Duane Gran’s log of thoughts

Avoid the Flip-Flop Flap and Join the Well-Heeled

And speaking of distractions, it’s also that time of year in which we have to persuade a misguided chunk of our young workforce that unless they are employed as lifeguards or gym-locker patrols, flip-flops are simply not suitable for work.

Indeed. The whole article is a good reminder on proper foot decorum.

I’m pleased to announce, for those not in my immediate email orbit, the birth of my son — Zachary James Gran. He was born on June 20th and weighed 7 lbs and 12 ounces. He is the picture of health and the apple of my eye.

Jeffrey Zeldman: Web 3.0

When I started designing websites, if the guy on the plane next to me asked what I did, I had to say something like “digital marketing” if I wanted to avoid the uncomprehending stare.

A few years later, if I told the passenger beside me I was a web designer, he or she would regard me with a reverence typically reserved for Stanley-Cup-winning Nobel Laureate rock stars.

Then the bubble burst, and the same answer to the same question provoked looks of pity and barely concealed disgust. I remember meeting a high-rolling entrepreneur in the early 2000s who asked what I did. I should have told him I hung around playgrounds, stealing children’s lunch money. He would have had more respect for that answer.

Zeldman describes the seesaw experience of the last 15 years of the technology business better than anyone I’ve heard. In the late 90s I was a part owner and sort of big pooh-bah of an internet company. We built web sites and as we became more hip to doing things well, we wired them up with databases and other whiz-bang things on the server side. It was all a sort of accident that was meant to happen and the late 90s was a great ride for the technically inclined.

I felt obligated in 1997 to explain, after announcing that I was a part owner of a dot-com, that I was in fact not wealthy and had no designs of becoming such. I enjoyed building cool things with technology and it helped that people paid me to do it. In 2002 I felt obliged to remind people that I was in fact not living in a dumpster. I still liked building cool things, even if no one wanted to pay me.

Fortunately things have evened out a bit and while IT struggles to come into its own as a proper profession, I like that I’m neither regarded as a rock star nor a wash out. Its just me… making cool stuff with technology.

Who would have thought? In addition to being a tasty morning drink, Coffee could provide shield from radiation. First I find out that coffee may be good for health and that it wards off liver cancer and now this!

How much longer can it be before coffee spam makes it way to my email box?

After two years of membership in the Charlottesville Rotary Club I’m compelled to reflect on the personal and social importance of civic organizations. The theme of Rotary is “service above self” and emphasizes philanthropy, ethics and cultural understanding within a framework of business relationships. In an age of Enron scandals we need the values of Rotary instilled in the minds of corporate executives.

I’m not a captain of industry, and at my young age I don’t expect to have many opportunities to influence the culture, but I do believe that a person successfully follows an ethic by forming it well before challenges mount. Fellowship among a group of civic-minded persons is one avenue to building up one’s moral reserve in advance of life’s tests. We all must sometimes choose between mammon and virtue, but the noble path seeks balance and opportunity for service within the framework of industry. I’m reminded of an excellent essay, All Work is Worship, which states:

(from page 9) In short, in a competitive market, there is no way to distinguish the service motive from the profit motive. In practice, no market is perfectly competitive, leaving room for the service motive sometimes to trump the profit motive and vice versa, but generally in too subtle a manner for general economic research to detect the difference. For this reason, Adam Smith’s claim remains convincing: to assume generalized selfish behavior does explain people’s behavior in the market economy satisfactorily. On the other hand, if the economy does include many altruists, we wouldn’t know it to look at them.

The ethic of Rotary never asks me to neglect industry, however it sets an expectation that profit won’t trump all else. Civics — that notion where community matters and individuals are proud to contribute to the common good — is a value worth preserving and, in our present condition, reviving. Without making too overt a pitch, I would be glad to talk with other civic-minded professionals about Rotary membership. Feel free to get in touch with me about it.

An enterprising fellow fashioned cuff links out of network plugs, thereby saving the day when losing his original cuff links. I’m impressed.

