It’s been five years since I started on our SharePoint implementation project, and recently a new opportunity arose that piqued my interest.  The opportunity was to rejoin the e-Commerce group, however this time as part of the business team instead of the IT team.  It’s a great opportunity for me to become directly involved with the products we sell and learn more about our business operations.

This new role also sets me on a track which will likely result in me relocating out of the Buffalo area, which will be a bittersweet change as I’ve grown to know so many people here and invested so much time and affection in certain pet projects.  However, those experiences certainly helped build my skills which ultimately prepared me for this career move.

For the near term, though, I’ll be sticking around and continuing to work with our IT team here, and our business teams in Chicago and Danbury.  I’m excited to be taking on this new challenge at Praxair.

I am pleased to announce that Derek Punaro, currently Lead IT Information Architect, has accepted the position of E-Commerce Specialist, reporting to me. Derek will replace [redacted], who has left Praxair to pursue other opportunities.

Derek’s main focus will be the e-catalog that supports all our different packaged gas e-commerce channels and will work closely with everyone on the team in this capacity. One important part of this will be to work with the Product Data Hub project team to align the system and workprocesses with the e-catalog efforts. Derek’s broad experience in information architecture, programming and systems will be a great asset to the business.

Derek will work to transition from his current position to his new role over the coming weeks and will be in contact with many of you to understand our projects, data, systems and work processes. Please join me in welcoming Derek to our team!

Jakob Janzon
Marketing & Business Development
Praxair, Inc.

I was really excited to have the opportunity to go back again and see what I could take this time shooting with my rented 10-22mm.  I’m actually really happy with some of the shots, even this first one which I wanted to be similar to my favorite, but still try to get something different out of it.  I think it was successful. I was really happy to have had the wide angle – so much that I ended up buying one.

We’re still in Dusseldorf, time for dinner.  I’ve been to Germany twice and both trips required a stop here.  I highly recommend the sausage platter (not a big stretch for those that know me well) and of course the local Altbier.

Suddenly this week rumors began circulating that BNMC was preparing a demolition plan for Trico Plant #1.  That rumor was substantiated when Preservation Buffalo Niagara released a statement saying that BNMC had rejected their offers of assistance to help fund an adaptive reuse study for the building and would likely try to push their demolition request through bypassing the Buffalo Preservation Board’s review.  This is where I start to become peeved.  Trico Plant #1 has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2001 – six years before BNMC acquired rights to develop this property.  They obviously knew what they were getting, and they certainly had no problems in leveraging that status to get state and private funding to redevelop part of the building into the Innovation Center.  So now, why is BNMC trying to end run around the city entity responsible for protecting the type of structures they’ve taken advantage of in the past?

BNMC has been excessively silent this week, saying nothing more than this terse quote obtained by the Buffalo News:

Matthew Enstice, Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus president and chief executive officer, left a voicemail message at The News that he was “surprised” by Preservation Buffalo Niagara’s decision to go public with its criticism and felt as if they “were working as good partners,” but would have no further comment.

Ok, now let’s start cutting the bullshit.  BNMC was in no way surprised by PBN’s statement.  Nor were they surprised by their stance.  More than likely, BNMC has been sitting on these demolition plans for quite some time and any meetings between the two organizations were cursory simply so they could make the above statement publicly.  The Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus knew this would be a hot button issue with the local preservation community, hence the quick demolition schedule – try and get it pushed through before anyone can tie it up. Of course, that was highly unlikely to happen, and now instead of being upfront and forthcoming with their plans, BNMC has blown a large chunk of their accumulated community goodwill by proposing demolition of a registered historic structure without so much as indicating that they even have a plan for the space.  If there’s one thing that preservationists (even those “moderate” ones like myself) don’t want to see it’s demolition to create more “shovel-ready” sites or expansive parking lots at the expense of viable, redevelopable buildings.

I also had the honor of sparring a bit with a few folks on Twitter today on the topic.  Some standpoints were flatly untenable and other were valid points for consideration.  But we can’t have a real dialog on the subject until we dispense with the lies and misconceptions and get some real facts.  So let’s break down some of the common arguments.

