Journal
Thoughts on photography, technology, music, and creative work.
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.
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.