Second Golf Game of 2006

Things You Never Expect to See on the Golf Course

I played 18 holes with Andy Southmayd this morning at Bethany Bay. We were surprised by this dead fish on the first fairway. Despite that omen, we had a good round.

I surprised myself with some decent shots and scored a few pars. We were fairly even through the first 9 holes, but Andy puled away over the second 9 and beat me by several shots.

Bethany Bay is a pleasant, though little, course. We had to play through some random sprinkler activations.

We were also interested to note that the one par-4 on the course is being shortened to a par 3. There is a row of garages that back up to the present seventh fairway. They appear to take something of a beating, though, so the hole is being re-configured.

Filed in:

• golf
• 2006

What Do You Suppose is Next for this "Internet" Thing?

This week I took part in a focus group for the Government Information Center (GIC), a small office in the Delaware Department of State charged with managing the state's internet portal: delaware.gov. They are studying ways to improve the usefulness of the internet as a tool for communication between government and constituents.

I maintain a web site for the Office of State Planning Coordination, Livable Delaware, and the Delaware Geographic Data Committee. I believe that the web can be a very useful tool, but it takes work and thought. I was pleased to see the guys at the GIC putting resources into this effort and I will be interested to see what they come up with.

Some of the things we discussed included taking advantage of the growing "social networking" phenomenon. Weblogs are a big part of that movement. I think that the kind of direct citizen involvement represented by blogs could be a benefit to a government web presence. Communication, after all, should be at least two-way.

I do see a potential problem in the trend towards anonymous blogging. Government leaders are going to be nervous about letting people comment anonymously; they'll be worried about what sort of things gets posted. As I have noted in the past, I share some of that concern, but I do think there are ways around the problem.

First, I'm beginning to see degrees of anonymity. Some of us, of course, are out here entirely as ourselves. Anonymous folks with their own blogs will at least have a fairly consistent nom-de-web. Though we may not know who they are in the flesh and blood world, we at least have a sense that we know the web personas like Hube, Del, delathought and others by their writings. Further, we know where to find them on-line if they start to get abusive in other people's blogs.

But there are also readers and commenters who are completely anonymous and feel no compunction about posting derogatory, abusive and unhelpful trash. To some extent, the community of weblogs and bloggers will self-police, controlling the anonymous trashers with a collective moral authority. But there will always be those who pollute the webways.

Any moves towards a more collaborative state government portal will have to take that into account. There are collaborative sites out on the net that have made strides towards enabling collaborative on-line work while keeping the trash to a minimum. My gold standard are sites like MetaFilter, Flickr, and del.icio.us, though these require strong moderators to police them.

I think we can find ways to open up the state's web presence to get more feedback from the public, but it will take careful planning by the state government folks and forbearance and help from the on-line citizenry.

As a start, I'd like to ask my fellow Delaware bloggers, many of whom are listed in my blogroll, for their ideas. What would you like to see on the Delaware portal? What would be useful? What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? What can you add?

Yes, Tears Were Shed

Colleen graduated from eighth grade this evening. Today was the last day of school for the year for both girls. This evening, we gathered in the lunchroom/auditorium at the Southern Delaware School of the Arts (SDSA) to watch Colleen and her classmates graduate.

Colleen is one of the two dozen or so who have attended SDSA from first through eighth grade. They have been a part of the school for its entire history. Their first grade year was the first year SDSA was open.

I remember visiting the first grade classrooms to show the kids my hand-drum collection. In second grade I read to the class. I remember watching a lesson or two in third grade. For fourth grade, I visited the Smithsonian with Colleen's class. I think it was in fifth grade that I showed them the Delaware DataMIL. About then, I started adding visits to Christina's classrooms, and they all start to melt together in my memory.

Original SDSA principal Tim Fannin returned from Florida for the ceremony this evening. He gets great credit for starting the school, as does Indian River School Superintendent Lois Hobbs, who had the original idea. Both of those educators deserve our thanks.

It was an emotional night for the kids. For Karen and I, it was a very, very proud night. We were pleased to have my folks and Karen's parents sitting with us as we watched Colleen make short speech and walk away from eighth grade.

