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I was disappointed that no mention of improvements for bicycles was made in this article, so I wrote to the Public Works Department in Champaign. An amicable and helpful fellow just called me back to talk about my concerns. Apparently there isn't room to add on-road bike lanes without sacrificing a car lane, so they're hoping to shunt bike traffic to White and Clark.White is already a pretty major traffic corridor for buses--so much so that the street seems to be bowed under the weight. My only problem with using White is the stop signs; they make sense for buses, which have to stop anyway, but they're not so much fun for a law-abiding bicyclist.Anyway, kudos to Champaign for taking on this project. University Avenue desperately needs the improvement.

CHAMPAIGN – Mohammad AL-Heeti operates his World Harvest International & Gourmet Foods grocery store just off of one of Champaign's busiest streets, University Avenue.
So the store owner is excited that, starting next month, a major section of University Avenue, between Third and Wright streets, will undergo a comprehensive streetscape upgrade. The work will include resurfacing University Avenue and installing new curbs and gutters, sidewalks, streetlights and trees.
"It's time," AL-Heeti said. "It's one of the busiest streets, and it's an entrance to the city. It should look good."

See original: University Avenue business owners ready for streetscape

I heard "The King's Hunting Jig" on WILL a week or two ago and got the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble album from Amazon MP3. Having sung barbershop for several years now, I've developed a taste and respect for ensembles that have this sort of tight harmony and perfect intonation. Other musicians that have struck a chord with me recently: The King's Singers (listen to Greensleeves!), the Kassiopeia Quintet (Gesualdo's madrigals), and Moira Smiley & Voco (their performance at BLEMF was on Harmonia recently).

If you use last.fm, I made a pipe for recently weekly artists (for a given user), since they don't seem to deliver that information in RSS format for some reason. The whole point of this post was to share a link to the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble from my feed and show how nicely information can flow from one place to another, but Google Reader stripped all the links out of my note. Fix it, Google!

Also nice: moc and lastfmsubmitd.

I went up to Chicago yesterday to play Whirlyball with a bunch of friends. It's kind of like basketball with bumper cars. Only these are not your fairground bumper cars that top out at a snail's pace. These things must be going a good seven or eight miles an hour (lucky car Black #7 was surely even faster), making for some bone-jarring, muscle-bruising, seatbelt-straining head-on collisions. It's even more fun than it sounds! We headed back to Chris and Helen's place afterward for many hours of good food and drink, fun games (hooray for Wii Sports, the only way I will ever make par), and impromptu music. (Cheers to Matt; I haven't heard "If You Could Only See" in a long, long time!)

We had some crazy rain last night. I got some photos of the viaduct that always gets terribly flooded.

CHAMPAIGN – No injuries were reported in the aftermath of severe thunderstorms that came through the area Tuesday evening.
Rainfall was recorded at 2.10 inches at WILL in Urbana and 2.68 inches in Sidell, said Heather Stanley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Lincoln.

See original: Rain overwhelms some streets, viaducts

commons.wikimedia.org:




Hong Kong Skyline Restitch - Dec 2007.jpg
from commons.wikimedia.org,
provided by Diliff

See original: Pictures of the Day - July 06

I was poking around on Google Street View today, and I realized you can actually zoom out fairly far and still get the blue layer that shows you their coverage. They've got a massive amount of coverage in the Chicago area, sprawling all the way out to Milwaukee, Madison, Rockford, and even Dubuque. The pattern around Indianapolis is quite different: a central mass with little feelers spreading out radially. So what's neat is that those feelers have already hit Danville, and good old Champaign-Urbana surely will be in the next iteration of growth!

On an unrelated note, the Orange Blossom Cream Ale from Buffalo Bill's Brewery is excellent.

This is what happens when I put my iPod on random during the walk into work in the morning:

• "Everything's Under Control" — Meat Beat Manifesto — Actual Sounds and Voices
• "Reveille" — The Black Watch — Proud Heritage
• "Éirigh Is Cuir Ort Do Chuid Éadaigh Cóiríu" — Clannad — Dúlamán
• "Honey Medley" — Max Q — Discovery
• "L'inverno: III. Allegro" — Nigel Kennedy — Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
• "Suite No. 10 "KA": II" — Aki Takahashi — Giacinto Scelsi: The Piano Works 3
• "Return of the Jedi: 'Jabba the Hut'" — The Boston Pops — Out of This World
• "Wie Glauben" — Carter Burwell — The Big Lebowski
• "Neon Lights" — Kraftwerk — The Man-Machine
• "Goriri" — Tortoise — A Lazarus Taxon

One of the cabinets under my kitchen sink is stuffed full of these wimpy, plastic grocery bags. There must be around a hundred of them in there at this point. The only reuse I get out of them is to take lunch into work. I decided I should start bringing my own bag, so I bought these reusable bags from Schnucks at five for $4.

They're great! It turns out I can stuff over 20 lbs of groceries into just one bag: all that stuff pictured above except the gallon of milk, which provides a good size reference. As a revealing comparison, I've lost about one and a half reusable bags worth of weight since I started working out regularly in January.

Head to Cockeyed.com to find out how much is inside other stuff.

First post from my wonderful new OLPC XO-1! It's so much more than I expected, albeit slightly tinier and cuter than I imagined. The coolest thing I've done so far: using the Measure activity to view the overtones while I practice my sygyt throat-singing.

This has got to be about the coolest performance I've seen, and not just because it was bloody cold and windy. The Continuum keyboard by itself is fascinating; it's essentially a piano keyboard with a continuum of pitches and an extra dimension of modulation. But it's clever: It can tune itself so that you don't have to be precise in order to play in tune, but it doesn't get in your way when you want to bend pitches or slide up and down. The output is MIDI, which controls a synthesizer, which in turn modulates a pair of Tesla coils!

Zounds! The crackling of the electricity through the air is music, and not just something you could generously construe as music, but totally rocking tunes, polyphonic, melodic and harmonic, expressive, and dangerous.

Here's one more short video. Hopefully EOH will post some high-quality videos with better sound; it looked like they had some decent recording equipment set up.

Congratulations to the people at the 2008 UIUC Engineering Open House who put this together!