Skip to main content

Abram Friedman Adult School

One of the weird things that is hard to explain about growing up in Puerto Rico is the lack of Public Libraries. I'm a bit of a compulsive book buyer. So being able to borrow books is still a novel concept for me. Of course Universities and schools in Puerto Rico have libraries but a public library, one that's there for the community? That still shocking to me. And it's a very American thing too. Even tiny towns I've visited seem to have them and some are shockingly nice. The Oviedo Florida public library was gorgeous, and I loved to go there. The Burbank Public Library has meeting rooms you can use and a whole section for children. I tell you this because another thing that was shocking to me was the Abram Friedman Occupational Center Adult School.
From the outside it looks way worse than I was expecting. It looks like a prison, actually a juvenile detention center. No windows, painted while like a polar bear with a blue strip down the bottom. Only a government building would get away with being so oppressively inhuman. The front of the building even has an old school fire escape. But inside it's a rather small school, that smelled faintly of paint like a painter's studio or an art school. In the school there is a cafeteria, with multiple diverse classrooms and classes. I'd never a expected a school like this in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. There are ESL classes I was expecting but also locksmith, a fully working barbershop, a car garage where people were doing body work and painting and more shockingly a graphics design class in a lab with full 27" iMacs, a computer networking and repair class, and electrical installation and construction lab and a solar panel installation class too.
I want to build my own tiny house so I'm considering taking the construction or electrical installation for the insanely low price of $65 a semester... I'm paying that much in books for my Agile Management class!
It's website needs work however... maybe I should take that on as a showcase project of my webdesign skills.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Multiple Assignments in Ruby

In this Rails project I'm running I need to set a whole bunch of individual variables to 'disabled' at once depending on the group the current user belongs to. We can use multiple assignment in this case but with a caveat. Multiple assignments are a quick way of setting a lot of variables at once. h, k = 1,2  => [1,2] h => 1 k => 2 but   h, k = 1      => 1 h => 1 k => nil In that case we can do this: h = k = 1   => 1 h => 1 h => 1  Beware this sets them to the same object. So if you change one you change both. h = k = [] h << 1 h => [1] k => [1] While we're at it here is how to reverse two variables: h = 1 k = 2 h,k = k,h h => 2 k => 1
Post a Comment
Read more

What Medieval Economics can teach us about tariffs.

As a teen, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) with my friends. This started an interest in the medieval period that led to me taking a medieval history class in college just to understand the period more. Over the years I've also read great books like " Dungeon, Fire and Sword " about the crusades (I recommend the book) and yet with all that knowledge it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me I had a completely wrong understanding of economics in the Medieval Period. "Viking helmets, sword and footwear" by eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 In my D&D games, players who are adventures battling monsters and creatures would need equipment and on the trips to town, they'd get resupplied with their adventuring necessities. I'd run these moments referencing my imagination of what it must have been and fantasy books I'd read. There be an inn with a raucous bar, a gruffly black-smith, if a city also a weapon and armor sm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Setting up the Marble Mouse for Ubuntu

I have a Logitech trackball which I love. I bought it when my wrists started hurting after hours of long Photoshop sessions. The switch to the trackball fixed all that. It allows me to hold my hand in the perfect position and it's great for most browsing with one exception: It lacks a middle-click wheel. This presents a bigger problem than it seems, as design seems to be removing the scroll bars at the edges of windows in favor of small slits. So to get around this you can emulate a scroll wheel or use the middle click to activate a scroll motion on various programs. Logitech has a utility that sets this up in Windows but in Ubuntu you have a better (if more hard-work required) option. The Ubuntu option is better because unlike in Windows you can emulate the wheel with the track-ball by holding down a button. This is the option I like to use. In Ubuntu you write a configuration file to set up the trackball to work the way you want it. I have to re-create this...
3 comments
Read more