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.

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!

Useless. Really useless. Whoever followed my previous posts about getting Cable or DSL Internet at various places throughout California (Mountain View, San Mateo, Los Angeles, Santa Monica) knows that the US is nearly dead-last when it comes to providing quality of service for connecting to the intertubes. With the exception of Comcast in San Mateo, I NEVER had speedy or properly working service (which includes Comcast in Mountain View).
Strange how my mom has been getting a reliable (!) 16Mbit ADSL2+ connection in our little village in the middle of nowhere on the German-French border for more than 5 years now…

Here is my latest futile attempt to get online:

Time Warner Cable
Price point: $57.95 per month + $20 sign-up cost. Useless. Completely useless. Alleged connection speed: 10 MBit/sec. It’s Sunday morning. There is barely anyone else online.

Congratulations go to Mr. Obama, 44th President-Elect of the United States of America. Watching the election results on Tuesday night were an interesting mix of suspense and non-suspense. On one hand the enthusiasm for Obama as well as the disappointment with the Bush administration were so strong that few people doubted how the elections would turn out. On the other hand the 2000 and 2004 elections showed everyone that results can end up being surprising.
The world-wide echo has been huge throughout the whole election cycle and culminated with congratulations around the world: