Tony Wilkins for Greensboro city council

GREENSBORO, NC -- With current district five city council representative Trudy Wade heading off to Raleigh as a newly elected state senator, the remaining city councilors must choose someone to fill her seat.

I don't know the other candidates who have nominated themselves to replace Wade, but I think nominee Tony Wilkins would be a good choice to replace her. Here's why:

Similar to Wade
Tony aligns with Wade politically. He's not a replica, but similar. It would be unfair to the citizens of district 5 for council to try to shift its composition significantly by selecting someone very dissimilar from the departing Wade. 2013 will bring an opportunity soon enough for voters to elect someone else if the council's choice is unsuitable to district five voters, until then, council should respect the last known preference of those voters: A mainstream conservative.

He's engaged.
Tony has experience serving on the War Memorial Commission, as executive director of the county Republican Party and as an active campaigner on behalf of others. He's politically engaged, aware and not likely to get buffaloed because of naivete.

He Blogs
Well, a little... lately. He used to much more and it is my hope he will resume if he's appointed. He has probably stopped because he's under consideration for this open seat, which is not admirable but probably practical. As a blogger, he knows the value blogs can contribute to the information stream as well as what it is like to be on the uninformed side of government secrecy. Those are insights we hope he'll not forget if appointed.

He is a business person, but not a developer
Like Wade (a veterinarian), Tony owns his own business (Furniture Connections) which he has operated for the past 30 years. I think business experience is helpful, although not required, for elected officials. It gives them a certain kind of insight and, unlike developers, retail business owners do not think that economic development means cut, plow and build.

I've also had lunch with Tony a couple of times. I respect a man with a hearty appetite and culinary curiosity, but I have even greater respect for a man who has an interest in sitting down and talking with someone with whom he knows he has some significant disagreement. To be able to do so cordially and to maintain mutual respect throughout is a sign of maturity that is appropriate for city council. He'd serve us well.

A big, slow, dumb hippopotamus sitting on our chest

GREENSBORO, NC -- A big problem with this town? Entrenched institutionalized mediocrity and incompetence suffocating innovation and new ideas. (Another problem, the people who think it's only polite to defend it. "It may be a big, slow, dumb hippopotamus, but it's our big, slow, dumb hippopotamus and it's rude to point."

The following post was originally published on October, 24, 2008. In light of the News & Record's new website fiasco, it could have been written again today. Hippopotamuses are hard to move.
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News & Record history online goes "poof"
October 24, 2008

This morning I was trying to research some of the media coverage of the events surrounding stripping former Greensboro Police Chief David Wray of his authority and his subsequent resignation. I am frustrated and disappointed to find that search result links to News & Record articles lead to page after page of broken links: "Page not found. We're sorry, but the page you've requested does not exist."

This blog post by News & Record editor John Robinson about the N&R's reporting of the Wray affair has seven links to what the editor purports to be relevant News & Record articles. Each one is broken.

The local newspaper should serve as an historical record. It doesn't. It sucks. The whole enterprise should be gutted, torn down and rebuilt from the ground up with the goal of some modicum of competence; or someone should start a new media enterprise to replace the N&R. That could probably be done for a quarter of the rumored sale price of the N&R and without the drain of a legacy culture and financial overhead that weigh like an anchor of perpetual incompetence around the neck of the N&R.

Newspaper editor on website fiasco: "My soup's cold."

GREENSBORO, NC --

Reviews have not been good. The paper takes a beating all week about its functionality-challenged website and in his Sunday column editor Jeff Gauger writes about cold soup. During the Amendment One debate he wrote about blue yard signs. Right before the election he wrote about grits.
-- Sam Hieb

Sam is right, since arriving from Ohio this spring, News & Record editor Jeff Gauger's hokum has been an insult to the people of Greensboro. We are a city of five institutions of higher learning, two of them historically black, of inspiring participation in the civil rights movement and of national renown for our blogging and citizens media. Quaker influences still resonate as we stake a claim to a progressiveness that separates us from most of the rest of North Carolina. Our economic history is of a city built on a triumvirate of tobacco, textiles and furniture powerhouses and the subsequent challenges of having that base disintegrate in quick order by globalization. Our present is about us keeping our heads above water while we remain ever hopeful of revitalization. That's Greensboro.

