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March 26th, 2009
06:05 pm - And people started saying, "I want my voice to count"
One of the things on my mind in recent weeks has been the viability of my lifestyle. Among those thoughts were whether my methods of consumption were sustainable. Wait, it's not what you think.
When I was young, I delivered the newspaper. For a while, just the now-defunct local weekly, but later, the Pittsburgh Press, now also gone, but at the time the only 7 day a week paper in the city. The going theory went, the afternoon paper was dying, and only a morning newspaper was viable. In the fallout, the Post-Gazette was unable to publish during the strike which marked the end of the Press, and Richard M. Scaife was able to make the move into the Pittsburgh newspaper market.
In the time since then, I went to college, got a job, bought a house. I was a Post-Gazette subscriber for many years, until it became apparent from the large pile of newspapers on my porch, some as many as 6 months old, that I wasn't reading them. The problem, it seems, is that in spending so much time in front of a computer, I'd started getting my news from the internet.
( The Mistake? )
After musing on Twitter and having a short discussion with Uncle Crappy in February, we talked a little more about it on Wednesday, so it's rolling around in my head again.
In general, to get people to start paying for something they're already getting for free, you need to offer them something better. I can already get a lot of news for free. Why would I want to pay? One potential reason is for better, easier, or more ubiquitous access. I'd hoped perhaps the Kindle might be the answer. The Kindle represents a point at which paradigm change is possible. Presentation and delivery can be managed. But an opportunity is being missed: I can subscribe to, say, the Washington Post for $10 per month. But that's a lot if what i'm after is a la carte issues, or even a la carte articles. And the Kindle model doesn't help me if I want something old. No doubt the Kindle will have a similar issue here as it does with books, namely, that its DRM model eliminates the First Sale Doctrine rule which allows me to resell or give away a book I've purchased.
So here's the pitch, a business for an ebook hardware vendor to partner with a newspaper or group of newspapers, and find a business to make both happy. Invest in micropayment technology, and tie it to the ebook reader. Let readers buy news, ideally a la carte, and let them have it deducted from a pool of money refreshed when it's exhausted, not unlike EZPass. Make the payments reasonable: if I can get a newspaper for $.50, expecting me to pay more than that for one article tomorrow probably isn't going to get you much business. Make it simple. But most of all, make it. The business will come.
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February 10th, 2009
05:44 pm - It must be hard with your head on backwards
Yesterday, Justin Kownacki posted some thoughts about Twitter and blogging, which caused me to start thinking, again, about how I was sharing and recording my thoughts. Then, last night when ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) twitch124 mentioned a concert I'd been loosely wondering if I could make, the rest of the details ended up falling into place.
Most Livejournal users remember how following SixApart's layoffs there was widespread fear of LJ's collapse. Like many others, I ran a script to archive my Livejournal. Not strictly a blog, nor exactly a journal, Livejournal has still filled a niche in my life, and I hope to not need to replace it. At the same time, Twitter has opened a new door, one which has let me connect and reconnect especially with many other Pittsburghers with interests similar to mine, as well as opened the door for new friendships and opportunities. Like Livejournal it's not blogging, but in some sense it's even further away. Given their current business model, it's probably also less permanent.
I've never much cared for services which just mirror Twitter to Livejournal, but in the sense of wanting permanence, and more importantly, external comment, perhaps they are wise. At the same time, spamming everyone following with a post a day doesn't seem fair or right. There's an obvious compromise, though.
My plan is to either start using or write a service which will mirror Twitter to a protected post. The goal is not the protect the comment; It's to allow it to be filtered. If you'd like to read my tweets, comment here. I'll add you to the group when I set things up.
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December 11th, 2008
09:19 pm - I got a dealer in Tokyo; I got a rep in Paris
 
Up the hill from where I live, 2 neighborhood associations, one for the hill, the other for the valley below, came together to sponsor a mural. The mural offers a somewhat whimsical picture of life in the South Side, from a blacksmith shop to a kid in a red convertible (not unlike mine). It took some thought before I decided that of the pieces around, this was my favorite. There are so many great choices. Of late, the Sprout Fund has been sponsoring new pieces around the area. This one, though, is filled with people. In some ways when I visit Tessaro's in Bloomfield the (private, obviously) mural there reminds me of the real people that pass me by, playing varying parts in my world. The people in this mural, while less actual, give the same idea.
There's just one thing that bothers me about it, but perhaps that's a story for another day.
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November 30th, 2008
09:37 pm - Don't know where it goes, but it's home to me and I walk alone
Is Oakland going to be the next downtown? It was mentioned at the Boulevard of the Allies ribbon-cutting that Oakland is the 3rd largest business district in the state, and it's long been true that it's the 3rd largest endpoint for transit trips in the state (after Center City Philadelphia and Downtown Pittsburgh).
