Tracking the Jacaranda

As I noted last month, I have been nursing a Jacaranda tree in a pot on my front deck. This is a tree that my friend Sandy had started and passed along to me. I let it get too tall for comfort, so this spring I pruned it rather drastically. Now, I'm pleased to see it growing again.

Being obsessive by nature, and blessed with a digital camera, I have started photographing this tree each week and posting the results in a flickr photoset.

Starting this small project reminds me of a project I thought about, but never started, back before digital photography. There's a lovely old Sugar Maple tree that stands alone in a field on my commute from Lewes to Dover. Years ago, I took a photo of this tree and thought about taking a regular series of photos, over time, to track its growth and changes.

But I put off starting that project. Then came the great ice-storm of some winters ago, which hit that tree hard. It was greatly reduced for a few years. Just as it started coming back, work began on Sugar Maple Farms, a development in that field. They've preserved the tree, but the view is not quite the same.

Ah, well.

Filed in:

• jacaranda
• tree
• garden

More on the Delaware.gov Update

As I mentioned the other day, the folks who run the delaware.gov web portal for Delaware State government are looking for opinions as they think about ways to improve the services.

They have announced a Focus Group meeting for next Wednesday (6/21/06) and invite users to take a quick Online Survey about the existing portal.

I've had a few good comments on my earlier post on this subject, which I will pass on to the portal team. Other thoughts?

Filed in:

• Delaware
• government
• web
• portal

Is This Legal?

It is tacky, I know that much.

There are at least four of these truck-mounted billboards on my commute. They seem to be a way to get a billboard up without getting it properly permitted as a permanent sign.

I wonder of these are regulated? Or are they a way to take advantage of a loophole?

I imagine Fritz, over at Sneaking Suspicions, would know the answer.

Filed in:

• sign
• legality

Tags? Yes, Tags

I'm experimenting with adding del.icio.us tags to my blogger posts. I'll be playing around with formatting for a bit.

I feel it is important to try to grow. Or, I was getting bored.

• tags
• delicious
• blogger

Busy, Busy, Busy

Good heavens, I've been getting sparse in my blogging lately. I'm not really sure why.

We've been busy. We're in the transition from school-year to summer schedules. The girls have been out of school for a week now. Karen's year-end in-service sessions ended yesterday. We're not quite into our summer groove yet.

The girls are in final rehearsals for their dance recital on Saturday. Karen was at the Seaford Senior Center for a concert with her church bell choir this evening. It gave me a small amount of alone time.

I haven't been entirely sure what I want to blog about lately. Political posts seem out of my league; the Delaware political blogging world has become quite heated recently. Much of the arguing is about the race for State attorney General this fall. I'm not sure I care that much about that race.

I've not had a lot of time to take new photos, though I hope to get back into the groove soon.

I guess I'll have to do better.

• apologia

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.