programmed a dynamic scheduler, called the Coachooser, that enabled concertgoers to customize their schedule based on artists they wanted to see. About 10,000 people used it in total in the 3 days before the concert that it was up. I also attended the concert for a couple of hours on Saturday and I photographed Fantomas.

Fantomas is a kick ass band, lead by Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle) with Buzz Osborne on guitar (Melvins), Trevor Dunn on bass (Mr. Bungle) and Dave Lombardo on drums (Slayer). There was nobody in the photo pit (maybe because some crappy band called Coldplay was on the main stage), so I was able to take some great photos... Ice Cream Man featured my crowd shot.

A scientist at State University of New York in Binghamton has achieved table top nuclear fusion in by heating a dueterium gas soaked lithium tantalate crystal. They are only heating it to 7ºC. It only produces a very small amount of neutrons, but you have to start small.

The folks over at LayerOne have posted up photos from the talks as well as links to the presentation files. So go and check it out. You may learn something!

A few weeks ago, the Search and Rescue team that I am a part of did a training with an embedded journalist. She ended up writing two stories about us.

In my talk and in the presentation I have linked in a previous post I stated that Autopsy and The Sleuth Kit are @Stake products, which they no longer are. Brian Carrier is the author and developer of both Autopsy and The Sleuth Kit. He left @Stake several years ago and they gave him full rights to his project.

This weekend I attended a security and technology conference called LayerOne. LayerOne is in its second year running and this year was even better than last year. It is really nice to have a security conference in the LA area (toorcon is pretty close being in San Diego).

I only live about half an hour from Pasadena, but I decided to book a hotel room for both Friday and Saturday. I showed up on Friday in the early afternoon because I still had to do some work on my presentation. Just for the record I want to state that Keynote is a far superior program in comparison to Power Point.

I worked on my presentation for a few hours and then decided to walk over to Afloat Sushi, which is one of my favorite restaurants in Pasadena. After eating about 10 plates of sushi I walked back to my hotel room and took a nap. A call to my cellphone from Kelvin awoke me and I rolled out of bed, realizing I still had an hour left of work to do on my Snarl presentation. Luckily Kelvin is easily amused, so I put on Fox News and finished up my work.

Ok I finally uploaded the image of the latest Snarl Release. You can find it on the sourceforge project page which is located here.

I just got home from the Layer One conference in Pasadena today. The conference went well and the attendance was good. I spoke today about my open source project Snarl. It was my first public speaking engagement and I was a bit nervous. All in all I think the talk went well. Here is a copy of my presentation in PDF format(2.3MB) and the original Keynote format(2.1MB). I am currently uploading the Snarl ISO to source forge and I will make another post when I have finished. It will be done in about 4 hours from 5:28PM PST.

Here is the checksum for the new release: MD5 (snarl-1.13.iso) = 451166f6094c94f06d9ed1603472b0c4

I just noticed a link on my flickr account thanking me for paying for their service even though it was in beta. As a gift they have doubled my account time (2 years) and have given me 2 more pro account to give away... that's pretty cool!

I used to work at a place in Los Alamos called the Black Hole. I had read recently that they were raided by the FBI who took a bunch of joke items that Ed Grothus had on display for years. The man is always trying to hold Ed Grothus down!

This is from the Santa Fe New Mexican (bugmenot reg. required):

I have been both an Adobe and Macromedia user for over 10 years and I am a bit surprised that Adobe is going to ingest Macromedia and curious as to what will come out the other end. Maybe Adobe will do us all a favor and kill Flash.

This weekend our SAR team had a two part training scheduled. The first part was Helitac training in which we were to learn about how to deal with helicopters in the search. We got about half an hour in to it when our team leader received a call from the Volunteer Forces coordinator. There was a need for alpine trained rescuers on Mt. Baldy for a patient evac. Being that 90% of our team is trained for Alpine rescue we responded and drove to the command post at the Mt. Baldy trailhead where we readied our gear. We were about to head up the trail when we heard on the radio that LA's rescue 5 chopper had successfully evac'ed the patient.

We decided to do the second part of our training, Cauhilla Creek Cave, which is near Temecula. This was a fun talus cave that is about a mile hike from the road. We had a reporter and a cameraman with us and I think they enjoyed themselves. It will be interesting to read the article.

