blog.ulfw.com

I miss Stanford. A lot. I miss the great friends I made, the great experiences I had, the fun, the excitement, the frustrations, the laughter, the late night study sessions, the abundance of brilliance, the palm trees. Everything. It’s one of the great places to be or have been at.
Stanford now has a twitter channel. So when I expressed my joy of seeing Stanford on twitter, someone was friendly enough to write me back from the Stanford account, welcoming me home. Aww I hope I can visit again soon. And god knows – maybe even share my knowledge and teach or guest lecture there at some point. One can dream…

Crazy LA…
Saw these couple of guys and gals randomly dancing in a side street in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, CA. Why they’d dance like this in front of a Buddhist temple is beyond me, but hey – why not…

Filmed with my new Canon SD780 in 720p HD.

The Wayback machine project is awesome. I was lucky to have my website featured and cached in the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization, since 1999. waschbusch.com started in 1995 (see History) btw.
Anyhow, check out old episodes of times way past here.

LA traffic sucks. There I said it.

Los Angeles is a strange town. Having lived more than five years in the Bay Area and only about 10 months in LA, I might still have a jaded view of NorCal vs. SoCal. But one thing is clear: Los Angeles is not a city. It’s a conglomerate of small communities that pretty much only function on their own.
If you live in Santa Monica, best to have your friends, shop, go out to eat and do business in Santa Monica. If you live in Beverly Hills, best to have friends around there. God forbid you live outside of central LA, say in Pasadena or down south in the OC.

Here is a prime example of what I’m talking about. A random shot of Google Maps on my iPhone, taken at the same time. Left is the peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area (where I used to live) and on the right is West LA (with the blue dot marking my current location).

Now in San Fran, my options to get from place to place are almost endless. If I live in SF and want to go south to see friends in the valley – let’s hit 280 and I covered the 50 miles in 45 mins. And vice versa.
In LA, the story changes. When you check the map, you’ll notice I really only have one option: go west on the 10 to Santa Monica, i.e. go home. That’s all. If I want to go to the valley (the San Fernando one), I’d be stuck in south-north traffic. If I’d want to hit downtown to see a show, I’d be stuck in bad west-east traffic. If I’d want to visit friends in Orange County, god forbid I’d be stuck forever in north-south traffic.
The map only shows part of the story. When you zoom out you’ll see lots of more red and even black (stand still) traffic.
Now I don’t want to use this post for random ranting. It’s actually not even about what is better or worse. There actually is an interesting social difference I have noticed between those two places. In the Bay Area, it was never really an issue where people lived. You can pretty safely guesstimate how long it would take each other to meet and just plan accordingly. In LA, it’s more like – OMG you live 20 miles away? Er… I think I’m busy or… Maybe let’s meet later in the evening (i.e. when the roads are free). This seems to lead to smaller communities who are much more focused on themselves than the interconnected communities in the Bay Area seem to be.
Interesting stuff…

Update: Here’s some statistical data to back up my case. Study: Los Angeles has worst, most costly traffic jams and the mobility data report for Los Angeles. The Los Angeles area topped a study looking at urban traffic congestion, saying that area motorists spent 485 million hours idling in traffic delays in 2007, which was the most in the nation. The delays also caused area motorists to use up 367 million more gallons of fuel in 2007 than they would have if it were not for traffic delays. Overall, traffic congestion in the area cost an estimated $10.3 billion in 2007, again, ranking number one amongst all areas.

2007. The first time I signed up for a twitter account.
2007. The first time I stopped using/de-registered my account.
fast forward to
2009. Twitter is exploding and usage and is becoming so much more useful. Lots of my friends are on it and updating your twitter status is as easy as possible.

It took me a while to become a real fan of twitter. I tried it real early when it came out, played with it again when I was working at Google and doing the communication piece for Google’s acquisition of Jaiku. Surprisingly they didn’t build the service out and now made the Jaiku platform open source.

Now that I am using twitter again, I’ve grown a bit frustrated with the reliability of the service. Now, a fast growing service does have scalability pains. I realize that. But these outages and problems have been there for years. How come that can’t be under control?

Well – I hope they will make the service more stable going forward. I for one can’t see any of my friends’ tweets for over a week now. twitter.com/public_timeline works, but twitter.com/home doesn’t, nor do any third party clients. I can update tweets, but just not follow any friends. At least they know about the problem (and are hopefully!) working on a fix.

Oh and while you’re at it – follow me on twitter.

Update: Seems like I’m not the only one with that (and other) problems on twitter right now.
Update2: Over a week later, Twitter is finally aknowledging the problem and working on a fix. Woohoo.
Update3: Problem got fixed. Woohoo. Took a while and I hope it’ll stay up for a while

Did you know, you can update your status on multiple networks via text messaging?
Once your account is setup you can send a twitter tweet to 40404 and the content of the text message becomes your status text. You can do it similarly by messaging FBOOK (32665).

MySpace users can also update their status. Setup your account once at http://www.myspace.com/mobilesettings and then send a text message to MYSPC (that is: 69772). The text message content will be your status on MySpace. Right now we set your mood to (empty), but we’re working on allowing you to set your mood too. Go try it out!