Category: tech

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Amazon Cloud Crash Makes it Harder to Procrastinate

when amazon's cloud goes down As if the traffic situation isn’t about to be a nightmare IRL with President Obama arriving at LAX around 2:30 p.m., an outage affecting web apps and services dependent on Amazon’s EC2 servers has crashed many of our favorite online procrastinatory tools and destinations.

What does this mean? We haven’t been able to monitor our social networks with Hootsuite, check in on Foursquare, ask questions on Quora, or check in on the real news of the day at Reddit for… going on twelve hours!

When can we freely procrastinate again? Amazon’s latest update asks us to give them “a few hours.” But that’s just a “high-level ballpark estimate.”

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Hiking Camelback Mountain’s Echo Canyon Summit Trail


View Camelback Hike 3/27/11 in a larger map

The summit trail to the peak of Camelback Mountain is deceiving — it’s only 1.2 miles from the parking lot to the top. But a steady elevation gain (1,300 feet total) on a trail of boulders and loose gravel makes a rather strenuous adventure. It took a little over an hour to summit and a little more than half that to get back down. But my quads still feel as though they’ve both been charlie horsed after absorbing the shock of the descent.

Awesome hike, tracked here with MyTracks, an open source Android app led by a team at Google.

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Neighborgoods and Tiziano Project Recognized at SXSW 2011

Good friends Micki Krimmel and Andrew McGregor & Jon Vidar were recognized at SXSW Interactive last week for their respective startups, Neighborgoods and Tiziano Project. I originally filed the following post at LAist. Click here to see all my recent posts at LAist.com.

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LA Tech’s finest represent at SXSW Interactive in 2009. (Photo by JD Lasica via flickr)

Los Angeles represented in a big way at SXSW 2011 in the film, music, and gaming world — no surprise there (both The Roxy and The Echo hosted parties in Austin last night). But this week two locally-based startups were recognized for their ability to use the internet as a tool for action and a community resource for social change.

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Interview: Dermot McCormack, EVP Digital Media, MTV Networks @ CES 2011

Can MTV.com do what many have tried (and failed) to do over the past decade-and-a-half — become the MTV of the internet? MTV Networks’ head of digital media told us that’s exactly what he’s set out to do in 2011. I spoke with EVP of MTV.com Dermot McCormack about iPads, Android tablets and the future of MTV digital and mobile programming at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas during the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show.

Flash Video [ 9:49 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Originally posted at LAist.com