1. “The Trico building isn’t historic.” – False.  It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  That is the very definition of being a historic place.  There is an application and a review process that is vetted by professionals in the field.  Applications go first to your state Historic Preservation Office, generally with letters of support from your local Board (if there is one) and local officials, and if it gets past them it then goes to the National Parks Service.  If they sign off on it and include it in the Register, congratulations – you are now a “Historic Place.”
2. “The Trico building is ugly.” – Subjective.  Even if it is, that doesn’t affect whether or not it’s worthy of preservation.  See the Third Church of Christ, Scientist in D.C.
3. “It can’t be adapted for use as a modern medical facility.” – False.  First, factory buildings tend to be the easiest to adapt because they’re generally wide open floor plates with high ceilings and only support columns to work around.  Wake Forest University’s Biotech Place [PDF] is a clear example of a similar space adapted for exactly this kind of use.  Is it possible that the structure doesn’t fit what BNMC wants to do with it?  We don’t know.  They haven’t announced any plans or made any such statement.
4. “It’s falling apart.”  – Extent Unknown.  We know there was roof damage back in 2007 when BNMC acquired the building and we know that bricks have fallen off.  So the question then is…  why hasn’t the landlord done anything in the last 5 years to fix it?  Not taking care of your property for the intended purpose of eventually making it more convenient or urgent to knock down is known as “demolition by neglect” and that makes a lot of people quite ornery.
5. “It’s contaminated.” – Unknown.  While some have commented that environmental studies were done early on, the results of those studies haven’t been made public.  Regardless, most types of contamination are fixable, and many will need to be remedied before demolition could take place anyways.
6. “We have too many vacant buildings. It’s better torn down.”  – False.  In the case of Trico, we have a National Register listed building which makes it eligible for up to 40% in redevelopment tax credits.  Saving it preserves a piece of history and part of Buffalo’s character, keeps it out of the landfill, and saves from the need to reconstruct from scratch.
7. “…buildings in Buffalo that sit vacant for years are only “historic” when someone wants to something with them.” – False.  Trico Plant #1 was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 – six years before BNMC acquired the property.  They knew what they were getting, both in status and condition.
8. “Buffalo wouldn’t fight to keep Trico here, but we’ll sue people for the bldg.” – False.  Quite a bit was done to try and keep Trico here actually, but ultimately they packed up and took production to Mexico, like many of the manufacturing jobs in this country have.  And that has no impact on whether or not to allow BNMC to tear down a historic building.
9. “BNMC needs the space to expand.” – Mixed.  The Medical Campus is certainly growing, and that’s fantastic.  But expand how?  If you’re demolishing the Trico plant, what is replacing it?  If there was a viable plan to replace the plant with a new building, that makes a much stronger case for demolition.  But then again, take a look at these two parcels and tell me which makes more sense to reuse and which to build new on?

So where does that leave us?  Well, an application for local landmark designation went before the Preservation Board today, with a public hearing scheduled for March 22nd.  There’s too much visibility on the building now to let a quick demolition permit slip by unnoticed.  You can follow updates on the Save Trico Plant 1 Facebook page.  There are also many questions that remain to be answered, and some that have yet to be asked, but at risk of burning any bridges related to my own preservation project, I’ll leave those cans of worms for some of the other investigative bloggers to open.

Could Trico be torn down?  Yes.  It’s designation on the National Register offers it very little in the way of protection from demolition.  Local landmark status carries heavier weight in that regard.  Could Trico be replaced with a magnificent new facility that would make everyone forget that the “ugly factory” ever existed?  Probably.  But if those were the plans, BNMC would have that plastered all over every available media outlet.  Could we end up tearing down a building – who’s history is tied to an invention used by every person who drives a car, from a company who’s founder’s namesake foundation is the largest philanthropic organization in Buffalo today – with just another parking lot that will remain for the next 5, 10, 20 or more years?  Absolutely.  And that would be a damn shame.

]]> http://punaro.com/index.php/2012/02/derek/basilica-di-santambrogio/feed/ 0 http://punaro.com/index.php/2012/02/derek/into-the-light/ http://punaro.com/index.php/2012/02/derek/into-the-light/#comments Mon, 27 Feb 2012 01:00:23 +0000 Derek http://punaro.com/index.php/?p=2548

I just loved this little interior courtyard in the castle.

#1 – Thank you. [Wikipedia]

The Wikipedia blackout is over — and you have spoken.

More than 162 million people saw our message asking if you could imagine a world without free knowledge. You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. Your voice was loud and strong. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet.

For us, this is not about money. It’s about knowledge. As a community of authors, editors, photographers, and programmers, we invite everyone to share and build upon our work.

Our mission is to empower and engage people to document the sum of all human knowledge, and to make it available to all humanity, in perpetuity. We care passionately about the rights of authors, because we are authors.

SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows. What’s happened in the last 24 hours, though, is extraordinary. The Internet has enabled creativity, knowledge, and innovation to shine, and as Wikipedia went dark, you’ve directed your energy to protecting it.

We’re turning the lights back on. Help us keep them shining brightly.

There’s also a “read more” page to find out more about the milestones of the blackout, and of course about the issue itself.

