As (e:sqb) mentioned [inlink]sqb,120[/inlink] Pano's is considering knocking down the Atwater cariage house. (e:matthew), (e:terry), and I are also boycotting Pano's until this issue is resolved. We also eat there several times a week. I am sad to miss the tasty food, but I also don't want elmwood to look like a plaza.

The list keeps growing so fast. Since (e:terry) signed the petition about ten minutes ago there are ten new people.

Here are some great quotes by boycotters:

[size=m]Ian MacDonald[/size]
    Please don't demolish the Atwater House. Please consider obtaining the Forest/Elmwood Parking lot instead. The city can't handle it, it looks like hell and it needs a real owner. There is so little of Buffalo's heydays left except the architecture and the character of the Elmwood strip is a reflection of those days. Parking lots on Elmwood will only make it more suburban and then whats the draw? Lastly it sets the example for other property owners. What is then to stop the numerous slumlords from demolishing their houses to charge for parking? not a pretty sight.

[size=m]Alan Kegler[/size]
You have got to be kidding. Are we as a city loosing our minds. Stop this idoicy immediately before all of our working, eductated people leave the city. Pedistrian friendly (as opposed to car traffic), walkable neighborhoods with magnificant architecture is exactly what attracted my wife and I to this neighborhood. Demolishing buildings like this will only aid in us wanting to move out.

Everyone should switch to firefox . Iy is definately better than IE in so many ways. I have talked about it many time sn my journal [search]firefox[/search] It is especially ideal if you are a web developer. It's web development tools are such time savers. As always firefox, remains the offically supported browser of elmwoodstrip.com.

Thanks (e:sqb) for the update info [inlink]sqb,112[/inlink]

UPDATE: WOW live bookmarks are mazing. This is really the greatest technology. Check it out. First install the new firefox. Then when you load any users journal, simply click on the little orange rss icon that shows up in th lower left hand corner of the browser. It will let you subscribe to their journal as a live bookmark. This allows you to see all of their entries as live bookmarks in your bookmark list which continually update. You will love it!!!!!

I saw the below article today in the Buffalo News. I hope that they don't end thurday in the square out of honor for civil war veterans. I guess you all know how I feel abot soldiers in gernerals, and especially how I feel about their glorification via large stone phalic structures. I personally think they should just knock the monument down to make more room for the future. Why should we remember the killing and snuff the future.

This is generally what happens in Buffalo. Something starts up and becomes sucessful and then some people make a problem out of it and the city goes to rust. I am not even a big fan of Thursday in Square, but I definately see it as one of the public functions that keeps Downtown Buffalo semi-alive. Imagine how much business revenue is generated due on of the massive 10,000 person events. It also brings out a sense of community and commrodery amoung the many attendees, that is rare to city in our city of snow and indoor activitiews.

In fact it is one of the few Buffalo events besides The Taste Of Buffalo where you actually see racial integration. Does anyone remeber the Arrested Development? That was the most racially integrated event I have ever attended in our oh so segregated city.

Here is the artcile ->

Veterans groups are unhappy with crowds swarming the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument during Thursday at the Square concert events.

Concerts upset VFW
By LOU MICHEL- News Staff Reporter - 9/14/2004

Good vibrations abound during Thursday at the Square concerts in downtown Buffalo - except for some members of the area's biggest veteran organization, who think the gatherings dishonor a war memorial at the site.

The Erie County Council of Veterans of Foreign Wars wants Buffalo Place, sponsor of the free concert series in Lafayette Square, to halt the successful event that draws thousands of concertgoers, a majority of them from the suburbs, to the heart of downtown.

"It's a veterans' memorial and it should not be used for concerts, drinking or merriment if we're going to abide by the meaning of the monument. It's hallowed ground," said Clarence E. Buob, commander of the council, which represents about 9,000 local veterans.

At the center of the controversy is the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument, a massive granite memorial built in 1882, that is thronged with people who come to watch the concerts and party every Thursday after work starting in late May.

I would like to re-write that second last paragraph as:

"It's a park in the center of a living city with many people and should not be used for veteran's memorials, as a museum, or silent area if we are going to abide by the meaning of a having living city. It is viable land. I am sure many of you feel different. feel free to voice your opinion.

I was reading this Reader/readers essay by Phillippe Bootz for the classI am taking with Loss Glazier at UB when I came across a video presentation by Phillippe Bootz in Erfurt, Thueringen. I used to live right next to there. I wonder when the presentation took place.

While the essay is interesting, the project itself looks dated. I wonder if e-poetry is all very dated looking but I am excited to learn more about it.

I have about 1000 new things I want to do with the site my problem is now time and balancing the site development with my homework load and job.

(e:nparkproject),[inlink]nparkproject,3[/inlink] you should record some songs for the elmwood radio station. Also, if you have any upcomming events you could post them on the calendar.

I have been working on lots of new features recently and decided to release two today. One is an rss news feed module for when you are logged in. It allows you to slect a news source and get the last 10 articles from that source. Currently, we have sources including boing boing, Buffalo News, Buffalo Employment, The Buffalo Report, The Beast, estrip, jambase, wired gadgets, wired politics, and yahoo top stories. If anyone knows of any other local rss feeds, I would love to add them to the list. Also, if anyone knows of any good local sports rss feeds, I'd happily add them too.




