RTP seeks to be more inviting for smaller companies

RTP seemed like a great idea 60 years ago but the tide has turned against the idea of putting job centers in the boonies. The younger workers (you know, the ones graduating from the schools that put the triangle in “Research Triangle Park”) don’t want to own cars. They want to work where they live. They want to work in a dynamic environment, not one with “large amounts of green space.” Collaboration with others spurs new ideas, not navel-gazing in green pastures (or former pastures, as is the case with RTP).

Skyrocketing gas prices and different priorities among today’s younger workforce are what dooms RTP. Yes, RTP could survive if it can become a place where one can not just work but also live and play, but it’s an uphill battle that RTP cannot win. Durham and Raleigh are light years ahead of RTP in this regard and that’s where the job growth will go.

Two years ago, concerned about competition from other research parks within the state and around the globe, RTP hired a New York urban design firm to update its master plan for the first time since the park was formed in 1959.

Since then, the urgency has also heightened as new competitors – Durham’s American Tobacco Campus and N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus, to name two – have attracted numerous start-ups.

The park, meanwhile, has been hurt by appearing to be content to be a suburban, isolated campus environment, said Joel Marcus, CEO of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a California company that has been in the park since 1998 and today owns nearly a million square feet of lab space in RTP.

“That’s really not today’s world,” he said.

via RTP seeks to be more inviting for smaller companies, quick innovation – Economy – NewsObserver.com.

Beach trip

I had the pleasure Thursday of chaperoning Hallie and her 4th grade classmates on a trip to Carolina Beach, NC. I had been looking forward to it for weeks and it lived up to its promise.

We woke up at 5:20 Thursday and made it to the school at 6, where kids sat and chatted in the cafeteria while waiting for stragglers. At 6:30 the bus headed down the highway, and I followed it with three other dads in the minivan.
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Time to update the City of Raleigh flag?

Leo Suarez of the Raleigh Connoisseur has some similar thoughts on Raleigh’s flag that I’ve had. I think the time might be ripe to update the city flag and get something we can all be proud to fly!

In other cities, the flag is a sense of pride. Chicago and Washington DC have great flags and if you’re lucky, you may find citizens with tattoos of it. (anyone in Raleigh can claim having this?)

In 2004, the North American Vexillological Association did a survey against 150 US city flags. Respondents answered on a 0 to 10 scale on what they thought were a well designed flags. We ranked 56 on that list, highest North Carolina city by the way, so flag design may not be a huge feather in our cap.

Still, I want to ask this question; Why are there so few Raleigh flags around town?

via The Raleigh Connoisseur (April 25, 2012) – The City of Raleigh Flag.

Bricks vs. clicks

On pondering how Best Buy is going under, allegedly due to becoming Amazon’s “showroom,” I decided it’s quite the opposite. Best Buy is losing to the search engine.

How many times have you walked into a big-box store only to be completely lost and unable to find what you need? How helpful have the zombies in the blue shirts been in finding what you need? Who wants to have to hunt for a surly, clueless sales rep to help them when it’s so much easier to tell a search engine exactly what one wants and have the answer appear within seconds?

Search engines don’t hassle you with aggressive upselling, either. The now-defunct chain Circuit City used to do this and it drove me nuts. I’d have to fight off their commission-based sales associates to the point that it totally turned me off on shopping at their store. The sharks at Circuit City were the meatspace equivalent of pop-up ads.

I think big-box stores still have a chance, provided that they return to one of the time-tested methods of making customers happy: giving them what they want. Store associates should be well-versed in the products and also polite. Above all, they should be accessible. It worked for hundreds of years of retailing and it can still work – search engines and online retailers or not.

Improv Everywhere’s Raleigh MP3 Experiment

IMG_0487

I happened to see in Friday’s paper that there would be one of Improv Everywhere’s MP3 Experiments happening in Raleigh as part of the grand opening of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’s Nature Research Center (NRC). I pitched it to Kelly, who agreed that the kids would have a blast with this. So, we hopped on our bike and rode downtown to join the fun.

