Two Perfect Days In Los Angeles – Day 1
The next morning we drove to Santa Monica and had breakfast at the Urth Caffe near the beach. The Urth Caffe has a couple of locations throughout LA and I make sure to stop by there at least once on every LA trip. They have excellent breakfast and very good lunch sandwiches. I personally like the Portabello Mushroom Panini the best. Now we were fit for shopping and headed to Fred Segal in Santa Monica. If you are into casual designer fashion, this is the place to hang out for a day. Well, we did not have so much time so on to the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Stopped by the Ripcurl store and spent a lot of time at Puzzle Zoo, a great place to find collectibles (like Full Metal Alchemist figures). After a little snack we visited Kidrobot, another great store for obscure figures (they have a store in San Francisco and NY as well).
Once you reached the end of the 3rd Street Promenade you can head towards the beach and walk back along the water, but since it was pretty windy we took a shortcut back to the parking garage. To escape the tourist area we drove to Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. I suggest you park somewhere at Montana and 12th Street and visit the many boutiques and stores along Montana. We stopped by Di Dios’ Italian Ice and had delicious Gelato.
Finally we headed to some of my favorite LA neighborhoods the little underground Japantown around Sawtelle Blvd. (between Missouri Ave and W. Olympic Blvd). As ususal we went right to Giant Robot to browse through contemporary Japanese street culture toys and books. If thats not enough visit also Giant Robot 2 just across the street. After dinner at Gr/eats (yes thats the Giant Robot restaurant next to Giant Robot 2) we drove back to the hotel to get some rest and be ready for day 2.
Two Perfect Days In Los Angeles – Arrival
As part of my recent mini vacation I spent two great days in LA. Inspired by United Airlines Inflight Magazine here is my personal version of two perfect days in LA…
We arrived early Sunday evening and checked into the Standard Hotel in downtown LA. I think the Standard Hotel is a good value and I like the modern minimalist interior. As soon as you arrive you feel immedatly that you are in LA. After I droppped the luggage I headed straight to the Rooftop Bar (make sure you got a wristband downstairs) and relaxed with a White Russian at the Sunday afternoon pool party.
After a while you will get annoyed by the LA crowd and also you need to eat something. I headed over to Ciudad a Latin American restaurant and Tapas bar with a nice outside patio. Sunday evening they feature an excellent “Tapas only” menu and make sure to try their excellent Mojitos.
On the way back I stopped quickly by the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and enjoyed the view from the top floor and glass elevator (which was used in the movie Total Recall).
Flickr Geotagging Now Available
Now it is official: Flickr allows you to put geographical tags on your pictures and browse them by location on Yahoo! Maps. I just tried it and Flickr actually recognized that some of my pictures were already geotagged by Plazes and automatically imported the geographic information. Neat!
Boeing Drops Wireless In-Flight Internet Service
That is really upsetting. I liked the service and used it on every flight to/from Germany when it was available. It was actually a reason for me to prefer Lufthansa (which offered the service) over United. I thought the price was not outrageous (I think $29.99 for unlimited usage on a flight). CrunchGear reports…
Company chief Jim McNerney said, “Regrettably, the market for this service has not materialized as had been expected. We believe this decision best balances the long-term interests of all parties with a stake in Connexion by Boeing.â€
CrunchGear » Blog Archive » Boeing Drops Connexion
I hope since the equipment is now installed on the planes that Lufthansa and other airlines can find an alternative service provider for the satellite Internet service.
BTW, I am sitting at the SFO ariport waiting for my flight to Munich… maybe one of the last flights with Broadband Internet…
My Latest Favorite Music Releases
In case you did not not know I am a big music fan. So now that my new car audio system is up and running I refreshed my iPod. I am mainly into Hiphop, Nu-Jazz, Electronica and Drum n’ Bass. These are some of my latest finds and on heavy rotation on my iPod:
Kings of Jazz – Compiled by Gilles Peterson and Jazzanova
A great compilation including classic Jazz tracks compiled by Gilles Peterson (I am a big fan of Gilles and have most of his mix CDs and compilations, make sure you check out his radioshow on BBC1) and modern Nu-Jazz compiled by Jazzanova from Germany.
World on Wheels Vol.2 – Expansion Team Soundsystem
Excellent underground Hiphop by DJ Babu and Rakaa with a lot of other featured rappers incl. Phil da Agony and Busta Rhymes. DJ Babu the DJ from the Beat Junkies and Dilated Peoples demonstrates again he can compile a great Mix-CD. Some of his former CDs like Duck Season 1 and 2 are my long time favorites and this has the material for a classic as well.