Next up: Sussex Technical High School. Ironically, one of the strongest academic schools in our area.

More Beachcombing

Colleen was away on a trip to an amusement park today with the Junior Honor Society. Karen, Christina and I spent a few hours on Lewes Beach; the Bay Beach, up the way from the public city beach.

Christina and I took a beachcombing walk up the beach to Roosevelt Inlet. Along the way, we found pebbles and shells and boats. We got to watch Horseshoe Crabs mating and we visited with a pair of whelks.

Another beautiful Sunday on the beach.

Monthly Blogroll Cleanup

It's time to once again go through the blogroll and clean out the sites that have stalled out. I have a general "one month" rule; no updates in a month (or so) and I remove a site. I reserve the right to violate that rule, of course. I am the decider.

Delmarva Dealings, which kept up a sometimes angry response to the politics of Salisbury, in Maryland, seems to have folded.

McLefty, out of Milford, may have left.

More useless yet interesting info from Delaware, from Wilmington, has been quiet for more than a month.

Jeff, the stay-at-home Dad from Bear, hasn't had anything to say on his No Ma'am, this IS my job for a while.

Posts at the first slate were down to about once a month. Not much happening there.

There are a few others that I'm sometimes tempted to remove because of their general mean-spiritedness, but I haven't. Yet.

Whew!

I am very tired this evening.

Today was the 2006 Delaware GIS Conference: Patterns of Change. I am, if only unofficially, the State GIS Coordinator for Delaware; I serve as host and emcee for this conference each year. I also serve on the Conference Planning Committee.

We started with a series of GIS workshops on Wednesday, followed by a Vendor's Reception/Conference Social Wednesday evening. It was nice to be able to have all the set-up done and have the vendors in place the night before the conference.

We had a bit more than 200 people registered and a nice crowd actually showed up. We had many interesting presentations and speakers and lots of great vendors.

It was great fun, but the few days before are always a time of great nervousness and spurts of work. The day of the conference itself is a marathon. My job is to be the public face of things, start the plenary session with a sense of energy, meet, greet, glad-hand and take photos.

By the end of the closing plenary I was dragging, but I think our event was once again a success.

So now I am worn out, but happy.

And So We Begin Again

Summer arrived this week-end. It drove down from Pennsylvania late on Friday afternoon, having skipped out of work an hour or so early.

At least, that's how it seems. I feel like it was only last week, or the week before, that we were starting to have warmer days. And now? Overnight, we've started another summer beach season.

Memorial Day Weekend, 2006, has been a hot three days. There are plenty of tourists here for the sand and sun. Lewes and Rehoboth both have newly gussied-up main drags. Rehoboth has a wider beach.

We spent some time Saturday on the beach at North Bethany with parts of my family. Today, we spent the afternoon on the beach at Cape Henlopen State Park.

So here we are again. Traffic. Rude drivers. Families in our restaurants after a day on the beach during which their smallest members have become over-tired, over baked, over-stimulated and on the edge of a breakdown. It can get ugly.

On the other hand, we live at the beach. We can spend an entire day in the surf and still be home in our own living room, cleaned in our own showers, with our cats on our laps, after a very brief drive. That may just make it all worthwhile.

It's Alive!

This is a Jacaranda Tree given to me by my friend Sandy. He'd grown it from a seed collected on a business trip we took out to California some years ago.

It has lived on our porch for a few years now. By the end of last summer, it had grown too tall for comfort. Sandy suggested cutting it back to within a foot or so of the ground and letting it "bush out."

This spring, I did so and have been worrying about it ever since. In the last week, though, I was pleased to see a few new shoots coming out the sides.

Another Walk in the Park

Park Path

I took a sunny lunchtime walk in Dover's Silver Lake Park earlier this week. Of course it was another opportunity to take pictures.

I would have posted this earlier, bit Flickr was having a bad week and I have been working out a kink in my back that may in fact be a Buick.

The Flickr folk seemed to have straightened their site back out and my spine is starting to come back into something like alignment. So here it is!

