Ominous Albany

When I think of ominous winter scenes, I generally am reminded of being in southern Vermont, high up in the mountains, with no one around for miles as the snow piled up outside.  I exaggerate only slightly.

Other scenes in Vermont may look familiar this winter, and are just as creepy:

Vermont in April 2009.  No snow, lots of haze.  Taken from my parents' deck.

Overall, I don't think of Albany as being a particularly ominous place, even during the autumn, although this can change during an Aqua Ducks Haunted Duck tour.

On the other, the lack of snow and cold this winter is certainly an ominous sign.  As was the lack of autumn in autumn.  (Of course, the lack of snow will change today, as a big storm moves into the Northeast.  Why?  Well I'm driving to Vermont, of course.)

Sometimes, the sky gets just that kind of eerie that makes for a nice afternoon, especially if it can be viewed from inside, on the couch, with a movie and a nice mocha latte.  The other day, there was just one of those skies.

These pictures have been taken over the course of the last couple of years.

Taken as the bus was coming to take me home, hence the blurriness. 

Taken from my apartment a few minutes later, which is always an ominous action in and of itself, as I have to stick my iPhone completely out my third story window in order to get this particular shot.

Taken from the 3rd floor of the Massry Center for the Arts at The College of Saint Rose.

Albany Stop Lights: The 12-second grace period

Drivers are douchebags.  This is something we all know.  When you get behind the wheel, you're a douchebag.  Instantly.  Admit it.  Sometimes I rent cars, and when I get behind the wheel, I'm a douchebag, too.  It's just how it is.

However, there is one aspect of driver douchebaggery that routinely grinds my gears:  the absurd grace period that every Albany driver assumes they have when approaching a stop light.  The grace period is generally about 2-3 cycles of any given light.  And someone recently put together a wonderful five-minute video about it:

The first segment of the video is actually taken at Lark and Lancaster Streets, otherwise known as the intersection at which I live for another month.  And the site of the gorgeous Trinity Methodist Church, the choir of which I am a member.  It moves to Washington Park, then to the intersection of Madison and New Scotland Avenues, and finally to Chapel Street between Columbia Street and Sheridan Avenue.  Pay close attention and you can see some of Albany's finest running red lights, as well.

A really great description of the impact of this type of selfish, immature and dangerous behavior can be found on the Albany Times Union Blog, from which this video was taken.  Additionally, it proposes some really good, cheap, easy solutions that work psychologically, such as removing traffic lights on some of the most quiet streets in Center Square and Washington Park.

Here's the URL for that post: http://blog.timesunion.com/albany/red-lights-mean-nothing/8611/.  Normally I only link to something, but I want to make sure everyone gets to this site.  It's important.

Especially if you're one of those douchebags.

Albany's Neat Stuff, Part One: A traveling art exhibit

Albany has quite a bit of neat stuff, and neat history.  I think it will make a pretty nice series for this blog to travel around to some of them, maybe even to those in other area cities.  For now, we'll let the neat stuff travel to us, instead.

The subject of part one is not part of Albany's history or even a permanent fixture.  Or might it be?

According to the Capitol Confidential blog on the Times Union site, artist Sergio Furnari is traveling the country with his sculpture of a life-sized recreation of the famous 1932 photograph, Lunch Atop a Skyscraper by Charles C. Ebbets.  It's probably the coolest way to search for a commission that I've heard of. He's setting it for roughly half a million dollars, so if anyone has that sitting around...

Last week, the exhibit was parked just off Lark Street on my walk home.

What an amazing piece!  It's super cool to walk up to what looks like a complete personification of this iconic photo.  I've always loved the photo, anyway, even though the real thing really gets my fear of heights going.

The original 1932 photograph in all its acrophobic glory. (Wikipedia)

In other news, Stephen Pastis of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine accidentally sent Rat, my favorite character, to Albany in a recent strip:

SOPA, PIPA and Protest

I took my blog down on January 18th, between the hours of 8am and whenever I remembered to turn it back on.  This was part of an American Internet-wide response to two bills pending in the House: the Stop Internet Privacy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).  My low-weight self joined heavyweights like Google, Mozilla and Wikipedia in protesting these two bills by shutting down our sites for a day and linking to information about the pending bills.

In a nutshell, these bills threaten the free and open World Wide Web that we've all come to love and post copyrighted material within.  I'm not anti-copyright, anti-artist, or pro-piracy.  I study information science as my discipline and deal with its workings daily in my job.  Copyright serves an important purpose and must be protected, reasonably.  Unmitigated enforcement by corporations, not governmental agencies, police departments or regulatory bodies, but profit-motivated and massive amounts of copyright holding corporations themselves, serves no purpose beyond increased revenues by those very corporations.

In fact, these bills, should they become law, would not address pirated content, as the content would still exist.  It only blocks access to that content, which is effectively censorship.


Here are some links to further information about the bills and action you can take:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57329001-281/how-sopa-would-affect-you-faq/ - Comprehensive FAQ with tons of nuts and bolts information about the acts.

http://theoatmeal.com/sopa - Hopefully this comic stays up for a while. Pure brilliance, as The Oatmeal is known to provide.

http://www.zoowithroy.com/2011/12/post-about-sopa-by-ryan.html - A really great site that puts it in very simple terms that nearly everyone can identify with.

http://sopastrike.com/strike/ - This is the site that I linked to during the outage of Albany: The Pedestrian Perspective (A:PP [if nothing else came out of these bills, I got a sweet abbreviation for this blog]).  Information about the issues, a petition of protest, links to the numerous websites that went dark today and information on how to black out your site on January 18th, which is now totally irrelevant, as the protest is over.

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/ - The Google petition site.

http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/ - A video about the situation.  Pause for a few minutes if you're watching before at least Jan. 22nd, since there's quite a bit of traffic. 

