cainmark

Reposted from http://hsvbike.com

Please consider signing this petition to have the City of Huntsville adopt the Complete Streets Policy. As you may or may not know Huntsville is the 2nd most deadly city in Alabama for pedestrians. Lets make the streets here safe for all!! http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/adopt-complete-streets-policy-in-city-of-huntsville-alabama

The streets of our cities and towns are an important part of the livability of our communities. They ought to be for everyone, whether young or old, motorist or bicyclist, walker or wheelchair user, bus rider or shopkeeper. But too many of our streets are designed only for speeding cars, or worse, creeping traffic jams.
Now, in communities across the country, a movement is growing to complete the streets. States, cities and towns are asking their planners and engineers to build road networks that are safer, more livable, and welcoming to everyone.
Instituting a complete streets policy ensures that transportation planners and engineers consistently design and operate the entire roadway with all users in mind - including bicyclists, public transportation vehicles and riders, and pedestrians of all ages and abilities.
more info can be found here http://www.completestreets.org

BASC, The Huntsville Bike committee, has these pdf graphics available of the swell bike route map that's in bike shops and other public areas.

http://hsvbike.com/?page_id=544

As a bike commuter, I greatly appreciate this work, something I could have used back in 1994 when I committed to bike commuting full time after skateboarding and bicycling when my car at the time would often be broken down due to planned obsolescence.

Pick one up even if you're not a bike commuter because it has instructions on bicyclists right to the road and how auto operators should behave in conjunction with them, and beyond that, it's actually a really good map of the city.

Last tax-free weekend we got a computer for my mother-in-law's birthday.

We got her a simple eMachine computer since she doesn't need a dual-core processor for email and searching the web and writing stuff. I wiped off Vista and put Ubuntu 9.10 Jaunty Jackalope on it. With 3g of memory, GNU/Linux flies on this machine.

This 76 year old woman who never used a computer or even a typewriter in her life was able to copy pictures from her camera's sd card and use f-spot to browse through images and print out a picture herself after I showed her how to.

My being patient and her being patient helped in tutoring her in computer usage.

From purchase to working installation was one hour.

To specifically configure it for her was one and a half hours.

To show her everything was 4 hours. Mainly showing her how a mouse worked and keyboard combinations and the menu layout. For those who haven't grown up with this stuff it can be overwhelming.

The most surprising thing to me was that her arthritis made it harder for her to use the mouse and easier to use the keyboard. I really thought it would have been the other way around.

I suggested that now that she has a computer, she needs to get familiar with it on her own. I suggested that she power it on, do 1 to 3 things at most, then stop so she doesn't confuse commands, do something else then come back to it later.

She's really happy with it and my wife and I are glad we could help her with this.

Next task is to get her phone line hooked to the internet. We didn't want to overwhelm her too much.

CC By-SA by cainmark
This photo is creative common attribution share-alike. You can use it for personal and commercial purposes as long as you retain the same licence, crediting me and allowing anyone else to do the same with whatever you use the picture for, remix or make derivatives, like a quilt or a sculpture, etc.-legally from this copyrighted photo by me.

more information about creative commons here:

http://creativecommons.org

Mayors Ride
May 17th 1:30 pm
Kids Fountain at 315 Fountain Circle

http://hsvbike.com/?p=235

http://hsvbike.com/

http://www.alabike.org/events/MayorsRide2009.pdf


If anyone wants to post this to the Huntsville community, that'd be swell.

These are one day behind. I don't know why.

• 21:39 Digitizing my CDs received as gifts using Soundjuicer on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Works pretty darn well. Cassetes and Vinyl in the future. #

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I just finished Cory Doctorow's YA novel _Little Brother_. Really great read everyone, not just YA should read.

It is available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. download yours. Librarians, ask for print deals.

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

These are one day behind. I don't know why.

• 08:23 Prince Caspian was a pretty good adaptation.
  
  Off to pay the utility bill. Whee! #
• 18:56 Shifting lots of books. Woo hoo. #
• 23:47 Playing with Star Trek LCARS customizations on my GNU/Linux Ubuntu Hardy Heron desktop just because I like the interface. And playing. #

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Surveill the Surveillance. Let's take back the Constitution's hijacked 4th amendment as soon as we can.




http://www.aclu.org/privacy/spying/surveillancesocietyclock2.html

More information about Earth Hour here:

http://www5.earthhourus.org/

This is pretty cool.

"Share the love with One Laptop per Child, the Creative Commons, Textbook Revolution, and the entire world."

LiveContent CD

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2008/02/14/olpc-bookdrive-and-hackathon/

One of my favorite vlogs from my incoming rss video feeds using the Miro (formerly Democracy)

http://www.getmiro.com

player has been the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks

http://www.getmiro.com

I love learning and these talks are always very good about a large variety of subjects, like African fractals, Ant colonies, local warming (laptops), animal movement, etc.

Internet archive automatically creates derivatives of your files

http://www.archive.org/help/derivatives.php

I find stuff like this fascinating, as while I'm not really good at math, I'm very good at finding visual patterns of different types:

Ron Eglash on African fractals

The Inline OGG Theora file's too large, so behind the cut:
( Read more... )

==Lydia Gold Skate Park==


Located at 200 Cleveland Avenue, NW (behind the Historic Huntsville Depot, between Church and Meridian Streets near I-565)

a FREE venue open to the public from sunup until sundown; named for Lydia Gold, an area skateboarding activist in the 1980's.

http://rocketcitywiki.pbwiki.com/Outdoors


I bought a good portion of my comics from the Tattoed Lady in the late 80s and early 90s.

Lydia Gold was the one who introduced me to the old black and white move, "The Haunting", based on The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (who also wrote "The Lottery". I could never really thank her enough for that. She passed away too young.

A very good presentation of exactly why DMCA and DRM are soooo stupid.

http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2007-12-04--DMCA/2007-12-04-on-the-digital-millenium-copyright-act.html

Remember, it's an education project, not a hunger project (I really don't know why so much negativity is thrown at this worhty endeavor. The low energy consumption alone is pretty amazing).


Birmingham, Alabama to be first in the US to get the XO laptop!
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/1525219&from=rss

Something to think about. If you think oil was a political bugaboo, just wait till the water wars. Some have already started:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/run-out-of-water.htm