City Room: Ask the Co-op Board Expert
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Arthur Weinstein, a Manhattan lawyer and Vice President of the Council of New York Cooperatives, is taking questions from City Room readers this week.
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By Janice L. Habuda  Kenmore officials want to join a growing coalition of municipalities seeking guidance for dealing with vacant properties.  At their Tuesday work session, members of the Village Board discussed joining the Erie-Buffalo Vacant Properties Coordinating Council.
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NEW YORK - They gathered on Oct. 19 for a ritual known to thousands of New York co-op owners, the annual meeting. The board president, Richard Cohen, and his wife, newscaster Paula Zahn, threw open their second
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I was in the audience yesterday when the one dramatic moment of the conference took place. Scoble was on stage. Mike Arrington was sitting to my right in the front row of the second section (on the right). Mike showed me a piece he was writing, and I gulped. It said Scoble was leaving Podtech and probably going to FastCompany to start a TV network for them. Since Scoble is my friend, I knew that there was some truth to this, but was disappointed to see it was coming out, esp at a moment when Scoble wouldn't have a moment to think and consult with friends before formulating a response. HIs laptop screen was being projected as we watched him edit his comment on TechCrunch. At one point Mike asked if I thought he knew we could see what he was typing. I didn't think he did. Anyway, Scoble lets it all hang out. And somehow he gets away with it. What would kill most people just stings him, and he smiles through it all, in his bumbling Scoble-like way, and it always amazes me how he makes lemonade out of the lemons. This isn't the optimal way to announce you're leaving a company, and his deal with FC isn't final yet. But somehow I think he'll navigate this transition and come out in a better place after the dust settles.
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By Daniel D'Ambrosio, Waterbury Republican-American, Conn.  Sep. 7--MIDDLEBURY -- The Board of Selectmen has endorsed a new ordinance  that would require land use applicants to pay for consultants hired by the  town to evaluate their projects.
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To: ENVIRONMENTAL EDITORS  Contact: David Kalson of RF|Binder Partners, +1-518-935-1040, +1- 212-994-7513, david.kalson@rfbinder.com, for New York Regional Interconnect Inc.   ALBANY, N.Y., June 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New York Regional Interconnect Inc.
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Gabe: The Penny Arcade Battle Academy Will be meeting next Tuesday the 8th at the Comic Stop. We're an official Pokemon TCG league now. Those of you in the Academy who haven't done so already, should register with Go Pokemon.com. Once you have a POP ID you can post it in this thread and Joe will get you added to the roster. As always, new players are welcome. Just grab a starter deck and be at the Comic Stop around 6.PM. There will be plenty of people willing to walk you through the game if it's your first time. For our regulars, if you're looking for a place up north to get cards and boosters I highly recommend the Cardhaus in Lynnwood. He's got some singles in stock but he also has the best price on boosters I've been able to find. Also, Kiko and I picked up some great tips and a few interesting rules that we did not know about while at the tournament. We'll share our "key learnings" with you all on Tuesday. It should be a fun night, hope to see some new faces. -Gabe out
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Russ asks: Where's the OpenSocial container API? I love Russ because he cuts through all the BS and gets right to the core, most basic question, and he doesn't care who he pisses off. That's my kind of developer. You can't lie to the compiler, when the bits hit the road, you gotta know what garbage goes in and what garbage comes out.  (Ahh programmer's humor!) In other words, suppose I wanted to compete with Google, MySpace, Plaxo and LinkedIn, well, where's the spec that shows me how to do that? Well, of course I don't know, they aren't communicating with riffraff like me, but I have some experience with this kind of stuff, so I can hazard a guess. If they publish a spec,all kinds of projects will likely get started to enable the API in (just for the sake of argument): Drupal, WordPress, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Scripting News (why not add widgets to a random blog), CNN, The New York Times, well you get the idea. There might be lots of implementations very quickly. And that would be it for changes. It would be frozen de facto, they'd have to live with what they have, which given how quickly it was thrown together, probably isn't very good. Not the kind of stuff you'd like to support for the next decade or two. Or maybe they would break everyone, something guaranteed to make them a lot of enemies, much the way Microsoft did, and they were good at migration of APIs.  Google is good at doing AJAXy web UIs, they make users happy, but they're not very good at APIs. This one is a loser, for sure. That's the answer to Russ's question. It's probably not malice that keeps them from releasing details to everyone outside their club, it's pragmatism. They have to try to hold on to it to keep it from becoming even more of a mess than it already is. Just my opinion, for what it's worth. I've been wrong many times before.
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Q I'm planning a business retirement party for a co-worker. Our company has a number of board members and employees with spouses, plus some unmarried individuals. Should I invite the spouses, and if so, should I also suggest that those who aren't married bring a guest?
