Blog Challenge To Do List

As I’ve mentioned at the bottoms of my last two blogs, I’m accepted @iaagustin‘s 30-Day Blog Challenge.  So now I figured I might want to do a little bit of organizing, so that I’m not just sitting her thinking, “crap, I HAVE to blog SOMETHING, what can I think up on the fly?”.

(between you & me, I’m pretty great at thinking things up on the fly, but you never want to exhaust your powers, right?)

Ok, so here’s a list of what I figure I’ll do to fill the days.

Day 1: done
Day 2: done
Day 3: also done
Day 4: this baby right here
Day 5: well…. what do ya got?

Okay, so I’m not good enough at planning to know day by day what will inspire me, but I definately have some topics I want to explore. Here we go:

• Finish off the drafts I never finished   (7 Posts)

• Baseball Season Starting    (3-5 Posts)

• Green/Urban/Environmental/Sustainable Topics  (3-5 Posts)

• Why I Like Comics   (1-3 Posts)

• News & World Events (1-3 Posts)

• Weekly 5 Things (4 Posts)

• Dear Ryan Weekly (4 Posts)

• Review the Challenge Post

There we go; that comes out to just about 30 posts or more.

Hopefully over the next month I can make some discoveries as I force myself to write consistently.

Hopefully I can also entertain while I do it.

Let me know when you think I’ve failed one of those.

(this is day 4 of the 30 day blog challenge)

2010 Blog Plan

Well, this isn’t so much a “plan” in the sense that I could follow it to pull off a heist.  It’s more a list of traits that I want my blog to embody in the new year.  A set of reminders for myself that I want to strive towards.

– Consistent!!

I need to use this as an exercise to improve myself.  Like all exercise, it’s best when done regularly, not sporadically.

– Discuss Intelligently

– Revelant!
Connect the dots, obscure is fine, haughty is bleh

– Don’t be afraid of Long-Form
If it’s worth the time for you to read it, it’s worth the time for me to fully discuss it.

– Intuitive
I don’t really know how this applies, but it sounds good.  I’ll figure it out later

– More Engagement
No, not the down-on-one-knee kind; the interacting-with-whoever-reads-this kind.  I work best when challenged from an outside sourse.  What better source than the one right here?

I’m sure this list will be evolving.  This is just what I got down in 10 minutes today.
List done.

I love cities

I do.  I love living in the city.  Not only because it fits my lifestyle, but because I love the promise of it.

Urban areas are traditionally the cradles of great ideas.  Think of Socrates, Cyrus, Solomon, Alexander, Magellan, Edison; democracy, art, opera, literature; all ideas born in cities, because cities allow us to know our fellow man in ways that yards & freeways & Cost Co’s don’t.

This got me thinking if there was an easier way to express my love of city life.

I hear people use the word “Urbanist” more and more lately, (or perhaps I’m just tuned into those types of channels more and more…) and I wondered if it’s a term that would apply to me.

So I Googled it.  But I had difficulty finding a clear definition.  I also learned that apparently there is some disagreement between “urbanism” and “new urbanism”.  Hmmm, well here’s the most well-written thing I could find. Wikipedia (pfft, great source, right?) defines New Urbanism as;

“an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types.”

Well that seems easy enough.  I love walkable neighborhoods, though my idea of walkable is probably a little more aggressive than most peoples.  Walkable for me just means “has flat-ish areas” and “hopefully few hobos and/or feral animals”.

Then I read a quote from the Congress for the New Urbanism:

We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.

So what do we have here?

• Neighorhoods?  Great
• Accessibility?  Indeed!
• Diversity?  Always good.
• Public Policy?  Can always use help.
• Pedestrian and Transit?  I’ve BEEN on-board with that for decades.

Alright, so this sounds like an agenda to get with.

As you know from my previous post about freeways, urban sprawl is something I definitely cannot get with.  In truth, even when I lived miles away from my job and school, I still took public transit, and as opportunity presented itself, I moved closer and closer to the core.  Now I live 1.5 miles from my office, right next to a light rail stop, and withing walking distance of parks, museums, great restaurants, pubs, a farmer’s market, the full gamut of culture in Phoenix, AND my favorite coffee shop.  I don’t see how a car would improve my life.

We really COULD improve my life, and the lives of thousands of people around me, is a good healthy dose of Urban ReUse.

I don’t say Urban Renewal, because Roosevelt Row and many parts of Downtown Phoenix are already vibrant and thriving in their own way, so I don’t want to solicit the type of “renewal” typically thought of.

No, what I would like to see is more redesign and reuse of existing structures, filling in the empty store fronts and repopulating the vacant lots that leave gaps in our neighborhood picture.  Just like an MRI, you can have 90% healthy areas, but if you have 10% missing, then you’ve got a problem.

