I am provoked to write you by a recent flyer I received in the mail from the “Downtown Seattle Neighbors Alliance” (DSNA) about a housing project of the Plymouth Housing Group (PHG).

My family and I enjoy living in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle. We are active members of the community, love and enjoy many of the amenities that downtown living offers like restaurants, theaters, museums, parks, the waterfront, and even schools for our young daughter. Since 2010 I have also operated the Belltown-centric news outlet @BelltownBuzz.

I am not in any way affiliated with PHG, but as their neighbor for over a decade I am familiar with their great mission and good work. In contrast, I have never heard of the DSNA. Their flyer omits any identifying details of its organizers beyond an email address (cc’ed above).

With the above qualifiers, I’d like to suggest you consider several other key pieces of information missing from DSNA’s flyer and map:

• Middle- and High-income housing – The DSNA map indicates over a dozen low-income properties across Belltown, downtown, Pioneer Square, South Lake Union, and Capitol Hill. This same region has seen huge growth in the development and availability of middle- and high- income housing in recent years. Whole blocks have been gentrified or re-developed year after year. Within the sightlines from my apartment building at 1st & Broad I count 10 new 12-story condo properties that did not exist 10 years ago. And growing in-city employers like Amazon will drive development of more such properties. Were these properties also shown on the map, you’d see how the properties of PHG and similar groups serve a necessary end of the housing spectrum.
• Residency & apartment size figures – The DSNA map omits any mention of the number of people or the size of the apartments in the properties shown. When most of the condos on my block are dual-tower properties housing ~300 people in studios, 1-bedroom, and two-bedroom units that start at $175,000, PHG’s 63-person low-income project seems very reasonable.
• Locations & Timeframes –The DSNA flyer doesn’t specify the exact location of the PHG project they’re concerned about (I imagine it’s 2013 3rd Avenue) or the nearby “crime hot-spot”. I do know from living in the neighborhood for 10 years that “crime hot-spots” move around. It’s entirely possible this one does so too before PHG opens their building in 2015.
• Location-decision factors – The DSNA map doesn’t explain why so many social service agencies are already co-located downtown. I suspect it’s a neighborhood-scale version of “the wrap-around”: a case management technique in which case workers from diverse social and health agencies who support the same individual coordinate their efforts and share information in order to provide more effective support to the individual. If residents of PHG’s new building work at or receive support from more than one agency downtown, I imagine they’d benefit from having those agencies close together. 2013 Third Avenue also seems a terrific location for PHG because of the large North/South bus stops on the same block.
• Tom Douglas restaurants – There are 7 concentrated in the DNSA map’s boundaries, almost as many as there are social service agencies.

Finally, I’m unfamiliar with one expression DSNA uses in its flyer: ‘non-worker housing’. I don’t know how one distinguishes the home of a ‘worker’ from a ‘non-worker’. If this factor is a real part of the issue, couldn’t the DSNA’s organizers address this easily by offering their new neighbors jobs? That would strengthen the ‘ramp’ to sustainable independent living that organizations like PHG, Farestart, and others are trying to build for downtown residents.

Thank you for your consideration, and please let me know if you have questions.

AMD

The President's State of the Union Speech barely warrants a mention. Here's hoping next week is quieter?

A small asteroid, known as 2012 DA14, was expected to pass close to Earth later on Friday, NASA reported on its Web site. Aleksandr Y. Dudorov, a physicist at Chelyabinsk State University, said it was possible that the meteorite may have been flying alongside the asteroid.“What we witnessed today may have been the precursor of that asteroid,” said Mr. Dudorov in a telephone interview.

via Meteor Fragments Are Said to Rain Down on Siberia - NYTimes.com.

At the end of the holidays, the challenge becomes how to remove the tree from our apartment, through our building, to the trash room, with as little mess as possible. Dry, brittle pine needles break easily, and wrapping it in a sheet (the preferred apartment dweller's method) always leaves behind a long trail of needles to clean up. We've adopted a different tradition: after New Year's passes we cut our tree down. Branch by branch.

It takes a few hours. But the slow methodical nature of clipping larger branches repeatedly into smaller and smaller bits until the whole tree is just a few bags of four-inch sticks, can be meditative. As a family we made the holidays together, and this is our way of bringing closure, appreciating what we have, and celebrating the end of another season. Plus the cleanup is a lot more contained.

