A reflection of us

The picture of the small channel or gut running from behind our house to the White Oak River is a nearly perfect reflection. The White Oak River is a blackwater river. I am guessing that make the reflections less or a rarity, but that is only a guess. I know that I regularly capture deep reflective images here on the banks of the White Oak in coastal North Carolina.

I make no effort to hide the fact that I am addicted to local newspapers. I find them fascinating. I recently wrote about this love of newspapers in a post, "The morning newspaper."

Here on the coast of North Carolina newspapers seem very local. I was surprised to find out that you can't even get home delivery of the Raleigh News and Observer.

The newspapers that I read are all over the map in opinions. As I mentioned in my other article, one even regularly features Ann Coulter. Of course much of the news is local news, but I am surprised to find that I get more of national and international news without having to resort to a larger paper. Yet I still do not really have a handle on the three or four North Carolina newspapers that I regularly browse.

As a local newspaper goes, I always found the Roanoke Times to be a paper that seemed to have a very balanced approach on its opinion page. What I enjoyed even more was the active commentary for local people. There were many very articulate opinions pieces penned by people from the community.

Our local newspaper reflect the communities around them. Perhaps sometimes they get out of sync, but I that does not last long.

If each of the opinion sectors is a little unhappy with the local newspaper, then they are probably doing a pretty good job.

I have noticed that the Washington Post has started letting readers who are registered with their website post comments. The Santa Fe newspaper, the Free Newmexican started doing the same over a year ago. I think it is a great idea.

In these days of politics being too sensitive to discuss in polite company, maybe we can get back to reasonable discourse through written debates within our local newspapers.

That will certainly allow the newspapers to paint a more accurate picture of their communities.

On to the producer society

I drove down to Wilmington, NC earlier this Saturday morning for a class. As I zipped down the road, I stopped to take this picture of the the frost on the marsh running out to the White Oak River. The marsh grass looked like it had a dusting of snow.

It was a beautiful scene to have in your mind at the beginning of the day. Wilmington is the shopping mecca for the Crystal Coast. I guess that's good for us since it is closer than Raleigh, Charlotte, or other more urban places.

Buy as I cruised by Best Buy today winding my way through parking lots to find a lunch spot, I had to wonder if it is good for any of us. The swarming crowds reminded me of the holiday buying frenzy. We live in a consumer society where in theory the consumer is king. We have a multitude of choices, and we buy what we want.

The problem is that we end up buying stuff we do not want and part of the stuff we do want and or need ends up being defective. This may be a consumer world from one perspective, but from another it is certainly a producer controlled world. I have not tested the old LL Bean's warranty lately on the one on Sears' Craftsman tools, but beyond those I think there is little hope for the consumer.

We are in a world full of consumers. That is the good and the bad news. If you become an unhappy consumer, it is likely less expensive to ignore you and fill your space with another consumer. Satisfying unhappy customers is an expensive business. I just read about the Volvo throttle body recall. That's worth a good laugh. I paid nearly a thousand dollars to have my Volvo's throttle body replaced. It was a well known problem and Volvo fought a recall tooth and nail. Probably most Volvo owners ended up like me, getting rid of their cars and being stiffed by Volvo.

Despite all the customer surveys, does Volvo really care that they have lost me as a customer for life? Probably not. I'll run out of good, reliable products long before Volvo runs out of customers.

The manufacturers or producers of product are running the world, not we consumers.

Thoughts of LL Bean

This morning the temperature was 24 degrees here on the western side of Carteret County, NC. We are less than five miles from the beach so when it gets that cold this close to the Atlantic, it classifies as cold weather.

The scene to the left and the LL Bean sweatshirt that I put on this morning brought back memories of trips to Maine my freshman year in college.

That would have been 1967. We were in school in Cambridge and Freeport, Maine was only a couple of hours drive. I can still remember leaving the dorm around ten pm and getting to Bean's at just after midnight. There were bunch of true natives around the wood stove in Beans. The store was a far cry from the giant modern store that anchors Freeport these days.

It was a great introduction to Maine. I am sorry it has changed so much.

Living in Carteret County Coastal Website up and running

Back in August when I last did an entry, I was working hard to get my new website going.

I have worked hard to get a site built with content that readers might find useful. CoastalNC.org targets people who are interesting in living on the North Carolina coast or newcomers who are looking for more information about the area.

I am an avid photographer so there will be plenty of photography on the site with links to much more.

When you move to a new area, there are always many questions about services and products available. I hope to provide a personal perspective on those. Being someone who born in North Carolina but who has lived in Canada, Boston, Maryland, Mount Airy (NC's inspiration for Mayberry), Northern Virginia, and Southwest Virginia, I can relate to most people's situation.

Being an ex-cattle breeder who spent eleven years working outside, I am always interested in the weather so I have started a weblog on my daily observations of the weather with pictures to highlight the conditions.

As new residents to an area that we have long loved, I am looking forward to providing my perspective on the area.

Carteret County is not one of those places where I hope that we are the last people into paradise. It is very obvious that this area continues to grow.

As someone once told me the Crystal Coast is becoming one of the favorite retirement homes for "OPALS."