Grits, Duke blue v. Carolina blue and our soup not hot enough for his liking? Gauger sounds like he's writing to his meemaw back in Akron while passing through, not to the people of his new hometown of whom he has apparently yet to gain any significant understanding, insight or respect.

skeuomorphs

In product design, the simplest thought exercise is to make additions. It’s the easiest way to make an Old Thing feel like a New Thing. The more difficult exercise is to reconsider the product in the context of now. A now which may be very different from the then in which the product was originally conceived.
-- Craig Mod, in his essay Subcompact Publishing

Skeuomorph [skyoo-uh-mawrf] — a design element of a product that imitates design elements that were functionally necessary in the original product design, but which have become ornamental in the new design.

It's hard to let go of skeuomorphs, they're cozy and familiar, and sometimes they are intentionally maintained, as Steve Jobs was apparently fond of for iPhone designs. But there are some really interesting things happening out there by people who are eschewing old things and thinking completely "in the context of now."

 The News & Record's new website design utilizes a lot of skeuomorphs. Do they enhance the user experience or are they the product of legacy thinking layered on an old thing to make it feel like a new thing? Do these leftovers from newspaper design help or a hinder the use of the site?

• A masthead 
• Columns (layout, not written pieces, although those too, perhaps).
• Sections
• A division between writers and readers
• Galleries
• Editions

I wonder what the News & Record would look like on the internet if they stopped thinking about putting the "paper" online and asked themselves what is the most interesting and valuable digital product their resources are capable of producing.

The appalling consequences of the News & Record's incompetent management

GREENSBORO, NC -- Jeff Martin has a post about the News & Record's website fiasco. He says they owe us an explanation. I say, we'll never get it. There has been a virtual blackout on any commentary by them on this matter so far except for one "thanks very much for your patience" blog post from editor Jeff Gauger. For at least the past seven years, the News & Record has never demonstrated a willingness to explain itself to our community that I can recall.

If ever such an explanation were warranted, it would have come from events surrounding the unjustified firing of former Greensboro Police chief David Wray when the slow but inevitable revelation of facts was found to contradict, in great measure, the reporting on the topic by the News & Record.

The paper never explained how it got things so wrong or, most importantly, never followed up with news stories to correct the record. The N&R's editorial pages, that had demanded we get to the bottom of the affair, grew quiet when the bottom came into focus and reflected poorly on the News & Record.

If something like the Wray fray did not inspire the News & Record to make amends with the community, their website fiasco won't either. And it's time for that to end. Management's disdain has reached the point of causing real harm

As much as I think Jeff has a point, as much as I think the community is owed an explanation of not only what happened but of how the N&R is going to avoid letting us down so harshly in the future, those expectations are secondary to what is owed to the reporters and columnists of the N&R.

Their work, the entirety of their careers in some cases, has been wiped from public view by the News & Record's web fiasco — or "stumble," as editor Jeff Gauger called it. That's right, all of the previously online articles, columns and comment threads written and inspired by N&R staff have disappeared from the web. Search "Joe Killian County Commissioners" and results for anything older than a day or two are broken links. It's the same for everyone. Doug Clark? Gone. Travis Fain? A ghost. Amanda Lehmert? Erased.

If you are a journalist in the twenty-first century, your body of work is what is on the internet. What you have backed up on your computer doesn't count. It is what search engines can find that matters. The News & Record just wiped these people's professional reputations from the face of the Earth for all practical purposes. That's not a stumble, it's malpractice.

I don't know how much longer the rank and file there will put up with the management that allowed this to happen. As I wrote at Jeff's blog, they should stage a walkout and demand that the owners provide them with some leadership worthy of their dedication.

I don't doubt that the community would support them, as we too deserve better. Think about this, it's not just those poor people who have been shat upon, vast swaths of Greensboro's story — our history — are gone too. Greensboro has been made podunk by the sociopathy of a few individuals too narcissistic to see that their incompetence is harming people and the community they purport to serve and, dammit, we all deserve a hell of a lot better.

A win for digital due process

It's just one step, but an important one for bringing law enforcement in the digital age back in line with the Fourth Amendment.

In a win for privacy advocates, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation on Thursday designed to strengthen electronic privacy protections.

Most notably, the bill-called the Leahy Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendment-requires a search warrant before law enforcement can review emails or other electronic communications.

Wired in with some Argentinian new new age

One of my favorite scenes from The Social Network is when screwed over co-founder of Facebook Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) storms into the office looking for Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) who is working on his laptop with headphones on, oblivious to outside distraction, and Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) tries to wave off the charging Saverin with "He's wired in. He's wired in."

