Woke up in my clothes again this morning; Don't know exactly where I am

All anguish, pain and sadness leave your heart and let your road be clear

2009-12-24T23:37:54Z

In what were for me darker times, Greg Lake's 'I Believe in Father Christmas' quietly became my standard of the season. A wistful song, it's final verse tells us that we sow what we reap: "The Christmas we get, we deserve."

Today, I am reminded that I have not always, and still sometimes am not, all I can be. I don't give as much as I could, which is entirely unfair given that I almost certain have whatever I might reasonably ask for in life. I am healthy, able-bodied, I have food to eat and a roof over my head.

Greg Lake and most of the music he was involved in has passed out of the body of material I regularly listen to. Still, there is this, and each year as I hear it I quietly cry: I still live in fear of getting the Christmas I deserve.

These bandages cover more than scrapes; cuts and bruises from regrets and mistakes

2009-12-23T17:16:38Z

Another year is nearly by. I won't quite make my goals. Single, check (divorce final 2 weeks ago). Homeless, check (sold in May). Broke, not quite. I'm net negative, but close.

Reflecting, there's more I've failed at. Regrets are easy to have, and I certainly have 13 years of Catholic education to thank for my ability to feel guilty, too.

I said after I sold my house that I'd start volunteering with an organization that rehabilitated houses. Hopefully in the spring I'll schedule that in, and make it happen. Hasn't happened, yet. I'm hoping perhaps to interest some of the other members of HackPittsburgh in joining me at least once, as the more people you have, the more you can get done... at least if you're organized.

Similar, but different, I swore I'd make more of an effort to enjoy life, lest I approach the misery I've had before. I've done reasonably, but sometimes I miss. Biking, for example, I find therapeutic. In spite of that, I had fewer 20 miles rides this year than last, and most of those were the 20 miles I can pretty much stumble out the door onto. I've done more biking-as-transportation than ever before, at least.

I also failed at getting out as much as I'd like for railroad photography, but in some way that's constrained by my inability to find others available for it, and my lack of desire to sit in a car in the middle of nowhere by myself for the more interesting things I might see; I could, again, take the pictures in stumbling distance, but largely, I have, and it's old-hat.

2010, like each year before it, offers an excuse to try to "do it better". Here's hoping that I will.

Two thousand miles is very far through the snow

2009-12-23T05:08:00Z

So much in my life is very different to me for what it was just a few years ago; I'd call it new self-awareness, but that's not quite it. I do still feel a bit like someone who's just occupying this body, not the rightful owner of it.

Some things evoke feelings, memories, conditions of days gone past. This past week, walking somewhere, I caught of whiff which seemed familiar. The odor was reminiscent of that of slightly decaying paper, one I know well from spending time in the stacks in the Carnegie Library in high school and college. I've not spent hours on end just perusing the stacks in years, but still, the smell tresspassed briefly, long enough to trigger the memory, then passed.

Monday night I recounted that I wasn't 'feeling' Christmas. There was a brief moment Sunday, with the snow, where it almost felt right. Almost. And then it passed.

Tonight, on the table next to the gifts being wrapped, I opened an envelope. Inside, a check for a dozen dollars and an address on a sheet of paper waited. I pulled out the check, walked to the basement, and grabbed something from a box. As I carried it upstairs, memories flooded back. I remembered Christmas. I felt it.

Reaching the top of the stairs, I found a box, placed the object I was carrying with it, and put the address somewhere I'd find it in the morning.

Tomorrow, after I leave the house and before my morning tea, I'll visit the Post Office, followed shortly thereafter by the ATM across the street.

So send a smile, we’re on our way back home

2009-12-10T17:19:13Z

I started replying to Abby's blog entry about going beyond the call, and rapidly came to the point where the comment was as long as the post! I guess that's a sign I should be blogging myself. Without further ado:

I still remember on a particularly snowy and very cold day, waiting in Forest Hills for a 67F which was apparently running behind, an off-duty driver stopped and picked me up, then made a few more stops down Ardmore Blvd picking up people. "The Trafford's running behind schedule"... he was returning to the garage, and I recall getting off at Penn and Dallas or something for the remainder of the trip on whatever came next, but it was still a great thing.

A comparable experience: on a cold windy day, at the top of the Seattle counterbalance on Queen Anne hill, some problem had caused the bus line to not be running. A route supervisor came by and told us. We must have looked pathetic as he asked if we thought we could all stuff into his van. We did. A couple older ladies sat in the like 2 seats, and the remainder of us, including stuntviolist and our late friend Don Galt(*) stood, holding the ceiling and each other with our hands so as not to fall as we were driven back down to where we could find a bus again.

I bet both of these were one of those things you could get in trouble for, so I said nothing. How do you offer kudos when you know it might get someone disciplined, or fired?

Anyway, it's nice to have occasions where life interactions are more than simply what's required; what you can do, instead of merely what you must.

--

* Don was the reason I was at the counterbalance, and indeed why I know of it. He also merits a blog entry. Would that I had more time to write it. Maybe soon I'll write it anyway.

1, 2

2009-12-05T22:03:14Z

poster, fire

Because you cannot know yourself or what you'd really do...

