Between putting out the fire that destroyed a century-old warehouse early Wednesday morning and returning Thursday when it rekindled, firefighters went to the factory across the street to put out a fire they say the warehouse fire likely caused.

The cause of the initial fire remained undetermined, Alliance Fire Inspector Guy Aumend said.

Firefighters from at least 10 departments were called to the Alliance Wholesalers building at 321 Rush St. at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday.

They were still dousing hot spots at 5 p.m. Wednesday in what had been three large brick buildings that stretched at least a block. The fire did about $200,000 damage to the building, which was mostly vacant.

A pest control business was leasing the office area with four trucks and a car parked in a nearby fenced area outside the building, and a Sebring man was storing a pickup, a motorcycle and a car in the buildings nearby garage.

While parts of a few walls remained standing, most of the structures were reduced to rubble.

The blaze also damaged PTC Alliance, a factory across the alley, Aumend said. Dozens of employees were evacuated from the factory, which manufactures steel tubing.

SPREADS TO NEARBY FACTORY

The Alliance Wholesalers fire was so hot it melted the blue or gray paint from the aluminum siding on the PTC buildings.

Hot embers carried far enough, Aumend said, that they landed on PTCs rubber roofing. The PTC factory is located at 640 E. Keystone St. but its buildings stretch from Keystone to Webb.

More here:
Warehouse fire spread to roof of PTC Alliance

VOL. 127 | NO. 95 | Tuesday, May 15, 2012

The blue banner that hung until recently at the curved atrium at Cooper Street and Madison Avenue and read Returning in 2012 will soon ring true for Overton Square and its developer, Loeb Properties Inc.

In the coming months and years, the firm will invest about $20 million to revive the arts and entertainment districts footprint to about 115,000 square feet. Loeb is expected to close on nine acres near the Cooper-Madison intersection from its Colorado owners by mid-June.

Loebs plan, first and foremost, is to redesign seven existing buildings on the north and south sides of Madison.

This is 2012, we want to lease this stuff up and have it open by the end of the year, said Bob Loeb, CEO of Loeb Properties. The north side of the road will be leased and hopefully open, 100-percent occupied by the end of the year.

Loeb announced its first lease for the Square two weeks ago with the signing of Local Gastropub in the space that housed Yosemites Sams for nearly 40 years at 2126 Madison. Yosemite Sams was the longest-running existing business in the Square before closing its doors last August. Local will have a patio on the north side of its 6,000-square-foot, two-story building.

Moving westward from the Cooper-Madison intersection, Loeb is in discussions with Boscos Squared about an expansion and enclosure of its patio.

Boscos wants to enclose their patio so itll be year-round, and they want to increase their brewing capacity, Loeb said.

The next two adjoining spaces west and only spaces left to fill this year are the gingerbread house next to the old Paulettes restaurant, as well as the old Paulettes at 2110 Madison. Loeb hopes to fill the house with a coffee shop and breakfast provider because thats what it looks like.

Loeb said his company has a couple of prospects it's working for the actual Paulettes space, and there are plans for an eastside patio. The restaurants parking will be enhanced, as well as the addition of a grass courtyard, because we want people out on the street, Loeb said.

Read the rest here:
Loeb Makes Progress on Square Plan

He was loyal and compassionate and tough, a teacher and counselor and promoter, one of the rare who influenced so many in a positive way.

Those words describe the late Jim Hunter, who, yes, in his younger days, walked on the wild side, too.

But more than nouns or adjectives or verbs can say, he was Darlington.

Yes, that Darlington, the race track that annually stages one of the states oldest and most captivating sports spectacles.

The timing is perfect: Another Southern 500, this one the first sponsored by Bojangles, unfolded Saturday night at Darlington Jim Hunters Darlington and 48 hours later he will be among the inductees into the South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame in ceremonies tonight.

The two are entwined; if Jim Hunter had not come along at the pivotal point in the raceways history, stock-car racings first super-speedway which staged the first Southern 500 in 1950 would almost certainly be gone with the wind.