I find that certain aspects of web development take enormous amounts of concentration for me. Coding doesn't come easy or naturally. It helps to get wired in -- headphones on with the right kind of music: no words, nothing too sleepy or frenetic. I like psy trance, down tempo, classical and new age.

I've found a great streaming new age station out of Argentina: Cienradios.com, which you can listen to here. It stretches the boundaries of traditional new age, yet retains that meditative and spiritual essence that is the hallmark of new age. It's not predominately South American, as far as I can tell, but it offers a broader mix than I'm familiar with from U.S. new age stations. Flavors of jazz, spacey and the occasional electric guitar join the familiar lush hypnotics. I find it great for getting wired in.

Here's the scene from The Social Network:

What's a web app?

Web apps are web sites that are made with open and common components of web design (HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript) to deliver an internet experience to users that is more like that of interacting with an application or program than what we have commonly experienced when visiting web pages through the years. In fact, the whole notion of "pages" generally takes a back seat in a web app to the experience of interacting with screens or portions of screens.

Web apps are not Android apps, iPhone apps or Window's apps that are created specifically for those operating systems and are capable of utilizing some features of mobile devices that web apps cannot (yet) such as the accelerometer (the thing that is aware of the orentation and movement of your phone). Web apps do have an advantage for developers/designers though in that they can run on multiple platforms and devices — a build once/run anywhere method of development that has obvious advantages of its own. While web apps rely on a device's web browser to function and actually reside at an address on the web, they can be added to a phone's desktop with an icon so that users can launch them directly, just like other apps.

Project Greene River, my redevelopment of Greensboro 101, entails making the site into a web app, essentially. I'll have more about my thinking on the ergonomics and user experience in another post, but I've been doing a lot of thinking about what it is Greensboro 101 can do and should do for users and how its current design has grown stale and deficient in meeting those goals.

I have no firm launch date yet, but it won't be long.

Why is the News & Record not on Greensboro 101?

You may have noticed that the News & Record's blogs and news feeds have disappeared from Greensboro 101. Their new site design broke the connections from which Greensboro 101 collected their excerpts and I don't see any updated links to replace them. I've emailed the editors and publisher to inquire about new links and hope to hear back soon.

In the mean time, I've added local TV stations WGHP and News14. These feeds are less than ideal because their "Greensboro" excerpts include stories from well outside this area, but they are still mostly local. WFMY does not provide a feed that does not also include world news and is not included for that reason.

Operation Greene River nearing completion

Operation Greene River is nearing completion. More soon. Please stay tuned.

Dispatch from inside the bubble: Tim Duncan on the impossibility of reality

Greensboro Guardian columnist Tim Duncan prior to the election, in predicting defeat for President Obama:

These polls [those showing an Obama lead] also serve another purpose — which is to support the meme-in-waiting among those on the Left that Romney "stole" the election.

Greensboro Guardian columnist Tim Duncan after the reelection of President Obama:

Make no mistake – this election was defrauded, and stolen, by the Democrats on a massive scale.

How does Duncan know this? Because of the polls that showed Romney with a lead. His predictions could not have been wrong, he says. They were actually, he says, based on "pretty solid" data—those being the inaccurate polls.

Information that backs up one's wishes but doesn't match reality is not pretty solid data. It's the opposite. Fool's gold. Yet, this is where Duncan plants his flag: Those polls that were wrong—those that predicted a Romney win—were really right and those that made accurate predictions were wrong.

To explain the incongruity between the information he really, really, really wanted to believe and reality, Duncan reaches the only possible conclusion: the election was a fraud and "Obama is not legitimately the President of the United States."

Welcome to the inside-out reality of life inside the Bubble.

Ensconced in his womb of denial, Duncan finds himself exactly where he predicted "frenetic and desperate" Democrats would be after the election, using bad polling data to justify claims of fraud. Pathetic (and frenetic and desperate).

Life in the Bubble goes beyond just being wrong a lot about a lot of things, however. It fosters a threat to American ideals. With an incomplete and inaccurate view of the world, it's easy to suppose there are two kinds of people, "us" and "them." Failing to grasp the empirical truths of the world, it's easy to remain blind to the mockery made of self-determination and to the footnotes appended to "all men are created equal" that result too often from the opinions of those immersed in intentional ignorance.

