Dear Mage

Posted on November 12, 2009 by ruthek

You're right, I don't do this often. I don't think it was their mistake; they had a whole days worth of people coming. I must have read the date wrong and probably didn't double check it. I tend to have what I think of as visual hallucinations.

It was another beautiful day here–a little cooler but lots of sunshine. That's very special in Pittsburgh. I had a 9:30 class this morning. Took the bus; it was too early to think about walking. That class is Gulliver's Travels. Notice I didn't say about Gulliver's Travels. We have been sitting and taking turns reading aloud to each other. I haven't been happy with that class, but I've stuck with it. We finished the book today. In the next two weeks we'll watch a film of Gulliver's Travels.

I went home for lunch then walked part way back for a class about documentary film. Last week we watched Nanook of the North, which was really interesting. Today was a film about the Kennedy-Humphrey primary race in Wisconsin. It was the beginning of cinema verite, but I liked Nanook better.

The best thing today was my meeting this evening with my two Chinese ESL students. I really enjoy talking to them. They both have a fair command of English so it's mostly a matter of giving them someone to talk to. Both work with other Chinese so I'm their big chance to speak English.

Another summer day in November

Posted on November 8, 2009 by ruthek

One of my ESL students is a Russian Jewish woman, a doctor who left Russia because of anti-semitic persecution some twenty years ago, and went to Sweden to live . She now lives nearby and is close to me in age, only a few years younger. She's working very hard to learn English, goes to school four days a week and has at least one session with me each week. In spite of our language difficulties we have much in common; I enjoy being with her.

Taking advantage of another November summer day the two of us went for a walk in Frick Park. We talked as we walked, but it's harder to do both when you're not sure of the language, so we often stopped. My husband used to tease that I couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. I guess I can't walk and listen carefully to broken English at the same time. When I walk with my neighbors I have no problem, but I don't listen so carefully either.

Some of the leaves are still up there.

I like the way the little tree is framed.

Sitting on that bench it seems like you can see the entire park, or one of the trails, anyway.

Yesterday's crows.

Walking around Pittsburgh

Posted on November 2, 2009 by ruthek

I'm trying to post every day this month. My friend Kathryn says this is National Blog Posting Month. She's going to do it so I'll try also. I've been feeling guilty about how little I've been posting. Like Kathryn, I may be resorting to a lot of photos. Here are a few photos from some of my long walks.

Amazing leaves:

My backyard. Those golden leaves are making a carpet on the ground.

Walking home this afternoon I passed the site where the housing project was torn down and will eventually become a Target store. I was amazed to see all the crows. I wonder what they are using for landfill.

They flew away everytime I tried to get a closer picture.

Picture taking in Pittsburgh

Posted on October 16, 2009 by ruthek

I've been admiring these trees at CMU for awhile, but never thought to look closely at them until I saw a student taking this picture. Of course, I had to stop and look, even with the rain and darkness.

Sometimes Pittsburgh is just as beautiful as a garden in Japan.

Looking in the other direction there is a huge construction project to fix the sculpture, Walking to the Sky, which had evidently been threatening to take off. I missed a wonderful picture (another image for my museum of pictures I wish I had taken) last Thursday with all of these cranes and another machine emitting a cloud of steam. My excuse was rain. Here's one I took earlier in the week.

Here are a few more shots from around the 'burgh, because I like their geometry or their weirdness.

There is something surreal about that school bus. It's actually parked at the top of a parking lot, but it took me a while to figure it out.

My second favorite place in Pittsburgh, under the convention center. I've never seen the lights on before.

Podcamp 4: a great weekend event

Posted on October 12, 2009 by ruthek

This weekend was Pittsburgh Podcamp 4. The first
podcamp was a down home kind of thing concerned mostly with do-it-yourself
instructions for podcasting, blogging and using video. I had already been
blogging for 2 years and I wasn’t really interested in podcasting, but it was
fun. People were nice and I learned some new stuff. I never got to 2 or 3; I
was in Japan or somewhere. Podcamp has grown up and evolved. Five hundred people were signed up for this
one. The people are still nice, although much more businesslike than those
original geeky types. It all ran very smoothly and was much more sophisticated.
Technical discussions were limited or non-existent. Do-it-yourself concerned
using social media and focused on content, with lots of concerns about marketing. One of my goals in attending was to learn more
about Twitter. I did, not because there was a class about it, but whole thing
seemed to run on Twitter.

