I’ve been working in downtown Plano, Tx, for a few years now, and during that time my interest in transportation and urban planning have grown. Every time I’m driving around town and I see the DART light rail train, it just makes me smile. I love it.

Many people don’t know that between 1908 and 1948, North Texas had a very cool commuter rail system – the Texas Electric Railway. The system ran north/south from Denison in the north, down through Plano, Richardson, and Dallas, and all the way to Waco. It was a passenger system that ran electric trains that looked like street cars.  Back in those days, Plano and Richardson were very small rural towns. The system allowed people to travel to the city efficiently. The cars could apparently reach speeds of 60mph.

I won’t try to tell the entire history of it here. The only place you can see one of the cars and learn about the system is the Interurban Railway Museum, in downtown Plano. Their website tells you a lot about the history.

Also, here is a D Magazine story from 1977: When Dallas had Mass Transit.

I’m going to try to make an appointment to go interview the historian there. I spoke briefly to one of the mean giving tours, who told me as a private company, the railway was not able to continue when faced with increasing requirements for more sophisticated control systems.  Of course, as automobiles became popular, and the highway system was built, that probably put the final nail in the railway’s coffin, as it runs roughly parallel to Central Expressway and IH-35.

It is a shame that the government didnt’ help out. And its amusing that now, as the DART system expands, we are trying to recreate something we had 100 years ago. Here are some pictures from the museum.

Saw this on a thread on the message board of kunstlercast.com, relating to the recent podcast there about food. One of the participants brings up some common objections to farmer’s markets as being mostly for the wealthy. I enjoyed Duncan’s (the host) reply. I think he’s exactly right. The only thing I’d say is a problem is that we don’t haven enough farmers markets or grow enough of our own food at home in our own gardens.

Quote from: jarober on October 01, 2009, 03:42:32 PM

What you miss is simple: farmer’s markets are expensive luxury items, not a sustainable way to feed a large population. For that matter, being a vegetarian by choice is an affectation of wealthy socities; poorer ones grabat tge (rare) opportunities for meat.

There’s also this: “eating locally” means giving up on a lot of very healthy foods during off seasons – say hello to a whole range of banished 19th century nutrition problems. If modern habits are so bad for us, how does life expectancy keep rising?

The whole farmers market-as-luxury argument makes me laugh. Most of the really high prices at the farmers’ market are literally for “luxury” items — like fancy cheese, or gourmet peanut butter. Those items are priced as luxury items — DUH!

But I find that most of the food is reasonably priced. Although I do make it a habit of looking around before I buy. One farmer might be charging more or less for the same item.

Either way, you get what you pay for in terms of nutrition. The eggs I buy at my local farmers market cost more than the runny, nutritionally-vacuous factory farm eggs at the supermarket. But they cost the same as the “organic” eggs in the supermarket. So I’d rather buy them from farmers who live in my community and whom I see every week.*

A lot of people who bitch and moan about the cost of food at farmers’ markets have X-boxes, plasma tvs, huge DVD collections, big houses and big cars out in the burbs. They have Jet Skis for the summer and Ski Doos for the winter. They take the kids to Walley World (or Six Flags or Disney World) once a year. Etc. Etc.

One of their favorite delusions is to pretend they can’t afford things like food at the farmers’ market because they’re just hard workin’ middle class folks who don’t have money for that fancy “green” food. That is their verbal patriotic totem. We’re not supposed to make them feel bad because they “can’t afford” to shop at the farmers’ market.

But the reality is that they can afford to shop at the farmers’ market. They just don’t want to. They don’t want to deal with the human interaction. And they don’t want to spend money on local food when they could be spending their money on trinkets at Target.

They could skip one meal at a restaurant per week and spend it on the “additional” cost of farmer’s market food. They could not buy that DVD set of Lost Season 5. They could cancel their cable subscription. They could carpool. They could pass on buying that nifty plastic banana slicer that they’ve had their eyes on at Wal Mart.

There are million ways they could make up for the “extra” cost of shopping at the farmers market. And in doing so they could also be help out their local farmers who usually belong to the real middle class in this country.

As far as the seasonal thing goes. If you need to supplement your winter diet with Frankenberries and Frankenanas, then go for it dude! Don’t use that as an argument not to shop at the farmers market at all!

My city has a year-round farmers market. And there’s an amazing amount of great fresh food available during the winter. The greens are grown in green houses. Some of the fruits — like the apples, have been frozen.

As far as life expectancy goes, if you believe that the corn syrup generation will outlive the previous generation then by all means…. dig in brother.

(* Another thing to consider: When I support my local farmer, I am also helping to pay for them to help conserve the agricultural landscape which I enjoy looking at and being in. I’m helping them keep the cul de sacs out of the country. Which also helps my city in many ways.)

