Yes, Gimenez, tell that to the people who will be employed at minimum wage and can’t afford basic living expenses and the commute to and from work. Vete pa’ la pinga. Thank you for the decades of complete lack of any urban and community planning.
This shit made me mad. Read on if you dare.
Read more “Largest mall in America, worst possible planning.”
Yes, this is me whining about traffic in Miami again, at least somewhat.
To the south of Miami International Airport, there are two roads. There’s a small surface street, Perimeter Road, and a large cluster-f-bomb toll road, 836 / Dolphin Expressway.
Recently 836 switched to open road tolling with quite unaffordable tolls and extra bonus front facing cameras on the toll gantries that photograph the faces of the occupants of a vehicle while dazzling them with a high power strobe (WTF?).
Perimeter Road just remained as it was until about last week, when signs went up declaring it to be used for airport traffic only. Additional signs indicate it’s now part of the airport’s secure area and anyone using the road is consenting to search and seizure of their vehicle or its contents.
What, may I inquire, the Fuck?
Does MDX just really want everyone paying $1.50 and up for the privilege of getting parked up on the 836, or was this the result of some new aviation security directives?
Nothing and everything surprise me here.
I apologize in advance, I tend to get a little politically incorrect when you take something I held dear, grind it to dust, mix it with dirty sewer water from the pipes under the campus Burger King, and shoot it through a Pepsi machine.
Years ago when I was in school I was working for Radiate FM, WRGP-FM 88.1 FM Miami.
We called it Radiate FM, the Radioactive Underground.
As of about the middle of last year it fell under new management, and subesquently, down the proverbial toilet. Staff who had been with the station for years were suddenly fired for merely playing songs the new general manager didn’t like, the conditions under which one could get a show on the station changed in very awful ways, and it generally just lost all its staff and character.
I very much enjoy one former staff member’s review of the new format he posted to Facebook using their emoji feature:
It’s now just “WRGP, FIU Student Radio”, but it’s not there for the students anymore. It’s there for the new general manager and her sorority buddies. That’s about it.
I have no idea if their new transmitter installation is finished or not (whatever the hell is in that room nowadays, it bleeds like hell and I’ve had to replace and shield the hell out of cabling in the next room over to keep a modulation monitor and Arbitron PPM decoder happy!). Either way, they’re on the air, and you can tune in any time and enjoy them becoming progressively less and less enjoyable to listen to.
Back when I worked there, we were reminded by a few engineering consultants that the station’s license including its two translators were worth about $25 million… we tried very hard to ensure that none of the consultants would convey this information up to Mitch Maidique, who had the campus named after his grubbing slimy ass as part of his golden parachute, since he was hellbent on liquidating and lend/leasing every part of the university they didn’t absolutely need to remain in basic operation and keep attracting new students.
Meanwhile we had a pretty damn huge base of loyal listeners who really enjoyed our programming, from South Florida and all around the world via a streaming system I set up. The budget wasn’t there for like, a proper system like Streamguys or whatever, so I just pretty much put it all through Icecast on a Linux box and it allowed as many people to stream as would fit over the pipe the university gave us. We won the Miami New Times award for best radio station for several years, beating out WVUM, which is, well, WVUM. (Stay tuned for my thoughts on WVUM’s programming some time, it’s kinda… silly…)
Several times it came up that there was some group that really wanted the license for a while to convert WRGP into an NPR affiliate (you know, in addition to WLRN-FM just across town?) and remove all the student participation and programming… The school thankfully said “not for sale… for now.”
Hell, the building that contained Radiate’s studios, classroom space, the university bookstore, and most of the student life offices almost got converted into a shopping mall on several occasions.
And we held out for this?
Their new logo isn’t even worth posting, it’s just a vaguely soundwave like line behind the letters “WRGP”. Yawn.
