Our neighborhood, more or less.
Tuesday, May 23rd, 1995
Hello from Atlanta, or more specifically, Virginia-Highland, the small intown neighborhood I’ve called home for the last dozen years or so. It’s a pleasant enough place with small shops and restaurants around the corner from our house, a lot of pedestrians, and brick homes built anywhere from 1920 to postwar. Sidewalks, trees, it’s nice.
And more than one person I know has pointed out that it’s not all that different from the neighborhood I grew up in…Grandview Heights, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, which was much more a blue-collar place in the 1960s of my youth. I understand now it’s more like Virginia-Highland…fashionable, home to many sport-utility vehicle drivers, and you can’t swing a cat without hitting a coffee house. Strange how that goes. I’m wondering whether Grandview, which was pretty white-bread when I lived there, has become more diverse with time…because if not, than it does differ from Virginia-Highland, which has a comfortable mixture of people, races, cultures, orientations. It’s something I notice, with pleasure, after a long trip to places elsewhere. It’s one of the reasons I like living here.
That, and the trees that come crashing down at the first sign of trouble.
Loath as I am to offer too much praise to the folks at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, they are fortifying their web site every time I check in. My favorite tidbit is a driving tour of Atlanta, lushly illustrated, written by Jim Auchmutey of their staff. A great web-taste of here. It’s nice as well that they go to the trouble to spell the name of our neighborhood right. (some folks like to call this ‘Virginia-Highlands’ with an ‘s’. Drives me nuts.) Click on the the AJC’s photo of our neighborhood (Copyright 1995, them), above, and you’ll go on the tour.
What else is new out here/there on that great Internetway? As a designer (and type fanatic), I’ve been enjoying an ‘Online Type Museum‘ that celebrates the many shapes that letters can be (and the slightly eccentric folk who make them that way.) Folks I know know I am a sucker for books about typography, and this is darn near–but not quite–as much fun as paging through a beautifully-printed fancy hardbound text.
And as a TV guy, I appreciate the usefulness of a site like this Digital Video Resource Page that gives you great jumping-off points to video manufacturers, facilities, and documents that list obscure technical specifications like CCIR601 and explain just how many pixels, and how square, your image can or should be. Component? Composite? It’s just a jargon treat for vidfolk like me.