But like the cavalry in a John Wayne western, Hunter rode to the rescue of the track he fell in love with while listen to radio reports of races at his boyhood home in North Charleston.

Put it this way, said Mac Josey, the tracks vice-president and general manager: Jim gave this place a second chance on life. He was the key to keeping the track open. We wouldnt be here (on race weekend) without him.

His track-saving work represents only the tip of his contributions to the racing world, said NASCAR vice-president of competition Robin Pemberton, who noted, Theres not a life in the garage that he has not touched.

Those touches could be one-on-one sessions or the trickle-down result of conversations with others, but he always delivered the message in his special way to young and old alike.

See more here:
Inductee Hunter: ‘He was Darlington’

After a long wait, Starhawk releases this week. The game, a third person shooter and spiritual successor to the game Warhawk, features a rich single player campaign and a deep multiplayer experience. To find out more about the game, we talked to Dylan Jobe, president ofLightbox Interactive, who developed Starhawk for the Playstation 3. Read on to find out more about the games inspiration, why its the best shooter for younger players, and what Starhawk feature is the best addition to any shooter game in years.

Banks:Starhawk has an old-west-in-outer-space feel, reminiscent of Firefly and other great shows, movies, and books. What were your inspirations for the story in Starhawk?

Jobe: We had a lot of inspiration from classic westerns and classic sci-fi. We were privileged to work with a guy who worked on Star Wars characters with George Lucas, a conceptartistnamed Ian McCaig. He designed Darth Maul and a number of other characters. We brought him in and he helped us on the world and universe in the early stages.

When we got into more nitty gritty development of the actual screenwriting with dialogue and the actual story, we brought in a writer from Austin, who had a lot of experience with westerns, a guy named Koen Wooten. His family helped as wranglers for Last of the Mohicans. He did prop work for True Grit and Appaloosa. He was very familiar with the genre, but we were fortunate to work with him because he loves games very dearly.

We often referred to classic westerns when we wanted to tell a story about a man and his family, even though it takes place in the vastness of the frontier. In many respects, the classic western tale pertains to a white half, black half kind of structure, isolated small town in the vast expanding west in the United States. So there were a lot of classic American western influences in the conflict between Emmett and his brother Logan to the industrial expansion of mines and towns throughout the frontier. There were many, many parallels to American history.

Banks:The betas been out for a while now and one of the great things about games, video games especially, is seeing all of the organic things that happen. Was there anything that you saw in the beta or didnt anticipate people doing with the game?

Jobe: On the good side, we were pleasantly surprised to see people build and battle pretty quickly, so that was a good thing. One of the things that was tricky was that not all players were doing good building. A lot of players were excited to build, but they were kind of being dumb when they were building.When youre playing the team mode online, if you go off and build stuff for your personal enjoyment, but not building with a tactical mind or a smart mind for your team, then youre not doing well for the rifters or outcasts, depending on which team youre on.

So, we decided to help combat this by changing the single player campaign. We added the concept of specific beats throughout the story where Cutter, your gear man, might give you a hint as to things you might want to build. We put a faint wire frame in the world, to give you an idea as to where structures should be built. Things like If I want to build a choke-point, this is a good place to do it or I can build my auto-turrets on the ground, but I can see the wireframes up on the top of the bunker, I could put them out of harms way. So we decided to seed the single player with hints to help players build more appropriately for their teams.

The other thing was we saw in the beta was that some players didnt build at all. They like to play purely as shooters. We would see these players get Starhawkand play online, reaping all the benefits of Build & Battle, even though they didnt build a single structure. But their teammates like to build, so they get the benefit of it, which was a pretty cool thing to see. Truth be told, the fusing of RTS and shooter elements isnt standard first person shooter recipe. So, we were concerned it would be off-putting to pure shooter fans. But to see pure shooter players enjoying the game and being successful, even though they werent actively building. Its good to see those kind of players still have a home in this kind of game.

