joshuadflog

2011-09-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

The Gated Urban Center

I recently read mini-book The Gated City by Ryan Bellows, a writer for The Economist. The thesis is a bit complex, perhaps best summed up by Avent in this article: "How home prices helped kill the first tech boom." In the book, Avent comes down hard on NIMBYs, largely blaming housing expense on neighborhood opposition (1230):

Often enough, exclusion is an explicit goal. In urban neighborhoods, residents wish to limit multi-unit buildings in order to keep poorer or younger residents out, fearing crime or nuisance. In more suburban neighborhoods, schools are often the reason for opposition. Neighborhood schools are only as exclusive as their neighborhoods. To protect the high quality of public schools in rich, well-educated neighborhoods, it is necessary to keep others out.

However, I think that's missing the big historic picture. In the mid-20th Century, freeway construction and removed tens of thousands of units (4500 parcels for I-5 alone) where we are talking about allowing a few hundred per neighborhood today. Those lost units aren't coming back, and neither can we fast-forward to get the decades worth of housing we should have had. Avent mentions he lives in Arlington, VA, one of the few places that did meet housing demand. In most urban centers across the country, however, office buildings with massive parking lots replaced housing. Business leaders at the time praised the forward thinking and called for even more freeways. The tide turned in the late 20th Century (at least in cities such as Seattle) but the most insidious damage has largely not been removed: outdated zoning in urban centers, where the highest potential for dense residential development exists.

Before World War II, commercial buildings and even industry often had housing right next door; separation of uses has always been a lie (or perhaps an ideal). The goal of the factory owner was to get rid of the neighbors, and zoning was the tool. For example, South Lake Union where I live is often called a "historically industrial area," but it has about a dozen old brick apartment complexes and a handful of wood frame buildings remaining; a better description would be "historically mixed use." The 1956 Seattle Comprehensive Plan made it illegal to build new housing in South Lake Union. In the 1990s some of the neighborhood was rezoned to allow housing before the Seattle Commons rejection, but get this: the center of the neighborhood, prime real estate between Lake Union and downtown Seattle, is still zoned industrial/commercial. An expensive and time consuming "contract rezone" process is required to build anything else. The same is true in downtown, where the vast majority of land is zoned for plenty of height but with the use required to be "Downtown Office Core." The picture to the left, from the NYTimes Mapping the 2010 Census view of housing unit location, shows the problem quite nicely. The biggest gating factor in housing expansion are these outdated and inflexible rules.

2011-09-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

Somber Bike Commute

Yesterday was a somber day for my bike commute, several other cyclists yelled "Ride safe!" as we passed. When I'm coming from the U-District as yesterday, I go right through this intersection where Robert Townsend died and down Fairview past where Brian Fairbrother crashed, so I took a short detour over to the Mike Wang memorial on Dexter too on my way home in South Lake Union.

It's important to note that all three of these are infrastructure issues: in one case, a shared sidewalk trail that ends abruptly in a stairway, and in the other two cases unprotected left turns (i.e., no left turn signal). Paint or barriers cannot keep people from making left turns of course, but adjusting signage and signal timing would be a good idea. In general unprotected left turns across traffic are dangerous; bus-pedestrian collisions, like the one in April 2010 in Portland, are twice as likely during left turns as other movements.

Hopefully most of us who drive in urban areas know to that 3 right turns is not only safer but often faster as well. In my opinion, there's no reason for unprotected left turns to be legal at all on arterial streets--it's already illegal at NE 45th and University Way, for example. And yes, that's what they do for left turns in the Netherlands:

"cyclists also can ride straight ahead without right or left turning motorists having permission to cross their paths. However, when motorists are given a green light for a right turn this is separated in time from the cyclists' straight on green so that conflict is avoided."

Lastly, while a dozen cyclists have died in Washington state this year, that doesn't make it a crazy dangerous activity. There are thousands of people riding every day, and it's extremely rare for someone to make a tragic illegal turn.

2011-09-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

First experience with Hertz Local Edition

About 6 months ago a Hertz Local Edition (HLE) appeared in our neighborhood, inside a hotel on Lake Union. Previously, we'd use traditional car rental almost exclusively from Enterprise since they were the only company with a convenient location. So on a 3-day camping trip, we gave it a try. The most attractive part is that membership in their Hertz #1 Club "Gold" level is currently free, which allowed me to "simply show driver's license, pick up keys and off you go," without dealing with pushy car rental salespeople (it remains free until the end of September, normally $60). The check-in is done on the website; I easily added the required liability insurance supplement aka Supplemental Liability Protection (SLP) and declined the collision damage insurance which we get via our credit card. The HLE turned out to be a desk in the hotel lobby, and it was quick. The Hertz staff just verified by license and credit card, handed over the keys and papers, and pointed us to the parking garage.

There were about 10 Hertz vehicles parked together, each with a numbered sign that read "Please Lock Car, Take Keys to Counter, NOTE Time, Mileage, Fuel Level." The car was a Nissan Versa, nothing fancy but it had cruise control, CD player, and got decent mileage. The camping went great, and three days later I filled up with gas, parked the car back in the garage, and dropped off the keys. Hertz emailed me a receipt. Much smoother than a full traditional car rental, though still doesn't compete with Zipcar (or perhaps Hertz on Demand) for convenience. The HLE advantage over Zipcar is of course price; we spent a grand total of about $160 ($40 for gas, $120 for the rental including $35 for the SLP) for three days, which would have cost $200-240 with Zipcar depending on vehicle. We probably would have also needed a car wash with Zipcar, since it had gotten fairly dirty and they require you to return the vehicle clean. Unfortunately if that Hertz gold membership is an annual fee, it would greatly reduce the savings for a 3-day trip since we only rent cars 2-3 times per year.

2011-08-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

Better Maps of Kid Density in Seattle

And now the maps. Here is an image export of King County census blocks classified by Population Under 18 Per Acre (i.e., Kid Density):

I think this effectively demonstrates what I've been attempting to communicate. It's a variation on the theme, "No one with kids lives there anymore, it's too crowded with kids." While Seattle has a lower percentage of population under 18 than the rest of King County, in terms of per-acre density, there are actually more neighbors with children in Seattle. Here's another example I've used: say a cul-de-sac with 10 houses has 8 families with children. That's an impressive percentage! However, on Capitol Hill that same amount of land area can contain several apartment buildings with hundreds of residents, including more total children than the cul-de-sac.

Here's a detail image of Seattle's Center City. Note that there are some huge blank spots, some of which are parks, hospitals, office parks like the new Amazon and Gates Foundation campuses, and industrial areas. But for the most part, in addition to the well-known areas of Queen Anne and Capitol Hill, wherever there is housing, there are kids. There are kids in condos above Whole Foods (Denny and Westlake). There are kids in Belltown. There are kids on First Hill. There are kids in Chinatown/International District. There are kids surrounding Cascade Park near REI. There are kids in the U-District, particularly in the northern part where I used to live. There are even kids who live downtown (on the two ends of Seneca St, dark colors for the very different housing of Harbor Steps apartments at 1st Ave and the YWCA family shelter at 5th Ave).

2011-08-20T18:45:00.000-07:00

Toward Block Level Census 2010 Maps

Since I last posted about 2010 Census data, the Census Bureau released the 2010 Summary File 1 (SF1) for Washington which includes more detailed demographics down to the Census Block level. In urban areas, Census Blocks are literally city blocks. In rural areas they are however small a geographic area can be made reasonably distinct. One note, because of the scale of the census, blocks have a much higher margin of error than a tract or especially a Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA). It's easy for a few forms for get mixed up, for example to accidentally put one for Block 3018, Tract 321 into Block 3021, Tract 318. (In fact this seems to have happened for the block I live in, which shows fewer children that I know firsthand lived here in April 2010. It's also possible that residents did not return the form at all.) In other words, this SF1 data gets me the detail I've been looking for, though with that grain of salt.

In searching around on how to use SF1 data, I found the excellent Missouri Census Data Center's Uexplore/Dexter Web Software which pretty much negates the need to parse the raw data myself anymore. Instead I followed the following steps for MCDC's Dexter to generate a nice CSV file for me:

Go to wablocks.sas7bdat (Washington Census 2010 Blocks)
Ignore most of the options, just scroll down to "III. Choose columns (variables)" and choose "Block" on the left and a few variables such as "esriid" (important) and "P12. Sex by Age" on the right and click "Extract Data" and after a few seconds it will take you to a page with a "Delimited File" that you can save and put in Excel or in my case, mangle with a python script to show Population Under 18 Per Acre.

This is far simpler than messing with various perl scripts or whatever for parsing the data from ftp://ftp2.census.gov/ though of course the MCDC project may not be around forever (they don't have older census data for Washington, for example). Unfortunately there are over 35000 census blocks in King County, so the CSV files are about 4MB so I've created just one Kids Per Acre compressed file instead of having the CSV posted to the web. I also found out I needed to make a one-line "CSVT" file to let QGIS know which fields are numeric types (Integer and Real).

Speaking of QGIS, I knew that the maps I produced with R before weren't great, and R was not really intended for that purpose. Therefore I was very glad to find a detailed Tutorial on QGIS, a free and open source system. After installing all the parts and grasping the basics of the interface, I loaded several TIGER shapefile layers for 2010 Census: Census Blocks for Washington, all roads, and Area Hydrography (i.e., water). Then I added my new CSV file, joined it to the blocks, and set the style to my "kpa" (kids per acre) column. Voila.

2011-05-11T16:51:00.000-07:00

City Kids, Cons and Pros

Timothy J. Keller is an unabashed urbanist who believes that cities, and especially urban professionals, exert disproportionate influence on culture throughout the world. He is also an orthodox Presbyterian minister whose best-selling books include The Prodigal God and The Reason for God. On top of all that, he is a parent raising three kids in New York City (on car-free Roosevelt Island). I recently got the chance to listen to a lecture he gave a few years ago titled "[mp3] It Takes a City to Raise a Child" and I think it offers some great insights to urban parents, whether you're religious or not. He focuses somewhat on teens since his kids are that age. Below is a brief summary, but I encourage you to listen to the entire 80 minutes or so.

Dr Keller starts off by stating that New York City is a *better* place to raise a child than suburbs, but to be balanced he would start with 3 cons--and follow with 8 pros:

Con 1: Money. NYC is expensive, especially housing.
Con 2: Logistics of getting around with young children
Con 3: The complex educational environment; difficult to comprehend and decide

Pros:

1. It is the Real World, though not the Hollywood fantasy city of "Friends" that suburban kids think
2. Undercuts the inevitable self-righteous "my parents just don't understand"
3. Children grow up more self-reliant
4. Intuitively handle diversity of class and race vs the homogeneity of suburbs
5. Families get more "facetime" due to shorter commutes and mutually interested social and cultural opportunities. One example was taking teenage son out to favorite pub--there's nothing to do but look at each other and talk.
6. Teens can't imagine being 40 and their peers are uninformed. They imagine being 25. The young adults the city surrounds you with can be good role models.
7. Teens begin to process the complexities of the world with you around to talk to, instead of on their own in college
8. With exceptions, there is less pressure to conform.