Details of the process I went through, and how I got to these conclusions is below:

THE MACHINE:

It's a dual-core i5 Lenovo e220s that I bought new last year with 4gigs of RAM and a 300gig hard drive. I've run Windows Ultimate 7 (64-bit) on it just fine. And after upgrading to a solid-state drive for the OS, it has run even better. I bought it knowing it wouldn't support Windows 8's touch-screen imperative but I was unwilling to wait a year to find out what OEM's would offer. Microsoft offers existing Windows users like me an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro via a $39.99 download. Before beginning, I did a complete cleanup of my laptop, and then imaged all the drives in case I wanted to restore my Windows 7 build in the end. Lifehacker has a good step-by-step for doing this: How To Prepare Your Computer For Windows

THE UPGRADE:

I ran the initial setup program from the Microsoft website which checked compatibility of my machine.  It advised I uninstall 5 Lenovo drivers and hardware apps. The Lenovo website gives the same guidance for many their laptop models.

After the un-installs I stepped through the purchase experience and proceeded to get the 2gig OS download. The setup program then offered the chance to make an .iso file to burn to disk, which I did. I then used the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool to create a bootable USB thumb-drive to do the actual install.

The install itself went very smoothly. Despite having multiple drives in my laptop, it never gave me the choice to pick where to install, which, since I was doing an upgrade, made sense. The only serious choice point was the initial user account: you can create or use an existing "Windows Account" (hotmail, live.com, outlook.com, etc) or create a local account. There are trade-offs to be made, so choose wisely. How To Geek has a good explanation of this: HTG Explains: Microsoft Accounts vs. Local Accounts in Windows 8.

During the install I enjoyed the friendly on-screen tutorial about navigating around the new user experience. This began with a blank screen and a single word dissolving into then out of view: "hi". How Apple.

THE NEW UI:

After a quick 30-minutes I was staring at my newly booted Windows 8 Pro laptop Start Screen. And wondering what to do next. Whether you call it by its original name Metro UI or the new copy-safe Modern UI label, the new blinking, flashing, tiled wall of Windows 8 is distinct. A Charms Bar menu overlay hidden off-screen right offers Search, Settings, Start Screen and Personalization options. An app toolbar overlay hidden off-screen at bottom lets you un/pin and un/install programs and apps. Another Running Programs overlay hidden off-screen left shows you what's open, including the Start Screen as an app itself. After exploring how to use the new Modern UI Start Screen on a laptop without a touch-screen I quickly decided the Start Button/Menu-and-Mouse usage-paradigm was much faster. I live in my apps, not on my desktop or a rudimentary Start Screen. The Start Button was the one place to go discover icons and links to the programs I wanted, not three hidden overlays in three different directions. The Live Tiles probably work great on a phone or tablet with few inputs. But on a PC without a touch-screen they are like the Crawler on CNN. Distracting and limited. It took 10 minutes of web research and another 10 minutes of downloading, installing ClassicShell to de-activate the Start screen, Charms Bar, and other UI overlays and configuring John Edward's clrSharp skin to restore a familiar Start Button and Menu.

As part of Windows 8 you also get a whole suite of default "Modern UI" apps offering specific content like News, Sports, Finance, Weather, Travel, Videos, Music, and Photos. There's also modest Modern UI productivity suite of Mail (confusingly called Outlook in some places), People, Messenger, and Calendar. I installed the updated Modern UI versions of two programs I use a lot: Skype and OneNote. But all of these paled in comparison to the full-on PC versions and websites they are meant to replace. For example, the Modern UI version of Skype has no search function. If you have hundreds of contacts, and wish to call your friend Tony, you'll have to swipe or mouse or right arrow for a very long time to find him. The Yahoo! Finance website offers more than the Finance app on Windows 8. In fact, when you think about it, all the default Modern UI apps subvert the 'move to the cloud' strategy driving Windows 8: they are locally installed apps that duplicate poorly much richer content found on websites. One gets the sense they were included to 'seed the experience' of a computer running a bevy of Modern UI apps until more apps are available. On a computer with a keyboard and mouse with which you'd want to get some work done too much of the functionality in these apps has been removed. I restored the previous PC versions Skype and OneNote after less than an hour. I uninstalled every default Modern UI apps I could.

So there you have it: I upgraded to Windows 8 Pro easily and quickly. I got great performance improvements with fewer 3rd party drivers, faster boot/sleep/resume/shutdown, and cooler sounds. Once I restored the Start Button & Start Menu this $39.99 OS upgrade became truly usable on my one-year old laptop. Of course, YMMV.

And if you've taken the plunge, I'd love to hear your experience in the comments below.

I got curious about the web technology choices the two candidate's campaigns have made. So I took a look at the source code behind their websites. You can do this by visiting http://www.mittromney.com and http://www.barackobama.com and then selecting "View Source" in any browser. Romney's campaign website reveals

1. it runs on Drupal
2. it's served from Amazon CloudFront (which I believe had a big outage tonight)
3. the code is a mess

Obama's campaign website by contrast has clean code that includes a giant ASCII-art Obama logo at the top of the page spelled using the letters 'u', 's' and 'a'. Classy nerdy fun. Click the screen-shot above for a bigger view. Check it out!