Being the next downtown is not necessarily a good thing. Like so many town centers in the state, the first two have suffered from the suburbanization of the state. Storefronts have become empty; Upper floors of non-office space have been all but abandoned, and sidewalks "roll up" in early evening, leaving the area feeling empty until morning rush.
With Downtown Pittsburgh's push to being back residents, grocery stores, and amenities as well as the growth of the Cultural District, after nearly 40 years of steady decline, downtown is often (but not always, and not all through it) alive at night.
At the same time, as hammered home during last night's final night of Ceremony, the decline of Oakland has marked the decline of a lot of other areas of life here. With the demise of the Upstage, Oakland's club scene is gone. The Oakland Beehive is long gone, but after many years the space finally hosts a cell phone store and American Apparel. There are still a number of restaurants which stay open late thanks to the captive resident population, at least, and with the university population there are still people around at all hours. But there seems to be a definite trend of Oakland moving in the direction of every other "downtown" in the state, becoming just the host of office workers during the day, and dead at night.
It's not too late, but if things are going to change, some effort to harness development to cater to the beyond 9-5 crowd will need to be undertaken. Sadly, starting down that path seems likely to require investment not available in a market in which money supplies are tight. This may be a challenge which ultimately fails.
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November 25th, 2008
11:49 pm - The world drags me down, and the world turns around
On November 25, 2002, six years ago today, PennDOT cut the ribbon on the PA26 bypass freeway, signed US220 at its opening, from the Mount Nittany Expressway to a point just shy of I-80. The freeway is theoretically "Future I-99", and while I'll ignore comments on numbering, it's interesting that it's *still* future I-99.
On that day, as the barrels were rolled away, I was in the first vehicle to roll though the entrance at the south end from the surface road there (East Park Avenue).
When PA 43 opened south from route 51 to I-70, I was in the line of vehicles which entered there.
Yesterday, I biked over to Oakland for the ribbon-cutting of the Boulevard of the Allies bridge. What changed? Well, I didn't use the bridge after it opened, in a car. I used it before it opened, on foot. Whereas before, I wanted to use new facilities as a motorist, now, I want to see them as a part of history.
To be fair, today I did have the opportunity to use the new bridge. I did.
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November 24th, 2008
09:15 pm - We look at life with such disregard
Today, in the rain, PennDOT cut the ribbon on the new Boulevard of the Allies gateway span.
( A little history lesson... )
In 2007, a project began to remove the old bridge and replace it with a modern span lacking the dogleg ramp to outbound Forbes Avenue (and forever locking Forbes into one-wayness). Here are a few pictures of the bridge before and during demolition, and today's reopening. (As a note, Historic Pittsburgh has shots of the original end of the Boulevard as well as the previous bridge just before its opening.)
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November 19th, 2008
10:14 am - It all comes back to you you're gonna get what you deserve
I was doing pretty well at NaBloPoMo, and then my muse got sick. Not deathly ill. Just a cold-having malaise.
Anyway, continued discussion in social media circles have me again thinking about collaborative mapping. I have gathered a lot of historical information and pictures about my neighborhood; I'd like to be able to apply layers, tie in pictures, and allow others to do the same, on top of the same base map. And I bet the pieces I need to do this are all out there, but not, seemingly, in the same place, or in the same language, or usable in the same environment. Python is hot for GIS, but one solution in this space, geoserver, is Java.
Goals are important. Here are mine:
-Base map based on current data.
-Ability to apply rasters with varying transparency, so one could, for instance, overlay a nearly-opaque historic map over the base map, then put a nearly-transparent historic aerial photo atop them all.
-Ability to add vector layers which can be drawn in. Consider a case where you'd trace old property lines, municipal boundaries, land user patterns...
-Ability to tie photos to particular points, ideally with perspective information. Looking down a street towards a given direction should allow me to see a picture taken from that perspective.
And of course the ability to tie free-form text to any object. I'd then populate Pittsburgh, and start letting people fill in. Just because my own interest is history doesn't mean such a system couldn't be used for far more. Understanding the past doesn't, and shouldn't, disallow living in and enjoying the present.
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November 15th, 2008
11:02 pm - We drank wine in the matinee, and the spotlight showed what i chased away
Carrying in a small batch of groceries after a stop at Giant Eagle in Robinson, (and grabbing some dinner at Bocktown) I realized I was carrying only things which I largely hadn't drank earlier in life:
-Beer
-Soymilk
-Licorice Tea
-Diet Pop
In 2000, when visiting Sweden for the first time, I got over my aversion to tea other than "sweet tea", because in a nation famous for coffee, my friends drank tea.