Some more points during the Q and A:

His church, Redeemer Presbyterian, needs to do better supporting families, but raising kids can be done without a "youth group". Young adults provided great support to his family.
The difficulty of constantly replenishing circle of friends, both of kids and parents. There is high turnover in our mobile culture, especially in cities. You have to consciously work to "promote B-level acquaintances". However, keep in mind that it is also very difficult to connect with suburban neighbors as well due to mobility.
A city can be any urban area. Of course there is no where else like New York City, but anywhere with density, diversity of class and race, and mixed use is a city.
City kids can develop a "snob" attitude toward others such as relatives that you may need to help them work through.
On danger: there is danger everywhere. NYC is a terrorist target. But it hasn't been a big problem. Danger is an 18 year old male driver.
On "growing up too fast": it's a mixed bag. Yes, urban teens talk about things that don't occur to suburban kids until college, but they also are better at handling all sorts of situations. And an anecdote, when in living in suburban Pennsylvania his 8 year old watched Playboy on cable at a friend's house.
On the difficult early years: kids are a great icebreaker. How much it's worth staying in the city paying an extra $1000/mo for another bedroom is a subjective decision. He focuses on the positives; the joys not trying to coerce people into staying.
It is vitally important to have real relationships with your kids, building character and offsetting immature peer influence
Q: "What about a missional attitude? People don't spend less in the suburbs, they just get a bigger house with yard and a 2nd car. Who asks missionaries about the school district?" A: it's a tension. Saving the world is not for everyone, but also many people are not listening to truth and just trying to live a safe, tidy life.
On materialism: this is a cultural problem and not specific to NYC; in fact, seems better in NYC than many other places (though not compared to the frugal scandinavian midwest)
Intellectualism: depends on child personality. They may need more or less support on self-image/religion/ethics/sexuality.
Being an example of repentance from mistakes like yelling at them versus struggling though and pretending they won't notice

2011-04-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

Kid Density

As a geek, the initial release of US Census 2010 data has left me itching for more detail. In particular I do not find a few percentages about an entire city or region to be all that useful. Cities vary from urban cores to single-family neighborhoods--what differences between the parts can the census data reveal? For example, take the often-repeated statistic that Seattle has a low percentage of children, only 19.8% versus 33% in Washington State. Well, how much does that vary by neighborhood or urban centers and villages? What does it look like in terms of population under 18 per acre, as opposed to a simplistic percentage?

Over at Build the City, Chad did some nice maps of population density and gross housing units per acre. Unfortunately I quickly found that the factfinder2.census.gov website does not provide reports on population under 18 at the census tract or block group level, at least not yet (only the voter redistricting census data has been released so far). So I did what any self-respecting programmer would do and went for the raw data. After some false starts, I generated maps.

Much of Seattle is in the top quartitle, including neighborhoods like Capitol Hill. It's a bit hard to see, but the highest number of kids per acre in King County is the census tract covering Seattle Housing's mixed-income High Point development (New Holly was number two). In other words, Seattle's a great place if you're looking for an area where there are more neighbors with kids rather than only neighbors with kids. But in terms of density here's one tidbit that I kept coming back to:

Location	Tract	Land Area	PopulationUnder 18 Per Acre
Capitol Hill	74.02	249282	2.5
Belltown	80.02	229060	0.9

These two tracts are a couple of the highest density census tracts in Washington State, and are of a similar size. Both are close-in locations with great transit access. Why does Capitol Hill 74.01 have three times the number of kids as Belltown 80.02? To hazard an unscientific guess at the clear preference for Capitol Hill: a wider range of housing types, including family-friendly courtyard apartments; more parks and open space; the presence of nearby public and private schools, including Seattle Public Schools' Accelerated Progress Program (APP) locations; safer streets than Belltown's arterial avenues, some of which carry high-speed one-way traffic; and
a wider variety of businesses, including more grocery stores. Of course, if I were properly researching the question I'd probably do some in-depth interviews with a few parents in each area and use that to develop a larger survey of how families choose one or the other.

I see two lessons for our region.

First, many neighborhoods around the region could benefit from more walkable density--even for families with kids. As Richard Florida recently pointed out, people aren't choosing "between urban and suburban but between neighborhood and subdivision." Outside of urban centers, infill like High Point is the way to go. There is also no reason car-oriented subdivisions couldn't be easily retrofit with courtyard apartments, street calming to provide safe routes to schools and parks, and mixed-use buildings at nearby transit nodes.

Second, as we develop high-density housing in urban centers we need to pay close attention to serving the needs of families with children. Vancouver, BC, has famously succeeded in this partly through its [pdf] High-Density Housing for Families with Children and funding urban schools; as the Puget Sound region's urban centers like South Lake Union and Bel-Red develop over the next decade, we need to make sure they're more like Capitol Hill
than Belltown.

2011-04-17T07:22:00.000-07:00

Population Under 18 Per Acre

I have some raw Census 2010 data, now what? My initial interest was to see what the 2010 data could tell me about The Myth of the Childless City, especially since local media is reporting a low "concentration of households with children" in Seattle.

So how to do that? A while back I ran across an interesting writeup of a little 29-page guide called "Data Mashups in R." It's part of the O'Reilly Short Cuts series of $5 mini-books, and it also happens to be available from SPL's Safari Books Online subscription. I ran through the examples in "Data Mashups in R" to learn a bit about using R, a free software statistics and data graphing environment.

The best part is that R can read Census 2010 TIGER shapefiles to map the data without needing expensive software like ArcGIS. (Thanks Canada! The PBSmapping code was contributed by Pacific Biological Station, Nanaimo, British Columbia.) You can run the code too if you want:

download R at http://cran.r-project.org/
Start R, run this and follow the instructions: install.packages(c("maptools","PBSmapping","XML","RCurl","Hmisc"))
Make sure you have the data files in the current directory. For my code: King County, WA, census tracts TIGER shapefile tl_2010_53033_tract10, modified Census 2010 GEO file kingcounty-wa-geo2010.txt, the original Census 2010 PL 94-171 Redistricting file 2 wa000022010.pl, and my code from under-18-kc-wa.R.
Start R and run with source("under-18-kc-wa.R")

The results? While Seattle does have a lower percentage of population under 18, when measured in population under 18 per acre Seattle census tracts are in the top quartile. In other words, Seattle's a great place if you're looking for an area where there are more neighbors with kids rather than only neighbors with kids. The map below is separated by quartile, and for fun I highlighted the top census tract in green, which is Seattle Housing's High Point mixed-income project.

And for comparison, here is the similar map by percentage:

2011-04-10T12:19:00.000-07:00

Census 2010 Raw Data

Now that the Census 2010 data is out, I thought I'd look at a few trends not covered in the New York Times Census 2010 map. I was disappointed to find that, at least as of April 2010, the Factfinder2 website doesn't provide much detail--only a couple variables are available at the Census Tract level.

So, I did what any geek would do and went straight for the raw data, which is available at ftp://ftp2.census.gov/census_2010/. I vaguely remembered an article from a few years ago, Query Census [2000] Data with RDF, which includes some perl scripts. I probably would have used python myself these days, but no harm. I downloaded the raw 2010 file for Washington state, ftp://ftp2.census.gov/census_2010/01-Redistricting_File--PL_94-171/Washington/wa2010.pl.zip started hacking. I realized the format has changed slightly and so edited the census.pl script to match the variable list found in the only code sample provided by the Census Bureau, pl_all_3_2010.sas. I also changed the script to produce a simple CSV file instead of RDF (I sometimes work with RDF in my day job so didn't feel the need to write SPARQL on the weekends). The result: parse-census-geo2010.pl
./parse-census-geo2010.pl Usage: ./parse-census-geo2010.pl filename [countycode] Examples: ./parse-census-geo2010.pl wageo2010.pl --- will create a list of counties including codes. ./parse-census-geo2010.pl wageo2010.pl 033 --- will output a list of census tracts for county 033. This script takes as input a Census 2010 geo PL_94-171 file Download your state and unzip the file: http://www2.census.gov/census_2010/01-Redistricting_File--PL_94-171/ Output is in the following format: LOGRECNO|GEO_ID2|SUMLEV|NAME|STATE|COUNTY|TRACT|INTPTLAT|INTPTLON|AREALAND|AREAWATR|POP100|HU100 LOGRECNO can be used to read the other PL_94-171 files GEO_ID2 can be used to correlate with TIGER Shapefiles For explanations of the data, I recommend http://factfinder2.census.gov or, read the SAS file from the URL above, pl_all_3_2010.sas The geo PL file also has a lot of additional information about congressional districts, named places, etc. but you will have to edit this script to get them! In particular you want to look at SUMLEV (Summary Level) in Chapter 4 of http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/doc/pl94-171.pdf

2010-06-13T08:20:00.001-07:00

Surprisingly Urban Vancouver WA

Vancouver WA mid-block crossing
Photos tagged Vancouver WA by joshuadf

If you've ever ridden Amtrak or driven on I-5 through Vancouver, WA, you might have shuddered a bit at the parking lots and fast food signs. Hidden just a few blocks away, however, is a surprisingly urban downtown area, we found out during a recent conference.

The livable area is centered around Esther Short Park, which has huge trees, a large playground, a basalt water feature, and the historic Slocum House Theater. You can read more about Esther Short Park at Every Town Deserves its "Square" and From Vandalville to hipster hangout. Like Portland's Pearl District and Seattle's South Lake Union, this area was an early part of the city that fell into industrial use.

After a brewery shut down in 1985 the city of Vancouver began to transform their downtown. Now, in addition to the park there is a large farmer's market with produce, fair food, and crafts; apartments and condos; many restaurants and shops; wide sidewalks and crosswalks; bike lanes and trails to nearby Fort Vancouver and the Columbia River; and Zipcars and C-TRAN bus routes. A new $43m Vancouver Community Library is under construction on donated land, due to open in 2011. One thing missing is a grocery store. Downtown Vancouver has a walkscore of 97, but the closest full service grocery is a Safeway in Portland. They could also use a bike rental shop; I didn't bring my bike with me but it would have been handy.

2010-03-13T08:43:00.001-08:00

Clever title about fair housing goes here

Jarrett at Human Transit:

Transit is the consummate public space, but it's enclosed and constrained by its transport function; more like a cafe than a public square. It's likely to put us in direct contact with difference, including differences we find painful. This is why transit was a major battlefield in struggles over segregation and apartheid. Transit remains a site of anxiety about being near people who are different, and who behave differently.

Would we describe fair housing in the same terms? When looking for a place, we definitely got strong hints about kids being too loud, or about the city not being a good place for kids.

2009-12-29T16:43:00.001-08:00

66-and-slu-trolley
Originally uploaded by joshuadf

Confession: I like the SLU Trolley

When we moved to South Lake Union, I thought I'd never use the trolley. Like most transit in Seattle it goes North-South, but the path from our apartment to work or most shopping is East-West. On top of that, the King County Metro 70 electric trolley bus runs just as often and is 2 blocks closer to our apartment.

But we find ourselves using the streetcar quite a bit, usually to get downtown. My wife pointed out, "I like that I know when the trolley's coming without having to make a phone call. And that the stroller doesn't have to be folded up. It's a lovely ride." Also, despite its reputation for frequent stops, the streetcar has 2 fewer stops than the 70 between Mercer and Pine. By schedule the trolley is a couple minutes slower, but the bus is frequently running behind.

As Human Transit points out, these improvements could, in theory, be made to existing bus routes without the need to install rails or build more trolley maintenance facilities. For example, King County Metro estimated $182m would upgrade all the electric trolley bus routes, though that does not include the larger level-boarding buses. The First Hill Streetcar is estimated at $140m. Unfortunately it's politically harder to change a bus system that you already have than it is to get a landowner to say he "likes the streetcar idea".

2009-12-03T06:58:00.000-08:00

Change of Address

Technology has come a long way. We had to update our address with about a dozen organizations, and the only one without a way to do it online was the WA State Department of Licensing, and even they have a downloadable form. The easiest was the banks (disturbingly), though it was also straightforward for memberships like PCC and The Children's Museum. The Woodland Park Zoo was a little weird; you have to create an account on the website and wait 48 hours for it to be approved before updating your info. I was shocked that the UW Employee Self Service has just one form that goes out to payroll, benefits, and the WA state Health Care Authority! They should get in touch with the Dept of Licensing too. The most interesting was the Ubookstore Customer Rebate account which uses a PIN number printed on every receipt for purchases made with your Husky Card.

One thing did go wrong. Our ORCA card is set to autoload $20 when it runs out. Unfortunately I forgot to update our ORCA billing address, so at the next autoload the transaction was rejected. The weird part: King County Metro set up a special kind of transaction with the credit card company that basically goes through anyway and gives us a loan on the ORCA card. The money has to be repaid to Metro with cash or check, so it can't be done online.

Oh, and if you need our new address, it's on my Facebook profile.

2009-11-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

Leaving Las U-District

After more than 6 years, we've moved out of Seattle's University District. My two kids were born there and we've spent countless hours shopping, playing in parks, or on UW campus. I'll miss all the great local stores, and a few chains like Trader Joe's, and seeing familiar faces on the Ave.

What I always appreciated most about the U-District is the heart for others, from the agencies of the University District Service Providers Alliance to volunteers turning a vacant lot into a community garden to pro bono work by an architect (whose firm is located on the Ave). The charitable feelings aren't universal, of course; the results of the city planning survey [PDF] have quotes about "too many homeless" and so-called "criminals hanging out on University Way." But these complaints happen in any community and are certainly not stopping
positive interactions between the homeless and the non-poor.

