InBerkeley

I wrote an email to the mail list for the North Berkeley street that I live on saying that construction projects are a fact of life in California towns like the one we live in. I know because I’ve been living in California for 30-plus years, and it seems if it isn’t rainy season there are a bunch of hellacious construction projects going on nearby.

One of my neighbors appeared at the front door, hysterically ringing on the doorbell. I’m greeted downstairs with his anger. “I have a right to do this,” he yells. “And I have a right to say it sucks,” I say.

Never ring a neighbor’s doorbell in anger. Please. Count to 10.

In the mid-90s I lived next door to a high-school-sized project. Sunday morning at 7AM they’re out with the bulldozers. I called 911, fed up, not wanting to fully wake up after a night out. Later that day the neighbor is yelling at me for calling the cops. I should have called him, he says. He should go to hell, I think.

Yes, they have the right to do these projects. But they ruin the quality of life here. I’ve been wanting to say that publicly for some time. Now I have.

I don’t know the rules, but they must prohibit construction at 7:40AM and on Sunday mornings.

We live in paradise. But we also live in hell.

“I can get through this.” I’ll just turn up the music. Turn on a fan. Wear noise-cancelling headphones. Travel.

Last week I was in Boston and New York. The peace and quiet. Coming home, the cab dropped me off in front of my house. For a moment I was fooled. Took a deep breath. Home sweet home. Then I heard the drill next door. The peace shattered, I remembered why I dread living here.

I’ve done one very short construction project of my own on a house I bought in 1992 in Woodside. Other than that I’ve been on the receiving end.

What are the rules? Maybe we need some new ones. Or just a little compromising or understanding. Appreciation for our community.

I think at a minimum we should have the same information about the project that they have. If they know the crew will be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the neighbors should know too. Maybe we should have two months of the year when you can’t do projects so that neighborhoods could enjoy at least some of the sunny season. What about people who move out of the neighborhood while their house is under construction. I understand they can’t live in the house, but it seems a bit unfair that they don’t have to deal with the noise they inflict on their community.

Maybe there should be a cost for excessive noise. An incentive to keep it quieter. I love weekends here. I look forward to rainy season.

I think one thing we can ask for is that the people with the projects at least listen to the people who are effected by their projects. You shouldn’t be able to send a contractor or architect around to notify people about your project. When that happens I refuse to sign the form they put in front of me. I give them my number and ask that the homeowner give a call. It seems pretty basic, no?

Update: Construction suckage extends to the UC campus.

General

This report is coming to you from your New York correspondent, here on family business…

The Breakfast-Cabal mail list is abuzz with news about helicopters flying over Berkeley today.

Art Medlar wrote: “…there’s no place to go to get an immediate answer to the general question, ‘what’s up with the helicopters?’ For the most part, the online edition of the Oakland Tribune tends to post breaking news long before either the Chronicle or the Daily Planet, both of which are equally hopeless on that front. Attempting to get the info from the websites of the actual news companies involved is beyond laughable.”

“It would seem like there’s an opening for someone like inberkeley.com to add a ‘helicopter’ tag and become the default source of info.”

Art, let’s see what the InBerkeley.com readers know about the helicopters…

David Rowland adds: “I live near Willard Park, and about once a year something happens that draws the news copters to our area. Although it’s very expensive to keep them up there, if nothing else is happening they will linger for hours, making square miles of noise. I have called the FAA noise complaint line and the individual stations when I can determine which are involved. I think the word gets through, and it may have some effect.”

General

We love getting mail from people like Douglas Smith, Deputy Director at the Berkeley Public Libary. He says: “I realize this is in a sense promoting the organization that I work for, but I do believe this is exactly the sort of thing that downtown needs and I’m really proud to be involved in creating innovative, community-building events here in my hometown.”

We’re totally with you on that. One thing a local blog like InBerkeley has a conflict about is our hometown — we admit to being biased. We like things that make our town more interesting like the events you guys are hosting.

