nicomachus.net

Who knows, “protect and serve” might mean changing your tire the next time you flat.

h/t to Dale McKeel who pointed this out on the durhambikeandped listserv.

Standing Start, a 12-minute documentary short-film on track bicycle racing, uses narration adapted from Homer’s The Odyssey to frame the significance of training, pursuit, and competition.

Like Douglas Gordon’s Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, this riveting film from the Scottish Documentary Institute looks at the some of life’s larger questions through an intimate and aesthetic portrayal of sport. One man stands for all men through most of the film, and only in the sparse scenes of a multi-person race are we reminded that this struggle for strength, explosive strength, has meaning because of the community of others whose training is just as steadfast.

Track racing is a beautiful marriage of the human and the machine. In contrast to the stories of judgment and salvation told in the Terminator films, Standing Start presents a story about the very human use of machines to realize full human potentiality. Instead of humans-vs.machines, it is a story of humans with machines.

I was able to view the film, which is still on the festival circuit, last summer at the Los Angeles Bicycle Film festival. If you get a chance, check it out. It’s among the most carefully measured 12 minutes of film you’ll ever watch.

Like the good folks over at the Independent, I too have recently been reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, a collection of arguments and vignettes on the power of the Internet. The salient point that the Indy picked up on is how, by abolishing the high costs of printing, publishing, and distributing information, the Internet is forcing The Newspaper to reassess its traditional role as the weekly standard for a community.

A few weeks ago, I ran into Lenore Ramm of Eclectic Glob of Tangential Verbosity at the DPAC Blogger Bash. She told me of a friend who’s bike had been stolen and how, in an effort to retrieve the bike, the friend created a website. While stories of using blogs and monitoring eBay and Craigslist to recover stolen goods have become almost commonplace, take a second to think about what this means for just how pervasive the Internet has become to our conception of community.

Just two examples to focus my point:

• Neighborhood listservs are now among the most reliable sources of hyperlocal news. Warnings about loose dogs on the streets, plants to give away, yard sales announced, café music benefit show funds raised, even homes sold — no topic is off-topic as long as it happens in the neighborhood. When friends ask about finding housing in my neighborhood, I refer them to the listserv and encourage them to join.
• There are also a growing number of cities with local blogs that cover on-the-ground civic reporting with as much reliability and insight as the municipal papers. Bull City Rising and Church Hill People’s News (Richmond, VA) come to mind.

And while there have always been start-up attempts at taking a cut from the local publishing market, Shirky’s point is that never has it been so easy to obtain the means of publication. Until the advent of the Internet, publishing an independent organ for the sole purpose of recovering a $700 bicycle just would not have been possible.

So, on March 21st, a bike was stolen in Old West Durham, and now the whole world can know about it. Any computer attached to the Internet can browse to http://findmybicycle.blogspot.com/, learn how to spot the features that make the victim’s bike unique, and get in touch with the owner. “I’m hoping that we demonstrate the power of social media!,” says the website’s creator.

So world, although it may add some perverse pleasure to your life to know that bike thieves spend eternity in a special circle of hell for their miscreant deeds, the owner of a silver Trek 7500 FX will find more pleasure if she gets her bike back. Even more still if a community helps her find it.

Attentive readers may notice that I’ve recently added a Creative Commons licensing badge to nicomachus.net. I’ve meant to add it for some time now, and older versions of nicomachus.net bore the badge. In the process of switching to WordPress (in 2007) and revamping the (visual) theme for the site, I lost or decided to shed most of the blog links and other sidebar items I had collected. So after a two-year hiatus, it’s now back.

from wallyg's Flickr photostream

You’ll notice too that I’ve recently updated the look of this site, which I hope is both pleasing to the eye and quick-loading on your computers. One feature that I want to draw your attention to is the navigation system in the top left corner of the screen, which is a story in itself.

Color by COLOURlovers

The vertical bars, which switch to black when you hover your cursor over them, are meant to mimic the fluted columns of doric and ionic architecture (e.g. the inset grooves of the columns supporting the Parthenon in ancient Greece). I don’t really expect anyone to pick up on this bit of visual rhyming, but it represents part of the style I am developing on both this website and, more specifically, on my business’ website. You see, as a perpetual student of ancient Greek philosophy, I look for ways to incorporate and exhibit some of the virtues of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus’ ethics and aesthetics. After all, one of the most important things one can do with one’s life is to develop a sense of style that ultimately guides all of one’s decisions and behavior.

