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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December 06 2006 06:08 PM Lewis Sellers
I'm happy for Cynthia. She's been increasingly interested in journalism this last year or so. (That's why 10-east exists in the first place after all.) So it seem appropriate that she's now the new webmaster for the local Grainger Today. Starting in a week or so anyway.
She might be writing the occasional article for the paper as well.
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November 29 2006 11:49 AM Lewis Sellers
It's no great secret that I'm not happy with any of the domain names used by our little community site. Though I have grown rather attached to 10-east.com and citizenj.info. The problem is that domain squatters seem to be sitting on most every domain that might make for a good name. Eventually we'll come up with something memorable and unique of course for the final and permanent name for the site.
In the meantime, I ran across an interesting article on the keys to a successful citizen journalism site at the Poynet Institute. We've done most of these, or are working on them. :)
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November 28 2006 06:01 PM Lewis Sellers
Then DO NOT use any websites that offer to do domain lookups for you to look to see if the domain is available. Just type the url in directly in the browser, or use a program that can do what is called a "whois" for you. (The Network Utility app that comes standard on the Macintosh will do this for you. On Windows the program called "Sam Spade" is fairly good at this as well.)
Why?
In recent years a huge scam called (by some) "domain kiting" has really taken off. Basically, spammers and their ilk are using the 5-day money-back requirement of all domain name purchases to automatically buy up 30+ million domains a year esssentially for free. And where are they getting the suggestions for these domain names their computer programs are automatically buying up? You guessed it. Apparently some websites are feeding the domain names you're looking up into these programs, which buy them … and then you have to buy the domain from them at a much higher price.
So keep your domain names to yourself, until the very last minute. FYI.
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November 13 2006 02:07 PM Lewis Sellers
Well, we haven't (or I haven't at least) had much time to work on or promote the site recently. Doesn't mean you just can't go ahead and use it as of course. :) Maybe we'll get around to doing that properly by the year end. Just as well. It could use a bit of time to be tested and have all the rough edges smoothed out.
In other news, Cynthia Rosenberry is (among other things) taking over as the regular webmaster for graingertoday.com. The position was previously held by James Zachary. If you hadn't guessed by now, she's also the webmaster of this site as well.
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November 10 2006 07:10 PM Lewis Sellers
I was glancing through the logs for this site (citizen j) just now. Know what most people are googling for that brings them here? You guessed it. Cows. In every shape and form, they're coming here because someone mentioned they have cows for sale.
(Oh, and of course lots of people visiting are interested things like politics and pottery and the like … but it's the cows man. It's the cows that are the big draw. :) )
Speaking of cows — trivia side note: Ever see www.fatcow.com advertising in Wired Magazine? Their name came about because, when I was working on their original website many years ago (before they had settled on a name), I posted a photo of some local cows sitting under a tree. Moo jokes insued. For weeks. It just seemed appropriate after that I guess.
Yep, the original fatcow was a Grainger County cow. :)
Anyway... back to to work. Ug.
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November 08 2006 03:27 PM Lewis Sellers
George Walker Bush is the Anti-Christ.
Yes, I mean the actual Anti-Christ. Yes, the One from the Bible. End of Times. War. Famine. Pestilence. Death. All that. Yes, that one.
It's just something I've pretty much come to terms with over the last few years. And I'm fine with it. I mean of course, I stopped watching television about three years ago because I was sick of watching where the world was going and what was happening, and having to stare at his face all the time. But other than that, I'm fine with it.
Why? Well, true, there's lots of evil been done, and still more to come, but at the end of it all, in a few years, there is supposed to be a thousand years of peace on the Earth. That doesn't sound so bad. I suppose you just have to look at the bright side of things.... Yea, sure, so a false messiah is walking the earth, destroying everything in his path, subjugating the world … yadda, yadda, at least we know that, one way or the other, it's not going to last. And there will be some nice times ahead. A few years out anyway ...
