Author: vargocity

May Daze

I consider myself pretty lucky. I don’t think I’m one to plan big outings but still continue to find myself involved in them and having a great time, all thanks to the hard work of others. (click photos for more photos)

For four weekends in-a-row during May I was out of town on a trip of some sort. On the 9th Shannon and John set up a camping trip on Jekyll Island that we were fortunate enough to be a part of. Shannon is a wizard at these things and I am not surprised that this trip was awesome. We all took our bikes down there and rode around the entire island.

A week later Lauren and her mom organized a meetup in Blowing Rock, NC. The plan was for them to drive down from the northeast with a table that was made for us by a townsman up there (who coincidentally presided over our wedding) and we would meet them, hang out and take the table the rest of the way home. It gave us a chance to see them, them a chance to see other family in the area, and us a chance to get the table which could not be taken apart and shipped. Lauren and I rented a Dodge truck and headed out early on Saturday. In another stroke of good fortune we all stayed in a house owned by some extended family and had the opportunity to visit the quaint mountain towns, including Boone. There the people were surprisingly gentle as they came to find out I had loyalties to the University of Michigan. We also found out of some bouldering spots very close to the house up there and made it out to the Blowing Rock Boulders twice.

The following week was Memorial Day weekend and thanks to the splendid vision of Liza’s sister, Jess, we were set up in a beachside condo on Folly Island near Charleston, SC. We enjoyed lot of beach time as well as complimentary breakfast and happy hours. We also made it into the city to see the historic preservation efforts of the city and got to pay attention to some of the ultra high class old-money you might not expect of South Carolina. It was captivating but a bit surreal at the same time.

Finally last weekend I got off my butt and did some planning. I booked a backcountry site at Black Rock Mountain State Park for a weekend in the mountains. Lauren was off in Yellowstone for work and I used it as an opportunity to take Jorge out to see some of Georgia and visit a different park named for a colorful cobble. Dave and TJ made it up on Saturday to make it an official festival de salchica and for some creekside debauchery.

I also used it as an opportunity to get some hiking practice in for an upcoming trip on the west coast. In late July I will be heading to British Columbia to do the West Coast Trail with 7 other compatriots. The trip deserves more mention than I give it here and I will be providing updates and recaps as it nears and takes place.

This weekend I’ll be at home in Atlanta, taking care of all the things I have neglected during May (ironically the month of May ‘labor’ Day). I’ll be thinking of all the effort that others put into making this a great May for me and wondering what I can plan to give them some fun.

Re-invention

About two months ago I went to a wedding out in LA. In this politically correct, main stream environmental age that we live in couples are now starting to make note of all the ways their special day is a nice day for a green wedding (I hear an updated single for the Billy Idol comeback). A poem written and read by two friends of the couple mentioned the Canadian roots of the wedding ring diamond. Perhaps the food was local and the flowers organic, but as we proceeded to dance the evening away I continued to think about how it could go a bit further. The thought crossed my mind, how could the energy being expended by this party’s patrons be harnessed and put to further use?. I thought that if underneath the floor were many cylinders (like springs) under pressure then the movement up and down of people on the floor could somehow be turned into energy. Perhaps for electricity to power the party. I didn’t take it very far and the idea fell to the wayside like many of yours, I’m sure.

Today I was watching a video called The 11th Hour and they had a short video simulation of a dancefloor that produces energy very similar to what I had envisioned. I googled “dance floor collects energy” and got over a 200,000 hits (actually not that many). Turns out a fitness club chain in Hong Kong, called California Fitness, actually put the idea into practice. The article mentions a similar idea that place the generator into a shoe and could be used to power a cellphone.


This came a few days after I finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s article on the how ideas are created and how similar ideas can often come about at the same time from different people and places. He reports on a briantrust formed by a former Microsoft Exec for the purpose of creating innovation. As Gladwell says:
“It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. [The exec] wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies.”

I have to admit that I am always a bit proud of myself for a new idea, especially when I see it appear in practice later. But for real innovation to happen different views need to come together and combine knowledge to create new ideas or fields. A lot of you readers are my knowledgeable and creative friends from a variety of backgrounds. Who wants to start our own Manhattan Project of sorts? Even if we don’t produce anything earthshaking (and it’s very likely we won’t) I think it will at least be enriching.

PS: DJs are the new fossil fuel.

Hear more from Gladwell Sports fans must watch!!

Sustainable Dance Club

Radiohead


Last Thursday we had the opportunity to see Radiohead play in concert here in Atlanta. We were on the lawn for a night that expected severe storms but most of the rain held off and we got a great show. Someone with us had binoculars, still most of the time I had no idea what J. Greenwood was doing over in his corner.