For the palette, I knew I wanted to use a spectrum of shades of red. I found inspiration on the bedside table.

The concept for the vertical bars fits most squarely into my other website, the one for my web-design and digital media company, nicomedia. I decided to use the vertical bar concept, although mirrored, on this website as well in order to imply the connection between the ethic of my business and and ethic of my personal site — both sites, just as both the commercial and civic motivations in my life, are inspired and led by the same background.

header for nicomedia's website

in the footer at Ogilvy Durham

So, if it’s not obvious from all that I’ve said here, I put some thought into this design. A moment of panic, then, was understandable last week, when I noticed that another local website design company is making use of a similar navigation system. Ogilvy Durham’s blog site lists their most often employed tags in shades of red not unlike the pile-of-books palette.

While it struck me at first as a strange coincidence that two website design firms in Durham would develop and employ a navigation system so visually and behaviorally similar, after an email exchange with the Senior Art Director at Ogilvy, it’s clear that we simply share both an affinity for red and black (OgilvyDurham because red and black are Ogilvy colors generally, nicomachus.net because of the political symbolism behind the colors) as well as a design intuition.

It’s about f*ckin’ time. Known as “The Ugly Green Thing” on Waymarking’s website, the pedestrian bridge over the Durham Freeway is not the most attractive entrance to the Bull City. Yet, if you’re traveling up 147 from either Research Triangle Park or from I-40 (as most people coming to Durham from Raleigh would), then this behemoth is what greets you.

By the end of May, that may all change.

From today’s Herald Sun…

Bridge replacement set to begin
The Herald-Sun
May 19, 2009

DURHAM — Demolition and replacement of the pedestrian bridge at Alston Avenue will begin later this month, resulting in overnight traffic detours on N.C. 147.

Beginning May 26 and lasting approximately two weeks, traffic on the Durham Freeway will be rerouted using Briggs and Alston avenues as detours from 11 p.m. until 5:30 a.m. as crews complete the demolition of the old pedestrian bridge.

After demolition is complete and the new bridge span arrives, crews will again close N.C. 147 during the same hours and using the same detour routes until the new bridge span is in place. The second closure will be announced once this date is set.

Read the rest at the Herald Sun’s website.

I wrote a column about the 147 bridge in May 2006, at which time the story was that the bridge was set to be demolished in the fall of 2006 and that the new bridge might possibly be open by the fall of 2007. When delays in fulfilling promises take this long, what should be celebrated as good news turns into bittersweet resentment.

new Durham Freeway (Hwy 147) bridge design, ca. 2006

new Durham Freeway bridge design, ca. 2006

American Tobacco Trail bridge supporters take note. As I pointed out in October 2007, for most of the time I have lived in Durham construction dates for the American Tobacco Trail bridge over I-40 and the new pedestrian bridge over 147 are indexical: no matter when you ask, the answer is always “they should be completed in about 2 years.”

So, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Design images courtesy of Stewart Design

North Carolina Central University will play host to WordCampRDU 2009, which as far as I know is the Triangle’s first WordCamp.*

WordCamp is a conference type of event that focuses squarely on everything WordPress. WordCampRDU is a day-long event on June 13th, 2009 in Raleigh Durham, North Carolina that focuses on beginner and advanced WordPress users with presentations and useful information. WordCampRDU will be highlighted by a much anticipated keynote speech by WordPress Founder, Matt Mullenweg.

The RDU conference is designed around a dual track, so both beginners and more advanced users are welcome. Sessions currently include WordPress 101 (an introduction to WordPress and blogging, hosted by yours truly), Search Engine Optimization, using WordPress as a content management system, as well as integrating eCommerce into your WordPress sites. WordCampRDU is coming together this year under the leadership and hard work of Danielle Baldwin.

I made the switch (from MovableType) to WordPress in October 2007 and haven’t looked back. The plug-ins, the editing pane, the overall ease of everyday use, and the power of php have convinced me that WordPress is the blogging platform for me. Whether you are already a WordPress user or  are thinking of making the switch (or even thinking about starting your first blog), WordCampRDU will be a great opportunity meet other WordPress users and find answers to some of those burning questions.