The rest substantially came in 2005.
I've beaten the topic of change to death. Sometimes, though, the contrast smacks you in the face.
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November 14th, 2008
03:09 pm - We are, we are, we're just children; finding our way around indecision
A side conversation at PodCamp Pittsburgh 3 brought out part of the Pittsburgh story which is seldom heard. The aging of the local population and the loss of talent as people leave to pursue opportunities elsewhere has been widely reported, but the growth which has happened here thanks to the people who stayed has been largely ignored.
Pittsburgh stands on the cusp of becoming a much younger city. The challenge we face is that of continuing to grow, hopefully keeping more local talent local. To that end, creating a self-sustaining local economy of this talent is an obvious path forward, but we face the issue of discovering the talents of others and how we might collaborate in our ventures. Networking events and word of mouth when your "mouth" is the internet are great aids in this path, but we have the opportunity to do more.
Now is the time to put the pieces together to make sure we can rely on each other to aid in our ventures as we build the next generation of the tech economy in Pittsburgh. It's just a matter of finding the right pieces to connect the right people.
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November 13th, 2008
10:11 pm - Born On The Cusp In The Month Of November
The contrast of working during a hackathon and sitting alone at the Beehive working is stark. It's not necessarily critical to be working around people who are working on the same thing as you, so much as someone who is technically inclined. Likewise, I know full well I am not the only work-at-home person around.
Podcamp, and the proposed BarCamp have the right idea, but are once a year events, perhaps more heavyweight than what I'm thinking.
To that end, would an organized, say, once per month tech lunch/hackathon in Pittsburgh be of interest? Having no personal font of wealth and no connections, I assume we'd either meet somewhere for buy-it-yourself lunch, or "free for all" if we begged meeting space.
Does this sound interesting to you, or perhaps to someone you know? Thoughts, interest, or disdain welcome!
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November 12th, 2008
11:33 pm - You climb out the chinmey And meet me in the middle
Yesterday, as you no doubt guessed, was Neighborhood Walk. I spent too long putting my own together, and then checked out what other people saw on their walkabouts.
This shot, from Cynthia Closkey's walk, makes me sad. Why? Well, seeing as the Bessemer and Lake Erie and Buffalo and Pittsburgh tracks are under it I've also taken shots of it and from it.
But I have this other problem. I'm one of what seems like must be 5 people in the world who are products of engineering discipline and doesn't believe that form should be forgotten and only function is worth paying for... and the bridge they're going to build is yet another one of the usual "slap a trio of beams over concrete T-bar piers" that are supplanting older, interesting structures with history and character.
We can't preserve or reuse everything. That doesn't mean I have to be happy about it.
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November 11th, 2008
01:05 am - It's a mess, it's a start, It's a flawed work of art
The South Side of Pittsburgh cut its teeth as the industrialized, working-class boroughs of Monongahela, South Pittsburgh, Birmingham, East Birmingham, and Ormsby. A keen observer will notice discontinuity in street width, grids, and land use at the boundaries.
With coal mines just beyond the edge, inclines connecting both those materials and people above, a river below and eventually 2 railroads passing through, it's little wonder the South Side became the industrial workhorse it did. Iron, steel, and glass were focal industries, but other businesses were scattered throughout. The South Side retains its gritty industrial nature while at the same time settling into a role as a residential community as well as what's being called a hospitality district.
( Without further adieu, a photographic journey through Pittsburgh's South Side... )
I tagged all the photos in the album with locations, incidentally, which means you can use the "view thumbnails in a map" feature here. There are many more photos in the album than I shared in the walk here.
n.b. Yes, Google will help if you don't "get" the title of the post.
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November 10th, 2008
01:12 pm - Every time I thought I'd got it made It seemed the taste was not so sweet
Change is all around. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, and sometimes just... change.
As I was biking across 18th St this morning, I saw a fire engine pulling out, then heard the siren moments later. I remembered that very soon, the public safety building at 18th and Mary will no longer house the police department. This has caused some worry, but unlike the fire department (which is staying put) a good police station is one which is empty: you want your officers to be patrolling, not waiting around for calls.
At the same time, just 2 blocks away, UPMC South Side still faces closing and relocation of services to Mercy Hospital, across the river and about 3/4 mile closer to the Point. An emergency room is never somewhere you want to spend time, but for myself and others I have spent a bit of quality time there in the last 18 months. The idea of needing to visit the Bluff at 1am instead of place within walking distance of home fails to appeal.
