AskSpike - Go Ahead, Ask. →

By the way, if you haven’t been reading Spike Jones’ (with an “s”) new blog, there is something deeply wrong with you.

Beating a Dead Horse →

In case you haven’t heard, I’m pretty good at it.  So get out your sticks, lower your morals for a moment and get ready to plow some horses.

Greenville wants to be in on the Google Fiber for Communities experiment to the point of organizing a massive amount of people group up on Main Street with glowsticks and actually spell out ‘Google’.  By George, they’ve even had the genius to register ‘WeAreFeelingLucky.com’ to promote the idea.  The icing on the cake?  They used Google Pages to host it, making sure they’d get the attention of the right people.  Damn, got those beat sticks ready?

I wont gripe as to why no one in Spartanburg has thought to do something like this, instead I’ll gripe about something else entirely.

If someone thought to organize an event like this, who would show up?  That’s the question on my mind.  Subtracting from the fact that when Show Up for Spartanburg was announced, and got a pretty impressive result (in the rain no less), I can’t help but to think to what extents the people of this city would get behind something more on socially aware.  I’m all about technology and social policy, so of course I’d be happy to put on my work boots and be the guy to say ‘hey we should be doing this too’.  But as Christopher George so brilliantly explained, Spartanburg is suffering from a chronic case of apathy and ignorance.  It’d take something pretty substantial to get us to care about anything that isn’t Mark Sanford, Andre Bauer or John Ludwig.

Then it hits me.  Maybe Spartanburg isn’t ready for something like this because the political agenda is far more exciting than progressive like a high-speed fiber optic connection to the rest of the modern world.  We’re so wrapped up in the idea that ‘holy shit we’ve got a brewery downtown’ and too concerned about parking spaces so we can go to said brewery that everything else seems like too much.  Heaven forbid I begin postulating what inhibitions city council might raise to an unregistered event of hooligans standing around with glow sticks hoping to attract the attention of an Internet data company.

Maybe that’s what needs to be fixed.  It’s not city council, or big businessmen or even the ass-backwards transportation system.  Maybe it’s us.  Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s me.  Maybe it’s exactly what Christopher George said.

Maybe no one here gives a shit.

That’s Not Typography (It’s Not Art Either)

I’ve been following the typography tag, and I wanted to say something:

This is a good image to tag with ‘typography’.

This is not.

That’s all.

Podcast Uprising! HubCast Pops Onto The Spartanburg Scene →

Steven Shanafelt throws us some traffic!

Looking for a Co-Host!

Yesterday I officially launched a very low-budget, low-tech podcast covering both large and small things that happened in Spartanburg.  The first recording was fun, the post-production was a mess (I got angry, ranted and made a fool out of myself.) but in the end it was worth it because I felt like something great had just been accomplished.  Well, with any talk show worth listening to, the best results come from two opinions and two perspectives.

Read More

Anonymous asked: hello

Hi there.

I apologize for the massive contenticide that just occurred.  This was not the result of my making an insufferable ass of myself on Hacker News, it was the result of this blog changing directions.  You’ve probably already noticed things are starting to change.

The first being that I’m now using typekit for the font.

(Don’t) Make Drug Testing Mandatory for Welfare Candidates

I get it.  Folks are pretty serious about welfare reform: they don’t want their tax dollars being used to support a ‘welfare queen’ who keeps cranking out babies and malingering her way out of work so she can continue to abuse the system and get high.  Anyone would justifiably be outraged if they found out they spent thousands of dollars sending their kid to college and find out he or she hasn’t spent an hour in class.

What I don’t get is how drug testing is going to solve this problem without creating others.  We are inherently inclined to believe that drug testing will ‘scare folks straight’ because of the prospect that getting caught means losing their benefits.  That’s socially responsible?  That’s not even close to socially responsible, and it’s even further away from effective legislation (if such a thing can possibly exist).

If the end goal in drug testing welfare candidates is to save money by directing those funds in the right direction, exactly how does it help Johnny and Suzie who need new shoes for school?  It would be devastatingly more expensive to try and send each and every crack-addicted parent to a rehab clinic or group therapy sessions, and it would clog the social institutions already in place to remove these children from disastrous homes, process them and place them into foster care-all the while never solving the issue of welfare funds being used on drugs and alcohol.

So what’s the solution?

Provided a solution can be found, the government needs to spend less time writing legislation and more time promoting positive reinforcement within the communities and invest in developmental programs geared towards activism, and personal responsibility.  If there is a viable solution that doesn’t automatically place hefty assumptions and broad generalizations on families (like my cousin who has four children and has to raise them on her own, while remaining clean and clear) of being drug-dependent/alcohol guzzling monsters, the government needs to back those solutions and provide incentives-not for simply participating-but showing results.

This creates jobs, it builds communities, and it establishes a fair system where people who need help get that help without being treated like a criminal.

Dale Carnegie

Eight years ago I had a teacher recommend everyone read Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (that should have been underlined, and not quoted), presumably because it was just that interesting of a book.  Principled of a man George Wenger was, he applied the tenets within; it’s just easier to think he enjoyed the book because it was well written.  Then in 2010, I actually started to read it because it was on a book shelf, and nobody was looking.

Fast forward three weeks to myself sitting in a coffee shop listening (eavesdropping) to a girl complain about what she’s not looking for in a mate.  I started to pull out a business card, but decided against it because something occurred to me: she’s spending more time telling her friend what she doesn’t want, versus what she does want.

Think about that for a while, I’m going to smoke a cigarette.