Car2Go seems to have fixed most of the problems that I mentioned in my previous post about their website and I was actually able to successfully use it recently. I was going to pick up my bike from the shop, and I had a time crunch because I had to be home by six. At […]
Author Archives: Alexis
The perils of blog-writing
I think writing a single-author, regularly-updated ‘subject’ blog, other than one on cooking (where you at least have the advantage of being able to constantly cook different recipes), must be uniquely challenging, particularly in the area of retaining a long-participating readership. Unlike a personal or news blog, which can draw on natural repositories of new […]
Reviewing Transport for Suburbia by Paul Mees
Those who follow me on Twitter have been subjected to a lot of little quotation gems from Paul Mees’ 2010 book Transport for Suburbia recently. There’s so much to say about his book that I hope to do a series of posts on it, but since it’s apparently not a widely-read or -known book, I […]
PBOT needs to be solution-oriented
In Saturday morning’s Oregonian neighborhoods section, there’s an article about the safety and traffic conditions on NW Cornell. It contains the line: The society would like to see a stop sign or a crosswalk signal, but Costello isn’t optimistic. “I had a PBOT engineer tell me that realistically, it’s not going to happen until someone […]
Asking the right questions
As the days and weeks have stretched into a month, I’ve gotten extremely frustrated with being injured. In the last two days I realized that I’ve been making it worse by certain attitudes I wasn’t entirely conscious of. One is that I should be able to keep up my usual standards even when injured (with […]
Summary of my position on bicycle helmets
I accidentally concisely summarized my position on bike helmets in a Facebook comment: It might be a good idea to wear a helmet, but it’s a waste of passion and effort to try to get other people to do it. Spend the effort and breath you would have spent on helmet debates on making it […]
Drawing the wrong lessons
I was reading an interesting Atlantic Cities article someone linked to on Facebook: Survival Lessons from an Ancient City. It made me think of Strong Towns (which isn’t mentioned in the piece, sadly) but it also made me think about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of efforts to extend light-rail systems to far-flung suburbs, as […]
The cons of being a holdout
I really like hosting my own photos, because there are copyright/rights management, privacy, and cost issues with doing it any other way. But I really would like to outsource it sometimes, because Gallery2 is a bizarre piece of software with a shitty user interface. To get batch-rotate capabilities, I’d have to directly patch the source […]
The worst advice I’ve ever gotten
The worst advice I’ve ever gotten is to go ahead and pursue a potential romance with a friend, because you really can’t ruin a good friendship that way. It’s not true. You really can. It doesn’t mean you will, or that if you do, the decision was a bad one. But it’s not true, and […]
Remixing yourself
I just finished Reamde, which I’ve been meaning to pick up and serendipitously ran across at the library on Thursday, just before spending a bunch of time on a plane and then in bed with a cold and a renewed pain in my ankle (probably from selfsame traveling). I was only about 250 pages in […]