Rust Valley

With a massively underdeveloped sense of irony, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette is unintentionally running a multi-week parody of the local climate. Last week, you may recall, they noted that the Business section contained obituaries.
This week, it is the lottery that the business section contains.  This may reflect an ill-founded hope by the local business [...]

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I am more clever than I thought I was.  Apparently, I got away from the police not once, but twice:

A man who police said stole a car and led officers on a chase that prompted them to evacuate a Wal-Mart store has been caught after spending the night at the home of an acquaintance. Man [...]

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I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone in the Walmart in Phoenix, Arizona who had to be evacuated when I tried to get away from the Cops. The whole thing started when I took off while they were trying to get me on a warrant. I hid under the bed [...]

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Yesterday I was walking Agatha (aged 4 years) to school, as I do most mornings. She asked me what day of the week it was. She’s getting curious about time and days of the week and the patterns of life that go along with those. So I replied that it was Tuesday [...]

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Hurricane Ike did more than knock out power to 130,000 people in and around Pittsburgh. It is shaping up to be the biggest power outage in 5 years, when power blackouts affected Internet-connectivity (and electricity, obviously) from Ohio and Ontario to the Eastern seaboard. This is all according to an excellent writeup on [...]

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about a fantastically clever housewarming party that my partner Beth and I threw when we moved to Pittsburgh. That post remains one of the most popular on the site.
Recently, we were invited (well, “invited” is a stretch—more on that in a minute) to another very clever party. [...]

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[This is neither about Pittsburgh nor about technology, but it's a Friday night so cut me some slack.]
I love the Olympics.  I’m one of those people who normally doesn’t care at all about sports (tough to live in Pittsburgh without caring about sports, I’m learning) but I love the sports that you can see at [...]

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Pittsburgh is great. People here are friendly, there are tons of things to do, it’s affordable, and so on. I’ve said it all before here. But one thing Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania does not have is low taxes.
We moved here from New Hampshire, the state with the second lowest per-capita tax burden in the [...]

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Last weekend we had a housewarming party in Pittsburgh.  We invited everyone we knew (and several people we didn’t) to help us figure this town out.  Our guests were incredibly generous with their time and expertise. The suggestions range from where to eat, to the best places to take your kids. There are recommendations for [...]

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Pittsburgh is on a Public Relations Bonanza. The New York Times published an extremely positive piece about Pittsburgh (that I commented on previously. Now  USA today has published two articles about Pittsburgh in the past week alone. Whoever the city hired to do PR for this summer and the ongoing Pittsburgh 250 celebration is [...]

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