It's my blog. My only blog.
April 29 2007 10:26 PM Lewis Sellers
Well, we've been aware of this for two months or so now, but if you hadn't heard, many of the bees in the United States have vanished in the last few weeks and months. It's called "colony collapse".
No dead bees in the hives, just empty, barren hives. Silence.
My first thought upon learning about this was that a "Bee Rapture" was going on. (Somewhat seriously. Ok, just slightly seriously.)
Or maybe that they knew somehing we didn't and left while they could.
Best anyone can tell though (at the moment) is that a new nicotene-based pesticide that's being used in the States has essentially killed off their immune system, and now every bee disease known (and unknown) is ravaging their colonies. The infected wander off (delirious/insane) and just die. (There many other casual suggestions, but the fact that exhibited behavior with the bees is exactly what the pesticide is supposed to do with termites is a little hard to ignore.)
Cynthia has been keeping tabs with a few locals (and some at state level) and apparently this (at the moment at least) doesn't seem to be affecting Eastern Tennessee. At least appreciatively.†
But in other parts of the county … the bees are simply gone now.
Not good, considering the bees are responsible for polinating a 3rd of the food crops in the US. At best expect the price of honey and certain foods to begin skyrocketing moving into the summer, as the US has to start importing these foods from other counties.
† (Though we have noticed a few bees acting a bit unusual of late. Doing their little location dances for us in a drunken repetive manner. I can't but wonder as I stare at them dancing if the bee is saying to me: "I've been sent by the Queen. We desperately need antibiotics. We're at such and such location. Hurry!" … But maybe I'm just reading my own fears into it.)
TN Beekeepers Association
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April 19 2007 06:19 PM Lewis Sellers
I just spent the last few days writing a new AJAX based chat for A&E Salvage.
www.aesalvage.com/onlinechat/index.html
It turned out fairly nice. Check it out.
UPDATE: Well, rewrote it into more of a 1-1 instant messenger than a proper chat app.
I think I'll rework it and make it available on tnfolk at the group or personal level. Hmm. (We're developing thier aesalvage.com, lowlandmpf.com and lowlandic.com after they gave their previous developers the boot last month. aesalvage.com first. A&E owns the old ENKA/Liberty Fibers plant. Interesting place. Looks like World War II occured there recently though — they're in the middle of demolitions and reconstruction of the place. The old coal plant is one of the few buildings still completely standing. Though not for long.)
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March 21 2007 11:21 AM Lewis Sellers
I went to the Bean Station public workshop the other night. (What was I doing there? Um. I got lost?) The Mayor was there. The Aldermans. The Chief of Police. (Here is my artist's rendition of the scene made on my PDA.)
It was a productive, positive meeting. Both sides seemed ready to settle the entire issue with the next few days. The terms would be $15,000 a year, with a %5 (or $750) increase IF REQUIRED (hardware only, not for salaries) with an explict stipulation that a repeater owned by the city be left out of the contract. (The repeater is a device used by emergency services usually sitting at the top of a mountain attached to an antenna tower which picks up their radio conversations and boosts the signal out across the county. If say the local police or fire and rescue need immediate assistance, it's important their call can be heard.) E911 had originally planned to take control of the repeater (forever) as a $3000 trade-in. The Chief (Andy Dossett) and several of the board members spent a good portion of the meeting trying to figure out a way of keeping the repeater under city control without incurring undo expenses. In the end, the Chief tabled plans for moving his office to a larger building nearby ($2200) and one of the aldermen (Eddie Winstead) offered his alderman salary ($500) in an attempt to cover expenses.
E911 is going to provide the board with a draft of the contract to carefully read through by this wednesday. They'll have a formal public first reading monday. In the past the city lawyers have been very unhappy with the wording of the draft contracts. As one of the board stated, the way they were written, E911 could charge them $20,000 one year and the city would have no legal choice but pay them. This is the big sticking point. All the E911 draft contracts to date make the city lawyers and the board uneasy about loopholes in it's wording that could end up costing the city many thousands upon thousands of dollars down the road.
I have a suggestion. Have The City of Bean Station draw up the next draft instead of E911, if it comes to that point.
(This post was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Apologies to anyone I drew incorrectly. :)
BTW. My sister's been in law-enforcement most of her adult life, but something only occured to me the other day as I was sitting next to the Chief of Police. What are the intials for that office? C.O.P. Is that not … bizarre?
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March 05 2007 01:17 PM Lewis Sellers
The short answer is that we are a couple web designers who are also interested in writing and various forms of interconnectivity. Human interconnectivity.
We built this site completely from the ground up using the PHP scripting language and MySQL for the database backend. There are several thousand lines of code backing up this site, all of which was written exclusively for it.
This means that though there was a considerable amount of effort put into building the site, and will be more still in the future as it continues to evolve and grow, that — in short, essentially any features the community desires in the future can be integrated into the site. This is not a "canned" site using some pre-made software package, but one — for better or worse — backed by people who have been doing web design since 1997.
We're based just outside of Knoxville, TN (in Grainger County).
Cynthia Rosenberry can be emailed at c.j.rosenberry@gmail.com
Lewis Sellers can be emailed at lasellers@gmail.com
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February 20 2007 01:21 PM Lewis Sellers
Obviously, for those of you who've been following the progress of the site for the last few months, we changed the site name this month. It's the final name. We experimented with a few others initially when the focus of the site was still unclear. But based on feedback we've gotten as we've worked on the site, it finally started to come into focus what this site was about … and the name became somewhat obvious after that.
So we're almost done. A few more things here and there. New graphics. Checking the tires. Moving a few lamps. (Finishing the region/county filters.) And that's it.
We moved the site off our development site into it's own hosting account with plenty of space and speed. (It currently does about 500 pages per second for the cached pages on the new server — which is pretty good. When we start getting more than about 500 people clicking on the site at anyone time maybe we'll upgrade. But that'll do for now).
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February 05 2007 08:33 PM Lewis Sellers
We've been meaning to do this for several months. We have now finally setup the new domain and it's own hosting account and begun remodeling the site based upon the comments we received while testing it.
It will still be a few more weeks (depending on other work-loads) before it's completely up. There are several to-do items left on the list including final graphics, reworking all the forms for ease-of-use, completing the new regioning scheme (so you can look at only the stuff that's happening in your local area) and adding in the new the small business store.
All old domain names will point to the new one.
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