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The HooK Closes

in General Real Estate Off-topic on

Damn.

One of the most pressing questions is posed on cvillenews:

And what of The Hook’s website? There are 12 years of vital, historically significant news coverage there, available to anybody using Google. The loss of that archive—like the once-deep web-based archives of The Cavalier Daily, WINA, and The Observer—would be terrible. What’s the plan to maintain that?

There has to be a plan – even a community plan – to fund the archives’ existence in perpetuity.

The Internet Archive isn’t going to cut it.

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Charlottesville is Brainy – For Everyone & For Those Under 35

in Off-topic on
water_st_maples [Explored 10/18/2012]

No, really, Charlottesville is the 15th brainiest metro area in the US.

From the Atlantic Cities article:

Lumosity data scientist Daniel Sternberg explains the prominence of college towns this way:

College towns tend to do well because education is correlated with cognitive performance. We’ve seen in our other research that those with advanced degrees tend to perform better cognitively throughout the lifespan. When we looked at some trends based on American Community Survey data, we found that the percentage of individuals within a metro area with advanced degrees, and the percentage of individuals within a CBSA pursuing advanced degrees were both strong predictors of the cognitive performance score for that metro area.

Not bad. The ancillary effects of the University of Virginia are well known, but this is the first time I’ve seen the Charlottesville area as being noted for the under-35 demographic – I’ll take that as a very good thing for the future of our area, should it be a reasonably accurate conclusion.

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Hearing Cicadas for the First Time

in Off-topic on
Cicadas in the most unlikely places

Ironically, I am hearing cicadas in Charlottesville for the first time on a new construction site. I remember the last time they were out, we were using them for bait. 🙂

A friend told me last week that cicadas aren’t in places where ground has been disturbed in the past 10 years. Living in Crozet, most of that space has been disturbed.

The contrast between new, graded lots and trees that will stay is striking.

20130522-114408.jpg

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Charlottesville Loves its Restaurants

in Albemarle Charlottesville Off-topic on

Charlottesville is the #14 most “Restaurant-Crazy” City.

I like that they qualify “Charlottesville” as “The Charlottesville area” by virtue of their noting that “Charlottesville” has a population of 204k.

and:

Restaurants: 460

Restaurants Per 10,000 Residents: 22.8

I have my favorite restaurant(s) (Brookville, ahem) in Charlottesville … and many of their chefs are featured at Beyond the Flavor, (note their Kickstarter campaign).

The food in Charlottesville is remarkable, and helps to make living here pretty nice.

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What Happened to the Daily Progress’ URLs?

in Off-topic on

https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/article_5885bff4-e808-5ab6-ad42-fcb60512f9b5.html

https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/news/article/12548-scottsville/

In doing brief research for an upcoming post, I discovered that (sadly) the Charlottesville Tomorrow article displays a snippet and the “Read More” goes to the Daily Progess article, the URL of which is at best a scrambled-alphabet with do decipherable logic whatsoever.

I’m no coder, but I am a firm believer in simplicity and planning for longevity.

I might pay for a subscription if I could be assured that the Daily Progress wouldn’t delete their archives again, as they did in 2008.

Community newspapers provide a true service; they are an archive for the community’s history. Hopefully libraries are archiving the Daily Progress – on microfiche or whatever – so this history won’t be lost.

/rant

Update 18 November 2012: It’s not just the URLs; it’s the entire “new” site that’s changed for the worse. It’s like they have a strategy to drive readers to print.

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