Cox Crow

The Poughkeepsie Journal today reported that Rhinebeck expects lots of discussion of the town’s proposed comprehensive plan. Rhinebeck is a beautiful town surrounding a beautiful village. As in most places, the citizens want to preserve the qualities about the town that they love. As far as I can tell from a cursory glance, the plan’s main failing is a technical one: too many different files to download.

The paper quotes two persons who object to portions of the plan. One is an out-of-town developer.

Marty Torrey, a consultant for the New York City-based White Acre Equities, called the proposed plan unconstitutional. White Acre Equities wants to build more than 400 senior homes on the site of the old Holy Cross Campus of Pius XII, a former juvenile detention center off Morton Road.

That site is included in the New York state Scenic District and would be given 20-acre zoning — preventing the senior housing complex from going through. [links added]

Any plan will, unfortunately, disadvantage some. One way is by reducing the uses for the property. Another is that by increasing lot sizes fewer people will be able to live in a given area. This usually increases the cost to acquire the property.

The other is a resident.

Joseph Gelb, a Rhinebeck resident, has concerns about a traditional neighborhood design the plan recommends near his home on Wynkoop Lane. A traditional neighborhood design offers a mix of commercial and residential spaces within walking distance of each other.

Gelb, along with several other residents of Wynkoop Lane, believes the placement of the community would be inappropriate because it would increase noise and traffic. [link added]

Traditional neighborhood developments like Rhinebeck?

Other residents can be found discussing the plan at the Rhinebeck Community Blog.

Raymond Chen asks, What happened to the traffic circle at the corner of 156th Ave NE and NE 56th Way? Apparently tort happened.

A car was driving down the street in excess of the speed limit and failed to negotiate the circle, resulting in the car going off the road. In the flurry of legal action that ensued, somehow the City of Redmond ended up being held responsible for creating “dangerous driving conditions” or something like that. As a result, the City of Redmond went around removing all the city’s traffic circles and replacing them with speed bumps.

It really puzzles me why people have such animosity to roundabouts. I suppose it comes from the distinction between traffic circles and roundabouts. The difference is that in traffic circles the merging traffic has the right-of-way. Since this is just plain stupid, it is no wonder that drivers hate them.

Today was the Big Sister’s last day in kindergarten, so tonight we went to see Cars to celebrate. The Little Sister had lots of questions during the film.

Are his teeth like that because he sucked on his tires too much?

This movie’s great. Go see it.

I loved listening to Engines of Our Ingenuity on WSHU during my morning drive. But since we’ve moved to the big house, when it’s broadcast I’m in the shade of the Fahnestock plateau and don’t pick up that station’s signal.

But not to worry! Now it comes in a portable form.

The latest dust-up over at Mark Pilgrim’s place yielded some interesting product recommendations and a warning about Mail.app. Mark has switched his operating environment from the homogenous Apple orchard to free software on Ubuntu.

I like Ubuntu too, but what’s interesting about the switch is Mark’s reason: data integrity. Like any parent, he’s making lots of home movies, and is worried about long-term data integrity. It will be somewhat difficult to make fun of the children in front of their intendeds if you can’t play the video of them driving the car while wearing goggles and a swimcap — and that’s not even the embarrassing stuff.

When we moved last year, I uncovered a number of hard disks that I’d been saving for that time in the future when I would be able to move them onto long-term storage, but that time never came. So now I have a computer which won’t interface to disks in a format that it could read, and a computer that will interface to disks in a format it can’t read, and some miscellaneous floppies which can’t be read by the machines which still have floppy drives. That’s not uncommon. Bill has data on 12″ floppies which can only be read by one drive in one machine. What I’ve tried to do, not entirely successfully, since I was first bitten by the problem of data formats in college, is keep lots of copies of things, in lots of different formats, including paper, in lots of different places.

What kind of shoebox are you storing your photos in?

One of the things that Man can do — or maybe that’s Woman, since I’m not sure men learn from their mistakes — is learn from the mistakes of others. We can even learn from mistakes that are just written and then read. The government calls these “lessons learned,” but I don’t think the past tense is deserved.

Over at Subtopia they remark on the trend toward automated mechanized warfare.

Did we learn nothing from The Terminator, nothing from Berserker? From “Second Variety“? Or, even, from the Greeks?

The U.S. Census Bureau has provided statistics on how Hurricane Katrina changed the demographics of the Gulf Coast in what the Houston Chronicle called possibly the largest, fastest forced migration of U.S. residents in the nation’s history..

Most of the news I hear about folks who left the Gulf Coast concerns how they’re trying to get back. I’d like to see some analysis of where the migrants went who do plan to return. In terms of migration patterns, this event may be as seminal as the Dust Bowl.

I sent Rick a link to what appears to be a contract for concentration camps, he passed along a Metafilter thread about Spider-man’s revealing his secret identity when he endorsed the Super-Hero Registration Act.

I guess the Wal*Mart stopped accepting his Visa check card.

The Little Sister, budding music critic that she is, had this to say about “What Time Is Love (The KLF Original “Pure Trance” Version),” The Timelords, Doctorin’ the Tardis (1991).

That’s good cooking music.

Denise Howell points out that Marty Schwimmer asks some tough questions. I have not been reading Marty’s work since he asked Bloglines to stop pulling his feed, and missed these.

But I’ve been wondering about these questions too. Let me know if you find any answers.