Maybe the New Urbanism had a point...

You know, if people lived close enough to stuff to walk, we'd use less gas. But until people abandon the suburbs and the exurbs, gas prices aren't going down anytime soon. You don't have to live where you're surrounded by trees to hug to save the environment. You can start with the smaller carbon footprint that city life potentially offers.

Almost every day I drive through, over, or past neighborhoods which were fashionable- even elite- back in the day, the day being the late 1800's or early 1900's. Brownstones with boarded up windows with ornate plaster trim. Reminds me a bit of Jersey City when I first moved there in the mid 1990's, just when the young Wall Streeters started to discover the 10-minute train ride into lower Manhattan.

I had a love-hate relationship with Jersey City. The late 90's were a transition time, from "urban squalor" to hip, to overpriced get-rich-quick real estate speculators. But living there meant a short commute to work (when I worked in the WTC at least - 10 minutes), short walks for takeout, a coffee shop, a little French bistro, and the flats our friends lived in. In 5-10 minutes, you could walk to a lot of stuff, occasionally bumping into friends on the sidewalk and catching up.

So I'm finally buying into the New Urbanism: resettle into the old, abandoned areas near downtown. Be adventurous. It'll take a few years for the good services to follow suit. But the catch is this: just rehabbing an old rundown brownstone is a huge project. For urbanism to work, one brownstone isn't good enough- you have to rehab a few blocks, at about the same time, or dozens of buildings, for this to work. In Jersey City, it took the Manhattan real estate market to absolutely saturate in the late 90's before people ventured across the river en masse.

We're in the middle of a massive real estate collapse right now, with energy prices going through the roof. Underwriting mortgages and rehab loans is the only leverage we'd have to rebuilding downtowns, especially now that conventional mortgages on single family (suburban) homes is about to tighten up more than we've seen in our lifetimes. I'm expecting my own house to drop down to the level it was when we bought it, before all the work we've put into it. But no rush to sell either, since I'm within a couple of blocks of the three core bus lines from our local transit provider, and live in a nice suburban-feeling neighborhood on top of that.

(We talk to our neighbors through the kitchen window, borrow cups of sugar and flour from each other, and watch and feed each other's kids depending on errands and schedules. Not only have we moved back to Albany, we've teleported to the year 1958.)

What would it take in Albany to convert places like Arbor Hill into the middle class enclaves they used to be? My thoughts: improved schools, firm support from the city, county, and state, and an enormous cultural change in Upstate New York to prefer urban living over rural living. But- being a young professional in an up-and-coming city has its charms. If I were in my 20's again, I'd live downtown.

end of yet another semester...

Now that announcements of my former classmates' proposal defenses are popping up all over the place, I'm reminded to start making some progress. Of course, none of them are teaching 6 classes this semester...

But I'm catching up with grading, making more progress on my dissertation plan (though have yet to start writing a real draft rather than just scribbling notes everywhere). And a department meeting today, and my annual review to consider and sign. My review was pretty good- almost glowing in a way, even though my class evals were average across the board.

But, hitting the average for my first semester with a full teaching load was given a heavily-qualified rating of "outstanding". But, all I think about was the one question out of 20 where I rated pretty low- a couple standard deviations below average. Of course, that class had only 6 respondents out of a class of a little over a dozen of registered students. There is the statistical validity of ultra-low sample sizes to consider...

If only my ratemyprofessor.com ratings were so kind. I'm sad that I care...

Checklist

I like crossing things off of lists. Today, I got to cut the research outline for my dissertation proposal almost in half after today's meeting with my adviser. Happy day indeed... I might yet graduate someday.
It's easy to overreach when planing out a dissertation. I like to think of it as a roadmap-- though I'm not sure whether this means that the trip will be any shorter, or whether it just means fewer turns. We'll see... :)

Random Driving Thoughts

Last weekend consisted of another expedition to New Jersey- namely the Fort Lee - Edgewater area. It was my first overnighter in the area, and my second overnighter in New Jersey since moving back to Albany some 3 1/2 years ago. It was a bit easier this time without the kids to herd- my sister took them for the weekend. We also tried out a portable GPS Navigation unit- a relatively new model with a screen to show location on a map, altitude, direction, speed, etc. Over a combined total of 8 hours of driving over the weekend, I had a few thoughts about it:

• The letterbox display doesn't work for me- it shows more what's left and right rather than what's ahead and behind. I want that adjustable-- usually I'm most concerned about what's ahead, so the option to put my current location near the bottom, with most of the screen showing what's ahead.
• I don't really want a map at all, but a schematic diagram of my route, with some indicator about where I am- how much longer before I turn in terms of time and distance. The rest of the stuff in the picture is visual noise rather than usable information.
  
