Thursday, November 17th, 2005

Blog Posts

Wednesday, November 16th, 2005

Monday, November 14th, 2005

Blog Posts

Many Gigabytes of Photos

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.

Read more...

Friday, November 11th, 2005

Blog Posts

Downtown ArtRide

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.

Read more...

Tuesday, November 8th, 2005

Blog Posts

Sunday, November 6th, 2005

Blog Posts

Friday, November 4th, 2005

Blog Posts

New Meade Truss-Tube Dobsonian Telecopes

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.

Read more...

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005

Blog Posts

Tuesday, November 1st, 2005

Blog Posts

Mo-e!

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.

Read more...

Monday, October 31st, 2005

Blog Posts

Nerds!

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. =]

Read more...

Saturday, October 29th, 2005

Blog Posts

The Producers

I was wasting some time watching trailers over on the apple trailer site and the remake of Mel Brooks The Producers looks hilarious and brilliant, starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Therman and Will Ferrel. Ferrel plays the crazy Hitler loving playwright who pens the centerpiece of the movie, a play called Springtime for Hitler. I can't wait for this one to come out.

Another movie that looks pretty good, and also starring Will Ferrel (or his voice anyway) is Curious George, which involves everybody's favorite monkey and a huge dose of curiosity induced hijinx.

Read more...

Friday, October 28th, 2005

Blog Posts

After Midnight Ride

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

Read more...

Wednesday, October 26th, 2005

Blog Posts

IKEA LED Lamp: MÅNSKEN

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.

Read more...

Tuesday, October 25th, 2005

Blog Posts

Monday, October 24th, 2005

Blog Posts

Congratulations Penelope!

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!

Read more...

Sunday, October 23rd, 2005

Photos

Saturday, October 22nd, 2005

Blog Posts

The Fixie is Done!

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.

Read more...

Friday, October 21st, 2005

Blog Posts

Fixed Gear Bike Project

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.

Read more...

Thursday, October 20th, 2005

Blog Posts

My First Fixie

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.

Read more...

Wednesday, October 19th, 2005

Blog Posts

Brick Photos

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!

Read more...

Monday, October 17th, 2005

Blog Posts

Blogads

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.

Read more...

Sunday, October 16th, 2005

Blog Posts

Palm to get Blackberry Email

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!

Read more...

Thursday, October 13th, 2005

Tuesday, October 11th, 2005

Blog Posts

Pave the Earth, starting with Griffith Park

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.

Read more...

Sunday, October 9th, 2005

Photos

Saturday, October 8th, 2005

Blog Posts

Data Loss

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.

Read more...

Friday, October 7th, 2005

Blog Posts

Wednesday, October 5th, 2005

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

Blog Posts

Major changes / dynamony

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 xmlrpc 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 printr() 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.

Read more...

Thursday, September 29th, 2005

Blog Posts

Support Cosmo Brown

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:

Read more...

Wednesday, September 28th, 2005

Blog Posts

Monday, September 26th, 2005

Blog Posts

No Organic Express for Me!

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:

Read more...

Saturday, September 24th, 2005

Blog Posts

Hundreds of Swallows

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.

Read more...

Thursday, September 22nd, 2005

Blog Posts

Teaching about the Bible in School

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.

Read more...

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

Blog Posts

Tuesday, September 20th, 2005

Blog Posts

An Issue with Tiger Mail

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.

Read more...

Monday, September 19th, 2005

Blog Posts

Mobile Homes?

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.

Read more...

Saturday, September 17th, 2005

Tuesday, September 13th, 2005

Blog Posts

Inka Pen

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!

Read more...

accessories
accessories
urban
urban
outdoor
outdoor
crowd
crowd
outdoors
outdoors
sky
sky
building
building
electronics
electronics
hat
hat
part
part
architecture
architecture
lighting
lighting
art
art
nature
nature
concert
concert
night
night
plant
plant
coachella
coachella
glasses
glasses
recreation
recreation
land
land
footwear
footwear
shoe
shoe
jewelry
jewelry
photography
photography
indoors
indoors
furniture
furniture
performance
performance
light
light
vehicle
vehicle
transportation
transportation
machine
machine
city
city
device
device
portrait
portrait
club
club
electrical
electrical
blue
blue
room
room
stage
stage
rekognition c
rekognition c
bag
bag
animal
animal
life
life
microphone
microphone
interior
interior
audience
audience
handbag
handbag
rock
rock
cap
cap
car
car
computer
computer
music
music
metropolis
metropolis
musical
musical
road
road
performer
performer
instrument
instrument
headgear
headgear
activities
activities
leisure
leisure
baseball
baseball
tree
tree
shirt
shirt
hardware
hardware
necklace
necklace
wood
wood
entertainer
entertainer
water
water
pants
pants
cloudy
cloudy
wristwatch
wristwatch
table
table
screen
screen
chair
chair
coat
coat
fun
fun
grass
grass
monitor
monitor
musician
musician
bracelet
bracelet
mammal
mammal
floor
floor
party
party
arts
arts
speaker
speaker
performing
performing
flooring
flooring
baby
baby
flare
flare
pub
pub
cup
cup
pet
pet
scenery
scenery
food
food
wheel
wheel
path
path
jeans
jeans
spotlight
spotlight
housing
housing
junglescene
junglescene
beverage
beverage
couch
couch
weekend
weekend
design
design
jacket
jacket
plywood
plywood
alcohol
alcohol
office
office
nightclub
nightclub
container
container
flower
flower
canine
canine
child
child
hill
hill
dog
dog
cord
cord
darkness
darkness
summer
summer
pc
pc
boy
boy
area
area
laptop
laptop
street
street
park
park
happy
happy
glove
glove
equipment
equipment
desk
desk
cityscape
cityscape
landscape
landscape
singer
singer
sport
sport
shelter
shelter
wear
wear
formal
formal
phone
phone
smile
smile
sea
sea
guitar
guitar