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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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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I awoke this morning to find that Renesys, the company I work for, is featured in a business brief on the front page of the Business section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. They probably have no idea that anyone from Renesys lives and works in Pittsburgh.
The coverage is due to the what I [...]

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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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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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Even our would-be-leader, Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is getting into the Pittsburgh spirit.  In a NY Times article about Obama traveling the nation Obama opines:
“I’ve been struck by how many beautiful places there are in the country that you don’t necessarily think of as beautiful. Pittsburgh, for example, is a really handsome town with the [...]

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Just as with the Sonya Labs posting about Pittsburgh that I wrote about yesterday, a significant number of friends, family and colleagues pointed out this story about Pittsburgh in the NY Times over the weekend.  The feature has some nice praise for Pittsburgh:
“[T]his city of 89 distinct neighborhoods is a cool and — dare I [...]

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