At the end of the day we received verification on the possibility that we would be needed for a search for a missing woman in Indio. The call entailed us showing up at the command post in indio at 0630 which required us to leave the Sheriff's Office in San Bernardino at 0500. This meant that I would have to wake up a 0345... joy! So after about 4 short hours of sleep I jumped out of bed and into my car and drove to San Bernardino.

We showed up on time at the CP in Indio and feasted on some egg mcmuffins, yum. After the briefing we were assigned an area to search and we drove out and started searching. We searched for about 4 hours when we were called back to the CP where they said they needed Alpine certified rescuers to find some lost Boy Scouts on San Jacinto. Once our gear was ready and we were about to leave we were notified that the scouts were found and were being pulled of the mountain.

We then ate lunch and continued our search for the missing woman. After a few more hours of looking for her in the hot sun and not finding her we were called back. It was a long weekend and I was tired. I fell asleep as soon as me head hit the pillow.

Google has just released a couple of new tools that rock big time! They have added satellite maps to their regular maps page as well as a ride finder service that tracks taxi cabs! Here is one of twentynine palms.

Last week on April Fools I read a post on BoingBoing that stated the famed Survival Research Labs of the Bay Area would be in full force with their killer robots on Saturday. Hoping that it wasn't just an April Fools joke, I hurriedly finished removing the rear differential from my 86 Bronco and raced back from the desert to watch some good ol' fashioned robot induced destruction.

Penelope and I showed up about half an hour into the show and couldn't get a good look at at the action due to the crowd that had formed. After trying to shoot photos over the crowd we went back to my car and grabbed out ear protection and then went to the other side. We watched the action for a few moments until it was over and then waited at the front of the riot gates. One of the crew members in an orange suit looked at my camera and said that security wasn't watching so I might as well go take some pictures. That was my cue so I walked in and took a bunch of close-ups of the machines. My favorite photos was of an LAFD fireman wearing 3d glasses and watching the show on a PowerBook.

As we walked around and took photos, one of the robots came back to life to the delight of the SRL crew. They quickly opened the robot's body and euthanized it. It was pretty funny to watch.

Next time SRL shows up I will know to come early and bring a ladder!

I'm pretty sure this is an april fools joke from Nature.com, but it's pretty funny nonetheless: news @ nature.com - Apollo bacteria spur lunar erosion  - Images reveal worrying cracks in the face of the Moon.

I think the Desert Globemallow is my favorite wildflower in the Mojave Desert. On my most recent excursion I didn't see any until we were driving back. I pulled over and took some photos. What a beautiful flower.

While driving through the desert I spotted not one, but two desert tortoises. They are really cool creatures and are protected under the endangered species act. I slowly walked towards the tortoise making sure not to scare it. When I was about 10 feet away I stopped any laid down. The tortoise then approached me and I photographed it.

So I just got back from the desert, and I took about 500 photos. The only problem with my new camera is that it takes photos so quickly. With bracketing it really adds up quick. I got some great photos including 2 separate run ins with desert tortoises. I am sorting through them now.

This is one of the first really nice photographs I have taken with my new Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens. I took it in my backyard. The daffodils were provided by the illustrious and beautiful penelope. I am heading out tomorrow morning to the desert and I will be back with many photos of wildflowers!

Take a look at all the crap I carry around in my bag:

I took this photo with my new Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens. I need to get another flash to get more even lighting but this one still came out pretty good. I am going to the desert this weekend to take some photos of flowers. Last time I was in the desert I photographed over a dozen species of flowers. I wonder how many I will get this time.

I just got back from Samy's Camera in Santa Ana. So far I have had two good experiences with Samy's and their salespeople. When I bought my camera, they sold it to me below the website cost. When I bought my lens and flash today they also gave me a good deal. I picked up the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens and the Canon Speedlite 580EX. I just played around with the lens for a few minutes handheld (I have work to do) and the results are really amazing. The lens is really quite a deal, as I thought it would be after reading nothing but good reviews about it. I will be heading out to the desert again this weekend in search of more wildflowers.

I made some changes with the way that the gallery looks. I made the interface cleaner and changed the order of display of the image details. I also updated the tag creation in the images and log sections. I also fixed the way the comments are added in these sections. Finally I changed the RSS feed in the comments sections so that it only shows replies.

I reorganized the photography archive on my site. You will find it much more intuitive and have an easier time locating galleries.

There are some really beautiful flowers in the desert right now.

