An open window in mid-December

We actually had a cold streak of weather last week down here on the North Carolina coast. As I was getting ready to mount a thermometer outside one of the windows, I happened to come into my upstairs office. The sun felt like spring so I opened the window and set the thermometer in the corner. It didn't take long to come up from the downstairs temperature of sixty-five. Since I took the picture it has risen close to eighty degrees.

The challenge of keeping cool in the winter is lot easier to handle than the challenge of keeping warm. I was thinking recently of how cold I was in December during a couple of trips to NY City and Montreal.

The city streets seem to amplify the cold. Once the giant buildings get cold, it takes a lot of heat to warm them. In the winter they radiate cold while they often prevent the suns warming rays from reaching the ground. Here in the country we're more at the mercy of the weather. The large bodies of water nearby tend to moderate the temperatures, but once they get cold they also take a long time to get warm.

You often hear about how the pace of life here on the coast enables even the most harried city person to relax. Our open spaces and relaxed way of life might also ameliorate a population trend that cities seem to enhance. I read this in a post, "Bigger Cities, Fewer People," by Stephen Johnson.

Demographers now believe that the earth’s population will peak in the middle of this century, at somewhere around 8 billion people, and then start decreasing.

Cities turn out to be a driving force behind that correction. Keep in mind that we have shifted, in just two centuries, from a planet where 3 percent of people lived in cities to a planet where 50 percent of us do. When people move to cities, they have significantly fewer children for several reasons: women tend to work, birth control is more readily available, and space limitations make children an economic liability.

While we often hear about the stress that our planet is under, we rarely hear about things coming into equilibrium. One of the most interesting things that has happened this century is the reforestation of the eastern United States. According to this USGS article ninety percent of the Northeast was covered with forest in 1700. That number had dropped to thirty percent by 19oo. Today the number has recovered to eighty percent. At the same there is something of a trend in the US for people to move to low density spaces. I suspect there is another trend for some folks to move to city cores.

I wonder if any of the movement out of the cities will slow the drop in the birth rate. Perhaps the reasons for many children outside a city are no longer there. In fact the more children you have, the more trips you have to make to the city. I wonder if suburban family sizes are smaller or larger than those in the city?

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.