The instructions were on the Improv Everywhere website and boiled down to this:

  1. Download the “Raleigh MP3 Experiment” MP3 onto your music player.
  2. Synchronize your watch.
  3. Wear a red, blue, green, or yellow shirt.
  4. Be near the designated area before 6 PM.
  5. At exactly 6 PM, start playing the MP3 and follow the instructions.

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Perdue makes emergency landing at RDU

So, uh, tell me again why our governor took the state jet to Greensboro, a city an hour’s drive from Raleigh even without a highway patrol escort? Does she have a clue about how much jet fuel costs nowadays? Is this good stewardship of our tax dollars?

Gov. Perdue’s plane made a safe emergency landing at Raleigh-Durham International airport this afternoon after a plane malfunction, her spokeswoman said Friday. No one was injured.Her plane was on the way to make to make a job expansion announcement when her plane exhibited unusual vibrations in connection with the retraction of the landing gear, and a decision was made to return to RDU, according to Chris Mackey, her press secretary.

via Perdue makes emergency landing at RDU | newsobserver.com projects.

Update: Here’s a state auditor report on the state aircraft operations, undertaken by then-state auditor Ralph Campbell, Jr. in 2005.

Update 2: My friend Warren has pointed out that Greensboro is closer to a 90 minute drive from Raleigh. Guess I’ll cut our governor some slack after all.

David Parker must go

I watched the press conference by North Carolina Democratic Party chairman David Parker yesterday and thought it was surreal. I’ve read all the speculation swirling around the claims of alleged sexual harrassment by former executive director Jay Parmley and was quite shocked by it. I’ve tried to keep an open mind about it all but Parker’s defense of it just didn’t add up.

How can Parker say he “didn’t supervise” the staff and also claim that he witnessed the alleged incidents and deemed them completely innocent? Which is it? Parker has a point about the sworn EEOC statement being different than the December letter, but at some point the excuses he has to make to justify the alleged incidents become a bit too heavy to stand up to scrutiny. Grown men do not pretend to hit each other in the crotch.

I don’t know exactly what may or may not have happened between staffer Adriadn Ortega and Jay Parmley, but I do know that to believe Parker’s explanation of them requires a huge leap of faith. Also, Parker’s claim that he doesn’t know where the settlement money came from either shows he is an aloof, out-of-touch leader at best or a liar at worst. Either way, yesterday’s press conference did little to convince me he should stay.

Parker should resign immediately for the sake of the party.

Progress to investigate utility pole vandalism

Another missing grounding wire

I reached out to a contact I have at Progress Energy about the thefts of copper wiring from my neighborhood’s utility poles. Marty Clayton, Community Relations Manager, called me back today and told me the utility has had other reports of this crime and would send someone out to evaluate the damage in my area. He said these thieves are taking their lives into their own hands with these thefts, going so far as to break into live substations.

I spent some time today before and after work, tagging some of the damaged poles with red marker tape. I’m finding that about one out of every two poles I check has its copper missing, and some of the missing pieces are only two feet long.

Why would someone put themselves and surrounding neighbors at risk just to steal five bucks of metal? I just don’t get it.

Google redirected me to Lithuania?

I was surfing the Internets at work today, searching for info on solar panels. I put in a phone number for a Google search and got four results. Clicking on the first one, I expected to see the contact page of Westinghouse Solar. Instead I got redirected to the following URL:

http://39008.peachtreepropainters.info/url?sa=X&source=web&cd=1&ved=0IrIEbA43&url=http://www.westinghousesolar.com/index.php/contact-us&ei=2ZEufKTL5qizrI2OzlM08Z21oQ==&usg=z-CCthkp93j-2o-7wI1SJZ&sig2=yIZHjyHJ17arcqFVojVX4B

Now, I know Google usually tracks which search results I click on, and hides this tracking using Javascript. That’s been the case for years and I’m used to it. However, I’m stumped as to why the above URL says 39008.peachtreepropainters.info instead of www.google.com. The IP address for 39008.peachetreepropainters.info routes to Lithuania:
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