Is Austin the Next Silicon Valley?
By “next Silicon Valley, ” I mean a runaway housing affordability disaster that prices out all the diversity and creativity that we value about Austin.
Michael Agresta at Texas Monthly is opimistic that Austin won’t repeat the same housing mistakes as San Francisco.
If there’s one reason to be confident that Austin will not turn into the next Bay Area, it’s this: Austinites of all political types, from libertarian to social-justice-minded, have been warning each other for years that we don’t want to turn into the next San Francisco… there’s no chance we are sleepwalking through a reenactment of the past few decades of California history. For better or worse, what gets built here will be something brand-new.
I wish I could be as optimistic. That assumes that Austinites recognize and agree on what the mistakes of the Bay Area were. We may not sleep walk though it, but we seem to be courting disaster with our eyes wide open.
Happy New Year 2021
“Good riddance” seems to be a common sentiment towards 2020, but I can’t complain too much. I have my health. I have food and place to live. Nobody in my family got sick. Not everybody can say this. It did my best to stay healthy, but there are those who did the same and got sick regardless. Such is the nature of a virus.
I’m not big on resolutions, but the new year is a natural time to stop and think about the year past and future. I developed some good habbits in the last year that I’m happy about: cooking, exercise. I need to build on that to turn it into tangible health gains, like weight loss.
Another goal is to write more, to post more here. I wrote sporadically in the last year. About 12 posts, or once a month. I hope to increase the frequency.
“Find a niche and stay focused” is common advice for blogging. It’s advice I’m going to ignore. I don’t expect a large readership. I don’t plan to make money. I’m free to write what I want. The only unifying theme is what I’m interested in. Maybe technology, or programming, or photography, or books, or movies, or transportation, or urban design. Maybe cats. Of course, cats.
It’s all about small gains and incremental improvement. Nothing earth-shattering, just some improvements on past habits
TxDOT's Plans on Interstate 35
Texas Department of Transportation Open House. Don’t forget to submit a comment.
Towers.net, Widening I-35 to 20 Lanes in Downtown Austin is the Anti-Project Connect:
More people than ever recognize you can’t build your way out of traffic, but the Texas Department of Transportation is planning to try just the same, and Austin will suffer for the next several decades if such a failure of imagination moves forward.
Reconnect Austin is a grassroots campaign to bury I-35 through Downtown Austin and reclaim this vital corridor as public space and developable land. Our vision is to create a new, humanized boulevard, reconnecting East Austin to Downtown, mitigating air and water pollution, and providing an economic boost in the form of new, centrally located housing and businesses.
Other cities to learn from:
Houston went all-in on the mega freeway expansion with the Katy Freeeway. The expansion made congestion worse.
Arch Daily writes 6 Cities That Have Transformed Their Highways Into Urban Parks.
World Atlas on The Story of the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco:
The replacement of the Embarcadero Freeway is considered a large success in the world of urban planning. The waterfront park has become extremely popular and has also received a significant level of private investment. The Embarcadero Boulevard which replaced Embarcadero Freeway carries almost half of the original freeway volume with the remaining traffic finding alternative routes or switching to other modes of transport. The changes also allowed more pedestrians to use the boulevard.
Pew Charitable Trust: More Cities Are Banishing Highways Underground — And Building Parks on Top
Another Take on Austin's Proposition A
Emma Freer wrote a good retrospective on Austin’s successful 2020 light rail election in Austonia:
Unlike other races this election cycle, the results weren’t close. Prop A passed by a nearly 19% margin, which local political analysts and transit advocates attributed to record-breaking turnout, a younger electorate and a new approach to transit planning.
The new approach to transit planning is described by Christof Spieler. First, don’t be coy. If you’re proposing transit, go all in for transit.
Conventional wisdom used to be that a transit referendum would be more likely to pass if it appealed to transit skeptics, said Christof Spieler, a senior lecturer at the Rice University School of Architecture.
This was often achieved by limiting the amount of funding and bundling in spending for different kinds of infrastructure.
Comparing the 2020 plan to 2014:
This time around, Capital Metro and city officials learned from past failures. Project Connect included more than seven times the investment and focused exclusively on transit, with two light rail lines, expanded bus service and other components.
Second, do the community outreach. Getting community groups involved and invested improved the plan, but it also included a bunch of activists who were influential in their communities.
Another key change, Spieler said, is the attention paid to advocacy groups and grassroots organizing.