2009-09-04T07:25:00.000-07:00

More Compact

"Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions -- Special Report 298", just released by the National Academies, is being widely misread by the press. For example, here's one article: "Forget Curbing Suburban Sprawl: Building denser cities would do little to reduce CO2 emissions."

The report, however, concentrates on "more compact" new development, not on density in existing urban areas. While the authors "identified two locations that have had considerable success in implementing such policies—Portland, Oregon, and Arlington County, Virginia" (66) they decided they were too exceptional to use as examples. Instead, they asked, What if sprawl were a little more compact in places like Atlanta (median lot size 0.58 acres)? Unsurprisingly they found very modest 5-12% reductions in driving. To be honest, I'm surprised it was that much.

Unfortunately I agree with the committee members: on a national level, higher energy prices are the only hope to curb US overconsumption. On the other hand, I feel lucky to live in one of the few areas of the country that is at least trying to implement better solutions.

2009-08-10T16:14:00.000-07:00

Carfree: a misnomer

"No matter what utopian city planners/bureaucrats believe, people still want to own a car."

What sort of vehicle would the quoted person drive, maybe an F-350 with a gun rack? Well, it's an anonymous quote from Living in False Creek North, a report on high-density life in "socialist" Canada, where thousands of people live within a 10-minute walk of daily shopping needs. I see this "green planners hate cars" sentiment a lot in news about transit or high-density development, and it may be because of the misleading term "carfee."

We use a car more than you might expect considering we haven't owned a car for nearly 6 years now: zipcar to a birthday party in the suburbs, rent for a weekend trip, etc. What you won't see us doing is making the kids get in a car for a trip to the park or Children's Museum, because we have better options. I don't mean to say there aren't many challenges, but really a better term might be "car-choice living." Use a car when it makes sense. Take the bus or train when it makes sense. Walk or bike when it makes sense, and work toward it making sense more often.

2009-08-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

Trees

Seattle's tree protection proposal has gotten mixed reviews. In my opinion what we need more than just laws and restrictions: we need a new attitude toward trees and their amazing benefits.

For example, "A sea of green" describes how the Woodland Park Zoo has planted over 4000 trees since 1987 as part of its development, quadrupling its tree canopy while expanding programs. "Removing something that has lived longer than any of us causes us to pause and consider potential alternatives for a long time," said David Selk, Zoo Horticulturist. He cites design considerations that retained mature trees in the new Zoomazium and Education Center.

Unfortunately that thoughtfulness is the exception in Seattle development. In the central U-District, the most common new land use in the last 50 years has been more parking lots. Meanwhile over on UW campus they're winning awards.

2009-07-23T19:58:00.000-07:00

Draft U-District Status Report

Seattle Planning Commission held an "ON-Line Meeting" (survey) about the 2009 draft neighborhood status reports. Here are some thoughts on the statistics in the report for the University Community Urban Center (the area of the U-District targeted for dense housing and jobs, which does not include University Park or Roosevelt Neighbors' Alliance areas).

There are more non-UW jobs than I thought--6000 in the Northwest section and 2500 in the U-Village area up to NE 55th (confusingly called the Ravenna Urban Center Village). Around 2000 of these are Finance/Insurance which surely was Safeco, but also around 2000+ retail and 4000+ services jobs. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised considering the hundreds of dentist offices in the U-District. There are of course also 25000 Education jobs, strangely all listed in the campus section (my guess is that off-campus groups, such as at Roosevelt Commons, are counted by mailing address).
Over 40% of people below the poverty level; this very high level is partially explained by students with no income, but we also have public housing and several homeless shelters in the area. It's always great to see low-income elderly people buying affordable fresh local vegetables at the Farmer's Market.
Very few children--less than 2% under 18. This is the lowest percentage of any of the Urban Centers in Seattle, which is sort of depressing to me (for example, Pike/Pine has 4.5% and Belltown 3.6%). Various studies from other cities, which you can read at the Seattle Center City for Families website, have shown that the biggest factor is lack of appropriate housing, which was certainly our experience when we looked for a 2bd apartment in the U-District. I would not be surprised if there are no 3bd apartments at all. This is especially sad considering UW has the EEU school and museums that busloads of kids visit regularly, plus the area near U-Village has a great city playground, a covered play area at U-Village, and the Blakeley Village UW family courtyard housing. This would be an ideal place for developer incentives for family housing, for example similar to Stockholm's Hammarby Sjöstad (which has small private units with more shared community space).

I don't mean to be negative about the progress that the U-District has made. I especially like the artwork along The Ave (my daughter asking about each art piece reminds me of the kids during Joshua Bell's incognito subway performance), and it's exciting that the University Heights Center for the Community finally owns their building. It's been a great place for my family the past 5 years and I hope to help make it even better.

2009-07-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

Bowling League Optional

Ever been involved in a group and started to get disillusioned? Maybe no one could agree on a plan, or leaders lacked accountability. I've been surprised how often the symptoms are the same whether we're talking about hobby enthusiasts, a church small group, or a neighborhood association. Sometimes we pull ourselves together, but many groups fade into nothing but memories of good times past. There are countless "leadership training" seminars and self-help books on the subject, but in my experience most are focused on leaders or particular tools that don't quite fit my situation.

I'm excited about The Art of Community, a new book that I think puts the focus where it should be: on the people of the community. The author, Jono Bacon, is community manager for a major open source software project, but the book describes a general "distilled set of approaches and thoughts about how to build community." In many ways it is the practical, hands-on followup to The Success of Open Source, which I reviewed for Slashdot back in 2004. In that book, Steven Weber made the point that open source's community building process "may be generalizable" which would "make the consequences of the first-generation Internet seem quaint." I hope he's right and we're entering a new progressive era, because our major societal institutions are still failing.

The Art of Community is in final editing now, and the table of contents and chapter 1 are available on the website (the whole book will be a free download as well).

2009-06-09T21:21:00.000-07:00

I need a Radio

Our internet connection was out all weekend. For the past couple of years we've had Clearwire wireless broadband, mostly to avoid being locked into bundles from the phone or cable monopolies, and this is the first time we'd had trouble. Our wireless modem was completely dead with no lights at all. We quickly realized how completely dependent on the Internet we've become. I even had to call my dad to look up the tech support phone number for me (good thing we have a non-VoIP phone). I was expecting a long time on hold, but the Clearwire tech answered on the second ring and quickly agreed to send out a new modem. For the past few days we've been wondering how we ever got by without email, weather websites, online maps, and so on.

The new modem arrived today and the lights came on but we couldn't get online. I spoke with another friendly tech who was baffled. Eventually I had to get off the phone. Later, I couldn't help tinkering with arp and getting this screenshot from the modem... including the "[D] for Denied" flag from the access points. I called back and asked the woman if perhaps they'd forgotten to add the new modem to my account. She had me read her the serial number from the modem and fixed the problem within minutes.

My main realization from this minor adventure is that we need a battery-operated radio. That way we'd at least be able to hear the emergency broadcast system. I'm also a frequent NPR listener, but always online!

By the way, if anyone reading this is interested in getting Clearwire, I get a referral credit if you use my account code: 138098. It's not available in very many areas of the country yet, but they got a big pile of money last year to build a nationwide network.

2009-05-02T21:08:00.000-07:00

Lessons from Arlington

A while back NPR did a story "Northern Va. Tries New Model To Battle Sprawl" about how the Washington, DC, suburb of Tysons Corner is trying to remake itself into a walkable community. I also read the intriguing fact that one of their models is Arlington, VA, a close-in DC suburb which made this transition 30 years ago.

The weekend I got the chance to watch Arlington’s Smart Growth Journey (free online), a 52-minute documentary that tells the history. In the 1950s civic leaders realized that interstate construction and shopping malls (like in Tysons Corner) threatened to divide its neighborhoods and ruin main street retail. In response Arlington used transit and land use planning to retain single-family neighborhoods while building density in quarter-mile "bulls-eyes" around DC Metrorail stations.

I am somewhat puzzled by how they accomplished this, though. In a slide presentation on the Arlington Community Planning, Housing and Development webpage says they told developers they could get "Increased density in return for building the development we want, where we want it, and building significant amount of the required and desired public improvements." This leaves me with a lot of questions about how Seattle could best do land use planning.

2009-04-06T16:02:00.000-07:00

Housing Appreciation

I noticed a sign advertising a really good rental price on two bedroom apartments at Archstone Belltown (also called Wall Street Tower) so we took a look. The location is unbeatable: right at the intersection of South Lake Union, Denny Triange, and Belltown so it is within walking distance of downtown, Seattle Center, and everything we'd want to do in SLU (work, church, etc.). A large company owns the complex; they keep apartments rented via daily price changes and apparently this is a great time to be looking (one of the staff told us prices are always a bit lower in the early Spring but she hadn't seen prices this low before). The price would have saved us literally thousands of dollars (guaranteed by a year lease and no more than 15% increase after that). And yet... and yet...

We weren't really looking for another new place anyway, and it helped us realize more things that are important to us. When we walked into the apartment to take a look we saw an amazing view of the Space Needle... and smelled industrial strength carpet cleaner. The view was stunning but we wouldn't want our daughter crawling on that (not to mention the offgasing). That means we will have to focus on green or prewar construction. The walk from downtown also underwhelmed us: 5th Ave through Belltown is a "major thoroughfare" and we humans felt out of place. We don't mind spending a little time walking on arterial streets, but I'm not sure we'd want to live at the intersection of several.

2009-03-30T10:36:00.000-07:00

Road Funding

After its defeat in 1955, President Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway System again in 1956 "to relieve existing congestion, to provide for the expected growth of motor vehicle traffic, to strengthen the Nation's defenses, to reduce the toll of human life exacted each year in highway accidents, and to promote economic development." The biggest issue was cost, and to save money "[President Eisenhower's] vision was that the freeways would go around cities, as on the autobahn."

Once it was passed, though, the tune changed: "Everyone who used the road would use it to reach downtown, road planners forecasted. The road, therefore, must be routed directly through heavily populated areas and the central business district in order to entice drivers and to generate the necessary tolls to make it cost-efficient."

So what did we get? The initial cost estimate for the interstate system was $25 billion over 12 years; it ended up costing $114 billion, taking 35 years to complete (and of course the tolls are gone in most places).

2009-01-25T17:37:00.000-08:00

UW Station Area

I just got a beautifully done "Project Update" mailing about SoundTransit's University Link Light Rail which includes the 1/4 mile radius picture above (that's approximately 5 blocks in Seattle). Besides the obvious stadium, here are some highlights:

Union Bay Natural Area, one of the best summer walks in the city
Two major transit transfer points:
- Stevens Way & Okanaogan Pl (on campus)
- NE Pacific St and Pacific Pl NE (in front of UW Medical Center)
School of Engineering which has 6200 students and nearly $100 million in research
UWMedince, which has 16000 employees (some at other locations) and $680 million in research

Though the location has its faults, it has a lot to offer both to the UW community and to Seattle in general.

2009-01-24T09:36:00.000-08:00

My Obama Wishlist

President Obama: since you are apparently reading every blog in the nation, here is my wishlist to add to your priorities (you can put them after "Save the world economy" and "End the slaughter of civilians in the Middle East"):

Encourage Real Food by switching school lunches to local food, organics where possible, and cutting down the $290 billion farm bill, which subsidizes processors like Cargill and ADM. Note this will reduce fossil fuel consumption (via fertilizers and transporting food) as well as make America more healthy.
Build a national transit infrastructure including high speed rail in ideal corridors. Note this is common across the rest of the developed world and China and India are currently building their systems.
Reform Copyright Law so we don't have to jump through ridiculous licensing hoops just to share cultural creations with our friends. While I know Congress has the most to do here, you can appoint a reasonable Librarian of Congress, who sets some copyright policy.

OK bye thanks!

2008-11-24T10:26:00.000-08:00

Older LaserJets and MacOS 10.5 Leopard

If you have a Hewlett-Packard network printer from a few years ago, chances are you haven't been able to print to it in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard because it doesn't have what Apple calls a "Modern Driver." However, I just ran across a way to do it that works great:

In System Preferences / Print & Fax:

Click the "+" to add a new printer
Click on "More Printers" at the top right
Select "HP IP Printing"
Click on "Manual" and enter the IP address.
Click "Connect" and it should find the correct printer details.