Just in the last few minutes, I heard that DHL USA is exiting the domestic package business. Given that they plan to pare 3/4 of their stations, one can only assume the airport location will survive, and the location in the South Side's M. Berger Industrial Park will not.
Change isn't necessarily something to fear; The fabric of the community, though, will change in response to the changes within. One can only try to make sure the change is ultimately for the better.
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November 9th, 2008
11:05 pm - This could be the very minute I'm aware I'm alive
I was not always someone who enjoyed adult beverages. It wasn't all that long ago that I drank very infrequently and sparingly when I did.
One year at a chocolate party at eichin's, someone brought chocolate beer. I had a little of someone else's. It was interesting, but it didn't really scream chocolate to me. Last year, wandering into Double Wide Grill one night, I noticed Southern Tier Choklat on the draft list. Intrigued, and always willing to try a new chocolate beer, I ordered one.
Alas, it kicked the keg, and I got just a little, but *wow*. Choklat was the most chocolatey beer I'd ever had. It was as much like drinking chocolate in beer form as I figure I'm likely to experience. I have a small stash of bottles now which I break out occasionally, and I mean to get to Southern Tier this year to buy some in person.
I'm also a member of Pittsburgh Beer Society. This past week, one of the 6 samples we enjoyed was Tommyknocker Cocoa Porter. Tommyknocker has good brews; I've been enjoying a variety pack of their stuff since it, um, appeared at my house when I got back from Ohio Linux Fest. Well, if Choklat was like drinking chocolate, Cocoa Porter is like a mug of hot cocoa in beer form. McBroom's in Regent Square had a case left. Had. If you like hot cocoa, you should try it, but you may have to get it from elsewhere!
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November 8th, 2008
11:24 pm - ride all night, we ride all day; Some may come and some may stay
In 3 days, I'll be participating in the neighborhood walk. But the story of how it ended up my neighborhood is an interesting one.
In a great sense, I owe ending up here to my friend Elden.
In early 2000, on a mailing list I participate in, a simple question came. It began: Hi all, I was wondering if any Pittsburgh-familiar folks know anything about the PRR's "Allegheny and South Side Railroad". What little I know is that by the 40's it was a single-track running from PRR's 21st Street Yard adjacent to the P&LE tracks on the South Side west to the Pittsburgh Terminal Warehouse Transfer operation near the Liberty Bridge. We've had an ongoing dialog about it since then, and I wrote a wikipedia article on the subject. But at the time, it harkened back to my high school days, when my high school's home football field was South Stadium and the closest ice for the hockey team other than Civic Arena was Neville Ice Arena. I visited the South Side Giant Eagle just after opening, and traveled up S. 21st St when the center of the street was still dirt from the rail line which had been located along it.
It took a couple months before Elden managed to hook me, but once he did, the neighborhood became a second passion for me. I started doing research, looking at maps, pictures, anything I could lay my hands on. In 2006, disheartened by the amount of time I spent in a typical day traveling from Trafford to Pittsburgh and back, and looking for a less sedentary, more participatory lifestyle, I made my move. It's been just 2 years since.
The idea of a photo walk here is actually an old one: I've done it before (and drew a map to boot). The difference now is it's actually *my* neighborhood.
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November 7th, 2008
08:45 pm - Don't wanna argue, I don't wanna debate
It's Restaurant Week in Pittsburgh again, and this time I was actually in town. I dragged my often-times dining companion to UUBU6 tonight for the prix fixe Restaurant Week menu; It's only my second trip to the nearby UUBU6, and I get the idea I don't go often enough. It didn't seem as busy as it was the last trip, either, which for a Friday at dinnertime was a little worrisome, but the food was just as good.
Neither of our wine choices were stellar, but the Coppola Claret 2006 seems like it's going to be excellent in a year or so. The Spinach Spaetzle I started with, however, was probably one of the more interesting dishes I've had recently, and the small appetizer of goat cheese on a fig was wonderful. We both had salmon as a main course and couldn't stop, but the lime tart was far and away the dessert champ.
It's sort of a shame that restaurant week is more than half over and I've utilized it once; However, like so many other "discoveries" I've made in Pittsburgh, this one is great, and I hope it doesn't go away.
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November 6th, 2008
11:20 pm - Well maybe it's just time to say Things can go bad
Of the many issues the place I'm living now has, the prior owner failed to run cable conduits before he closed up the walls, and half the house has no basement, meaning without breaking plaster those walls are now inaccessible.
Like any other sane person, I use wireless technology for networking. Sadly, I have a TiVo with a wired network connection. This should be easy: attach what's called a wireless client bridge to it, or to a network switch, and have wired network on a different floor, but I am cheap, and that's where the fun begins.
