Salt

Day 028

Thursday, May 26. We will hear a very interesting and informative presentation about the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project by John Bourgeois and Eric Mruz. The presentation will focus on the history, background, and current status of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. As the largest wetlands restoration project on the West Coast of the US, the project encompasses 15,100 acres of former salt ponds located around the edge of South San Francisco Bay. Its mission is to restore and enhance wetlands in South San Francisco Bay as habitat for federally endangered species and migratory birds, while providing flood management and wildlife- oriented public access and recreation. John Bourgeois is the Executive Project Manager for the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. He is an estuarine ecologist with experience in a wide array of coastal settings, including San Francisco Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and mangrove swamps in the western Pacific. Eric Mruz is the Refuge Manager for the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge where he manages over 30,000 acres of former salt ponds, tidal marshes, and uplands. Eric has worked at the San Francisco Bay Complex since 2004 and was originally hired to manage the newly acquired Salt Ponds as part of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project.

You really do acquire increased knowledge on a daily basis.

Parkmerced

Day 020

Parkmerced transformation wins approval Will Kane, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, May 25, 2011 The San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave the go-ahead Tuesday to a $1.2 billion plan to transform the sprawling Parkmerced area from a car-centric neighborhood to a state-of-the-art sustainable neighborhood. In a 6-5 split, the board voted to replace 1,500 rent-controlled town homes with 7,200 new energy-efficient units over the next 20 to 30 years. When the project, which currently houses about 8,000 residents, is completed in 2040, an additional 14,000 people will be living in the 152-acre neighborhood, originally built in the 1940s as a suburban outpost in San Francisco. Units where rents are currently controlled will stay that way, but new ones will be rented or sold at market rate. The rebuilt Parkmerced will have a maximum of 3,200 rent-controlled units, the same number it has today.

Bout time too. Remind me to look up the split and vote accordingly.

Stellar Management - National
Stellar Management - San Francisco
Stellar Management - San Francisco
Supervisor Sean R. Elsbernd

002 - EWB and Other Matters

Day 002

Water Resources Group - May Meeting Please join us on Tuesday, May 10 as Jennifer Lehane of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) San Francisco Professionals speaks on three water projects in the developing world – namely Tanzania, El Salvador and Fiji. Ms. Lehane will also talk about the EWB as an organization. EWB-SFP supports community- driven development programs worldwide through the design and implementation of sustainable engineering projects, while fostering responsible leadership EWB-SFP’s vision is a world in which all communities have the capacity to meet their basic human needs. Ms. Lehane will be joined by project managers to present the above projects.

Not simply a mercenary opportunity to meet a number of engineers at URS, after all water is not really my area, because I truly am enamored by the idea of Medecins sans Frontieres and all of its offshoots.

I think I can just manage to squeeze it in-between class and the Emperor.

As for Monday a mixture of applications, phonecalls and study.

Day 001 - Upcoming CadCamp

Day 001

7:45am – 8:45am Coffee and Registration 8:45am – 10:00am Session 1: Applying 2012 Features and Functionality 10:00am – 10:15am Break 10:15am – 11:30am Session 2: Reaping the Rewards – Productivity Best Practices 11:30am – 12:30pm Lunch 12:30pm – 1:45pm Session 3: Master the Skill Set – Certification Exam Objectives 1:45pm – 2:00pm Break 2:00pm – 3:15pm Session 4: Secrets to Preparing and Passing the Certification Exam 3:30pm – 4:45pm Session 5: Combination of the above

Don't spend any more of your career looking up. Attend the powerful, single-day Autodesk boot camp when it arrives in San Francisco. Register to attend AUGI CAD Camp 2011 today.

I think I'll go. I hope there is a good turnout. The higher the turnout the more people I can beat at the Top Daug competition.

Not Really Work but Sort of ASCE

The nice people at the ASCE in association with the nice people at RTO have been doing some volunteer work at the Brookdale Discovery Center.

Rebuilding Together Oakland, a local nonprofit, generously donated materials and tools for 25 volunteers to help spruce up the local Discovery Center. The Discovery Center offers free hands-on activities in physics, rockets, electro-mechanics, woodworking, telescopes, microscopes, woodworking, art, computers and more for children. Throughout the day, volunteers will work on the following projects at the center:

Refurbishing the garden beds in the back; Weed whacking the clover; Building a chicken coop; Pulling down ivy from the left side and spreading mulch; Cleaning up the front; Clearing out the brush on the right side (in the fenced area); Fixing the trim around the front door; Light painting and possibly other tasks. Volunteers who are skilled in carpentry are a plus! Pastries, lunch, snacks, beverages, and T-shirts will be provided. Volunteer shifts are as follows: 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.; 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

SO I've spent the last two Saturdays in head high brambles and scrub - hacking away. OW, my arms hurt.

Very Soon

Revit 2011 Certification This is a list of the peeps in the Bay Area who have passed the exam. I'm going to join them very soon.

probably sometime week 18th

What I would do - a ramble

No matter what the benefits of aggregation, then, our new civilization is likely to need many cities of diverse sizes, each matched to the ability of the local environment to supply its needs. That means no megacities in the middle of the desert, like Phoenix, Arizona.

Another example of the 'easy targets' which i think everybody has at least come to accept. I always wonder about Phoenix, a city so incongruous, a city so misplaced and so ill-advised, how exactly did it get there and what does that tell you about us. I don't think recognizing that Phoenix is a problem (about 50 years too late) is something we should be all back-slappy about, the 20-20 hindsight of today's urban planner is no reason for optimism and no reason for urban planners to broadcast their new self-importance in today's long term development strategy.

"Hey, we know we made a huge blunder in the desert, but our recognition of an empty stable is why you should listen to us now."

We get it, it is bad, and anybody with half a brain should have known that long ago. Now you tell us you should trust us now?

While we're tinkering with the economy, we might want to move away from using GDP as a measure of success. When nations began focusing on GDP after the Second World War, it made sense to gauge an economy by its production of goods and services. "At that time, what most people needed was stuff. They needed more food, better building structures - stuff that was lacking - to make them happy," says Ida Kubiszewski of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University in Oregon. "Now times have changed. That's no longer the limiting factor to happiness."

On the other hand, increases in mobility, communication and technology - as well as the sheer size of the human population - mean that many of the world's problems are now truly global. "What if there were a newspaper that was published just once a decade? What is the macroheadline of our time?" asks Paul Raskin, president of the Tellus Institute, a think tank in Boston.