I am not sure what all printers work, but at least the HP Color LaserJet 3500n and 3600n work for me.

2008-11-21T13:51:00.000-08:00

More Robots Please

A couple nights ago after dinner Cedar said, "Let's play knights, Daddy!" I had been thinking about the dishes and laundry, but for once I just let it pile up and spent the evening in a wonderful imaginary world, almost like when I was a kid. Unfortunately the chores are not imaginary, but it got me thinking: where are our household robots?

2008-11-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

Michael Waits: An American Hero

There are many Veterans to honor today, but right now I want to tell you about my friend Mike. I went to college with Mike. He came from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, rode a Harley, worked at the auto parts store, and eventually Mike got degrees in Bible and Business. No one was ever sure where he'd end up, but I doubt anyone could have guessed.

In 2003, Mike joined the Peace Corps. He'd been out of grad school a little while with his MBA, and I suppose the truth is he would have taken a job on Wall Street if it had fallen in his lap. But Mike never belonged behind a desk, so he learned French and went to Francophone West Africa. Over the months he sent sporadic emails, the last of which said, "When i first came i couldn't understand how anyone would want to stay longer and now i am very close to deciding to stay another year also. But it is not to be. I have other things to do with my life."
By 2005, I had moved to Seattle and lost touch with Mike, so I was surprised when I got an email in late summer from our friend Shane saying Mike was in basic training at Fort Benning. Mike emailed less from Iraq, but he did send this in October 2007:

So I think about this and history and my conscience and maybe there is some great big motive of money or oil or something. Or maybe it is that we saw the opportunity to overthrow a dictator that was a problem. Or maybe it was something else. But I think about it a lot. I think how much American’s give to charity and trying to do good in the world. And I wonder why the war is being portrayed the way it is. I wonder why there is the negative slant to it in the new I read. I admit that my news consists of Yahoo and a little CNN.com. But anyway. I wonder why the war isn’t being sold as helping people. Why isn’t the boring and mundane efforts of teaching administration, building roads, trying to get different tribes and groups to work together and discuss their problems in the local government in the paper more? Because that is a lot of what we do.

A couple weeks ago Mike emailed to say he's back on base in upstate New York. Welcome back to the USA, Mike. Thank you and Happy Veterans Day.

2008-11-08T08:43:00.000-08:00

New Family Portrait

2008-10-24T20:21:00.000-07:00

Two Ways to Spend More Money on Food

Michael Pollan is at it again with a refreshingly apolitical 16-page letter, "Dear Mr Next President." He points out that the challenges of energy, health, and international stability all have major roots in US food policy, and you can agree on that much whether you're a far-right Christian conservative like Joel Salatin or a liberal Berkeley professor like himself. You, however, do not need to act at the glacial pace of Congress, as long as you're willing to double the amount of money you spend on food:

Buy local when possible, ideally at a farmer's market or u-pick. Prefer organic because chemical fertilizers are major contributor to agricultural use of fossil fuels, which make up a ridiculous 19 percent of the US total.

Buy produce and non-feedlot meat. Since the USDA subsidizes calories, those processed "vitamin enriched" foods are cheap but less healthy.

The cost adds up, so you might want to save a little by eating out less and instead gardening, foraging, and hunting.

2008-10-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Frances Anna!

She was born early this morning (15 October 2008) and all are healthy but tired.

Yes, I'll go put her hat back on to keep warm.

2008-10-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

Unexpected Encouragement

Two of our favorite professors visited us last weekend after a conference in Seattle. To be honest I've grown nervous about having intellectual adults around since more often than not that means Cedar just gets ignored. They took the time to kneel down and speak with her, enjoying not only listening to her but engaging the playful imagination of a 3 year old. They also provided useful perspective on parenting as their sons near adulthood, especially pointing out that an older child often enjoys a break from parental attention. Refreshingly different from the new child section in Naomi Aldort: "Image your spouse bringing home another partner with great and obvious excitement."

2008-10-02T15:32:00.000-07:00

They're after your library catalog

There are things that many library systems do poorly. Do me a favor: go to your local library website, and type in "Anne of Green Gables". If you're lucky, you'll get a nice page like this one from King County Library System with links to similar books, a summary, and so on. More likely you'll get a plainer page like this one from UW. Both of these "integrated library catalog" (ILS) systems cost a very large amount of money. Now look at this page from a completely free ILS: the basics, plus things like a Shelf browser for nearby books and Google Books Preview (with "Buy this book" links). The backstory here is that a few years ago, Georgia looked into a new statewide system and found that the expensive ILS systems didn't meet their needs, and so developed the Evergreen ILS as open source software (OSS). Now an Integrated Library System (ILS) Survey by Linda Riewe tells us that "libraries using open source ILSs are actually a bit more satisfied overall than libraries using proprietary ILSs". Hardly surprising to me. "OSS is of potential interest to librarians because libraries might save money by using it, they may customize it, and because the open source community and librarians share the same values of equal access and freedom of information."

2008-09-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

Did JP Morgan steal WaMu with government help?

I don't pretend to understand high finance, but something seems pretty fishy about the timing of this FDIC seizure of Washington Mutual. JP Morgan has been trying to buy WaMu for a long time (they offered something like $8 a share last year; WaMu was trading at under $2 yesterday). No deals were finalized on Thursday during the trading day, WaMu's new CEO Alan Fishman gets on a plane back to Seattle, and suddenly at 9:15pm the FDIC steps in and gives JP Morgan a deal: pay us $1.9b and get WaMu's $307b in assets? Huh? I hope there is some explanation that I can understand soon.

Update: I guess it is a little odd: Economist says "WaMu’s seizure marks another step-up in regulatory muscle-flexing . . . [going] over the heads of its board and chief executive." Probably for the best considering the combined bank will be carrying tens of billions in option ARM and home-equity loans. Also interesting, the Guardian points out that in October 1907 John Pierpont Morgan helped put together a $35m bailout to stop the Panic of 1907. Let's see... in today's dollars according to the Consumer Price Index, $35m 1907 is about $796b 2007 dollars. Does that big number sound familiar?

2008-09-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

Back in the news: Libraries For All

On May 23, 2004, I was one of many volunteers who helped the crowds through the new Seattle Central Library on opening day. That building and the 26 other branches of Seattle Public Library are back in the news with on time and on budget completion of the $196.4m 'Libraries for All' voters approved in 1998. (What a bargain compared to today's capital costs!) The Seattle Times published an inspiring front-page article: Seattle Public Library celebrates "Libraries For All" in neighborhoods across the city that quotes City Librarian Deborah Jacobs: "We asked people: 'What do you want in your new library?' And we asked that question in every single neighborhood." In his Learning from The Seattle Public Library presentation, Central Library architect Joshua Prince-Ramus said he learned the importance of this process when he hears from new clients: "You listened to us! Let's build it." Update: TED has online video including slides of his presentation Designing the Seattle Public Library.

2008-09-05T15:24:00.000-07:00

Rental Car Insurance update

A couple months ago in an Enterprise rental car we hit a rock on the freeway which caused some wheel damage (and flat tire; by the way no one was hurt and the spare worked fine). It was my first opportunity to see what the claims process was like for our Discover Card $25,000 secondary collision damage insurance.

First, a helpful Enterprise employee provided me an invoice for $192.24, which included a $50 Administrative Fee, $28.49 Loss of Use, and the repair bill for $113.75. Armed with paperwork, I followed Discover's instructions to complete the CHUBB Loss Damage/Collision Damage Waiver Claim Form, including a trip to the bank to get it notarized, and sent it all in. A while later a CHUBB adjuster sent me a letter saying the claim would be closed unless they received a repair estimate within 30 days. I called and yes, she said they needed a repair estimate as well as the copy of the repair invoice I sent it. This was clearly nonsense. She then tried to tell me that they only cover damage "to the vehicle" and not tires, so I pointed out that the repair invoice said "STEEL WHEEL" which is part of the car. She said she would need to double check on that paperwork, so at that point I asked for her supervisor. Of course the supervisor had left for the day, but I got her extension number and called right back to leave her a message. And proceeded to call back every day for the next couple of days until she miraculously answered. The supervisor said it all looked fine and they would issue a check. I was amazed when the check for $113.75 in fact appeared in the mail in just a few days.

So, it was certainly a bit of trouble but honestly not any worse than most insurance providers I've had to deal with (excepting State Farm, whose agents have truly been helpful to me). I do wonder if we would have had the $78.89 in Enterprise fees if we had purchased Enterprise's $16/day collision insurance, but at least in this case I think the extra hassle wasn't a big deal and the credit card coverage saves us money every time we rent a car. For major car damage those fees might be a lot higher, though. I also wonder how the unrelated Zipcar claims process works, though God willing I will never need to know.

Note: If you're wanting to do this, call your credit card provider for details of your coverage; for example Amtrak World MasterCard provides similar coverage, but neither will cover rental trucks or vans. Also, in most states you still need to purchase the Supplemental Liability Protection Insurance ($12/day from Enterprise).

2008-08-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

One Bus Away

The only way car-free living works is good access to transit, which in Seattle's case is still only buses for a few more months. Check out all the bus stops within walking distance of home; not many right by 20th Ave NE, but that's the tradeoff when you live inside a park.

King County Metro makes online information on bus stop locations difficult to find, but now I can do it with One Bus Away, a new mashup website put up by Brian Ferris of UW CS. I can also get real-time info on any stop by calling 206-456-0609 which changes my life. Some technical details in the Seattle: Where is your bus? discussion.

2008-07-14T16:35:00.000-07:00

This is Denny Triangle?

Commuting sucks. I've never really had a commute, except for temp jobs during college breaks. I can get to work on UW South Campus in 15-30 minutes via bus or 30-45 minutes walking. Coming to UW SLU is a different ballgame. I've got to catch a downtown express, then transfer to the blue shuttle or trolley or walk.

Anyway, it's a beautiful day and I wanted to get to know the area so I walked through Denny Triangle on 7th. I did 7th on purpose even though it's really the periphery. I've been hanging out in Cascade mostly (and of course the trolley heads down Westlake) and wanted to see the other side. So I found out that this space between Denny Triangle and Belltown is pretty untouched by new development. Some aging hotels (really motels despite the names--very car-centric), various industrial supply shops, etc. I crossed Denny into SLU and there is the new Borealis (Denny/Dexter), but other than that Dexter is pretty much the same story. One thing that surprised me was that there are art studios on Dexter in SLU. I don't know whether that's old or new or affordable or what.

Overall, coming from the U-District, the most noticible thing to me was that the streets are so wide. Of course Dexter and Westlake are thoroughfares, but they seem even wider than 15th Ave NE or Roosevelt in the U-District, and even side streets like 8th in SLU seem wide to me. It may just be the lack of trees.

2008-06-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

What the heck is Translational Science?

In the past year, I became involved at UW Seattle with a newly funded entity called the Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS). As with most medical research of unknown commercial benefit, our money comes from the US National Institutes of Health, specifically from the Clinical and Translational Science Awards allocated to "reduce the time it takes for laboratory discoveries to become treatments for patients," a process called Translational Science.

Sometimes it's good to have a specific example, though. About a month ago we met with Dr. Cassian Yee, who wanted to get access to certain information from medical records. Our group's little part is to do the technical bit so that every researcher doesn't have to do it themselves, and then deliver the data in a secure manner. What does Dr. Yee want with the data? He wants to cure their advanced stage cancer, too .

2008-06-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

Family Friendly Urban Neighborhoods

This week I went to a focus group hosted by Gary Johnson of the City of Seattle Dept of Planning and Development at the new UW South Lake Union campus (815 Mercer, but the main entrance is actually at 9th and Republican).

Overall it sounds like the city is already working on the major issues: housing, open space, walkability, etc. One very interesting possibility to me was that he mentioned some developers may be putting an enclave including family-sized units along 8th between UW SLU and Denny Park in the next few years. Ideally (but no promises) something along the lines of the International District Village Square II which includes a library and community center.

