Category Archives: Los Angeles

Los Angeles

Space Shuttle Endeavour lands at LAX

Endeavour flyby of south runway at LAX

I caught a ride with pinguino to El Segundo this morning to watch the Space Shuttle Endeavour land at LAX. It was on top of the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. The SCA, Endeavour, and its two T-38 escorts entered LA via Santa Monica at 11:50AM. It flew by many LA landmarks before doing a flyby of LAX’s north runway. It toured more of LA and then did a pass of the south runway complex (pictured above) before coming around one more time to land. There were a ton of people on the hillside where I was viewing and the El Segundo police warned us if we fell off the hill we’d be in LAPD territory and wouldn’t be rescued for days. From our vantage point, we saw people on top of the tallest hangars along with all of the construction workers from the Tom Bradley terminal covering the ground and scaffolding. You can see a few more of my pictures on Flickr. Endeavour will be removed and prepped for ground transport over the next month and I hope to see it on the road in October as it travels to its new home at the California Science Center.

Update: Pinguino posted her photos to Flickr.

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Los Angeles

The odd history of Google’s new office

Frank Gehry's Binocular Building, Venice / USA, 1995

Google recently leased a 100,000 sqft. complex in Venice, CA that includes Gehry’s binoculars building. In the mid 90’s the building housed Chiat/Day, the advertising firm behind Apple 1984, the Energizer Bunny, Think Different. The building was home to Chiat’s virtual office experiment (no guaranteed desks or equipment)… which eventually went all Lord of the Flies. Here’s the full story from Wired in 1999 which is well worth the read.

Sidebar: Tour of TBWAChiatDay’s current office

Thank you, @cnelson for digging up this article.

Update: I happened to be in the area today and took a current picture of the building.
Future home of Google

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Los Angeles

Mushroom walk

The spoils

This last week, Machine Project has been hosting several different events as part of their FungiFest 2010. Chris and I decided to check out their mushroom walk this morning at Franklin Canyon Park. I was a bit skeptical when we showed up and they turned us loose into the woods to gather whatever we found with only a few words, but the whole experience was quite interesting.

Continue reading →

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Los Angeles, Portfolio

Oh exploitable!

My hardware, let me show you it
This weekend was BarCampLA 6. BarCamp is a self organizing conference. It has sponsors, is free to attend, and speakers are all voluntary. It was hosted at Mahalo so I decided to give a talk titled “Intro to Hardware Hacking: @sweetums pulls random crap out of his office”. I tried to cover a broad spectrum of what you can hack in hopes that people would see something they personally identified with and would use as a starting point. I started with consumer devices that were hackable. Then went to kits that you can purchase. Finally I covered tools and resources. Managed to fill the whole 50 minutes.

I happened to be presenting in the Mahalo Daily studio with the green screen in the background. I made sure to pose appropriately in case someone wanted to photoshop it. Thank you vissago for the photos.

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Los Angeles

First earthquake: Chino Hills Earthquake

Twitter _ Eliot Phillips
I had just stepped out of the shower and the whole wall I share with my neighbor appeared to move. I didn’t know what was going on. I heard rumbling and wall was moving, “Does my neighbors closet shake my apartment?” I placed my hands on the wall and tried pushing. Nothing happened. The moment was gone and I left for the office. When I arrived I was asked “Were you riding during the earthquake?” That was my only indication as to what had happened.

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