This weekend was my birthday and a group of my friends and I went camping in the Mojave Desert. The normally brown sandy desert, which receives and average 2" of rainfall a year is green and covered with flowers due to the 6" of rain that has fallen so far this year. I took some really wonderful photos with my new Canon EOS 20D. I can't wait to go back and take even more. I identified almost a dozen different species of wildflowers.

Today I bought myself a big birthday present. I picked up a Canon EOS 20D, with the Canon EF-S 18-75mm USM lens. I also bought the battery grip and a Manfrotto 3021BN with an Arca-Swiss monoball B1 head. Here is one of the first images I shot. I really love this camera and have been planning on buying it for a while. I am really looking forward to taking nature photos this weekend!

I will be in the desert this weekend for my birthday. If you'd like to come send me an email.

-eek

Here is an interesting read about the media's so called "liberal bias"

Dotty Lynch from CBS news writes this editorial about the possible Rove factor in the GannonGate scandal.

The Gannon/Guckert fiasco is gaining momentum and as I see it may be the downfall of this administration. Woodstein in this case are the bloggers.

And he makes it painfully obvious with his attacks on Chris Rock.

This is a hilarious german clothing website with a great monologue about the F word...

I just got a letter in the mail from Montrail about their ICE 9 and Khumbu crampons. The recall is for all crampons produced between September 2003 and February 1st 2005.

From the letter:

Montrail has received some reports of breakage on the Kumbu and I.C.E. 9 crampons. No injuries have been reported.

Thhe breakage occured in the vertical reails of the forefoot portion of the crapon just aft of the point array. When the crampon breaks in this way, it will no longer remain attached to the boot or the function as a traction device on snow and ice and and could result in serious injury to the user.

You can call for an RMA#: 800-826-1598 M-F 8-5PST or email custservice [at] montrail [dot] com.

Montrail will provide postage and several reimbursement options.

Happy Valentines Day to all the women in my life especially my fiance Penelope and my mother R.G. Bullock, who are the most wonderful women in the whole world. Thank you for all the happiness you bring me.

Check out the tags page to see if you are one of the top 500 words in my photos / logs / albums.

Tagging is a way to identify posts / photos / events / albums / etc. with keywords that you can search by and cross-reference. Technorati has a good introduction to tags. Flickr uses tags as well. Now this site uses tags, of which the top 500 can be found on my tag page. You can also check for tags by using the following url: http://eecue.com/tags/[tagname]. Right now the tags are somewhat one-way (you can only see tags on the tag page... eventually each item will have a list of tags that it belongs to).

The National Cave Rescue Commission was formed in 1979 to train rescuers and track rescues related to caves. It is a component of the National Speleological Society which is a non-profit group of over 50,000 cavers who are dedicated to preserving caves and cave environments. The NCRC does NOT do cave rescues, instead it trains rescuers in the latest cave rescue techniques.

Every year the NCRC sponsors a national week long cave rescue seminar. In 2004 there was also a regional week long (actually 10 day) seminar located at California Cavern in Cave City. Most of the SBCSD Cave Team members attended.

NCRC trains rescuers on 3 levels:

• Level I - Team Member
• Level II - Team Leader
• Level III - Incident Command / Rescue Management

[Click permalink to read the rest.]

Bush released his new budget proposal and claims that it is fair and balanced, sort of like Fox "News". His budget fails to account for the $80 billion we will spend in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also fails to account for the several trillion dollars that his proposed Social Security "reform" will suck out of federal coffers. Senator Jim Jeffords pointed to the most glaring cuts:

So I have been using the new iPhoto 5 for about a week now and I am really happy with its performance. It is much faster than iPhoto 4, especially with my 5,200+ high res images. The Adjust widget permits me to adjust my photos without having to open them in photoshop (which I can do now easily too). The comment typing bug has been fixed. The search and smart folders rock. [Ed's Note: I should proofread and edit what I write.]

I just watched a very touching series of interviews with people throughout the red states. Here are the links to the videos.

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Day 5

During the month of January I received over 200,000 hits from search engine spiders. Here are the top 6 spiders that crawled my site:

• 116,448 Hits from Yahoo! Slurp
• 37,011 Hits from msnbot/0.3
• 26,424 Hits from Ask Jeeves/Teoma
• 14,618 Hits from psbot/0.1 (picsearch)
• 12,204 Hits from Mediapartners-Google/2.1
• 10,514 Hits from Googlebot/2.1

I wonder if picsearch will ever have more than 4 images from the search for eecue.

I attended the lighting of the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro. I arrived just after the fireworks. I took a group of photos, but my tripod was complete crap and didn't stabilize the camera enough. Oh well, next time I will use a better tripod. Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that my camera doesn't have a tripod attachment point, so I was using my underwater case. I think that may have added to the blurriness but mainly it was the crappy aluminum tripod that I was using. I will either have to invest in a better tripod or use my mom's.

I have created 4 different layouts that you can now choose from. Click on the links in the menu labeled layout. The site is currently laid out to the left. The liquid layouts will allow you to change the size of the window and still see content. Enjoy!

So I saw a news item about Microsoft releasing their new beta search engine as the main search on MSN (instead of yahoo). When I was checking it out i noticed that in Safari there is no left margin so the text is right up against the left hand side of the window... annoying (if you stretch it out it looks ok). I checked it out in Firefox and it looks fine. In Mac IE you can't even see the search box (on the main MSN page...)! If you post the link to the search in the browser it does work though.

Last Sunday Peneloper and I went to the Huntington Library in Pasadena. We had a great time and I took some beautiful photos. I look forward to our next trip there.

This is really cool... A full tour of One Wilshire from the colo cages to the roof to the coolers. I wonder if I could get a tour to take more photos.

Bush has been doing a very naughty thing and now that he has been caught he is passing the buck and asking his cabinet to stop doing it. He has been spending our tax dollars on PR Campaigns. That means our hard earned tax dollars are going towards making Bush look better. I have an idea... instead of spending money on PR firms to spin your ideas in a positive light, why not create sensible policies?

Last night my friend Don Smith aka Don of the Desert died in a fire at his residence in Twentynine Palms. Don was a master welder and could fabricate anything imaginable out of metal. Rest in Peace Don.

You're technically not allowed to take photos at the Body Worlds Exhibit. The reason being is that they have a contract with Gunther that says nobody can take pictures. It is not a request from the cadavers that are on display. It is so they can make more money selling the posters. I think it is silly, but I still only took one photo of the exhibit. Btw, the California Science Center's site about the exhibit has been taken down but here is the new one for Body Worlds 2.

I noticed there weren't pertinent groups for the following subjects: Caves and Mines, Drum'n'Bass, Urban Entropy, Search and Rescue and Metaphoto so I created them. Look for tons of photos coming soon. (This weekend I took some really cool pictures at the Huntington Library Botanical Gardens)

So I recently signed up for flickr. I then created an export system where I can send selected images to my flickr page. Cool deal!

I didn't get a chance to watch the daily show last night, but I found a link to the best part of it on a whole lotta nothing. It is quite hilarious. The final score: 27 freedom and 15 liberty.

So as you can see I have created an archive by category index on the navigational section of my site. These links will allow you to browse just a category if you choose. These links also work with Technorati tags. =]

I just bought my tickets to the Body Worlds exhibit at the California Science Center. I have been putting if off for the last few months, and in doing so I was only able to attain tickets for 1:00AM on Sunday! Oh well it will still be fun. ~~I will take tons of photos~~ As i just read: "The taking of photographs or filming in the exhibition is prohibited", but I will still try and sneak some anyway.

I have updated the way that trackbacks and comments displayed on my site. My posts now support technorati tags. I am also now pinging ping-o-matic. Cool deal.

Google has added a feature to they search algorithm that ignores links that have the rel="nofollow" tag in them. This is great because it let's google know what information is your and what information was just posted by somebody commenting. They have recommended the nofollow tag be used on all links that can be posted by untrusted users. MSN Search and Yahoo! are both supporting it. Most blogging applications have already incorporated it. I am going to add it to my system too. Here is the link to the original article on Google's blog.

Here is a photo I took. As you can see it depicts a sprawling oil refinery and a huge amount of sky above it. I took it riding in a car on the freeway.

I Like it.

Now attempting to ping Ping-o-mactic's Metaping.

In 2004 Simson Garfinkel gave a talk at the USENIX LISA conference about data on old hard drives. The report he wrote was actually what made us decide to do the drive slagging site in the first place. He featured our method of data removal in his slides which can be found at the link below. If you just want to see the slides click the permalink.