For example…

This evening at 8PM, on the front steps of the library, 2900 Kittredge, there’s a free reading and performance by local writers, artists and musicians. It begins just after the library closes.

And Douglas, please keep us posted on upcoming events at the library!

General

I just got back from a very successful and lively rssCloud meetup this evening at South Hall on the UC campus.

A full report from a variety of perspectives is to come soon.

General

I just got a tweet from the Bay Bridge.

What an amazing world we live in.

The Bay Bridge webcam confirms.

Cars on the bridge. Now here’s the question. How did they know the bridge would be open? It was supposed to be closed all day.

General

I don’t usually blog about the development work that I do, but today something notable happened that’s worth making an exception for.

Mid-day I checked my email and a message was waiting from Matt Mullenweg, the founder and chief guy at Automattic, the company that makes Wordpress, software that powers millions of blogs, including InBerkeley.

His team had been working with a format and protocol that I had designed many years ago as part of RSS 0.92 and RSS 2.0 called rssCloud. A few weeks ago at a lunch in San Francisco, he told me that they planned to ship it around this time. His message today said they were ready to go.

So Lance installed the new rssCloud plug-in here on InBerkeley, probably the first site outside of Matt’s company to do so. I tested it from the server in the media room in my North Berkeley house. We found a few problems and debugged them and got his software working with my software, the new River2 aggregator. They were ready to announce it.

A few minutes ago Lance installed the revised software here, and now with this post I’m going to find out if it works. If it does, my server will find out about this new post within seconds of its posting here. Wish us luck!

Sure enough! It worked. Happy.

It was so fast that it was there before I could refresh the page. This is the benchmark for “realtime web” performance.

Where does this lead? Well, the plan is to have a loosely coupled 140-character message network. In other words, a communication system, like Twitter, but without a company at the center of it. Kind of like the Internet itself.

You should be able to use any software to communicate with any other software, choice everywhere. So you could just as easily use wordpress.com, or as we do at InBerkeley, a hosted server, or in my case an old Mac laptop in my Berkeley den. It all should work seamlessly as one distributed network, and that’s just what happened today.

Today this vision took a huge step forward. Exciting stuff!!

PS: We’re having an rssCloud meetup on Wednesday night at UC-Berkeley.

General

Susan Henderson writes: “Wouldn’t it be great to have piazzas in Berkeley. With all the urban development it would be nice for planners to recognize that we need urban squares to relax and share time with neighbors. I live off of San Pablo and as the city approves 4-5 story buildings it would be wonderful to include some plazas to be lined with small retail businesses, cafes, news stands, etc.”

Amen!

General

The Bay Bridge will close at 8PM today. If all goes according to plan, it will re-open on Tuesday morning at 5AM.

Tomorrow, Friday, will be the first workday that the bridge has been closed since the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The Chronicle has a list of travel alternatives, including BART, AC Transit, ferries.

The Bay Bridge has a Twitter account, where you can get realtime updates. Only 434 followers!

BayBridgeInfo has a site with video slideshows explaining this weekend’s construction project.

KQED will have traffic reports through the weekend. The bridge closure was the topic of KQED Forum today. A podcast recording of the show should appear on the KQED website.

511.org has Bay Area traffic status.

People who live on Yerba Buena Island will be able to get to and from their homes using special passes that allow them to use the western segment of the Bay Bridge.

Traffic is flowing well on the bridge right now, according to Google Maps. What will the map look like at 8PM?

Transbay Blog: Another Year, Another Bay Bridge Closure.

Free Ghirardelli chocolate Friday morning for bridgeless Berkeley BART riders.

Webcams on the construction site! Wow, this is going to be cooool.

General

Oakland Tribune: “An underground water pipe broke in the Berkeley hills on Wednesday morning, flooding six homes and causing a 5-foot-wide sink hole, city fire officials said.”