#2 – Megaupload Taken Down On Piracy Allegations [TechCrunch]

Popular file-hosting site Megaupload, probably known to our readers for a variety of reasons, has been taken down after the FBI charged some of its staff with copyright infringement and “conspiracy to commit racketeering.” Seven people have been charged, and four arrested (in New Zealand), and the site itself appears to be down as authorities around the world closed in on the site’s resources.

The day after the SOPA/PIPA protests, the FBI illustrates why we don’t need those bills by orchestrating an international takedown of a site that was a haven for piracy. The system works, and if you break the law, the law will come and take away all your toys.

#3 – Twitter Is Making A Gigantic Move (And Going To War With A Board Member) [Business Insider]

Twitter is slowly finding a way to curate its own massive fire hose of information.

Twitter has typically been a pure stream of information that’s gone uninterrupted. Thousands of tweets fly across the Internet in a given second — sometimes tens of thousands, depending if there’s a big event.

But just moments ago, Twitter announced it acquired Summify, a service that crunches Twitter and other social media sites and creates a personalized news digest based on that information.

I subscribe to the Summify service – it does a pretty impressive job of curating your social feeds and sending you highlights of things that are of interest to you. This is particularly useful if you’re not continuously plugged in to your networks scanning for the latest news, or if, you know, sleep. This acquisition should be making the future of the Twitterverse interesting to see how the integration works. Hopefully they do a better job than they did maiming Tweetdeck.

#4 – The Wired Q&A: ICANN President Rod Beckstrom on ‘the Biggest Change in DNS Since Dot-Com’ [Wired]

Beginning Wednesday, Jan. 12 — midnight UTC, to be exact — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) starts accepting applications for new, bespoke top level domains (TLDs). This will be the first time website owners (at least governments and businesses) will be able to request their own replacement for .com, .net and .org. Think .facebook, .losangeles and .lolcats.

The number of top level domains was originally restricted to give the internet user some idea of what kind of a site they were going to – .com for commercial, .edu for educational, .org for a nonprofit, etc. Of course, the vast majority of TLDs accessed in the U.S. are .com, which forces some institutions to register multiple so that unsuspecting folks don’t end up at the wrong site (remember that whole whitehouse.com debacle?).

Countries also have their own country-specific TLDs (.jp for Japan, .de for Germany, and the ever-spammy .ru for Russia), and then some companies, especially those URL shorteners, found they could get cute and repurpose, say, Libya’s TLD .ly to create sites like bit.ly, although one of the original domain “artists” was none other than del.icio.us, using the relatively unused TLD for the United States.

So the underlying question is, will all hell break loose now that anyone (with $185,000) can get their own top level domain? Not likely. People don’t rely on the TLD anymore to know where they’re going. In fact, with browser search integration, a lot of people don’t even realize they’re typing “amazon.com” into Google instead of the address bar. Search and social media will drive people to sites, so any new TLDs will just be a new kitschy advertising device.

#5 – Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL [Habitudes for Communicators]

Watch it. Then hang your head in shame at how many of these things we’ve all done.

Steps:

First, you’ll notice an out-of-the-box email references the “Open this task” button, but does not include the link to the SharePoint workflow task. This is fine if the document is a Microsoft Office document and the person approving it is using Office 2010, but there doesn’t work for other circumstances.

To adjust this, we need to open up the site and then workflow in SharePoint Designer. Note that in this case we are modifying the OOTB workflow itself, which will change it for all instances of the site collection. If you want to make a unique instance of this workflow, right click on the workflow and choose “Copy and Modify”.

Click Edit Workflow

Next, click on Approval.

Under “Customization” click Change the behavior of a single task.

 
Under the “When a Task is Pending” section, find the line that says “then Email task notification to Current Task:Assigned To” and click the underlined link.

The Define E-Mail Message window opens. Insert the highlighted text, select the text you wish to make a link, then click the Edit Hyperlink button.

 
In the Address field, click the … button, then click Add or Change Lookup, and choose “Current Task: Approval” as the Data source and “Form_URN” as the Field from source:

Click OK all the way back out of the dialog boxes, then Publish your workflow back to the server.

Start the workflow on a new document and you should get the modified email.

Click the link and it should take you directly to the task page!

It’s important to note that this is not the only location an email is defined. Overdue notices, for example, are defined elsewhere. You may need to make the same modification to multiple places in the workflow.

Enter Lightroom.

So I actually spent a couple hours going through some of Adobe’s online tutorials to get some insight into how to really use the tool.  Very helpful.  I learned all sorts of things I would have never discovered on my own.  Then I set off to adjust a photo of the Terminal that I love, but hated certain aspects of.  Here it is:

Love the tone, hate the noise and the darkness of the Baggage Check arch.  So, I tried out a multitude of Lightroom tweaks and got this:

I could easily fix the perspective distortion, the chromatic aberration and the luminance noise, perk up some of the darker areas, and easily add back in the lens’ vignetting after adjusting the cropping.  Not bad for a first time shot at using Lightroom!