America needs better. However many good ideas one political party may have, America depends on a vigorous competition of ideas. That cannot happen if one side is sliding into intellectual atrophy. Republicans have four years to realign their party. There are steps they can take to have broader demographic appeal, but none of them will work if they continue to accommodate stupidity. They should issue an ultimatum: Think or leave.

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Related: The right wing Bubble is not an abstraction. It is manifested clearly and forcefully in the conservative media. Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic does an excellent job of explaining in How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File. An excerpt:

It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thinking; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear.

But guess what?

You haven't just been misinformed about the horse race. Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven't tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they've done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.

Four years without a cigarette

I quit smoking four years ago today; not a single cigarette or puff since then -- haven't wanted one. I quit using Chantix, obviously it was quite effective. If you are thinking about trying it and have any questions, use the comments here or email me.

Time marches on; Bill's Pizza now a memory

"Bill's?"

It was always on the short list for off-campus lunch among my friends at Smith High School. Even before I had my license, good friend Nancy and her AMC Gremlin provided the exhilarating freedom of a thirty minutes of escape. I liked school and even liked the cafeteria food, so it wasn't so much about leaving something behind as it was about getting out in the world, even if it was just down the street.

Among the usual choices, Bill's was a special temptation requiring consideration beyond what to eat. If we chose Bill's we knew we'd get some of the best pizza around. Although we all agreed, and  reaffirmed with a snicker each visit, that the sausage topping looked like rabbit pellets, it was the key to the full enjoyment of a Bill's pizza.

http://www.news-record.com/content/2012/10/11/article/bill_s_pizza_pub_on_high_point_road_closes

Sharp drop in News & Record print circulation

GREENSBORO, NC -- After leveling off somewhat in 2011, the News & Record's print circulation returned to a years' long trend of decline. Sunday circulation fell by 5.4 percent in the six months ended October 31st and was down 6.1 percent year over year. Weekday circulation was down by 4.3 percent in six months and 4.7 percent for the year.

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation:

Sunday: 81,600
6 month change: -5.4% (-4,634)
12 month change: -6.1% (-5,332)

Weekday: 54,789
6 month change:  -4.3% (-2,485)
12 month change:  -4.7% (-2,700)




There are anecdotes that reader disappointment with publisher Robins Saul's decision to prohibit the paper from taking an editorial stance on North Carolina's anti-gay marriage amendment may have contributed to the resumption of decline, but it's likely, in my opinion, that may have only been an aggravating factor in a larger industry trend. I wonder how their online audience is doing?

Since 2005:

Sunday circulation: Down 27% (-30.054)
Weekday circulation: Down 42% (-40,330) 

Cheer up Republicans

With significant wins at the state and county levels, Republicans here in Guilford County North Carolina may need less consoling than those elsewhere. Still, this from Will Saletan rings true.

Dear Republicans,

Sorry about the election. I know how much it hurts when your presidential candidate loses. I’ve been there many times. You’re crestfallen. You can’t believe the public voted for that idiot. You fear for your country.

Cheer up. The guy we just re-elected is a moderate Republican.

I know how stupid that sounds. Barack Obama is the head of the Democratic Party. For five years, conservative politicians and media told you he was a raving socialist. In the heat of the campaign, when you’re trying to beat the guy, it’s hard to let go of that image of him, just as it’s hard for Democrats to see past the caricatures of Mitt Romney. But now that the campaign is over and you’re staring at a second Obama term, the falsity of the propaganda may come as a relief. By and large, Obama’s instincts are the instincts of a moderate Republican. His policies are the policies of a moderate Republican. He stands where the GOP used to stand and will someday stand again.

Read the whole thing.

Election predictions

My predictions for the 2012 general election.

Presidential popular vote
Obama: 50.15%
Romney: 48.75%

Electoral College
Obama: 318
Romney: 220

Senate change
Republicans: +1

House of Representatives change
Democrats: +4

North Carolina presidential
Obama by 40,000 votes.

Endorsement kibosh

GREENSBORO, NC -- Four of North Carolina's five largest newspapers have made presidential endorsements (all for Obama). Can you guess which one slunk away?

Time Warner Cable earnings miss on falling demand, glad I could help

Time Warner Cable missed third quarter profit estimates because of a decline in video subscribers. From Reuters:

The company lost 140,000 video customers during the third quarter.

I was one of them.