Fire in Dover

We had minor excitement in Dover this morning when a fire broke out in the attic of the Old State House, on the Green. The building is in the middle of extensive renovation, so there was nothing much inside to be damaged, and the fire fighters caught it quickly and put it out fast. I understand one of the renovation construction workers was injured, but I don't know how badly.

I took a break to get a few shots of the aftermath. Greg Hughes, of the Government Information Center, was more on the spot and got lots of shots of the actual fire fighting. He's posted those on his Flickr site.

Getting Back on Course

I took time this morning to try some golf. I walked a truncated round on the Heritage Golf Course.

The Heritage is close to home and inexpensive. But it is also being redeveloped as a shorter course with townhomes. You can see some of the evidence above.

The back portion of the course has been scraped clean and the fourth and seventh holes are closed. Other holes are drastically shorter. And there's a huge mound -- Mount Golfmore? -- looming over several holes.

I needed to get out and see how bad my swing has gotten. I'd hit a bucket of balls at a Dover-area driving range recently, but it's just not the same.

I'm still a rotten golfer, but I was somewhat heartened by my play. I scored a respectable six on the tough, island-green par-5 and I scored what I think is my first Birdie on a par-3.

The eighth hole has been cut down to a very short 90 yards. The first time through I hit too much club and bounced over the green entirely. The second time around I dropped down to a wedge and bounced to within about a yard of the hole. I'm not a great hand with a putter, but I sank that one.

I guess I'm still a duffer!

Filed in:

• golf
• 2006

This View of Hybrids Bugs Me

There's a story on hybrid cars in the Business section of today's News Journal. The article -- Can hybrid cars really save you money? -- takes the line that most of these articles have seemed to take lately. That is, now that gas prices are rising, are hybrids really a good way to save money?

It's a valid question, but it ignores the main reason that I and many other early-adopters had for buying our hybrids: air quality. I love the higher mileage that my Prius gives me. I've long wanted a way to cut my personal use of a non-renewable energy source. But my chief concern was, and is, to reduce the amount of air pollution that I create. And my Prius does that quite well.

To be fair, this particular article does allow that the environmentalist angle remains valid, but it quickly goes back to busily debunking the notion of hybrids as a way to save money on gasoline.

That's fine, and may be a valid point (though I note that they focus mostly on the Honda hybrid), but I have to insist that gas mileage is not the main reason to own a hybrid.

On Indian River

This is the view from our table this evening at the restaurant known as Serendipity, in Oak Orchard, Delaware. The dining room over-looks the Indian River about where it broadens out into Indian River Bay.

We had dinner there with Andy and Lyn and their daughter Rebecca. Our Colleen and their Emily and Rachel were at Sussex Central High School getting ready for the Dance Gala we attended after dinner. Christina spent the afternoon with a buddy and met us at the show.

There were groups from the high school, from various dance studios, and from the Southern Delaware School of the Arts. They were all very good, but I was quite proud of the girls from SDSA. They were the only middle-school group dancing. They held their own; they more than held their own.

I Used to Be Unique

A report from R. L. Polk & Co. confirms what I've been seeing out on the road:

Nationwide registrations for new hybrid vehicles rose to 199,148 in 2005 -- a 139 percent increase from 2004 according to R. L. Polk & Co. For the second year in a row, Toyota Prius led the segment commanding 52.6 percent of new registrations. However, with more models entering the market, hybrid share for any given vehicle is being challenged.

I used to be one of the only folks out there in a Prius. Lately, there are more and more of us. I don't mind; I think it's good to have more low emissions vehicles out there.

I do miss that sense of being special, though.

Returning to an Old Favorite

Sunday evening, I finished reading the novel I'd borrowed from the Lewes Public Library. This week is full enough that I won't have a chance to get back to the library again until the week-end, at the earliest.

So I found myself in front of the book shelves late that night, scanning the titles of books that I've read and thought enough of to own a copy. I was looking for a book I could comfortably revisit.

As is often the case, I eventually grabbed one of the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian. I keep coming back to these books. This time, it was the first in the series, Master and Commander. This book, by the way, does not tell the tale that was told in the movie of the same name; it gives an introduction to Captain Jack Aubrey and his pal Stephen Maturin.

