The construction costs vary by $600 million and the operating costs by $5 per year, so some tough decisions need to be made on which makes most sense long term.
Apparently, EP wasn’t all that excited about the LRT back in the day, but they’re coming around to the idea and want it fast tracked now. I’m all for getting EP folks in and out of downtown without idling their SUVs in my city and causing more ramps to be built downtown.
Minneapolis has tons of great trails, but it also has tons of people who want to use the trails in a variety of ways, including walking, running, rollerblading, biking, rollerskiing, and dog walking. A few other bloggers have looked into the issues lately, including great blogging newcomer, Nathan, from Life by the Falls, with this take:
I have been yelled at a couple times by bikers, both times by an elderly man on a bicycle. I must say it’s a little shocking to be called an a-hole at 8am on a beautiful spring morning, especially by someone who could be my grandfather. I sure hope my grandparents don’t swear at runners!
True dat. Nothing gets your day started off right like being called an a-hole while running.
Brian Moen has a great post on the topic where he describes how lucky we are to have such a great trail system, but still runs into problems when cars and bikes mix:
Oh, and I did get honked at once, by a lady in a SUV. I was crossing at a crosswalk, from the river road path to get up to the Franklin Ave bridge, when this lady, who I thought was slowing down for me to cross, honked at me. Guess she thought she had the right of way.
The Star Tribune’s Roadguy blog includes a photo of the painfully overdue for a rebuild trail along W River Rd with the following description:
This stretch won’t be rebuilt until 2009 or 2010; in the meantime, it’s not impossible to understand why a cyclist who wants to keep his or her teeth might choose the roadway instead.
Here’s my take: The park system needs to take a serious look at how people are using the parks today. More and more people are participating in individual sports like biking, running, and rollerblading on Minneapolis trails while less and less are using the baseball diamonds and hockey rinks. The money should follow the active users of the park, enabling the city’s fitness choices by providing safe areas to work out or simply enjoy the outdoors.
Seriously, I’ll give you through the New Year. I’ll even tolerate a few stragglers until Valentine’s Day (assuming there’s snow on the ground). Then this year we got all that snow right around March 1st so I got out my scissors and started cutting some more slack. But come on. It’s 81 degrees out, people. It’s time to take them down.
You can’t use the “it’s been too cold” excuse. Or “there’s too much snow” since lawns are starting to turn green.
Seriously, people, it’s time to get those lights down.
The pages load times on The Deets over the past few days have been painful, as if the server was approaching the peak of Everest with a piano in tow. I finally had a chance to look into why this was happening and figured it out.
The left column used to have a feature called “Recent Posts from Friends” or some sort of similar term. It used an RSS aggregation service called FeedBlendr to pull together the recent posts from around a dozen sites into one single feed, and the “blended” feed was then syndicated onto this site.
Apparently, FeedBlendr hasn’t had enough fiber in it’s diet lately, so The Deets was becoming backed up when the page load reached the FeedBlendr request. FeedBlendr would eventually get it out with some squeezing, but it was a painful process.
So, FeedBlendr is gone.
It’s worth noting that the problem may not be with FeedBlendr but with one of the feeds I has mixed in the blendr. That’s something I’ll check out on another day.
While digging around, I noticed the Flickr photos in the upper right-hand corner of the site didn’t have dimensions in the HTML code, so the server didn’t know how much room to set aside for the photos until they loaded. Fixed as well.
Teresa Boardman has the goods on the new Farmers Market Flats going up next to the St. Paul Farmers Market (duh). District Energy heating and a year-round indoor farmers market both sound cool:
A year-round, indoor Saint Paul Farmer’s Market on the street level of the building, complete with room to showcase products from more than 160 area growers and producers and demonstration space to involve customers in the experience.
Heating and cooling by District Energy, which provides community energy services utilizing biomass and other environmentally friendly practices.
Will people take the source of a building’s energy into consideration when buying? I suppose some will from an eco standpoint. Does me make sense financially?
Mr. Manners is one of my favorite podcasts to listen to if I have a few minutes to kill. Carly and I were listening to Mr. Manners’ takes on finger foods on the way to work today, where he covered things like when it’s appropriate to use a fork & knife for onion rings. Things you don’t think about every day, to say the least.
Later in the podcast after I’d dropped Carly off at work, he got into a rule I’m often guilty of breaking:
For dinner rolls or bread at the table, place a small amount of butter on your bread plate from the serving dish, break off a small, bite size piece of bread with your fingers, and use your butter knife (or regular knife if no butter knife is provided) to butter just that bite.
You can listen to the podcast on the site, or subscribe through iTunes.
Butter each bite? That’s not how I roll. I’m a split the dinner roll in half, spread a generous amount of butter inside, then eat it like a butter sandwich kinda guy. Maybe I’m not ready for dinner with the Queen of England, but I’m perfectly content with my dinner roll consumption method.
The Deets is the personal blog of Ed Kohler. Views represented here are his own. Views of comments on The Deets are their own and Ed does not necessarily endorse the views of commenters. Ed's wishlist can be found here.
