In a recent article in MLive, Ann Arbor Spark reported that they brought $700 Million in investment into the community which would then lead to the creation of 2,248 jobs in the Ann Arbor region.

I'm not sure where the 2248 job number comes from, but it's obvious that Spark is doing good things for the community.

A couple of Ann Arbor solar power projects have come to my attention in the last few days.  First, The Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association is offering it's Go Solar program to Ann Arbor home owners.  It's a way for multiple home owners to get together and purchase Solar products together.  Second it looks like the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market in Kerry town is going to be completely solar by the end of July.  The City is installing 156 solar panels capabable of producing enough power to supply five homes.  The DDA is funding the project.

Ann Arbor is so cool (hope this also makes financial sense as well).

The Ann Arbor Rail Project

If you're driving 23 south into Ann Arbor, this Bi-Level Passenger Rail Car could be in your future.

Details are still hard to come by, but more info has come to light about the proposed Ann Arbor rail project.

According to an arcticle in MetroMode, the plan seems to be to start in the fall with a single train running between two temporary stations, one in Ann Arbor on Plymouth Rd. and another at the border between Washtenaw and Livingston counties.  The Great Lakes Central Rail Road, the company that owns these tracks, would make six trips in the morning and six trips in the evening. A trip takes 20 minutes from station to station. 

Thanks to this MDot Rail Map, you can see the basic train route along the black line from Howell to Ann Arbor.

The train would have three passenger cars, each of which is a double decker car that can hold somewhere around 500 passengers.  That means each trip, the train could carry around 1500 passengers.  The capacity of the system would then be 9000 commuters a day if every train was full.   That's 9000 one way in the morning and then 9000 back again in the evening.

Ann Arbor plans to provide bus service to and from the temporary station.  I'm not sure about the other end of the line in Livingston, possibly that would be more like a park and ride. 

Depending on how well the service works, there are plans to take it farther south into Saline and possibly Monroe and farther North to Howell.

Yes, it's true, Mary Heitzeg, my pretty and brilliant wife is on wikipedia. Not in some obscure post either. Just check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine.

 There was a time, not so long ago, that I greeted every new Microsoft release with happiness and wonder. "How do they do it?" I would ask. "These guys are geniuses!" I would exclaim. I remember learning MFC for the first time and ATL, both were as exciting as a Christmas morning. Microsoft understood what developers needed and Microsoft was there to deliver it. To this day I tell people I owe my software career to Bill Gates and the Microsoft attitude of making things great for all developers, not just for those with huge amounts of money to spend.

I moved into the Java space just as .Net 1.0 came out. This wasn't because of Microsoft or .Net, it was because of customer demand. I still love Microsoft, but those days of wonder and excitement have passed (at least for now).

Yesterday I felt that same old feeling. I was sitting in the Las Vegas airport, waiting for a red eye when I learned that I had missed something quite huge. The release of Google App Engine.

What's so cool?

In a nut shell, Google App Engine is a way for developers to write applications without worrying about the deployment of those applications. You write the application, using the Google SDK (which runs locally, not on the Net) and you deploy those application in the Google App space. The Google App space takes the place of Apache, JBoss, MySQL, etc. running on your own hardware. In addition, Google offers a number of API's, including Data and authentication (using Google accounts like GMail).

Google's goal is to make application development faster, easier to deploy, and automatically scalable. I've only started working with the SDK, so I can't speak as to how good a job they've done so far, but it's definitely like Christmas morning again.

Check out Dave Winer's article on CNet or the Google App engine site itself for more info.