The second upgrade is the ability to see how many guests are online. Guests are people who are visiting the site but are not users or are not logged in.



More to come soon . . .

In reference to [inlink]paul,1914[/inlink] There is finally some good news in regards to information being published about the site in a local newspaper.

I received a phone call from Tony Violanti at the Buffalo News for an interview about web pages. (e:holly) said that they had called Medaille about web design and she gave them my info. I was so excited to talk about the site but still a little nervous. I don't usually get calls on my cell phone, I try to keep my number secret, so when it rang I picked up figuring it was (e:terry) or (e:southernyankee) calling from work and then all of a sudden I was being interviewed.

He asked me a lot of questions about web design in general and what I thought about it. One question he posed is, "Should people start their own webpages?" another question was, "Should people learn to code web pages or use deisgn programs such as Dreamweaver?"

I responded that everyone who feels that they have something important to say should have a web page. I also said that I encourage people to learn HTML from the ground-up as HTML coding is not that difficult and quickly becomes routinea dn used the intro students at Canisius as an exmaple. While some of them find coding daunting at first, they easily pick it up and can transfer the code from making one site to the next.

I explained that I created this site for people who have something to say but are unable to web program or are simply interested in drawing from the larger audience offered by the site. I also mentiioned that our readershp statistics reflect peoples interest in reality programming on televsion and in gerneral. People simply love to learn about the lives of others and when it can be people within their community it makes it even more interesting because they can meet each other.

[size=m]What do you guys think about it? Why do you keep a journal here?[/size]

So we have over 125 members now and I would really like to see that number grow to about 300 over the next couple months. At that point we will have a really good base to define what was the elmwood experience during our time here. I would like to branch out in some more in terms of user background, hopefully picking up some more younger people and some more older adults. Right now our average age is around 24-29.

I am also working on developing some new stuff and a new look although that might have to wait till my other projects are done.

Today, I sent an article about our site to Alt Press . I hope they carry it. I have been meaning to talk to more news sources about it but was so discouraged after the Artvoice, buffalo.com, and west side times let down.

[size=m]Art Voice[/size]
When I wrote to artvoice telling them about the site, I thought they would be excited about the development of a free local site where people could have a "local" voice on the internet. I was kind of hoping for an article but instead was offered a classified ad for free or a $500 spread. I was not interested in spending $500 on them. I chose neither. I have worked so hard for this project to be free and I felt like they were trying to exploit me.

[size=m]Buffalo.com[/size]
Then I had a similar experience with Buffalo.com. No need to retell it here, you can read it on the entry from the time it happend [inlink]paul,1818[/inlink].

[size=m]West Side Times[/size]
Then we wrote to the west side times. Didn't even get a response!

I guess that is why we created this site in the first place - as a way to circumvent the old media barriers to publication.

So anyhow, I am being brave and writing to Alt Press this time. Wish us luck.

Here we have (e:matthew) trying to take an upclose picture of something in the sand. From far away it looks quite funny.

We ended up at Bennett Beach again. It is much nicer than Wendt Beach which is closer by but trashier.

We went to (e:trisha) 's bachelorette party last night. Many of the peeps were out. Congratulations trisha. It was also nice to see (e:springfaerie) this evening. I really like her, not to mention that she was supercute in her snow white wig.

[sizem]Paper Media[/size] At frizzy's, (e:southernyankee) took a pic with (e:flacidness) in the photobooth and I recaptured it on the 'kick. The photobooth is a strange media producing dinosaur. It's black and white and prints on paper. Paper! Yuck! I thought we were promised a paper free lifestyle 10 years ago. Thank you (e:terry) for never allowing me to buy a printer with ink.

[sizem]Translate It[/size] So now I have a picture of this picture and I'm sending it to the web and we have a situation with media based on other media, based on an event being sent to another medium. Is it changing during this process? What is the data? What is the media? Can we separate the form from the content in this case or are they intrisically interconnected. While my life revolves around this translation of digital media resources, I am still not exactly sure what the essence of the media is and if it can be separated from the content.

On the web, you can easily separate display information and style from content. But can you do that with other mediums. What about a photo. What is the content in this case? Is it chamile or TK? Is it the paper and ink? Does the history of the paper or the photo machine / sidekick and web somehow imprint some sort of mark into the content / media? Or is the media itself is unimportant? Does a photo of a photo somehow lose something in translation. What if they are using the same medium, what if they arn't (e.g. a picture of a painting)?

So can the original paper photo perhaps express something that the digital version of the image can't. Maybe it's just ascribing a sense of nostalgia. The photo machine and paper strip does have a certain aethetic appeal that is lacking in the digital reproduction. But what will happen in 20 years when the digital phone snapshots have a similar nostalgic feel to paper pictures. Is it possible that with time this aspect lost in translation can "develop."

We can't just look at these translations alone, we should also consider the reason for making the translation and see what that offers the media. If it offers enough value to the media, does it make up for what is lost in translation? In this case the digitization offers mass distribution to an otherwise static, temporary, and easily destroyable medium.

Okay enough of this.