Josh Flynn

While I had done a lot of the smaller seperate components included in this project, overall it was a valuable learning experience and really challenged me in a lot of ways. The obvious things that I am sure everybody feels is that we all needed to manage our time better, and that getting going in the beginning and finding interesting stories were the hardest things.

Mosaic on the side of Chameleon Cafe

Being that I set up my own domain for the project, there were some obstacles in the initial stages of that, but once I got everything set up and installed Wordpress, it was very easy for me to make changes and update everything. I really like the blogs actually, it forces you to stay engaged in the project and gives people who are interested something to read while the final project is still being assembled.

One of the obstacles that I feel is unavoidable is being ignored due to lack of credentials. Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of people that were happy to talk to me and take time out of their day to help me out with this project. I just find it a bit hard to feel confident in asking people to give up valuable time to help with something for a class. One thing that was good about this though is it actually is published online for people to see. I have been connecting with a lot of people in the Lauraville community as well as other Baltimoreans that really seem to like what I have put together.

Overall, I think the package turned out really good. I am glad I decided to go with the Lauraville stories rather than the hiking trails, and especially since I live in Lauraville, I have learned a lot about my neighborhood and the small business that connect us and keep the area growing. It has been an interesting ride and I am happy with the outcome; but I am so happy that I get a break before school starts again!!

Thanks for everything Dr. Lieb; the semester was a success! See you in the fall!

This week one of the people I follow on Twitter posted a link to this blog that has recently been writing about Lauraville and Baltimore events. It is the accompanying blog of a website for Salamander Points, a Baltimore based website that has formulated a points system for a huge variety of things you eat and use and then at the end of the day you calculate your “salamander points”.

It is actually a pretty interesting idea, and they go pretty in depth into each category to where most things that you use in an average day would be able to be converted to points. They had some good blog posts about the Tuesday Market Connection, including their most recent post entitled “Tuesday: The New Friday”. They had some nice photos from the market in one of their older posts and got some reaction from people attending the market.

They look at things from a green perspective, trying to think about the carbon footprint and the effects that our actions have on the enviroment and community. I also liked their post and pictures from Artscape, I was there on a different day then whoever wrote the post so it was nice to see a different perspective

Baltimore Regional Green Map

Being that we have been making and looking at Google maps over the past few weeks, I thought this site, Baltimore Regional Green Map was an interesting illustration of how it can be used as a collaboration having multiple users post places. Obviously I didn’t view every icon, but it seems like for the most part most of the things that people post are relevant to the site’s three categories; sustainable living, culture and society, and nature. While the map looks overwhelming, when you zoom in a bit closer to a more specific area, the map becomes a lot easier to look at and navigate.

Biking to class but don't know where to park?

While it is close to what you can do with the basic Google map setup, I still really like the simple and functional design of the map and the small sidebar on the right. Somebody posted the Tuesday Market Connection, which is how I found out about this site. I am actually kind of surprised I never came across it before.

There is also a map made for Towson’s campus. Somebody actually took the time to map out all of the bike racks on campus! While this might be taking it a little bit too far, it is still a cool idea as the web and mapping becomes more interactive and collaborative.

To read my comments from this semester go here or click the “comments” tab at the top of the page.

I looked at the MSNBC interactive map called Islam in Europe which gives users a rundown of the history, population, and issues of the Muslim inhabitants of Europe. It is a pretty basic setup, users are presented with the map, the countries change color when moused-over, and when they are clicked on a space on the right of the screen displays the promised information.

As far as story telling capabilities, it is not a very effective presentation. Not to say this is necessarily a bad thing, in a map format like this, a self-guided nonlinear approach makes a lot more sense. Users can navigate to where they want and find out information however they see fit.

Islam in Europe

Each individual country has history and origin information, which can tell a story within themselves, but overall the map doesn’t tell the chronological story that most people have come to expect, especially when learning about history and anthropology.

It works well as an overview looking at Europe in its individual components, and is a good starting reference to get an idea of what the population is like and a brief history, and the current issues and conflicts.

Jeff Smith grew up in a family of 10, where cooking was always a big deal. Since he was a kid, he had always wanted to be a cook and owning a restaurant. After learning some basics of cooking from his mother, Smith got into the restaurant business as soon as he was able to work, and has been in it for a little over 20 years and has some diverse experiences.

The Chameleon Cafe

“So I’d say I’m mostly self-trained because I had probably been cooking for six years before I went into culinary school; and then that just kind of refined things for me a little bit. Yeah, I’m kinda from the old school, before everybody was going to culinary school. Back when I started, nobody went to culinary school; it’s kind of a new thing.”

Chameleon Cafe is about to hit its eight year anniversary, but Smith also cooked at many restaurants around Baltimore, as well as spending some time in New Orleans. His time in Louisiana inspired him to try to come up with some local dishes using local ingredients for his Maryland Menu. It is the only menu he repeats every year because people love it and call the restaurant asking when it is coming back.

Jeff Smith (left) and his kitchen staff

Smith was taken by how much pride the New Orleans community had for their cuisine, and how the local dishes were “revered”, so he went and did a lot of research to dig up some old recipes; one of which is called “Chicken Maryland” out of a 100-year-old cookbook by Auguste Escoffier. The dish called for an ingredient that wouldn’t normally be associated with Baltimore, so Smith dug deeper.

