Dave Bullock / eecue : Programmer | Photographer | Admin | Human

A few weeks ago at the CPAB meeting I met one of the managers of The Edison. I asked him if I could come down during their off-hours and take some HDR photos. He agreed and here is the result:

The building that The Edison is in was the first building in Los Angeles with electricity. The power came from a very large oil furnace that is now a room in the lounge. As you can see from the photos above, the generators are still in the basement, although obviously they are no longer in operation.

You can see some more photos on blogging.la, flickr and in the Edison Bar photo gallery here on eecue.com.

I just signed up for an interesting social aggregator website called Jaiku. It has the same functionality as twitter, but it can subscribe to and display your RSS feeds. I'm not sure I'll use it as much as twitter, but it seems like a useful application. You can check out my Jaiku page here. I heard about it via a twitter from Jason DeFillippo, who was waiting to get in to the Jaiku launch party in SF, but apparently ended up leaving with Scott Beale due to the long, motionless line.

Update: As it turns out, but Scott and Jason made ended up going to the Jaiku party, as evidenced in this laughing squid blog post. 

My Blackberry Pearl's trackball just stopped working again. This is my second Pearl that failed for the same reason. The trackball scrolls, but does not click. According to T-Mobile, this is a known issue with the Pearl. They are sending me a replacement... again. 

Several months ago a progression of disturbing Downtown filming events culminated with a low flying helicopter buzzing our rooftops at midnight on a Sunday. Residents and business owners in Downtown voiced their opinions against the way they were being treated by film crews. In response the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC) formed and ad-hoc committee on filming issues. I have attended many of their meetings over the past months.

FilmLA is an organization that coordinates with production companies to simplify the film permit approval process. FilmLA is responsible for notifying residents of upcoming productions in their vicinity. The way FilmLA handles notification is one my main problems with their operation. Their notification process consists of hanging a flyer on the front door of each building in the area. I very rarely see these flyers, and there are productions almost nonstop in my neighborhood. At one of the first meetings I told FilmLA that they could solve 90% of their problems if they could create a notification system that actually worked.

As it turns out they weren't interested in creating a system to let people know what to expect in their neighborhood as far as filming goes. Instead I volunteered to create a map based film notification system myself. DLANC was able to convince FilmLA to provide them with digital copies of all the notifications for the Downtown area. I had initially hoped we could convince FilmLA to send us the notices in a format that would be easy to put right into a database, like CSV or Excel. I soon realized that no such thing would ever happen, so I decided to write a parser.

FilmLA gives us the notifications as Microsoft Word documents. There is an open source application that converts MS Word files into text called wvWare, which I had previously used for another project. I set up an special email address that I (or at some point FilmLA) can email the notifications to at which point qmail hands off the email to a php script that I wrote, which pulls out all the attachments, feeds them to wv and then parses the text wv produces. Currently I am able to parse about 90% of the notifications, but some of them are now being sent in PDF and RTF formats. In the near future I am going to enhance the parse to handle those formats as well.

After the raw data is parsed it is sent to a Ruby on Rails application that I wrote that uses YM4R to integrate with Google Maps. Using the Downtown Filming Maps application I wrote you can now search by date range and keyword to see what is going in, filming-wise, in Downtown. You can also subscribe your iCalendar compatible calendar application to see what is going on. The application is still in beta, and doesn't have 100% of the filming locations on it, nor does it show any parking or road closures from filming.

In the near future I plan to add:

• More parsing ability
• Different colored icons to designate upcoming, current and past productions
• Ability to comment and upload photos for each production
• Ability to get email notification when productions are scheduled within a user defined radius of an address

Check out the Downtown LA Filming Notification Map and tell me what you think. The screengrab above shows all the notifications in the system which goes back to the beginning of April. The map shows a week in the past and a week in the future by default. 

I've decided to do something a little bit different with the Downtown Art Ride route this month. Being that we never make it to all the galleries, and that the route hasn't really changed much in the last few months, we will only be visiting galleries that are having openings that coincide with the Art Walk / Ride. There happens to be 9 galleries that are having openings, so that gives us a little over 20 minutes at each gallery. Here is a google map of the galleries we will be visiting which include: Art Murmur, LACDA, Regent Gallery, DLANC Outreach Center, Crewest, M.J. Higgins, Gary Leonard studio, 626 Gallery, Infusion. We'll see you today at 5pm at Art Murmur, bring your bike, a light, a lock and a helmet.  

Here are some photos I took of Ozomatli at the first Grand Performances of the summer:

More photos can be found on blogging.la, blogdowntown, flickr, and in my Grand Performances Ozomatli gallery. 

Here are some of the photos I took at Pixelodeon 2007:

More photos can be found on blogging.la, flickr and in my full Pixelodeon 2007 gallery.

View from the Pershing Square Building:

Union Bank & Trust Building:

808 Spring Street Building:

You can see some more photos on blogging.la and you can see the complete Buildings In Transition set here. 

I posted up some notes I took at the CPAB meeting this week. You can read the story here on blogdowntown. 

I have unlimited invites to Joost and Dopplr. Shoot me an email if you would like one. 

I've recently started tracking my RSS feed information through FeedBurner. So far it seems pretty darn cool. If you don't know what I'm talking about, RSS is a way to keep track of your favorite sites without having to constantly visit them to see what is new. There are a bunch of different online and desktop RSS readers. I used to use NetNewsWire, but I switched over to NewsFire. I actually kind of miss NetNewsWire, so I may go back at some point. Some good online readers are Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes and Newsgator Online. Here is a link to the rss feed if you want to subscribe. You can also now subscribe to email updates by clicking on this link.  

You can see a few more photos here on blogdowntown, blogging.la, flickr and the full gallery here.  

So I've been really getting in to Dubstep in the last few months, and I've decided to start a site about it: dubstp.com It will be similar to junglescene.com, in fact it currently just forwards you to the Dubstep and Grime forum. As soon as I'm finished with my current rewrite of eecue and junglescene I will create a separate, but closely integrated site for dubstp.com.  

A few months ago I signed up for twitter, but I really didn't see the point to using it. I've decided to give it another try, so I've been updating my info and I've invited a bunch of my friends and neighbors to try it out. So far it has been pretty darn cool and I can see how this could be really useful for organizing spur of the moment things. You can check out my twitter page here.