Month: February 2009

Urban Farming! There’s a very nice post on the Green City Blue Lake blog that includes Joe Cimperman’s enthusiastic rundown of some other ideas and upcoming legislation in this area. One item in particular is interesting: A partnership between the OSU Ag Extension and Blue Pike Farm (72nd between the Shoreway and St. Clair) on…

Bill Callahan: Big banks declare moratorium, file 25 new Cuyahoga foreclosures on same day. Bill’s definitely on the case here. I’m wondering what possible explanations these guys will come up with. I’m sure they’ll be interesting reading. On a related note, PNC (aka National City Mortgage) announced a similar moratorium today. I really hope they…

NY Times: In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update. A profile of New York elementary school librarian Stephanie Rosalia and all the new skills necessary in that position. In this age of Wikipedia, I particularly liked her trick of using this site to force kids to recognize reliable and unreliable sources.

More Convention Center Stuff! Tony Coyne had a nice piece in the paper today that again tried to show how completely non-secret and non-speedy the Convention Center site selection process has been. I’d forgotten about some of those earlier discussions. While Tony mentions the Cleveland School District’s infrastructure problems as derailing this initial push for…

NY Times: Cycling Enters Electronic Age. Electric shifters for racing bikes. One of the most interesting parts of this article for me was the discussion of the prices for this high end gear. What makes a shifter worth $2400? We looked at a lot of different shifting parts when we were volunteering down at the…

Convention Center Stuff: Lots of good info today on this. First of all, the great Cleveland Mag Politcs Blog, MMPI and the Mall 2, Forest City & Cleveland Partnership 0. It’s pretty clear that MMPI was the only party in this mess that did their homework. And from Steve Litt: Medical Mart presentation makes convincing…

Dell: They’ve finally announced that new XT2 Tablet. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the fact that this is based on a standard Intel chipset is automatically a huge improvement over the woeful XT. Speaking of the XT, Dell’s also blogging about driver updates for it. Weird. Brand New: Yellow/Roadway’s new crappy logo. (As…

More Urban Farming: On the heels of Cleveland’s recent relaxation of zoning rules, Lakewood’s also looking at allowing residents to raise chickens. Ned Hill and Fran Stewart: The New City Beautiful. The “old” City Beautiful movement was about placing monumental buildings in park-like settings. Think Cleveland’s or Washington DC’s Malls. Gorgeous, but not very practical,…

Mary Beth Matthews: The 200 Day School Year. Gov. Strickland recently proposed extending the school year in Ohio. This particular part of his education plan has obviously hit a nerve with teachers. I’ve now heard from several teachers (and spouses of teachers) on Strickland’s plan and read a bunch of letters to the PD editors…

Writer’s Beat: Profit & Loss/Profitability & Liability : How Books Make (or Don’t Make) Money. Anna Genoese dives into great detail — with real numbers — about how the publishing and bookselling business works. For example, did you know that bookstores can get all their money back on unsold books just by sending them back…