RobotSkirts

Google recently leased a 100,000 sqft. complex in Venice, CA that includes Gehry’s binoculars building. In the mid 90′s the building housed Chiat/Day, the advertising firm behind Apple 1984, the Energizer Bunny, Think Different. The building was home to Chiat’s virtual office experiment (no guaranteed desks or equipment)… which eventually went all Lord of the Flies. Here’s the full story from Wired in 1999 which is well worth the read.

Sidebar: Tour of TBWA\Chiat\Day’s current office

Thank you, @cnelson for digging up this article.

Update: I happened to be in the area today and took a current picture of the building.

This last week, Machine Project has been hosting several different events as part of their FungiFest 2010. Chris and I decided to check out their mushroom walk this morning at Franklin Canyon Park. I was a bit skeptical when we showed up and they turned us loose into the woods to gather whatever we found with only a few words, but the whole experience was quite interesting.

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This weekend was BarCampLA 6. BarCamp is a self organizing conference. It has sponsors, is free to attend, and speakers are all voluntary. It was hosted at Mahalo so I decided to give a talk titled “Intro to Hardware Hacking: @sweetums pulls random crap out of his office”. I tried to cover a broad spectrum of what you can hack in hopes that people would see something they personally identified with and would use as a starting point. I started with consumer devices that were hackable. Then went to kits that you can purchase. Finally I covered tools and resources. Managed to fill the whole 50 minutes.

I happened to be presenting in the Mahalo Daily studio with the green screen in the background. I made sure to pose appropriately in case someone wanted to photoshop it. Thank you vissago for the photos.

I had just stepped out of the shower and the whole wall I share with my neighbor appeared to move. I didn’t know what was going on. I heard rumbling and wall was moving, “Does my neighbors closet shake my apartment?” I placed my hands on the wall and tried pushing. Nothing happened. The moment was gone and I left for the office. When I arrived I was asked “Were you riding during the earthquake?” That was my only indication as to what had happened.