Southwest Virginia Blogs

I have always been a fan of the late Edward R. Murrow, the crusading CBS newsman who took on the fanatical Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy when no one else in the news business had the guts to do so.

That battle cost Murrow dearly. CBS, weary of the many controversies caused by Murrow's award-winning "See it Now" television news magazine, caved to pressure and exiled the show to a Sunday time slot. Murrow's prime-time appearances were limited to his celebrity interviews, which he hated but admitted he did to "pay the bills."

In 1958, Murrow appeared before the Radio-TV News Directors Association and delivered a stinging indictment of TV's aversion to controversy. Parts of the speech were used to lead and end George Clooney's excellent film, Good Night and Good Luck.

For example:

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER.

For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally. If there were to be a competition in indifference, or perhaps in insulation from reality, then Nero and his fiddle, Chamberlain and his umbrella, could not find a place on an early afternoon sustaining show. If Hollywood were to run out of Indians, the program schedules would be mangled beyond all recognition. Then some courageous soul with a small budget might be able to do a documentary telling what, in fact, we have done--and are still doing--to the Indians in this country. But that would be unpleasant. And we must at all costs shield the sensitive citizens from anything that is unpleasant.

I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and more mature than most of our industry's program planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence. I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is--an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate.

When we moved to Floyd County, we divested ourselves of most of our business interests so I could concentrate on photography and have the time so Amy and I could enjoy life.

One of the businesses I kept was a scaled-down web hosting operation from the company I started in 1994. Over the years we built a successful operation hosting business, organization and news web sites for those with computer savvy. We also used our various hosting platforms to develop web sites and other Internet-related products.

I sold off part of the hosting business before we moved to Floyd but kept some servers to continue to host my various sites and sites for friends, associates and longtime clients. I also started offering free or reduced-cost hosting to bloggers and other small business operators, many of who lacked the computer expertise to set up or maintain web sites. I found as time went on that my workload providing support for these sites increased dramatically.

The problem came home to roost last week when we moved our data center out of Northern Virginia and closer to us in Blacksburg. Although most of the 127 sites we host moved without a problem, a handful of sites caused a lot of problems - nearly all of them blogs or small sites that outdated code or extensions that create server problems.

So I decided Sunday to get out of the web hosting business so I can concentrate on things that interest me. The motto of Blue Ridge Creative has always been: Determine What Sucks…Don't Do It. Notices went out today that we are closing our web hosting business effective May 31. We will continue to host sites that I own or ones that I develop but will no longer host third party sites or blogs.

There are many web hosting companies out there who specialize in blogs or web sites for novices in web operation and they can do a far better job than we. I made a mistake getting away from my core of hosting only the sites that I own or maintain or co-locating high-end, scalable servers for those who need high-end web sites and have the in-house expertise to manage them.

For months now a number of friends have told me I need to learn how to say "no." Some of those had web sites on my servers and now face moving because I have started to say "no."

There's an old Mongolian proverb about being careful what you wish for. I just determined what sucked and I'm no longer doing it.

I don't know what it is about being in your mid-twenties and not married but I'm just ready to scream.  Over the past two days, I have been asked somewhere between 10 and 12 times when I am getting married. Now, let's put this in perspective.  I'm not single, but I'm not engaged.  I am living alone, but that does not make me alone.  Being unmarried after 25 is not the end of the world.  In fact, I'm proud of myself for all my accomplishments WITHOUT being married.  

I don't know why it bothered me so much this morning, but I was ready to scream at the women at my church.  I guess after all that has happened this week (which I have not blogged about for my own reasons, but the three people who know–me, the Boy, and Linds–are the only ones who currently need to know), I must be getting overly sensitive about this question.  I know that many people get married at 18 and stay married for life.  I also know that many more who get married at 18 get divorced within 5 years when they realize they gave up on a lot for their spouse.  I know that being in your twenties and unmarried is not a big deal. 