Capital Metro reports that around 60,000 Austinites provided input on Project Connect, and advocates—some of whom opposed the last ballot measure because they felt it did too little—were more directly involved.
“Those advocacy groups were a major voice in the creation of the plan and then rally their supporters to turn out to vote for it,” Spieler said.
You could say that the 2014 plan died because of a bad map. But they developed a bad map because they studiously avoided involving any community groups. In the end, they had a bad map and no supporters.
The Long, Strange Trip to Austin’s Transit Victory
In November 2020, Austin passed Proposition A, authorizing a $7.5 Billion transit expansion which includes rail. There have been various interpretations of why this succeeded. I’m not a transit or political expert, but I am an Austin resident who has been paying attention to transit issues since the initial, fateful 2000 loss. Here are my impressions of the various campaigns, and how we ended up passing the 2020 plan.
The 2000 Referendum
The 2000 loss was a true heart-breaker. It lost by less than 1%, fewer than 2000 votes. A couple of things that were in play that election:
The whole CapMetro area was voting on the plan, which added a lot of suburban voters. Central Austin really needed to perform to overcome those votes.
The anti-rail campaign had more traction in the central Austin electorate. Max Nofziger was still a respectable voice in local politics, and respected as an environmentalist. Climate change from automobile emissions felt less urgent then, and he led the charge against the plan, largely being a mouthpiece for South Congress merchants (i.e., Guerros) that rail would be bad for business.
Some potential advocates felt they could vote against this and get a monorail passed in a couple of years. It did feel like the plan was rushed to the polls, and there wasn’t the sense that all modes had been thoroughly considered.
With such thin margins, any of the above could have made a difference.
Red Line 2004 Passes
In Trains, Buses, People, Christof Spieler writes (something to the effect) that if nobody opposes your transit plan, it probably isn’t a very good plan. Pretty much nobody opposed the 2006 plan, which is why it passed.
The line runs on existing rail, so the capital cost seemed pretty cheap. It seemed like a good way to dip our toe in the water of light rail. In hindsight, it was the wrong idea. The line is slowly gaining ridership, but it isn’t the sort of smash success that makes people clamor for more. It will likely become a valuable element of the system after it connects to the orange, blue, and gold lines of project connect.
I often read that the 2020 election was Austin’s third try at rail, which ignores the 2006 election entirely. I think there is a sense in that this doesn’t count. It’s a commuter train, and doesn’t serve residents trying get around within the city. It also wasn’t a hard sell. Nobody was really asked to give up anything. The agency already owned the existing track. Even so, it’s relevant as a something that informs the typical Austinite’s perception of rail.
The 2014 Referendum
The 2014 referendum lost by a wide margin. Even transit advocates opposed the plan. Instead of addressing the densest areas, it was a speculative plan that tried to anticipate future growth by building in a corridor that was sparsely populated. The University of Texas played a part in ruining the line, as they wanted to encourage development along their eastern edge, since the western edge (where the 2000 and 2020 plans go) is already built out with some of the most historic buildings on campus. The western edge is also densest with residences, retail, and academic buildings. The 2014 plan ignored all that density.
Austin already had a rail line that had low ridership (the Red Line from 2004, opened in 2010), and the outsized operating budget of the line was a drain on the whole system. Transit supporters felt that the proposed line would perform poorly, drag the whole system down with it, and doom any additional rail investments for a long time. The secondary effect of this is that the plan was left without an army of community activists who would do the legwork it takes to push a citywide referendum over the finish line.
The 2014 failure is a best understood as a failure of leadership. It wasn’t messaging. It wasn’t pro-road sentiment. It wasn’t even anti-tax sentiment. I doubt a more transit-supportive electorate would have saved it. It was that the initial process ran amuck and ended up with a plan that served very few.
2020 Success
If the 2014 failure was a failure of leadership, I think it is fair to credit the city’s and Capital Metro’s leadership in the 2020 succes. The outreach was clearly superior. I had several feedback opportunities. CapMetro did the traditional forums at the community rec center, but they also did lots of virtual sessions (accelerated by COVID by the end). They seemed geared to take and incorporate feedback, rather than just present results.
