Walking L.A. #18 - High Tower and the Hollywood Bowl

Before the walk, we stopped for breakfast at the Mar Vista Farmers Market getting omelettes and French toast from Cafe Laurent. Two good friends who were visiting from San Francisco joined us today.

The first part of the walk was interesting. We walked through the Hollywood Heights neighborhood which is just south of the Hollywood Bowl. At the center of this hillside neighborhood stood a tall elevator tower known as High Tower. The tower is closed to everyone except residents with a key, so we had to climb many cement staircases to get to the top. This was a challenge considering we had our baby and stroller with us. Luckily my friends took turns helping me out. One of the things I liked the most about this neighborhood was that many of the homes were accessible only by footpath. This gave it a quiet, neighborly feel similar to places I've seen in Europe.

The next part of the walk took us to the famous Hollywood Bowl. There were no shows going on and the bowl was open for people to just walk in and check it out. We walked to the boxed seat area, took a seat in one of the boxes, and dreamt about how nice it would be to attend a concert or show in one of the boxes eating cheese and sipping wine.

The next walk is Whitley Heights and Hollywood Boulevard.

Walking L.A.: 36 Walking Tours Exploring Stairways, Streets and Buildings You Never Knew Existed

My Twitter Account Has Disappeared!

I was about to Twitter just now and for some reason Twitter wouldn't let me login. I tried visiting my Twitter feed page at http://twitter.com/kweiner and Twitter responded with the message "That page doesn't exist!". Figuring that Twitter was just down, I tried a friend's page, and that page loaded just fine. In the "Following" section of my friend's page, I noticed that my picture was missing! Next I tried to reset my password, and when I entered my email address, Twitter responded with "Oh, snap! We couldn't find you!".

What is going on? Is my Twitter account really gone and my data lost forever? I know they have had problems scaling recently, but losing someone's account is way worse than having a temporary outage. I submitted a support ticket and also posted a message to Get Satisfaction. Let's see what happens... If this doesn't get resolved, I am just going to give up on Twitter which will probably make my wife happy.

Walking L.A. #17 - Carthay Circle and South Carthay

There wasn't anything that exciting about today's walk which was a little south of last week's walk in the Miracle Mile area. We explored 2 of 3 neighborhoods within a residential district called Carthay: Carthay Circle and South Carthay. Our book says that these neighborhoods are in the Miracle Mile district, but Wikipedia says Carthay is its own district. Both neighborhoods contain HPOZ's for their architectural integrity and cohesiveness. The styles include Spanish Colonial Revival and Tudor Revival. I can't think of much else to say about this walk.

The next walk is High Tower and the Hollywood Bowl.

Walking L.A.: 36 Walking Tours Exploring Stairways, Streets and Buildings You Never Knew Existed

Walking L.A. #16 - Miracle Mile

Our friend Kevin joined us for this walk which meandered through the Miracle Mile district where he works at E! Networks.

The walk began at Hancock Park (a real park, not the wealthy LA neighborhood of the same name). This park is home to the infamous La Brea Tar Pits and the adjacent LA Country Museum of Art. We paused briefly by the tar pits to see if we could get the smell to trigger our memory of childhood playground asphalt on a hot day, something our book mentioned we might experience. It didn't work at first, but as we walked away from the tar pits, a gentle breeze indeed carried the scent we were waiting for. We skipped the Page Museum which is dedicated the ancient history of the area since we'd all been there at some point in our lives.

Next we passed by a new part of LACMA called BCAM which stands for Broad Contemporary Art Museum. In front of BCAM was a giant red toy firetruck and closer to Wilshire was a display of lamp posts. We paused here to take some pictures.

We stopped for lunch at Farmers Market on 3rd and Fairfax. I had fried catfish and jambalaya at one of my favorite eateries, The Gumbo Pot. My friend Kevin grabbed a savory crepe from the French Crepe Company. After lunch we walked quickly through The Grove, one of those generic, outdoor, fake-urban, Disneylandesque shopping malls that everyone but me seems to love.

We left The Grove to walk through a nice neighborhood called Miracle Mile North, one of the district's several HPOZ's. Very nice homes in a very central location. Wish we could afford to live there. We finished up the walk passing through the Park La Brea high-rises. It was the first time I had walked through Park La Brea, and I wasn't impressed, although it seems that many people like it.

The next walk is Carthay Circle and South Carthay.

Walking L.A.: 36 Walking Tours Exploring Stairways, Streets and Buildings You Never Knew Existed

Cloud Studio Released

Cloud Services just launched Cloud Studio which is a java-based desktop application for managing images and instances in Amazon's EC2. I've yet to try it, but from the screenshots, it looks really nice. I'm not sure, though, if it does anything more than the very capable Elasticfox which runs right in your Firefox browser. Cloud Studio is also available as an Eclipse plugin which is really convenient for Java developers and users of the popular open source IDE.

GUI's like Elasticfox and Cloud Studio make working with Amazon EC2 really easy. Now I wish someone would create similar management tools for Amazon's SQS and SimpleDB. I'd like to be able to list, see stats for, and manage my SQS queues and SimpleDB domains, items, and attributes without having to run command line scripts. Hint, hint, Cloud Services!