subscribe to this page
Manhattan Up Close
The Charming Gadfly Who Saved the High Line
By JOHN FREEMAN GILL
FOR all the giddiness surrounding the transformation of the High Line, the city's favorite elevated railway, into a linear park running from the meatpacking district to Hell's Kitchen, nearly one-third of it remains in danger of being torn down. The stretch between 30th and 34th Streets, where the High Line loops gracefully around parts of the railyards between 10th and 12th Avenues, is shaping up as the last battleground for the innovative project.
...
For Mr. Obletz, the railyards west of Penn Station were not a hotly contested development opportunity, but literally his backyard. Beginning in the late 1970s, when the western fringe of Hell's Kitchen was such a forbidding wasteland after dark that cabbies would not take riders there, Mr. Obletz lived in the railyards in a formerly derelict concrete-block railroad building near 30th Street and 11th Avenue. Next door, on a spur of track, he kept two elegantly appointed antique rail cars he had obsessively restored.
A train buff's train buff, Mr. Obletz worked as a real estate consultant for the transit authority and gave elaborate dinner parties in his gleaming, 68-ton Pullman dining car. Places were set with New York Central Railroad china and flatware, with the host sometimes attired in a blue velvet smoking jacket and saddle shoes.
"He was an absolute charmer," said the playwright Paul Rudnick, who along with other creative types like the choreographer Tommy Tune was a guest. "It was such a treat to visit him because you felt you were leaving New York, and in a sense planet Earth. You'd entered Train Land."
Mr. Obletz's rail cars sat a stone's throw from a long, rusting overhead structure. One day he climbed a metal staircase and stepped with astonishment onto what he later learned was the defunct 1934 freight railway known as the High Line.
"It was a terra incognita up there," Mr. Obletz told a New York Times reporter for a 1984 article. "Unrestricted space. Unimaginable tranquillity."
It isn't surprising Pennsylvania wants to offload its shabby 66-year-old turnpike. What is shocking, though, is that nearly 50 firms, including a few of Wall Street's finest, should want to lease the highway. True, not all will end up bidding. But this is a sure sign that the infrastructure frenzy, which has been going strong in Europe over the past couple of years, has spread to America.
...
From the website:
Featuring a high level of automation, advanced monitoring capabilities, and flexible processing options, it's the ideal solution for university-wide lecture capture, publication and management. For lecturers, the unobtrusive operation of Lectopia makes it a highly appealing learning technology. For students, 24/7 access to recordings means greater access to lecture materials for revision and concept review.
Produced at the University of Western Australia.
Good quick description of serverless backup. From the website:
Serverless backup over SANs requires three major components:
- The backup application itself
- The Extended SCSI Copy Command standard
- A protocol-aware, intelligent SAN appliance that can recognize protocols from many heterogeneous systems and transmit data at high speeds to the tape and DLT libraries.
With serverless backup, the data flows across the SAN directly from the disk drive to the tape device, with no data moving through the server. The enterprise servers only need to host the backup application, and the backup application determines what needs to be backed up and sends the command to a "copy agent" embedded in an intelligent SAN appliance. The intelligent SAN appliance detects the source and destination parameters, retrieves the data from the storage devices, writes it to the tape or DLT libraries, and reports completion (or status) back to the backup application.
The enterprise-class Open Source LDAP server for Linux. It is hardened by real-world use, is full-featured, supports multi-master replication, and already handles many of the largest LDAP deployments in the world. The Fedora Directory Server can be downloaded for free and set up in less than an hour using the graphical console.
Includes integration with active directory.