At the beginning of the process, CapMetro seemed to be showing a worrying attraction to Autonomous Personal Rapid Transit, and other novel, unproven gadgets. I don’t know the story, but I like to think they were just doing due diligence. Maybe they knew these systems were unlikely to pan out, but they had to walk stakeholders through the decision process that leads to a system that can move tens of thousands of people in a space-constrained corridor. During the campaign rail opponents were full of promises of imminent technology we should just wait for. That sort of talk was much less resonant this time, and promises of non-existent autonomous vehicles, HyperLoop, monorail, and goldolas were not taken seriously. Maybe we got lucky, but the final plan was so solid that I suspect Cap Metro knew what they were doing all along.
The community engagement undoubtedly lead to a more equitable plan. As good as the 2000 plan was, it served very privileged parts of town and the distant suburbs. The only thing offered to the historically underserved east Austin was the promise that a central spine could improve the whole system. The 2020 plan incorporates east Austin into the core of the system with the blue line, rapid buses, and eventually a green line commuter rail.
The team apparently had the political space to pursue the best plan. My impression of 2014 is that Mayor Leffingwell didn’t do much to protect the transit team from political pressures. He might have even though he could harness those special interests to his advantage, without considering the damage they would do to good transit fundamentals. This time, the team seemed to address the project as a transit project, not as a development incentive. They haven’t shied away from proposing construction in a crowded, busy corridor. Construction on Guadalupe will be painful enough that plenty of Austin mayors have shied away from proposing building a rail line along that corridor. The Project Team felt empowered to suggest the best transit route.
In the end, pretty much any organization with political weight in Austin got behind the plan: business groups, multiple Democratic party groups, social justice groups. The anti-rail groups was reduced to car dealerships, the one-off local businesses (Guerro’s and Esther’s Follies), and the ever-present road-warrior crowd.
Austin had 20 years to reflect on the real costs of inaction. There is no option that improves automobile traffic within the city. Things are pretty densely built around narrow rights of way. There is no space to widen roads.
I’ve read about the demographic changes that drove much of the change. I don’t have much to add to that. I’m sure it’s true. I don’t know how it balances against, say, the equity elements of the plan. Or against the slow, methodical consensus building that resulted from community outreach. Or the scope and reach of the entire plan. But all of these are really part of the same thing. The plan is large, comprehensive, and equitable because of diligent public outreach and reacting to that feedback.
They all worked together, which enabled a $7.5 billion plan, funded by a tax increase, to be passed by a wide margin during a pandemic. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.
The Long, Strange Trip to Austin’s Transit Victory
In November 2020, Austin passed Proposition A, authorizing a $7.5 Billion transit expansion which includes rail. There have been various interpretations of why this succeeded. I’m not a transit or political expert, but I am an Austin resident who has been paying attention to transit issues since the initial, fateful 2000 loss. Here are my impressions of the various campaigns, and how we ended up passing the 2020 plan.
The 2000 Referendum
The 2000 loss was a true heart-breaker. It lost by less than 1%, fewer than 2000 votes. A couple of things that were in play that election:
The whole CapMetro area was voting on the plan, which added a lot of suburban voters. Central Austin really needed to perform to overcome those votes.
The anti-rail campaign had more traction in the central Austin electorate. Max Nofziger was still a respectable voice in local politics, and respected as an environmentalist. Climate change from automobile emissions felt less urgent then, and he led the charge against the plan, largely being a mouthpiece for South Congress merchants (i.e., Guerros) that rail would be bad for business.
Some potential advocates felt they could vote against this and get a monorail passed in a couple of years. It did feel like the plan was rushed to the polls, and there wasn’t the sense that all modes had been thoroughly considered.
With such thin margins, any of the above could have made a difference.
Red Line 2004 Passes
In Trains, Buses, People, Christof Spieler writes (something to the effect) that if nobody opposes your transit plan, it probably isn’t a very good plan. Pretty much nobody opposed the 2006 plan, which is why it passed.
The line runs on existing rail, so the capital cost seemed pretty cheap. It seemed like a good way to dip our toe in the water of light rail. In hindsight, it was the wrong idea. The line is slowly gaining ridership, but it isn’t the sort of smash success that makes people clamor for more. It will likely become a valuable element of the system after it connects to the orange, blue, and gold lines of project connect.
I often read that the 2020 election was Austin’s third try at rail, which ignores the 2006 election entirely. I think there is a sense in that this doesn’t count. It’s a commuter train, and doesn’t serve residents trying get around within the city. It also wasn’t a hard sell. Nobody was really asked to give up anything. The agency already owned the existing track. Even so, it’s relevant as a something that informs the typical Austinite’s perception of rail.
