Dear Office of Zoning: I like you guys, I really do. All your transcripts and orders are online, and you're pretty good with putting meeting information on the web in a timely fashion (though I can still dream of the day when applicant submittals are all posted as PDFs). But this new calendar you've come up with, it's a travesty, and I say that not just as a member of the public and a user, but as a web application developer. Instead of the old calendar, where you can easily look at an entire month's worth of agendas on one screen, we're now forced to click on each meeting's entry and wait for a god-awful-slow pop-up window to appear (we're talking 5-plus seconds, and that's even after you realize you have to double-click and not single-click the calendar entry, though it loads faster if you go directly to the URL instead of having to click the calendar and get a pop-up); and then the pop-up we've waited on so long is a huge window with a tremendous amount of wasted space telling me a small piece of information. This, my noble public servants, is absolutely rotten design. The old calendar may not have been flashy, but it works and works fast. This new way makes it nearly unusable. Please give some thought, at the very least, to an alternate view that maintains the old list method of getting to the information--clearly you've gone to a database-driven app, which in and of itself is fine (believe me, I know a thing or two about databases), but it's not that hard to spit out records in list form. Or, beyond that, you could start an e-mail list that e-mails out your agendas and calendar changes, like other agencies. Because those of us who spend a lot of time alerting the public to the good work you do are going to stop doing so if we can't easily get to your information. Either that or I'm going to tell Mayor Fenty on you, and then you'll REALLY be in trouble. Love, JD.

Today I was able to take some photos from up high at the Courtyard by Marriott--since it was a clear day, I could indeed see forever. First off, with the Capper/Carrollsburg demolition west of 5th Street now complete, I've posted before-and-after photos of the Capper footprint that illustrate the astonishing difference 10 months and six blocks' worth of demolition can make; this page also has new photos as you scroll down showing ground-level shots of the final demolished block north of K between 2nd and 3rd. Next are photos-from-above of the holes in the ground at 70/100 I and 100 M/Onyx, with comparison shots from last year (scroll down a bit from the top of the page). And, if you can bear to scroll ALL the way to the bottom, I have views of the Nats ballpark construction from this Courtyard vantage point--it's pretty much like looking into the stadium from dead center field, except four blocks away. And, at the top of the Capper Seniors page, there's a neat shot of all three Capper Seniors buildings. Alas, now I will have to return to taking boring street-level shots for a while....

Apparently the sign announcing construction on the South Capitol Street Bridge has reappeared, and I'm hearing that this is the beginning of the rehab work on the existing bridge. (No, not the construction of the new one, that won't begin before 2011!) There won't be lane closures right away, but look for some probably on weekends in the near future. DDOT hasn't yet posted anything about it on its web site--when they do, I'll post, of course.

Here's an interesting bit of political maneuvering.... From the Examiner:

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