The Evil Eyebrow

Category: Atlanta

  • Atlanta City Council wants to Ban Saggy Pants

    According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the city council is contemplating an amendment of the city code which is targeted to ban saggy pants (reg. required).

    To summarize: Someone on the council considers the style of droopy drawers with boxer shorts showing to be indecent and inappropriate. Therefore, an ordinace with fines attached. The ACLU is stepping up to combat this stereotypically stupid measure by demonstrating that it could not be enforced in a non-discriminatory way. Despite its wording, which would eliminate jog bras, bra straps, thong straps, and running shorts from public view, it is intended to be a blow against a primarily african-american clothing style.

    Usually, I’m happy to live in the Atlanta Metro area. It’s a cosmopolitan place, with very little “deep south” vibe, excepting some blue laws and the traditional southern hospitality and friendliness. This sort of thing, though, makes me wonder what goes on at council meetings. I can just hear some old geezer during the meeting shouting, “Dang whipper snappers! Don’t they know how to dress!”

    Very very silly.

  • Barry Bonds Surpasses Hank Aaron

    Thanks be that Barry Bonds didn’t go through a drought like last week. If he had, he might not have hit his 756th home run untill next week when San Francisco would have been here, in Atlanta, home of Hank Aaron, and previous holder of the Career Home Run record. That would have depressed me. Especially because Hank Aaron beat the previous record here, at Fulton County Stadium. The stadium is gone, but the wall section where his ball went over exists, still.

    Do I care that Barry Bonds probably did steroids? Yes. Do I think it matters? No. The culture in baseball has allowed it to happen, so it boils down to an institutional fault. What this means is that the next time the record is broken, it will be much more exciting.

  • Second Atlanta Airport

    When you look at this image, what do you see?

    Atlanta Region Airport Locations

    I see a spaghetti-tangle of aircraft travel corridors. These are the airports within 30 miles of Atlanta that have instrument landing systems. Hartsfield-Jackson Airport (the southernmost red blob) is, of course, the world’s busiest in terms of takeoff and landings as well as numbers of travelers. The second from the top-left red blob is Dobbins Air Reserve Base, home to a fighter wing, a maintenance facility, a training facility, and Lockheed. The other blobs are airports without commerical airlines, but still plenty of traffic. The skies over Atlanta are rarely free of aircraft.

    Transportation Secretary Mary Peters was here last month and announced some federal funds to help study ways to keep Hartsfield-Jackson operating effectively into the future with all the expected growth. One of the options to be considered is a second large commerical airport for the region.

    Wow. That is the sort of project to make engineers’ mouths water. Build a large new transportation facility from scratch.

    Controversy immediately kicked off. Delta and AirTran, Hartsfield-Jackson’s largest tenants are against any second airport for their own reasons, some of which might make sense, but others of which sound like “don’t make us compete with other carriers.” The City of Atlanta seems to be against it because it would be outside the city (there’s no space large enough inside) therefore no tax base. The various surrounding counties seem to be against it because their large tracts of relatively undeveloped land would make the ideal location for a new airport and its attendant noise, development, etc. In fact, I’m not sure anyone is actually for the project, except for every single airline passenger I’ve spoken with around here, me included.

    Most people seem to think that the logical place to put a new airport would be somewhere on the northern side of the city. I agree, if only because it would cut my time to get to an airport by 75% or so. Of course, there’s no telling what airlines would fly into a hypothetical ATL2, but you can bet that the citizens north of I-285 would flock there.

    Whatever comes out of this bruhaha, you can bet that we’re still years away from any sort of construction.

  • Tour de Georgia

    IMG_4873
    The last stage of the 2007 Tour de Georgia was today, in downtown Atlanta and points east. This leg was nine laps of a 7.4 mile loop (map here). Jenn and I drove down to watch and sat at the corner of Highland and Sampson Streets. This is a re-building part of Atlanta with lots of apartments, townhomes, and refurbished houses, not too far from Little Five Points. There were lots of pretty people walking around, which we both appreciated.

    The race was cool. I’ve never been to a professional cycling event before, and I was impressed by the speed of the cyclers going by. Thankfully, I got to watch them go by nine times, so I didn’t drive 45 minutes for [whoosh], “Ok honey, time to go home.”

    Lots of pictures available at my flickr set. Some special notes: We watched an Atlanta police officer have a seizure on the sidewalk. Not good. Of course, he’s a cop, so the ambulance and a gazillion other responders were there in milliseconds; There were dogs everywhere; There were also people on bikes everywhere. It is apparently the thing to ride a long way to watch one of these races. One set of people next to us had ridden in 40 miles and were tanking up on beer before heading back.

  • Georgia Marathon Photos

    Georgia Marathon 2007As I mentioned in my post a few days ago, I went to take photos of the runners in the Georgia Marathon today. It was a great time, and I learned a lot about taking pictures of sporting events.

    1. Make sure the battery that is in the bag as a backup is charged, too. Wasn’t a problem, but it could have been
    2. Bring more memory. I had 2 gigabytes, and it wasn’t enough by a long shot. I shot from 7:22 AM til 10:08 and we were just getting to the thick of the Marathon group
    3. Get a better lense. I’m using the kit lense that came with the Digital Rebel XT, and it sucks in low light, which 7:00 most definitely was
    4. Check my camera to make sure it’s showing daylight saving time, and not eastern standard

    I had a great time and I hope all of the runners did, too.