I don't know why old women don't understand that some things are more important at different times in peoples lives.  My goal was my education.  My second goal was being financially stable and able to take care of myself before marriage.  I've now reached both of those goals.  Does that mean I'm getting married this year?  Nope.  It just means now that those two things have been accomplished I will let myself get married in the future.  I'm in no hurry.  Why does everyone want to rush me?

Just call this the week from hell. Actually, it was the month from hell. Server crashes plus configuration problems on a new server this week brought just about everything to a halt.

The trash bin in the back of our data center is littered with the remnants of servers that didn't work as promised and hard drives corrupted by viruses and worms because a virus program also didn't work as it should have.

Part of the problem started with a planned move from our data center in Loudoun County to a new one at Virginia Tech's Corporate Research Park in Blacksburg. The idea was to have the server farm closer at hand. This meant buying new equipment and, in true Murphy's law fashion, some of the equipment didn't work like I expected new servers to perform.

Since the first of April, I've had three of Sun's new Coolthreads Sun Fire servers bite the dust, two Dells running Linux suffer kernel failures and one Windows 2003 server reset itself and destroy everything from the last 10 days.

Capitol Hill Blue, which runs on multiple servers, went offline three times in the last three weeks, crippled by a bug in a new content management system and the same bug corrupted the backups without our knowledge.

We thought we were on the homestretch Friday moving the last of our servers, the one containing blogs for Fred First, Colleen Redman and others. But Fred's blog crashed before the move and wouldn't reboot on the new server. Finally traced the bug late Friday and finished up the move at 12:50 a.m. today.

So far (fingers crossed) everything is running fine. I've suffered more hardware and software problems in the last three weeks than in the last 11-and-a-half years of running and hosting web sites.

Lessons learned:

• Sun Servers ain't what they used to be. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. David St. Lawrence, an escapee from the corporate drudge of Sun, said it ain't the company it used to be either.
• Abacus, a server co-location company located in San Diego and Germany, is a ripoff. I had hoped to locate a mirror site there but their tech people failed to respond in a timely manner when we needed assistance and it took them three days to fix a minor problem. That's a shame. Abacus used to be a good company. Now they are just sham artists in it for the quick buck.
• Backups don't work when the file corruption that brings down a server is also on the backup files.
• Linux is good for running Tivo and small web sites but it doesn't have the power for large, full-scale operations that demand multi-threading, heavy processing needs and high traffic.
• I need some sleep.

This makes me sick. 

You all know the Duke potential rape scandal.  I don't know if she's telling the truth.  I don't know if these boys hurt her or if it were someone else.  But I do know that just because she was raped before (it was never proven that/if she told a false story, from what I've read, she just didn't pursue charges due to the hardship and lack of evidence) it does not mean she can't be raped again.  Sure, she could have put herself in a bad position but SHE'S not responsible.

If she's lying now, it will come out.  Her past and the things that happened to her in the past should not haunt her.  That's just disgusting. 

Somewhere, in one of the boxes that that lurk in a closet of Chateau Thompson, lies a brochure from an investment firm promoting the “joys and relaxation” of retirement.

If I had the energy I’d find that brochure and burn it.

At some point, in 2004, I remember saying we moved to Floyd County to “relax and retire.”

I’m sure I said it.

At least I think I did.

My “to do” list Thursday contained 14 items. I got to five of them before collapsing on the couch and sleeping for the next seven hours.

Amy laughs as I wonder where the retirement went. She’s not surprised.

“You’re not big on relaxation,” she says.

She’s right.

The problem, of course, stems from a singular inability to say “no.”

Somebody asks if I can do something and I say “sure, why not?” I should say “no way!”

Then something happens to throw me behind – way behind. A week lost because of the flu. Two days when Loki’s fragile heath failed and we had to take him to Virginia Tech and put him to sleep. A 10-hour board of supervisors meeting that should have been over in four.

I’ve never been good at time management. Time is a journalist’s enemy. We race against it and, all too often, lose.

Time, they say, flies when you’re having fun.

Actually, time flies, no matter what your state of mind.

And you’re always racing to make the flight.

