Apparently the city of Pittsburgh who claims to be “A Most Livable City” has never heard of traffic calming. If they had, the intersection at 29th and Liberty, where my office, a gym, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre among others, would have received some sort of treatment to help us navigate the highway known as Liberty Ave safely.

Since I have worked here I have witnessed four accidents during work hours and am forced to play chicken with speeding traffic. When I first contacted Pittsburgh’s non-emergency line, 311, about it this is the response I received.

None of the signal warrants are met at this location; therefore a traffic signal cannot be installed. However during evaluation, it was noticed that many of the crashes were at night. Because of this, lighting has been increased at the intersection by replacing a light pole and replacing the light with a higher wattage variety. The stop signs have been replaced to ensure reflectivity. The storage container was on the corner has be relocated to allow better visibility of oncoming traffic from southbound 29th street.

Apparently there are even more accidents happening outside of business hours in addition to the few I have witnessed and documented. Great that they addressed these issues, but none of them address the accidents that happen during the day, nor do they address pedestrian safety issues.

After my coworker was struck this morning I contacted them again and immediately received a response telling me there is nothing they can do and to contact my state representative. The Federal Highway Administration governs the installation of traffic signals and our intersection doesn’t qualify for one.

What about lowering the speed limit? What about a pedestrian signal? Nothing. They don’t care. I am afraid that just like on Braddock Ave outside of Frick Park, that it will take a death to address the issue.

This the city’s idea of traffic calming? It clearly isn’t working.

• update, 2010-02-03 – Tried it again this morning and had the same results. CPU spikes well over 100% and the UI is unusable.

John Gruber writes,

Seriously, this is the real deal — full-screen H.264 playback with no Flash, no browser plugins, full iPhone OS support, and sane CPU usage, better in every single regard than any video player ever made with Flash.

Have a look for yourself.

What I experienced is nothing like Gruber describes. I saw my browser lock up and my CPU usage spike and stay spiked while the video played. I sent it to Matthew and he experienced the same performance issues.

I look forward to better implementations and support from browsers. Better performance, real full screen, sharable implementations.

Fact. iMovie 09 will not recognize the original Flip video camera’s AVI files. For awhile I was doing a complicated conversion using QuickTime Pro that converted the files to DV files which caused some quality degradation. Not happy with that solution anymore I did some more Google searching and came across this thread. As it turns out Flip released a new version of their FlipShare software which allows you to export an exact copy of your videos in a format that iMovie can recognize!

In honor of the sea lions who apparently took a fishing vacation up north I present this. Audio was recorded using the Voice Memo iPhone application and it was edited with iMovie.

Recently I have had some issues with some older files having a lock that couldn’t be removed using the info panel.

The issue was two fold, first I had to remove the lock. After searching around I found this command, “chflags -R nouchg.” I typed that into Terminal and dragged the file into the window which removed the lock so I could now at least open the file again.

The next issue was the fact that I was no longer the user allowed to edit the file. Using the info panel I had to add myself as a user and add the permissions “Read and Write.”

I had to do this for about 40 files one by one but at least I could edit the files again.

After trying to rent two movies I realized there was trouble in paradise. When I try to sync via iTunes I get the following error.

The Apple TV “Apple TV” is not responding. Check that any firewall software running on this computer has been set to allow communication on port 3689.

A quick Google search reveals I am not the only one and there is no known solution. Thanks Apple!

Before today I have never seen smog in Pittsburgh, but on my way to work while riding down Liberty I noticed the cloud of yellow floating above the river. I know it was smog, I have seen it in Phoenix and Los Angeles. This winter while at Seven Springs Monica and I noticed it all the way out there. This isn’t cool.

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I was having some issues getting my iPhone to connect to my wireless network at home. I tried resetting the router, adjusting the settings, restarting etc. In the end I had to reset the network settings on the iPhone for the WiFi to reconnect again.