Penelope and I went to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach on MLK Jr Day. The aquarium is really beautiful and well designed. I really enjoyed myself and I took about 200 pictures, out of which 95 came out well. The tickets were a Christmas present from Penelope. What a sweetie! Here are the photos.

I have imported all of my various mini-sites and even created some new ones. They are now part of the main eecue site, but they have distinct designs. I wonder how long it will take the search engines to find the new info on these sites:

• Metaphoto
• Driveslag
• Japan Trip
• Resume
• Snarl
• Slacker

=]

Here are the links to my photo galleries from Japan that I took in 2003.

• Akihabara : Tokyo's Electronic Town
• blowfish dinner
• brees house
• bullet train
• club evo
• coin laundry gas station
• conveyor sushi
• earth simulator
• ebisu tower
• harijuku
• hk peak
• hong kong
• hotel sungarden dojima
• japan in transit
• kobe
• kobe2
• kyoto
• kyoto temples
• local dive bar
• more shibuya
• my new technology
• nye evo osaka
• okachimachi
• okonomiyaki
• osaka taxi
• osaka technology district
• osaka whiskey bar
• shibuya
• shinjuku
• simons pad ebisu
• streets of osaka
• tokyo with irma
• yoyogi

enjoy!

Just got back from a snowshoeing / backpacking trip with my lovely fiance Penelope. We had a great time and got plenty of good exercise. Check out the pictures. We even brought the snow monkey.

This is a random picture of Steve Kemst that I took after respect. As you can see we are standing outside. I posted it instantly with my new photoblogging feature that i just programmed a few nights ago. Fun stuff.

Here is a link to the newly captioned photo album of the Akihabara District in Tokyo. I took them a couple of years ago on my trip to japan . There are 5 pages with 20 images per page.

I am currently folding the jp.eecue.com mini-site into eecue along with several other of my mini-sites. Each site will retain a unique design but will be part of the main eecue site. The articles will be integrated in to my main (b)log. Current links will still work.

This is a random and pointless photo of some sauce at dinner

One ring to rule them all

A g3 opened up for service

This is a picture of a random bunny head that i have in my office. It was used in a world industries ad a few years back

This is a test of the new photoblog feature of my website... as you can see it worked!

So I just added a cool feature to my website. If I send a photo email from my cellphone to a certain email address with the correct username and password (just for photo blogging) it will be posted to my photo blog archive and into my main blog. The next message on here will be a test from my phone! The image is actually one my mom took and sent me.

I have updated my website to now support iCalendar import and export. This means that you can upload a calendar that you export from nearly any organizer application and you can subscribe to a calendar with the same application. It doesn't currently support recurring events, but it will eventually. Here is a link to my calendar, and here is where you can add my calendar to your organizer program (like iCal, Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc).

Here are some Cool Places in Southern California that I found on HowStuffWorks. I plan on checking out most of them throughout 2005... I will post pictures.:

The other day when I posted my old pictures from One Wilshire I did a bit of research and found out some interesting facts. One Wilshire is owned and managed by the Carlyle Group, which is everyone's favorite Bush Family mega-corp which makes billions from the war on terrorism. I wonder why they would want the most expensive real estate in North America, which happens to be the name of a really cool art / architecture exhibit. Here is a excerpt from the study:

One Wilshire is the meet-me room for over 240 of big players in the telecom industry. Everyone who is anyone is located there and they all interconnect for free as they are in the same big room.

I also found some neat stuff like the Tenant Handbook and an Elevator / Card Key request form.

A few years ago I got a tour of One Wilshire in Downtown Los Angeles where I took some cool pictures. Some of them were also at Pajo Networks which is now called Tier Zero. I host my servers with Tier Zero. Here is the gallery

I took this a couple of years ago in front of a 7/11 on Sunset in Hollywood. He looks really excited as you can tell. I'm sure he really enjoyed big annoying tourists wanting to take a picture with him.

So I've been working on a few thing over the last few days and I have finished them for the most part. I have changed all the code on my site to be XHTML compliant and everything should now validate... you can test for yourself with the links at the bottom of the page. I also finished importing about 20,000 images from my old junglescene photo albums. All of the archive pages should be generated in the next few hours... feel free to look through them. I have also changed the CSS code for the image pages so now you can see more than one column at a time (note that this works in everything except Mac IE). I still have about 2000 of the new images from junglescene to import and then I have to import all my old articles and journal entries. Finally I will be creating a page where I can easily edit a whole groups' captions... when that is done I will go through and label all the thousands of unlabeled photos.