Below is a copy of the setlist. Nothing from Pablo Honey and a lot of new stuff (though noticeably lacking Jigsaw Falling Into Place). Though there were two of my favorite slower ballads, “How to Disappear Completely” and “You and Whose Army.” I know plenty of you are going to see them this summer, let me know what you think.

“All I Need”
“There There”
“Lucky”
“15 Step”
“Where I End and You Begin”
“Nude”
“Pyramid Song”
“Optimistic”
“Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”
“The National Anthem”
“Idiotheque”
“You and Whose Army”
“Reckoner”
“Everything in Its Right Place”
“Bangers and Mash”
“Bodysnatchers”
“Videotape”

Encore:
“The Gloaming”
“Talk Show Host”
“Just”
“Faust Arp”
“How to Disappear Completely”

Second Encore:
“Paranoid Android”
“House of Cards”

Lexicon

I was killing some time on Facebook today and came across a feature that was able to capture and hold my attention enough to warrant a post. It is called Lexicon and it allows you to query words from posts made to people’s walls. The results are plotted along a time line and you can perform searches on multiple words to compare trends.

With Lexicon we, the users of these mass social networking (read preference collection) sites, have the ability to mine some of the data we provide. Facebook, even give the data a first-cut cleaning to correct for common mispellings (sp.) and problems with apostrophes. Notwithstanding the absence of a scale on the y-axis, the conclusions we draw from the data are not always incredibly interesting. Take, for example, the graph below showing the appearance of each candidate’s name on Facebook walls. You can add the word ‘delegates’ to your search and watch the peaks line up. You can pick out Super Tuesday (Feb 5) easily. More than that, you can see that Obama is getting a lot more free press out there in the Facebook-a-sphere.


I think this could be useful to get a rough idea about some associations we suspect to exist. Unfortunately the wall is not the best place to collect data as only certain topics are discussed and the makeup of the users is likely to screw up any generalizablity, and sometimes the scale of the two things you are comparing makes it difficult to find what you might be looking for (see ‘cold’ vs. ‘bike’). Nonetheless it is fun to see you suspicions confirmed (no one mentions ‘smog’ in Dec or Jan)and to think a bit about what people are talking about. Remember that you will not be able to infer causation from anything you find here so be humble with what you discover. Here are a few more of my favorites.

Elevate

Over the weekend I had some time to sit down with some reading materials that I have not had time for recently.
This article was one that I particularly enjoyed and find myself bringing up to people over and over.

Like many of articles in the New Yorker it concerns a topic of only superficial interest (elevators) but covers it with penetrating detail. The article is built around an anecdote about a man who experienced one of the most dreadful thoughts many of us have about elevators: being stuck in one. A video of the ordeal is included below.


More than impressing me with this rare account, the article made me think of elevators as a legitimate form of transportation – enabling societies and furthering ‘progress’ for the last 150 years.

EWE 2008

In the middle of another late frost advisory I thought it was about high time to finally post something of the tornado we had about a month ago. It ran through downtown and then hit Cabbagetown, but little known to everyone is that it continued south and east into East Atlanta. We haven’t attracted as much attention from the press and the volunteer corps but quite a few houses were hit hard over here.

Luckily we were about one block south of the real damage. We only lost a ‘small’ cedar in the front between our house and the neighbor. Several houses had damage from debris, if not a whole tree, hitting them.

We were out of town for a wedding but got plenty of calls and texts from family to check on us, from the neighbor about the tree, from Jorge about his first tornado and
from Mikey about the NCAA basketball in the Georgia Dome.

We expect that this type of event is a rarity and hope not to see our house crushed by the massive trees that surround it.

more pictures from Matt

ALR 2008

I have been away for awhile and as you may have guessed that means a lot has been going on. I have been accepted to the planning PhD program at Georgia Tech and have been awarded a three year assistantship to work on climate change and urban planning. I am still working out the details of it all but I will keep you informed.

This week I was in Washington DC presenting a poster on my thesis work at the Active Living Research Conference. Friday’s schedule featured some activity for the participants in the form of walking tours, group runs and even yoga. I figured that I should disseminate some of the information I was exposed to at the conference. The theme related to linking research and policy and we heard from Oregon Rep Earl Blumenauer. He’s a bike fanatic and you can see him on The Colbert Report below. Also are some of the best links I hear about.

http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml

Travelsmart a site from the Australian Government with information to help citizens make smarter travel choices. Also, the old guy at the top looks like he has the same helmet as me.

Perils for PedestriansThe guy who ran this was also at the conference. It looks like he puts out a show about the perils for pedestrians on some public tv station.

