Sounds like Carlsbad.

If it were anywhere near the beach, that house would sell within a few hours of being listed for well over asking price.

Detroit seems to be finally "bouncing back" from the precipice.. I remember a few years ago Johnny Knoxville hosted a documentary about Detroit, and the amazing opportunities and "scene" that could be found among the ruins, and for a while I considered moving there. Something about living in The Motor City, and the "bare knuckles"/urban pioneer vibe of the place really spoke to me, but it all seemed so wildly speculative at that time that I stayed on the sidelines. I'd have loved to grab a big old building downtown and build it out with a dope-ass loft upstairs and my shop downstairs. Back then you could buy huge buildings for almost nothing, and I sort of regret not doing it.

Our new Downtown Investment Authority here in Jacksonville is looking for a CEO and just approved the hire of a guy named Aundra Wallace, who is currently the Executive Director of the Detroit Land Bank, on the hopes that he can help turn around our largely abandoned Downtown. (I live in a loft downtown, and it's absolutely a ghost-town after 5 pm and on the weekends when the remaining office workers all go back to the burbs... Like, we skateboard down the middle of Bay St, a five lane thoroughfare, and you won't see a car in sight.. It's spooky.. )

Any of you Detroit folks have any insights on this Wallace guy? He's being touted as The Answer here in Jax.

Never heard of a Wallace.

Detroit has a few problems to fix still. Downtown is ready to bounce back at any moment. But there are a few things holding it back. Instead of talking about the good it's easier to talk about the bad. I'll start out by saying that Detroit has been run by the blue since the 70s. Coleman Young really screwed the city...

To touch on a few things that are holding Detroit back. Corruption. For the most part, that's mostly all taken care of with king Kilpatrick gone. But we still have our selfish foolish ignorant city council. For example we have Bell Isle that is pretty much filled with trash, abandoned busted shitty buildings and pretty much nothing. (Detroit GP was just last weekend there) Other than that, it's just a plot of grass with some baseball fields, and a big paved lot with some auto-x on it sometimes. Anyway, it was brought up to turn the park over to the state. (probably end up charging a few bucks to get on it. which is no big deal to me all state parks you pay to get into) Well our idiot city council shot it down.That's one simple small example. Until they get bent the city won't move forward. Time and time again you hear stories about how the city gets hundreds of thousands of federal money to tear down buildings and houses that gets unused. The last big lump of money they got they had to give back...

Problem #2. The city is simply just to damn big. As far as land area goes it's one of the biggest cities in the country (if not the biggest). Not much more needs to be said about that.
Problem #3. The residents. It goes back to what i first said about Coleman Young and the blue. To sum it up: fast food workers demand $15 hr/ wage I went to school graduated and don't make $15 an hour. Residents feel they're owed something but don't want to work for it. Not to mention they'll completely destroy the city they live in without regard to consequences. You and i know that if we rob and torch a building, then businesses move away. They don't. I always say "you can't help those that won't help themselves".

That's just a small bit of it. I could go on, but i feel this post is useless enough already.

I do want to start a my business and get a building in Detroit. Somewhere around the midtown area.

Excuse grammatical errors, i'm drinking already.

I really want to buy this and then swap in a TDI.

1984 VW Scirocco

I've always had a soft spot for Sciroccos but I have vowed to avoid owning and driving a FWD vehicle (other than whatever my wife owns at the time). I would definitely respect a TDI swap, though. And you would have to leave it brown.

I really don't mind FWD for a daily driver. Track car, weekend car, no, but for a reasonably fun lightweight car for going to work? Sure. I'd absolutely daily that Scirocco or a Saab Sonett III.

Sadly, preliminary research indicates that while cross-generation VW engine swaps are certainly doable, they are less than straightforward. The hottest engine that you might expect to just drop-in with no fuss would be the A1 platform 1.8l 16v...which was offered in the later year Sciroccos, so you're not really cranking the power up to anything super fun.

Talking about doing engine swaps on what's suppose to be a daily? That's about just as bad as racing/building the only car you have.

The engine in that car is toast -- nobody will be daily driving it at all unless they swap something else in or rebuilt it.