Joy!

A few days after Christmas I received an email from an upset University server admin who thought my servers were attacking his servers through email. What was actually happening was that a spammer was sending email using random fake address at his server's domain name which I will call anonymous.edu. It wouldn't have been a problem if the server was correctly responding with 550 errors which mean Permanent Failure, but the servers were sending 450 which are Temporary errors, so all the servers that were trying to deliver the bounces, kept trying.

So here is the first email I received from [email protected]:

From: [email protected]
 Subject: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: December 28, 2004 2:19:23 PM PST
 To: [a bunch of my email address]


Network/Security Administrator,


I'm sending you this mail because one or more IP addresses in your domain
are currently attacking our electronic mail server with a denial of service
attack consisting of multiple, rapid attempts to send mail to randomly
generated, non-existent email addresses.


Please take action with regard to the below hosts immediately to stop this
worm or virus. This attack may be reported to the U.S Federal Bureau of
Investigation for criminal prosecution. These hosts may also have been
blacklisted from sending mail to our server.


64.239.136.142 (www.eecue.com)

To which I responded:

From: eecue AT eecue.com
 Subject: Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: December 28, 2004 2:32:16 PM PST
 To: [email protected]


Hi you will notice those emails are not actually coming from my server.


The spammers are using my domain as their From: address.


Is this email for real?


-Dave

My guess was close, but I had it backwards...

After getting three more of those emails they sent me this:

From: [email protected]
 Subject: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: December 28, 2004 2:59:32 PM PST
 To: [a bunch of my email addresses]


Excuse me if this email is a duplicate. I forgot to list the IP address
of the victim of this attack. It is: atlantis.anonymous.net (192.168.139.69)
Also, I can be contacted at: [email protected]


I'm sending you this mail because one or more IP addresses in your domain
are currently participating in a distributed denial of service attack
consisting of multiple attempts to send mail to randomly generated,
non-existent email addresses at our site.


Please take action with regard to the below hosts immediately to stop this
worm or virus. These hosts may also have been blacklisted from sending
mail to our server. They can be re-enabled once the DDoS attack subsides.


64.239.136.142 (www.eecue.com)

To which I responded this:

From: eecue AT eecue.com
 Subject: Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: December 28, 2004 3:01:28 PM PST
 To: [email protected]


Hello,


Please send me the full email in question including the headers
so I can track down who is sending said email.


Thanks


-Dave

I didn't hear back about it until today when I received this email:

From: anon\[email protected]
 Subject: Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: January 3, 2005 12:42:57 AM PST
 To: eecue AT eecue.com


It was for real, but was the result of a mis-diagnosis of the problem...


Things have returned to normal, there is no need to do anything on your
side. Our domain was the subject of a massive spam forgery ("Joe Job")
with randomly generated reply-to fields @anonymous.edu. This occurred for over
14,000 domains, and our mail server was sending a 450 temporary error.


Basically we told 14,000 sites to keep trying to deliver bounce messages
back to us, with no valid local recipient, at whatever rate they did queue
flushes. Making it look very much to us like a Distributed Denial of
Service Attack. When really this whole thing would have been only briefly
painful if we had changed the failure notice to a permanent failure,
causing those 14000 servers to trash those invalid messages.


It was not apparent to us what was happening (since we never received any
of the bounces) until someone said, "Hey you know this bounce says that you
are replying with a 450 temporary failure..." It has now been changed to a
550 (permanent failure) response.


Thanks again for looking into this!

Well that was nice of them to fix everything.

From: eecue AT eecue.com
 Subject: Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
 Date: January 3, 2005 7:17:39 PM PST
 To: anon\[email protected]


Glad you worked everything out.


I thought it was somewhat humorous, so I posted about it on my website:


http://eecue.com/


I changed the names to protect the innocent.


-Dave


....
A. David Bullock
eecue : programmer / designer / admin / human
http://eecue.com/ -
anything is possible

I want to wish everyone a safe, happy and prosperous new year. I also want everyone to take a few minutes from their day and a few dollars from their bank accounts and help out with Tsunami Relief. Click the link in the article below to find charities to donate to. Thanks!

yay

ignore this!

It is really coming down outside my office right now

Just wanted to wish everyone a safe and prosperous new year! =]