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Field of Dreams in Midtown Atlanta

This semester is almost done and I haven’t done a whole lot of work that is really worth sharing here. I did do one presentation, though, which is short and somewhat interesting. It looks at a development project that was slated in midtown Atlanta, across from the High Museum — a high-end condo complex called “One Museum Place.” It was supposed to be designed by a world-famous architect, provide more gallery space for the High, and its units would start from $1.5 – $2 million.

The project got as far as the demolition of the buildings that had stood in that part of Peachtree ST previously. Shortly thereafter, the housing bubble popped and credit began to severely tighten. The developer could not get the money to proceed on the $300 million project, nor could he really justify putting more condos on a market that was already glutted. 1301 Peachtree ST is now an empty, overgrown lot – a “field of dreams” in Midtown Atlanta.

Looking at the pictures over the course of the project is kind of interesting, and it helps illustrate just how much our city has been affected by the economic downturn. Hope you enjoy the presentation:


Written on 28 November 2008 by Joseph Geierman under Uncategorized with 1 Comment

Blogs aren’t Dead Yet

Earlier today, a friend of mine linked to a post about the death of blogging. More specifically the article posits that blogging is dead as a vehicle for publishing independent voices (read not part of the “Mainstream Media”).  The following excerpt cuts to the crux of his argument:

Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a “blogosphere” that is distinguishable from the “mainstream media” seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

To some extent, this is true – but I think it misses the whole point of blogging in the first place. The power of the platform was never that Joe Blow could become a “star” or rise to the Technorati Top 100 – it was simply the promise of an easy way for anyone (from a large corporation to a guy in his living-room) to publish on the Internet.

The author is right that the days of someone starting a blog, writing about their day-to-day thoughts, and becoming wildly popular are mostly over. There are lots of niche subjects, however, that are not going to make oodles of money (or that would not make enough to be worth hiring writers) and so are always going to be labors of love.  Example of these include blogs about small town politics, candy, knitting and even grocery store history and design, .  No one’s going to be able to get rich writing them, but their authors continue do it anyway because they are passionate about their subjects.  None of them are probably ever going to make it to the Technorati Top 100, but to people who are interested in their topics, they can be must-reads.

It is this specialization, along with the power of RSS feeds, which has made blogging such a powerful tool. If you’re looking for fame or lots of money, you’re probably not going to get it from writing a blog – but if you are passionate about a subject and want to share that passion with others who have the same interests, then blogging is just as relevant today as it was in 2003.  Maybe it’s actually an even better platform now, actually, because you can reach many more people (since more are online) and the blogging tools have improved a lot in the last 5 years.

Written on 08 November 2008 by Joseph Geierman under Social Networking, Technology with 2 Comments

Playing Tug-of-War with Sebastian & Topsy

A few days ago, Sebastian, Topsy (our current foster) & I had fun playing tug of war with a cheap piece of rope…


Written on 06 September 2008 by Joseph Geierman under Dog Rescue with No Comments

Singularity on my Mind Again

The NY Times published a brief story today about The Singularity — the idea that there will be a tipping point, when the rate of technological (and subsequent social) change will become so accelerated as to be incomprehensible to the people living through it. Vernor Vinge, the person who theorized about the Singularity wrote:

It is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer and closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown.

In 2005, I wrote the following about the approach of the Singularity:

When I was in college in the mid-90s, very few people that I knew had cell phones. Personal computers were common at college–but not ubiquitous. Some of my classes had e-mail lists, but it was usually pretty rudimentary. The classes BJ is in now have really extensive websites and download sections, and they all utilize a lot of e-mail. Lots of little changes have added up, and I feel like I entered some new world without even noticing. TiVO and ipods have changed the way I think of media (TiVo more than Ipod, so far) Last night, I nearly had a panic attack when I woke up and realized that BJ didn’t have his cell phone with him! What planet do I live on, and how did I get here?!

