As mentioned previously my randomly assigned topic at the Greater Richmond Challenge II was “Workforce Housing.” Real quick: workforce housing is housing for people that form the backbone of society (think teachers, police, fire, clergy). Workforce housing is different than affordable housing. Affordable housing is for the guy who sells you beer at 7-11.

Our day was filled with meetings all over the region with interesting people: the publisher of the RTD (aside: I was really hoping that Tom was going to be lame. But he is awesome, intelligent, and funny. I don’t know how good he is going to be at running the ol’ paper but as a dude: he rocks.), the head of planning for Hanover County, an employee of St. Joseph’s Villa, the head of the Department of Revitalization for Henrico. That was all before lunch.

We had lunch at the FRIENDS center in Gilpin Court. While there we spoke with the property manager of Gilpin, some representatives from the RRHA, the director of the Department of Community Development, as well as a resident. I’ll share some demographic stats from Gilpin in another post. They are eye opening.

After lunch we went to a successful affordable housing neighborhood on Jeff Davis called Winchester Greens. The Better Housing Coalition renovated a depilated apartment complex to some pretty awesome Fan-esque apartments — that rent for 700$. It is probably the most “successful” workforce housing option in the region.

The final place we toured was the South Richmond SRO. A SRO, “single room occupancy,” is a renovated hotel where each resident lives in one room. These facilities cater to the homeless and provide social services as well as extremely cheap rent. An astounding 96% of people leaving the South Richmond SRO are self sufficient after one year. !!! . That is amazing to me. The other great thing is the whole renovation cost 1.9M$ This isn’t a convention center, or a performing arts center sized project. We could plop these down across the city for basically nothing and move a lot of people off of the streets.

I’m back from the Greater Richmond Challenge II. I had an excellent time and met some pretty awesome people. We traveled all around the the area to each of the three counties and city. We went to Gilpn Court. We went to Winchester Greens on the south side.

I’ll be back early next week to give a good brain dump of things I learned. It’s still kicking around in my head at the moment.

Now back to learning to play the ukulele.

PS. For a mini run down check out John(whom I finally met in person!)’s blog.

Tomorrow I take part in the Greater Richmond Challenge. Basically I pay the Chamber of Commerce a bunch of money so I can brainstorm ideas to make Richmond a better place to live. I will be there because I am Richmond’s number one fan/cheerleader. NUMBER ONE.

There are 95 participants and 5 topics; making two tenish person groups for each topic. My topic is “Workforce Housing.” Last year “Workforce Housing” was called “Affordable Housing” which is way more interesting to me. Workforce Housing: teachers, firemen, police, other people necessary to our society can’t afford to buy the median priced house on their median incomes. That is the issue. (Affordable Housing was a broader issue, something like “poor people are being priced out of owning a home.)

Does that suck? Should the rent? Should we/government give them some sort of helping hand? Should we/government give developers tax incentives to build affordable housing? These are the kinds of questions we are going to be asking several Richmond area officials/peeps.

It should be fun. Do you have any questions you’d like answered/asked? Drop a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

THE CHALLENGE BEGINS TOMORROW.

Richmond Chapter and the Richmond Hokie Club

The Richmond Chapter and the Richmond Hokie Club will be holding a Virginia Tech alumni meeting on Tuesday, April 17, 6:00pm at the Virginia Tech Richmond Center, located at 2810 N. Parham Road Suite 300 (3rd Floor) in Room 306.

University of Richmond

Additionally, the Virginia Tech Alumni Association will hold its own candlelight vigil at Cannon Memorial Chapel tomorrow evening (April 17) [at 7:30pm]. An alumni representative asked people interested in attending to consult Virginia Tech’s Web site for details.

Tonight at Commonwealth Chapel a time for prayer, grief, and community. 5pm — 7pm.

I’m hosting the 5th edition of the RVA Blog Carnival — get excited. While the name “RVA Blog Carnival” looks like “RVABlogs” the two are not related, except topically. JUST HAD TO GET THAT OFF MY CHEST.

Anyway, Haduken is looking for this week’s excellent posts. If you know of one, or even wrote one yourself, use this form to submit it to me. You could also email me, if that is your fancy: maxpower [at] haduken [dot] com.

The carnival should go live Monday. Posts are due to me Sunday sometime.

Check out this sweet video of “Whiplash.” It involved bikes, ropes, and getting yanked off backwards on your ass. Pics on flickr soon.

Update: Photos posted

Each year a mechanical horror claws its way to the surface from the swampy bottoms of the mass graves of dead Union soldiers. With cranks for arms, chain rings for eyes, and teeth made of spokes, the SLAUGHTERAMA comes to terrorize y’all’s neighborhood.

Waves of silent deadly terror will crash over the innocent as the SLAUGHTERAMA seeks to slake its millennial thirst in the mighty James. Unable to find solace in the coursing waters of that ancient river it will release its hatred on cans of cheap beer.

Those who gaze upon the rotting maggot filled corpse of the SLAUGHTERAMA — and survive — are said to live out their lives in greatness, reigning as kings over the weak and mere mortal!

See you Saturday! ^_^

An aide to our very own Jim Webb was arrested the other day for trying to carry a loaded pistol along with 2 loaded ammo clips into the US Senate office building.

