Last night I got in a debate with (e:Paul) over buying organic/local/fair-trade food. (e:Terry) had sent us a link ranking Tops as one of the worst grocers in the country, and I said at least they're semi-cheap. Paul wanted to know why I value price over quality when it comes to food.

I definitely see the value in buying organic, local, and/or fair trade food when possible. I am well aware of the impact pesticides have on the environment and how unsustainable most of our food supply is without tons of petrochemicals. I've heard about the potential health risks of residual pesticides. But I've never been able to get myself to spend for organic.

I've been shopping at Aldi for close to 5 years now. Of all the discount stores, I think they're the cleanest and best run (that ruthless German efficiency!). I don't know where they source any of their mostly non-organic produce and food, but I know that their workers are paid at least $12/hr and managers $20, plus benefits. I could always get by shopping on a $30/week grocery budget, where Giant Eagle in Cleveland would have cost me closer to $60. Same thing for Wegmans and the coop costing much more. I would love to get my food from there but I sink my budget into my loans.

Is it selfish of me to be cheap and buy crazy unknown Aldi food when now I can technically afford more? I definitely have noticed a quality difference between what I've been buying vs what Paul and Terry get at the coop and Wegmans. I said it's worse to be feeding the student loan monster with interest over industrial ag, but that's me justifying it after the fact.

Maybe I can become a couponer like (e:mike) or my mom and shop at Wegmans. Or skip the local aspect and keeping going for cheap organic way out at Trader Joe's. Either way it's good to be challenged.

Yesterday I left work early to head up to the Park-In on Parkside, a protest to support changing the traffic configuration of Parkside Avenue. The goal is to reduce the four lanes of traffic to two, either with two parking lanes or a center turn and bike lanes. A "road diet" on a congested street like Parkside typically makes traffic flow smoother with less accidents, since you don't have cars constantly merging and changing lanes from other cars parking and turning. (Road Diet wiki) Same volume, less area.

There were probably about 30 people, a good mix of drivers, pedestrians and cyclists at Sweetness 7. The drivers all parked their cars in the outer lanes to make the street two lanes, and we all held signs protesting to passing cars. Surprisingly we didn't get too many angry drivers and seemed to get more honks to support us rather than people flipping us the bird.

Eventually the po-po showed up with 4 cars plus the police chief. They weren't aggressive or anything but isn't that an overreaction? I'm sure 3 of those cars would have been much more useful on patrol. And why did the chief need to come? Anyway, they threatened to give tickets to anyone who didn't move their cars. A few people refused to and took the tickets.

I hope that something comes out of it. There was a decent amount of press coverage from Channel 4 and 2, and the petition got over 300 signatures not counting the internet ones. If you want to sign it, you can online here.








A little dramatic, but why not!


Popo no 1


Traffic was pretty backed up with everyone rubbernecking


This school bus driver was so pumped up and was honking a ton


Henry from GO Bike - awesome guy


The po-lice shut us downnnn




Negotiation

I hadn't actually been to Sweetness 7 on Parkside before. The owner, Prish Moran was super friendly, the shop was pretty cool and there was free beer from Community Beer Works, aw yeah. On the way home, I stopped at Aldi, then took the metro back from Lasalle Station. It was the first time for me on NFTA since the summer. I need to make it my backup after my bike again, rather than my car.


I didn't know Sweetness 7 had a liquor license either.


Cute cell phone booth - who really makes that many calls anymore?


The tudor building across from Sweetness is getting redone - last use was a restaurant I think? Unfortunately they're removing the stucco for vinyl, yuck.


Ride home

Tuesday night, (e:paul), (e:terry) and I went with (e:YesThatCasey), (e:Dianne), (e:Heidi) and Tanya out to Griffis Sculpture Park for the night lights. I hadn't been there before, but it looks like it'd be amazing to walk around especially on a nice day .

I'm not big on art so I can't tell you much about the statues except that they were huge and pretty cool. I'm especially a sucker for LEDs, and they had some amazing lamps thrown on some of the statues. I thought the best were the lasers projected on a bunch of tiny rotating mirrors. in the dense trees, the green lasers almost made it look like there were fireflies everywhere. Possible arduino project?