City of Seattle is working on a website, which I assume will be linked from Center City Seattle Projects. Update: The Seattle Center City for Families website is up with links to a lot of resources.

There is also a little background in this article I found via a web search for Seattle "Family Friendly Urban Neighborhoods": Cities plan for kid-friendly downtowns.

2008-04-29T06:42:00.000-07:00

Having a Toddler

in restaurant. I'm a hungry bumpkin! Man at next table laughs.

Neighbor: Where'd you get that belly button?
Cedar: Trader Joe's.

We're all kittens. Want to say meow meow? Two minutes later. We're all firefighters!

Cedar, to a dog: Do you have a fireplace at your house?

At random times, including church, loudly: The wheels on the bus go round and round!

2008-04-06T14:19:00.000-07:00

I absolutely loved Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food, which makes a readable case for eating much like our ancestors did instead of today's low-fat (or alternatively low-carb) diet. In the afterword he mentions that the book is an expansion of his magazine feature article "Unhappy Meals", so if you want the 20-page version read that. In basic form, In Defense of Food is very similar to the argument made in the introduction to Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions, but without the shill tone and with footnotes to actual published studies. I'd like to think that the FDA is still out for our good, but honestly with commercials claiming "Frosted Flakes are part of a balanced breakfast" (even kids don't believe that) and other absolutely ridiculous "Qualified Health Claims" being made on every major-brand foodlike product I'm not sure if the FDA is in government or marketing. (I realize the FDA is executive branch, but perhaps we could Change Congress to start with.)

2008-03-16T15:37:00.000-07:00

Archiving Digital Stuff

As someone with a MLIS people sometimes ask me about how to keep their digital stuff organized and make sure it stays around. The answer: listen to Jumping Monkeys Episode 38: Archivist Alison. (Preview: there's no easy way.) If you want to skip the pre-interview banter, skip to about 23 minutes in.

2008-03-04T11:36:00.001-08:00

South Lake Union

We did a walk around South Lake Union on Sunday with some people from Union Church Seattle. Amazing contrast between the new ritzy luxury apartments and what's left of the old Cascade neighborhood. More pictures at http://flickr.com/photos/joshuadf/tags/southlakeunion/.

src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3252/2306270644_845b58c5ab.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="DSC07338"/>

2008-02-24T22:09:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, we've been carless since moving to Seattle in '03, and are moderate users of Flexcar (and heavy users of King County Metro). I was a little nervous about the merger with Zipcar since they'd gotten some bad press for insurance--especially since we do not have auto insurance otherwise. (For traditional car rental our credit card offers enough coverage to get by.) Well, two pieces of good news: Flexcar's $300,000 insurance is what the new merged Zipcar will offer, and the Zipcar website (seen to the right) is so much better that I want to cry. It shows more that 4 cars at a time! You can see the closest vehicles to any address! (Flexcar was limited to neighborhood, and I once spent at least an hour on the website finding a car in an area that was on the border between two neighborhoods.) They will even show you what kind of car it is so you don't have to accidentally end up with beastly Scion. And the maps are Google Maps!

2008-02-12T10:45:00.000-08:00

I just listed to this Interview with Cookie Monster and immediately needed a snack. Coincidence?

2007-11-12T10:21:00.000-08:00

Craigslist is awesome

9:12 Free boxes posted

9:45 First call

10:06 Boxes gone

2007-10-12T10:42:00.000-07:00

Hey! Neil before Zod!

Funniest thing I've seen all week: Hey! Neil before Zod!. This reminded me of the Google Stop Words Game and it's interesting to see that Wikipedia does well in the current results (first page for everything except "of"). I wonder if it's their PageRank or if Google specifically ranks them higher, even for meaningless searches like these:

not: 1 of about 3,640,000,000 is To be, or not to be - Wikipedia. It was GNU's Not Unix! with 677,000,000, so obviously they should not have changed their TITLE to "The GNU Operating System".
of: 1 of about 4,410,000,000 is YourDictionary.com
Huh, them again? It was The Library of Congress with 3,720,000,000.
that: 1 of about 2,920,000,000 is Web Pages That Suck which may be a commentary since it was Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters with 1,090,000,000.

a: 1 of about 7,030,000,000 is Links in HTML documents. Ah, makes sense. Wikipedia takes second. It had been YourDictionary.com with 3,390,000,000.
an: 1 of about 3,350,000,000 .an - Wikipedia which had been The Heart: An Online Exploration with 727,000,000.
the: 1 of about 5,230,000,000 is The Onion -
America's Finest News Source and Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is second. Far superior to the old winner, The White House with 5,580,000,000.

2007-10-01T16:13:00.000-07:00

Finally Moving!

We successfully rented a 2-bedroom place. It's been literally months of trying, and it's not surprising: the P-I told us last week that vacancy rate was down to 2.6% in our area of Seattle (3.4% for the whole area; it was 8% in 2002). The only bad news is the hundreds of dollars extra in rent. We'll be residing a few houses from Ravenna Park within the month.

Update: A friend reminded me that since we made the special trip to pick up their old tabletop dishwasher this was inevitable.

2007-08-27T15:19:00.001-07:00

It's a secret to everybody

On the way to our server room today the Zelda 1 theme song popped into my head... and I realized that the Health Sciences is just like a NES dungeon. The G&H Renovation adds gameplay. Path to server room from office:

Up to exit office
Left
Up door (use key card)
Up
Up
Right stair
Up
Right
Right
Right stair
Cross bridge
Right
Down
Right stair
Right
Left door (use key)

2007-07-12T09:41:00.000-07:00

Why I'll eventually buy a used iPhone

For a while I had a Creative mp3 player. It was cheap, did what it needed to, and even had a radio. But it broke, and I never used the radio, so I got a used iPod. It's amazing how much more iPod information and tools are available just because so many millions of people use it. This is already happening with the iPhone DevCamp. Can you imaging these sort of creative apps for any other phone? Or any other handheld for that matter?

2007-06-09T23:02:00.000-07:00

Master of graduation

I'm pleased to announce that Molly is officially a Master of Education. In case you want to read her thesis, here you go: A “Poor Man’s Friend”? A Study of Seattle Public Schools Alongside the Diary of Helen McMicken, 1880-1900 (large PDF). It actually is quite interesting in my opinion, and has some archival photographs of Seattle public schools. Unfortunately none of the graduation photos turned out very good.

The following children* attended the graduation party with parents:
Trevor
Collin
Caleb
Anna Rose
Seth F.
Luke
Cedar
Seth O.
Henry
Walter
Isabel
Ellie W.
Tim

We were sorry that Ewan, Callem, Jude, Max, Gabe, Toby, Ellie S., and Ruthie and their parents couldn't make it, but we had a full house. Very big thanks to Grandmama, Papa Mo, and Grandma Emma for all the prep and cleanup help!

*the majority of whom are around 2 years old

2007-05-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

I HATE MYSPACE

But if you use it and live anywhere near Missouri and would like to see us when we're there from June 20-25, feel free to attend our MySpace event pre-party for Yates-Montgomery wedding. Their party is Saturday the 23rd, we'd like to figure out something. Maybe a camping trip, which should be kid-friendly. My atlas indicates lots of parks near Columbia.

2007-03-14T15:25:00.000-07:00

Beauty, Quality, and Other "Nonessentials"

Whenever I try to make the case for beauty and quality in our built environment, I encounter nods of approval but also a sense of resignation. . . . I've tried to explain how in real dollars we are actually far wealthier today than when most of our beautiful public buildings were built. But somehow this line of reasoning seems too abstract to make any difference, especially when it comes to a discussion of spending any extra money. . . My latest strategy has been to show a picture of an old factory with five smokestacks belching out black smoke. I then ask my audience to imagine a situation in which there exists some legal loophole that allows us to heat and power our church facility by employing the device show in this picture. This setup would save us thousands of dollars in heating and power bills every year. . . . And they invariably agree that we would never do this--even if we were permitted to--because of the pollution, the ugliness, and the smell. We wouldn't want this kind of environment for ourselves, and we wouldn't want to inflict it upon our neighbors. . . . And we are willing to incur higher costs in order to avoid this kind of setting. Why, then, is it so often considered extraneous to hire a competent architect or to use quality materials for the purpose of making our church buildings beautiful and elegant?

--Sidewalks in the Kingdom by Eric O Jacobsen, p. 114

2007-02-28T15:21:00.000-08:00

I needed something similar to commons-exec, which unfortunately looks abandoned. It turns out that all the code is from ant. You can just do
import org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.*;
instead of
import org.apache.commons.exec.*;
The bad news is that ant has a huge API, so you have to sift through all the documentation just to have a better Runtime.exec().

Here is an antExecute testing app, also at http://staff.washington.edu/joshuadf/


import java.io.*;
import org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.*;

public class antExecute {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    String mybin = "/bin/sleep";
    String pwd = "/tmp/";

    String[] cli = {mybin,"4"};

    Long timeout = (long) 2000; // seconds * 1000
    ExecuteWatchdog execwatch = new ExecuteWatchdog(timeout);
    Execute exec = new Execute(new PumpStreamHandler(),execwatch);

    exec.setWorkingDirectory(new File(pwd));
    exec.setCommandline(cli);

    try {
      int exitval = exec.execute();
    } catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }


    if (exec.killedProcess()) {
      System.out.println("watcher killed the process!");
    }

    System.out.println("done");
  }
}

2007-02-26T10:25:00.000-08:00

Online Taxes!

I have to give H&R Block a thumbs-up for making sure their online tax filing works with Mac OS. I used Firefox but they say on 10.4 both Firefox and Safari are supported. Last year I even used Fedora Linux. And, if you have an adjusted income of $52,000 or less, be sure to use the IRS Freefile link to save yourself $10.

2006-11-29T09:50:00.000-08:00

Quick update on Picasa and Blogger, the downgrade was quick and painless. I ran the uninstaller, clicked "No" to the "Remove the Picasa Database?" question, then ran the non-beta installer while crossing my fingers. The older Picasa still understood the database, so I didn't have to re-import gigabytes of pictures. Hooray for backward compatibility!

2006-11-28T15:31:00.000-08:00

I've done it! 10 blog posts in one day!

2006-11-28T14:59:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed a lack of pictures both here and Cedar's blog since last August. This is because Blogger hard-sold me on upgrading to Blogger Beta, and at the time the fact that it didn't work with Picasa was not listed on the known issues page (it was added to the list later). In trying to get it to work I upgraded to a beta version of Picasa which was a mistake. Posting pictures started working, but takes our poor Dell x200 laptop to an unbearable crawl. I need to try downgrading to the release version of Picasa.

2006-11-28T14:49:00.000-08:00

NPR has a new series The Sounds of American Culture that does a little investigative story on items in the
Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Facinating stuff on 'Adagio for Strings,' Jimi, Jerry Lee Lewis, and so on.

2006-11-28T14:31:00.000-08:00

Stardust is my current favorite Gaiman work, probably since I'm a sucker for well-crafted fairy tales. Neil is a continuously positive guy, so I shouldn't be tool hopeful just because he's happy with how the Stardust movie is going. But I am thinking it looks awesome.

2006-11-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

It's still a long way off, but there will be light rail to the U-District. It doesn't hurt that Patty Murray (D-WA) will be the new chair of the Senate Transportation committee. Watch the SoundTransit Photo of the Week for more construction.

2006-11-28T14:18:00.000-08:00

The only thing I hate about going to Capitol Hill is the unreliable bus times. The 43 and 49 run fairly often, but I've seen 3 or more of them in a row more than a few times. I assume they started at different times and all got stuck in traffic somewhere. The other day we were actually at the head of the route, but there was no bus on layover, and none came for about 40 minutes. That was pretty awesome.

2006-11-28T14:06:00.000-08:00

Seattle only got an inch or so of snow (more at higher elevations, and a lot more north of the city) but it's a mess. Some roads were still full of commuter traffic at midnight. Part of it is that drivers lack snow-driving experience, but also all the steep hills and ice. The U-District didn't really get enough to play in.

2006-11-28T13:54:00.000-08:00

I've found audiobooks hit-and-miss since you need both a good story and a good reader, and you can't usually preview them (except a few seconds on iTunes or the publisher's website). That's why the SF Site Audio Reviews Podcast (RSS) is the perfect application of podcasting: an acutal review with excerpts from the audiobook. I'm hoping for
Anansi Boys, read by Lenny Henry (MP3) for Christmas.