The most impressive presentation was given by Priya Narasimhan, a
professor at Carnegie Mellon. She just blew me away. I don’t know whether it
was who she is, what she is doing, or the fact that she became a sports fan
when she got to Pittsburgh, probably all three. This fandom has driven the product she created, Yinzcam, an enhancement, using your mobile device, to your ice hockey game experience. Here is a brief version of the speech she gave us, which I found on YouTube. She made this presentation in August. If they get her presentation up on the Podcamp website, it's worth watching. There's a lot more about edemocrary and iburgh.

http://www.youtube.com/v/T6FqKLjefu0&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0

The idea for iburgh, the second device she speaks about, evidently came from City Councilor Bill Peduto, who gave the keynote address on Saturday morning. He talked about using the information on the web to make government more transparent, something sorely lacking in the 'burgh. Peduto's presentation is also worth watching.

I met Amie, who sometimes comments on my blog. That was really fun. She's the second of my blogging friends I've met in person. Also took a class called "Refinding Your Blog Voice." Maybe it will help me post more often. All told a good weekend.

Photos and Gigapans

Posted on September 29, 2009 by ruthek

I began writing this post on Sunday/ Even though I carefully followed instructions for embedding the Gigapans, I kept getting the wrong one in the post. The instructions didn't quite match the code, the the post kept rewriting the code on its own and I wasn't sure what to do. I've been mulling this over ever since. Tonight I decided to change a colon and a quote sign to an equal sign and voila!

I was able to borrow a Gigapan from my class and have been playing with it for 10 days already. The concept is easy enough: Gigapan and camera are on a tripod; set the upper left and lower right images; let the Gigapan do its thing. It's not that simple in practice. The camera has to be set up in a certain way and the Gigapan and tripod have mechanical problems; everything has to be just so and it has to be done quickly or the camera will shut itself off. (See what it looks like here.) I've shot hundreds of pictures, each Gigapan setup requiring anywhere from 24 to 147 images, with only a few good results.

Here is one of Pittsburgh's latest construction projects:

function FlashProxy() {}
FlashProxy.callJS = function() {}

http://gigapan.org/viewer/GigaPanViewer.swf?url=http://tile33.gigapan.org/gigapans0/33504/tiles/

This was originally the site of a Nabisco factory. Now it's becoming offices, retail and a hotel. The first panorama I wanted was my backyard. I got two bad ones you can see here. I'm not always sure the camera and Gigapan are working together; sometimes the camera isn't responding. The trigger piece on the Gigapan is flimsy, to say the least. I finally got a good one:

function FlashProxy() {}
FlashProxy.callJS = function() {}

http://gigapan.org/viewer/GigaPanViewer.swf?url=http://tile33.gigapan.org/gigapans0/33542/tiles/

Downtown Pittsburgh

Posted on September 27, 2009 by ruthek

Another gray, rainy day in Pittsburgh. It was a beautiful week until yesterday when the rains came. After I did my weekly tutoring stint, postponed from Friday because of the G 20, I went downtown for a walking tour. Fortunately, it was mostly indoors with only short walks between buildings. Downtown Pittsburgh is being restored and reclaimed for residential use. The first building we went to is called Piatt Place. Originally built in 1995 (?) as a Lazarus Department Store, it was empty for years. We were taken to the seventh floor, the uppermost of three floors of apartments newly built on top of the original building, which will house office and retail.

We looked at both the smallest and largest apartments. The view from the largest apartment was unusual; you could see the tops of several nearby churches. I took only a few pictures as I was being rained on.

Looking through the bars around the terrace of the million dollar plus condo, unfortunately the only things in focus, you can see a person lying in the indentation in the church wall, trying to take shelter from the rain.

From Piatt Place we went to Market Square Place and Market at Fifth, rentals this time. We finished with some of the new retail that's come to Market Square. It was interesting and I hope lots of people will make downtown Pittsburgh their home and dispel the ghost town feeling you get nights and weekends now.

The sun just came out–I think I'll go for a walk.

Fenced in by the G 20

Posted on September 24, 2009 by ruthek

The powers that be in Pittsburgh tell us this is great PR for the city; we will finally get known for something other than being a smoky city. I don't think they meant the steel city would be known for our fencing and steel barricades, but that's how it looks to me. Tuesday, walking to class, one of my classmates offered me a ride just as it looked like the rains were coming. She drove through Schenley Park near Phipps Conservatory and already the park was being fenced in–or we were being kept out. Yesterday I went to a noon colloquium at Frick fine arts, the Pitt building closest to the Phipps. It was surrounded by fencing with only one way to get in (or out). I felt like I was in some kind of prison. Pitt is closed today and all of my classes at CMU have been canceled. Sculpture in front of the Carnegie Museum looks like it has been crated. All of this because there will be a welcome dinner tonight at the Phipps. How welcome is that!

They say it's because of all of the protests and the damage done in other cities. Here are some links about the protests: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/23/g20-usa

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture2009/04protests_at_the_g20_summit.html

http://pittsburgh.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stories/2009/09/21/daily23.html

If I was coming here from a foreign country I would certainly wonder about all of these impediments to free movement in our supposedly free country. And why don't these government ministers from all over the world wonder what they have done to make so many people so angry.

