west north

On the last possible day… it appears that all posts have moved, that any duplicates can and will be deleted, and that email sent this morning might not have gotten through. Oh well; at least everything’s here. Again, things will look funny due to different text encoding, but deal.

I got a sudden note that my web host is shutting down at the end of this month. Therefore, there will be some weirdness with the site as I move to a new host. Expect the photo galleries to finally migrate to Flickr, for instance.

Update: we’re now at WordPress.com, more or less, after wrestling with numerous export and import scripts (you’d think WordPress could handle this simply, no?). Some posts are still missing, the lack of Textile formatting here makes some posts look strange, and I’ve trashed some of the old static content, but most importantly everything’s safely backed up. Might also give TextPattern a try.

Busy month, notably owing to a full winter travel schedule. (Chicago’s a nice place to leave in the winter.) Now, I’m almost sure that my hard disk has crashed — thus wiping out most of the photos from the past few weeks, too, at least since the last backup. Oh well.

Among the photos to be posted earlier which will likely never make it: one of the “multimodal signs”:http://www.commuterpage.com/carshare.htm marking Zipcar spaces in Portland. Nice to know it’s not just a PDX thing, though.

Updating the “web version”:http://westnorth.com/guide will take another little bout of enthusiasm, but in the meantime you can download a PDF of a fully revised “Chicago City Guide”:http://westnorth.com/guide/cityguide06-web.pdf (2.9 MB), created for “Rail~Volution 2006″:http://railvolution.com.

Due to workload, the very light blogging schedule will continue until mid-June or so. Keep checking for new photos, though, and watch for live blogging from the floor of “CNU XIV”:http://www.cnuxiv.org in Providence — resting place of “General Burnside”:http://www.quahog.org/attractions/index.php?id=81, whose legendary facial hair gave us the Spoonerism of “sideburns.” I’ll grow mine out for the occasion.

Spent time hacking at the stylesheets. The index page looks fine in Firefox, different but okay in Safari; interior pages need work. It’s not a high priority, though.

Rather humbling to see just how small a map describing most of my travels ends up.

I finally got around to posting the Chicago City Guide that our committee wrote for CNU XII last year. It’s an entertaining, quick overview of the city and its neighborhoods, even without the great photography and maps that we originally had. (I need to find where those files went; when I do, I’ll add them to the guide.)

Devin posted photos from our Team Biking Vikings adventure at Saturday’s Explorago sustainable scavenger hunt, presented by the Foresight Design Institute. Still no word on whether we won, but I’ll certainly never forget getting towed in a wheelchair, at top speed, down the middle of Lake Street, in a thunderstorm.

Minor but important changes here: the blogroll is back, although lacking in some refinements and still missing many of the old internal links. In time…

The archive now looks more extensive because it is now officially complete: almost four years of blogging! After two hours of wrenching with code, I managed to import almost 200 blog entries from the dim mists of antiquity, pre-MT (i.e., 2001-2003). Didn’t have categories or titles back then, so most of them (except ones I’ve revisited) lack both — but they’re now searchable, in the calendar archive, and filed under the category “musty stacks.” Due to odd line break behavior, I’ve noticed a few broken links; if you see one, leave a comment and I’ll fix it.

Sorry for the downtime (really, only about an hour or two) over the past day. I’ve been ironing out the kinks, and re-imported from Movable Type thrice in order to fix some links and some funky text formatting behavior. (I knew that my penchant for em dashes would get to me one day, but “Textile”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/index.html sees double dashes without spaces as strikethrough.)

The entire move has been planned for a while, but mostly has to do with dropping Apple’s $100/year .Mac service, which I had been using for web storage and the email account. However, three primary email boxes and two web hosts became too much to juggle, so now I’m down to two boxes and one host.

Bonus feature: comments are back! Plus a new, temporary look while I rebuild the templates.

This is not really turning into a cameraphone photoblog, but Flickr’s upload-by-email makes it ridiculously easy to send posts from, oh, a street corner or a nightclub or anywhere. I’m pondering switching to WordPress later this summer, which supports blog-by-email.

I’m presenting “Driving for Dollars” (downloads will be reposted in July) twice this week:
1. Greening the Heartland–Palmer House, Wednesday, 9am
2. Transport Chicago–IIT HUB, Friday, 11am

Next week, I’m off to Pasadena for CNU XIII, then taking some time after that off. So, I’ll be posting sporadically at best through, oh, maybe mid-June (before going on vacation again in July).

yay! 100 photos at Flickr! (and to think I doubted the value of a pro membership.) I went ahead and posted some from NYC just to be able to share with the world.