2009-11-23T04:25:32Z

Twice in recent days, putting a small amount of money on hand to a good use, I realized something: I am bad at drawing attention to worthy causes I believe in and have given to.

I'd like to give you a nice, well-considered message reflecting detailed consideration of the issue. Alas, the issue boils down to my issue. Notably, I have no grasp on how to focus on what the need is, because I am looking for things to be fixed and not necessarily credit for doing so, and I am usually fearful of self-aggrandizement, even if that's not actually how anyone but me would perceive my actions.

Perhaps others of you have thoughts? Or is the issue, fundamentally, just that I am broken?

But always understand that everything, everything ends

2009-11-17T20:59:56Z

It's been, what... well, it's been many, many months. Why am I breaking the silence? I never really intended to be silent, actually. But the events of the week will finally drag me out.

You see, it's been 88 days since the divorce was filed. That means, Allegheny County court system load willing, I will end the week divorced, thus reaching my goal of ending 2009 single, broke and homeless(*).

It's been more than 4 years, and I'd like to think I've changed for the better in that time. I still have plenty of flaws. At the beginning, having been unhappy for long enough, and resultantly positively miserable at coworkers, I figured my penance would be to be single and alone forever. I even wondered if a fresh start in a new city where I wouldn't be saddled with notions of me from who I was weren't always around would be good for me. Things have worked out better than that, though I still bear scars in the form of irrational paranoia that I am an outsider somewhere between unwanted and tolerated.

The biggest lesson to me has been that, whether I agree or disagree with the means, there are a lot of sincere people trying to make a difference that it's nice to interact positively with, even if that interaction is based on the disagreement of means.

I was reflecting earlier today on the fact that I feel less effective as someone who doesn't use the power of negativity as a tool. At the same time, going back to being miserable is not a tenable position. So, what I'd like to learn going forward is how to be useful while still being positive. I suspect it will be a lesson long in the learning.

* - in the strictest sense, namely, legally single, negative net worth and sans tangible assets, and no longer a homeowner.

And people started saying, "I want my voice to count"

2009-03-27T04:21:17Z

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.

When the web wasn't yet very mature, and I was newly staff at CMU, there was talk already of micropayment systems: NetBill was an academic proof of concept for which at some point I was able to obtain demo software. Startup CyberCash, whose assets were eventually purchased in bankruptcy by Paypal, would attempt to develop a system called CyberCoin based on this concept. In a universe where things like Firefox's extensions were but a pipe dream, and web browsers themselves were closed source, and couldn't be modified, a system which did payment for content would likely involve cookies and redirects, and wouldn't be particularly unobtrusive to the end-user. So the idea of micropayments never took off, and little wonder, as the experience wasn't particularly pleasant.

Still, content providers, or at least some of them, pushed ahead with putting content on the internet. The Tribune-Review, Scaife's newspaper, plunged headlong into the venture, promising in some many words to bury the Post-Gazette by moving quickly into the electronic sphere. For a venture heavily supported by advertising, perhaps the idea of clickable advertising held some merit. It's easy to see in hindsight that it wouldn't work out that way, and Craigslist would later appear to eat the lunch of classified advertising.

So at this point, the genie's out of the bottle: the content is being distributed for less than the cost of producing it. Other means of recovering cost aren't. Some sites have tried things like access only for subscribers, marginalizing their content. Others charge for archives, in many cases far more per article than the entire newspaper cost when it was published. Still others, like what the New York Times' "TimesSelect" was, charged for premium content. Given layoffs, closings, and the like, I have to assume it's not working. So what's the answer?

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.

It must be hard with your head on backwards

2009-02-10T22:55:08Z

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 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.

I got a dealer in Tokyo; I got a rep in Paris

2008-12-12T02:20:55Z

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.

Don't know where it goes, but it's home to me and I walk alone

2008-12-01T03:12:42Z

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.

The world drags me down, and the world turns around

2008-11-26T05:57:59Z

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,

US220 Expressway State College 11/25/2002

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.

We look at life with such disregard

2008-11-24T21:47:02Z

Today, in the rain, PennDOT cut the ribbon on the new Boulevard of the Allies gateway span.

Following World War I, looking to improve access to Oakland, the city undertook to add a modern highway skirting the edge of the Bluff. The fast way to Oakland at that point was via Bigelow Boulevard, at the time Grant Boulevard, which looped to the north around the Hill District to reach Oakland from the northeast.

In its first phase, the Boulevard supplanted Second Avenue downtown, then took to a viaduct to reach the Bluff before petering out just past the Brady St. bridge on the south side of Forbes Avenue. (That's why, to this day, the road has an odd configuration just east of the Birmingham Bridge where the Boulevard passes overhead.)

In 1928, the road was extended on to Oakland, ending at Bates St. on the Zulema St. alignment. A large bridge over Forbes Avenue was erected by the McClintic-Marshall company, as could until about 10 years ago barely be read in painted letters on the girder over Forbes. Still later, the Charles Anderson bridge replaced the old Wilmot St. bridge and the Boulevard of the Allies reached its full extent, connecting to the broad road through Schenley Park.