Events of the week

Posted on September 13, 2009 by ruthek

I never intended to make this a weekly blog; just haven't had the inspiration to write very day. I promise I'll try to do better. The best thing this week was an afternoon with Charna. She'll be going off to Chicago to school next weekend. It was wonderful to spend time with her.

We went out for lunch, then a walk in Schenley Park where we found wonderful wooded areas we didn't know existed. When you drive through the park you see acres of rather boring, manicured lawns. I was told there were wooded areas like Frick Park, but had never seen them. We finally found Panther Hollow Valley, and really only explored a bit of it. I was afraid our parking meter would run out if we stayed more than an hour. And I hate to admit it, my legs were beginning to complain.

Not so happy was the arrival of a bill from Comcast for $116 after months of paying only $65 a month with virtually no TV. I've been using their service for phone, internet and TV for about three years. I began with a deal: the three services were $69/month for one year. At the end of that year I renegotiated the contract for just slightly more money.

At the beginning of the week I called them (mistake) about the bill, had a long talk with someone who sold me a service package for $3 something a month and just as I agreed the phone went dead, I couldn't get back to him and I no longer had the internet. When I finally got back to a human after I spent about an hour on hold, she told me I didn't have internet service, only phone and TV. Finally, she got a supervisor and got the internet back for me.

None of these conversations included talk about money, so I was staggered by the bill. This time when I called they told me I had been getting the internet for free, but not to worry, they wouldn't try to collect. You bet, they won't. I sent a detailed email to their corporate offices and got a return call from a peon here in Pittsburgh, but no satisfaction. Verizon here I come.

Raja is having a show of her photographs in Kentucky. The opening is today. If the drive wasn't quite so long, I would have liked to go and surprise her. I'll miss the brownies and Oreo cookies. I spend a lot of time thinking about healthcare.

Robert Reich has a great post about it that I particularly liked because he lays the blame for most of the mess on the insurance companies and big pharma. For a fast recap of what he has to say watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/v/ZXFHXqrrJ6g&hl=en&fs=1&

Let your Congressmen and the President know how you feel about making profits from health, or lack of it. Let's make it
Medicare for All.

Pittsburgh and points west

Posted on August 31, 2009 by ruthek

I went downtown to the scene of my terrible accident and found it all changed. I had this terrible dislocated feeling: was I dreaming; did I dream my fall; how did they manage to totally change the area in slightly over a month? I know I didn't dream it. I have the bills to prove it: $50 copay for the ER, $25 copay for the plastic surgeon, badly scratched glasses for probably another $225, finally a notice that I will have a $100 copay for the ambulance. That's what motivated my trip downtown. I want to threaten to sue the city for their bumpy sidewalk. I wanted evidence of the bump. Alas, the sidewalk is completely torn up and now sits behind Jersey barriers and a wire fence. Here's a Google satellite photo showing the area where I fell. It's not an ordinary corner; I could not have mistaken it for another place. The red arrow marks the spot. I tripped on the red brick paving. I was heading toward the busway. You can't get there today. It's completely blocked off and a small sign directs you to another corner to get the bus.

On to better things–I'm still cleaning up the details from the Chicago trip. Finally looked at my photos; I'm not too happy. On my first weekend I stayed on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. That weekend was the air and water show. We could see it from the apartment. Sunday the weather wasn't very good, but Saturday was beautiful. There were lots of boats, many sailboats, anchored out in the lake around the harbor. The beach at North Avenue was so full I don't think another person could fit there. We didn't stay for the show but went down to the Art Institute. The first thing we saw was a 21st century lemonade stand: bottled water and cookies. I think the kids were doing a great business. We saw a wonderful show of gilded Japanese folding screens, then looked at the newly opened modern wing and walked on the connecting bridge to Millennium Park. Here is a marvelous fountain where children play. It reminds me of the Art Institute's famous Seurat: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. This is Saturday on Michigan Avenue.

On Sunday we came back down to the Cultural Center where we attended an opening for several of my artists friends and saw a show of contemporary Chinese art.

Monday through Saturday we were up in Door County in a wonderful house on Lake Michigan. Our hostess, Anita, made us very much at home and always had wonderful things for us to look at while we ate all her great food. Here's one of her great table settings. Raja has more, and some wonderful pictures of our trip, including the Garden Door and the lake.

My photos of the Garden Door were mostly details: water drops on a spider web;

the lotus pond;

planting in old purses

I forgot what this is, but I like the look of it against the sky.

Sitting at that dining room table I spent lots of time looking at reflections. The water is behind me but there it is in the glass. On a day the waves were high it looked like the water was flowing around the trees.

On our last morning the lake was gray and dull; sad we were leav
ing.

100 Books Before I Die

Ruthe Karlin

Category Archives: Pittsburgh