It doesn’t stop. Since I wrote that passage, I have started using a cell phone as a data device – streaming music, taking pictures, and sucking in twitter feeds and websites almost anywhere I go. I watch TV shows made halfway around the world almost at the same time they broadcast in their home countries. I weep silicon tears. OK, that last one isn’t quite true – but it might be one day!

I don’t consciously spend a lot of time thinking about all this change. When I do, though, I feel anxious. Like I can almost feel where it’s leading, and I want to go there – but I’m also scared about what I’ll find. But of course, I don’t know where all this is leading–that’s the point! Maybe I have future shock…

Here’s some further reading about the Singularity if you’re interested:

  • Tales of the Singularity, by Michael Roberts (very short, entertaining riffs on American tall tales, using the Singularity as a backdrop.
  • I Robot, by Cory Doctorow (a re-telling of Isaac Asimov’s famous story)
  • The Singularity is Always Near, by Kevin Kelly (in which he refutes the idea of a single point of exponential change)
  • Signs of the Singularity, by Vernor Vinge (in which he answers his critics)

    • Written on 26 August 2008 by Joseph Geierman under Pop Culture, Science Fiction, Technology with No Comments

    Amazon Needs to Get Social

    For the most part, I hate shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. While an occasional visit to Fry’s may be kind of fun, I really don’t enjoy big crowds of people, trying on different clothes, or the general act of shopping. Shopping online, however, is another thing entirely. I spend a lot of money with Amazon every year, and even subscribe to their “Prime” service, which makes my purchases through them default to 2nd day air.

    According to some people, I am a hard person to shop for. I typically buy things that I want for myself. While I have an Amazon wish list, I don’t share it with people, because of Amazon’s stupid defaults. Their wish list has just two settings — either completely viewable by everyone on the Internet; or completely private to anyone but me. There is no ability to share the list with select people, no “friends” feature that allows different degrees of access – it’s just all on or all off.

    While I don’t think there’s anything really shocking on my wish list, I also don’t think that its contents should be the entire world’s business. In 2008, how hard would it be for Amazon to add some varying privacy levels to their site — allowing its customers to share information at whatever level they wish. So many different sites have this feature, I can’t imagine that it would be that hard for a huge retailer like Amazon to implement.

    For whatever reason, this was really bothering me the other evening and I wrote Amazon’sr suggestions group a quick note on the subject:

    I think that you should have more privacy settings for the wishlists than the two defaults (“public,” where everyone on the internet can see my wishlist; and “private,” where absolutely no one but me can see my wishlist).

    I don’t particularly want potential employers or people I don’t know looking at my wishlist. I don’t want all of my wishlist picks showing up when people do a google search on my name. I do think that the wishlist does not have functionality unless the people I am close to can find it and view it, however.

    What I think makes sense is if you would give me (the customer) the ability to approve who can see my wishlist. Someone could search for me by name or e-mail address, and the fact they would see that I have a wishlist, but would not be able to see what was on it. If they want access to it, they would have to send me a message asking me to authorize them to see it.

    You would sell more items (from the gifts that friends and family members would purchase for people who are concerned about their privacy, like me) if you could set up a system like this. I hope you consider the suggestion.

    Of course, they sent me a mostly-generic response about how the wishlist works, which did not answer me at all. Hopefully, though, they take this data they got from me (and maybe from other people) and decide to make a change.

    Written on 06 August 2008 by Joseph Geierman under Social Networking, Technology with No Comments

    Book Read: Journals of the Plague Years by Norman Spinrad

    Since starting school a year ago, I haven’t much reading of books… at least not for fun. Partly I can blame being in school for my lack of book-reading; partly I can blame all the distractions of technology (blogs, rss feeds, video, etc). To be honest, technology is probably the real culprit that has been keeping me away from books lately.