Maybe someone should let the Capitol Police know that in Virginia, this is perfectly normal, accepted practice.

Today is the anniversary of Patrick Henry’s famous speech down there at St. John’s Church in Richmond, VA. You know the one, about the liberty and such. If I had to guess, I might predict that there may be a reenactment or something going on there, although that may simply come from spending too much time living in Williamsburg - I’m not sure how they do things in Richmond. How they roll.

So this is a famous speech, or at least, it is a famous last paragraph of a speech. The whole thing - in its entirety - is pretty short though, and is worth reading. Even without a preconceived burning hatred for the British, it is pretty effective in instilling one, at least to me. You can read it here, if you like: wikisource.

Of course, something to keep in mind while reading that, and something which the wikipedia article does not mention, but which I am fairly certain is, nonetheless, true, is that no one wrote the speech down while he was speaking it, and Henry was not the sort of person to write down his speeches beforehand. So there is probably a degree of creative license, or creative memory there; be warned.

I might be thinking of the Gettysburg Address though?

The title of this post is stolen from the Daily Show book. FYI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_liberty_or_give_me_death

The guy that invented FORTRAN died this month, John Backus. For those of you without the wonderful sublime pleasure of knowing FORTRAN, it was the first high-level programming language ever invented. This means that it was the first one to sort of kind of look like English. If you have actually used it before, you know that “sort of kind of” is the operative word there, but then again, if any of you have programmed in assembly before, you also know what a wonderful gift to the world FORTRAN was.

This guy has an awesome quote which describes I think a defining motivating characteristic of Computer Scientists and Programmers:

Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

Why spend an hour doing something when you can spend 5 hours figuring out how to get a computer to do it for you? There is no good reason.

Another interesting tidbit is that FORTRAN was apparently the first programming language to come with a manual. This is a feat that is still yet to be equaled even today by much of the community.

Here is an illuminating quote from one such manual:

“The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.” —Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers

On a final note, an interesting thing about Computer Science is that it is such a young field. Right now, many of the people that invented some of the major first steps are still alive, or, in this case, are dying now. That is always crazy to me, since so many other things were invented so long ago that you only hear about the people in history books, instead of in the news.

RIP, John, you will live on in the dreams and nightmares of engineers and programmers everywhere (respectively).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran - WARNING: contains numerous awesome nerdy FORTRAN jokes

Now, I don’t normally type headers in all-caps. The woman I’m married to can’t stand it. But if ever a time came when an all-caps title was needed … that time was now (WTF tenses).

Seriously, Slaughterama Four. Saturday March 31 on Belle Isle.

Slaughterama is the sweetest darn bike festival on the eastern seaboard — held right here in our town. And by bike festival I mean drunken explosion of cranks and chains. Words don’t really do it justice you really need to check out the pictures.

More details to come but this far the events include:

• Six pak attak
• Four way whiplash (this is seriously awesome / someone might die)
• Chicken fight races
• Chariot races
• Best in show
• World’s smallest messenger race

If you miss it, you’ll feel like the biggest toolbox. Come to watch, bring a beer, get arrested for drunk in public!

My good friend the bearded MattWhite, of various fames, is hosting — what some are calling — the bestest event ever to happen ever. Tonight at The Cous his “amalgamation of saxophones, trombones, trumpet, guitar, bass, and drums” called Fight the Big Bull will cover Weezer’s Blue Album from top to bottom.

It should be excellent and I am expecting some amazing sing-a-longs. The 90’s reunion starts at 9.30pm tonight at Cous Cous. Get there early as seating and standing room will be limited.

We all remember the recent Governor’s race in Virginia. We remember how Kilgore warned us about how Kaine would love to have saved Hitler from defeat in World War II. How if, given the chance, he would gladly have pardoned perhaps the most evil man in history from the death penalty.

Well, now all of our worst nightmares have come true. Tim Kaine has pardoned the only witch ever caught and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia. Of course, witches are notorious as the brides of Satan, which at the least is just as bad as Hitler, if not worse. They are certainly more dangerous, with their skills in magick.

Witches are very difficult to catch, and they are very wily when brought to trial, using every trick in the book to escape punishment so they can return to their tasty gingerbread houses. That is why in over 400 years, Virginia has only managed to successfully prosecute (at the cost of hundreds of taxpayer dollars) this one, single witch.

And now, Kaine has thrown all of this hard work away, all because of his love of Hitler. He couldn’t pardon Hitler, since (as far as we know) Hitler never came to Virginia, so he picked the next best thing - a proven witch.

Shameful.

So Tuesday is an election day here in Virginia. The Democrats’ primary election is on the 13th (Tuesday), which means it is time to decide who will be running against the eminent George Allen and the plucky Gail the Rail Parker.

As a disclaimer, it is a well-known fact that I hate George Allen - for carrying a football around everywhere he goes because his daddy was a famous coach, because of his ridiculous form letters (he once told me that he supports the right of Americans to fly the American flag - so brave!), and because he loves to tow the party line, one time arguing that “compromise” had no place in a democracy. So if this article is colored by my insatiable desire to “vote for the other guy (or girl),” please forgive me.

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