It is on the eve of my departure from the Big Easy that I’ve realized I actually enjoy being here again. I’ve always been in love with the city. The architecture, food, and music are second to none. Walking down the middle of Royal Street in the middle of the street, enjoying the balmy weather and soaking up the live performances took me back to my childhood. When I left here I had become disenchanted with the location because of the people that inhabited it.
And so it seems that while Katrina ruined a lot of things for good people, it also chased out a lot of the assholes. Now that the repair effort is reaching a frenzy there is a huge influx of interesting people from interesting places. You can go to a bar and have a conversation with someone who doesn’t judge you based on the fact that no one in your immediate family was a debutante.
My parents have listed our French Quarter house for sale, but thanks to the over-saturated market there doesn’t seem to be much activity. With any luck I’ve have even more time to reconnect with the city of my youth.
In business news, Paul Smith’s “Class of ‘61″ tribute page is done. He came to me with a concept he made in iWeb but he wasn’t able to edit it easily. iWeb has an annoying tendency to render all the text on a non-blog page as a PNG, making it invisible to google and screen readers. We quickly realized that he needed a simple, consolidated design hooked up to a CMS. What we ended up with is a sleek and clean XHTML/CSS design sporting a little javascript countdown, and a new place for Lehigh alum’s to stay up-to-date. We are in the process of migrating the installation to his new server but in the meantime you can view a screenshot here.
See you soon, Philly!
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