Earth-shattering news! Both Brendan and I are now LEED-accredited professionals. Sweet.

What’s different?

If you don’t know, LEED is a program that certifies new “green” developments for having low energy impacts and doing other good things. You basically memorize a bunch of stuff and take a test. Both Brendan and I passed on the first try, so I’m not sure what that says about the integrity of their process, but we’ll take what we can get. One of my friends who’s wiser than I am once said: “LEED accreditation just means you have a lot of money and are good at memorizing stuff.” Maybe that’s true, but I’d like to add that we can use their logo on our business cards. Boom, roasted.

Also, we’re working on a project with the Bay Area non-profit TRANSFORM developing a LEED-like process for certifying low-carbon developments. So it’s good to know this stuff.

Need us to sign anything?

The other cool thing is that if you want to certify a project, you get a bonus point just by hiring someone who’s certified (like us). We’ll work for cheap.

If you didn’t already get it, we sent out an email to most of our past and present clients, friends, colleagues, drinking buddies and facebook friends.  Thanks for all of the positive replies, I’ll make sure to respond to everyone who wrote back within a day or two.

We don’t email our list very often (once a year or less).  If anyone wants to follow us more closely than that, subscribe to this blog or follow us on twitter (@brendannee @jedhorne).

Many of our clients send out emails to their constituents/customers/subscribers/fans using a variety of platforms.  We’ve had good luck with Campaign Monitor and PHPList.  Campaign Monitor is fully hosted and costs money, but provides a slick interface, decent analytics and bounce tracking and supports custom templates and custom user fields.  PHPList is an open source application that you can host yourself.  As such, its customizable in any way you’d like and its completely free.  The interface isn’t as streamlined and intuitive as campaign monitor but it does the job.

Not that I’m interested in living in waterfront property after my hometown was destroyed, but apparently our warehouse used to be on a lake. Right by the blue X (bonus: can you guess what major street didn’t exist on maps of the day?):

Not sure if this group’s efforts well ever bear fruit, but it would be sweet to hop into a lagoon on a scorcher like today. Or maybe I can just sit on the roof and drink beer instead.

Hot off the presses! Obama has announced a vision for high-speed rail corridors nationwide.

I also think it’s cool that this was posted on the White House’s blog.

I’m glad that the administration is paying some attention to transportation, but I’m actually a little skeptical of the whole idea. I don’t know much about the proposed link through Oklahoma, but I know the California idea has been knocking around for awhile now and people aren’t buying, especially since it’s going to link to a bunch of crap towns in the Central Valley, preventing it from being a true high-speed network (notice the image only has stops in SF, Sacramento, LA, and San Diego, and connects them all in a big loop). Florida’s plan has been controversial too, and I’m not surprised given the shady history of real estate speculation linked to transportation improvements that seem to dominate that state’s history. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Even though it’s sort of Web 1.0, I’m glad someone is collecting these data. The New York maps are kind of boring, really, and more or less confirm what most people already know: there’s a lot going on there, all over, all the time. LA is more interesting, and because event venues are more spread out you can get a better feel for what’s going on given the scale of the graphics.

Better yet would be to scrape data from yelp or eventful or whatever and show this stuff real time. Is it really worth paying some professor a full year’s salary to do this?

CurbedSF reports that a new residential development in the financial district might mark the start of the new “funky tower district”. The FiDi needs more people on the street outside of work hours to activate the vacant streets, patronize the restaurants and businesses and bank at the hundreds of ATMs scattered throughout.

I’m excited about the funky tower and the upcoming funky tower district. The plans include restaurants and improvements to the redwood grove and Mark Twain alley at the bottom of the Transamerica Pyramid. The twisty tower is reminiscent of the new De Young museum in Golden Gate park.

Twisty Tower

View the full EIR.