The 2014 Referendum
The 2014 referendum lost by a wide margin. Even transit advocates opposed the plan. Instead of addressing the densest areas, it was a speculative plan that tried to anticipate future growth by building in a corridor that was sparsely populated. The University of Texas played a part in ruining the line, as they wanted to encourage development along their eastern edge, since the western edge (where the 2000 and 2020 plans go) is already built out with some of the most historic buildings on campus. The western edge is also densest with residences, retail, and academic buildings. The 2014 plan ignored all that density.
Austin already had a rail line that had low ridership (the Red Line from 2004, opened in 2010), and the outsized operating budget of the line was a drain on the whole system. Transit supporters felt that the proposed line would perform poorly, drag the whole system down with it, and doom any additional rail investments for a long time. The secondary effect of this is that the plan was left without an army of community activists who would do the legwork it takes to push a citywide referendum over the finish line.
The 2014 failure is a best understood as a failure of leadership. It wasn’t messaging. It wasn’t pro-road sentiment. It wasn’t even anti-tax sentiment. I doubt a more transit-supportive electorate would have saved it. It was that the initial process ran amuck and ended up with a plan that served very few.
2020 Success
If the 2014 failure was a failure of leadership, I think it is fair to credit the city’s and Capital Metro’s leadership in the 2020 succes. The outreach was clearly superior. I had several feedback opportunities. CapMetro did the traditional forums at the community rec center, but they also did lots of virtual sessions (accelerated by COVID by the end). They seemed geared to take and incorporate feedback, rather than just present results.
At the beginning of the process, CapMetro seemed to be showing a worrying attraction to Autonomous Personal Rapid Transit, and other novel, unproven gadgets. I don’t know the story, but I like to think they were just doing due diligence. Maybe they knew these systems were unlikely to pan out, but they had to walk stakeholders through the decision process that leads to a system that can move tens of thousands of people in a space-constrained corridor. During the campaign rail opponents were full of promises of imminent technology we should just wait for. That sort of talk was much less resonant this time, and promises of non-existent autonomous vehicles, HyperLoop, monorail, and goldolas were not taken seriously. Maybe we got lucky, but the final plan was so solid that I suspect Cap Metro knew what they were doing all along.
The community engagement undoubtedly lead to a more equitable plan. As good as the 2000 plan was, it served very privileged parts of town and the distant suburbs. The only thing offered to the historically underserved east Austin was the promise that a central spine could improve the whole system. The 2020 plan incorporates east Austin into the core of the system with the blue line, rapid buses, and eventually a green line commuter rail.
The team apparently had the political space to pursue the best plan. My impression of 2014 is that Mayor Leffingwell didn’t do much to protect the transit team from political pressures. He might have even though he could harness those special interests to his advantage, without considering the damage they would do to good transit fundamentals. This time, the team seemed to address the project as a transit project, not as a development incentive. They haven’t shied away from proposing construction in a crowded, busy corridor. Construction on Guadalupe will be painful enough that plenty of Austin mayors have shied away from proposing building a rail line along that corridor. The Project Team felt empowered to suggest the best transit route.
In the end, pretty much any organization with political weight in Austin got behind the plan: business groups, multiple Democratic party groups, social justice groups. The anti-rail groups was reduced to car dealerships, the one-off local businesses (Guerro’s and Esther’s Follies), and the ever-present road-warrior crowd.
Austin had 20 years to reflect on the real costs of inaction. There is no option that improves automobile traffic within the city. Things are pretty densely built around narrow rights of way. There is no space to widen roads.
I’ve read about the demographic changes that drove much of the change. I don’t have much to add to that. I’m sure it’s true. I don’t know how it balances against, say, the equity elements of the plan. Or against the slow, methodical consensus building that resulted from community outreach. Or the scope and reach of the entire plan. But all of these are really part of the same thing. The plan is large, comprehensive, and equitable because of diligent public outreach and reacting to that feedback.
They all worked together, which enabled a $7.5 billion plan, funded by a tax increase, to be passed by a wide margin during a pandemic. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.
Morgan Witt on Austin Land Use
Candidate for Austin City Council Place 7, Morgan Witt, quoted in the Austin Monitor
The reality is that when we talk about preserving neighborhoods as they exist right now, that means we’re excluding people from those neighborhoods, If we don’t develop in these neighborhoods, people build outward. That means the people most vulnerable to being displaced because of lack of affordability, they have to move further out of the city; they have less access to resources, they have more transportation costs to get to work, but also we as a city have to spend more money in infrastructure to build out so that people can access the city.
