The Cusp of Relevance

It has been a couple of weeks since I posted my concerns, as expressed to Ohio Senator Ray Miller by email, to this blog about Senate Bill 62, which would prohibit the issuance or transfer of liquor licenses with 500 feet of just about everything in the state. After I posted that, I wore out my iPhone calling the offices of both Senator Miller and Senator Turner, the author of the bill, to try to clear up some confusion. I was rewarded with an opportunity to speak directly with Senator Turner, and I thank her and her staff, and I apologise to everyone for waiting so long to post a follow up here after that phone call.

Senator Turner assured me that the goal of the bill she introduced is to address the crime that takes place in and around some liquor stores in some of the distressed parts of Ohio’s urban areas, especially when it occurs around children and puts them in danger. The bill is not intended to target any types of businesses other than retail liquor stores, and the Senator assured me that it is a priority that the bill not do any harm to existing businesses.

I certainly share the Senator’s concerns regarding illegal activity that endangers children, and as she spoke a few of the dirty liquor stores that always seem to have people loitering in the parking lots around Columbus came to mind. I really appreciate the Senator’s willingness to take time to talk to me about her intentions in proposing this legislation, and am heartened to hear that her aim is not to limit Ohioans access to alcohol per se.

However, I will still be watching the progress of this bill closely and will post updates on this blog if anything happens.  The fact is that illegal activity is already illegal, and that further restricting the sale of alcohol to law abiding citizens in Ohio can do very little to help, in my opinion. One fact I was happy to have the opportunity to impart to Senator Turner was that right here in Columbus, the fantastic Weiland’s Market secured a retail liquor license in the last few years, giving the residents of my part of town a friendly, warm place to buy our favorite beverages, staffed with nice, helpful people. When this option opened, I immediately brought my business to them, at the cost of two stores in my neighborhood that I think fall into the class of establishments that Senator Turner and I agree need to go: cramped and dirty, hosting gatherings of intoxicated people out front into the night. I’d been exposed to racist jokes and offers to sell me illegal drugs at these stores, and was happy to have the opportunity to go to a place I felt safe and made buying drinks fun. Of course, as any resident of Clintonville can tell you, Weiland’s is right across the street from a city park and playground.

Again, I apologise that a hectic and unforeseen personal schedule has delayed my update on this issue for those of you here care, and I thank the Senator for taking the time to speak with me. I think we are all releaved to hear that the goal isn’t primarily to ban alcohol from our city’s or to put our favorite watering holes out of business. Hopefully a way can be found to help distressed urban communities without impacting good businesses that provide good jobs and good times to law abiding Ohioans.

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My State Senator, Ray Miller, is co-sponsoring a bill in the Ohio Senate that would create a patchwork Temperance Zone throughout the City of Columbus and every other urban area in the state. You can read the bill here.  You can learn more at Columbus Underground and NBC4.

The below is the text of my email to Senator Miller.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Senator Miller:

I called your office yesterday to express my disappointment and outrage at your co-sponsorship of S. B. 62, which would make most of the city of Columbus and every other city in Ohio a temperance zone.  I am a smart person, I think, who spends a lot of time thinking out this issue, and for the life of me I can’t fathom why you would support this bill.  Not surprisingly, neither could the person I got on the phone at your office yesterday - she told me to call the bills main sponsor.  As a political aside, I, a Columbus voter, do hope you at least know why you put your name on this terrible bill.

I am not indifferent to the dark side of alcohol.  Good friends of mine have been involved in drunken driving related accidents, and I myself, as a young person, was victimized by the poor judgment of drunken drivers.  I hope you will agree with me, though, that it is no more alcohol’s fault that people use bad judgement and hurt others than it is the car’s, and also that 500 feet or 5000 feet won’t be enough room between people using bad judgment and the innocent to ensure that no one is ever harmed.

I also hope that you will agree with me that alcohol is one of life’s finer things.  I have a healthy and enthusiastic relationship with spirited beverages as a home brewer of beer and a columnist for This Week Newspapers, covering as best I can the wonderful array of brews available to the inclined Central Ohioan.  Beer specifically has long been a part of Columbus’ epicurean tradition, exhibited by the revival of our old brewery district, still a shaddow of it’s former self.  Let us not forget that we are the home of a Budweiser Brewery as well, producing a large portion of the most widely consumed beer in the nation.  Columbus is a growing city, benefiting by it’s efforts to attract and retain youn professionals and new businesses.  One key piece in this effort is the widening array of fine dining, groceries and taverns, each of which enhances the culture of our fair city.

Now, the impact of SB 62 seems a bit vague.  On my first reading, I though it effected all establishments that serve up spirits.  I then reread it and determined that it only effected package liquor stores.  It seems that many others share my confusion.  Let me just say that this bill is just as bad - for our town’s economy as well as for its culture - if it effects only liquor stores.  In fact, if it is only an attempt to clean up liquor stores, I say it is a completely counter productive effort.  Think about the incentives we have already created for liquor stores to trend towards the bad parts of town, to have lax security, and to be dirty, unfriendly, unsafe and unwelcome: unable to compete on price, these establishments can only compete by minimizing their prices, and unable to advertize effectively, they are behind the ball when it comes to competing on service, inventory and customer experience.  By chasing them further away from the city centers and the thriving and growing parts of the city, we will reinforce these effects.  This bill will ensure that no one can open a nice liquor store in German Village or much of the Short North: growing, vibrant parts of town that would likely welcome a friendly, well-supplied vendor, and the kinds of places where a nice establishment that could be an asset to this community could thrive.