So I was decently intrigued to see this post by fellow #30DayBC participant (and RDJ doppleganger) Tony A.  I’m interested to see how his series turns out, and perhaps add a few spots to the list.

(Ironically, for 5-years I used to live next-door to the first place he mentioned, and didn’t know that it had since turned into a vacant shell.)

So, in closing, give cities a boost, for all they’ve done for you.

…and be kind to the planet while you do it….

(This is Day 5 of the 30 Day Blog Challenge)

Your Inner Superman

We all know Superman, “Mild-Mannered Reporter” Clark Kent’s alter-ego.  Beneath the surface Kent always has his super-powers at the ready, to pitch in when disaster calls.

But what about the rest of us.

Certainly we all have talents and abilities that we don’t broadcast.

Here’s my list:
– Incredible BS/Gift-of-gab ability
– Extremely powerful eyebrows and facial expressions
– near-mythical efficiency

(all adjectives are thematically exaggerated)

What’s your Superpower?  What do you have laying right below the surface?

(this is day 3 of the 30 day blog challenge)

“You said to never take the freeway”

Sorry, any chance to use a Matrix quote has to be capitalized on, right?

So, to follow-up on yesterday’s blog, I thought I’d take a look at one of the most ridiculous inventions of the last century: freeways

Before I give my opinion, let’s list some facts:
1.)  Freeways cost money to build and maintain
2.)  Freeways cost more money for highway patrolmen and/or the nefarious speedcam
3.)  Freeways are often noisy and unsightly
4.)  They don’t accomplish their stated goals

That last one may have been a surprise to some, so I’ll back it up.

A recent study by Brown University economist Nathaniel Baum-Snow shows that building a freeway to serve the residents of a community actually reduces that population by 18%.  No, the massive concrete beast didn’t eat up the area that those people’s houses used to be in.  But by creating a new tool for their commute, you’ve now told them that with a few adjustments, they could live somewhere else and still make their same commute.

If suburb A builds a highway to connect to suburb B, that’s going to effect the distribution of commutes not only between those suburbs but also the commutes in the region as a whole. So there are going to be these externalities where someone in suburb C has a faster way to get to work, so they’re going to start using it and filling up this new highway. And a business downtown might say, hey, there’s this new infrastructure, let’s go locate out there and I can have a lot more space to work with. So anytime one part of a region changes something, it’s going to effect population and employment throughout the metropolitan area. So I think it’s important to engage at the regional level.

A lot of people think that decentralization is about fleeing to the suburbs out of central cities, but if you look at the change in the spatial distribution of the population across large metropolitan areas, you find that it’s really much more of a spatial phenomenon. You see that the population density in the more peripheral regions of central cities actually went up quite a bit over the last 50 years, while the population of the central business districts went down.

Sometimes an Idea is almost Too Novel

borrowed infographic from GOOD.is:

The inner-environmentalist in me think that this is exactly the kind of great idea we need to make happen.  Imagine if Chicago, LA, Miami, Phoenix…all these big, sprawling cities weren’t needed anymore.  Have one Megapolis with all the finance and creative and any other urban industries, and let the rest of the US go fallow.

We already know that NYC is one of the greenest cities because of it’s use of mass transit.

Now imagine you have a huge vacuum and you could suck out all the pollution from all the cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic in LA, all the smog that hover over Phoenix every day (and all that cow-stench that pervades Chicago still).  And you’d never have to re-vacuum again…

Sometimes I wish we hadn’t achieved Manifest Destiny.

Of course this idea will never happen, but it’d be awesome if it did.

(this is Day 1 of the 30 day Blog Challenge.  To see who else is in, click here)

Divergent Interests

Call it ironic

Call it lack of focus

But as it turns out, while I’ve been admittedly derelict in my maintenance of the Awesome on this site, I have actually volunteered to guest blog on a friend’s gaming blog this week.

In a five-part series none-the-less.

I’m really not sure how I will turn out, so I won’t link it here, but I did think it was worth exploring what’s going on in a way that did not amount the “sorry I haven’t blogged lately” post that’s so proliferate.

I’ve worked 13 of the last 14 days and was a ball of rage and frustration and energy and ideas and stress for at least 10.9 of those 13 days.  The best way I can summarize this week at work is “Balls”.

Yep, balls.

It’s an adjective now.  Deal with it.  Embrace it.  Help it spread it’s wings and soar.

Or crash awkwardly into the bin next to my desk.

Either way, stress levels have been high, and I actually didn’t turn on my tv this week until Friday morning.  Other days I skipped dinner, was late to social commitments, and drank at least triple my usual amount of coffee.