Updated with additional links:

http://blog.timesunion.com/rogergreen/the-best-explanation-of-why-the-internet-piracy-bills-are-bad-for-you/2624/ - Roger Green from the Times Union Blogs in his post:  The Best Explanation of Why These Internet Piracy Bills are Bad for Us.

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/19/jon_stewart_takes_on_sopa/  - John Stewart demonstrating that the members of Congress who gave the go-ahead for the bills have no idea how the Internet works.

More actual Pedestrian Perspective posts will be up soon.

BLACKOUT

I know that it's not going to have a tremendous impact, but nonetheless, Albany: The Pedestrian Perspective will go dark for 12 hours tomorrow, to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, which will virtually eliminate the Internet as we know it.  Learn more about it here.

Other confirmed sites, among the heavyweights, are Google, Mozilla, Wikipedia and Cheezburger, the site with the cats saying cute things in broken English.

I promise to black out for half a day, as soon as I figure out how.

The Holidays in Albany

Albany's usually much prettier this time of year, with snow on the ground and in the trees softening the appearance of everything, making the cold a bit more bearable.  All of that is absent so far, much like autumn was.  The most winter we've had yet was in October, even as the temperature dropped quite uncomfortably today.  Still, there are some nice things during the holidays that do a bit toward making up for the lack of proper northeast seasons. So let's take a look at some of them, particularly the Capital Holiday Lights and the recently re-introduced skating rink at Empire State Plaza.

Holiday Lights in Washington Park

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One of the larger displays in the middle of the park, with many more behind.  Taken earlier in December.

I took a nice stroll through the park over the weekend, during one of the last nights of the Capital Holiday Lights.  Here are some unfortunately dark iPhone photos of it:

The bridge over the lake.

There has been some controversy lately over the light displays, which benefit after-school programs for inner-city youth by the Albany Police Athletic League.  Concerns have been raised by the Washington Park Conservancy, a group of people who seem to detest fun and helping disadvantaged children, that "permanent damage" is being done to the park by the cords and stakes that support the light displays, and which also support other events such as the Capital Pride Festival and TulipFest.  Personally, being that many old industrial areas are slowly returning to nature, I fail to see how permanent damage can be done by some light fixtures and electrical wires.

Here is a link to an article, and another to a blog post, about the controversy.

The blog post (which, as usual, I bitchily participated in) included comments by some posters that talked about not being allowed in the park as pedestrians, sometimes even being kicked out of the park while walking their dogs.  While I think this might have been possible, and that sucks if it's true, I have yet to see this happen, after walking through the displays at all times of day for all four years that I've lived in Albany during the Holiday Season.  Of course, I've always used only the walking trails (to be fair, some of them claim they were as well), but I've walked right past police officers, attendants,  and other workers from both directions, all of the park, without a single incident in four years.   The night these pictures were taken, a young father was carrying his child on his shoulders walking down the regular road, co-mingling with cars, past two police officers, without a word spoken other than pleasantries.

Just saying.  Take a walk.  Enjoy. :)

The lake from the other side.

A video of the lights, as dark pictures don't do the flashing much justice.

I like this one, a family of ducks running down the hill into the lake.  One of my posts from this summer featured a shot of some ducks taken right by here:

The Real Ducks of Washington Park.

A video of the ducks in action.  I meant it, they really were running down the hill.

The bridge, decorated for the holidays and closed to pedestrians.

CDTA Route Restructuring: One Week In

On November 13th, the Albany County CDTA bus routes went through the most dramatic revisions in their entire history.  One week later, they seem to be working out pretty well.  I haven't seen anyone freaking out about everything and I've heard some pretty positive comments on the buses themselves.

This one...uh not quite.  At least making fun of the CDTA website is a guaranteed good time.

The discontinued #4, my dearest friend in Lark Street transit for years.

My morning commute hasn't altered significantly.  I used to be able to take the 4 at 7:40 and the 63 at 7:57, both across the street.  If I want to take the Madison Avenue routes now, I take the 114 (with coffee on the way) at Madison and Lark at 7:35 or 8:05 or the 63, still, at 7:57.  The 10 now runs every 10 minutes at Washington and Lark between 6:00 and 9:00 am.  And the company shuttle that I can take still comes at 7:50.  To be fair, these routes all get me to work at different times.  But to be more fair, that's just as consistent as I would be if I had a car.

The first commute on the 114.  Madison and Lark.  The Madison Corner Deli and Lifestyles Vegetarian Juice Bar, two very recently opened businesses, are across the street.

Lifestyles Vegetarian Juice Bar and Dino's Pizza.

Madison, Lark and Delaware.  Just behind the walk/don't walk light is Delaware Park, where a farmer's market is held on Thursday afternoons in the summer.

The 114 letting me off at my stop, Madison Avenue and St. Rose College, as its known on the bus announcements.

This particular stop is across the street from the College of Saint Rose's new Huether School of Business.  The new business school, renderings of which can be seen in this Places and Spaces post, will be housed in a renovated building that will have a rear addition, not to the knowledge of some commenters on various Times Union Blogs, however.

This school is one of the two sites on the Saint Rose campus that has been the subject of protests over non-union labor, including this rat in front of the new dorm:

And this groove of footprints worn into the grass up the street at the new business school:

Yeah.  For real.

I'll write more about the protests when I write about some various new construction and renovation projects in Albany.  Some really cool and exciting stuff going on overall.

As far as my thoughts on the protests themselves, it's pretty well established that I support many forms of civil disobedience.  Saint Rose does, as well, in their policy of tolerance toward the demonstrations.

Back to Madison Avenue and St. Rose College, as the #114 pulls away.

The College of Saint Rose Alumni Garden