Why?

This entry pretty much amounts to some links that I thought about but didn't get around to posting--and here they are:

• Sunday's Mercury News had a good, in-depth section devoted to the San Jose's new City Hall. If you don't live around here, what this project is is a relocation of the local government from its essentially out-of-the-way headquarters north of town and from scattered rented space into a single location directly in the center of San Jose. It's good for symbolic reasons, and the architecture is good, although that massive blank wall on Santa Clara Street is not exactly a great addition to the streetscape. And the building's color--as bleak as Le Corbusier.

• The latest Project for Public Spaces newletter is full of worthwhile analysis. Read it and learn some site design lessons--please? By the way, I wonder how PPS would rate the new City Hall, its plaza, and its "Parade of Floats."

• And it appears The Bay Area Was Talking last month (as I said, the links are not brand new) about a handy, Mac-only program that graphically illustrates (is that redundant?) BART's schedule. If only Apple would cede some of its overwhelming dominance in the PC software market to benefit us oppressed Windows users, maybe I could give it a try. I suggest that BART's webmaster and maybe 511.org rip off some of this program's ideas for their respective websites' text-heavy trip planners.

• Oh yeah, and Don Perata is hilarious--and Neil Diamond is supposedly still cool.