A question about telephony, generally:
 

Assuming that you have a traditional land-line in your house (a copper pair provided by the phone company which supplies POTS), does the concept of "local" vs. "long-distance" calling still exist?

I have no idea why I'm curious about this all of a sudden. It's been nearly a decade since I've had a conventional phone line. At that time, local phone service was provided by your local phone company and billed at a flat rate, whereas long-distance was provided generally as a separate service package, often by a third-party, and billed similarly to cell-phone service, typically at a flat rate for up to X number of minutes, with an additional per-minute fee.

The last phone line I had (c. 2003-04) didn't have the ability to make long-distance calls at all, as I elected not to have a long-distance provider assigned to it. I used that line only for modem calls to a local ISP, as I had moved into an area not yet serviced by high-speed internet access.


I was just wondering whether this concept still exists.

Yes it still exists.

Technically "long distance" is still anything that isn't hitting your local exchange. I'm not sure how it works for cell phone numbering, but for land lines:


So any number that isn't '555-something' is long distance.

I do think it's funny that my local cable company wants to charge me $15/month for something I can get for $1.5/month and ~$.015/minute.

Maybe in the 1940s.

During the era with which I am familiar (1960s-1990s), multiple exchanges are often hosted within a single CO, and it's quite common for multiple COs (usually operated by a common LEC) to be chained together into a single LSA which is smaller than a LATA, but larger than a single town.

Commonly, there is overlap in the assignment of LSAs, such that a call from exchange A to exchange B is "local", and a call from exchange B to exchange C is "local", however a call from exchange A to exchange C is billed as either long distance or "local toll" (eg: non-IXC, but greater than the ZUM-defined flat-rate area.)


Were it otherwise, cities with more than 9,9xx subscribers (the maximum number of subscribers serviceable by a single exchange) would be faced with the problem of being unable to make a "local" call from one end of town to the other.




During the BBS era, we had a trick for exploiting this system to increase the "local" area of a small board. Say the BBS was located in exchange A, but there was a large population in exchange C which wished to access it. A subscriber in exchange B would have a phone line installed in his house or place of business, with the call-forwarding option enabled. He would then perma-forward the line to the BBS's local number in exchange A (or the top level of its hunt group, if it was a larger BBS). Callers in exchange C could then make a local call to exchange B, which would automatically ring the BBS in exchange A, all without incurring any toll changes.



I just just curious as to whether the telco's billing practices had caught up with present-day technology, given that circuit-switched trunks are pretty much totally obsolete, and thus, long-distance capacity is no longer a scare resource.

Yeah, probably. My CompSci teacher is both a VoIP expert and a history buff, so what I know of telephony is either 1930s or earlier (magneto telephones) or 2000 or later.

I'm sure they'll be right on that as soon as they have some competition, otherwise they have no reason to.

The introduction and pairing of the 4XB (sector tandem) and 5XB (subscriber) switches changed a lot of things, and made crossbar / DDD pretty much universally accessible.



That's what confuses me.

There was actually competition in the LEC arena during the 1980s and 90s, though it was limited mostly to larger markets (hanging copper is not cheap.) And in the decades since, the so-called CLECs have mostly become consolidated.

On the other hand, traditional loop service now faces competition from sources which would have been unimaginable during the early CLEC era.

Today, you have "telephone" service being offered by the cable company, as well as by carrier-agnostic VoIP firms such as Vonage and Skype. You also have the wireless (cell) companies, which are increasingly convincing consumers to transition to wireless as their primary phone.

To the best of my knowledge, all of the above make no distinction between "local" and "toll" service. All calling is simply flat-rate, and, increasingly, unlimited.


What I don't know is whether the LEC/IXC division continues to be imposed by regulatory fiat, or if it's just the result of stupidity on the part of the individual RBOCs.

I have an "all-in-one" package from the local cable provider. Phone, internet, cable TV.

Long distance is free and unlimited, except for international calls.