A blurb in a recent edition of Virginia Living magazine caught my eye because it discussed the condo craze currently sweeping the Ballston-Virginia Square-Clarendon corridor of Arlington County.

We lived there for 23 years, settling into Northern Virginia’s first high-rise condo, Tower Villas, at Virginia Square, in 1981. We rented the first year, paying $625 a month (including condo fee) and buying it a year later from our landlady. When we sold it in 2004, we walked away with a tidy profit several times over what we paid in 1982. The couple who bought it poured a ton on money into renovation and now rent it out for $3,500 a month plus the $575 a month condo fee. That’s six times more than we paid in rent our first year there some 25 years ago.

According to Virginia living, new two-bedroom condos roughly the size of our old one (1300-plus square feet) now go for $1.4 million and up and new condo developments sell out in a matter of days. The market flattened for a while in early 2005 but is now booming again.

An old rule of thumb used to say that your housing costs should not exceed 25 percent of your take home income. That means the couple renting our old condo should be taking home at least $16,000 a month or about $192,000 a year.

We paid off our mortgage in 1997 and held a old-fashioned mortgage burning party in a park across the street from Tower Villas. Amy and I pledged, at the time, to never, ever take out another mortgage on a home and, thankfully, we haven’t broken that pledge. Yet according to a recent study, fewer than 10 percent of Americans will pay off a home mortgage, down from 44 percent just 25 years ago and some financial advisers suggest paying off a mortgage is a bad idea. Now Americans just trade up, adding larger, longer-term mortgages and debt while keeping their monthly payments about the same. Another new twist is the “interest-only” mortgage where you never pay on the principal of a loan

Trading up to bigger mortgages and interest-only loans means you never actually own your home. You simply possess, for a time, a contract to live there. Saying you own such a home is only an illusion – just another fantasy in a society built all too often on false perceptions.

Last night, Dateline had a special dealing with myspace.com. Myspace is apparently a type of friendster website where you make your own page, like a blog (I think you can even have your own blog entries, but I’m not entirely certain), and you have “friends.” Apparently it’s a great place for predators to find unsuspecting kids and pounce on them.

I’ve never used MySpace, but after watching Dateline I can see where parents would be concerned and where kids are sometimes, simply put, naive. I would say stupid, but that’s not the problem. It seemed these girls on Dateline thought they were being cautious, even using a different location as where they lived in an attempt to thwart any potential pouncers. Obviously these tactics didn’t work and they were easily discovered and could have been hurt or worse.

My question is, where are the parents in this? No parent can honestly expect their 14, 15, 16 year old kid to exercise the good judgment of a 40 year old. The parents on Dateline were “Shocked” and “Concerned” by their daughters actions. Well, why didn’t you check your daughter’s internet usage BEFORE you had to be put on Dateline and find out your daughter offered to meet a total stranger? I know parents want to trust their kids, but the kids are hardly the problem. The problem is OTHER people. It’s kind of like when you’re driving somewhere and you know you’re a perfectly safe driver, but that other guy in the Tahoe…HE can’t drive.

Kids, especially teens, are very easily swayed. The internet, and websites like myspace, are full of faceless potential predators. I don’t understand why parents think that just because they might want to check their child’s internet usage, they are violating their kids privacy or seem like they don’t trust their kid. I know had I grown up with the internet, my mom would have been looking over my shoulder.

The parents want to blame MySpace for providing a free service to teens (and adults). MySpace can’t be expected to parent for the parents who’s kids put their phone numbers on the internet for all to see. That would be like people reading this post and blaming wordpress for what I say. Ridiculous. Be a parent. Stop expecting everyone else to do the job you signed up for.

You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Blog Zone!

My apologies to Rod Serling’s memory for stealing one of the openings to his classic TV show The Twilight Zone but it seems, at times, like we’ve entered just that when it comes to the subject of blogging.