« Last Edit: October 02, 2009, 08:07:02 PM by Duncan »

cover37WIP

Originally uploaded by aeneastudio

Love this artist’s stuff. Very clever.

IMG_5803

Originally uploaded by bibliosk8er

Just a picture of a bee in our garden. As we have gotten more nice plants back there, more bees have been showing up in our square foot gardens. Real cool.

Not that I have anything particularly insightful to say about it, but flickr.com has become a very powerful research tool for this librarian. Sometimes you just don’t know what you are looking for until you see it. Lately I’ve been researching sustainable/green technologies for homes, and being able to browse through millions of images to gather information is really helpful.

I’m also blown away by the diversity and niche-ish-ness available from the various groups on flickr. For example, today I happened upon this group devoted to pens. Yes – pens. Good pens. Some really nice photography from the pen freaks. Makes me want to go buy a new pen.

I’ve been running this blog for a while now, and thought I’d post up the all-time stats for most popular posts. These are the ones over 100 views. Pretty cool. My skateboarding stuff is popular, as well as any technical stuff about Macs, blogging, Linux, etc. I’ve been blown away by the interest in my Streit Slumber Chair.

Some downhill longboard carving	4,114
RSS Readers: Google Reader vs. Bloglines	1,496
My new MacBook – problem – solution?	1,391
the Streit Slumber Chair	869
Some downhill skateboard racing	855
bob’s trick tips videos	797
Importing problem with iPhoto and Canon	743
MacBook WiFi problem/solution	646
Silverback at the Fort Worth Zoo	608
Combining free blog hosting with your ow	436
Canon SD750 and video	408
Comet Longboard	357
Longboard ditch skating	204
Canon PowerShot SD750	199
about bsk8	191
yet another cat drawing.	182
Skateboarding, Germany, and Information	180
Ice Cave in Austria	159
“Hip” librarians…	156
Aikido image “art”.	148
YouTube.com and the death of a website	131
Comet longboard: pre-review article	128
MacBook update	125
Moving your site to a new server: some t	103

Matt and Bob

Originally uploaded by dickdavid

Me and my friend Matt, Saturday morning Oct. 3, on my birthday ride at Whiterock Lake, in Dallas. Matt was rocking his punk rock fixie, while I was rolling on my black granddaddy punk Townie.

In 1999 I began my website, Bob’s Trick Tips. I had noticed that few young skaters knew any of the old tricks from the 1970s, and of course flatland freestyle was all but dead. The F forum was up, and Lillis had some tips there, but that was pretty much it.

So I designed and built BTT to 1)educate the current generation of skaters about older moves and 2)try to help revive freestyle.

10 years later, there is a great international freestyle scene. Because of BTT, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and skate with great people all over the country, as well as with my friend Yoyo Schulz, in Germany. I’ve skated with Michael Brooke up in Canada, Gary Holl and his crew up in the San Francisco area, become good friends with Jeremy Elder, met new friends here in Texas, and reconnected with many old friends. One of my best friends, Mike Moore, contacted me because he found my site — a friendship I’ll always value and for which I’m grateful.

The friendships that BTT helped me start have been by far the greatest unforeseen benefit of having the site.

But over time, the nature of the internet has changed. In 1999, it was expensive to put video on the web. Over the last 4 years, it has become easy and common. Websites like youtube and other social networking sites have allowed everyone to participate in reviving freestyle and as a result, things are thriving. While this has been happening, I’ve been getting interested in some other things, as you’ll see from this blog. I still skate, and love skateboarding, but there is a lot more to learn and do. I simply don’t have the time to maintain and update BTT the way it really needs to be done.

So I’ve shut it down. There’s nothing sadder than a site that is never updated. I don’t want that to be the case with anything I’m involved in.

I’ve archived the videos from the site here on this blog. Please feel free to watch them, share them, etc. That’s what they are here for. I may film new tricks from time to time and post them here, as well as longboarding videos, and other skate-media projects. I’ll be working with Jeremy Elder on some projects in the near future too.

So a big thanks to everyone who supported BTT over the years. It has been a great and rewarding experience for me.

Bob

Gaze

Originally uploaded by Perchance To Dream

I like this guy’s stuff.

There’s nothing quite as educational at Aikido practice than working directly with your sensei on a technique. Several Mondays per month, our brown belts get to teach a class to prepare them for that role in the future, so Shiba Sensei gets to simply work out with the rest of us. It is always great to practice a basic move that you have been doing for several years with him, and have it not work at all, and then he shows you the way to make it actually work on a less cooperative training partner. It is usually a way that expends even less energy on your part too.

I have a lot to learn.