2006-11-28T13:40:00.000-08:00

Speaking of fake podcasts, I did make a podcast of the 2006 UPC Mid-Week Lectures. (The official full title is How Can We Trust the Books? Understanding the Ancient Documents of Early Christianity.) I like it since iTunes will label all the mp3s with the podcast title, author, etc. The format of the UPC page was pretty easy to script into RSS, but each page looks different so it has to be done by hand. The real motherload would be the UPC Audio Archive of sermons back to September 1999.

2006-11-28T13:28:00.000-08:00

Dr. Dobb's TechNetCast appears to be dead. The website is still there, but all the archives are 404, "Connection Refused", or 550. I still have the Knuth lectures I mentioned earlier saved on my computer, feel free to email me if you want them. It's too bad since I was going to whip up an RSS feed as a fake podcast.

2006-08-24T14:40:00.000-07:00

I mentioned a while back about my script that edited NPR's RSS, and thought I should post it. However, it was written as a shell script so not pretty. For my reader, this means combining multiple little command-line tools, often written for the original 1970s UNIX. How many little tools? On my current machine, 2557 of them. How do I know that? By using a couple of the little tools: ls /bin/ /usr/bin/ | wc -l

Unfortunately, you never know whether Mac or Linux versions of the tools are going to work the same unless you try. So I decided to re-do it in Python, which is both pretty (for a computer language) and works the same everywhere. It's also got a lot of great learning resources, such as the free online book How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. Here's the code:


#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib
import re

####
## read the whole file into a string; for large file I wouldn't do this
f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=500000")
mystring = f.read()

####
## do the substitutions on the string contents
# Most E-Mailed Stories for Saturday, 19 Aug 2006 -> 06Aug19 Satur
mystring = re.sub( '(.*)day, (..) (...) 20(..)', '\4\3\2 \1',mystring)
# fix in case "Aug 19" instead of "19 Aug"
mystring = re.sub( '(.*)day, (...) (..) 20(..)', '\4\2\3 \1',mystring)
mystring = re.sub( 'Most E-Mailed Stories for ', '',mystring)
# delete the XSL transform line, so Firefox shows the XML
mystring = re.sub( '.*XSL_formatting.*', '',mystring)
mystring = re.sub( 'NPR: Most ', 'NPR: Short-title Most ',mystring)

####
# dump it to STDOUT
print mystring

And here's the original for comparison:


#!/bin/sh
NFILE="$HOME/public_html/rss/npr.xml"
wget -q 'http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=500000' -O - |\
# NPR: Most E-Mailed Stories for Monday, 01 Aug 2006
# NPR: Most E-Mailed Stories for Monday, Aug 01 2006
# -> "NPR 06Aug01 Mon"
# then change title
# then delete XSL reference
xmllint - --format |\
  sed -e 's;Most E-Mailed Stories for \(.*\)day, \(..\) \(...\) 20\(..\);\4\3\2 \1;g' |\
  sed -e 's;Most E-Mailed Stories for \(.*\)day, \(...\) \(..\) 20\(..\);\4\2\3 \1;g' |\
  sed -e 's;NPR: Most ;NPR: Short-title Most ;g' |\
  sed -e '/.*XSL_formatting.*/d' > $NFILE

2006-06-16T17:31:00.000-07:00

10 Years of Driving: 1994-2003

2006-04-15T21:47:00.000-07:00

Party Like It's 2009

I'm sure this is pathetic, but I'm really excited for the Seattle light rail to open in 2009, and there are two peices of good news this week: Soundtransit found money to get light rail to Sea-Tac and not just really close, and it looks like planning for the North Link to UW is progressing. I'm hearing 20 hrs a day of service (maybe not 1-5 AM?) with trains every 7.5 minutes at peak, slowing to every 10 or 15 minutes otherwise, and it looks like it runs on weekends (in the tunnel, in the rainy winter). Maybe some people are right about light rail being more expensive than it's worth, but the simplicity and lack of traffic interference (viz-a-viz bus) will be very nice.

Oh yeah, pictures-pictures at http://www.soundtransit.org/slideshow/soundtransit.html

2006-04-11T20:17:00.000-07:00

So recently a rambling friend from college brought up that there is much taxation of and little representation for bearded beer and coffee lovers. This is true and I support direct representation of this sort. Perhaps it would help get the "Legalize Cannibalism" movement going. (A side note: the geographical representation demanded by US colonists was just as odd an idea to the 18th Century British, who practiced Virtual Representation and lived with many bizarre voting districts for more than 50 years after the US Revolution.)

2006-04-01T20:15:00.000-08:00

The Cure for Information Overload is finally available.

2006-03-21T20:04:00.000-08:00

I really like the NPR: Most Emailed Stories Podcast; it's a regular dose of great NPR stories, slightly filtered by popularity. However, there's a problem with it if you don't listen every day: the title is so long and poorly constructed that different episodes appear as just "NPR: Most E-Mailed..." In fact, it's even worse since the full title is something like "NPR: Most E-Mailed Stories for Wednesday, 22 March 2006," so "Wednesday, 15 March 2006" appears right next to it. After thinking of complex ways of changing the title each day, I realized there's an obvious solution: a little script that downloads the RSS feed daily and changes the title to something like "NPR: 06Mar22 Wednes." Now I just subscribe to my new NPR: Short-title Most Emailed Stories Podcast.

2006-01-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

One of the 11 (there went my time!) books I got over the holidays was Donald Knuth's 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated which I'm really enjoying. The calligraphy is unbelievable (there's a PDF sample by Hermann Zapf at Knuth's website).

In browsing around I also found that Knuth did a related 7-part series at MIT called "God and Computer Science" (online audio and video). I wouldn't call Knuth a dynamic speaker, but he certainly has interesting things to say. Unfortunately it was a lot of trouble to download the mp3s to listen on the go since the files are hidden in a tnc_play.m3u CGI and have totally uninformative filenames with no ID3. I came up with this little script, perhaps it will save someone else some trouble--works on Mac or most any other OS via curl:


#!/bin/sh
# http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_catalog.html?item_id=421
curl -o knuth-God_and_Computers-introdution-158.mp3 -O http://media.cmpnet.com/technetcast/tnc_mit_dk_01_03.mp3
curl -o knuth-God_and_Computers-randomization-160.mp3 -O http://media.cmpnet.com/technetcast/pgm0050/160_24a.mp3
curl -o knuth-God_and_Computers-language-168.mp3 -O http://media.cmpnet.com/technetcast/pgm0050/168_24a.mp3
curl -o knuth-God_and_Computers-aesthetics-173.mp3 -O http://media.cmpnet.com/technetcast/pgm0050/173_24a.mp3
curl -o knuth-God_and_Computers-panel-181.mp3 -O http://media.cmpnet.com/technetcast/pgm0050/181_24a.mp3
curl -o knuth-God_and_Computers-glipses-189.mp3 -O http://media.cmpnet.com/technetcast/pgm0050/dk_24a.mp3
curl -o knuth-God_and_Computers-conclusion-190.mp3 -O http://media.cmpnet.com/technetcast/pgm0050/190_24a.mp3

2005-12-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

According to the Google Blog:

Hugging for 20 seconds has been shown to reduce blood pressure.

I grabbed a guy on the street and held him for 21 seconds, but I don't feel any better. Any suggestions?

2005-12-01T18:15:00.000-08:00

Got a flyer from my state representative today, with the following statistics:

54.9% Retail
18.7% Business and Occupational
10.5% Property
...

35%DSHS
27% Public Schools
16% Higher Education
...

Interesting, no idea we were taxing schools to pay for retail sales now.

2005-07-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

Join us in welcoming Cedar Grace Franklin into this world! She was born
at 1:56 AM today (July 13, 2005), weighing 6 lbs. 11 oz. and 19" long.
Everyone is healthy and doing great at the UW Medical Center.
Update: There is now a Welcome Cedar Grace Franklin slideshow on Flickr.

2005-04-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

Fortification of Learning #1 - UW Gerberding Hall

2005-04-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

Fortification of Learning #2 - UW Miller Hall

2005-04-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

Fortification of Learning #3 - UW Music Building

2005-03-13T12:01:00.000-08:00

UW Intensifies Siege on Johnson Hall

March 11, 2005

SEATTLE - The siege of Johnson Hall entered a new phase today as UW
unvieled a new blue weapon against the hardhat barbarians who have
occupied the former geosciences building. This marks the first major
action in the conflict since the UWMC put up an impassable cyclone
fence around the perimeter.

UW Provost for Defense John Graham denied reports that this was a sign
that UW believed the siege strategy might be failing and was close to
giving up. "Full normalisation of relations with Johnson Hall -
diplomatic recognition, open trade and a robust aid program - will only
be possible when it has a new government that is fully democratic, when
the rule of law is respected and when human rights are fully protected,"
Mr. Graham said.

The hardhat barbarians are an obscure group of malcontents that occupied
Johnson Hall last year. Since then, they have been smashing windows and
driving vehicles around within the building. The UW has mostly contained
their activities, though there have been reports that individuals and
small groups are frequently able to escape during the early evening.

2005-01-18T20:09:00.000-08:00

So this post is mainly to testing out Picasa's functionality... for those of you who don't know, it's a digital photo management thingy. Google bought a bunch of little companies, including Blogger (who hosts this site) and Picasa, and is doing interesting stuff with them. They just released version 2 of Picasa which has integrated support for posting pictures to a Blogger blog and/or emailing them with Gmail. Fairly nice.

Now, why do I have a picture of a cut up Tolkien Artist and Illustrator? I have to admit, I cut it up (with Molly's help). But it was a good reason! When we were moving from Arkansas in 2003 we had some stuff in storage, and there was a flash flood. Sadly some boxes of books were on the bottom and so some, including several Tolkien books, were damaged. This Tolkien Artist and Illustrator seemed particularly bad--though the water got only the sides, the pages were so warped that there was no longer any way to open it. I couldn't bear to throw it out, though, so it's been on the shelf for the last year and a half. With the knowledge of bookmaking I gained a class last quarter with Sandra Kroupa and David Levy, though, I thought now was the time to take it apart. I cut off enough of the spine and glue to reveal the signatures (the gatherings of folded pages you can usually see by looking down at the end of the spine). Then, I peeled off each of the signatures and Molly and I were able to get at the pages from inside, which wasn't warped shut. Then, a little pushing at the warped edges and viola! Now we have a complete and sort-of readable copy again. We decided to use the excellent illustrations as crafty materials, though, and buy another copy for the book's text.

2004-12-28T20:52:00.000-08:00

Wing and Moon

2004-12-06T21:13:00.000-08:00

Ah yes, the University Motor Pool.

2004-12-04T17:44:00.000-08:00

So we've been back in the States for several months now. We made it and miraculously so did the suitcases, though it was somewhat expensive at times.

My Togo picture pages tell it better than I can here (worth thousands of word, etc.). Here's one to pique your interest:

Kara, Togo, West Africa

2004-12-02T22:24:00.000-08:00

I forgot I was writing a sort-of journal while on that summer trip and ran across it. I thought I'd might as well put it here:


      July 2004

   September 2004

Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 

         21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7

 8  9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31  1  2  3  4

 5  6  7  8  9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

This train is for COCKFOSTERS
22 July
We walked out of customs at about 9:30 AM Thursday morning and
went to pick up our luggage. We wasted about half an hour there
waiting at the wrong baggage carosel (oh, it was the *other*
American Airlines flight from New York that just came in), then
immediately took the suitcase to left luggage since we won't
need it in London. Then, we followed the signage to the nearest
Underground station. One good lesson: always talk to the Information
people. A guy told us about the L17 week-long Travelcard which
was a lot better deal than what I'd been able to find on the Transport
for London website. Then it was onto the Picadilly Line where we were
greeted with an electronic marquee and a friendly voice: "This train
is for COCKFOSTERS." (That is, Cockfosters is the last stop.)
Our reservations were at Acacia Hostel in South Kensington,
and we arrived there about 11:45 AM. The friendly lady there told
us that they were overbooked, so she had an offer for us (I assume
since we were probably the first new checkins of the day): Acacia
Hostel has a partner hotel, Chelsea House, about 15 minutes away
and we could have a room there at the hostel rate. London hotels
are insanely expensive, so that was a great offer. Chelsea House
put us in the basement, which I suppose is fair, but we've got a
private room with our own bathroom and refridgerator. The only
downside is that we are a little farther from museums and downtown,
and there's no kitchen for cooking our own hot meals. Anyway, we
didn't feel like really going into town after finally getting
settled, so we just wandered around Kensington and Chelsea (which we
found to be miles and miles of very similar rowhouses) and walked
along the Thames by Battersea Bridge.