(Hooray for that last part)

So when I saw everyday that I had not updated my blog, it began to represent a duty that I wasn’t handling well.  It is not at all that writing in my blog isn’t fun or therapeutic or slipping on my priorities list.  It was just that I allowed my writing, any writing, to turn into an obligation, and in a week filled with obligations over-run and not met, this just joined the heap.

Then in the midst of it all, @loganwm suggested we do a podcast.  Talk about a new challenge and a way to reinvigorate my creative juices!!

To be clear, I have really no idea what goes into making a podcast.  I’m sure I’m about to offend quite a few people when I say that it sounds like a couple folks, usually dudes, sitting around, drinking beer, talking about the news or sports or video games or boobs, or all of the above, and that REALLY sounds fun.

So this week I started researching by listening to other podcasts and reading up on the logistical side as much as I could with about 3% energy left after a day at work.  However, this was enough to get me thinking about some ideas to develop for the show, and also about community.

Then I remembered that I have a pal who writes a blog about gaming and figured I’d hit him up with a few ideas and maybe see if he wanted to have a piece on file to put up as a guest post the next time he goes on vacation, gets sick, hung-over, new episode of The Simpsons is on, whatever.  Turns out, his reaction was better than expected, and as I sit here and write this, I currently owe him five posts to put up starting Monday.

Oh yeah, and I’m working on moving my blog to my own hosted site.  (“Hooray!” / “It’s about time” / “Way to be behind, noob!”)

But I had to put this up first.  I still have my priorities.  Have a great weekend.

GOOD’s “Neighborhood Manifesto”

City slickers love telling everyone what neighborhoods they live in. It’s become a kind of shorthand for what sort of person they are, what they value, where they like to hang out. It makes sense: As small as the world has gotten, it’s still really big, and carving out a little piece of it that feels familiar and pride-worthy is a basic human urge.

But forget for a second where your apartment is, and think about the blocks that surround it, the guy one door down you’ve never spoken to, the people you mill around at the flea market or pass in the bike lane on your way to the grocery store. You probably have as much in common with them as you do with your friends, but you’ve never even met.

Now, if you’ve read my blog (TB3N) for any time now, you’ve seen me advocate for more lively neighborhoods more than once.  At it’s base, what they said above is 100% true.  We do tend of generalize people, even within our own community, based upon where they live.

Does your block have something to say about you?
Or do you have something to say about what your block really is?

The first step is getting out there and finding out the truth and seeing what you can do to be more involved.

The first step to building a better neighborhood is the step out your front door.

To read more from GOOD.is Guide, click here.

(This is Day 30 of the 30 Day Blog Challenge, be sure to check out the other participants at #30DayBC)

Earth Day: Congrats, Now Do More!

(image from GOOD.is)

There we are, Phoenix.  Number 12 on the survey for Least Wasteful Cities.

Not too bad.  Let’s see some of the details:

Ranked 12th in the nation as America’s Least Wasteful City
Ranked 20th in 2009

Phoenix’s high rankings:

• 5th Never driving their car for trips that are less than one mile from home
• 7th Participating in their city’s sustainability/environmental programs
• 7th Turning off the water when brushing their teeth

Phoenix’s low rankings:

• 23rd Shutting the lights off when not in the room
• 23rd Hanging their clothes out to dry when possible
• 24th Buying locally grown/produced foods

So oddly we’re good at walking for short trips, which I’d expect us to be awful at because of the heat, and we’re awful at hanging clothes to dry, even though it only takes 0.8342 seconds to dry off here.

But here’s the part I loved best:

Efforts/Decisions to more environmentally friendly

• 84 percent recycle
• 78 percent use energy efficient bulbs
• 75 percent shop locally

Hooray for shopping local!

So we moved up from 20th to 12th in one year.  No reason we cannot crack the top 10 next year.

To learn more about Phoenix’s environmental and sustainability efforts, visit http://phoenix.gov/greenphoenix/index.html

(This is Day 29 of the 30 Day Blog Challenge, be sure to check out the other participants at #30DayBC)

When Goals Don’t Match

Based on my previous posts about architecture, design and sustainability, I’m certain the casual observer would expect that I’d also appreciate this award-winning design from Peleg/Burshtein Architects.

It’s got solar power, wind power, clean lines..what’s not to like?

Well, the fact that it’s an industrial chicken coop.

Sure, this place generates it’s own power and converts the waste into bio-fuel, but it’s still a coop.  A long hallway that these chickens have to spend their entire life in.

You know what’s an even better, more sustainable way to house them?  Let them be open range.  Earth, already made, naturally ventilated.

(This is Day 28 of the 30 Day Blog Challenge, be sure to check out the other participants at #30DayBC)