I am riding on Maple Ave — a 15mph road — about to turn on to Brinton Rd, my arm outstretched signaling that I am making a left turn. The woman behind me decides that I am taking too long and floors it to pass me as I am starting to turn. Now this is not the sort of intersection where you would do this sort of thing, not that there is any intersection that it would be ok, but for this road in particular it is really, really dangerous.

I would have been right about where the turning car is when she started to pass me. – View Larger Map

Drivers are coming off of 376 and a Ardmore Blvd and they are normally going pretty fast right until the stop sign. Well she floors it into the oncoming lane with a car approaching her but she wouldn’t have known that because you can’t see around the corner. Like I said, this isn’t the sort of road where this sort of thing might be reasonably safe.

I would guess she was going around 55 mph by the time she made it back into her own lane.

Merry Christmas lady! Hope you got to where you were going in one piece.

If you need to launch the maps application from a PhoneGap application you can do so by editing your AppDelegate.m file with the code below. If you’re not using ChildBrowser you can comment out the else condition.

Archived here for my own sake from the PhoneGap Google Group.

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)theWebView shouldStartLoadWithRequest: (NSURLRequest *)request navigationType: (UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType { NSURL *url = [request URL];

if (![[url scheme] hasPrefix:@"http"] ||
    [[url scheme] isEqualToString:@"gap"] || 
    [url isFileURL] )
{ 
    return [super webView:theWebView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:request 
        navigationType:navigationType]; 
}
else
{ 
    ChildBrowserViewController* childBrowser = [[ChildBrowserViewController alloc] 
                                                initWithScale:FALSE]; 
    [super.viewController presentModalViewController:childBrowser animated:YES ]; 
    [childBrowser loadURL:[url description]]; 
    [childBrowser release]; 
    return NO; 
}

}

I just read about a pug being mauled to death at a Verona Kennel named Tail Wags N’ At and I wanted to bring attention to them here.

Tail Wags N’ At has an open door policy where anything goes apparently. As my wife said, their website is a big warning sign for anyone choosing a kennel.

Tail Wags N’ At is where every dog gets a chance. We will take any dog that needs daycare or boarding. No more worries that your dog won’t pass an interview.

Apparently the Tail Wags N’ At staff left the dogs unsupervised and an aggressive large breed killed the defenseless pug while no one was around.

When selecting a kennel you can afford to be choosy these days. There are a number of highly regarded kennels to choose from. Go and visit the kennel in person, ask for references, etc. If it doesn’t feel right find somewhere else.

I have a pair of Keen Newport H2 sandals that have torn in the same place as the last pair I owned and returned to REI. I’ve contacted Keen about them and they said to take them back to the store or fill out their warranty form. The soles are still in brand new shape and have years of life left in them.

I feel an odd sense of responsibility to just deal with issue myself since I’ve already retured the same model sandal once and replaced them with these.

I am in the process of drafting a “letter to the editor” about my experiences with 29th and Liberty and dug up a few articles about the intersection.

In addition to my own documentation of the intersection we have from 2009, a news story that my coworkers are featured in.

“We’re waiting for PennDOT approval for a full-scale light system in there. I believe that will take about six more weeks,” O’Connor said at the time.
Team 4: Neighbors Say Strip District Corner Still Unsafe After Deaths

The rest are from 2006 when there were two people killed within a month or two of one another.

A car hit a woman at the intersection of Liberty Avenue and 29th Street in the Strip District during Thursday’s rush hour, Channel 4 Action News reported.
Woman Hit By Two Vehicles In Strip

“I’m so afraid. Every day, when I cross, it’s so scary. I feel like you are going to get hit because you have to dodge the traffic,” student Laurie Garside said.
How Safe Is Liberty Avenue For Pedestrians?

Transportation officials have published a report on dangerous roads, and a major thoroughfare in Pittsburgh is at the top of the list.
Report Names Pittsburgh’s Most Dangerous Roads

According to investigators, Cassandra Gatewood, 43, of McKeesport, was charged with vehicular homicide, driving under the influence and fleeing an accident scene.
Police: Suspect In Strip District Pedestrian Death Was DUI

Since all of this and despite repeated appeals from our office and the Pittsburgh Ballet the best response we have from the city is “None of the signal warrants are met at this location; therefore a traffic signal cannot be installed.”

The Steel Valley Trail is a recently completed section of the Great Allegheny Passage that starts at The Waterfront and ends in McKeesport. I’ve been on it myself a few times already. A couple weeks ago Monica and I met Alan and Heather at The Waterfront and went for a nice slow ride to McKeesport and back ending at Rock Bottom for beers. I sometimes dwell on so much of the bad stuff on this blog that I forget about mentioning the good. This is good.

From the McKeesport end one could connect with the Great Allegheny Passage and end up in Washington DC or the Montour and Pandhandle Trails and end up in Wheeling West Virginia.

All of this just a few miles from my house! Now, riding to The Waterfront isn’t the greatest trip ever and there are no bike racks anywhere you would want them but I will save that for another post.

Instead of installing lanes and sharrows to get to the promised “additional 25 miles of on-street paving markings and 5 miles of shared lane markings” I feel like we are taking them away. Liberty Ave through the Bloomfield business district has been paved for months and yet the sharrows have yet to make a come back. In Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s recent campaign for office, he promised to install 100 miles of protected bikeways in the city and within his first month in office he was already installing the city’s first protected cycle track. You’re one of the youngest mayors in the country and have a city council who seems ready to support more cycling, yet you do what it takes to only maintain the status quo. If you want Pittsburgh to remain most livable city and continue to attract and retain young people and professionals, you’re going to have to continue working at it.

I can add captions to photos

I spent the weekend updating this site to HTML5, CSS3 and Disqus in an effort to refresh things and learn more about the new technologies for work. I haven’t made any effort to test for IE compatibility yet, and I don’t know when I will.

I created this theme in 2008 so it needed a fresh coat of paint and the hope is that with this update I can move forward with a couple ideas I’ve had for a long time now. No pressure though.

I also updated my sidebar to support WordPress widgets and marked up my contact page with the hCard microformat.

some of the tools I used

• Twitter Tools
• flickrRSS
• HTML5 Boilerplate
• Disqus

Critique my code and design in the comments.