friend of the built environment

I hate passwords. They were specifically designed by the software industry to make our lives hell and remove any blame for that state of hell from themselves. “O, well, you failed to give yourself a secure password, so it’s not our fault you got hacked”. “O, you forgot your password, then we’ll have to give [...]

What’s this here thing? Am I supposed to be updating this or something?
Three weeks of Blah in San Francisco, which I expect to break up with one or two nights of dinner with friends, a trip to see the family in Fresno (and give them the gorgeous shiny videos David made for them) and a [...]

Portland. Facial Hair capital of the world. A city composed entirely of the same cute 20s-40s neighborhood that I covet so. A cheap city whose housing prices do not reflect their Left Coast geography as they should. A city full of fuzzy granola fags with tattoos. Portland.
I met up with Amy for Bread and Ink, [...]

She was the lady that taught me to love cities. She taught me to temper my value system with real life. She was real. She understood applied philosophy. I’ll miss her.
David has also written a (more thoughtful) epitaph.

America’s Demographic Future
Americans, as a group, are clamoring for more restrictive immigration laws in the US. The populist reasoning behind this is the perception that the primary immigrant class today are low-skilled Latin-American workers, and that their entry into the US is placing an unacceptable burden on the economy of this country. The rhetoric usually [...]

As much as our society pretends to love the geek and the ‘creative class’, there really is a subtle war against genuine geeks and nerds.
I’ve contemplated making a rather caustic journal entry about Americans for the Arts, a group that thinks getting kids interested in art is more important than letting them be interested in [...]

Alameda is a really strange place, by Bay Area standards.It’s not outrageously expensive, considering its geography and the quality of housing on offer. It has a vast amount of undeveloped space and thus a healthy reserve for future growth, thanks to a dead naval air station on the northern half of the island. It is [...]

[A long essay written during and after our mega 2-week roadtrip of the Great Lakes' urban environs.]