Newest articles on The Sacramento Press written by Joel Rosenberg

Second Saturday vandalism data analysis

2011-03-26T00:46:46Z

Today I came across a comment on Bill Burgua's recent article about the Second Saturday Art Walk. Larry was exasperated about the crime he witnessed on our most recent art walk, specifcially citing the vandalism near his place of residence.

He wrote:

"The last Second Sat event I got graffiti outside on my apartment building as well as inside and this is a controlled acces building. Out of Control! City council talking about walkable alleys when we dont even have walkable streets."

I often read the complaints from my neighbors concerning the escalating crime during Second Saturday. My personal feeling is that it's no different from the drunks and litterbugs I see roaming the streets every weekend evening. I decided to take a deeper look and check out the crime visualization site that Police Department spokesman Sgt. Norm Leong promoted this week.

Narrowing the map to the grid, and constraining solely to property crimes, I exported a list of all crime data using the site's "print" functionality from October 2010 until last weekend. I then skipped all non-vandalism crimes such as unlawful camping and trespassing incidents to focus solely on the issue Larry was complaining about. Using a little programming know-how, I formatted the crimes by weekend into the lists at the bottom of this article.

Due to this not being an official police analysis, I don't assume it's exhaustive for all vandalism occuring in the grid. And while the CrimeReports website lists the time an incident occurred, that data wasn't available to me via the print feature, and I couldn't find any other means to export data. Because of this, I've included Sunday as well. Hopefully this will serve as a rough guide for incidents over the past six months.

Data Summary

Weekends: 24
Second Saturday weekends: 6
Non-Second Saturday weekends: 18

Total weekend incidents: 69
Second Saturday weekend incidents: 23
Non-Second Saturday weekend incidents: 46

Average incidents per weekend: 2.88
Average Second Saturday incidents per weekend: 3.83
Average non-Second Saturday incidents per weekend: 2.56

Although the six weekends sampled have a slightly higher vandalism rate than the 18 other weekends, this isn't a big enough difference or sample size to substantiate the claims that the vandals paint the town red (and blue, and green) one weekend more than any other. January's Second Saturday weekend shared the lowest number of incidents for that month. November's was right in the middle. December's art walk had the highest number of incidents.

Seems pretty routine to me.

Incident Breakdown by Weekend

10/02 = 4
10/09 = 4 (Second Saturday)
10/16 = 2
10/23 = 2
10/30 = 5
11/06 = 2
11/13 = 3 (Second Saturday)
11/20 = 2
11/27 = 1
12/04 = 2
12/11 = 5 (Second Saturday)
12/18 = 1
12/25 = 3
01/01 = 4
01/08 = 2 (Second Saturday)
01/15 = 5
01/22 = 2
01/29 = 2
02/05 = 4
02/12 = 4 (Second Saturday)
02/19 = 3
02/26 = 0
03/05 = 2
03/12 = 5 (Second Saturday)

Incident List (Date, Type, Incident Description)

See my scribd document: http://www.scribd.com/doc/51572612/propertycrimes-20100925-20110325

A winter evening with George Winston

2010-01-09T02:13:32Z

Not having any relatives west of the Mississippi, my family often traveled up to Portland to spend Thanksgiving with old friends. We'd usually pick up a couple books on tape from the Contra Costa library before heading out on road trips like these, but pianist George Winston's albums Autumn and December always traveled with us.

Because of these albums' bonding themes – holidays, family, journeys – the music grew into an important memory from childhood. In some ways, it ceased being art for me, in that I couldn't evaluate it with a critical eye as I developed musically. This isn't to say that I think George Winston is a bad composer or pianist. In the same way I occasionally eat at a childhood restaurant or put in an old movie regardless of its merits, Winston's music provides a service to me that eclipses anything that it could offer artistically.

So when I found out that he'd be playing the Crest Theatre in Sacramento Thursday night, I purchased tickets for the concert and convinced some family members to drive up from the Bay Area to join me in the realization of this shared tradition. I left work early, showed everyone the fading holiday cheer of Midtown and stuffed them full of pizza. After finishing a glass or two of wine and poking around the historical displays, we made our way inside the beautifully ornate (if half-filled) Crest.

It's always a crapshoot to hear an artist live for the first time, especially after years of familiarity with the ins and outs of his recordings. You can't help but anticipate the exact melody, tone, and tempo you know by heart. This put me at a disadvantage. It's like hearing the same stories about an old family member over and over throughout your life. When you finally meet that person, how could you not expect him to be the one-dimensional person from those stories?

I've been to enough reunion concerts to know that this discovery process is usually irreversible. Depending on the strength of the recordings and their attachment to me, a disappointing performance could end up spoiling all future listenings. This time, however, I felt confident. The specific role of his music in my life distances the art from the artist himself.