Next up…  transferring it to Photoshop to remove that damn EXIT sign…

My Mom gave me this photo recently, so since I’m not dressing up this year, here’s a blast from my past.  Costume sponsored by Federal Meats.

Here’s how I see it – yes, Buffalo has its problems.  But we’re not the only city that has problems.  We have great people, but we’re not the only city that has great people.  So what really distinguishes Buffalo?  What makes Buffalo Buffalo?  Location.  And History.  In one word – Place.  Our history is instantiated by the buildings we create and the monuments we construct.  Our location is defined not only by geography, but proximity to other population centers.

So what makes Buffalo Buffalo?  We’re located on one of the largest freshwater lakes in the country.  We’re on a heavily trafficked international border and a short enough distance from the largest city in Canada.  And because Buffalo was a major city in the early years of the United States, we have a lot of history and a lot of notable buildings that were created while that history was happening.  Our default action should be to save those buildings whenever possible.

Why?  These buildings are part of the city’s identity.  The more we lose, the less unique we become.  Buffalo needs every advantage it can get to regain it’s place as an burgeoning economic center, and having a strong identity is a major advantage.  Our social, commercial, and industrial heritage should be part of that, because it’s already here, and it is “For Real”.  We don’t need to fabricate an identity, we already have one.  We’re international, we have great natural resources, and we have history.  All we have to do is leverage what we have and build on it.

That’s not saying that there aren’t other problems that need to be fixed, or that preservation alone is going to save Buffalo.  But why not start there?  Historic rehabilitation creates coveted construction and highly skilled craftsman jobs.  Those are actual green jobs, because you’re not sending entire buildings to the landfill and replacing them with the disposable crap that many buildings are made from today.  And this type of preservation is tested, proven, quantifiable economic development.

What we need now is to convince our elected officials that this is the way of our future.  Preservation projects, especially the large-scale ones, require the cooperation of city, county, state, and federal representatives.  In our fractured political climate, this may be the biggest challenge, even moreso than finding the money to complete the projects.  Without their help in setting and dictating the vision, every new project is open for debate and petty bickering, and valuable time is lost.

In one conference session last week being given by a German man responsible for helping to establish Europe’s Industrial Heritage route, “People in Europe no longer question whether preservation is worthwhile, it’s already been proven and is accepted.  The demand to live in places with rich heritage sites exceeds the supply.”  We have the supply here in Buffalo and it’s our responsibility to not squander that.  In other places in the world, things like this are being built:

And the people there aren’t even laughing at the idea. They’re embracing it.  A lot of people came to town last week that see the potential that Buffalo has that a lot of people here refuse to acknowledge.  That’s a Place that they’d like to come back to, and a Place that we should be proud to call home.

Today was the first official day of preschool – no parents!  You can see how concerned Ariella was about this…

Of course she was fine with the whole experience.  And now she can finally tell people that she does something other than gymnastics!

Ok…  one train photo.

Of course, when we got there it was just starting to rain.  By the time I was finished checking in, it was pouring.  The category I drew?  “Rides.”  I didn’t even make it the 500 feet to where the rides started before my sneakers were soaked.  And of course, none of the rides were running.  So I figured if I couldn’t beat the rain, I was going to have to join it and tell the sad story of closed rides due to rain.  So I started by shooting this:

Ariella and Grandpa were walking around in the rain with me (Amanda stayed behind with Cambree inside where it was drier) and I figured that they made a more interesting subject.

The shot I liked best stylistically was this next one, but I shot 3 frames and each one the focus was off.  It’s tough shooting one handed with an umbrella in the other hand!  When I saw it on the computer I knew I couldn’t submit it.

Tried another ride worker shot…

Then we met back up with Amanda and Cambree and I tried a couple variations on the Ariella looking sad because the rides were closed theme.  She wasn’t very cooperative.  I really wanted to get one of these with her holding the umbrella standing all by herself.  Didn’t happen.

We had time to take one more walk through the midway and the rain had stopped.  Ariella was running from one ride to another and Amanda had the idea of putting her in front of the height measuring stick.  I had a bunch of frontal shots, then the runner up shot:

And finally, the big winner:

I was amazed to find out I won not only first place in the “Rides” category, but “Best In Shootout” too!  I was blown away!  I thought it was a decent shot, but it pales in comparison to what I see some of my pro buddies shoot on any given day.  Kudos to those shooters who work with kids on a regular basis.  I don’t know how you keep up with them and get great shots consistently.  I’m also not typically a portrait photographer, but trying to shoot closed rides wasn’t going to work without another focal point to tell a story.

I guess winning is motivation enough to try it again next year!