While we think that not developing in these neighborhoods is protecting the environment, the reality is sprawl is a huge environmental issue. We really need to think about how can we be more inclusive as a city and allow more people and more diverse people to live in the neighborhoods that exist so that everybody gets the opportunity to live that Austin experience and share in that neighborhood character.
I wish her luck in her campaign.
iA Writer 5.5 Improves Wordpress Support
iA Writer just updated to version 5.5. This looks like a significant update, with one big feature that affects me: better support for self-hosted WordPress sites. Previous versions required the Jetpack plugin, which I balked at using. Now I can use the IndieAuth plugin. The OAuth2 plugin is also supported with a little more configuration.
This is my first post with iA Writer 5.5. It took me a couple of tries to get the plugin to work–documentation is scarce. But it works as advertised. Here’s hoping it leads to more posts here.
Markdown for Technical Documentation
It seems like this advice comes along periodically: Don’t use Markdown for technical documentation. Hillel Wayne is the most recent plea to hit hacker news, but there have been others.
Hillel Wayne, Please don’t write your documentation in Markdown
Markdown cannot carry data. There’s no way to imbue properties into text using markdown. Good documentation is all about the semantic markup. A “definition” is not just a different formatting or like. It means there’s actually a concept of a “definition” as a discrete concept in your documentation.
Matthew Butterick, in Pollen: the book is a program:
Markdown is a limiting format for authors. Why? Because Markdown is merely shorthand notation for HTML tags. As such, it has three problems: it’s not semantic, it only covers a limited subset of HTML tags, and it can’t be extended by an author.
Eric Holscher, Why You Shouldn’t Use “Markdown” for Documentation
Though many people have added extensions to Markdown, almost none have any kind of semantic meaning. This means that you can’t write a Class or a Warning, you can only write text.
Mister Gold, Stop Using Markdown For Documentation
With Markdown you can only write text. It means that if you need to grab the reader’s attention with some kind of notes or tips, you have to embed HTML.
I have focused on the lack of semantic data in all these criticisms, because I think it is the most important drawback. The lack of semantic meaning in markdown makes in unsuitable for many technical writing tasks. Yet, I still write in markdown. This post is in markdown. There are a couple of reasons:
- Its easy. I never forget the syntax. This may be because it is so limited, but it makes it easy to do simple documents.
- It’s ubiquitous. The fact that there are so many different markdown parsers is not problem, its a strength. It’s usually trivial to add markdown to a system or workflow, regardless of the environment
What are the alternatives?
ReStructurexText – If I were writing a book, I would probably use ReStructuredText. It is extensible, so you can add your own “roles”. But the syntax is pretty hard to remember. For example, here is the image syntax:
.. image:: images/biohazard.png
:height: 100
:width: 200
:scale: 50
:alt: alternate text
Of course, the benefit is that the image tag has a height, width, and scale: something few markdown parsers support. It’s heavily tied to Python, which is something I’m comfortable with. It’s also heavily tied to a single implementation in docutils.
AsciiDoc – The syntax is more in the spirit of markdown. It seems to have coalesced around a Ruby implementation, and left the original python implementation languishing[1]. I was unhappy with the HTML produced by asciidoctor is styled entirely by div tags. Title ; just styles applied to named div tags.
Pollen – Very nice system. The fact it requires Racket is both admirable and a real-world pain. I gave up after trying to write my own pollen command. Trying to debug the unexpected return type from a nested s-expresion did me in.
For now, I stay with markdown, and all it’s shortcomings.
-
There are also two competing versions of aciidoc for python3: asciidoc-py3 and asciidoc3 ↩
Remote Cheese Tasting
In the spirit of supporting our local business during the pandemic, we signed up for a cheese-tasing course with Antonelli’s. We picked up a half pound of cheese from their shop: a pre-selected sampling of seven different cheeses. Then we embellished it with a little prosciutto, Castelvetrano olives, a baguette, and some wine. We then tuned into their video stream while they talked us through the full tasting menu. It was great, especially considering they had never streamed a tasting before and rushed into it with about a week’s preparation.
Three Days, Three Rings
One thing I noticed during these coronavirus work-at-home days is how absolutely sedentary I am when working from home. I’ve worked from home in other jobs, but I really notice it now. My Apple Watch detects essentially zero exercise, and very little activity. At work, all the small trips to the water fountain, to the restroom, to the cafeteria, they all add up. They don’t close my rings, but they at least make it look like I did something besides sit on my butt all day. At home all of those little trips are about 20 feet away, max.