Early spring in Chicago brings with it shifting winds that seem to wipe clean the air above the city. The salt dust, fuel-oil soot, marine fog, and low-angle sunlight that conspire to create the gray (or, at night, orange) pallor of winter all drop away. Warmer sunlight and battling lake and prairie winds make for some crisp, severe-clear days that are perfect for photos — before the humidity and smog of summer drop their veil of haze. That’s all to say: I’ve uploaded quite a few springtime-around-town photos to Flickr — from the leviathan Industrial Gothic lofts of the Central Manufacturing District to elegant Graceland Cemetery, with forsythias and willows in their pale beauty.

I’ve also uploaded a few photos from months past, including shots from Philadelphia (e.g., 30th St. Station, as above) and Boston and a few events here (like the Anti-Auto Show).

Runyon D. Banks, my distant billionaire cousin, has off and started his own blog. We don’t exactly agree on politics, but his sense of style is utterly infallible.

run, child

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

Taken on Miami Beach at the 10th Street lifeguard station, probably around 6pm on 15 January. I’ve also started a flickr feed in the left navbar, showcasing six recent photos uploaded to flickr. It’s a neat service–I’ll probably keep assembling the urban photos into galleries, but will use flickr for snapshots since it’s much easier. (Now, if only there were a quicker way to web-optimize photos or adjust perspective…) Hopefully, this will result in much more frequent photo updates.

Also, Flickr allows comments, which I’ve had to remove here due to a flood of comment spam — even with filters, the spammers are always one step ahead. I’m investigating moving over to WordPress for the blogging software, which would hopefully allow me to open comments back up. (Got the first ping spam attack last week — harumph.)

I’m on a train now, waiting at the station in front of Jacksonville after a day spent traveling up the length of Florida’s Atlantic coast.

A curious juxtaposition from yesterday: two neighboring bars on Washington Street in South Miami Beach are called Deep and Bash. Guess which one is the gay bar? Hint: we queers are evidently not quite campy enough for this final frontier of language reclamation.

Note for future research: it would be interesting to see Terraserver aerials of a bunch of what appear (from the atlas) to be questionable Florida “land speculation scams”:http://www.spikowski.com/landscam.htm. Among them: “Rotonda”:http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=26.887778,-82.271389&spn=0.3,0.3&t=k, “Golden Gate Estates”:http://www.defenders.org/releases/pr1997/pr617972.html, “Port Charlotte”:http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&om=1&z=15&ll=27.05,-82.105831&spn=0.013989,0.02974&t=k, Port La Belle, Lehigh Acres, “Cape Coral”:http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Cape+Coral,+FL&ie=UTF8&z=15&ll=26.684084,-81.972041&spn=0.014034,0.0421&t=k&om=1, Indian Lake Estates, and Clewiston. (Clewiston had the advantage of being platted by John Nolen; the others seem to date from the early 20th century land grabs: grids platted far into the swamp.)

Joel noted that I can now add Florida A1A (the Atlantic coast road) to the list of notable highways I’ve seen from both ends.

That list now includes all of the key transcontinentals:
US Route 66, Chicago & Santa Monica
Interstate 5, San Ysidro, Calif. & Blaine, Wash.
Interstate 10, Santa Monica & Jacksonville
Interstate 40, Barstow, Calif. & Wilmington, N.C.
Interstate 80, San Francisco & New York City
Interstate 90, Seattle & Boston

Almost:
California Highway 1: traveled in 13 of 14 counties, seen southern terminus
Interstate 55: well, at least I plan to eventually take the train down to New Orleans
Interstate 95: traveled in all 15 states, seen southern terminus

However, since both CA 1 and I-95 end in the wilderness of the north, I may never be able to say I’ve properly traversed either. Considering I’ve still never learned to drive, that’s still not a bad record overall.

12-22 January. Schedule includes Orlando, Miami, Raleigh, and Washington. Looking forward to: sun, hearing Vincent Scully, taking Amtrak up the East Coast (Amtrak’s the closest to a road trip that I get), and, of course, celebrating the Re-Coronation with Eastern Establishment Billionaires.

and some schadenfreude: not that I despise the cold, but this is the forecast for Chicago while I’m in Florida:

It appears that at least two or three entries from the past few days have been deleted in the course of a site rebuild. Oh well. I’ll work on reconstructing them if I’m ever reminded of their topics again.