    I’m currently in the process of posting all ~1,400 photos I took today to my flickr accout, Georgia Marathon set. As I mentioned previously, if you’re in one of these pictures, feel free to take it with no restrictions. I’m fully licensing the occupants of these photos to do with them as the will.

    A few Notes:

    • I was standing at the corner of Saint Charles and North Highland, which by my calculations was at mile 7.6 for the half marathoners and just shy of the mile 21 for the full marathoners.
    • In order to find the photos that you (might) be in, you’ll have to figure out what time you ran by me and check out the timestamps on the photos to narrow it down.
    • I forgot to set my camera to daylight saving time, so you’ll have to add an hour to the photo time to get the actual time you ran by me.
    • 23:00 Edit:I ran out of memory at 10:08 AM, so if you passed by that location after that, I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better next year.

    If you have any questions, send me an email. If you find the photo you’re in, and you want the full-res version, send me an email.

  • PodCamp Atlanta 2007 Review

    PodCamp Atlanta 2007
    PodCamp Atlanta was a rockin’ good time!

    This unConference was centered around Podcasting and how to do it or do it better. There were endless networking opportunities and I met a ton of great people. Everyone I spoke with asked me the question, “So, do you podcast?” to which I answered, “Not at the moment, but I’m thinking about it.” The equivalent question from me received about a 50% yes rate, and another 30% “I’m learning how to podcast right now.”

    Blog your unConference!It is always interesting to be in a group of people where I am one of the least wired around. During sessions, at least 10 people were typing away on their laptops, uploading content, blogging about the conference. Me, I had a steno pad (but I took a lot of good notes). That’s how I roll.

    When I was at Dragon*Con last year, I had been mildly inspired to do a podcast concerning…something. I had no idea what. These ideas have solidified somewhat, and I’ve developed a punch list for accomplishing a regular-ish podcast. Keep watching this space for more.

    Check out the flickr for photos (including mine) of PodCamp Atlanta.

  • PodCamp Atlanta

    I’m off to the mixer before PodCamp Atlanta starts tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll meet good people tonight.

    For those of you interested, the pre-unconference get together is at Manuel’s Tavern at 602 North Highland Avenue, just north of Little Five Points.

  • PodCamp Atlanta

    I will be attending PodCamp Atlanta next weekend. It is an unconference for people interested in Podcasting, Blogging, and new media.
    PodCamp Atlanta, 2007
    The schedule is chock full of interesting stuff which I’m sure I’ll have fun participating in. I’ll let you all know next sunday.

  • Amateur Day

    The state legislators A few of the State Legislators of Georgia apparently had nasty things to say about the Atlanta Police department after last Thursday’s traffic snafu in downtown.

    Rep. Edward Lindsey (R-Atlanta) said. “Yesterday, you let down the citizens of Atlanta, our commuters, and our guests to these great conventions. This is simply unacceptable for the great international city that I am so proud to represent.”

    This was after reported 3 hour commutes that would normally take 1, or 30 minutes to move 10 blocks in downtown. Suffice to say, it was a mess.

    However, the implication that the Police can run out and start directing traffic and make things better is a fallacy. Anyone who has ever tried to do signal coordination on a network of criss-crossing roadways is aware that optimizing traffic throughput is a non-trivial task. Skilled professionals working in conjunction with sophisticated computer models have difficulty getting it right. Changes to one area cascade throughout the system, and if you begin with a thoroughly saturated network, the best you can hope for is that everyone is trying to leave, which blatantly is not the case in downtown Atlanta. To expect that a police officer directing traffic can alleviate congestion in a situation like that is silly. At most, they can make sure all of the available space is continuously filled with vehicles, but until those vehicles actually leave the area, there will be no relief.

    The “best”* solution would be for officers to set up roadblocks prohibiting traffic from entering the downtown area while directing them to central parking and MARTA. However, once the traffic is already in the downtown area, it’s going to be a disaster no matter what response the police enact.

    To Representative Edward Lindsey, I say that you should spend a day in a traffic cop’s shoes before criticizing their capabilities or performance.

    *By “best” I mean, of course, the solution that leaves the most free roadway. No cars, no congestion. I don’t think anyone would be happy with that solution, however.

  • Atlanta Traffic

    Last Thursday there was a snafu here in Atlanta that I fortunately was not caught in (link, reg. required). Donald Trump coming to town caused serious traffic congestion throughout the entire Atlanta Region. It illustrates how delicate the traffic situation is around here. There are 300,000 vehicles traveling on I-75/85 through downtown Atlanta every day, and that’s an average; it can be worse.

    Today’s AJC has an article (reg. required) talking about how daily traffic has affected the lives of people around the metropolitan Atlanta area. How some people drastically change their daily schedules to avoid peak travel times, and others move from loved homes to shrink their commutes.

    I understand entirely how these people feel. On a normal day, if I leave at 7:30 AM, it takes me 35 minutes to get to work, and a similar amount of time to get home. It only takes 18 minutes with free-flow traffic conditions. On a weather day, or a Friday, or a holiday, or because the Flying Spaghetti Monster is punishing us, it can take 45 minutes to an hour and a half to get home. That gets old quickly.

    Thankfully, Jenn and I aren’t so attached to our house that we will have problems selling it and moving someplace else. We fully intend to move closer in to the heart of Atlanta if we decide to stay here after she gets tenure. However, there are people who, for the sake of a bigger home or larger yard, move to locations that force them into 1.5 hour commutes each way. I have met these people in the course of my work. That would be a nightmare, and I don’t know how they do it.