News Comments: A Topical Aside

Although this topic may not seem to immediately affect the streets of our fair city, it does affect a related aspect: community.

The Grand Forks Herald, after several months of allowing fewer and fewer articles to be commented upon, has finally removed all functionality on streets, etc.)?  
And now that this particular community has been removed, how and where to rebuild a bigger and more inclusive one?
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*Since I have no information on the reasons for the change, I’m forced to speculate.  Obviously, if comments are hurting the company financially (paying someone to moderate, hosting fees, etc.), then there is no reason for Forum to keep them on at the Herald.  I’m not asking for the Herald to keep free comments up if it is not helping them make money.  Based on other AreaVoices comment sections remaining active, however, that doesn’t seem to be the reason.
**I have a theory that by allowing people to show off what they know through comment systems or message boards, we could get a better “oral history” of the area than we would if we relied only on people who want to edit Wikipedia.  Wikipedia requires citations, comments do not.

State of the City 2013

The State of the City address was yesterday.  You can find the summary information here (at least until next year).  Direct links are below.
– Speech text
– Speech video

Highlights include a new focus on downtown and the 42nd Street corridor, props for Choice Health and Fitness and the Greenway, and especially support for CAT riders in the form of a new mobile app (well, actually interfacing with an existing mobile app, Columbia Road widening project, which focuses on moving cars, not people.

Geologic Figures Database, step 1

I hope to someday put together a tagged database of figures pulled from the geological literature that may be useful to others, primarily maps and stratigraphic columns.  For now, though, I am sharing an Evernote notebook to which I will be adding over time.  It can be accessed here:

https://www.evernote.com/pub/matthewbk/publicimages [EDIT: No longer. 2014-02-04]

Future plans include tagging the images (type of map, area covered, stratigraphic units) but I am not sure of the platform to use.  Tumblr, Blogger, or even Pinterest (in addition to the possibility of Drupal) are all possibilities at this point that will allow collaboration.

Petra: Select wells with a datum

In Petra 4, to select wells that have a datum (e.g., if you want wells you can export with sub-sea true vertical depth [SSTVD] rather than just measured depth [MD]), the correct search criterion is Well Header–Datum–By Active Datum–Datum Is Between the Minimum and Maximum, and set the minimum depth to something greater than one.

New! Maps by Event Type

[This post refers to functionality that has been removed.]

I’ve been working on this for a while and finally found the time to figure it out this weekend.  Any of the #hashtagged event types listed in association with an event can be clicked on to bring you to a page listing upcoming events of that type.  This is nothing new, but NOW you get an interactive map of those events!

Check out the example below, which can be accessed here.

If you want to quickly search by event type with a map, mouseover the ‘Event List’ menu item up at the top and select from the dropdown menu.

One quick note on maps: Basemaps shown on Northern Plains Athletics use OpenStreetMap, the world map that can be edited by anyone.  If you prefer base maps from Google or somewhere else, you can select a different base map by clicking the  icon in the upper right of each map.

SedLog symbols in Windows 7, 64-bit

This one took me a couple days to figure out.  When trying to import new symbols into SedLog 3.0, I kept running into an error “Unable to read this file: <filepath.svg>.”  It turns out that the 64-bit version of Windows 7 is getting in the way somewhere.  

To solve this problem, you can download and run the installer again, but first do the following:

  1. right-click on the installer file (sedlog-3.0-setup.exe),
  2. select the “Compatibility” tab,
  3. check the box “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and select “Windows XP (Service Pack 3),”
  4. check the box “Run this program as an administrator.”  

Run the installer.  You should now be able to create and import SVG graphics per the official instructions.

Additional note on the SVG graphics: in Adobe Illustrator CS6, you should reduce the size of the artboard so that it is the same size as (or only slightly lager than) the symbol graphic.  It also looks like the maximum size for an SVG image to fit the entire symbol is about 42×42 pixels, but to match the existing symbols I think 20×20 px is a good size..

Good Advice: How Can I Get My Local Government to Pay Attention to Me?

There is a great post at Lifehacker about how to get the local government to pay attention to you.  Whether it’s related to streets or otherwise, the basics are pretty clear: talk to the right person, be focused, be polite, and keep documentation.  One commenter also suggests going to a public meeting for the purpose of getting your name (and your issue) into the public record (the meeting minutes).