In the last few days I’ve been making an effort to get out and close my exercise ring. I no longer have a commute, so that gives me an extra 45 minutes to an hour I can devote to exercise. I’ve been getting my rings closed, and breaking free of the stay-at-home ennui.
WordPress Hosting
While I’m on the topic of WordPress, I found a new hosting provider. I run a small family site. Even though it’s small, it has a lot of specific needs:
- It’s very image-heavy, so it needs lots of storage space
- I need to send out email notifications at various events
- Users need to be able to post by sending email
- It needs to be robust and reliable, so I don’t spend a lot of time chasing down issues.
We’ve tried various hosted solutions. Wordpress.com was hosting it for a while. At some point, they made changes to their user profile settings, and some users were having issues I couldn’t help them with. I moved to self-hosted so that I had enough control to address these issues. Besides, our disk usage was growing and I was likely to get priced out of the free plan.
There are several shared plans that I looked into. They often come with an email serve I can use, but my experience with them hasn’t been great. Running a DigitalOcean droplet works great, until it doesn’t. Then it takes all Saturday to figure out what’s goin on. There is a next tier of plans that help you manage a VPS. ServerPilot and RunCloud are a couple of examples. They help with the setup of the web server and database, but after that, you’re on your own. They don’t have a mail server, and only the foolhardy run their own mail server. Then I found CloudWays. It does all the stuff ServerPilot and RunCloud do, but they also offer mail server add-on. For $1/month, I can add a RackSpace mailbox. I use this for incoming post-by-email traffic. Then for a few cents per 1000, they offer an outgoing SMTP server. I could (and have) patched this all together with a service like Migadu. But having it integrated with the server is a big plus.
New Theme, Take One
Well, here I am, with a new theme. I’m giving GeneratePress a whirl after discovering it on the WordPress subreddit. I want a pretty simple, text-heavy site. I don’t have a store, a shopping cart, or any heavy layout needs. My main interest is fonts and typography, and this gives me enough control. I can also tweak various layout elements as much as I need.
There’s a pretty capable free versions, I paid the $50 for the pro upgrade. That pricing is perfect: it makes me reasonably confident the theme will be supported and upgraded, but it’s cheap enough for a hobby site with no income.
If you looking for more like this, Astra is another one that came up, with a similar pricing structure. I don’t have a particularly good reason to choose GeneratePress over Astra. I think it was partly that the pricing and the product info gave me the impression their market is individual bloggers, whereas Astra is trying to address agencies and WordPress freelancers. Like I said, not a great reason, but they both looked good, and I need some basis to make a decision. Hopefully there is no Take Two sequel to this post, but if there is, it will probably be Astra.
Wordpress Theme Search
Every so often I gather the strength and resolve to try to get a Wordpress theme that does what I want. I want it to:
- Not look terrible–mostly minimal, optimized for reading text, but enough photo support for the occasional gallery post
- Support latest standards like micro formats
- Responsive, but no hamburger menus in the full size view
- Use the Wordpress content formats to appropriately style an aside as an inline Twitter-style post
Finally, I always end up wanting to make this interop with Twitter and Facebook.
Right now I’m using a theme that hasn’t been updated in years, so I need to find an update. I am not particularly looking forward to it.
West Texas
We went to West Texas in November. Turns out it was an ideal time to go: cool at night, and the midday sun was not strong enough to be miserable.
We stayed at El Cosmico in Marfa for a couple of nights. Here is the inside of one of the tipis. Plenty of space and a fire pit to boot.
[caption id="attachment_686" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]
Inside an El Cosmico Tipi[/caption]
Finding the desk at Sul Ross in Alpine was harder than we expected. It was pretty far, and we felt lost a couple of times. We pressed on and eventually found it.
[caption id=“attachment_685” align=“aligncenter” width=“1024”]
The Famed Desk at Sul Ross[/caption]
Austin Orange Line Workshop
Depending on the map you look at, the Orange line is either a 21 mile route from Howard Lane to Slaughter Lane, or–if you ignore the parts marked “future expansion”–an 11 mile route that runs from North Lamar transit center to Stassney. In either case, the midsection of the line runs through the center of town via Lamar, Guadalupe, and South Congress.
