The Prospect Hill Neighborhood home tour today was quite interesting. To be honest, I knew almost nothing about the neighborhood before today. It is located directly next to the Peace Bridge. You probably see it everytime you go to Canada. It has been and is in serious danger of demolition via eminent domain because the government wanted to expand the Peace Bridge truck plaza to be like 5 football fields big.

Its kind of sad how the Peace Bridge Authority has purchased properties along Busti and just let them decay. The whole neighborhood was kind of decaying because for years no one knew what the fate of their houses would be. I mean who wants to invest in home improvment like roofs, paint, etc when you don't know if your home is going to be demolished any day now.

The really interesting part was learning about the major health effects from idoling diesel trucks on the bridge, even at its current size. Apparently, studies show the air is toxic. The one woman we visited was just recovering from breast cancer, she said she was one of 9 out 15 women on her block that had breast cancer and they blame the epidemic on the toxicity. Apparently, all of her kids had asthma too. Here is a PDF with findings and info about the situation
I also ripped the PDF here ::READ PDF::

While on the tour we also joined Preservation Buffalo Niagara as a family and bought ticket for the upcoming Lincoln Parkway tour this week. Family membership is $50. The tickets for the tour were so expensive ($45/per) but I figure it is a once in a lifetime chance to see the fanciest houses in the entire city and the money is going to the preservation group.

Well, here are some pictures. I couldn't believe I took 129 of them. It was hard to decide which to post.

These are examples of the boarded up houses owned by the Peace Bridge Authority.



While there were a lot of awesome houses with really intersting and amazing woodwork, one of my favorite was the home of local artist Julian Montague I really enjoyed both the house and his very interesting graphic design.

The blond colored wood was so nice looking and the windows were amazing though the house needed a lot of work. It made me really appreciate how well the people that lived in our house throughout its lifetime, really took care of it.






Another interesting find was this. A women was excavating a wall in her home and found a beautiful pocket door with a brick wall behind it. On the other side, a previous owner had building a modern 70s swank lounge room. Its so weird to see it that way. I would have to knock the brick down althought I kind of like the look of that room on the other side.




One of my favorite parts was the stairwell of this house. Theo outside did not match the inside at all to me. I mean I like the outside but I would not have expected the inside it had. The stairwell was one of the nicest I have seen. I wish my stairs wraped around like that.










The last house we saw was the gigantic mansion originally owned by one of the Jewett's. The house looked so amazing, especially the leaded glass on the front door, but the amount of work it required actually made me feel sick and I don't even own it. Almost all of the original woodwork had been painted over and the main staircase and much of the original design had been removed or remudled beyond recognition. I don't evny the people who live there and are trying to restore it.

I came across this gem while trolling the interwebs for xls files. Sadly, that's what I do for entertainment. Not sure what if it was originally part an article but it was found on the Buffalo News server here

The highest one made about 2.3M. Can you imagine making that much in Buffalo. Its interesting just how much money they make, how much is bonuses, how much is tax deferred or even tax free.

::READ PDF::

I have four batteries now. So for around a $20 investment I get four days of non stop cell phone power. Suck that iPhone and your stupid unreplaceable battery.

I found these cute pics of (e:matthew), the sugar glider and I from July of 2007. It was so tiny then. Maybe it was one of the babies.




And then we went for the lenses

I can't belive I ever thought that was a good idea. The crazy part is that if I had stayed in Arizona, the expiration date of the license was 01/22/2037 which is when I turn 60. Can you imagine carrying around that picture until age 60. Thank god they have expirations here.

Its also the place I met (e:terry). He would come in all the time and I thought he was so hot. I specifically remember admiring him in his sporty ,shimmer, basketball shorts. Then one day he came in and asked me out. "Hi, I am Terry Mickelson, would you like to go out with me" and shook my hand. I think he moved in with me shortly thereafter.

Here I am on the laptop that saved all of these docs. This pic is from the same week.


And these too. He was so freakin cute.










I miss arizona so much. It was so fun to climb on everything but I missed the green. This was a couple weeks earlier. I wish I had a blog then. Or maybe not because it would have probably gotten me in so much trouble.


This picture was taken two years later but it was on the same disk.
We were so apple cute, lol. Its so funny how not mac I am now.

Back in the late 90s, one of the first fun computer jobs I had was working in the foreign language learning lab at my school. Up until that point I was dead set on botany or german as a carrier. I had computer programmed and tinkered my whole life but never realized it could be a job for some reason.

While there I did so many different things, one of the most fun was a desktop app for mac that could check students in and out of the labs by swiping their id cards. I went to the cafeteria manager and asked him if we could borrow their card reader for testing and he let me, then when it worked I went to the professor I worked for and showed him and we got our own reader. The system really simplified and organized time tracking.



The code is so inefficient and redundant looking back but it's interesting to still have it.
::READ PDF::

Check out the amazing referral I got for the year I worked there. I wonder if my current boss could match this despite my significantly upgraded skill and dedication to my current job.
::READ PDF::

Lab assistants typically had little technical know-how and experience with software in this area. This changed when Paul Visco was hired. Paul started the job as student assistant and finished it as technical manager and technical support analyst. Paul brought the most varied and extensive background to the job of any of the LLC assistants I ever had, including one who served from 1991 to 1996. More importantly, the few Macintosh hardware and software applications in this multimedia lab that Paul was not familiar with, he taught himself at an amazing speed, not stopping until he had in-depth knowledge of the equipment or program. For example, Paul had never worked with FileMaker Pro, the database development software. When took up the software in my lab, he started from scratch to develop a lab visitation database application that he integrated with an I.D. card reader to automate the registration and sign-in process for students. I should mention that he managed to interface a card reader model made for Windows only with an iMac due to his astute technical skills and relentless efforts in searching the WWW until he found a solution.