Time Warner Cable treats its customers poorly. It jerks them around on price and offerings. Until they learn to treat people right, price their products reasonably and give their customers some respect, they should expect nothing less than people saying goodbye. The letter I received from Mike Munley, President of Residential Services painting a 50% increase in my bill as "additional savings" was contemptuous. The subsequent decent into the hell that is Time Warner "customer service" was the final straw. Good job, Time Warner Cable.

Guilford County Commissioner candidate fails to file timely finance report

Transparency is fundamental to the health of democratic elections, so it is vital that candidates file timely and accurate campaign finance reports. All of the candidates for the Guilford County Commissioner races have filed their third quarter campaign finance reports by the October 29th deadline except for Democratic candidate for the 6th district seat Linda Kellerman.

(HT: Joe Killian)

The choice: a straight shooter or a chameleon on plaid?

People here in North Carolina used to say of their support for the late Senator Jessee Helms, "I may not agree with him on everything, but at least I know where he stands." At times frustrating to hear, there was a nugget of reason within that thinking: If you cannot trust a politician to speak honestly, it doesn't matter whether you think you agree with him or not because you have no real idea of what your agreements or disagreements may be.

I supported Barack Obama in 2008 and I think he has done a lot of good for our county. Yet I recognize that he has been less than perfect so, with room for improvement, I was keeping an open mind about whomever the Republicans would offer. Would they put forward someone who would be better?

I have my answer and it's no. I'm an unaffiliated voter and I will be voting for some Republicans and some Democrats this year, Republicans as high as at the congressional level. They do not suffer from the disqualifying fundamental flaw that infects Mitt Romney: a lack of trustworthiness.

Romney's recent fear-mongering deceptions about American auto companies sending jobs to China, roundly refuted by the CEOs of Chrysler and GM, are just the latest examples of his lack of truthfulness. We've had presidents before who had disdain for the sophistication of the American people — who have had no qualms about intentionally deceiving the public. It doesn't turn out well.

Obama, on the other hand is a straight shooter. As the Republican Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie said of Barack Obama this week: "He says what he means." Like Jessee Helms, you know where he stands. Not Romney.

Look at the self-contradictory positions Romney has taken on a variety of issues and it is inescapable that he has no compass — no discoverable core. He leaves voters to guess his true convictions — if he even has any real convictions beyond a commitment to his own advancement.

Social Security
Does Romney favor privatizing Social Security or is he against it? He has said both.

Gun Control
Does he support an assault weapons ban or is he opposed to gun control? He has said both. (In his first presidential run, he claimed an endorsement by the N.R.A. that he had not received.)

Roe v. Wade
Does Romney support Roe v. Wade or would he prefer the overturn of Roe v. Wade? He has said both.

Mandated Health Insurance
Is he for health insurance mandates (he called his Massachusetts mandate a model for the nation) or does he think they are unconstitutional? He has said both.

Immigration
Does he support a path to amnesty for undocumented workers or does he want them to get out of the country? He has said both.

Gay Marriage
Does he think gay people have a "right" to adopt children (as he provided for when governor) or is it a matter for the individual states to decide? He has said both. (And does he think such matters are really for the states to decide or does he support a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage?)

Tax Cuts
Does he favor a capital gains tax cut or does he oppose it? He has said both.

Carbon Taxes
Does he favor taxing carbon emissions or, wait... he probably still does.

Campaign Finance Reform
Does he support campaign spending limits or oppose them? He has said both.

Gay Soldiers
Is he in favor of allowing gay people to serve openly in the military or does he oppose it. He has said both. (Or does he favor it again)? 

On these issues and more, Romney has taken contradictory positions. He is a chimera, a mirage, a chameleon on plaid. It may very well allow him to win the election, but I think — hope — that Americans are smarter than that.

If you support Mitt Romney because you cannot bear Barack Obama, that's one thing. No risk may seem too high to you to oust the "foreign born socialist," if that's your view. But if you are supporting Mitt Romney because you think you agree with him on his positions, that demands an answer to a simple question: which positions? Those he has adopted weeks before the election? Those he took while campaigning for the Republican nomination? Those he adopted as governor of Massachusetts? You think you know where he really stands? If he's elected, which Mitt Romney do you expect to show up and how do you know? Fingers crossed?

Are we not better off reelecting an experienced straight shooter over an inexperienced panderer from whom we don't know what to expect? You will make up your own mind, of course, just as I have, but you owe it to yourself and to your country to know what you are voting for.