blog.ulfw.com

Today at 9:01pm PT Facebook opened up their signup for usernames. In good old MySpace style, people can now access Facebook profile pages by going to a facebook.com/name.

As one can imagine, the rush to get one was crazy. At first I tried to get my well-known and long-lasting standard username ‘ulfw’, which I tend to use as much as I can. My car’s number plate says it, my yahoo and aol accounts are ulf and even my URL as you all know is ulfw.com
Sadely Facebook permits 5+ character names only (like Google). So instead of going with something like ‘ulfmw’ or ‘uwaschbusch’ I opted to go with something different this time and made my profession the user name.

You can now find me on http://facebook.com/productmanager

Here are a few other funny ones:

• Tom Anderson
• Swine flu
• Sexy Girl
• Sweet Lover
• Super Slut
• default.aspx
• Tech Support

Yesterday I watched the newest Star Trek movie. And I have to say – I loved it! The actors are great, the action was awesome, the story was good. Even the JJ Abrams lens flares rocked!

In unrelated news. I am scared. We just had a 5.0 earthquake literally less than a handful of miles of my apartment. Everything and everyone’s alright, but I got pretty shaken.

PS: Several aftershocks after the quake. Today we had a 4.0 while I was at work. This one felt more like a fighter jet going supersonic rather than an earthquake. I am getting worried about the amount of them lately. I had nothing like that in San Francisco.

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…

I am proud to announce that we launched our new mobile website for all MySpace users today. The new site has been months in the making and features
- a stream-lined backend architecture that should allows us to scale better and serve you faster and more reliably
- a whole new user interface that more closely resembles MySpace and other mobile MySpace products that our users are accustomed to
- Friend Updates will keep you up-to-date on what is happening in your friends’ MySpace lives
- You can now activate MMS/eMail photo uploading right from m.myspace.com
- Numerous smaller enhancements, features and shortcuts compared to our former site

The new site has been optimized for newer devices with screen sizes that are 176 pixels wide or larger in mind. Our MySpace Mobile website is one of the highest trafficked mobile websites in the world, with more than 20 million users worldwide across our mobile properties. It is available in in 13 languages. With the new site we estimate to increase that number significantly going forward.

European stays European. One thing that I haven’t and don’t plan to give up since moving to the United States is my desire to have things in walkable distance from the place I live. My first residence in Berkeley was in walking distance to Campus and all the crazy shops out there. It stayed somewhat similar with my stay at Schwab Residential Center at Stanford. And when I moved out from there in 2005, the first thing I was looking for is a place with shopping and other possibilities nearby. My first home in Mountain View had a Whole Foods store, a Target, a fresh grocery retailer, a Trader Joe’s and Safeway – everything in less than half a mile. Even my next home in San Mateo was kind of walkable, though the choices were a bit more restrictive.
When first moving to Los Angeles I thought okay – it doesn’t half to be walkable, but at least I should be close to major attractions. So when I found my first apartment on Mid-Wilshire I figured the relative vicinity to West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Hollywood and Downtown would be cool.
It wasn’t. I realized that taking your car out the garage in Los Angeles is an exercise in frustration. Traffic moves slooooooowly.
Thus when I moved to my new apartment in Santa Monica, I specifically looked for walkability and having a lot of stores, restaurants, cinemas and other things to do nearby.
It turns out, this might very well be one of the best places to walk in all of Los Angeles county!

(Map from walkscore.com)

In a fun turn of events though, I did decide to buy a bike yesterday and can’t wait to take it out for a spin.

Hi all,

I would like to wish you all the very best this holiday season and a successful and happy 2009!

Ulf

Danny Boy:

Go girl!