• It would be nice if the unit could somehow tell you what the radio stations are in the area. It's public record where transmitters are, and it's easy to calculate what stations are probably in range. It's dangerous to go flipping through stations while driving.
  
• Stations could be rated, sorted, by category -- by listeners, or by themselves. You should be able to download that into your navigation unit. In a perfect world, you could tell your navigation unit what kind of music you like, and it'd just tune to whatever was in range. Many stations are in range for maybe an hour or two, tops.
• When entering an address, you enter a city, and pick from a list of combinations of cities and states with similar names. If you're already heading towards Albany, NY, is it likely you'll want directions to Albany, GA?
  
• I'd like some link between Google Maps and my GPS navigation unit. Even better if I could bluetooth an address into it (via OBEX object) from my cell phone rather than the painful exercise of inputting an address from my cell phone into the GPS address entry system.
• It doesn't also log your trip, or enter waypoints. Maybe my unit was too cheap, but I don't see mention of these features on other units.
• Why is the navigation unit's voice female? I fully expected it to start snipping at me when I missed my turn. :) (My wife's theory- guys don't ask for directions. My theory- women wouldn't listen to a guy's instructions anyways. YMMV.)
• But drivers are a little hypnotized when driving anyway- is a talking navigation unit a good idea for everyone? I can see some people turning when the navigation unit says so- even if it's dangerous. Maybe if the navigation unit just talked while driving, about landmarks driven past, or something else, it would help keep drivers awake and alert.
  

I had a lot of other things to think about, but less interesting than that.

Happy 40 Recap

What I did for my 40th birthday:

• teach 4 classes
• grade papers
• give 4 make-up exams
• go home
• do laundry
• grade papers
• greet kids, read their birthday cards, get happy birthday hugs
  
• drop kids off at neighbor's house
• iron shirts
• dress "casual"
• go to 677 Steakhouse in downtown Albany
• go for dessert at the Cheesecake Factory
• go home
• fold laundry
• go to bed

When you're in Albany, beware when anything is described as "New York City" or "Manhattan" by anyone who's lived there less than a year. And forgetaboutit if they're describing anything observed on that island while still holding a bus or train ticket in their pocket.

The highlight wasn't the "Manhattan-style" "677 Steakhouse". Food was average, service condescending, bathroom like a college bar at happy hour. I ditched the birthday dessert, because I just had to leave. If it's "Manhattan" anything, it would be a Manhattan tourist trap: overpriced, average food served with too much attitude.

Nor was the highlight dropping the kids off before going out to dinner.
It was the part about birthday cards and birthday hugs.

Next birthday, it'll be back to the BBQ, grilling stuff properly, watching the kids kick a soccer ball around in the yard. And there will be a pint of Newcastle involved.

I think I'm starting to understand what turning 40 means.

Blue in the Tooth

I've been thinking a bit about Bluetooth technology lately, here on the eve of another decennial birthday. I opted out from skydiving for the first time, or getting a leather jacket and a motorbike. (I had 23 stitches and a really cool scar from the last time I was racing one, but I was only 9 then.) I think my daily routine provides ample opportunities to cheat death, especially the part that includes driving on I-90 during morning rush hour 5 days a week. (And that, after nearly a decade of driving in New Jersey..)

Instead I've occupied my scarce free time been playing with a mix of old and new tech: a cheapie GPS unit that clips onto an old PDA I have, a Handspring Visor. Sometimes it works, but more often not-I'm suspecting it's sensitive to voltage levels, since it works best with the first half-hour or so on a new set of batteries. But the old PDA doesn't talk well to newer devices... yet.

Also, I'm getting the hang of Bluetooth services in the course of trying to get a headset to work with my computer. I'm also running across the idea of the "Carputer", though my hypothetical version consists more of a collection of interacting devices without a big central computer- more a peer-to-peer architecture, though something that backs up once in a while, maybe while parked in the driveway. When I think of it, the real problem is where to park the data- some central storage device, though a $10 SD card would be more than enough...

So where's the midlife crisis part of all this? Apart from having a dissertation to work on and a full teaching load, I'm doing pretty much the same stuff I've been doing the past few years, though a bit more settled and secure. I'm not terribly introspective today, or no more so than usual. Maybe that'll be the next decade's birthday.