Paul and I were at lunch and picked up a copy of the Allentown Association newsletter - it was all about the Allen Street reconstruction meetings. Apparently the assocation, city engineer, and design consultant all voted to remove parking for a pedestrian friendly and better streetscape (versus widening the road and removing feet from the sidewalk). Despite this fact their going to back to the design phase - more money spent on consulting, less on the actual construction :(

It turns out I was semi-anonymously quoted in the article about the debate as a Roswell employee!

Anyway if you believe at all in a sustainable future for Buffalo and making Allentown a nice place for people, not cars - write Peter Merlo, City Engineer at pmerlo@city-buffalo.com, and Stephen Stepniak, DPW Commissioner at sstepniak@city-buffalo.com and let them know what you think

Allentown Association doesn't put out an electronic version of this :( So i took a picture.




Joe Herzig said...

A Roswell Park employee also said a walkable, attractive Allen Street was essential for merchants to gain customers from the BNMC. He reminded the crowd that they could potentially get a lot of patronage from students, staff and visitors to the new UB Medical School and the new Children's Hospital now under construction. ...
Another suggested shuttles from BNMC lots at night when they are underutilized

Just to be clear I never actually said anyone needed a shuttle from BNMC to Allentown (unless you're disabled). Not sure where that came from. Walk your butts a block or two!

So (e:Paul) broke his ring. I thought it was ridiculous that Paul wanted us to buy him a new ring. I don't understand jewelry and I never will - even cracked, the ring was still very beautiful. But in true Paul fashion, he constantly browsed eragem.com looking for other rings, and once he found one he wanted and made sure (e:terry) and I knew about it. Non stop. For weeks. Through every method of communication we use, including dance.

The price was $1600 for a diamond band in gold. Terry and I broke down and decided we might as well make an offer to negotiate - not having any idea of what a band like that is worth. I emailed the owner via his site yesterday, offering $900 for the ring and linked to Paul's post explaining his situation.

Less than a half hour later, the owner of the site, Michael Michael, called me at work. He wanted to let me know he felt terrible that Paul's ring cracked - that sometimes it can happen with a heavy ring like that due to the occlusions in the gem, but he wanted Paul to be happy with his business.

I was mentally preparing to haggle when he mentioned the diamond band. Before I even said anything, he offered to send it out next-day free of charge. I couldn't believe it. I don't think I've ever seen awesome customer service like that before.

The only thing I wish I would have done was to have asked him to not contact Paul about it so it could be a surprise. I was so shocked I forgot. As soon as he sent the both of us an email, Paul flipped out with excitement.
So (e:Paul) broke his ring. I thought it was ridiculous that Paul wanted us to buy him a new ring. I don't understand jewelry and I never will - I thought his cracked ring was still very beautiful. But in true Paul fashion, he constantly browsed eragem.com looking for other rings, and once he found one he wanted and made sure (e:terry) and I knew about it. Non stop. For weeks. Through every method of communication we use, including dance.

I'm so happy that Paul is happy.

On Sunday, (e:terry) and I wanted to go sledding or skating, something active. It was pretty warm out. So we walked downtown to the new rinks.

No dice. The line was almost a half hour long just to pay for admission, not even the line for skate rentals. It's good that it's so popular - the space is awesome and it probably brings more people downtown on a weekend than anything else.

So instead we continued our walk over to Riverworks. It was much less crowded and the ice looked way nicer. It was already closing when we got there, so we'll have to try another time. Some weeknights they're open until 10pm.


This house on Franklin has been done completely in white. Blank white walls inside, fresh white paint on the outside, white snow on the lawn.


The dreamland crew made these pretty ice globes out of water balloons

Riverworks and the river

When we got home (e:terry) and I made a delicious curry with the leftover paneer from my sandwich.

I continued my work on porting the Paul's CSS color themer away from surebert while we watched a terrible zombie movie called World War Z. It's amazing how all so much of the javascript that needed to be abstracted into toolkits and frameworks has been standardized in the past couple of years (if you want to ignore IE8).

Saturday we spent a good chunk of the day cleaning, hyping ourselves up on Chinese tea, and listening to Paul dream about rings and warmer temperatures.
I also am nearing the a good first draft of Squeaky Wheel's wordpress. It's a lot less generic looking now - I want to make it more artsy by porting over Paul's custom colorpicker code to it.


Warm laundry for (e:paul)

At night, we went with (e:flacidness), (e:dianne), and Heidi's nephew Tyler out to bear night at Ohm. It was kind of what I thought it would be like, big men, big beards and a lot of cheesy music. Almost nobody was dancing so we had the floor to ourselves, which is a lot better than Funky Monkey. Fittingly Bear night has free pizza. It was amazing.





I came across this really cool picture of a wolf and 3D art online. It turns out it's by Daniel Yemchuk who we saw at Bass Mountain. He does a lot of his generative work with Javascript.

Last summer at the Taste of Buffalo, I got a pamphlet from Solar Liberty, the solar panel installers. (e:paul) and (e:) terry and gotten an estimate from them in 2011 for an installation on the roof, but it was too expensive then.

I requested a new quote from them this month, and it's so much more in reach. The proposal they gave us has the south facing roof covered in 19 300W panels, although more could fit on the flat peak. This would be more likely to get by the preservationists. I've attached the documents comparing the two estimates, but here are the key points. (These numbers are for the smaller array, but the size could increase which would improve the numbers even more.)

• Since 2011, the cost per watt on similarly capable panels (19% efficient) has dropped almost in half
• subsidies have dropped from $1.75 per watt to $0.80 - and dropping
• despite the subsidy drop the net cost to us has dropped from ~$12k to ~$5k
• even with Basra using 2150W for heating in his 7 month wintering, we can cover 40% of our electric use. Without his environmental disaster, I have to image it'd be closer to 70-80%
• the return on investment, even on a smaller 5kW array has dropped to 6 years, from 9-11 years
• the 25 year savings (length of the panel warranty) would total ~$30k

We haven't decided for sure if we are doing it yet but the estimate alone gives me a huge nerd boner. It's crazy how quickly affordable renewable energy is becoming, even in a a cloudy place like Buffalo. Imagine a distributed grid powering Buffalo throughout the day and the Falls powering us at night. No one would ever have to breath in the disgusting Huntley coal fumes again.