We are awash in bloggers. Even worse, we’re drowning in news and views about the world of blogging. Google “blog” and you get 2.1 billion (yes, that’s billion with a “b”) results. Newspapers add blogs to their online sites. Journalism professors talk about the impact of blogs on the news biz. Last week, I got an invite to sit on a panel to talk about blogs at a journalism conference this summer in Boston.

David St. Lawrence over at Ripples is on his fourth straight day of writing about the joys of blogging on his, of course, blog.

Blogs are not only big news but more and more are trying to find ways to turn blogs into big business. Web hosting companies offer one-click blog setup as part of their hosting packages. Ad agencies offer packages for blogs. The rush to commercialize blogs, of course, runs counter to the original premise of blogging but it is the same kind of crass commercialization that ruined the Internet for many people.

I’ve been puttering around on the ‘Net since 1994, publishing the Web’s oldest political news site (Capitol Hill Blue) as well as owning one of the original surviving independent web hosting companies.

But I waited a while before jumping into the blog frenzy because I wasn’t sure it was a long-termer on a web where fads and “the next big thing” come and go. Even after writing Muse for two years, I’m still not sure blogs are something that will last or even if they should last.

Most blogs are exercises in self-gratification (or self-abuse) read by friends and family of the blogger. Others exist as shameless self-promotion of one’s products. Still others exist as a crass corporate attempt to cash in on the craze. Too many promote hate, intolerance and bigotry. Some pass on rumor as fact and publish misinformation in a deliberate attempt to mislead.

Blogs allow anyone with a modem and mouth to become a publisher. While this can lead to the growth of “citizen journalism,” it can also lead to confusion, misstatement and the rampant spread of damaging information.

In the end, too many blogs are just opinions -- and mostly uninformed ones at that.

The jury is still out on whether or not blogs serve any real or perceived public need or stand as just another part of a society of information overload where speculation replaces fact, hype stands in for truth and opinions masquerade as news.

Well, not sharks actually but bloggers. Lots of bloggers. David St. Lawrence, the project-manager-to-the-world, organized a meeting of area bloggers at Cafe del Sol today and I'm sitting here in the midst of all these cyber opinion makers, listening to discussions of trackbacks, cascading stylesheets and whatnot.

If you've read Ripples, David's blog, you know he likes to organize things and so we now have regular meetings scheduled to talk about what is supposed to be the disorganized world of bloggers. If David had been around during this nation's westward expansions, he probably would have organized the Indians and they will still own everything West of the Mississippi.

Fred First, of Fragments from Floyd, is the dean of Floyd Count bloggers, having been around since 2002 or so, which is a century in blogtime. Of course, my political news site, Capitol Hill Blue, has been online since Octobe 1994 which makes it prehistoric -- an appropriate analagy since David thinks news sites are dinosaurs anyway.

Last night, W and I decided it was time for a girls night out. We hadn’t seen each other in awhile (seriously, like a month) and we wanted to go some place quiet and get a few drinks. We found the place, our usual hang out in town, which is a seedy little bar with a regular crowd that I would never regularly hang out with.

The interesting thing is, no matter how long it is between visits from W and I, we’re never forgotten in this bar. They know us, they know our drink, they even know where we like to sit when we come in. So, we go to our barstools and sit and this bald weirdo comes over and stands next to me. Now, we had seen bald weirdo there before and he was totally invading my personal space so I was trying not to look at him. When I did, he winked. When he did, W and I moved to a booth. That guy ended up passed out on a bar stool and the owners had to call his MOTHER to come pick him up.

Anyway, there was another guy. He makes me wonder, why won’t some guys take “No” for an answer. W and I decided to play the photo game on one of the machines and he came and sat next to us. First he said he was a chiropractor and asked “Are you two girls waiting to hear what colleges accept you?” I said “No, I’m a lawyer.” W said “And I’m a teacher.” A few minutes later he told me he didn’t believe me so I showed him one of my cards, wishing he would go away. He asked for a dollar to play music, which I thought was totally rude, but I gave it to him thinking he would leave us alone if I did that. He came back.