According to Capital Metro, the 6.5 mile segment from Koenig to Oltorf is under consideration for grade separation, such as subway or elevated. Should it be? That is the question posed to the community.
Some of the tradeoffs presented are construction cost, right-of-way fit, and travel speed. Cost and political viability were not explicitly under consideration by the transportation engineers.
Sticking with the transit considerations: Guadalupe near 29th is particularly narrow and difficult to fit two dedicated lanes of transit in addition to the existing two lanes of car traffic. Even giving up the middle chicken lane and the parking makes things tight.
How sacred are the lanes of car drivers currently on Guadalupe. Mayor Adler has named them a priority. The transit engineers at the meeting seemed more accepting of talking about trade-offs, whatever those were.
So what about the price of the options offered? Jerry Smiley was hesitant to offer a concrete metric. Site-specific was his favorite term to temper desires for specific numbers.
In general, elevated and CNC are more than surface; tunneling is more expensive than any others. But the scale factor was highly site-specific. Sometimes cut and cover can run into problems that it would have been easier and cheaper to just bore underneath.
There was less discussion around route and station selection. In general the route was deemed sane, and far better than the route offered to (and declined by) residents in 2014. The local 1 bus will probably still run the length of Lamar-Guadalupe. The stops will be more frequent, and the bus will be stuck in traffic the way they are today.
Ulysses vs. iA Writer
I’ve been looking for a serious writing program. Maybe serious isn’t the right word, because I use Vim and BBEdit, and those are nothing if not serious. But they don’t feel right for the type of concentrated, long-form prose that I am trying to write. The contenders that I settled on are iA Writer and Ulysses.
Both are great, and I would recommend either. Choosing between them is more about your personal preferences, workflow, and writing needs. My observations based on my particular needs are below.
You should also check out the comparison by Marius Masalar.
Comparison
This is not comprehensive, just a few things that happen to be important to me.
Post to Wordpress
Ulysses posts to self-hosted Wordpress installations.
iA Writer requires Jetpack for self-hosted Wordpress.
I have no desire to install Jetpack, so this is a drawback to iA Writer. Ulysses works exactly the way I want it to.
Update: Starting with iA Writer 5.5, Wordpress posting on personal sites has been improved.
File Management
iA Writer works on files. Ulysses works on “sheets,” a file abstraction that lives in a database owned by the application.
Both approaches have their advantages. iA Writer’s advantages:
- The files are searchable with Spotlight. Using Finder to search for things will reveal your iA Writer files just as well as searching within iA Writer.
- The files are portable. It is easy and immediate to edit the files in another program. I can use BBEdit or Vim to open a file I created in iA Writer without having to export.
- I can keep the files in a git repository. iCloud probably serves most writers’ needs, but if you’re a git user, having your history in a repository is reassuring.
The downside is that I am doing my own file management. I have to decide what to name a new document. I have to decide where to save my file. These little decisions can slow me down.
By contrast, Ulysses works with a container that manages the files for me. The benefit of this is that no file name or folder location is required when I create a file (or “sheet”). Just ⌘N and I’m ready to write.
It also easy to compose a work of many sheets. It lets me think in sentences and paragraphs instead of files. I can combine sheets, rearrange their order, “glue” sheets together, and split them apart. It’s more flexible and useful than iA Writer’s “content blocks.”
Fonts and Appearance
Ulysses has a very detailed preference pane to customize every element of my Markdown syntax. I can create themes, and I can use themes created by others. Ulysses comes with a solarized theme, so I picked that. Then I noticed that there is another solarized theme: slightly different and more in line with what markdown looks in MacVim. So I changed to that. After a while, that started to feel garish, so I switched to a theme that mimics Editorial. This was great. But now that theme is starting to look a little…I don’t know…too subdued, maybe. I’ll find something I like if I keep looking. If not, there’s a way to create custom theme styles…
iA Writer looks great. There is a setting for light or dark. There is a font setting with three choices. I picked the one I like and haven’t given it much thought since. I feel none of the theme malaise that Ulysses makes me feel.
Markdown
iA Writer is straight markdown, more or less. More textual than Ulysses, anyway. That is, a link in iA Writer looks exactly like you would expect:
[Link anchor text](http://example.com/path/to/target.html)
Ulysses has clever little additions that make it less textual and more graphical. The target URL is not listed in the source view. If you double-click on the link text, a little inspector window opens to show the target link. It’s very well done, but I feel the textual nature of markdown is a benefit, and Ulysses loses that.