I brought my Canon, but had so much trouble hand holding in such low light, even wide open. I'll have to go through and post what turned out well.

Yesterday afternoon, I opened up my car to find my glove compartment and center console emptied out onto the passenger seat. I usually leave my door unlocked because I don't keep anything valuable in my car and I don't want my window smashed. I've never had a problem. But bish we ain't in Kenilworth anymore.

Of course they didn't find anything to take because I don't even have change in my car. They even left my old first gen Zune in there. I guess nobody would want one, even for free.

So Buffalo is now a bronze level biking city, according to the League of American Cyclists (only took 17 years after our first Bike Plan in 1997 and 6 years after the most recent in 2008).

Although there's still a long way to go before we're really a bike-friendly city, I definitely notice an improvement in infrastructure and culture in the past few years. The most recent Census data says we have the 14th largest share of bike commuters in the country, and we've seen an 88.6% increase in bike commuters from 2011-2012 .

Unfortunately there are still too many bike and pedestrian accidents and not enough good infrastructure (43 deaths for Erie county in 2012). There aren't many east-west bike lanes in the city, and almost no lanes at all north of Delaware Park. There are too many roads still being constructed and reconstructed with only cars in mind, despite a completes streets law for the city and the state.

Some of this can be changed relatively soon! This week there is a chance for the public to air comments on the reconstruction of the 198/Scajacuada. The NYS Department of Transportation wants to essentially reconstruct it as is, instead of turning it into a connected, bike and pedestrian friendly boulevard that there should be. There will be a meeting at Olmsted School 67 at 7:15 on Tuesday for input on how this can be changed.

There is also currently an effort to put Parkside Avenue on a road diet, down from four lanes to two and a turning lane plus some bike lanes. This Wednesday at 5 will be a "park and bike-in" at Parkside and Russell.

Parkside Neighborhood residents and supporters are organizing a day of action, calling for motorists to park their cars on Parkside and join bicyclists and pedestrians to show support for safer streets and come to Sweetness 7 Café to sign a petition demanding that the city put Parkside on a Road Diet (taking out traffic lanes, adding turning lanes & bike lanes)."

These two projects would fit perfectly together and definitely help link more parts of the city together for bikes.

(e:lilho) you need to drop your single soon. chambord will license the hell out of that



maybe one day Paul will be pinked.

so (e:Paul) got a few arduinos and a raspberry pi for his work projects. If you hadn't seen them before, they're basically small, embedded all-in-one computers that are designed to be low-power and expandable. The Arduino can only run compliled programs under 32k using very little pwoer, while the raspberry pi can run a full fleged version of Linux with expandable storage, using slightly more power.

Over the past couple of weeks, we've been playing around with them to get used to them and test out their capabilities. We were able to rig up an Arduino Uno to respond to a button press, and post a test post to the estrip website. The programming logic itself was pretty basic, but I am not experienced in web stuff and it took a lot to learn how to craft a good POST header. Paul definitely did though and we were able to work through it. I love nerding out with him, he knows so much.

I can see for larger projects working on the arduino might be frustrating because the storage is so limited, and there aren't tons of libraries available because of it. Also, doing anything object oriented is a pain because you have to go through all these steps to make every new class a library. The Arduino IDE isn't too great either. It's basically a text editor with no other features although you can use an external IDE like Netbeans or Eclipse if you set it up right. But for super simple projects like sensors or little displays, I can see a good use case.


Kind of looks dangerous...

I want to start playing with the raspberry pi and maybe some other sensors to see what projects we can do with some more power.

pic dumppp

on Wednesday, (e:Paul), (e:terry), (e:xandra), the infamous (e:lilho) (who I met that night), went out to dbgb's for the "we're taking plowed" Halloween party. The music was kind of lame but the night was pretty fun.

I went as a slutty farmer to go along with the slutty nerd, and the gay nerd.

This is being posted from the Arduinooo, (e:Paul) is awesome!