oddmart

South Africa

Photos from flickr, by PanelSwitchman.

Older Nortel switch have some screaming 70s colors. The DMS-100 is the bigger of the two Nortel end offices, and it’s green. The DMS-10 is the smaller one, and it’s orange. My company uses DMS-10s, and we even have orange and brown Nortel touch-up paint.

I don’t know what color the DMS-200, DMS-250, or DMS-300 are, but I hope they’re equally as fabulous. I hear newer Nortel switches are grey, sadly.

Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), 21 August 1970, originally uploaded by allhails.

Map of Greater Winnipeg Proposed Rapid Transit Subways in Relation to Present Surface Transit Routes (1959), uploaded to flickr by Manitoba Historical Maps.

Winnipeg, like Seattle, has a plan for a subway that was never built. In 1959 the designer of the Toronto subway submitted a plan recommending the construction of a subway (over elevated rail, “mono-rail”, rubber-tired subway, or commuter rail).

Future Development of the Greater Winnipeg Transit System by Norman D. Wilson, 1959

Transit Rider’s Union of Winnipeg maps of the subway on modern (2009) maps

Over four years after I moved from Minneapolis to Seattle, my couch is finally moving too. It’s an extremely orange couch. Before I move the couch in, I’d like to paint the living room, and I really really really really want to paint it a mint/sea foam green. It seems like a fitting color for the Bauhaus/postwar modern building I’m in. Orange+mint seems like it could be rather loud, though, so I did a Google image search for those two colors. What I found was a color swatch and pattern with both colors I was looking for. And the best part? The name: “Odd”.

Palette and pattern by sugar! at COLOURlovers.com, swatch image by purplelemondesigns.com.

South Minneapolis neighborhoods

Google Maps always seems to be changing, often for the better. I’m not sure exactly when this changed, but today I noticed that the 81 official neighborhoods of Minneapolis now had their names on the map. Checking the Google Map for Seattle, I see that the (not officially “official”) 106 city clerk-designated neighborhood names are on there as well. Official neighborhood names, like townships (cf. Missing Municipalities), are often not the first thing that comes to mind when someone describes where they live. Technically, I have lived in Excel Township and St. Anthony East, but I was more likely to say “Thief River Falls” (or “Holt”) and “Northeast Minneapolis”. But now, it’s easy for someone to see they live in St. Anthony East, so why not get a little more local?

For informal names, I like Capitol Hill Seattle’s sociogeographic approach (including the neighborhood “watering hole”, for example). While I might not expect those names to show up on Google Maps, I do appreciate that Google hasn’t removed widely-used neighborhood names. The center of Uptown in Minneapolis, for example, is actually the intersection of the East Calhoun, CARAG, Lowry Hill East, and East Isles neighborhoods. Neighborhood neologisms like Madison Heights don’t make Google Maps either, but for those wondering what they should call their neighborhood other than “15th” or “19th” or something, Google Maps reminds them that, as far as the city is concerned, it’s Stephens.

CBC Butterfly Logo, 1966.

Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad timetable, from Wikimedia Commons.

From mistercola on eBay.