“The Chicken Maryland had bananas, so I thought it was really odd that it was called Maryland. I thought maybe it was named after somebody that had the last name Maryland. We found out that Baltimore was a big banana port town at one time, like the second or third biggest banana importer in the country; so he must have came right when that was happening and bananas just must have been everywhere in Baltimore at that point.”

Smith brings a lot of traditional methods and recipes to the table at Chameleon Cafe, which is a converted rowhome on the corner of Montebello Terrace and Harford Road. I am working on editing the audio to put up the whole interview so check back!

Tomorrow (Friday, July 25th) there is a pretty decent sized festival in the area bordering Lauraville to the north, Hamilton. The Hamilton Festival is going to feature two stages with over 10 bands, live performing arts, local foods, arts and crafts, classic cars, and for the first time patrons of age can get a wristband and enjoy beer from local brewers:  The Brewer’s Art and Flying Dog.

I posted the band schedule below. I am definitely going to check it out, but I didn’t really know too much about the bands, so I thought I would share these recommendations I came across from Wendy Ward of City Paper:

“Highlights include beer from Brewer’s Art and Flying Dog, a pie-eating contest, the performing antics of aminibigcircus, and classic cars, natch. Dancing in the street provided by non-stop line-ups on two stages. Don’t miss ms. ellen cherry at 1 p.m. and Lafayette Gilchrist at 7 p.m. on the Hamilton Stage and a strong finish by T.T. Tucker, the Beltways, and Rodney Henry hour by hour starting after 5 on the Gibbons Stage.”

Since it was first announced in 2005 as a competitor to Mapquest, Google Maps have proved to have many uses as well as being a simple, intuitive mapping solution that many developers have used to do many cool things. 10,000 Words has a really nice collection of posts featuring a lot of nice maps, a lot of which use Google Maps as the base for their interactivity.

Screenshot from CO Trip

The first one I looked at is CO Trip and is a traffic solution for Colorado drivers maintained by the Colorado Department of Transportation. It has a lot of nice pages such as road conditions, road work and a speed map. Another really nice feature is that it has pictures from different traffic webcams, I am originally from Colorado so it was cool to see some of the intersections I used to frequent. It looks like there are also future plans to have some streaming video. When I checked it, they had updated it about 15 minutes prior, which isn’t too bad especially at 7 p.m. after the rush hour has passed.

Screenshot from London 2010

The second map I looked at was from the website from the 2012 London Olympics website, and it allows people to view events going on in their area by location. It has a pretty radical color scheme, and uses these markers that show what kind of events are going on. Any given tab could have multiple events and types of events, or could be a single event and one color. It looks like it used Google Maps as well, and it is a nice use of customization.

Screenshot from LA Times

Finally I took a look at the LA Times homicide map which is similar to the Baltimore Sun’s homicide map, but with a couple more statistics, and the mapping of the homicides is limited to the 25 names on each page. I actually like the LA Times map a little more because of the filters, but I like the Sun’s map because it has better options for viewing all of the data for a whole year, rather than being limited. They also used Google Maps here.

Overall Google Maps can be a very powerful tool when integrated with other design elements or even just a simple mapping can be effective and add some context and locational data that can help viewers to better understand and connect with stories and ideas.

Food enthusiast Jeffrey Webber (a.k.a. Jeff W. on Yelp) got into online restaurant reviewing after trying to find restaurants in the D.C. and always stumbling upon Yelp listings. When finding lesser known places with good food, Webber wanted to shar his experiences with others, so he started reviewing a lot of restaurants on the review site Yelp.

He said he used to have a job with a lot of down time, and used that to write reviews of the restaurants he had recently been to. Just posting his 400th review recently, Webber said he has less time to share his dining experiences with his job now.

I saw Webber’s review for the Chameleon Cafe, so I decided to ask him some more questions about his experience there. He said that he was not expecting the food and atmosphere that Chameleon could offer based on the still developing Lauraville area.

“…it’s really intimate and unexpected given the area.  It’s basically just a rowhouse turned into a restaurant and it has a great community feel.  The food was really surprising since it has a heavy french influence and I wouldn’t expect to find that outside of a more affluent neighborhood.  I wasn’t particularly impressed with the surrounding area, but that’s not going to stand in my way of eating good food.”

He said the people he was with enjoyed themselves and the food was great, with a homey atmosphere that still had an upscale feel. Webber said he would definitely go back to Chameleon Cafe again for a special occasion as their food is a bit pricey to go very often.

I came across this blog called Harford Road, Hon about the neighborhood of Westfield in Baltimore, which is slightly northeast of Lauraville. It talks about a lot of things going on in the same general area and links to a lot of the businesses in Lauraville, including all of the places I did stories on and mentions of the Lauraville Tuesday Market Connection.

It has a lot of good links to relevant organizations, businesses, blogs and gardening tips, a pretty diverse range of information. It doesn’t get updated a whole lot, but it could be a good starting point for somebody that wants to learn more about the area. One of the links is for a blog called Adventures in Baltimore Restaurants which has some cool posts about good deals and free food around Baltimore. They also use a Google Map to show a lot of the restaurants that are featured in the blog.

Another link is to a blog called Bmore Tunes that has some pretty interesting posts about local artists as well as mainstream and big name acts. I particularly liked the interview with Slug from Atmosphere. I would have never seen the blog had I not visited Harford Road, Hon; definitely glad I came across it.