    Sunday night, though, I picked up a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while — Journals of the Plague Years by Norman Spinrad. It’s very short – really novella length — and a quick read. It posits a world some period of time in the future where AIDS has run amok and people have an unhealthy relationship with sex — alternately associating it with death and cold prophylactic machinery. People who have the disease are segregated in cordoned-off zones or given the opportunity to fight in colonial wars (with the promise of free health care). Throw in some evil pharmaceutical executives and you have the novel.

    The book was definitely worth reading; an interesting mid-80s view of the way HIV/AIDS was changing society. The story is over the top in many ways, but I do think that the author did a pretty good job of capturing the way this disease has impacted our culture in ways beyond making people physically sick. It’s definitely worth a read. If anyone’s interested in the book, leave me a message and I’ll send it your way.

    Written on 05 August 2008 by Joseph Geierman under Books, Science Fiction with No Comments

    Chelsea

    We’ve been fostering dogs since last October.  There are a few things that went into our decision to become fosters.  First and foremost, we wanted to help dogs that needed homes.  Second, we wanted to give our dog, Sebastian, some playmates–without the long-term committment that would come from adopting another dog. The first two dogs we fostered — Molly & Milo — were adopted really quickly. We had Molly for a couple of weeks, and Milo was only with us for a week.

    Then we met Chelsea — who became our foster on Thanksgiving weekend, 2007. Chelsea was a skinny little lab/pit bull mix with an incredible amount of energy. Here’s the description of her from the Atlanta Lab Rescue site:

    Chelsea is a 7 mos old female black lab mix shaping up to be quite a lovely girl. Chelsea’s story is not so very different than that of countless other black dogs – she was never cared for, discarded and passed over time and again in the shelter, through no fault of her own. No rhyme or reason, just a persistent, stubborn curse that continues to haunt black dogs. Thankfully for her, our volunteer looked into her eyes and connected with Chelsea’s lost soul. Little did we know, behind those serious intelligent eyes, the most wonderful, whimsical girl was primed and ready to unfold. And it has been quite a metamorphosis! She’s lithe & lean and her movement is marked with playful unreserved pep. She’s primed to play at a moments notice, every dog is her friend, every outing an opportunity to meet potential playmates. She LOVES people. She’s studious and seems to get everything on the first take – listens intently and responds quickly, with an innate sense of what she is to do, no matter whether she has done it before. She wants so much to please and prove herself – we don’t need a bit of convincing – but we do understand why. Dogs rescued from the shelter are often overly eager to please, they have fundamental security issues and an absolute desire to belong and be longed for – she is no exception. There’s so much left for us to behold, but another black beauty is always waiting in the shelter wings and calling to us and Chelsea wants us to answer that call. We can only do that with your help, so now that she is out of the shadow & into the light, wearing a smile that only freedom and happiness could bring, we are bringing her front & center – right where she has always belonged.

    Nothing in that description was wrong exactly – Chelsea got along great with our dog, did love people, and was very smart. The thing is that when she was on a leash she would go crazy when she saw other dogs. She’d bare her teeth at them and start barking aggressively. I don’t know if this happened because of something we did after we got her, or if it was ust some weird dog neurosis that she was born with. It did make showing her at the monthly adoption days pretty tough, though, since we were surrounded by other dogs, where Chelsea wasn’t at her best.

    We had Chelsea living with us for 7 months, and considered adopting her ourselves many times. She’s a sweet, goofy dog with a lot of personality. She’s so energetic that she could be draining sometimes, but that was also part of the fun. B.J. and I both came to love her and her sweet personality. It hurt that no one else was able to see how special she is.

    Last Friday, I had the day off work. I got a phone call from the rescue group’s adoption coordinator saying that there was someone really interested in Chelsea – who had had a lab/pit mix in the past. The thing was that this person worked at a doggy daycare place, and Chelsea would need to be aggression tested to see how she’d do with a bunch of other dogs, because she’d be staying in this doggy daycare all day during the week. I had a little apprehension about how she’d do on the aptitude test, but owed it to her to take her out there to see.

