Monthly Archive for February, 2008

Study: Grocery Store and Home for Martha Jeff.

Published by Waldo Jaquith on February 28, 2008 in Development. 49 Comments

A study proposes that the best use of the Martha Jefferson Hospital, once vacated, would be a grocery store and a retirement home, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. They’ve got thirteen acres they’re looking to sell once they move to their Pantops location in 2012. It had been thought that the building could be appropriate for a hotel or conference center, but the study shows that those things just don’t make sense. Martha Jefferson assures people that they’re not going to sell to the highest bidder, but find a buyer whose plans are right for the area. Martha Jefferson sponsored the study.

The hospital announced the move in 2001, but has taken pains to make sure that their departure doesn’t make the neighborhood hate them. The whole area grew up around the hospital since its 1903 founding, so this transition is going to be tricky.

Revisiting Blogads

Published by Waldo Jaquith on February 28, 2008 in Site News. 22 Comments

I decided to start running Blogads on cvillenews.com over two years ago, and classified it as an “experiment.” That’s still how I think of it, but it’s probably time to revisit the decision so I can decide if they’re worthwhile or not. From my perspective, they’re useful. I turn down all of the ads that advertise things that I don’t think would be of interest to some cvillenews.com readers, which is 20-30% of those ads that are submitted. The prices are about as cheap as they can be made on Blogads, and all of the money that I make off of ’em go to local charities. (Legal Aid got the last payout.)

What do you think? Are they a useless distraction? Or are they relevant enough to you that they’re worth keeping?

Dredging Reservoir + Extending CHO = Savings?

Published by Waldo Jaquith on February 28, 2008 in Development and Weather. 28 Comments

Comedian Brian Regan has a bit in his routine that I particularly like:

You see weird things driving… I’ve never understood log trucks. Sometimes you’ll be out on the highway, you see two big giant trucks loaded up with logs, and they pass each other on the highway… I don’t understand that. I mean, if they need logs over there… and they need ’em over there, you’d think a phone call would save ’em a whole lot of trouble.

In this week’s Hook, Lisa Provence explores a similar scenario: dredging the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir and using the soil to extend the CHO runway. It’ll cost an enormous amount of money to have the dredged silt hauled away and put somewhere, and the airport is looking at spending $15M to buy the soil to extend their runway. Supporters of increasing our water supply by dredging the reservoir (as opposed to the planned Ragged Mountain/South Fork pipeline approach) figure this is something well worth looking at doing to save money all around. I’m not equipped to say whether or not this is a good idea, but I certainly love this kind of thinking.

How Our Paper Is Recycled

Published by Waldo Jaquith on February 27, 2008 in General News. 5 Comments

Speaking of recycling, Scott Weaver surveys the state of C’ville paper use and recycling in the current C-Ville Weekly. Despite being in the thick of the electronic age, the amount of paper being used continues to climb. Though, interestingly, the amount of newspaper being processed by the RSWA is actually dropping.

I chalk it up to old folks (as does Weaver). I bought a laser printer a year and a half ago and I haven’t even burned through the demo cartridge that came with it. It’s been out of paper for two months, but I haven’t bothered to buy paper.

X Lounge Spams Thousands of UVa Staff

Published by Waldo Jaquith on February 27, 2008 in Law and Justice and UVa. 31 Comments

In one of the stupidest moves I’ve seen a local business make in a long time, the X Lounge blanketed UVa with spam today, apparently sending thousands of e-mails to UVa employees. The 7.1kb message appeared to originate from The Event Company, who shares an address with the downtown restaurant. The e-mail didn’t even make a gesture at compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act, the federal law that makes precisely this sort of thing illegal. It appears that all e-mail addresses were harvested from UVa’s online staff phone book, which is maintained for the convenience of employees. I received the e-mail via a UVa address that I do not use for anything. I don’t give it out, I don’t send e-mail under it, and the only place it’s listed anywhere is in that UVa LDAP directory.

The X Lounge can expect a pretty stiff upbraiding from UVa’s network administrators tomorrow. If they’re lucky, they may get off with reimbursing the university for their bandwidth costs. But if they catch the UVa postmaster on a bad day — and with the number of complaints bound to roll in, it may be a bad day tomorrow, indeed — they may find themselves on the wrong end of a formal complaint to to the Federal Trade Commission.

Writing a script to dig through UVa’s staff directory and then sending e-mail to every one of them is both illegal and a really, really bad idea. It takes a special kind of stupid not to know that.

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