Feeling like a Real Neighborhood around these parts

Happy New Year!

It occurred to me last night that our neighborhood is evolving to feel like a Real Neighborhood here. Just in the last couple of years, we've seen the opening of a skate park (Holly Farm Park) next to the library; it also has all kinds of play structures for the younger set.

And next to that, we now have a pho place (Korean-Vietnamese, painted BRIGHT lime green) and a good vegetarian Chinese place, both opened in the last 6 months or so. Both good additions to the existing Middle Eastern/Mediterranean place.

Across the street, a new coffee shop that serves Stumptown Coffee and Kettleman's bagels (REAL bagels, not the round bread variety, started by a fellow with the name off Jeffery Wang). The Domino's pizza next door to the coffee shop closed, so I'm hoping for something interesting to open there.

So now I'm thinking—somebody should do something with that huge commercial building between the skate park and the pho place. In the almost 20 years we've been here, it has been unoccupied more than it has been occupied, it seems. The last incarnation had a professional yard tools place, but it's been empty for maybe a year now.

Maybe something that can house a yoga/dance/exercise studio, a small exhibition space, and..whatelse? Right now, it's ugly as sin, but it backs up to a lot of trees and has parking. Seems like a great opportunity for the neighborhood.

On other fronts—working hard on Portland Open Studios website update, getting ready for the 2010 application season. We're going to try to have some animators in our mix this year, so look forward to some fresh and new artists in the lineup!

MiT book, little tiny victories

My goal for today, besides all the normal Sunday chores, was to have the text for senior #1's book done and also to figure out how much paper I'd need. I didn't quite get the text done, but I made some progress. I did, however, figure out the paper needs, and as it happens, I have just the right amount of paper on hand to finish the text block of this book. Which means I can start trimming right away (like tonight), and start on the inkjet printed portion of the book tomorrow, while I continue to work on the text. I will need to put in another order for Rives BFK tomorrow, I'll most likely need them for books #3 and #4.

In the mean time, I have a BIG question...

Why aren't lost & found pets web sites run more like dating web sites?

Not that I've used a dating web site, but wouldn't that make some sense? Rather than the, what seems to be, standard method of allowing the user to input a few key features, and then some dumb search algorithm is applied where you either get back a big badly matched & badly sorted list of possible matches, or no matches at all. (I mean, on one site, I entered "long hair" as the keywords that must be matched, and the first 5 results it returned were all short hair cats!)

Hear ye, hear ye, you with ambition and web application skills — we need a lost & found pets web site that knows how to apply SMART matching heuristics and return the results in a NICELY SORTED LIST!

No, I haven't lost my pet, but a rather sad, skinny, sick looking cat seems to have decided my neighbor Don is just the ticket he/she needs. My neighbor Don has other ideas (like putting it in a carrier and bringing it over to my house!). We were talking about what to do with the cat when I decided to try some online searches.

And I must say it's a sad state of things we have here.

Maybe one of those dating web sites can start a pet matching subsidiary?