Share Extension
Ulysses has a (poor) Safari share icon. It can paste a web site title and URL, and that’s about it. It is no match for Bear or Keep It.
iA Writer has no service or share extension.
(Preliminary) Decision
I like iA Writer better. Even though Ulysses does have real advantages, iA Writer just feels better. I like the fonts and the built-in preview styles. I like the more standard, textual markdown source. I like the options for previewing the rendered markdown.
The file handling goes both ways. I can totally get behind Ulysses’ philosophy, but I like having my content indexed in Spotlight.
I love that Ulysses can post directly to my WordPress blog. I get around this iA Writer deficiency by using Byword to open the file created by iA Writer and posting from there. This workaround may become tiresome, but for now it works.
This comes down largely to aesthetics and intangible preferences.
Potential Game Changers
These are things that might tip my decision the other way, after more time using them.
- WordPress posting. Ulysses just does WordPress posting the way I want.
- File management. I can see myself coming to prefer Ulysses’ style after a spending more time with both.
- Writing Goals. Ulysses can track writing goals, both daily, and set per sheet.
Non-issues
iA Writer has a feature that will highlight words based on parts of speech (nouns, verbs, etc.). I don’t find this useful.
Many are outraged by the subscription pricing of Ulysses. It doesn’t bother me. It is useful how a single subscription gives me access to macOS and iOS versions of the app. If I start writing more with my my iPad, this might be useful.
Recommendation
My recommendation is that you can’t decide, get both. You can get a week’s trial of both. If that isn’t enough time, just buy iA Writer, and buy a monthly subscription to Ulysses. Give yourself a couple of months to settle into them both. One will reveal itself as your favorite.
This is what I’m doing. I prefer iA Writer, but Ulysses has clear advantages. I want to live with both and see which feels better over the long term. There might be drawbacks to iA Writer that get annoying only over time. When I make a final decision, I’ll post an update.
City Grid
From the BBC: The Hidden Ways that Architecture Affects How You Feel.
One thing that is guaranteed to make people feel negative about living in a city is a constant sense of being lost or disorientated. Some cities are easier to navigate than others — New York’s grid-like street pattern makes it relatively straightforward, whereas London, with its hotchpotch of neighbourhoods all orientated differently and the Thames meandering through the middle, is notoriously confusing.
I can speak to neither New York (which I found confusing), nor to London, but the Hyde Park neighborhood is one of Austin’s more walkable neighborhoods, and it is built on a pretty rigid grid.
The Traveller and the Sport
I wanted a new fountain pen that would better fit my passport-sized Midori Traveller notebook. I’ve been using a Pilot Metropolitan and a Platinum Preppy. The Metropolitan is a little too fat. The Platinum fits better, but the clear plastic dresses down the Traveller. The Kaweco Classic Sport is a short, pocketable fountain pen that has a barrel that looked like it might fit inside the Midori pen loop without a clip (the Sport doesn’t come with a clip). The pen writes great. The fit in the notebook is okay, but not perfect. You can see how lose it is in the photo below. With a little help with the elastic band, it’s okay. I got the plastic version of the Sport, so I don’t worry about losing it as much as much as I would with a nicer pen.
Choose Me
It’s common for a movie to have two-dimensional characters, poorly acted, placed in a riveting plot. The Star Wars comes to mind. It’s somewhat more rare for well acted and complex characers to be placed in a manifestly ridiculous plot. But that’s what Choose Me is. The plot feels like it owes a debt to Three’s Company in that the most improbably coincidences place characters in one another’s bedrooms. But somehow, the characters make it all work. Keith Carradine plays Micky, a mental patient who either escaped or was released from his institution. It’s not explained which. Nor is it explained whether he is a pathological liar or a former spy. Or a romantic or a creep.
Mickey lives in LA and hangs out at a bar named “Eve’s.” He mainly hits on two female roomates. One roomate is a host of call-in radio sex counsellor. The other roommate owns the bar and is a frequent caller of the radio show. Somehow, neither of the roommates realizes they are talking to each other on this call-in show. You might thing the distictive accent of the radio host would be a tip off.
Describing the plot of the movie makes it sound far more ridiculous than it is. The characters are all neurotic to some extent, and the movie is entirely about their interactions. Just accept the plot as a given, and try to pick out whether the mental patient is really a lover; wheter the sex therapist finds her first love; and wheter the jaded bar owner settles down for a one-man committment.