I first heard about Smart Growth America’sGrowing Cooler Report at APHA in November. It came up again in a talk from DC’s director of planning on Friday morning. It relates directly to the type of questions I’ll be asking about how climate change affects urban areas and vice versa.

The Participatory Photo Mapping Project at the University of Wisconsin was one of the coolest presentations I saw while I was at the conference. It combines photovoice with GPS and GIS to map the issues that residents identify themselves. Reminded me a bit of the work we started in Bogotá this summer and gave me some new ideas.

There was a lot of talk and presenting at the conference that related to schools and children. At times it seemed that we were always talking about tackling childhood obesity but not much about changing our own habits. CDC’s SHPPS website has the baseline data to introduce you to this issue and to point out some of the weaker spots in the policy that guide school diets and curriculum. Some of the best slogans to come out of these discussions were
“you can’t spell GPA without PA” and
“No child left inside”

There were plenty more informative speakers and tons of things I guess I could point you to but I hope that this gets you thinking and maybe even more active.

As seen in back (and front) yards

In the last month we’ve been spending a lot of time outside and working in the yard. And in that time we’ve seen a number of weird and unexpected things in the back and front yards of our home. First and foremost is April, the homeless woman who we helped out with a sandwich and is now determined to pick our weeds or sweep our steps in exchange for another meal. All the while telling us how the sod we moved from the back yard to the front looks like crap. Not really the way to win favor with someone, but then again, I have been suspect of her social skills since I first saw her (talking to herself).

The news of the back yard is mixed. There is progress with the garden we are trying to create and, like April and her story, some of the things we’ve uncovered in the backyard are a bit discouraging. (no, I’m not talking about Che) Since we moved in we’ve been finding trash strewn about in the back, we think thrown into our yard from the house behind us. I have been meaning to take pictures of some of the stuff to document the whole thing, but once you get in cleanup mode the last thing you wanna do is break for the camera. For me there are few things as disappointing as feeling like your property has been violated. When Lauren had her bike stolen I was pissed for along time. You lose your trust in every stranger on the street and how can you walk around in public when you feel like that? When we got in a car accident it was different because the guy was there, held accountable, and we were made ‘whole.’ If my dog (or someone else’s) steps on a nail in the yard or eats some chemical that a neighbor dumped over the fence and into my yard what recourse can I take? In the backyard, every time I pick up a spring or an empty spray paint can or a piece of old drywall I feel helpless and used.

Until now I have only had to pick up and thing or two at a time, while cutting the grass for example. However, on Sundays, Jorge and I usually take a stab at cleaning up our very own Superfund site. A couple weeks ago we were finishing up a weekend of backyard work when I tugged on a piece of red plastic in the back corner of the yard to find a whole bag of old drywall attached to it. We got the shovel out and started our own remediation on the Vargo Brownfield. Two trashbags, several Colt45 cans, some tools, and plastic cover to an air conditioner later we retired for the night. Since then I have started removing shovels full of dirt – and often laden with broken glass – from the top layer and throwing them into empty soil bags. Then I throw the whole bag away. It really is like a remediation operation. Soon we’ll bring in Georgia red clay and ‘cap’ the whole thing.

But all the work is not without progress. The raised beds are in and herbs have already been planted. We need more soil to fill up the rest before planting other seeds. Also, the weather keeps shifting on us. So while we planted some seeds in the 70 degree sun of the weekend, the low last night was 20 and we may have lost them all. To create the beds we took up soil from two spots in the back and transplanted them into the front. It looks really weird (like crap according to April) but we think it’s taking hold (and I doubt she could do better). We even bought some bulbs and other plants to put around the foundation of the house.

And that brings me to the front. On Sunday (Easter, one of the few days of the year that hardware stores will close) we were winding down the day by preparing the ground for some foundation plants. I was using the fork to break up the hard ground when up sprang an increasingly scarce commodity ’round our parts: water. I had hit and cracked the main water line into our house. Now we know that the line carrying all our water into our house is plastic and only buried about 3 inches below the surface. We got the water turned off thanks to a neighbor with a key, dug out the area surrounding the break and patched it yesterday. But the cold weather continues to compound our problems. We were afraid it might freeze last night but we made it through. Now were just waiting to see if it leaks again and then we’ll cover it completely.

That’s not even the strangest thing to be seen in our front yard. Lauren and Jorge came home one night to find a hawk on the front porch. A hawk that they walked right past and into the house. The thing didn’t even move! Yes, every day is another, even more strange, non-stop roller coaster thrill ride of domestic excitement at our house.

Easter

I came across this on aurgasm last week, just in time for Easter. There are also metal versions of it and I’m not sure if it’s a music video for the Nathan Larson track or if he just put a score to it. With this music though, it’s hard not to watch and think about love. I wonder also what the objects in the back signify.