Because Forbes Avenue hosted two way traffic in 1928, the bridge used to cross it featured an inbound ramp on the north side, and a second bridge to allow outbound traffic to enter Forbes from the right-hand side. When Forbes became a one way street, the inbound ramp became an odd, block-long one way street. The entrance to the Boulevard featured no acceleration lane, and the configuration made seeing approaching traffic difficult. As speeds increased, the narrow, curving Boulevard of the Allies bridge became a liability. Lack of maintenance didn't help, either.

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.)

It all comes back to you you're gonna get what you deserve

2008-11-19T17:05:17Z

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.

We drank wine in the matinee, and the spotlight showed what i chased away

2008-11-16T15:32:05Z

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.

We are, we are, we're just children; finding our way around indecision

2008-11-14T20:09:31Z

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.

Born On The Cusp In The Month Of November

2008-11-14T03:17:40Z

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!

You climb out the chinmey And meet me in the middle

2008-11-13T05:46:50Z

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.

It's a mess, it's a start, It's a flawed work of art

2008-11-11T06:21:24Z

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.

At the start of the day, the sky over the city is bright. The eastern edge of the South Side houses a substation which was part of the original high voltage electrical ring around Pittsburgh, dating from around 1930.

USX Tower, with its recently-acquired UPMC sign, dominates the horizon to the west.

The notary public, in an office a block from busy East Carson St., presents a neat appearance.

Just a block away, morning traffic is making its way into the city, and weary folks are getting their morning coffee before heading into work.

New construction on the site of the former J&L Pittsburgh Works has created a site with offices, retail, and residential space in a variety of buildings.

Real estate continues to be in demand, and some long-time South Side businesses and residents have decided to move on while the demand is there.

Hidden in the new development are public spaces including an interior courtyard accessible via this well-lit passage.

While lacking the historic nature of the long-gone Arcade Theater, the theater at South Side Works has vintage touches to its marquee.

Among the South Side's benefits are easy accessibility to Oakland, at least when the bridges separating the neighborhoods are open.

Just beyond East Carson St., Goodwill is now housed in the former J&L "company store". The South Side Slopes neighborhood is visible just beyond the railroad bridge.

The owners of Zovko's Garage decorate their house for every season.

Election day. The polls are not yet open but there's already a line to vote.

This colorful mural is on the side of the Green Front Inn. Another, new, mural is on a building behind the photographer.

Best pretzels around, if you ask me.

Beyond the library, a building which now houses elderly residents bears reminders of its past as a hospital.

If you're restoring an old home nearby, T&T Hardware no doubt has whatever odd thing you might be missing, and they know where it is, too.

The clock on the former Duquesne Brewery, once the largest single face clock in the world, has shilled for many folks. As recently as 2000, it was broken, its face blacked out.

The former J&L warehouse outlasted the mill by 22 years before finally getting a new face this summer.

In an area with infamously scarce parking, the parking chair is not an uncommon sight.

Among the restored homes a block off Carson St. is the Morning Glory Inn B&B.

The corner of East Carson and South 21st at one time housed meatpackers and a cereal dealer astride the railroad line which ran along the street. A gym and an optician are new tenants in a building whose appearance has changed in just 8 years.

"Uncle John" Brashear was memorialized after his death by Edgar Kaufman and others. He really was my great-great-great uncle, incidentally.

For the moment, the South Side still has a local hospital.

B.M. Kramer's building still features its original gorgeous arched windows.

The occasional empty house does still exist in the neighborhood.

Streets get tighter as you move west toward downtown.

Built by Henry W. Oliver, who owned Oliver Iron and Steel across the street, Oliver Bath House is the city's only indoor public pool.

The Salvation Army's sign contrasts with that of Nicholas K.'s studio.

While Pittsburgh's famous ethnic neighborhoods are much less homogenous, the culture has thankfully stuck around. In the background is Cupples Stadium, home of all the Pittsburgh Public Schools sports teams.

Social clubs of several Eastern European nationalities dot the area.

Seeking the Lord's blessing on the city.

My favorite landmark, the former Duquesne Brewery. The older building is an artists' community. The newer one, with the clock, has had its exterior refurbished but is not yet occupied. In 2000 a small curved building in the area between the railroad track which wrapped around the new building and the corner as well as bridge connecting the old and new buildings still existed.

Touches of the area's industrial past remain, such as the siding under the Birmingham Bridge to serve businesses at the foot of South 23rd St.

In looking to the future, the South Side has embraced its past, reusing everything from churches to gas stations while retaining the character of those structures in sometimes whimsical ways.

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.

Every time I thought I'd got it made It seemed the taste was not so sweet

2008-11-10T18:26:12Z

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.

This could be the very minute I'm aware I'm alive

2008-11-10T04:12:57Z

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!

ride all night, we ride all day; Some may come and some may stay

2008-11-09T04:45:57Z

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.

Don't wanna argue, I don't wanna debate

2008-11-08T03:23:51Z

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.

Well maybe it's just time to say Things can go bad

2008-11-07T13:09:22Z

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.

I never said I'm better, I'm better, I'm better, I'm better than you

2008-11-06T04:57:50Z

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.