General

I’ve got a little web app that makes it pretty easy to put together a collection of people on Twitter into a single stream. I have one for the New York Times, the people of Twitter Corp, a group podcast I’m a regular listener of, and the top 100 most-followed people.

Why not put one together for all the Berkeley twitterers I can find? Exactly!

http://berkeley.100twt.com/

Now this is just a beginning. If I haven’t got you on the list and you’re twittering from Berkeley, please post a comment here and I’ll add you right away! Or if you know someone we should be tuning into.

Let’s go Berkeley!

General

18 years ago the hills of north Oakland and south Berkeley were on fire. I was living in the South Bay at the time, but remember sitting on the deck of a friends’ Potrero Hill home watching the huge fire across the bay. Back then it seemed remote, far away, but now I live very close to the part of the East Bay that burned in 1991.

On Monday on the weekly Rebooting The News podcast that I do with Jay Rosen, our guest was Cluetrain author and Harvard researcher Doc Searls. We wanted Doc on the show because he provides broad coverage of the fires in Southern California, from the vantage point of his home in the hills outside Santa Barbara. He fills in the blanks by connecting local bloggers who are experiencing the fire first-hand, with public information sources, maps and aerial photography. He’s just one man, but he does an amazing job.

At one point in the 45-minute interview, I asked him what we should do to prepare for a fire in the East Bay. It seems that sooner or later we’re going to have a repeat of the 1991 fire, and while we tend to be aware of the danger of earthquakes, there isn’t much talk about fires. Until a fire season like 2009.

Bluntly, if the hills above or below your house, or to the right or left, are on fire — what do you do? I assume you leave, but is there any preparation that will make it more likely that your family and your house survive the fire?

Which way to exit? Probably not through the Caldecott Tunnel. 80? 880? The Bay Bridge? What about public transit options?

What communication tools are available? Which radio stations carry the best info? Which websites? Will cell phones work? Perhaps this is something that InBerkeley could help the community prepare for.

Where is the fire likely to happen? Are we more or less at risk this year?

There is at least one remnant of the 1991 fire — it’s hard to find a vacant safe deposit box in banks on Solano Ave. I eventually did find one, when I moved to Berkeley in 2006, in a bank that opened a few years after the fire. One thing people learned from the fire was to store important papers and valuables in a bank.

There must be other practices, like that one, that we can learn from the experience of 1991.

We’re interested in learning what you have learned. If you were here in 1991, please share your story. Either as a comment, or via email to tips@inberkeley.com. Stories with pictures are more interesting. If you’ve lived through a fire elsewhere and have a story or tip to share, please do so.

General

Berkeley is built on hills, seismic hills, and our houses have been here a while. Every winter it rains, a lot. So houses slip down the hill on a slow-moving river of mud. When they change hands the new owners might have a big construction job waiting for them! The contractor jacks up the house, it rests on huge beams of wood while they anchor and then pour a new foundation. As long as everything is turned upside down, let’s do a remodel! Three years later…

Know of other weird or interesting construction projects in Berkeley? Send us a picture and tell us why it caught your eye.

General

I wrote to my neighbors, a couple of weeks ago, in desperation — help — the construction noise is driving me out of my mind. In the summer there’s always a major construction job on the street. Often two or three. Just as one is finishing, promising a respite from the nerve-rattling noise, a new project starts. And the crews scream, often nonsense — their lifestyle is different from mine, writer and software developer. My work requires concentration. I suppose theirs requires a different kind. The two are incompatible. Mine doesn’t interfere with theirs, but theirs interferes with mine.

What’s to be done? Nothing, but endure it. That’s the way it goes in California. Every neighborhood I’ve lived in, from Los Gatos to Palo Alto to Berkeley has been like this. It’s quiet in the rainy season but in the summer it’s crazy loud with construction.