I’m not totally sure how Radiate could return to its former glory now, as the new management and media board worked together closely to ensure that only current staff members, carefully handpicked by the new management, can provide any input to the media board on the station’s image and charter… maybe someday when they all graduate, there will be an opening for someone who actually knows how to run a radio station. Until then, sit back and laugh at those fools gradually starting to gravitate towards an oh so hot early 2000s mallcore sound on 88.1 WRGP-FM Homestead, 95.3 W237CP Miami, 96.9 W245BF North Miami Beach……..
Dear unknown scrap rat: you manage somehow to have the least scary truck in the whole city right now. None of the cargo is secured in any way, but it’s not overflowing, and the containment structure is actually attached to the truck!
Whoever you are, you set a far better example….
Let me tell you guys about a magical time. The year was 2000, and we used this stuff called “paper”. There were no major delays at the polls. Upon arriving you would go into a short line based on the first letter of your last name; this was probably not even necessary at smaller precincts. Each line led to a poll worker with a book of authorized voters. They’d check your ID and give you a small tear out piece from the printout which you took to the next station to get your ballot. 
The ballot was a punch card; you’d take this to an ES&S Votomatic carrell which had a manual card punch with an attached stylus and a flip book that looked like the flip book inside a jukebox that tells you what songs are in there (let’s date myself even farther here). Punching the stylus through the hole caused it to go through the semi-prepunched “chad” in the appropriate position on the ballot and through a layer of rubber flaps. If punched fully, the chad should have detatched fully, or partially and gotten caught in the rubber flaps so removing the ballot will fully tear it away. If you messed up and punched the wrong hole, you took the ballot to a replacement station, handed it in and got a fresh one (you had to start over though). You then took the card out, checked it for correct punching, took it to the last station and handed it in. The whole process took MAAAAAYBE ten minutes from start to getting your “I Voted” sticker and walking out the door. Read more “Why do we wait in line at the polls?”
It should come as no surprise to anyone who lives, travels, or works here in Miami-Dade County that it has some of the worst traffic anywhere in the civilized world. As any truly spirited post describing Miami traffic should, this contains copious profanity and pseudo-phallic imagery. You’ve been warned. For a family friendly multimedia version of my commentary, enjoy der aktiv-schaum. (Flash support required ’cause I’m oldschool) Read more “Cockplugged! Or, a holiday salute to Miami traffic. Pingas.”
Greetings! I am FAILTUNER! Enjoy my field of nightmares!
I saw two AM towers I’d never noticed before while driving away from the site WDNA-FM is on after fixing a major case of explosive Z-Bola (more on that in another post). I’d never seen them lit before despite them having beacons at the tops? I drove in for a closer look and whooooa brother is there ever a mess to be found here. This is a good example of bad broadcast engineering and maintenance practices. FOUL!!!
Read more “WOIR-AM… There are no words”
…You read that right, the module has an ancient TYPO on it.
Today I was at the Miami-Dade County Store, and somewhere in the shelves of weird old broken network hardware and PCs that had been picked clean by creepy Jamaican exporters, this one bronze colored anodized aluminum mystery box peeked out at me. The thing just had a strange energy about it, I couldn’t really explain it.
This box has silently served hundreds of thousands of people on their way to work, to play, in good times and bad. But what is it? And what’s with the typo?
Read more “The Westinghouse Prog Stom Ass’y, or Lost Arts in Electronics”
As the Miami-Dade County election results trickle in, I noticed an interesting feature to the software used to display them on the website: if you click on Precincts Reporting, it will neatly give you a color map of which precincts voted towards that particular issue.
On a side note, Miami-Dade County is known for having really weird cultural boundaries for no particularly good reason. For an idea of just how strong this effect is, check out Culture Mapped and the Racial Dot Map (kinda coarser data, but you can see the sharp differences between black/white/Hispanic).
Here’s the result of just overlaying two of them: the race for state governor, and Amendment 2 on allowing medical use of marijuana.
Note how closely they correlate.
Also note that I did not observe the logical fourth condition shown ANYWHERE – a precinct preferring Charlie Crist but not medical use of marijuana.
The few bright green precincts left appear to be the results of missing data (I did this based mostly on the early voting+absentee ballot data!) and the tan areas are where the medical marijuana issue tied.