Back in the early '80's when I was in school I worked part time doing telephone surveys with AT&T business customers about how they wanted to buy long-distance and other network services. This was just post-divestiture, AT&T had just been broken up, lost the Regional Bell Operating Companies and was faced with competition for the first time in it's life, and frankly, they didn't know *what* to do. So they formed this "independent" research group (TRAC - the Telephone Research and Analysis Center; Ma Bell loved her acronyms) which was staffed by contract employees so they could claim to be unaffiliated with any specific carrier. (We were in a beautiful AT&T campus, the "bosses" were all AT&T employees; it was in no way "independent"..)

Anyway, the metric by which we were evaluated was how many "completes", i.e. completed surveys you were able to get; if the guy bailed out before the end it was worthless. The problem was that it was all script-driven, with additional sub-scripts being triggered by affirmative responses, but really poorly integrated, so it would give repetitive questions in each sub-script. Like, you'd ask how much they spend in total on telephony, the guy would answer, you'd ask if they have a toll-free number, and if they said yes it would launch that script, and of course the first question on *that* script was "How much do you spend in total on Telephony?".. And so on. If the poor bastard used anything at all we'd end up asking the same dumb questions over and over, and would go on for 15-20+ minutes. For a survey, and a poorly written one at that, with business decision-makers, in the middle of their busy workday.

Worst job I've ever had. I did it for a year or so, because it was an idea college student gig with flexible hours, but finally walked out in the middle of a shift and never went back again. It just sucked the fun out of life, and ain't nobody got time for that.

It was definitely interesting to have been there at that time in their history though; those poor bastards were pretty freaked out and really just winging it in terms of what they'd sell, how they'd sell it and what it was worth.

That sounds like it would have really sucked.

And I'm surprised that a company such as AT&T, with all of its vast experience in creating well-refined documentation and procedures, would have produced such a half-assed set of procedures for a direct customer-facing application.

For instance, here is one of my all-time favorite boring corporate documents. Produced by Bell in 1952, it is the definitive treatise on sweeping the floor:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1370898634

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1370898634

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1370898634





It is interesting to look back at the sheer volume of shit that they threw at the wall back then, and how little of it actually stuck.

A lot of other businesses were in the same boat, though. For example:

At some point during the 1980s, UPS came up with a brilliant idea for a new class of service which would put them head-and-shoulders above FedEx and the USPS in terms of urgent document delivery. Essentially, decided to equip each customer service counter with a system consisting of a PC, a scanner, and a laser printer. The machines were all linked back to a server at the home office, by a gnarly combination of POTS modems and various data classes of data service. The system worked thusly:

A customer in New York wishes to send a document to a recipient in LA. The customer would bring said document to their nearest service counter (or schedule an AM pickup by courier), whereupon the document would be scanned into the computer and transmitted to the server. The document would then be retransmitted to the UPS office in LA nearest to the recipient, where it would be printed, stuck into a UPS envelope, and placed onto a truck for same-day delivery.

The only problem with the idea was that nobody at UPS noticed that the FAX machine had recently been invented.

As a result, large numbers of dark-brown laser printers started becoming available on the secondary market in the early 90s. We bought one at a radio station I was working at c. 1993 or so. I can't remember exactly who made it, but I do remember that it did NOT use a standard interface such as Centronix or SCSI. (Yes, SCSI used to be a common interface for printers.) It came with a full-length ISA expansion card that it connected to. And although the original system ran on some variant of (x)NIX, we managed to track down a driver for Windows 3.1.


By contrast, I don't recall there being much of a use for surplus Picturephone / VideoPhone terminals.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1370898338

we here in northern virginia have 10 digit dialing mandatory for same-area-code calls. I didn't have this in california and it screwed me up the first time I failed to place a call here.

Huh. I'm not sure when it was introduced, but we have had mandatory 10 digit dialing in the 732 LATA (San Diego metro area codes 442 / 619 / 760 / 858) for several years.

10 digit dialing here in Houston since 99. To me, its something that I've grown up with. I forgot other areas don't have this!

I had to google it to find out when we actually made the switch. Here's an article about ISPs freaking out about back in the day of captain 56 gay.

http://lubbockonline.com/stories/011...16990008.shtml