    I dropped her off at the place so they could do the test without me around to influence things. I made the 20 minute drive home (the testing was supposed to last 2 hours). About 20 minutes later, just when I was getting off the freeway, I got a call from the doggy daycare place. It was so quick, that I thought it was going to be bad news. I was quickly put at ease, though, when the person on the other end said that Chelsea had passed with flying colors, and that the woman who worked there wanted to adopt her.

    We had Chelsea for about a week after that, while her new home was prepared. Early friday morning, B.J. and I took Chelsea to another part of town to start her new life. Even though we both miss her and are sad to see her go, I feel like this is probably the absolute best home that Chelsea could have found. The new pet-parent (I hate all the terms around dog ownership, but I guess that’s the “best”) is really good with dogs, and is going to train Chelsea much better than we ever would. I think she’s going to have a great life, and the 7 months she was with it were all worth it.

    We’ll miss you Chelsea, but are also very happy for your new life – we’ll never forget you.


    Written on 05 July 2008 by Joseph Geierman under Dog Rescue with No Comments

    Death of 99x and the Search for New Music Radio

    The state of radio in Atlanta is pretty poor. Our local “alternative” station (99x), which had been dying a slow death for many years, finally kicked the bucket in January. Since high school, the alternative format had been my commercial radio home. When I was in my late-teens and early-20s it seemed like a very consistent and relevant genre. By my early-30s, however, it has gotten to the point where I don’t feel like I even know what new “alternative” music is or what it is an alternative to. The loss of 99x was a little sad, but no big surprise – it also was a bit of a relief, putting a once-good station out of its misery.

    Now that 99x is gone, there is nothing else on Atlanta’s music radio scene really excites me. In fact, I can’t stand any of the remaining commercial stations, which seem to play the same 5 songs in constant rotation. One of the two college stations is OK, but can be kind of hit or miss. Other than that, the city’s radio landscape is pretty desolate.

    This is a disappointment to me, because I do like music radio – it is a way to discover new music and feel a connection with the people on the other end who are programming the songs. There’s an special excitement and immediacy to live radio that is not recreated in many other spaces. Because our local radio stations suck, I’ve been forced to search for this live music radio experience in other places.

    Luckily, my cell phone comes with a built-in Internet radio player and AT&T’s wireless network is fast enough to stream radio stations from the Internet. It’s like a portable internet radio that I can plug headphones in and listen to while walking the dogs, or just plug a mini-jack from my phone into my car and listen to while I drive down the freeway. The only real limitation is AT&T’s 3g network, which can be a bit spotty at times. The stations that I’m able to tune in and that I really like are:

    • Extreme Radio Swansea - a college station in the UK with a fairly eclectic playlist and fun student DJs.
    • Radio Darkness – ok, no live DJs on this station, but a nice playlist that plays goth, metal, industrial and even country and new wave.
    • XFM – a London alternative station that has a way better playlist than 99x ever did.

    There are some other stations I’d like to listen to, but a lot of broadcasters seem to want to force people who listen to their stations over the internet to sit in front of a computer. They hide their internet radio streams so that mobile devices cannot find them, and require that a browser tuned to their station be open at all times. Since I very rarely listen to internet radio while I’m at a computer, any stations doing this automatically lose me as a listener. It seems stupid to me for them to be limiting their audience when we are on the verge of an explosion in mobile digital devices (including cars) that will be able to access the internet outside the computer-desk paradigm.

    The always interesting radio blog, Hear 2.0, has addressed this issue in a way that sums up my thoughts exactly:

    s your content really that unique to the world that I can’t get a fair facsimile from someone else with a more open access policy?

    Are we learning nothing from the stupidity of the music labels?

    [...]

    Isn’t the very worst case scenario that all that audio advertising presumably plugged into your stream reaches a lot more ears than it otherwise would? Isn’t “reach” a good thing?

    Go ahead, erect barriers. Force listeners to do what you want them to do.

    And watch your impressions and traffic and listenership and brand value wane.