See the original post here:
GeekDad Interview: Starhawk Developer Dylan Jobe

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Read the original here:
Goderich Little Theatre to host rummage sale at The Livery

By Gail Waterhouse, Globe Correspondent

The Sudbury house that Babe Ruth owned after he was sold to the New York Yankees in the 1920s is for sale. And while it looks to be little changed from the outside, inside it is a far cry from the house that Ruth knew.

The 5,124 square-foot home on Dutton Road has been thoroughly modernized with high-end appliances in the kitchen, and large bathrooms with tasteful stone tiling. On the third floor is a room the current owners filled with pictures of the Bambino and other baseball memorabilia.

Listing agent Scott Adamson of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage said the owners were careful during their updates and renovations to keep many of the additions left by the famous baseball player, who played for both the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees.

In the front room of the house, you can still see the burn marks from where Babe Ruth used to flick his ashes, said listing broker Scott Adamson, of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage.

The two-acre property includes a large barn as well as a garage. It is listed at $1.65 million.

Ruth bought the home in 1922 after he had already spent a few seasons as a Yankee. He was initially attracted to the Sudbury area while a Red Sox because it offer opportunities for hunting and fishing and was away from pressing crowds.

He affectionately called the property Home Plate farm, and reportedly spent $26,000 stocking it, including 1,000 hens, many of which died not long after arriving, according to a history of Sudbury by A.S. Hudson.

After a difficult season in 1922, Ruth promised Yankee fans that he was lose weight and limit his drinking and return in better shape because he was going to spend the winter in Sudbury chopping wood and all the activities a gentleman farmer was supposed to pursue.

But instead, according to Hudson, Ruth could be found sitting back, drinking beer and carrying on while neighborhood boys would chop his wood for him.

Read more from the original source:
Babe Ruth’s Sudbury home for sale

VERGENNES At 7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 8, Vergennes officials and residents will take what could be one of the final steps on what has been close to a five-year journey.

Then, in the city fire stations basement meeting room, aldermen will convene a public hearing on new zoning regulations proposed by the Vergennes Planning Commission. A copy of the laws is posted at vergennes.org.

Planners have been working on those zoning laws since Vergennes adopted its award-winning city plan in October 2009.

When and if adopted by aldermen, the laws will create two new zoning districts, tweak regulations in other districts, and incorporate the citys subdivision regulations and significantly update them for the first time in 40 years.

The plan itself was the product of more than two years of work by the citys planners, who before writing the document conducted surveys, held well-attended forums and even interviewed residents waiting in line at the recycling center.

The Vergennes City Plan, said current planning commission chairman Shannon Haggett, provides both the vision for the citys future and the underpinnings for the new zoning laws, which planners approved after their own public process and gave to aldermen last month.

The goal of the process ... is to really to take the tenets set forth in the plan and reconcile our current zoning and subdivision regulations with them, Haggett said, so that our regulations are matching the intent of the plan, which was informed by the people coming together and saying these are the things that we want to see in the city of Vergennes.

Aldermen must hold at least Tuesdays public hearing; they may choose to hold more. If they accept planners work as is or with only minor technical changes, they may then adopt the laws.

If aldermen want to make major changes based on what they see or what they hear from the public, the proposal must go back to the planners to be reworked, and the hearing process must from scratch back before planners.

Haggett hopes and expects that wont be necessary, given that both the plan and the zoning laws have been based on extensive public input over the past five years for example, just recently, based on testimony at their final public hearing, planners added density bonuses for planned unit developments in the citys agricultural zone.

Read the original:
New zoning could effect look of Vergennes

Photo credit http://www.theelectricbrewery.com

Hey, remember us?

Yeah, weve been busy babies, too many hours on the clock, building business plans, blah, blah, blah. The fact that so much time has passed since our last post seriously burrows into our collective psyche. It pains us. But, sometimes life gets in the way. What can you do? Please allow us to apologize. Consider it a hiatus, a time to recuperate. And we move on

One thing that we have absolutely not allowed to go stagnant is our endless trek down the path to better beer. We have been homebrewing every chance that we get. For us, brewing is not just a means to the end of having beer to drink. Its so much more. We want to make the best beer in the world. We put hours into recipe formulation. We read, we discuss, we reflect This is a log of our process.