There are two important testaments that I would like to make in regard to Paul and with a view of the position for which he is applying. First, after eight years of being a Macintosh lab manager, and at the time after almost 15 years of experience with Macintosh applications including desktop publishing, digital video, courseware authoring, MIDI, and image editing, Paul was the first person I met who knew more about the Macintosh in some areas than I did. As a result, I entrusted him with administrative duties such as system software maintenance, equipment and software trouble-shooting, as well as software installations. This freed up valuable time for me to meet my teaching, research, and service obligations while I was assured that the job in the LLC would not only get done on time but also effectively.

Second, I was thrilled to have a student worker in my lab who was intrinsically motivated to do everything in his power to ensure smooth technical operation, to search for new ways to improve lab management, and to identify software that could get certain tasks done better than the one the LLC had at the time.

Paul's work for the lab went above the and beyond the call of duty. He always put in extra hours just to learn new software or solve a problem, taking responsibility for attending to essential administrative and technical tasks without having to be assigned. I am convinced that to a certain (healthy) degree Paul identified with his workplace, a type of involvement in the daily and special routines that I had never seen in a student assistant before.

Paul was very pleasant to work with. Due to his exceptional skills and reliability,our work relationship quickly turned into one of cooperation and trust. He was well liked for his friendly personality and much admired for his expertise by his fellow lab assistants. Students using the lab were thrilled to have a peer who knew every facet of the lab and could solve their technical problems on the spot. Faculty frequently commented that they appreciated Paul's hiring because when they needed help and could not meet up with me, they knew they could receive qualified support in the lab from Paul.

I give Paul my highest recommendation because his technical skills, his sincere curiosity about everything Macintosh, and his open and cooperative demeanor make him an ideal candidate for the position of Multimedia Specialist in an educational and Macintosh dominated workplace.

Today, (e:Terry) and I are cleaning out the office and found all kinds old CDs with data going back into the late 90s. Its so interesting to see how much I documented and saved. I really don't do that at all anymore because every company has online services but back then I scanned and saved everything.

Here is a note from our old landlord saying I was a good tenant. I thought I would have needed it someday.



Back in the day when (e:Terry) and I lived in Germany we had to hike to a castle for class project. We had a long journey and this was before mobile internet. I carried a pad and paper with me and we decided to try and come up with a comprehensive list of all of the television shows we remembered. When we got back I typed it up on my blueberry ibook.

[txt]1011/Sitcoms_List_158.txt[/txt]

Wow, (e:terry) just found the originals.





Back in the day my email was pav2@dana.ucc.nau.edu - when is the last time you saw an email with so many subdomains.

My old phone bills from Germany, you know, just in case.


At that same time I downloaded so much crap from the internet via hotline. It was an irc/warez/ftp software so downloading before torrents. Its amazing how much crap I collected including everything that I considered secret or underground like making bombs, stealing cable, hacking software and phones, etc. Clearly I did not make bombs and I never stole cable but I think I downloaded it all just because the internet was new to me and I thought the information would go away once the government cracked down on it. Really that never happend but I was a paranoid person.

[txt]1011/hotline_hacker's_handbook.txt[/txt]

An email from (e:terry) to our friend Jörg after we got back to Ameria.
[txt]1011/Jörg.txt[/txt]

One of the first website I made was for a group called Parents Anonymous.
I can't believe how ugly this was. It was when I first discovered the web as it was for community service for a scholarship that I made it.

I was reading this article called "Pot smoking may more than double crash risk" on USA Today's website this morning

It seems obvious that driving while high is dangerous. Anyhow, the part that struck me was this:

A large U.S. survey in 2009 estimated that more than 10 million people aged 12 and over had driven while under the influence of illicit drugs in the previous year.

Why are 12 year old driving, much less driving on drugs!?!

Studies like this are so stupid. I can't believe people waste money on this, if there was any government funding it is even more outrageous but my guess is the funding was done by insurance companies.

I love the really awesome discoveries.

And the response was dose-specific, the authors said. That is, the more marijuana smoked -- in terms of frequency and potency -- the greater the likelihood of a crash.

Wow, what a freakin surprise. You mean the more drugs you consume, the more they affect you? That seems so surprising. I wonder how much these people were paid for this stupid study.

I spent the evening moving my surebert repos from svn to git on github. After reading a lot of the git pro book I feel comfortable using it and the speed working with local repos is nice but there are a few things that stress me out.

The one thing that I hate/love is that tags do not actually exist as materialized files. One one hand this saves a ton of space. The repos are an tremendously smalller than in svn. I can export when needed but I liked having all of the tags in a repo for surebert because then I deploy all of the tags separately on the server and let the programmers link by defining the base path in their app. This was so easy before as I would just set the servers to sync the tags directory so that any time new tags were made, they were available immediately on all the servers.

If I like it maybe I will move more of my bizillion repos over. Thanks to the creators of svn2git