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Jasmine and I headed to Los Angeles for the new year. And we had an amazing time. This is hard for me. As a native of Northern California I was raised to despise Los Angeles. (and really I’m more a Central/Southern California, but culturally we identified as NorCal.) Studies on environmentalism and conservation just reinforced the point.

Part of the deal for us going to LA was that I’d do a chunk of the driving as Jasmine’s wrist is sprained. This was problematic as I don’t drive, and didn’t have a license. So on Dec. 24th we spent some time driving, and on Dec. 26th I proved that CA will give a driver’s license to just about anyone. And Dec. 28th we drove the 350 miles to LA. And so ends a 15 year boycott of car culture.

The weather was great, we saw amazing art, we ate great food, we caught a good show, and saw good friends. We took a bunch of photos, I’ve got a small sampling of them, and Jasmine has a more complete set.

We drove down to Watts Tower.

The Smart House, Venice, CA

Shepard Fairey might be over saturated, but he is also at the top of his game. The execution on his new work, Imperfect Union, is flawless, and gorgeous. Also sold out. Literally. Every piece was sold. We tried to beg/borrow/steal anything with War by the Numbers on it. Without success.

The Murakami show was overwhelming. On paper doesn’t it look that large, but the live experience is different. Interesting to see his work all together, you realize how weak the painting is, and how amazing his sculpture is. The security presence was so intense, I almost felt like I was in a performance piece, the © in the show’s name being acted out as authoritarian dystopic future. Which is to say, we were only able to sneak a handful of photos. Or a plot to make you buy the catalog. (which we did)

We met up with Jasmine’s people from NYC at the Varla NYE party. The Dickies were the headliners, but the Airliner is a great funky dive bar, with 3 stages, which they kept busy that night, including our favorite act of the night, Vegas based “Objex”, the only one we got photos of.

More then any other year I can remember “Happy New Year!” congratulations seemed to roll in every hour on the hour all day long. This diversified geography thing is starting to look unscalable.

VeniVidiWiki: travel guide

VeniVidiWiki.eu is a Google map wiki mashup for attractions around the world. Anyone can add a POI (point of interest) to the map and provide as much as possible of the following information:

• Name of place/poi
• Category - those shown above are listed as POI with Video -- so they all have a video link; the full list of categories is listed on the left
  
• Description
• Website, and
• Photo and/or Video links

The wiki has a large number of sites, and crashed a few times when I was trying to view a lot of them. But in general it is quick and easy to navigate, and worth exploring to learn more about attractions in a place you may want to visit.

I got an email today from some place called Trippermap.com. At first I thought it was spam and almost deleted it. But instead I opened it a took a look. -- and I am glad I did. Trippermap.com used to be called Flickrmap.com, and I do recall signing up for their service a while ago -- a little before Flickr.com added its own geotagging function. However, at that time I did not really feel like going through and adding geotags to my many Flickr pro account photos -- which now numbers almost 22,000 (most of which are "public").

Well, apparently the Trippermap folks have been updating their tools and I think the current version is great! What they sent me in the mail was a link to my Trippermap, which automatically locates any photo that I have tagged with a city and country. Not all my photos have that, but many do -- and I think it would be quite easy to add those tags to sets of photos in Flickr. I copied the code from the Tippermap site and plugged into my homepage (near the bottom) and now I have a nice size map tagged with icons for many of my public photos , along with a photo bar and java-based viewing function. I have tried a few other Flickr photo bars, but never really liked the results. This is the first one that I will probably keep on my website!

In addition to the basic city and country tag approach to locating photos, Trippermap also provides a Google Earth tool that allows you to use satellite images/maps to locate one or more photos more precisely, and then add the latitude and longitude coordinates direct to your Flickr site photo for searching and viewing using Flickr's map link. A video Tutorial is provided on the Trippermap.com on how to do this.

The free version of Trippermap only comes with a blank outline map of the world, on which photo icons appear, and only shows 200 Flickr photos. Trippermap Premium costs $9.75 year and includes full color Google Maps, all your photos, and Trip Route/Itinerary creation by drawing lines from one photo icon to the next. (Each icon, by the way, can include an unlimited number of photos.) They convinced me to go for the Premium account.


NEW: After posting the blog above, I received an email about Panoramio.com you can geolocate your photos via drag and drop interface and using Google Maps and you can watch uploaded photos inside Google Earth with a KML file (http://www.panoramio.com/panoramio.kml)." - I visited the site, but you cannot really tell what it does without registering, which I was not ready to do (and there was no Bugmenot.com). However, there were some cool sample travel maps on their blog page, and you can also search without registering (type in the name of a place to get a map with geotagged photos).