A successful LA artist, Roman Velasco appears to have everything he could possibly want--money, women, fame. Only Grace Moore, his reluctant, newly hired personal assistant, knows how little he truly has. The demons of Roman's past seem to echo through the halls of his empty mansion and out across his breathtaking Topanga Canyon view. But Grace doesn't know how her boss secretly wrestles with those demons: by tagging buildings as the Bird, a notorious...

"An alien virus ravages the world, its results as random as a hand of cards. Those infected either draw the black queen and die, draw and ace and receive superpowers, or draw the joker and are bizarrely mutated. Nevertheless, human nature reigns supreme. And one fo the most enduring human drives is the search for love. Aces and jokers alike both want to find it, or have lost it...or perhaps just want to use it for personal gain. Within these stories,...

"Walking L.A. is your portable guide to 40 walking tours exploring historic stairways, hidden streets, public artwork, and architecture, much of which even lifelong Angelenos probably never even knew existed. Completely updated, the third edition of this award-winning book expands and improves upon most of the existing routes with completely revised points of interest, including brand-new trips to Palos Verdes Peninsula, Manhattan Beach, Highland...

We describe an approach to automatically detect building facades in images of urban environments. This is an important problem in vision-based navigation, landmark recognition, and surveillance applications. In particular, with the proliferation of GPS- and camera-enabled cell phones, a backup geolocation system is needed when GPS satellite signals are blocked in so-called "urban canyons." Image line segments are first located, and then the vanishing...