The ever sharing Eric Salazar of New Belgium (photo credit http://www.fairfaxbrewfest.com)

The brewing community is phenomenal. We love being a part of it. We always feel accepted and we almost always walk away from a brewery visit feeling like we were virtually hugged by the staff. The one thing that we are often most surprised by is how open brewers are about what they do. Processes, recipes, sometimes even financials are shared with us openly. It speaks to the genuine quality of people that we aim to surround ourselves with. Ultimately, we want to be just as open and helpful. We want to spread the love too.

So this is our attempt to share. We thought that it might be helpful to write down our process for recipe formulation, if not to help other all-grain brewers, to help us remember why we did what we did. This way, if a bit of time passes between the first time that we brew something and the follow up brew,we dont have to start all over from scratch.

We urge you to share your experiences as well, for we are still figuring it all out ourselves.

I (Timperial) should, in addition, mention that I am also writing this as a means to assist one of my employers, Homebrew Heaven, get flow to their website and to create a deeper set of tools to assist homebrewers on that site. Please check them out if you havent already, for they are allowing me to take time on the clock to write these articles.

-

More here:
The Homebrewer’s Brain – Munich Helles

BROOKLIN With the critical success of The Hutchins Times, a newspaper Hoyt Hutchins wrote for his family, the young newsmans next step was obvious find a larger audience.

I was doing it for my house as a fun project and I thought maybe we could do it for the whole town, Hutchins said Monday.

With that, the 13-year-old home-schooler launched the first edition of the Brooklin Times on Feb. 12, 2011.

Ive missed a few weeks, but it was a scheduled miss, he said, explaining that the fledgling journal didnt reach the newsstands for a couple of months while he was on an extended vacation and one other week when he was away to attend a conference.

As editor in chief, Hutchins writes the news stories, sells and creates the ads, arranges guest columns and letters to the editor, lays out each issue and delivers fresh-off-the-press copies to newsstands every Saturday morning.

Hutchins produces the paper on a home printer.

Along the way, hes developed a keen eye for news and features, and hes adopted the tools of the trade, including his own shorthand that he uses when working as a reporter.

Hutchins is well familiar with the driving force behind all newspaper work deadlines.

Ive always got it done on time, though Ive come close to not, he said. I deliver every Saturday morning. Getting it done Friday night is the deadline.

The young entrepreneur is also learning the business basics that can make or break a newspaper.

Read more:
Home-schooler Learns the Newspaper Trade by Publishing Brooklin Times

The last time the city asked residents to vote on a quality-of-life bond, the voters cooperated, easily passing all four propositions in 2000.

Twelve years later, as the city prepares to ask El Pasoans to vote on a new $655 million to $835 million bond, just about every project listed on the 2000 bond issue -- minus a parking garage at the zoo -- has been completed.

It is because of that success that the mayor and other city officials are willing to go to the voters again. The 2000 bond showed that the city could hold the line on taxes and still achieve its goals, Mayor John Cook said.

The proposed November 2012 bond referendum, while bigger in dollars and projects, is needed to create a longer-lasting economic impact on the community

"The combination of signature projects with neighborhood projects and basic infrastructure is what really makes this strong," Cook said.

Unlike the 2000 bond, which was worth $141 million, this year's bond could carry national implications as it calls for a multipurpose arena and sports stadiums. The 2012 bond proposal also carries money for the zoo, infrastructure and neighborhoods.

But the centerpieces are the stadiums, which won't be built unless there's a commitment from a team to make El Paso home.

"There's no reason that those events and shows that are going to Phoenix or even Las Cruces can't come to El Paso if we have the right facilities," said Rick Horrow, president of Horrow Sports

His national company has been hired to help develop a plan to spur economic development in the region, something that was not done in 2000.

Most of the money from the 2000 bond issue was spread among four city departments: Parks and Recreation, the library, the zoo and history museum. The library bond issue, was the most popular, passing with 77 percent of the vote, according to El Paso Times archives.

See the original post:
12 years later, money for new upgrades in El Paso sought