    You’re not the boss. The audience is.

    Hopefully we start seeing internet radio open itself up over the next few years. I imagine that the really good, unique stations will thrive, and the crappy ones (that sound just like every station in the Atlanta market) will wither when forced to compete with every other crappy station that is exactly like it in markets all over the country.

    Written on 29 May 2008 by Joseph Geierman under Mobile Phones, Pop Culture, Radio/Podcasts, Technology with 2 Comments

    Found Puppy

    While walking my dogs this morning (around 7:20am), I heard a whining sound coming from a nearby yard. There was a very young puppy cowering behind a garbage can. He appears to be a black lab, not more than a few weeks old.

    I’m posting this page and these picture for two reasons – first I hope to find the puppy’s owner. Second, if I don’t find the owner, I’m hoping there’s someone out there who’s willing to either foster this little guy until he gets adopted, or who is willing to adopt him themselves. We don’t have the room to be long-term fosters of this puppy, and we also are not home enough to take care of such a young dog.

    If you can help on any of the fronts mentioned above, please contact me – joseph at geierman dot net. Pictures follow below:


    Written on 26 May 2008 by Joseph Geierman under Dog Rescue with 2 Comments

    A Social Networking Site for Your Facility

    Late last year, I heard for the first time about “social networks” for buildings — these are websites that function primarily as ways for the people who live in big multi-tenant condo complexes to share information and form some sense of community. The NY Times featured an article about a few of these networks earlier this week. Of particular interest to me from a Facilities Management perspective was the following tidbit that makes one of these systems sound almost like a CMMS with a social component:

    BuildingLink is used in some 375 residential buildings in the New York City area, according to the company. With the system, which charges $13 per unit per year, everything from work orders to package deliveries is recorded online. (Residents receive e-mail messages when packages are received; signatures are recorded electronically.)

    “Our biggest fans are doormen,” said Fran Besdin, BuildingLink’s marketing manager. “We have streamlined their operations tremendously.”

    One of BuildingLink’s clients is the Albanese Organization, which uses the system in all its residential developments, including the Visionaire, a new Battery Park City condominium scheduled to open this summer. “It adds tremendous value, as it helps us efficiently manage a property,” Mr. Albanese said.

    The Visionaire will also be testing a service that will allow residents to order hotel-like amenities, like wake-up calls from the front desk.

    An article from October at TechCrunch describes a similar system that has some more explicitly social features:

    The building managers control the network and post information about the building itself. Residents sign up to get news about the building, interact with other users, etc. They’ll provide information about local businesses (dry cleaners, restaurants, delivery services, etc.) and allow residents to post reviews (similar to Yelp, but even more geographically targeted). They’ve also included a marketplace for people to buy and sell goods within the building.

    All of these examples right now are completely focused on the residential side of property management. I’m interested in how they could be applied to the office building side. While I certainly can see some problems in porting one of these social network/CMMS hybrids into a business setting, I think that (if done right) one could offer some real benefits.

    A system like this could provide a way to get employees who work in an office building engaged with things that are happening at the site. If there is a social component (a for sale module, for instance) that gets people to check into the system on a regular basis, and if the interface could be a convenient way for employees to communicate with the Facilities department and place work orders, then I also see the this type of system being a great way to communicate important Facility events back to those employees.

    In my own experience working in Facilities at a corporate office, we are very constrained about how many e-mails we can send to the employee population. Placing signs throughout the building is another way for us to communicate with people, but it doesn’t reach everyone. A building-specific website (or widget) that people check regularly would make it a lot easier for us to communicate when there was a special event in the lobby or a traffic incident nearby.

    Anyway, this is just a rough idea right now, and I imagine that a lot of corporations and property management companies would be reluctant to implement it. I think it could be a great tool for customer engagement if done properly, though, and probably not be all that difficult to implement.

    Written on 23 May 2008 by Joseph Geierman under Facilities Management, Social Networking, Technology with No Comments