The Denver Residential Block Beautification Program is a grant system for public area improvements within certain neighborhoods.

Eligibility Areas

The program is available to residential blocks with 51 percent or more of the residents are low or moderate income based upon census block group data. The actual monetary threshold is not stated in the informational brochure that I have. The neighborhoods that are eligible coincide with neighborhoods I recognize from Piton foundation maps that have recently had ~25% of residents under the poverty line. So, it's basically a way for poor people in poor neighborhoods to get some grant money to improve the public lands on their street. Examples of the public land are the curbs, sidewalks, and the "street lawn" which is the area of plantings that is between the curb and the sidewalk.

Eligible projects

Eligible projects include a variety of things such as sidewalk replacement where there are cracks, curb cuts to make sidewalks more wheelchair and stroller accessible, and to either install or remove trees from the street lawn.

You can also get the city to install sod in your street lawn. You can not get the city to install other plants in the street lawn.

This is the "Denver" residential program, but the use of the word "Denver" in the title is about the end of the regional personalization that was given to this program. Denver is a dessert. Sod is not a good idea. If you go to the Denver Water site you can see that the major issue for them is water conservation. They have articles on the limit for number of days watering per week, about "Xeriscape" a type of gardening in low water environments that was invented specifically for the Colorado dessert environment, and rebates for the purchase of new "low water use" systems.

So, while the folks at Denver Water are trying to figure out how to motivate customers to use less water, the folks in the Block Beautification Program are working to make sure each resident uses more water than necessary.

Jason Goldman figured out two things to save america.

Parapharsing: get rid of phone books and do assigned seating in movie theaters. Eliminating phonebooks saves us "fucktons" while assigned seating saves us from wasting time in line. Great ideas - the average person would probably be opposed.

There is an optional block in Drupal.org which contains lots of useful links including my favorite, the Bug Bingo link which takes you to a random bug. There is also patch bingo and both bingos are available for core or contrib (contrib patch bingo and contrib bug bingo.

There is an organization called Denver International Program that seems to be related to the University of Denver. They offer a variety of services for adult professionals from other countries to come to Denver, have a homestay, and be mentored by a local business.

Seeing as how Nikki and I and our businesses are focused on international trade, cultural literacy, and community this seems like a great organization.

EDIT: like this? Digg it.

I get asked questions - and now I'm answering them here to share the knowledge beyond the emails.

Today one of my coffee group reported the following:



1. He was trying to sign up for {online service} and was asked the usual

information and also he birth date and sex (not gender, as that only

applies to language usage).



2. He questioned the need for this and tried to submit the request

without it. He was rejected and told to fill out those boxes.



3. He called the {online service} and was told that they do not request that

info, that his browser had added it to their website. He was told that

if he did not believe them, he could try logging on to their website

through another browser and see.



4. He tried using MSN and IE and, lo and behold, the questions were

not there. They had been there when he used AOL.



Our question to you: Is this possible? How can this be?



This is interesting, and very possible.

Possible

There was clearly something malicious going on that didn't involve the {online service} system. It could have been an extra entry in his hosts file or it could have been some software that watches your browser and whenever you type in {online service} it adds in some extra fields and redirects the form to somewhere else. The malicious software could have gotten there from hundreds of different ways including security flaws in IE and/or Windows. It could have gotten there because this person downloaded some "fun" software for their machine and installed that (and the fun software had malicious software inside it).

I've been using Google Calendar for a while now and there are a couple of problems that I have noticed and a couple that friends have pointed out.

Event Parser

Generally, Google has yet again made a great product. The new event parser works really well. If you don't know, it basically allows you to type in events the way that you think about them (e.g. " ") and then it parses those into the fields where they go. This cuts the time of adding events down to a few seconds instead of a minute. Very handy.

Public Calendars

Another thing that they got right is public calendars. There are currently thousands of public calendars that you can add into your Google calendar like a calendar of holidays. But you can also subscribe to iCalendar feeds (as I have demonstrated icalendar importing of Drupal events in the past). This is the kind of thing that will take a geeky technology (iCalendar) and hopefully make it easy enough for "my mom" to use. She can just use the "search" box for the term in an iCalendar feed and there she has it without knowing about iCalendar protocol at all.

Shared Calendars

In that same vein, you can have multiple calendars in your google calendar - e.g. work and personal - and share your calendar with different permission levels. So, the wife can see and edit my personal calendar but not my work calendar. You could allow coworkers to view (bot not edit) your work calendar and only let your coworker friend see your personal calendar as well. Pretty cool.

Like I said...people ask me for my opinion. And I give it here instead of in email because now the rest of the world gets to enjoy the glory of my opinions:

Your website says you have an opinion on everything...I need an opinion
on cell phone service providers in Denver....