Then he starts telling me he wished his hair was as beautiful as mine. I didn’t take my eyes off the game. I’ve heard enough cheesy pick up lines in my life. THEN he goes “Your nails are so pretty. Can I suck on your fingers?” That time, I did jerk, “Excuse me?” thinking I had heard him wrong. But I hadn’t. He said it again. The owner’s brother was standing with W and I at this point, in the event this got out of hand (he knew that we could handle it, but you never want to think you could have stopped something bad if you had the chance). This time I responded, “No, they stay pretty because I don’t let strangers suck on them.” The owner’s brother laughed so hard, I didn’t think he was going to be able to stand much longer.

This continued. He wanted more money. “Have you ever heard of ____ Oil? My family.” I grinned internally, knowing that company went bankrupt and was bought recently by another oil company. And knowing, if that really were his family, he wouldn’t be saying it.

“Here, I’ll give you my passport. I’ve been all over with it. You can have it.” I’m not sure what good a man’s passport would do me, so I responded with “That’s ok, I have my own and it’s pretty full too.” He took the bait, “Oh really, where do you travel?” I knew W knew what I was doing because she started to smile next to me. “I don’t like foreign travel that much anymore. I prefer Alaska.”

“Alaska? Why?” And he took the bait.
“Because that’s where my boyfriend is.”
“Did you send him there?”
“No he’s in the military. The Air Force.”

Normal guys would back down. He did not. He continued to ask questions like “So are you practically engaged? You wouldn’t cheat would you? Let me guess, you’re a good girl?” Finally, W and I had had enough and we left. Quickly. And drove to my house. Quickly. Hoping he didn’t follow us.

He didn’t. Good thing. If he had, he would have quickly learned I have a gun and an alarm system.

Fellow Floyd County blogger (and friend) David St. Lawrence feels that I am "so far left you couldn't see the center with field glasses."

Such a comment pisses me off not only because I hate stereotyping but also because I have dedicated my journalistic life to observing the world through non-partisan eyes.

"If you piss off both sides you're doing your job," Elmer Broz, my city editor during part of my tenure with The Alton Telegraph in Illinois, told me when I first arrived at the paper.

In my opinion, a journalist is a failure if he or she is perceived as right or left, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat. In more than 40 years of writing I have written stories and columns that have sent both Democratic and Republican politicians to jail, infuriated conservatives and liberals alike and been the object of scorn from both the right and the left.

In short, in more than four decades of writing, I have managed to anger just about everybody at one time or another. Elmer would have been proud.

True, some who read only what I have written about what I see as the many misdeeds of the Bush administration might conclude, erroneously, that I am a liberal or a Democrat. Such a conclusion would be shallow and based on incomplete research. When Bill Clinton was President, I wrote many columns critical of him and his administration and authored a number of investigative pieces that exposed wrongdoing by the Democrats. At that time, the left claimed I must be a right-wing patsy of the Republican Party.

People too often tend to respond to what they've read or seen recently and make snap judgments based on that recent exposure. That's a serious mistake.

Yet it is easy to see why people make an assumption of partisan leanings based on a brief reading of a writer's recent work. What passes as journalism today is too much political hype written from a partisan point of view. Objectivity is passé in these modern "new journalism" times. Reporters apply a varying set of standards based on their own political beliefs.

When that happens truth suffers. Truth belongs to no political party and neither side of the philosophical spectrum can claim the high ground when it comes to truth or honesty. Political parties exist primarily to serve a limited set of views and beliefs even when those beliefs run counter to the best interests of the nation or the people.

But I am proud of my body of work over the last 40 plus years and any real research into that work will find that I take no prisoners, play no favorites and apply the same standards to right and left, liberal and conservative or Republican and Democrat.

The only philosophy I subscribe to is the eternal, and elusive, search for truth. Truth always struggles to survive in a partisan world and that's why I loathe partisanship in any form. Calling me a partisan is the same as saying I'm a failure in my chosen profession. I don't believe I am a failure so anyone who calls me a partisan will always have a fight on their hands.