Solutions? None. Work-arounds? Crank up the music. Buy an air conditioner, turn on a fan. But none really solve the problem, because as steady as the white noise distractions are there’s some saw or drill that penetrates. And the annoyance of knowing you’re listening to music not for the joy of it but to drown out something worse somehow generates more resentment than concentration.

Then you get a summer cold and need to take naps instead of working. Ear plugs! Great — just the thing when your head is already congested and you’re coughing your brains out.

Today I’ve got the Rolling Stones cranked up asking if I can hear them knocking, and it’s wonderful because this week there’s no construction! Somehow the gods heard my plea, and now when there’s no music playing all you can hear is the occasional train rolling by and the steady hum of Interstate 80 and the traffic going through the Solano Ave tunnel. Shhhh. You can hear the keyboard click, and you can hear your thoughts and when the music is cranked up it’s because that’s the way you want it.

Ahhhh life’s little pleasures!

General

In Madison, where I went to grad school in the late 70s, on a sunny summer afternoon, hundreds of people would congregate on the Memorial Union Terrace between the student union and Lake Mendota.

We’d spend hours there, drinking coffee and beer, reading, playing cards, enjoying the company of others. Meetings were both planned and serendipitous. We’d introduce friends to other friends, and parties would form, bike rides, LTRs, even families.

Berkeley doesn’t have a lake, but it does have a culture like Madison. Do we have a place like Madison’s Lake Mendota patio? If so where is it? If we don’t, why don’t we?

General

Susan Gibbs had this breakfast custom-made for her this morning at Saul’s.

A thing of beauty!

General

Dear InBerkeley,

Two days ago I was walking out to my car and I noticed a huge pile of garden debris, dirt, branches, leaves, etc piled up in the street in front of my house. I have no idea who put it there. It looks like it was cleared from my neighbor’s property, but he says it isn’t his. I have to believe him.

Who do I call? What do I do? I want this stuff out of there. But there’s way too much to fit in the trash. It has to be hauled away.

Sincerely,

AnnoyedByTrash

General

Last week when I was in NYC, I did a meetup for a new technology I’m working on called rssCloud. To get the meeting space, I did what I always do — telegraphed the need on my blog and waited for someone to volunteer. It worked. I got a beautiful conference room on the 38th floor of an office building in mid-town on the east side, with a fantastic view of the Chrysler Building. The volunteer was an investment banking firm, Ritchie Capital. I assume they offered the space because they like the idea of having leading-edge geeks be aware of who they are and have a good feeling about them. I think it’s great marketing. We need more of that kind of thinking imho.

So now I want to do a similar event on the West Coast, where I reside. So I did the same thing, asked on Twitter if anyone knows of a space I can use, and while I don’t have the space yet (pretty sure I’ll get it) — I did get an interesting response from James Munn, who I didn’t follow before, but do follow now.

He pointed to a fantastic piece he wrote about the possibility of creating a space in Berkeley for just such events. He writes: “With all the empty store fronts in Berkeley, its abundance of students, self-employed geeks, and new-thinkers, I think there is a great opportunity to design a space similar to a coworking office that is intended to support the kinds of activities that the connected cafe goers of today really want to partake in.”

I so totally agree.

And while I can’t start this business myself, I ache for it to exist.

In fact, it’s an impetus behind this site — to gather a community of Berkeley netizens and see what they want to do. I imagine that a certain subset would want to participate in the development of a loosely-coupled 140-character message network. One that would allow anyone to play the role of the company headquartered on the other side of the Bay.

After all we are the B in BSD.

So this thread picks up with a need for a small place for 35 geeks to meet. Should be close to BART. Good eating places nearby. That pretty much narrows it down to Shattuck, probably betw Hearst and Cedar. We don’t have money for the meetup, so it has to be free. We can of course, pass the hat around, in true Berkeley fashion.

Interested to see where this leads.

And of course, we can do it in San Francisco just as easily. But the name of this site is InBerkeley.

General