6 Rooms in 7 Hours
23 July
Molly had the fine idea that the best place to start our museum
haunting would be at the Museum of London, so we'd at least have an
idea of the city itself. The only problem is how much city history
there is. We actually made it through quite a bit; I'd gotten through
the Pre-settlement, Roman, and part of the Saxon rooms before
lunchtime. By a little before 5 PM, we'd both gotten through those,
the Middle Ages, and the Stuarts up to the Great Fire of 1666. We
decided to call it a day and went to St. Paul's for Evensong. I
decided that Sir Christopher Wren was an excellent architect (and
mathematician), but could use some pointers on accoustics.

Regent's Park
24 July
London simply has too much to see for one trip. We knew this before
coming, and so planned on just doing what we were interested in and
trying to avoid burnout. Having spent the whole previous day at one
museum, this seemed like a great opportunity for one of London's green
spaces. We had seen an intriguing picture of some big trees at
Regent's Park on the cover of a London guidebook at the library, so
that was the destination. We actually ended up at the Baker Street
Underground station (of Sherlock Holmes fame), and walked past huge
lines of tourists at Madame Toussaud's Wax Museum to get to the park.
It's a large park, full of everything from formal gardens, sports
fields, and the London Zoo to long-grassed fields and a waterfowl-filled
lake. We spent several hours sitting and reading under a tree by the
lake, and I walked around a bit and saw several species of swan,
along with of course many pidgeons, ducks, and geese. We finished the
day at Trafalgar Square, where they were supposed to be doing
something for the opening of Millennium 3 but it didn't turn out.

The British Museum
25 July
We tried to do the most overwhelming single attraction, The British
Museum, and I think we were more or less successful. We took our
guidebook's advice and each picked 3 rooms, which took around 2 hours.
I looked mainly at Britain stuff, from the Romans and Celts to
Mideival. By that time the crowds started pouring in, so we decided
to call it a day and headed East to Liverpool Station. From there we
walked first to Old Spitalfields Market, a kind of crafts market, then
to Bethnal Green and the Museum of Childhood. It's a small but very
interesting museum if you like games, dolls, or other toys. And the
best part is, you can throw trash into the mouths of the animal-shaped
trash bins.

Busy Day Number 1
26 July
There was plenty left to see at the British Museum, so we started
off the day with another couple of hours there. It's interesting that
a lot of the collections from the Ancient Near East (Assyrian,
Babylonian) were discovered by 19th Century Europeans who were
looking for stuff to bring back. I had always thought people had
known where places like Nimrud were for a long time, and the British
Museum had just ransacked them. Actually early archeologists tracked
down the sites and excavated the temples, then took everything.
Better than destruction by souvenier-seekers or not? Who knows. After
the British Museum started getting too overcrowded with tourists
(by a little after noon) we were ready to leave. I couldn't
visit London without a trip to the British Library (their version of
the Library of Congress), so we walked up to St. Pancras and took a
quick look. I didn't want to take much time, so I didn't apply for
readership privledges so the reading rooms will have to wait for
another trip. It's nice in a 1990's building kind of way. From there
we took the Underground to one of the highlights of the trip: the
reconstruction of The Globe, the theater where many of Shakespeare's
plays were first performed. There's a great museum and a tour of the
theater itself, which was built using early 17th Century methods and
is also in use. The museum was much better and more extensive than I'd
expected; it has a lot about life in Tudor London and, of course, the
pre-English Civil War theater. Highly recommended. Lastly we went on
one of the London Walks, a 2-hour tour of Westminster in this case.
Interesting commentary and it was around sunset, a great time of day
for looking at the Parliament building.

Last Day in London
27 July
Tate Gallery, Samuel Johnson's house, Underground at 6 PM.

I feel like we more or less randomly chose one of the many museums
left--the Tate Britain Gallery, an art museum with collections
relating to Britain (as opposed to the National Gallery or Tate
Modern Gallery). Unfortunately the Underground was delayed so we took
an extra hour to get there, but still plenty of time before any big
crowds. Molly liked a room themed "Innocence of Childhood." We also
had an interesting walking tour introducing the historical development
of perspective. From the Tate Britain, which is near the Thames south
of Westminster, we walked around a bit and eventually ended up at Dr.
Samuel Johnson's house, which is off Fleet St. It is privately owned
and has a lot of interesting memorabilia and fact sheets about the
Great Cham and his times. The biggest reason for coming, though, was
to see the upstairs room where he and his assistants compiled his
famous Dictionary. Since we were close to a lot of famous sites,
afterward we walked around a bit and saw things like the Old Bailey
and the site of Newgate Prison. After that we were very tired and
tried to take the Underground; unfortunately, it was about 6 PM and
the station was crazy and completely packed with commuters, so we
decided to hoof it after relaxing a bit in a park.

To Ghana
28 July
It was an interesting experience getting to Ghana today. In so many
ways it was unlike every airplane journey I've taken, though the
mechanics were pretty similar. First, this was our first time flying
out of Heathrow, so we had to figure out where to check in. Second,
we'd left some luggage in storage (in another terminal, of course) so
I had to take the exciting multiterminal trip to retrieve it and get
back. We waited in the long slow line to check in--no quick machines
for flights to Accra (we were also flying British Airways, which
operates approximately simultaneous 10000 flights out of Heathrow).
Security was less of a circus than in US airports. Then, acting on
advice that malaria-carrying mosquitos might greet us on the runway,
we sprayed ourselves down with DEET bug repellant. Once we were
actually on the airplane for the six and a half hour flight, I had
some time to think. Normally I'm pretty excited to be going to a new
place, but this time I wasn't really. It seemed like the first night
(really the few days there) were going to be an unfamiliar hassle. I
had done my homework with guidebooks and knew more or less what to do,
but that didn't make it any nicer. There were no problems with customs
(who had nice new Dells with software to check our passports and
visas, by the way), so then we went out of the international arrivals
section into the main part of the airport. Several people in a sort of
uniform were there to greet us; at first I naively assumed they were
airport staff, but then one guy started helping me push our luggage
cart and asking if we needed a taxi. In fact we did, so I suppose this
was helpful, but I think I could have found them on my own. Then, as
the guidebooks warned, the taxi driver wanted about 3 times an average
fare just because we were coming from the airport. I thought maybe I
could bargain a little, but he was very uncooperative. Oh well, it's
only one first time from the airport. Next time we'll take the advice
and get a hotel that will pick us up. For some reason Molly and I were
interested in really experiencing Ghana, so I'd picked the Hotel de
California, one of the shoestring budget accommodations listed in our
guide. It was an older building and honestly I think I'd have been
more or less happy with the room except that the bed was very lumpy
and did not make for good sleeping. Molly was also very concerned with
the dirty carpet, and the leaky toilet tank didn't help anything. But,
we'd made it into the country and it was near bedtime.

First Day in Ghana
29 July
Our morning mission was to find a new hotel and hopefully a better map
than the very basic one that came with the guidebook. Perhaps due to
that map, I took us on a wrong turn and we took the scenic route to
other guidebook-recommended hotels. The good news is that we got to
see a lot of Accra neighborhoods and found a hotel. The bad news is
that Accra is full of traffic and therefore exhaust. Perhaps our most
interesting experience was at lunch, which we had at a bar/restaurant
near Nkrumah Circle. After we'd finished as much of the huge hot plate
of food as we wanted, a lady came over and started talking to us. She
told us sometime we should try Fu Fu, a Ghanian specialty, and told us
our Ghanian names, which depend on the day of the week you were born.
(Unfortunately we forgot ours already.) Then she asked us if we were
finished and if she could take the food. When we said yes, she took it
to the next table and began to eat it! It was actually pretty nice to
know the food wasn't wasted, but it was still a rather surreal
experience to have it happen right there. The only other news of note
is that we found Busy Internet, a recommended Internet cafe (fast sat
link), and emailed.

30 July
Though we saw a bit of Accra yesterday, this was our first real day of
sightseeing. I more or less knew where we were and where the National
Museum was, so we went there. The building itself dates from around
Ghana's independence 1957 and it doesn't look like significant work
had been done since then. The Museum is much smaller than most
historical/ethnographic museums I've been to, but it is quite
interesting. The building unfortunately lacks climate control, which
means at least some of the wooden artifacts are deteriorating. There
were two good exhibits on the slave trade. One featuring an in-depth
look at a slave ship's trip from Europe to what is now Ghana to the
Carribean and back to Europe. The other was a more eclectic look at
many of slavery's disturbing side effects, including slowing native
societies' political and economic growth to a crawl. A telling example
of how far the slave trade twisted the West African economy was a
display about expiditions the British had to lead against slave
raiders in the interior after emancipation--raiders, whose careers
basically focused on kidnapping whoever they could, had become a
significant part of interior lifestyle. After leaving the Museum, we
ate at the Edvy Restaurant next door and then walked around some more.
We happened by the Accra campus of the University of Ghana, located of
Barnes Road just south of the museum, and got some books on Ghanaian
and West African history at their bookstore. I hope to get time to
read through them while in Togo to get a better understanding of the
area.

31 July
We unfortunately couldn't really think of much to do on Saturday since
the two main attractions left on our list of things to do (the Du Bois
Centre and University of Ghana) were closed. So we spent some more
time at Busy Internet then pretty much lazed around all day. We
watched some local television which was interesting. A couple of the
main stories were on the World Council of Reformed Churches
conference (in Accra at the same time we were), and a Church of Christ
well-building initiative that was providing clean water in some rural
areas. Ghana has a very large Christian population, but still it was
intriguing to see that on the national news. Molly also noticed,
however, that all the news seemed suspiciously positive and
congratulatory.

1 August
We thought it would be silly to waste two of our six days in Accra
doing basically nothing, so we decided to walk down and see what the
waterfront looks like. We went to James Town, one of the oldest areas
of the city and today known for its pushy markets. Since we didn't
want to buy anything, luckily today was a Sunday so it wasn't so crazy.
There are two forts in the area, the British James Fort and the
Dutch Ussher Fort, and a lighthouse. Both were built as trading forts,
but added dungeons for the lucrative slave trade. Neither is open to
the public, though there are plans to turn James Fort into a museum
about the slave trade. Unfortunately, Accra's waterfront is full of
trash (either just lying on the ground or in a pile being burned), so
we never went down to the actual beach, though we did sit on some
rocks and enjoyed watching the tide for a few minutes (well, enjoyed
it when the smell of burning trash wasn't blowing our way). From there
we could see the third fort of Accra, which is now known as simply The
Castle and is the seat of Ghana's government. Originally it was Fort
Christiansborg, the Danish colonial capital on the Gulf of Guinea
until Denmark sold all their local colonial possessions to Britain in
1850. It is also famous as the site of the 28 February 1948 massacre
of African WWII veterans by colonial police. Then we walked up to
Independence Square, where tens of thousands of Reformed church
conference attendees were just leaving the stadium. We ate lunch at
the rundown but nice Riviera Beach Hotel, then took a taxi back to the
hotel. This is a good time to say something about the transit options
in Accra. There are a ridiculously large number of taxis, I've thought
of a few unlikely reasons why but I'd really like to know the truth.
Anyway, it is very easy to catch a ride, and according to our
guidebook it's no problem to share a ride with several people and
split the fare. The other option is the packed minivans called
tro-tros, which stop at major intersections and landmarks throughout
the city. We don't plan on using them, on advice that it puts one at
much higher risk of airborne diseases, anything from colds to
tuberculosis. Tro-tros are apparently all privately owned and often
very old; it wasn't uncommon to see one on the side of the road being
fixed. The taxis also seem to be all independent, though I could
easily be wrong. Anyway, so we tried to take a taxi to the place where
Don, our brother-in-law, would be staying the next night in order to
leave him a note about where we are. I had the address and found the
street on the map, so thought it wouldn't be any problem. Well, it
turns out that street names are not used very often. Additionally,
since Accra grew up slowly from several towns over a long period of
time, streets turn in virtually every direction. To make a long story
shorter, we never found it any eventually had the cabbie take us back
to the hotel. When we got back, I discovered that we might have found
it anyway had I not transposed two numbers in the address, but just in
case we called the place and got good directions for next time.

