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I just wanted to point out that fixing Detroit is easy. The problem is the city is half empty. The solution is to bring the population in line with the size of the city. Normally, cities do one of two things to try and fix this. Appeal to young people who will spend a lot of money at the bars. This ignores the fact that any who have kids will move out for the same reasons they moved into the city. The other is to try and push the residents out and make the city only a commercial center. This reduces the need for people to live there. This ends up giving business an incentive to move to the suburbs. After all, that's where the people are. The real solution is to bring the size of the city in line with the current population.

There are two ways you can do that. One is to limit the size/height of buildings. This has worked in several cities but I think it is too late for Detroit to do that. The only real way to reduce of the size of the city to something the population to support is to consolidate the people in a smaller area. There was talk of doing this in New Orleans. The plan was to take low level areas that had been mostly emptied of residents and convert them to land preserves of various types. This would concentrate the population into a smaller and more affordable area.

Detroit probably won't have a natural disaster to make this easy. However, it does have a man-made one. The housing bubble has made land and housing in Detroit practically worthless. You do not a sell a house in many places, you just abandon it. The city/state could pick a large square block of the city and start acquiring all of the land. The cheap part is getting the land. Seizing property for unpaid taxes, buying near worthless lots, and programs to help move people to other areas of the city would work to empty it. The expensive part would be removing the housing stock, pulling up the roads, and cleaning up pollution. However, long term the land would be valuable. In the short and medium term you benefit from a smaller area to support and fewer empty lots.

If half the houses on your block are empty or full of squatters than its going to be hard to motivate you to improve your home. However, if you can concentrate the people in a smaller area you give neighborhoods a chance to form and improve the area. Police have a smaller area to patrol and can provide better service. Road crews have less road to maintain. Fire departments have less empty buildings to worry about and can focus on helping homeowners who area closer to the department.

The large cleaned up blocks of the city can than be redeveloped in the future when the city needs it. Hopefully, it would be used to give people housing they want versus the current Detroit house which is all to often small and only tolerated.

I uploaded the Quote of the Day stuff from the old side to the new site. They are just blog postings with their own category. I posted them under their original post date but chose noon for the time because I longer have a record of the original.

I also added one of the short and not so useful or detailed unix notes that I had on the old site. I'd like to go over and update some of the others and post them as well. i do not expect anyone will benefit from them but you never know I suppose. Either way, it should simplify things with the sites I maintain.

I finally got Movabletype setup on this thing. Unfortunately, it took long enough that I won't have time tonight to move some of the junk over from the old site. It isn't a huge deal since no one cares. Not even me, really. I'll get to it eventually though.

I really wish MovableType came with a good light text on dark background layout. I know what I want but no one else seems to be a fan of it. I never really get around to polishing the CSS before it is time to upgrade and I need to start over.

It's more of a carpentry phrase but it applies in other things as well. A good example is what I did today. I've not been real happy with any of the hosting company's I've tried. One was blacklisted as a spammer by some mail servers. Another seemed to be a spammer themselves. I finally found one I liked and I've slow been moving things over to that site. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention and managed to close out one of the old accounts while it was still a live site. It's not a huge deal, it will not affect mail and hardly anybody goes to either site. Still, it's an annoying and bit embarrassing, thing to do.

In the computer industry people talk about innovation all the time. However, things really don't change that much despite claims to the contrary. However, I saw an example of some real innovation. Amana has a refrigerator with a dry erase surface. You no longer need a separate board to leave notes. You just right it on the fridge. If you're in the market for a fridge you really need to take a look at it. Hopefully, this'll expand to more models/vendors.

The cool part is that this isn't just tweaking an existing item until it screams. Its not a slightly more efficient motor, better layout, or other minor change. It is a real and actual new thing. In computers, we're still using the same basic "desktop"metaphor that we've been using for twenty plus years with very little improvement or refinement. Here's hoping that the billions that are spent on IT will bring us some real improvements.

April fools' day is stupid. You can't trust anything anyone says at all.

Shares of SCO are now worth 5.5 cents each. I normally feel bad when a company is obviously failing because it obviously affects a lot of regular people. However, I'll make an exception with SCO. The current management has managed to make just about every mistake possible. They've sued their customers, potential customers, companies a hundred times their size, and managed to piss off everybody else. The worst part is they apparently launched the lawsuits without actually confirming that they had a case. They had to learn the hard way that they didn't have a case.

I finally got around to getting this thing up and running and working again. Someday I'll catch up on a lot of crap like this. In the meantime, why are you here? There's nothing to see here. Move along.

I suppose I should start posting something here. I'm not sure what though. I guess I'll just work on the next version. That'll be easier than posting content. :)