But I’m less impressed by an effort to meld the digital lifestyle of the iPod with a necktie. Pink? There are only a handful of men in the world who can wear a pink tie with élan, and much fewer while sporting a pair of ear buds.

The Cavalier Daily, a newspaper for students at The University of Virginia, explains its editorial position for filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control’s regulations on alcohol advertising. They are joined by the Virginia Tech Collegiate Times. College papers in Virginia are prohibited from advertising alcohol, presumably since the demographic is decidedly tilted toward those who are legally prevented from imbibing.

Is this a matter of free speech or one of fees and revenue? Alcohol is already a well regulated commodity and restrictions on advertising are well established in print, radio and television. Let’s consider for a moment who wins and who loses in this scenario.

I remember vividly each year arriving back on campus at my alma mater, Ball State University, to a barrage of alcohol advertising in our student paper*. In fact, one could see prominent “welcome back BSU students” signs at the local brewery’s and liquor stores. Students were regarded as a cash cow for booze purchases and the paper gladly accepted advertising revenue. Who won? The purveyors and the newspaper, but it is the student body who lost.

This isn’t to say that they had no hand in the matter. I personally contributed my (albeit small) part to the alcohol economy during college, but what is the logic of directing ads to a group that by and large is legally forbidden to purchase or consume the product? The logic, if it dare be called such, is that students will skirt the law and advertiser and newspaper alike can look the other way.

The paper offers the following defense:

By fighting for commercial speech we are defending the democratic principles of a free press and seeking to secure the paper on firmer financial ground.

Aside from the misnomer about commercial speech, their allegedly principled objection is belied by the monetary aim.

* Note: I was a columnist for the Ball State Daily News and made my disagreement with the editorial decision to accept alcohol advertising known.

Everything old is new again, or so it would seem. A new trend, called cohousing, aims to build communities with the intent of sharing resources and building a sense of community. In contrast to various made-up neighborhoods with kitsch names (olde pointe, anyone?), these communities aim to bring together people who wish to participate in the raising of children and making of meals. The movement is away from my yard to our yard, and I think it sounds fabulous.

It is like a commune without excessive communalism and you don’t need to change your religion. As it happens, a cohousing community is in the planning stages for Charlottesville. Community and true sprited neighborliness. What a novel concept.

Update (9 June 2006): A Mothering Magazine article features a first hand account of establishing a cohousing community and the benefits conferred. I find it particularly interesting how no developer is involved in the process and the community directs the construction.

A Commercial Alert bulletin warns about a new venue for advertising to children:

BusRadio, a start-up company in Massachusetts, wants to pipe into school buses around the country a private radio network that plays music, public-service announcements, contests and, of course, ads, aimed at kids as they travel to and from school.

It is shameful when we allow our public schools to become so impoverished that selling out children has become not only acceptable, but is called good policy in some circles. I was a student at a public school in 1990 when Channel One was introduced. Today the corporation has a direct conduit to 8 million students at 12,000 public schools, where they endorse soda and their own slant on the news. My efforts, naive as there were as a 16 year-old, to expose bias and propaganda fell on deaf ears. It is hard to make a principled objection to a school system when they have sold out.

More than ever we need to recognize the real harm done when school systems are bled dry or divert education funds into the pits of technology and sport.

A must read Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cites many reasons to doubt the legitimacy of the 2004 Presidential election results. In particular:

In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty
percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent — a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.

I’m not disposed to conspiracy, but I do believe that people are prone to dishonesty when passions flare. Every election is a composite of the 13,000 polling precincts and is bound to involve some fraud, but we hold out hope that a) the fraud is minimal and b) that it is counter balanced. The article seems to demonstrate, through statistical analysis and firm research, that there was significant fraud weighted heavily in favor of the incumbent President.

Kerry supporters will be dismissed for grousing about the results, but for the sake of our democracy we need to address the facts raised by this article before the next election.