blog.ulfw.com

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…

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!

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.

David is about the cutest 7yr old ever. Poor fella has been coming back from a dentist appointment that really knocked him down. So his dad saw it as an opportunity to film him and subsequently give him internet fame.
Here are a few of the cooler follow-on videos I’ve seen.

The original:

Darth Vader coming back from the dentist:

Techno remix:

Christian Bale meets David:

I want one so bad for my flat screen TV!!

(Too bad it has too many f.. words, but it’s still funny )

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.

Wow – is all I can say about the release of Palm’s new pre smartphone. So far (having not personally played with it yet) I love the UI (as I’ve seen from reports and pictures/screen grabs) and think the device does look pretty nice. Not Apple nice, but nice.

I have to admit I really thought Palm would not be able to pull this off after years and years of out-of-date offerings.
Now – will this save the company? Or will it be too late? – I don’t know. But they do have a shot! A real good shot!

It seems that US carriers are aligning themself with their unique high-end touch device:

at&t – the iPhone carrier
Verizon – the BlackBerry Storm carrier
T-Mobile – the HTC G1 carrier
Sprint – the Palm pre carrier

Frankly – out of those, I don’t think Palm/Sprint got the worst deal. Sprint will make sure to market the hell out of the device and if it’s priced right, they might have a killer offering for once. It will be interesting what strategy wins at the end:
- the integrated approach with beautiful hardware/software in one hand (iPhone/Palm)
or
- the open approach with hardware/software from different sources (WinMo, Android, Symbian)

For now, I for one welcome our new Palm overlords! Competition never hurts.

At the beginning of the year some blog statistics from January 1 2008 through January 1 2009. It turns out that readers of this blog are more tech affine than the general population and are happy to use alternative web browsers:
1. Firefox 51.9%
2. Internet Explorer 26.2%
3. Safari 11.8%
4. Chrome 6.8%
5. Opera 1.9%

The overall web statistic for Internet Explorer seems to be more like 70%.

Hi all,

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

Ulf

Danny Boy: