Old LA Zoo – Griffith Park

This past weekend, Constantine and I set out to go exploring a few different abandoned areas of Los Angeles, we started out with the one we thought would be the easiest to find and sure enough it was.

The Old LA Zoo first opened in Griffith Park in 1913, the zoo didn’t do very good and had many animal escapes and was poorly funded, during world war I many of the animals died due to food rationing. In 1965, the zoo was moved to it’s present location just south of where this one is located. This past year during the Griffith park fires, the old zoo was nearly destroyed, thankfully it survived the fires and is still amazingly well kept.

We headed up the I-5 early Saturday morning and got off at the first Griffith park exit and parked in the Merry-Go-Round parking lot. Head back across the street and up the road (away from the merry-go-round). Here you will find a trail that heads to the right along the ridge and through some trees. Go up the trail just a little ways and you will find the first group of buildings. It’s really very easy to get too. This is the back side of what appeared to be the Lion cages. There were plenty of holes in the fence that you can get through to climb around. In fact the day we were there there was some group filming a movie, which included a large fake tiger!

We continued to hike around for a while and found a few different ways to get there. In fact if you don’t want to go through the hiking part, you can actually get to the front of the zoo by going around the Merry-Go-Round to the right of the parking lot and then just follow the larger parking lot to the left.

You can download or tracks for Google Earth here, and see just how easy it is to see. You could easily spend 30 minutes or a few hours exploring this old compound and the areas around it.

Our pictures of the Old LA Zoo are here. Or you can view the GoogleEarth GeoTagged photos here. Lastly you can view the other hard data from the weekend here.

Here’s some more references:
Marilyn Carolyn
Boing Boing
Zoo Zoo Zoo

On the way home we saw this cute little PokeMan bug… Crazy LA people:

(Notice the mini one on the dashboard!)

Old LA Zoo and Nazi Camps!

What a weekend! Been very very busy!

Friday afternoon was just a gorgeous day here in LA! I got out of work and it was 77 degrees so I came home and did a quick 10 mile bike ride. It’s been SOO long since I’ve been on my bike! It felt great to get back out there. I sure hope this summer brings a lot more biking! The new chain was working great, on Tuesday I am hoping to try and get it out so I can do some hill climbing to see how the chain holds there.

Friday night we went out with a bunch of Constantine’s co-workers to the Grove in Orange. The thing said to be there by 7:30 because we were eating at 8. Well we got there at 8 and we weren’t going to get into the restaurant till 9:30! Thankfully the birthday girl pulled some strings and got us a table earlier which we had drinks and stuff at. Then when our real table opened up we went there. It was at Koji’s Shabu-Shabu. I didn’t really like the place, but I really enjoyed meeting his co-workers and stuff. Sadly we were both very tired so after dinner we came home and missed the bowling fun.

Saturday morning we got up and went to the Old LA Zoo, which I’ll write about in a separate post. But it was lots of fun. After that we we spent HOURs looking for the right birthday gift for Jason and still did not find what we wanted. We know exactly what we want, just can’t find one that we like. Stopped at the pet store for a minute to play with the puppies and ended up buying my cats a new comb. Soooo after the shopping we came home and had a good clean fun of brushing the cats! What a MESS! Oh my god!

Saturday night we headed up to the valley and hung out with Constantine’s friend Tal. He’s a really cool guy and we watched The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.. Which is a really messed up movie but I thought it was funny! If only I was a person who got high. Then it’d be really funny! Anyways, Tal and I discussed biking and hopefully this summer he and I can go biking some!

Sunday morning we got up early and headed up to the Nazi camp in Rustic Canyon (again, I’ll write about this later). We hurried home from there and then showered and headed to a recital thing which was put on by one of Constantine’s friends. Really good, one guy, Andrew, wrote one of his own songs and it was really good. I just wish he had told us all the lyrics!

We got home from that about 5 and then const left. It was really nice to FINALLY meet some of the people in his life! Now if only I could see the inside of his HOUSE! 🙂

Next weekend we are going to NAPA! So PLEASE tell me where good places to go are that are not crazy expensive!!!!

Drivers from HELL Day!

Ok, today must be drive like an idiot day or something! I left for work about an hour later then normal and it started off just a few blocks from my house. Some stupid bitch was blabing on her cell phone instead of going through the green light. Holding up all of the traffic.

Then a couple blocks later some other idiot on a cell phone swerving all over. Then after that another person txting on her cell phone going 20mph under the speed limit. Then I was stopped at a stop light and some woman putting on makeup nearly rear-ends me.

This is all just GETTING to work!

On the way home was much worse.. First there’s construction on Campus just down the street from my office. Some duchebag on his cell phone nearly merges into me because he didn’t look. Then some other idiot tried to turn onto a street that is CLEARLY closed off, causing more issues…..

But the worst one of all was once I got on the freeway, I was cruising along in the fast lane.. Ahead there is traffic, clearly lots of break lights. This woman in a Prius on my right tries making the car pool lane before hitting the traffic, serves violently behind me, nearly rear ending me, gets into the car pool lane but by now has lost control of her car, swerves back and forth pretty hard in the car pool lane all while braking and tires squealing! Then as soon as she gets control again she speeds off into the distance.

Idiots I tell you! PAY ATTENTION!

Mint.com – Manage your money!

A while ago, I stumbled upon a site called mint.com. I signed up for an account, but after that I was leary about submiting my personal info for all my banks to it. So I kept an eye on it and watched the forums. One of the guys here at the office told me he had been using it and really liked the way it worked, then a couple weeks later, mint.com hit the front page of digg.com and there was a very large discussion about the security of such a site.

Come to find out they actually use an outside firm to handle the verification with banks, which is also used by the likes of Charles Schwab, T.Rowe Price, etc. So I decided to sign up. I’ve now been using it for a solid two months and really like it.

They are still technically in a “beta” phase, but who knows how long that’ll last. IE, some of Google’s stuff is in a perpetual beta. Anyways, they have nearly everything I could want in a system like this. The site basically looks at your most recent transactions and imports them from all your accounts. You can then categorize them, exclude them, add notes, create a budget, analyze your spending in categories and over all, search for past transactions, etc. It’s all very very cool.

Here’s what the transactions page looks like:

When you click on one of the transactions in the list, it will then pop out a box on the right which will let you enter notes, see details about the expense and some really neat statistics such as your total purchases there, average purchase cost and average spent per month there. It also compares you to the national average for that retailer!

When mint imports a transaction, it tried to automatically categorize it. But you know computers, they are not always right. So you can create rules that certain transactions should always be categorized a specific way. For example, it kept trying to categorize my Gas utility bill as an Auto Gas/Fuel expense, so I created a rule and now it gets it right all the time!

They will even email or txt you alerts when certian things happen. Ie if a large withdrawl is made, or you get close to $0 in your account, when you are close to your bill due date, etc. Here’s what the budget screen looks like:

You can see at the top the alerts that are currently active. You can adjust at what dollar amount each alert goes off at, and even have different alerts and thresholds for your email or cell phone txt alerts! Below the alerts, you can see the budget. The line is where you are in the current month and then you can see how much you’ve spent, what you are over and how much you have left! It’s all very cool. Since we aren’t that far into the month, you can see I haven’t spent very much money. But sadly, I’m WAY over budget already for Entertainment! I guess I’ll be sitting around the house the rest of the month!

Everyone knows how much I love my statistics. Just look at my Gas Tracker that I have. So Mint.com’s statistics page is one of my favorites! The last couple months have been pretty unusual in spending for me, but with the following image you can really get a feel for how it works.

You can see that each part of the pie is a “Major” category item. Below each of these there can be sub-categories. IE for “Auto” there’s “Gas/Fuel”, “Maint”, “Service and Parts” and “Lease/Payment”. You can click on any of these major categories and it will break it down into the sub-categories, on the right it will then list all the purchase in that category based on the number of visits. You can also select one of the pre-set time periods or you can adjust the slider for your own custom time period.

Lastly, there’s a thing called “Spending Space”. Which is neat app, but not very useful for me. It will show you how your spending compares to America, a select City, or a select State. Here you can see how my spending for Food & Dining compares to California.

It’s a little strange that the spending for California dropped suddenly in Jan, not sure about that. But it’s still kind of neat. Again on this app you can also break it down by sub-category, or even compare yourself to just the LA area!

There have been a few hicups in starting this up. First was setting up my ING bank account. They ask you for SO MANY things that most of them I didn’t even know. Basically they have to ask you for ANY possible question that the bank will throw at them for security replies.

Second is that sometimes a bank will not respond. If this happens. It deletes all the log in information for that account and next time you do an update you will have to re-enter all this information. The good thing is that when this happens, it doesn’t delete the transactions for an account. I haven’t had it happen to much with my major accounts. But one of my credit cards has problems almost every week.

Third is that it only imports what is displayed on the first page of your account history. There’s no way to export from your accounts and then import into Mint. This would be an excellent feature. The forums are all abuzz with requests for this and the typical answer is “We didn’t expect people would want to do this.”… Really? How can you not expect people to want this feature! I have over 5 years of data on my banks website. It’d be awesome to import that into mint and extrapolate my spending trends over all this time!

Fourth, pending transactions can cause some issues. For a while all my pending transactions on ING were entered as credits, not debits. Now they appear to be correctly entering as Debits, but if you categorize them, once they become posted, they loose that categorization so I have to re-enter it, which can be a bit annoying.

Fifth, separation of accounts, I have both a business account and a personal account with one of my banks. However all the transactions are mixed together in Mint. It’d be nice if I could tell Mint that this one account was a different organization and to keep them separate.

Sixth, searching… This really needs some improvement. If you try searching for any category with an “&” in the name, you get NO RESULTS. All of the categories are setup by Mint.com, and you cannot edit or rename them. So trying to find all your transactions with an “&” in them can be difficult.

Lastly, support for IRA, stock accounts, etc. I know these are not considered bank accounts, but if we’re going to have one centralized place to manage money, it’d be nice if these were included…

I’d highly suggest going and checking it out. In case you can’t remember, the URL is http://www.mint.com/.

Update on Grandma

Well. I haven’t yet had a chance to talk to my grandma in person. I’ve called her 3 times on both her room phone and the cell phone, but no answer.

I got an update this morning from my Aunt though. Apparently they got around a foot of snow on Sunday. Apparently she hit a semi tanker truck and the gas tank fell off, so they had to have hazmat come clean it up. The car was towed in after the tow ban was lifted and they are saying it was totaled and that she is lucky to be alive.

Physically she apparently has a lot of bruises, a cut on the nose and her knee is in a brace and is on crutches.

They are getting another 10 inches of snow today so she is stuck in the hospital till someone can get down there to pick her up!

I’m just so thankful that she’s ok!

UPDATE://
Here’s some PICS!