Several minutes past the advertised start time, Winston entered the room and took a seat beside the Steinway. He was dressed modestly in a collared shirt, blue jeans and in his traditional stocking feet. Although his beard, glasses and male pattern baldness might have imparted a professorial impression, his soft-spoken nature and light-hearted candor showed the depth of a person with respect for his audience and a passion for the music he plays.

There was a quietness that extended beyond his speaking and into his performance. None of the instruments he played were amplified, but beyond that, Winston's care for resonance and tone required the listener to focus completely on the stage. The piano managed to fill the room adequately, but the softness of his "slack key" guitar renditions demanded a particularly deft ear. Normally, when an artist removes accepted tools in a performance or on a recording, it ends up being more of a parlor trick than a benefit to the overall sound. In this case though, the music was better for it, even if I had to cock my head during several pieces to hear them clearly.

The Winter Show was peppered with pieces familiar to me: "Carol of the Bells" from December, "Moon" from Autumn, and a handful of compositions from these and other solo piano albums he's released over the four decades that span his career. When a familiar tune from those canonical recordings came up, my initial reaction was to jerk and react to the differences in melody in his improvisations, and it was hard not to notice when he was a note or two off when exploring an idea or working up to a new one. But it was fun listening to him add inspiration to his piece; the uniqueness made up for the occasional misstep or half-explored diversion.

He also drew selections from a handful of artists that have influenced him over the years, from early Doors songs to Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts classics. These choices enhanced the concert and made it a personal experience. He has a passion for stride piano, a jazz style from the 1920s and '30s, and blended his own personal touch into these standards well. The pieces were a good fit for Winston's approach to the piano; he keeps his own compositions anchored with a rhythmic approach for his left hand while doing the melody and the improv with his right, a hallmark of the stride style. He also played several slack key guitar tunes, including a haunting piece that closed out his concert.

In the end, I appreciated learning of his influences and hearing the tunes and styles that were personal to him, rather than attending a note-for-note run-through of his most famous albums. I left with a more accurate impression of him and his music than when I walked in, but the nostalgia for those classic albums wasn't lessened by seeing the bigger picture. If anything, seeing this humble, unassuming man play the soundtrack of my formative years was like finally meeting the distant relative for the first time and leaving with a greater appreciation of the stories of the past.

Toward a clearer picture

2009-07-30T08:50:13Z

Have you ever noticed yourself straining to make out someone's profile picture? Perhaps you've had trouble seeing detail in an article photo. If so, you'll be pleased to know that tonight we've rolled out an update to The Sacramento Press that should make your pictures clearer and smoother than they've been before. Initially, you'll only see the difference in pictures uploaded after today, but in a few days we'll go back and fix everything uploaded to the site since day one. In addition, article images now appear in the order in which they were uploaded, and we're now accepting a few more image file types (although we recommend sticking with JPEG or PNG files).

We also added a few new capabilities and crossed some items off our list of known problems. Here are just a few of the 35 fixes and additions we've made:

Improved article pages so the text loads instantly (no more waiting for the whole page to load on your mobile device)
Fixed your personal tag clouds
Made the site work better in Internet Explorer 6 (but please upgrade to IE8!)
Darkened the text throughout the site to make it a little easier on your eyes
Fixed a problem when writing articles with Safari 4
Tweaked our layouts to have Featured Pictures clickable, and added quotes around Featured Comments (see picture above)

As always, let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Forgot your password?

2009-05-11T09:08:31Z

The Sacramento Press was updated tonight with a grab bag of wish-list items, tweaks, and bug fixes that have been accumulating over the last two months.

Recently, we've been using email as a tool to pass on news and workshop event details to you. Now, with this new release, we've started verifying email addresses on our site. So, for all new signups (or if you're already signed up and you change your email address) you'll get an email that contains a link to visit that lets us know your email address is in good working order. This will help us better communicate with you. We run a lot of free, fun workshops here in our downtown office, and having a working email is really important for us to be able to get the word out.

Here's a few other things we've added:

If you forget your password, you can request an email that shows you how to reset it
You can now log in with your email address
If it takes you a long time to write an article, the site won't kick you off when you eventually try to publish it
You can easily cycle through all an article's images when zoomed in
We've increased the font size in our conversations
There's a new RSS Feed for site-wide comments
If you include a large image in the middle of your article, it won't spill over into other parts of the page anymore

The list of minor fixes and features keeps going, but I won't bore you too much with that. Enjoy!

Light Rail Suspicious Activity

2009-04-03T18:11:32Z

Free Webcam Chat at Ustream

This is a live feed from our office window, which is the epicenter of the hazardous materials threat ongoing at the Sacramento Valley Station Light Rail stop.

The feed captures a small fraction of the law enforcement officers involved, but shows the ones at the center of the problem

UPDATE: Live feed was discontinued at approximately 12:45p.m. as all the law enforcement had left the scene.