At the start of the book, Jack is given a promotion and his first command, a "little small squat merchantman with two masts" as Stephen calls it when he first sees the Sophie.

Small, old, slow and not very powerful she may be, but a command is a command and Jack celebrates with too much food and too much drink. He wakes on his ship at dawn the next day, hug-over, sour and sick. But slowly, the sun comes up.

As his thoughts ranged on so the low cabin brightened steadily. A fishing boat passed under the Sophie's stern, laden with tunny and uttering the harsh roar of a conch; at almost the same time the sun popped up from behind St. Philip's fort -- it did, in fact, pop up, flattened like a sideways lemon in the morning haze and drawing its bottom free of the land with a distinct jerk. In little more than a minute the greyness of the cabin had utterly vanished: the deck-head was alive with light glancing from the rippling sea; and a single ray, reflected from some unmoving surface on the distant quay, darted through the cabin windows to light up Jacks coat and its blazing epaulette. The sun rose within his mind, obliging his dogged look to broaden into a smile, and he swung out of his cot.

I love the language in these stories, and I've always been a fan of seafaring stories. So what if this will be my eighth or ninth time through this book? I love these books.

Filed in:

• book
• aubrey

Blossoms Arriving

A few of the Iris Lily blossoms we've been waiting for have arrived. Flowers for Karen. For Mother's Day.

A Boat in Downtown Dover

An exhibit on 17th Century Delaware opened at the State Archives Building today. As part of the opening celebration, a replica of the boat Captain John Smith used to explore the Chesapeake Bay was (dry)docked outside the old part of the Archives Building today.

Smith used a boat like this -- about 30 feet long and built in two pieces for shipping across the Atlantic -- to explore the Chesapeake and many of its tributaries 400 years ago.

Some researchers recently used GIS tools to study John Smith's logs, map out his travels, and figure out that Smith and his crew came far enough up the Nanticoke River to have entered into what is now Delaware. So, of course, we now claim him as one of our own.

I love boats; especially wooden, sailing-type boats. I love the rigging, and planking, and ropes. So, of course, I took a small series of photos.

Blossoms Pending

We're waiting for these and other blooms to pop in our yard this spring. If my memory serves, this one in the side yard is an iris. (Update: Looks like this is a Lily. What do I know....) The day-lilies in the front yard are close as well.

From The Other Side of The Lens

I got to meet one of my favorite photographers this evening. Kevin Fleming, one of Delaware's best known photographers, stopped by to get a shot of me in my car for a story on commuting for the Delaware Beach Life magazine.

I have become a sort of serial subject for commuting stories over the years. I think it started with Terry Plowman, publisher of Delaware Beach Life, who did a commuting story (I think for the Delawarean) some time back, before he started his own magazine. That story included an off-hand comment about "the Zen of commuting" that caught the eye of a reporter working on Zen thing for the Washington Post some time later.

Recently, a writer working for Terry's new magazine called to ask me some questions for a new story about commuting.

I stayed away from the metaphysical this time.

And so, this evening, I got to meet Kevin Fleming, who came by for a quick photo shoot. He set up a timed exposure of me driving past him in my Prius. The end result looks like it'll be a neat-looking smear of car and background with me, a bit more in focus, behind the wheel.

It was a great pleasure to meet Kevin, and fun to watch him work.

Moments of Minor Transcendence

The other day I was driving through downtown Dover, on my way back to the office. I had the windows down; it was a bright, breezy, beautiful mid-day.

I had the radio on, tuned to a singer/songwriter station on Sirius. I don't recall what was playing, but it was acoustic and melodic.

It was just noon when I came to the intersection of State Street and Loockerman Street, in the heart of Dover. Church bells started ringing to mark the hour. It was a carillon, I think, playing a hymn.

What caught my ear was the fact that for just that moment, the song on the car radio and the music from the church steeple were in harmony and rhythmically in synch.

I love it when that happens. It is a reminder that there's order, if only accidental, in the chaos of life.