I just went to The Olympian website looking for news about the suicide jumper on Capitol Blvd... and was surprised to find an article that paints Triway in a pretty negative light and casts doubt on their ability to responsibly develop the Isthmus.

Excerpt:

Residents have complained of crawl spaces filling with water and lawns installed improperly — among many other things.

Triway project manager Janine Smith declined to comment, "until we have a meeting with the city of Olympia."

Triway is the same major South Sound developer that has asked the Olympia City Council to raise building height limits on the strip of land between Budd Inlet and Capitol Lake.

What's going on here?

I've been thinking about a comment made by a young woman at the city council meeting. She mentioned how everyone keeps talking about how we need to "revitalize" downtown, but in her view it already IS vitalized -- as in, full of life.

I happen to share her view. I've lived downtown for a long time and I love it here. Almost everything I need (with the notable exception of affordable groceries) is just a few blocks away. Any time I walk down the street I cross paths with someone I know, or at least recognize. Community isn't just an abstract concept here, it's something you can see and feel. And hear... like the folks who saw fit to bang drums and sing songs at the top of their lungs on the street near my building tonight while I was trying to sleep. But hey, it's better than the pile driving that will wake me up tomorrow -- at least those people were enjoying themselves.

Anyway, what I'd like is to hear what people think is wrong with downtown Olympia. I'm especially curious about what the pro-condo crowd thinks, since they're such big fans of revitalization and all.

Yeah, so... I'm not exactly a n00b on the internets, but this site has always baffled me.

My first visit was about a year ago. I saw that the site seemed to be set up for news, but was used more like a forum, although most of the content seemed to be generated by blogs, which I couldn't find a list of. Confused about how to navigate the site, and mystified by the many references to something called a "caiman," I left.

Today I tried again. This time I saw a list of recent posts in the sidebar. Intrigued by the topics, I registered, logged in, and tried to post a comment.

A pink error message box appeared, along with a notification that my comment would be subject to moderator approval before posting. That means twice the chance that my comment won't post at all, and twice the delay in finding out if it did. And then the list of posts mysteriously disappeared from the sidebar, so I couldn't even find the thing (thread? blog? caiman?) I'd responded to.

Eventually I discovered that the "books/collections" link did not refer to antiques or paperbacks but to a useful index (finally!) of topic-related threads. It took a while to figure this out because something on the main page (a video? one of those RSS menu thingies?) kept trying to load itself, crashing my browser and making me have to restart my computer. I've never had that problem on any other forum or blog site, but it happened about five times in 30 minutes on this one.

I'm sorry that my first post is so negative. I just want this site to be more accessible so that I (and others like me, assuming such creatures exist) can actually use it.