Tonight I returned home from school around 6pm to get an ominous note tucked in my door from Roscoe Management, the company that manages my gentrifying apartment building in East Austin. According to the note, there have been “recent reports of bedbug activity,” and while that might suggest a nice game of duck-duck-goose or perhaps a slam poetry reading, apparently these bedbugs travel from foreign lands to feast on American blood. The note gave me a list of instructions to complete by 10 AM Friday. Below are a few of these instructions.
While this clearly is a lot of work to do in forty hours or less, I find the last directive egregiously stupid. I don’t think there are more than eight square feet of countertop space in my tiny apartment between the vanity and the kitchen. They’re basically expecting tenants to pile all of their clothing and stray possessions in a poorly plumbed bathtub.
The note also says “should you choose to ignore the instructions attached with the this letter, we will consider your inaction to be a violation of the lease.” Considering the short notice given to tenants, I wonder if this threat of eviction is evidence of gentrification of the ugliest kind. Is Roscoe Properties using the cover of a bedbug epidemic to drive out longtime tenants? The building changed hands earlier this year, and they’ve been raising rent. Now they’re expecting tenants to turn their lives upside-down in a short time span, while making nearly physically impossible requests.
Roscoe Properties has made some improvements to the building like painting the siding and resurfacing the lot, while also making some costly mistakes like transplanting large oak trees on the eve of summer. I’ve resented paying higher rent to watch tree after tree die in the hot Texas sun. It’s hard to believe that the short notice they’ve given tenants – accompanied by the threat of eviction – isn’t part of an overall gentrification strategy by Roscoe Properties.
1 Comment Techdirt has a post ridiculing a service that adds a social-networking component to taking a cab to the airport. I agree that this service is probably “niche within niche” – it’s unlikely to find someone with similar interests who’s going from your neighborhood to the airport at around the same time. While TechDirt takes a dim view of adding social networking to everything, I do think there are some services that could benefit from a little Web 2.0 mojo.
The UT library system – like many other university libraries – gives graduate students and faculty semester loans for books. Grad students can hang onto books a semester or longer (with online renewals) until another student recalls the book. Then the borrower has two weeks to return the book. I’m sure my department is not atypical when our grad student listserv propogates “who recalled my book” messages, where students try to coordinate sharing the book. It’s unfortunate the library doesn’t acknowledge this fact of grad student life, but I think this is an opportunity for a Web 2.0 startup. Here’s the pitch:
Forget Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut, Recallr will match people on what really matters, the books you want from the library. When you recall a book, the borrower gets a link to your Recallr profile and the option to contact you in hopes of learning, levity, and love. How else will you meet that special someone that shares your obsession with post-Marxist analyses of 80s console games or psychoanalytic readings of gender roles on “The Greatest American Hero”?
Obviously, I’m being a bit silly, but it would be nice if the general libraries could integrate some social networking features and perhaps tagging in the library catalog. I suspect many universities would be reluctant to develop a formal relationship with Facebook, but they seem to be the outfit that could develop this kind of service for schools.
1 Comment The MacAppADay project will be giving away 5000 copies of OS X software each day in December. I’m not sure what the motive is behind the project, except perhaps to raise the profile of various shareware projects, but it can’t hurt to try out some new software. I imagine they users will hit the 5K limit early, so they’re offering bloggers to learn what software will be offered 12 hours before the unwashed masses if bloggers write a post about the project. I’m doing just that.
1 Comment It’s been several days since I’ve posted something to the blog, so I thought I would point you to the t-shirt I just ordered online. For a few months I’ve been brewing an obsession with the Apple ][e I had as a child, so, when I spotted that shirt for a mere ten dollars, I didn’t think too hard before I hit “add to cart.”
It’s worth noting that I think this is the first time that I’ve bought something I saw advertised online. I saw an ad on Austinist advertising local design studio Sparrowhead’s ten dollar t-shirt sale, and I thought it was time to pick up a new “cool” t-shirt, so I followed the ad to the site. It does seem like online advertising has improved in the past eighteen months or so. Certainly Google’s AdWords has matured to the point where it delivers ads appropriate to the content it accompanies, but I also think that bloggers and advertisers have figured out how and what to advertise on blogs. Hopefully, online advertising won’t get too good, or I’ll break my budget whenever I go online.
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