OPALS are "older people with active life styles."

This a great area to be active. The weather stays warm for much of the year. The roads and streets are uncrowded most of the time except a few weeks in July and August when it is too hot anyway. I have really enjoying biking now that I do not have to load my bike on the back car.

Then there is the water for kayaking and boating of whatever type you can dream. I hope that a can be a friendly resource for people looking to move to Carteret County. In many respects it is a dream place to live especially in years when the hurricanes ignore us.

Being from the Southeast, I have some memories of childhood and more recent hurricanes. One of my deepest memories is evacuating from the Outer Banks one summer and seeing our car drive through axle deep water. More recently I have had trees fall on our house in Roanoke , Virginia from hurricanes that have moved inland.

We live on the water, not on the beach. Hopefully our carefully selected housesite will provide some protection for us. If not, we'll head for the mountains which aren't that far away.

Ready to launch?

I've been working on a new website. It's almost ready for launch. There is no way to get a website up and going nearly as nice as this very well designed kayak-canoe platform at Hammocks Beach State Park near Swansboro, North Carolina. Even I could get a kayak off that platform without getting wet.

The waters for website launches also aren't nearly as calm as these waters around Bear Island and Hammocks Beach. With tons of blogs coming up every day, getting attention in the noisy space of the web gets more challenging by the day.

I've relied on putting information on the site that benefits the person who visits. If they want to find out about Coastal North Carolina, my site is a good spot to start. I'll advertise it on some of my other sites, but I still believe that people come to sites where they find value.

I plan to have more local reviews and add good links as I find them.

We'll be spending lots of time in the area described on my website. While I think we may have stumbled into a coastal paradise, I'm not interested in being the last person to check into paradise. I would rather find some kindred souls to occupy the vacant lots and to help make certain that the paradise part get protected.

I'll measure the success of my website by the number of folks who actually let me know that they have really visited NC's Crystal Coast.

Working the weekend shift

After over twenty years in the world of high tech, I'm pretty used to some weekend work. I joined a new company in January, Webmail.us. Since we're a fairly new company that is growing rapidly, there is no shortage of work. Trying to hire the right people, providing them with the right training, and making certain that customers receive quick responses keeps all of very busy.

In talking to potential customers, you get to hear all the challenges that bring them to us. Mostly people want email that they can count on to be there every day, all the time. Then they want someone live who can answer questions when there are problems. They would also like to talk to a human being before they make their decision of where to host their email.

I think we do a really good job of taking care of our customers which means we end up with lot of referrals. This makes for a very busy time, but it is really is nice to know that American ingenuity can still create a very competitive business that has gathered over 17,000 customers over the few years.

With hard working engineers, a foundation of good Open Source software, we've been able to create a very scalable system that has the kind of redundancy that one would expect in a top quality email system. With our servers residing in one of the country's best managed hosting facilities, we have a very compelling proposition for anyone who is looking for business class email at very reasonable prices. Being a second generation Internet company, we offer a thirty days free trial just so people can see how good email can be.

I guess all that is worth a few weekends of work.

Welcome Apple, Seriously

Recently Apple Computer, Inc announced their entry, iWeb, into the world of blogging. I think we should all welcome Apple's acknowledgement that blogging is something that they can no longer afford to ignore. Apple once took out a famous ad to welcome IBM to the world of microcomputing. They went on to watch IBM help create a world of computers that dethroned Apple as the leader in microcomputers.

Based on early examination of Apple's first effort into blogging, I don't think there is much risk in Apple taking over the world of blogging.

As is often the case, Apple's efforts are sometimes colored by the company's solitary nature and isolation from anything that might amount to serious crticism.

For fifteen months now I have been trying various blogging software which has led me to maintain a number of blogs, including the one here, one at Radioland, one at Bubbler.net, and my two main blogs, View from the mountain, and Applepeels along with one rarely used over at Livejournal.

It was only natural that I bring one up with iWeb since I'm already a subscriber to dot Mac. Yesterday I did my first posts to David's Dot Mac Spot.

As I mentioned in one of my other posts, I think iWeb is a work in progress. I felt like I had hand cuffs on while I was doing my first iWeb post. I've been a little nervous about it since when I launched iWeb on a second computer, it didn't seem to see the blog that I had already created. I did manage to post a new page of photos from another computer, but you also can't use iWeb to manage the photos you've already posted to dot Mac so iWeb is something of a mixed bag so far.

I wander from computer to computer depending on what I'm doing. I depend on being able to work on the same thing from multiple computers. I haven't figured out how to do that from iWeb yet, but I've just started using the program so it's early in the game. As I'm fond of saying Apple products usually get better with patience, updates, and some time.

Right now I would suggest anyone that wants to start blogging, try something besides iWeb. Blogger is actually a very friendly and a nice free place to start. I think the tools have improved, and it seems very reliable.

It may take Apple a few updates to get it to reasonable functionality in their product.

I wonder though if iWeb will actually get updated quickly. Blogging isn't exactly part of Apple's corporate culture. Computer snooping might be, but blogging isn't actually encouraged at Apple.