Oh yeah, as for why I call him Scottdemort, well, it was better than my other name for him: Dicksnot.
I’M SO DAMN POLITICAL TONIGHT.
Yeah, so I don’t like ‘urban lifestyle centers’ or Yet Another Fucking Urban Lifestyle Center – YAFULC – but it’s actually one step up from what is far more common out in the suburban sprawl… Box Store HELL!!!
Above: Tropicaire Shopping Center, a Box Store Hell constructed on the grounds of the former Tropicaire flea market and drive-in cinema, and nearly cutting off a block of apartments from the outside world.
Box Store Hell is yet another example of complete and total failure in urban planning, coupled with a myopic belief that everyone drives a car and never goes anywhere without it.
I guess you could really say the same thing about the box store in general. Typically, it’s the equivalent of a poorly laid out department store, surrounded by parking lot. Usually a MASSIVE expanse of parking lot separates it from the road.
Back in the early 1990s, the mini-mall or strip mall began to disappear as box stores took over where other things had been. The original phrase for a strip mall filled with box stores was “power strip”. It was a number of box stores that had a common walkway in front, sometimes covered. The box store hell, though, is a new kind of awful.
Owing to an obsession in the retail industry for strictly planogrammed stores, many retail chains now insist upon making the very building their store is built into a part of the strict planogram. You may have already noticed this with Walgreens, CVS, Target, and Wal-Mart stores. They all have to be built exactly the same, right down to how the entrances and exits are positioned. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really fit well when all the stores are located together in a ‘power strip’, so the buildings are now just separately dribbled across a vast parking lot. Thus, the Box Store Hell was born and glommed up every bit of commercial zoned landscape it could get its hands on.
Your typical Box Store Hell has a massive parking lot which usually floods in seconds when it rains. Sometimes the parking lot is large enough (especially in the case of Walmart stores) that it required its own stormwater treatment system and underground detention pond be installed. The urban heat island effect is so strong on some of these parking lots that a plastic shopping bag cast into the wind will rise endlessly out of sight, finally disappearing several hundred feet into the air from the thermal updraft.
The parking lot will be a sea of randomly strewn shopping carts, people peeling in and out of parking spaces in sport utility vehicles and minivans without looking first, and a baroque arrangement of nonsensical reserved parking and tow-away zones. There are usually a few spotters for towing companies nearby lurking, watching for you to park in the wrong zone, sometimes even “helpfully” directing you to do so.
Each store has its own shopping carts. You will not be allowed to use the same shopping cart between more than one store, of course; you are expected to pull up to Box Store Hell in your car, visit exactly ONE store, then leave. What, you thought this was supposed to be CONVENIENT?
A second generation of Box Store Hell appeared in some urban centers; it’s basically vertical Box Store Hell. A parking garage is attached and allows access easily(?) to the stores via massive elevators sized to accomodate shopping carts.
These are the goofiest pieces of shit you will ever encounter. Some of them have free parking, but will hold you hostage in a massive line when you’re trying to exit. The line is actually the tail end of a line for valet parking. Others have a pay garage that offers free or discounted parking with validation from one of the box stores in the stack, but if you stay too long you’ll probably be paying a hell of a lot to get out of there. At Midtown Miami, for instance, it’s $30 the moment you hit three hours. Most of these do have pedestrian access though, as opposed to forcing pedestrians to walk through a quarter mile of blindly launched SUVs to get to the stores.
The really curious thing about Box Store Hell happens when a retailer decides to close one of their locations that’s set in one. The entire building will usually be left to rot for a few years, then eventually demolished, because it doesn’t fit the new potential tenant’s planogram. Sometimes it’ll just be knocked down and turned into more parking lot area. There’s just almost no market for a lot and building that big; it’s a total waste.
The most recent Box Store Hell project planned down here in Miami-Dade County is actually seeking to destroy an area of tropical hardwood hammock containing endangered plant species. What’s really more important, yet another Walmart, or one of the last areas of undisturbed tropical hardwood hammock? Seriously? Bueller?