Good Morning, RVA: You did it!

You either completed the Monument 10k or successfully grumbled about it from underneath the covers. Either way, congrats!

March 30, 2015; 7:03 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: lightcomposer

Good morning, RVA! It’s 44 °F, and today’s high is a certainly springly 65 °F. There could be some rain headed through the area early this morning, but the skies should clear up by this afternoon and, afterwards, maybe stay that way until Friday.

Water cooler

The results of this past weekend’s Monument 10k have been posted. You can find, perhaps unflattering, pictures of your friends and family as they cross the finish line here.

Michael Martz writes for the RTD about the crumbling state of Old City Hall and the efforts to fix it up before the thing falls down. Here’s hoping your office space never has the following attribute: “diminished occupant life safety.”

Have you been by those wild, modern houses on the 2600 block of Floyd? The ones that make me go “Whoa!” each time I roll by? Richmond BizSense has some more from developer Bill Chapman and Baskervill architect Burt Pinnock. If you’re interested in buying one, too bad. They’ve all been sold!

You should read this letter in the RTD from UVA’s president and rector about the university’s path toward keeping college affordable(ish). I’m 100% unqualified to speak on the changing economics of higher education, but I’m also endlessly fascinated by how institutions will begin to react as college becomes, for many families, completely and almost hilariously financially unrealistic.

Richmond Magazine has an interview with John McEnroe, who will be in town on April 23rd as part of the 2015 PowerShares Series. It reminds me of this episode of Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin that you must listen to if tennis or John McEnroe or New York are your things.

Speaking of, Vox has a list of 26 podcasts you should listen to–including the aforementioned Here’s the Thing!

Sports!

• Kickers rallied for a 2-2 draw against the Wilmington Hammerheads.
• Caps lost to the Predators 4-3 but beat the Rangers 5-2. They remain 4th in the Metropolitan Division.

What to expect

• Susan Howson looks at why Josiah Lockhart and his heritage breed animals are a Big Deal.
• I’ll recap the seven movies (I missed my goal by three) I saw at this year’s French Film Festival.
• Trevor Dickerson tells us why we should be stoked for Studio Two Three.
• The RVA Hackathon returns!

This morning’s longread

Inside the Mad, Mad World of TripAdvisor

The impact of the so-called TripAdvisor effect can be enormous. When a group of researchers at Ireland’s University College Dublin examined hotel reviews in the Las Vegas market between 2007 and 2009, and compared the data with reviews in the Irish market (where, they noted, TripAdvisor was a more “recent phenomenon”), they found that while ratings in Las Vegas remained more or less constant during that period, in Ireland they rose from 3.6 to 3.8 bubbles. Their takeaway: as Irish managers scrambled to respond to the novelty that was TripAdvisor, hotels actually got better. Additionally, responses to customer reviews more than tripled over the two years of the study.

The Internet is a terrifying always-churning, ever-hungry beast.

This morning’s Instagram

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March 30, 2015 7:03 AM 0