Play inline hockey in Davis!

2008-12-23T21:58:53Z

Shake off those winter blues with a sport that's fun, fast, and family-friendly. Play inline hockey at DISC, a sports facility owned by members of the Davis community that's right off highway 80 in East Davis. There are leagues year-round that are suitable for all skill levels. Even if you've never skated before you can pick up the sport quickly by enrolling in a class that will get you up to speed in no time.

I just recently learned to play inline hockey and started my first season in the beginner's league last summer. The players and facility owners were welcoming, friendly, and fun to play with. It's been great learning and playing a sport with people of all ages and backgrounds. The exercise has been a godsend, too, because it balances aerobic exercise with strength building. Oh, and don't worry about any lost teeth or black eyes - inline hockey at DISC is a non-contact sport.

New leagues start up soon, so check it out if you're interested. Here are the opening dates for the winter season (in increasing skill level):

Lower Copper League: January 4
Upper Copper League: January 6
Lower Bronze League: January 5
Upper Bronze League: January 8
Silver League: January 7

You can get more information at http://www.dischockey.com or by calling (530) 757-1111. DISC is located at 2801 2nd St, Davis, CA.

Even if you're not interested in a league, there's plenty of non-hockey skating, kid-friendly events, and "skate and shoot" hockey practice times throughout the week. As for me, I'll be playing in the Lower Copper league on Sundays come January and will be updating this storyline as the season progresses and we fight our way to the top. Hope to see you there!

Images courtesy of http://daviswiki.org

Making changes to your storylines

2008-12-17T08:12:35Z

Another Sacramento Press update just went live. Among the two dozen changes we made to the site tonight are a few that concern storylines. We've noticed that it may take an article or two to get a sense for the common thread in your subject. Perhaps you intended to write about one thing but ended up writing about another. If this has happened to you, you'll be glad to know that you can now rename your storylines. Other changes we pushed out include some icon fixes, tweaks to our RSS feeds, making profile edits more forgiving, and many more tweaks, bug fixes, and improvements.

Rogue Roosters

2008-11-23T07:04:34Z

Someone thought it would be a good idea to abandon a couple of chickens at one of the UC Davis housing complexes. Two months and ten fold as many critters later, one can hardly walk next door without incurring the disapproving clucks of these easily-startled fowl. At least the students can now save some cash and ditch their alarm clocks for that au-naturale 7:00 am wake-up call.

Regarding the next update

2008-11-16T06:34:21Z

Hello again.

Last I wrote we had made our first few changes to the Sacramento Press website. Time does fly, I suppose, because we're just about done with another update. If all goes well, you'll probably be seeing it in action sometime next week. And like last time, this isn't revolutionary stuff; we're still fine-tuning the engine to make sure everything's solid before we roll out the shiny new features.

So, what's in this update? Right now we have fifteen additions, tweaks, and squashed bugs coded up and ready to go, including fixes to an RSS feed that broke last week, the ability to rename your storyline, and a few graphics changes throughout the site (ever notice that the thumbs down icon was cut off in a list of articles?).

There will probably be more releases like this in the near future, but we're already working on a list of things to add to the Sacramento Press in the coming months that are shaping up to be pretty exciting. Stay tuned for more.

An introduction and a minor update

2008-10-26T07:43:59Z

Tonight I'm starting a new storyline (yes, this one). Here I'll be giving you a look at the Sacramento Press from a nuts-and-bolts point of view. Whenever we roll out a sparkly, new feature for you to use or fix a bug that's been causing you trouble, I'll try to let you know about it here. If you ever want to discuss the site or have any questions about something we've added, let me know in a comment!

And to christen this storyline, let me tell you about the release we pushed out tonight. It may not seem like a big change, and that's because it's mostly a collection of odds and ends we only discovered we needed after going live two weeks ago. Have you ever uploaded an image when writing an article, only to have it disappear if you made a mistake when publishing? Well, even if you haven't, we've fixed that. Had trouble clicking links in our RSS feeds? Well, yes, we have RSS feeds, and now they're working right! Most of the other changes are too small to mention, but I'll mention a few anyway: we've added favicons to give your bookmarks a little zip. Also, if you have an iPhone and you bookmark our site to your app list, you'll see the icon above.

Look out for more fixes and features in the coming weeks as we speed through our beta process. And, as always, if you're having problems with the site or have suggestions, feel free to bring them up here, but also remember to email our support at support@sacramentopress.com to get a faster response (It's like dialing 9-1-1 versus chatting up your policeman neighbor).

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy the site.

Sharks beat Kings 3-1

2008-10-13T03:33:21Z

Saturday night, the San Jose Sharks beat the LA Kings at the HP Pavilion. The sharks now have two wins and 0 losses.