2 August
Finally it was Monday and the Du Bois Centre was open again. In the
last years of his life, Ghana's President Nkrumah invited famed
African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois to come to Ghana and edit the
Encyclopedia Africana. Du Bois had long wanted to work and eventually
find his final resting place in Africa, and so moved to Accra in 1961.
He died in 1963. Today his home is a museum and research center for
Pan-Africanism. We took the guided tour and saw Dr. Du Bois' personal
library (which was climate controlled) and many other artifacts,
including a very interesting Chinese wall-hanging with a symbolic
representation of Dr. Du Bois' life. Unfortunately the Centre does not
appear very well-funded, though that is often the case in West Africa.
After leaving, we began using the directions we got the night before
to again try to leave Don a note. Along the way we stopped at a Shell
station to buy some water and I bought the best map I have yet seen of
Accra, put out by Surf Publications, who state in the introductory
note: "We also believe that in providing this map, Ghanaians will
begin to appreciate the usage of street names in giving directions."
We sent a few postcards from the nearby post office (after finally
getting the rude postal worker to sell us some stamps), and with the
help of the new map and our directions, successfully left Don a note.
We walked down to Cantonments Road, site of expatriot attractions such
as fast food restaurants and the Koala grocery store. After Chinese
for lunch and some more walking, we took a taxi back to the hotel.
Don called and invited us out to eat at Champ's, a sports bar and
Mexican restaurant, with their interns, who were leaving the country the
next day. It was fun to talk with them a bit. We made arrangements for
Don to pick us up the next day, and then spent our last night at the
hotel.

To Togo
3 August
Don picked us up early, hoping that we could get an early start. Since
he's been to Accra quite a bit, he took us to a cafe popular with
expatriots, which felt much more European than the places we'd been.
Then we went grocery shopping at Koala, a small but very nice grocery
store on Cantonments Road. You really could almost forget that you
were in Africa. Then we headed out of town for the 10-hour drive to
Kara. It was mostly uneventful, there was some nice scenery along the
way and we got a couple more stamps on our passports. The weirdest
part, I suppose, was realizing once we were in Togo that we'd be able
to communicate with very few people since French is the national
language. We got in between 6 and 7 PM, just as the last light was
fading. It was great to see Jane and the kids and unwind a bit from
the day of riding.

4 August
Well, now here we are in Togo. It's a totally different experience
living in a house with Americans than it was wandering around Accra
and interacting almost exclusively with Ghanaians. Of course, if we
were still in the United States it would be a lot different living
with someone instead of just visiting, too. Kara is a smallish city,
Don said he'd heard about 90,000 permanent residents but that it could
easily be three times than number on a market day when people come
from all over the surrounding area. We walked down to the schoolhouse
that the Togo team is using during the year which was nice to see.
Molly's going to do a little program with the team's kids there later
on in August.

5 August
I'm already feeling settled in. It feels a lot more like home when you
can just get up, take a shower and eat something, hang out and read,
play with the kids, and so on. We'll go around a bit while we're here,
of course, but I'm not feeling rushed to see some famous site or do
something I've heard about.

Allergies
7 August
You know, when you travel to Africa you make sure to get all the
important medications (malaria preventatives, etc.) but you might
not think of all the everyday things. One of those is allergy
medicine. I don't have bad allergies, so it didn't occur to me to
bring anything. I've had a more or less constant bit of sinus drainage
the six days we've been here. I actually don't have any right to
complain since my sister-in-law has it a lot worse; she's been
sneezing quite a lot. Still, I hope that I get used to it or that it
stops (I'm not actually sure that it's allergies--it might just
be my body getting used to the dust and humidity).

Family Vacation
8 August
Tomorrow the West Africa Missionaries' Retreat (WAMR) starts, and the
whole family is going. With four kids 5 and under, this is quite a
production but it went suprisingly smoothly. It being Sunday, we
started out the day by going to Te, one of the villages where Don
leads leadership training seminars. They have a small locally-built
church building there, with a wood frame, grass walls and roof, and a
bamboo door. Even though we can't speak the language, it was nice to
be at a worship service. Afterward we got on the road to go about 6
hours south to Kpalime (pronounced 'pah-lee-may') which is more or
less halfway to the place where WAMR is this year. We stopped for
lunch at a small hotel and restaurant along the main north-south Togo
highway and Jane and Don were suprised to find that it was run by
Kabiye. Apparently these were some of the Kabiye who moved farther
south for various reasons (farm land, government road-building jobs,
etc.). Eventually we got to Kpalime, where we stayed at the very nice
Chez Fanny Hotel, which is run by friendly French expatriots.

9 August
Today we continued our trip, crossing the border into Ghana and
passing through Accra to get to WAMR. Traffic got much heavier around
Tema, a planned seaport city right on the Prime Meridian. We stopped
in Accra at a grocery and food court complex popular with expatriots,
where we happened to meet another missionary family from southern Togo
who were also on the way to the retreat. Then it was a very slow
couple of hours along the infamous Ghana Coast Highway, where traffic
is so heavy and the potholes so dense that it made the busy Togo
roads seem nice. The only redeeming quality was that there was very
progessed road construction that followed beside the highway that
showed that it soon should be much wider, flatter, and smoother.
Perhaps that will help with the traffic, too. Finally we arrived at
the beach hotel, which I think is called Till's but I've also seen the
name White Sands (business names aren't that important in West
Africa).

West Africa Missionaries' Retreat
10 August
It is interesting to be in Ghana with around 40 other Americans at
this West Africa Missionaries' Retreat. Some are on teams much like
the one in northern Togo, others are involved in medical work, and
there are some former missionaries (and the hangers-on like us). As
far as I understand it, for a lot of them this retreat is the only
time during the year that many of them get the kind of teaching that
we're used to in the USA. Of course, it's also a vacation and a great
chance to unwind. Missions really is a tough career; there are very
high expectations, all the challenges of being an expatriot, and
usually a fairly long commitment at one job. It seems to be quite an
encouragement to have the former missionaries around as well. The
place itself is pretty nice, right on the ocean with palm trees and
big waves and everything.

Back in Accra
13 August
During our earlier stay in Accra, I didn't think it was that great. I
mean, there were some interesting sights and all, but not that much to
see. Coming from London was probably part of the problem. After living
in Kara for a week and getting a general idea of how things are with
the in-laws, though, I can definitely see why Accra is a Mecca for
Americans living in West Africa. There are two small Western-style
grocery stores, with things like jars of peanut butter. There are
several decent restaurants, and world-class resort hotels (even if
you're not staying there, you can pay to use the pool or get your hair
done at the salon). For us non-French speakers, it was nice to get
some readable news. And, naturally, since we were travelling at the
same time as other friends it was fun to enjoy Accra together. I think
about half the people from WAMR were at the guest house. According to
Jane and Don, another nice thing about Ghana is that people seem much
more optimistic about the future than in Togo, too.

University of Ghana
14 August
It turns out that the place we're staying is within walking distance
of the main campus of the University of Ghana, which makes me happy
since that's one of the things we hadn't gotten the chance to do when
in Accra before. We walked up there on Saturday morning, expecting
nothing to be open, but suprsingly the campus bookstore opens at 8:30
AM! The library was also open early, so I took a quick look around.
It's not that big for a large university, though I suspect that's
probably normal in Africa. Shelving was pretty normal, no climate
control but at least the book spines were perpendicular to the
windows. It looks like the checkout system is automated (bar codes on
all the books), but the physical card catalog is still used; the only
computers I saw were at the checkout desk. I didn't have time to look
over the collection, of course, but I saw a couple of recent books.
The building itself is nice, a sort of cross between colonial and
Japanese architecture (I stupidly forgot to bring the camera). It's
white stucco with a big clock tower, but also a wide pagoda with
ceramic tile roof. The bookstore was also a nice suprise. It's by far
the best bookstore I've been to in Accra, though obviously with an
academic bent. (I've heard Omari Computer Training's bookshop is also
good, but it was under renovation when we were there.) I picked up a
couple interesting-looking books and magazines, including the 2002
edition of Ghana Library Journal, which looks depressing (one article
is recommendations to reverse Accra Central's downward spiral).
Afterward we walked back in light rain and then drove around for a
while. The original plan was swimming, then maybe the zoo, then eating
something, and eventually the sun came out for a bit and we went
swimming at La Palm Royale Resort, which has a nice couple of pools.

Back in Kara
16 August
Riding in a car with 8 people (4 of them kids 5 and under) isn't
usually fun, but doing it for 10 hours is very tiring. Especially when
it's a trip you've done before (many times before for Don especially).
On the other hand, it feels pretty amazing once it's over that you
were really in the car all day and didn't go completely mad. I think
part of it is the attitude going into it, too, since the 3 hour drive
from WAMR to Accra actually seemed a lot longer (or maybe it was the
awful traffic).

Market
17 August
We'll be staying in Kara for the rest of our time in Africa (almost a
month left), so we decided to get going on things we wanted to do
here. One of the best opportunities is to have tailors make or copy
clothes that we brought with us, which is of course much cheaper here.
So since today is market day Jane took us to find some fabric. The
market is a large building in town, two stories with open walls. It's
plain concrete like many buildings here, and looks a little bit like a
parking garage, except instead of cars it's full of stalls and people.
There's also outdoor areas outside around the building. Apparently
it's open every day, but on the big "market day" more people come in
from the villages outside of town to sell their produce and buy. Jane
estimated the market gets about a third bigger. The types of things on
sale were somewhat suprising. There was all the normal food you would
expect, and other things like the fabric we were looking for and
locally made household utensils. But then there were lots of stalls
full of specialty items: basketball shoes, stereos, tool sets, and so
on. There are "garage sale" type stalls, which consist of large bales
of mostly used American clothing to pick through. Some items still
have the Goodwill, Salvation Army, or garage sale price tags on them.
I also saw a few people actually making things, like a guy with an
ancient sewing machine (the non-electric kind with a foot cradle to
run it), but that seemed to be the exception.

Visitors
23 August
Each of the families working with Jane and Don are sponsored (or
employed) by one particular church congregation. Today a group from
one of these churches headed back to the States. I was thinking about
what a strange situation that is; here are a group of people who
basically pay you, coming to stay for a while at your house and see
(or inspect) everything about your life. That's got to add a lot of
extra stress. (It worked out well for us, too; we had some especially
good meals those days. :) Of course, all the visitors are really nice
and very encouraging too. They really believe in what the team is
doing, plus they bring various news or goods from the USA that aren't
available here.

Yam Festival
25 August
Today Don was invited to some sort of holiday to celebrate the yam
harvest at Te, a nearby village. He teaches there now, but it's
also where he began his his Kabiye practice years ago, so most people
there know him. It seemed a little like Thanksgiving, in that
everybody was home and there was lots of food around. The main custom
seemed to be for men to wander around the village, visting all their
friends. After being seated and a round of greetings, the wife or
wives would bring out some selum (beer-like alcohol made from millet)
or water and a little food. Then after a while everyone including the
current host headed to the next house. The houses are right out of
National Geographic: baked mud walls, thatched roof, various animals
running around. There are a few manufactured items, including
battery-powered radios and pots and pans, but most things are made
right there. This is the way the majority of people in Togo live, as
subsitence farmers. As long as there is food, they're happy (but very
poor and very vulnerable to drought and sickness). A minority of
people live in basically a different money-based economy. They are
government job holders, expatriot workers, or part of the service
industry serving these "haves."

2004-07-17T16:55:00.000-07:00

We're getting ready for our trip to Togo (via London and Ghana) and it's entered the running-around-mad stage. Everything big is taken care of--tickets, shots, money--but now we have to actually get everything we want to bring together and pack it. It's also a little different since we're packing suitcases with various things for Molly's sister and her family, who we'll be visiting in Togo. It will be interesting to see how much trouble wandering around with those suitcases will be.