After receiving 16 emails over the past 4 days about the Enemy story, I feel the need to clear the air on a few things.

First off, if you don’t like my story, if you don’t think I should be writing it for you or anyone else to read, click that “X” on the top right hand of your browser and close my blog. Don’t read it. It’s so simple.

Next, for the group of you (and I’m fairly certain you are a group since every single one of your emails read practically the same unless you’re just one person with a lot of email addresses) who say I’m being inconsiderate of Enemy’s feelings, I’d like to ask you when my feelings were taken into consideration? Enemy and I no longer live in the same time zone. Once we graduated, I took off to one side of the US, and she took off to another. Neither of us even live in the time zone where these things occurred. If she’s really bothered by my posting of this story, then she can tell me (if she even reads the story and since she hasn’t contacted me, I don’t think she does). The other thing is, she’s never been identified by name. I’ve never said anything about her which anyone could link to her actual identity, therefore it can’t really harm her in anyway to have the story told. I’m also not the only one who has ever told this story. MANY people witnessed most of this and they’ve all told others about it.
This is a story which would be put in my autobiographical work if I ever wrote one for the three people who would buy it to read. That’s what this blog is. A retelling of stories. I’m telling my own story. Three years of my life were spent being harassed by Enemy and I felt like sharing because now that I’m away from the situation and I can look back on it, I think it’s funny. And, based on the people who actually have commented on each story, I can tell they think it is also.

If you don’t believe this is real, if you think I’m making it all up, that’s fine too. Apparently you missed the comments by Jeff and Annette, who were THERE during all of this, which help to validate what happened. And, even if I were making it up as the group of you seem to insinuate, why would it matter? People put fictional stories on their blogs everyday. Some people even write “autobiographical novels” which aren’t true.

In sum, this is a true story about my life as recounted by me. If Enemy were to write it, I’m sure it would have a completely different spin and I’d be the bitch. I’m ok with that. In fact, as you will all learn later on, she did try to spin all of the things that happened around on me in an attempt to get me kicked out of school. If you don’t like my story, stop reading me. If you don’t believe my story, that’s fine too. Take it however you want to take it. But I’m not going to stop writing it.

“Pain,” a sadistic Navy master chief once yelled at me, “is only the beginning.”

Pain has a way of becoming part of your life. A rambunctious youth and too many broken bones left me with severe arthritis, a number of joints that don’t work as well as they should, and some non-OEM replacement parts that don’t quite live up to manufacturer’s claims.

You learn to accept the pain. A walk up a short flight of stairs becomes an Everest-sized challenge to knees and ankles encrusted with calcium deposits. Typing strains arthritic fingers while lubricant-starved sockets limit arm movement.

Two years ago, I slipped and fell on a slick sidewalk in Arlington and thought I sprained my ankle. After 10 days, the pain hadn’t subsided so I went to the doctor for an x-ray.

“You may have broken your ankle,” he said.

“May?”

“I can ‘t tell. You have so much calcium around the ankle from previous breaks that I can’t see through the mass.”

Twenty years ago, I broke my left arm and dislocated my shoulder playing softball. The doctor warned me then there would be “a lot of pain in your future” because of the dozen or so bones broken in earlier years.

He wasn’t lying. Morning walks, once part of my daily routine, ceased late last year because I can no longer climb the hill back up to my house. As a photographer, I spend a lot of time on my knees, shooting from low angles. Getting down is not the problem. Getting up is. Last week, my left knee buckled after a night of shooting basketball. It now pops like a twig every time I bend it.

At Tri-Area Health Clinic Wednesday, Dr. Stephen Huff looked at x-rays of the knee and shook his head.

“Your arthritis is getting much, much worse,” he said as he ordered an MRI on the knee, and predicted yet another round of knee surgery in the my future.

Then I strapped my knees back into their braces and limped home to soak them in a hot tub where relief, while welcome, is only temporary.

Pain was only the beginning. Eventually it becomes the norm. The challenge, as always, is to control it and not allow it to control you, a challenge that those of us who live with pain face every day of our lives.