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One of my buddies had a brilliant idea I hadn't thought of: Check Pennsylvania's maps for what's called a co-op farm. It's not a commune, it's a farm which offers up it's land to the public for hunting.  What the Farmer Gets  If the hunters are decent-folk, they generally clean up the trash off the property. I personally built a blind out of rocks I happened to find in a fallow field to give me something to sit on and a hiding place. The blind is next to a power utility pole, so it gives me a great shot at birds coming in slowly to land on the wires. He got his field cleaned essentially for free since I also picked up trash. I don't want my game animals eating garbage.  The other bonus the farmer enjoys is limited crop losses to wildlife. This particular farmer was doing the soy-corn-fallow crop rotation which is pretty typical Pennsylvania crop rotation. Doves love this stuff and eat it up. Probably about 2/3rds of the doves I cleaned had corn in their crop.  What the Hunters Get  A place to hunt with a ton of acreage devoted to what essentially amounts to bait.
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Letters: We hear from Cobol coders who are still in the game.
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Questions will be asked tonight at Madison Square Garden. Difficult questions. Questions about the futures of Felix Trinidad and Ricardo Mayorga. Very likely they will be questions only one of them will be able to answer.
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By Garin Groff, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.  Sep. 4--Got a problem with Tempe but don't know which city department to call?   Just take it to the mayor.
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By Matt Kempner, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution  Dec. 10--Your co-worker in the next cubicle may not be working on the  Harris proposal. There's a good chance he's shopping instead.   The latest studies say Americans are doing more shopping online, and  often they do it at work.
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In a recent online discussion, a questioner wanted to know whether there was a type of professional he or she could hire who would give unbiased advice on those everyday money issues that always seem to pop up.
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Tycho:  In case you are wondering, cats apparently need regular maintenance, like cars.  And, like an oil change, this juicing process can be done (I'm told) at home, preferably with the curtains drawn and a couple inches of sawdust laid down.  That's right: you can wring out your own cat's asshole.  This is the kind of helpful information you can expect when you visit Penny Arcade.  Don't everybody run home at once.    I've been playing a lot of Prism on the DS, even though the Zelda cartridge seems to squeal as I remove it.  I understand there's some kind of Ghost Ship?  I forget all of my cares, and also the cares of Princess Zelda, once those beams begin to refract.    They've ginned up some ridonculous crap about light eating space monsters to support their gameplay, which is very solid, and requires no extraterrestrial photophiles.  It's a puzzle game.  When I put pieces of a puzzle together, I never think about how alone each piece must feel, longing only to congregate with similarly knobbed partial images.  So, discard that.  Discard also the truly nasty presentation, no doubt a result of hard time done in already the Mobile and PC Casual markets.  Part these imperfections like tall savannah grass, and gaze into the game's rich core:  the creation of sometimes very complex circuits.     Inside each puzzle grid, the player is given some combination of Light Emitting Entities, Reflective Mirrors, Splitters, or Prisms.  You must jigger the aforementioned until light of the correct colors is distributed to targets around the edge of the field.  That's it, and the fun comes from how complicated this process can become.  There are quite a few cooperative puzzles as well - where each player has access to half the grid, and they must work together to route everything.  If you try this mode - and I request that you do so, as you only need one (1) cartridge and a willing accomplice - I recommend that you each turn your DS sideways, so that the UI is along the bottom.  That will make it so that "left" and "right" and "up" and "down" all mean the same thing to each of you.  Trust me, you want this.  The game is hard enough without the horror of fully relative terms.    Prism actually taught me something fairly significant about why I play games, and I think it's because the gameplay is so clean and the presentation so spartan that I could pick up on it.  I like games that generate communication.  This is why team-based shooters, roleplaying games, and tactical games are my delight - every one of these entails a suite of custom language to describe it, they require constant dialogue, and, most importantly, all other things being equal these games can be won by the efficient use of language.  Working out puzzles together in Prism has a strong logic component, but in large part the challenge was communicating ethereal notions succinctly.    I suppose this is also why I torment you here, thrice weekly: even when playing a game by myself, I am harvesting the experience so that it may be reconstituted here.  So, thank you for reading.  You dignify my leisure hours.          The Playstation 3 in the office has been more than acceptable for playing the sometimes short, often bad games that have arrived on it - but this holiday, with the titles to prove out the claim, I had to "get mine" in the bawdy parlance of the young.  What tipped my hand wasn't the four hundred dollar system on offer, rather, it was the three hundred and seventy nine dollar model.  These are probably mostly a mail order proposition, but any of those rare twenty gig models the platform launched with got bumped down by the new price.  It's inexpensive by PS3 standards, but it's positively cheap for a Blu-Ray device.  Now fully franchised, flexing all the rich benefits of Sony citizenship, you may expect me to be even more brutal in my critique.
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What is the Free City Supershop? Hard to say. Maybe itÂs the future of retail.