the dot connection in new mexico

so i'm completely hooked on flickr these days. i've known about flickr for a few years now but in the past month i've started trying to take a picture a day. and now i'm hooked on making collages...yikes. oh well. i could have worse addictions.

January was a great month. I have had a 10 day intensive summer film course in Melbourne where roughly 120 of us are learning what happens in the process of making a film, from writing scripts all the way through to seeing the final project on screen. It's a fantastic course and well worth doing. Not only are the lectures given by professionals in the field, they are full of heaps of spot-on content. However, the participants are really what make the course unbeatable. There are folks here from all over Australia, from China, India, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, the USA and the UK. Ages range from 14 years to 60. It's wonderful the cultural and generational richness.

After the 10 day course i've had 12 days to travel the country. I took the Indian-Pacific train cross-continent from Sydney to Perth. Even though it was a long four days (mostly sitting on my ass), it was amazing to see this vast country this way. Along the way there are stops to get out and walk around for an hour or two. After re-entering the train at each of the four stops our noses are met with stronger and stronger smells of sweaty feet and moldy towels. But, you soon get used to it again and nod off to a peaceful sleep or read for hours on end (my $7 blow up pillow was my second best purchase i've made so far). Finally, Perth does come. After spending a few days in Fremantle (a trendy and raw suburb of Perth), camping in the outback and bathing on the lush beaches of Rottnest Island, I flew to the red center.

In the center of the continent (which otherwise is amazingly flat and very hot) tower Ularu and Kata-Tjuta. That they stick up out of the ground thousands of feet above the rest of the red, flat, sparse desert floor make them spectacular. And, hot is much to short of a word to accurately describe the immensity of the scorching temperatures here in January (the middle of Summer)! A sensible person would not be here at this time. Oh yeah, did i mention the flies? They stick to you like a rash, go straight for the eyes, and wait until you are just about to press the shutter button on the camera before drilling straight up the nose or right through your ears. It's -- unbelievable -- they are the most ornery and tenacious beings I've experienced in my life. They call it the Australian wave when everyone's walking around rhythmically waving their hands across their faces in unison--to no avail. (My $6 fly net was the first best purchase). Even so, I think it is one of the most beautiful places on this earth.

Yesterday I left VanDyke Software for the last time as an employee on the payroll. Jobs tend to be a large part of how we identify ourselves. In our culture, it is a common thing to be introduced to someone for the first time and have the first thing out of their mouth be something along the lines of..."nice to meet you, what do you do?" and without much thought we politely respond..."i'm a product director at a software company" (or a any such and such title at any such company). which does not at all answer the question what you do. sometimes people respond with a knowing..."oh, i see, how interesting". others respond with a disguised EWE! that sounds like..."owe...(big pause)"...

The most wonderful side effect of my "summer project" is that I'm actually starting to feel more fit and get "hooked' on exercise. Exercise for exercise's sake has never been able to hook me. But since I've started using my bike daily for basic transportation, I'm beginning to feel the exercise "high" that others report from running or working out at the gym.

It's getting easier and easier: to ride up hills, to go faster and further. It's also getting easier to ride on city streets. I'm quite comfortable now on streets that at first seemed treacherous. And I'm learning that there are ways to be safer and more effective riding on city streets.

The Great Taming of Lead Coal Gathering last Friday, July 15, was the first action I participated in around pedestrian issues. Around 60 folks gathered at a corner of Lead Ave in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill neighborhood, bringing their bikes, their kids, their lawn chairs, and signs to remind the drivers speeding past at highway speeds that people live here, people who want to walk, bike and play safely in their own neighborhood.

The overall feel was that of a neighborhood gathering, which indeed it was. The majority of the participants came from the Nob Hill neighborhood, many living right on Lead and Coal where they daily experience the hazards of life along a major traffic arterial.

I finally bit the bullet and headed out on my bike into dreaded NE Heights territory. I had several errands out that way and have wanted to get past the sense that I "must" drive when I simply must go into the Heights. I've seen some of those streets marked "Bike Route," and it doesn't much look like some of those cars want to share the road.

I chose Griegos/Comanche as my best route out, and it wasn't half bad. It goes back and forth between bike lane and bike route (a bike route is where there is no separate lane but cars are reminded by signs to share the road.) Most of it felt fairly comfortable.

The city of Albuquerque has a tough job when it comes to providing public transportation due to the low-density, sprawling suburban subdivision nature of most of its neighborhoods.

For this reason, Albuquerque's transit department mission statement encourages intermodal transportation as a way to increase use of public transportation and decrease single-occupancy-vehicle use. The Bike and Ride program offers bicycle racks on the front of all city buses to make it easier for transit users to ride their bikes to and from sometimes distant bus stops.

I'm starting to get pissed about how difficult it is to really switch from car-driving to more environmentally-friendly modes of transportation here in this lovely but highly unsustainably planned city of Albuquerque.

Today I'd intended to take the bus to TJs camera to bring in my print order. Looking at the bus schedule, had to concede that a four hour bus ride to perform a two minute errand 8 miles away is a way too inefficient use of my time. If I could combine errands it would be different, but even to do the two errands I need to do out in the NE Heights would probably turn it into an 8 hour, 8 bus ride prospect.

So I went in to my local Walgreen's yesterday to find out who to talk to about the possibility of getting a bike rack installed. I didn't have to ask the clerk, as there were three supervisory-looking types standing conspicuously together talking.

They looked pretty open to approach, so I approached them directly. Turned out two of them were this store's managers. The other was apparently a higher-up over all the local Walgreen's.

I asked about the possibility of bike racks, expressing not only that I bike there and that there is no good place to lock up my bike, but that I know this shopping center is slated for redevelopment, with plans to make it more pedestrian friendly, and that this would be a good start.

I came across this article about the Mayo Clinic developing and promoting workstations where people walk on a treadmill or stand rather than sit--a pretty cool idea and one that makes a lot of sense.

Since I work in the public schools, this got me to thinking about the obesity problem in children in the US. How come, in spite of the link of obesity to sedentary lifestyles, schools are still promoting a paradigm of sitting to work?

I mean, kids are being asked to sit still a lot younger and a lot longer than they used to. At the preschool level, some classes now spend the majority of their time sitting to do "pre-academic" work.