If there are any topics that you would like me to cover in the WordPress 101 session, feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

You can register for the event here. See you there.

*WordCampRDU 2008 was canceled at the last minute.

The self-righteous tone of the comments aside, Good Magazine’s blog has a nice photo show of traffic in Los Angeles. I realize that this collection of aerial photographs of mostly single-occupant smogmobiles is probably intended to be a critique of LA’s (and thus the USA’s) automobile dependence, but these photos are visually stunning and, dare I say, beautiful.

It’s amazing to me that I’ve been to LA exactly once, and that I recognize just from sight and memory several of these interchanges — the Los Angeles National Cemetery, the Getty, Elysian Park, downtown — and most of which I saw from the seat of a bicycle.

Years ago, the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt got comedian John Cleese to record a series of PSAs about philosophy. Some are on ethics, some on metaphysics, some on meaning-of-life questions. I’ve thought for some time that it would be fun to use those PSAs as the audio track for a series of videos. So, consider the video below the first in a series.

Makes any video look cool… (click the image to see what I’m talking about)

Fairway Outdoor Advertising’s attempts at wooing City Council into removing the current ban on new billboards may not be going so well. At least, not for Fairway.

The billboard industry suffered a trouncing at the March InterNeighborhood Council meeting, but the City Council vote that will ultimately decide the fate of Durham’s billboards will come later this summer. The persistence of both advertising as a phenomenon and the belief that people are essentially consumers with obligations to subject themselves to advertising in public spaces warrant more discussion, and Fairway’s recent attempts at infiltrating community groups leave the public to wonder why the ad giant doesn’t want a real conversation.

Not only is it becoming clear that the community doesn’t support the attempt to supersaturate the Bull City with corporate advertising, in the process of covering the issue, the Independent has identified and mapped 110 billboards in Durham — 89 of which are permitted and 21 that are not. (Note: Fairway currently owns 45 billboards in Durham.)

If those billboards identified as illegal are not dealt with by “the proper authorities,” then who knows what will happen to them.

Perhaps, someone might by inspired by a recent public art campaign in New York, which reclaimed public space from illegal billboards by whitewashing, then replacing with art.

Alternatively, in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, there is a compelling description of what happens to billboards that violate the spirit of community aesthetic.

Whatever the resolution, there’s new stuff to read on supportdurhambillboardban.com:

• a video of the InterNeighborhood Council’s vote, overwhelmingly supporting the City’s current policy on billboards
• emails sent to contact@supportdurhambillboardban.com
• updated list of letters to local newspaper editors

And if you haven’t yet voiced your opinion on whether Durham needs more billboards, just send an email or write a letter to the editor of a local newspaper.

	Discover the Rail Way on National Train Day, May 9, 2009
	National Train Day is upon us and this year the celebration is bigger and better. This Saturday from 10am to 3pm, enjoy live musical entertainment and educational and interactive displays about train travel in the past, present and future, including: Exhibits you can only find at National Train Day include: • Trains Move Our Economy: An in-depth exploration of rail’s current and future role in American society, learn about proposed high-speed corridors, the upgrading of rail infrastructure, electrification and the role of freight trains in our economy. • Go-Green Express: Discover the green aspects of rail travel – energy efficiency, electric rail, regenerative braking, etc. – with this free-standing interactive display. • Honor the Bright Land: Trains and the Preservation of America’s Great Places: This art gallery will honor the connection between trains and our national landscape through the art of J. Craig Thorpe. In his work you’ll find a beautiful representation of the spectrum of rail operations in three different settings: urban, rural and wilderness. The gallery will also feature a new commission from Amtrak on the future of rail. See trains up close and personal with exclusive displays that include historic private cars, commuter and freight cars, and Amtrak equipment: Washington, DC Dover Harbor Georgia 300 (President Obama’s historic inaugural private train car) Acela, Amfleet and Superliner Cars Chicago Warren Henry & Evelyn Henry Horizon Club-Dinette Amfleet II and Superliner Cars Philadelphia Epicuris Cab Car Acela Set Amfleet Cars Electric Locomotive Los Angeles Overland Trail Scottish Thistle Operation Lifesaver Wrapped Locomotive GM & O 50 Steam Locomotive Superliner and Surfliner Cars