The router I'm using is a small PC running pfSense, with 2 Atheros wireless cards in it. pfSense is FreeBSD (7.x). I have 2 unused Graphite Airports, and one Airport Express. The last will bridge to a WDS network. None of the first 3 will do WDS.
It looks like I will either have to open a wall, or spend money, to fix my problem. Sometimes, you just have to admit defeat, and move on.
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November 5th, 2008
11:39 pm - I never said I'm better, I'm better, I'm better, I'm better than you
I've been involved for several months in building a plan to create a not-for-profit foundation to support the OpenAFS distributed filesystem and the things you'd want to use to support it. In some sense this is foolish.
In 2000, IBM announced their intention to open source their AFS product. A number of us, me among them, got together to try to set up some organization to be ready to receive the code drop and run with it. At the earliest gathering of these folks, I got up in front of group, some of whom I'd just met, stood in front of a whiteboard, and sketched out a plan for an organization I thought would work. By and large, that organization is the one that got built.
Fast-forward a few years. One flaw in my plan became apparent: I wrote something which vested membership in the guiding board in people, not their organizations. But those people were not always motivated to get things done, or to step aside when they failed to. We met again. I laid out my complaints, offered my resignation, and left the room. It was not accepted, but the shakeup yielded a reconstituted board, and we again moved forward, if slowly.
Over time, another flaw became apparent. Another group of people, of which I am also one, vetted code changes and did all the release engineering work to get things shipped. Except we weren't all on the same page. I assumed the responsibilities of this would be implicit. I was wrong.
Finally, lacking any formal resources, things got done when someone volunteered and had time, or paid and contributed the work.
A draft plan, basically the second proposed structure for an organization which would exist as a vessel to steward OpenAFS, has been available for comment for a few weeks. Like the previous plan, this one also came from me, albeit informed by a new, different, and hopefully better set of sources and experiences. Among them, social media and open source communities have been talking about many of the activities needed to build a base for such an organization, and I've been privileged to be part of Ohio LinuxFest '08, Podcamp Pittsburgh 3, and the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit over the past weeks.
One can only hope finally we get it right.
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November 4th, 2008
05:28 pm - Civil servants fall in line for you
Socialism has become a dirty word this year, and in truth nearly everyone is a little socialist.
This will be my token political post for the month. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, or even who I voted for. That's beside the point.
I consider myself a socialist (little s). I am not a Socialist party member or someone likely to be. This isn't a unique issue; the distinction between libertarian versus Libertarian has threads in common. Nor is libertarian strictly opposite socialism. It is possible to be in favor of individual rights without expecting that all will be able to provide for themselves.
Do you share the air with everyone else? Want people to not asphyxiate you by stamping the oxygen out of the atmosphere? Guess what? The atmosphere is a socialized resource. You share it with everyone else. Do you believe it's reasonable to pay for the police if you've not been robbed? The fire department if your house hasn't burned? All of these are socialism. John McCain has been beating the drum of "socialism bad". He hasn't proposed to make the war efforts in Afghanistan or Iraq be paid for by only people who wish to pay for it. He also is a socialist. Any time you expect people to pay for things which they won't use themselves, that's socialism.
Social welfare is a specialized instance of this. People who rail against socialism generally are referring to this. They mean they don't want welfare, state-subsidized healthcare, or things of that ilk. It's possible to be socialist without wanting these services to be socialized (in my opinion anyway) though every way I read the bible suggests as long as there are hungry, sick or homeless people it's not possible to be Christian and not in favor of social welfare.
None of this is to condemn or castigate anyone. I just needed to get it off my chest.
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November 3rd, 2008
11:35 am - I am terrified of all things, frightened of the dark.
In 2003, responding to a challenge that OpenAFS support on MacOS was underwhelming from a manager at CMU, I pointed out that talk was cheap, and they were welcome to give me an actual Mac to use if they cared.
They did. Predictably, I have been doing kernel development in MacOS since then. One drawback of doing so: when you carry a laptop, and you crash your laptop, it's rather hard to figure out *why*, as your tools for figuring it out just went away! Through the years I've tried various tools to let me emulate a Mac, seeking a way to keep a virtual Mac with me to crash and debug.
At long last, with VMware Fusion, I have that, legitimately, even. Apple has helpfully provided aid to OpenAFS development for several years now, and the availability of OSX Server from that, combined with my own $40 purchase of Fusion, finally means on my lap I have the ability to work on internals even on the occasion where I am in a car or train miles from network, or on a plane to who-knows-where.
It's been a long time coming.
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