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November 04 2006 10:21 AM Lewis Sellers
I want one! Yes, I know. The $100 laptops are supposed to be children's laptop, given out by the millions to kids around the world for education purposes, but I still want one. Or two.
They're just so very cool.
laptop.org
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October 29 2006 12:19 AM Lewis Sellers
I listen to a lot of music. Most of the time I'm sitting down at the computer I have my headphones on and iTunes just constantly running. And usually after a couple days listening to something new I'm rather tired of it. And only occasionally ever go back and listen to it again.
Which makes it so strange that I've been listening to the same couple CDs for the last 3 or 4 weeks. Muse. A british group. Seems like a lot of the good music (and tv for that matter) is coming out of Britan these days. (Or at least not from the States).
Sing for Absolution , Citizen Erased , Black Out , Hoodoo , City of Delusion , etc. Lots of intelligent lyrics backing some strong music. That's rare. The "intelligent lyrics" part. I usually (inwardly) cringe when I start understanding the lyrics of a song because I know it won't belong til I understand how dull and uninspired the subject really is. It's what ruins a cd for me.
But there are a few … a rare few than have that true artistic gleam. Fitting name all in all.
Check out the Sing for Absolution video on their website. (The song is about something else all together, but it works with that storyline as well, strangely.)
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October 28 2006 07:46 PM Lewis Sellers
I should probably mention … I'm the person who's responsible for writing the PHP/MySQL code that drives this entire website, as well as handling all technical issues that may relate to it and continually updating and improving it's functionality.
If there's a "feature" you'd like for the site, I'm the one that's going to end up implimenting it.
These days I mainly develop on a dual G5 Apple Macintosh running OS X 10.4, but have been programming under Microsoft Windows as well since it first came out. (This site, as they say, was "made on a mac". Well. Partly anyway. There are Mac, Windows and Linux machines scattered about the place and site has been on all of them at one point in time.)
I have a degree in computer science. I'm engaged. Hi Cynthia Rosenberry .
Cats we have. Three. (Susy, Smiley and Waddles). I do also, however, have a funny Betta fish (Koo) and Chinese Alage Eater (Scrubby). Both of whom I worry about daily as to whether they're going to end up killing each other in a territorial dispute. There's also a Belgian Sheepdog turning in frantic circles, round and round, near the door. Don't know who's dog that is, but I think he's signalling about something. :-)
Though I've generally voted Republican by default, I've gone through phases of voting for Democrats and Independants (ie, the Green Party) as well. These days I'm thinking seeding a completely brand new party all together might be the best idea, long term. All the current parties are disappointing (and untimately ineffective) for one reason or another.
I'm rather into the new Battlestar Galactica TV series at the moment... And a copy of Space Colony I picked up at the last minute to add to Cynthia's goodies on her recent birthday. Mistake that. We both got a wee bit addicted. :) Course since it's usually a couple months inbetween "gamings" for us both I guess it's not too bad.
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October 28 2006 07:30 PM Lewis Sellers
I plugged Cynthia's Wacom tablet into my mac and started scribbling a bit. They're fun to play with once you get use to the pressure sensitivity. I'm thinking about making this the new logo for citizen j. Whadda think? :-)
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October 27 2006 10:36 PM Lewis Sellers
I'm now going to talk about my fish... Some more. Hey. Come back. ...
This is "Koo". He's a red Betta. His name comes from the classic Russian science fiction film Kin Dza Dza. (As to what the word "koo" actually means … well, that's a long story. And it would rather much ruin the film if I just told you.)
His tank-mate (Scrubby) is a scared orange bottom feeder that mostly hides in his hollowed out conconut I gave him. (From which he stares at me with one eye day and night and day … and night … It gets creepy after a while.)
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October 27 2006 10:10 PM Lewis Sellers
That was a strange photo of me (I said to myself) when I saw it. I look like I'm possessed … or have just seen Jesus or .. something.
(I'm actually just looking across the road up into a cave out front of our local artisans/hillbilly-potters.)
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