American Hunger – M.F. Grimm
A three disc underground Hiphop epic. MF Grimm former friend of MF Doom (famous for “The Mouse & The Mask” in which he actually disses Grimm in the song “El Chupa Nibre”) delivers the story of his life (he was shot 11 times in 1994). Excellent lyrics and the obligatory revenge track to Daniel Dumile aka MF Doom (“The Book Of Daniel”).
Can’t Sell Dope Forever – Dead Prez & Outlawz
Combining street and gangster hiphop with political messages and conscious ryhmes.
Living the "Simple Life”
We drove to Southern California today for a couple of days vacation on the country side. Karen’s friend Christine has a house (kind of a mini farm) in Santa Ynez. Remember the movie Sideways? Thats where we are. Its nice to relax away from the high tech and do simple stuff like feeding the farm animals (horses, goats, chickens, dogs and cats).
Well they have Wifi here, so no need to be off the grid. We will spend a couple of days here and on Sunday head down to LA.
Obon Festival in Palo Alto
Just came back from the Obon Festival at the Buddhist Temple in Palo Alto and had a lot of fun. We admired the Bonsai demonstrations (I started to raise some Japanese maple trees from seeds a couple of months ago)
Had to take a picture of these cute girls in Kimonos playing with their Tamagochi (or whatever the latest generation is called)…
The highlight was the Taiko performance
Challenges with embedding YouTube video into WordPress Blog
Today I tried to integrate a YouTube video into my WordPress. It did not work out of the box. Initially the video would break the layout in Firefox and not show up in Internet Explorer. It turned out that the problem is the Rich Text Editor in WordPress. Even if you select the HTML editing mode and copy over the HTML provided by YouTube it fails.
To make it work I changed back to the older WordPress Editor…
1. Login to WordPress admin
2. Go to Options >> Writing
3. Uncheck both Users should use the visual rich editor by default &
WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically
4. Go to Users
5. Uncheck Use the visual rich editor when writing
6. Go to Write >> Write Post
7. Paste the ’embeddable player’ code for your YouTube video in the write box
8. In the code change the width of the player to “500” (depends on your template, but in my template the standard “600”setting ruined the layout in IE.
8. Publish blog
Now it works (see my previous blog entry).
New Alpine Car Multimedia System
A week ago I decided to finally update the sound system of my car. A main decision criteria was to get a very good connectivity to my iPod. After doing some research I decided to go with the Alpine Mobile Multimedia System IVA-W200. It has an excellent video touch screen and an easy and fast way to navigate the iPod. I got it installed at Bay Car Stereo in Mountain View and they did an excellent job.
Here is a short video how to navigate the iPod from the Alpine.
2nd Web Montag in Silicon Valley – Unite German and American Techies
I attended the first Web Montag in Mountain View in June and really enjoyed the opportunity to exchange various technology ideas. I presented a Flex 2 application integrated with SAP web services. About half of the attendees were Germans or Swiss and the others Americans with an interest in Germany. I was really intrigued by the presentation of Stefan and Felix who build Plazes, a web site which keeps track where you last logged on to the Internet. I became addicted and use it a lot (as you can see from my Plazes batch on top of the Blog).
David Hornik (VentureBlog), just wrote about Entrepreneurship In Europe. I agree with him that it is even harder to build a successful start-up in Europe. What is important to understand however is that Europe is not one country. Each individual European country continues to have its own culture and therefore also deals differently with technology and start-up businesses. A lot of activity is actually going on in Ireland, but as you can tell from initiatives like the interest in Web Montags all over Germany other countries have grass roots efforts as well. As we discussed at Web Montag a major hurdle of starting a company in Germany is the fact that in case you fail (which is very likely) your reputation can be ruined. Therefore fewer entrepreneurs take the risk of starting a company. Interestingly several Silicon Valley executives came to the same conclusion in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The 2nd Web Montag in Silicon Valley will take place on August 14. Now you have the opportunity to join the discussion and help foster American German technology relationships around Web 2.0. I hope Shel Israel reads this and has a chance to attend since he is doing research for his next book “Global Neighborhoods”. Unfortunately I cannot attend since I will be in Los Angeles for a short vacation. But I certainly will come again next time.