Since the only effect of this bill would be to sacrofice business freedom and economic activity and growth in order to make alcohol hard to procure that it is a result of a neoprohibitionist impulse on the parts of its authors and sponsors, and that would be sad, because I think many of Columbus’ young professionals would think twice about supporting such a poltician.

Think about the short north without the wonderful, locally-owned watering holes that do so much to make it a welcoming place for professionals to live, and which employ so many people.  Think about much of german village and the brewery district, a good chunk of the arena district, and the area the city is looking to renew around the city center (soon to be a park). Think about the worst, dirtiest, scariest liquor stores in town, and think of them being there forever, because this bill does much to ensure that they will face no competetition for the dollars of choosy, proud drinkers like me.

I urge you to recognize that the current wording of the law on the books allows for a public hearing whenever a license is to be issued within the proposed buffer zone, and that the author of the bill, Senator Turner, said in an interview yesterday with NBC4 that the bill needs to be reworded.  I put it to you that the law as written, properly enforces, is sufficient, and that the bill needs to be rejected: we learned nearly one hundred years ago that criminalizing demon rum only ensures that criminals are the only ones with rum: punishing safe, sensible adults will do nothing to solve whatever vague problems your staff could not articulate to me on the phone yesterday.

Please, Senator Miller, I urge you to withdraw your support for this bill.  It will be bad for Columbus’ citizens, for Columbus’ economy, and for Columbus’ culture.  I’m sure your intentions were good, but if you help this bill pass, the results will only be bad.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like to discus this matter more.

Thank you,

Michael Paull

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This is a post about Twitter and the mainstream medias’ obsession with it. I am aware that the complaint that I am about to lodge – that way too many people are talking about Twitter – is inherently hypocritical. If you can not file it under fighting fire with fire and move on, you’ll get no apologies from me.

Now I certainly hope that anyone reading this knows what Twitter is, because I find it infuriating to explain to people and even more infuriating to listen to it being explained. However, I am going to explain it one more time right now using existing concepts so we can all see what an idiot media people are choosing to be when they wave their arms at their blackberry’s like someone is teaching them how to transmute email into lead.

1. Twitter is a tool for sending text messages to anyone who wants to read them from you.
2. Because it was originally based on text messages, there is a character limit. It has outgrown text messaging largely, but is still compliant and retains the character limit because a lot of people like it. Brevity.
3. Twitter can act as a sort of public chat room in slow motion with a (somewhat) permanent record. However, rather than chat ‘rooms’ there are just chats taking place, and the list of people you engage with is self-selecting.

The format does not dictate any specific use. There are people using it to update their friends on their aches and pains, their meals, their thoughts both profound and banal, their activities and their observations. People are organizing activities and sharing sort of real-time updates on events and goings on. Organizations are using it to update people on news, events or products, and to engage with their audiences in a less formal, more responsive and personal way.

And most media organizations are trying to shove the same old square peg of their mid-twentieth century approach to what they do down this particularly narrow and oblong hole.

This strikes me a little bit like all the energy drink fans suddenly discovering water - “it’s less potent than gatorade, but it’s free, and I can drink as much as I want? Whoa, someone better show me how to use it!” I mean, aren’t people like Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters supposed to sort of be experts in communication and engaging with their audiences? Twitter is a new tool that works slightly differently than the ones that came before, not the second coming.

But then, I do get why it’s so exciting to people in news rooms across the country, and here is why: Because they waited fifteen years to take the Web and social media seriously, and now that they can’t ignore the facts that we live in a two-way communication culture where the power to create content is in everyone’s hands and channels of distribution are a becoming meaningless concepts, twitter is their first foray into a new way of doing things.

Well, I want to help them wade out into the deep end, so I’m just going to close with some bullet points for people who are new to twitter to take to heart so they can move on.

Read more…

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There is one big reason I stick with Firefox: plugins.  Comparing a vanilla installation of firefox with other browsers is a fair fight - chrome and IE are fast, opera is lovely and has nice gizmos out of the box, and as a developer, IE gives me the view 70% of my users see.  However, as any pizza lover knows, good sauce and good cheese only go so far if the toppings aren’t there.  Since I’ve found all the plugins I use as recommendations from someone else, here’s my list.

• Better Gmail 2.  It’s hard to imagine that gmail needs to be improved upon, especially with all the Labs widgets you can add to your gmail regardless of your browser.  However, a week with this plugin and you’ll be sold.  Turn the Label feature in to nestable, collapsible folders, clean up the interface and add some new functionality for filters and stuff.  These tools are for gmail power users, and let’s be honest, who isn’t one of those these days?
• Collorzilla.  This is a really simple tool - adds a PhotoShop color grabber to your Firefox Interface that lets you grab a color for any part of any page you are browsing.  Gives you RGB values and hex code.
• Delicious Bookmarks.  I’m stuck on delicious, more for personal use than for the social element, and I install this plugin first on any new Firefox installation I do.  It adds buttons to the interface that access my account or tag the current page with one click.  I do not like or use the part that imports my delicious links into the browser’s bookmarks menu, but that’s because I don’t use the in-browser bookmarks.
• Download Statusbar. If you move files around a lot, you’ve probably started to think that all of the browsers could do a better job of managing downloads.  It can feel a bit like you click a link and cross your fingers, then poke around later and see if it worked.  With this addon, you can watch your files download while you go about your business, pause them, restart stalled downloads, and access the files once they’re done.
• Firebug.  This addon needs no introduction to Web developers.  Pop the hood on the page you are viewing, monitor network traffic, watch the DOM as your scripts work on it, and more.  If you need it, you probably already have it.  If not, you’re welcome.
• Fireshot.  Still using the print screen button to create screen shots?  I bet you still watch television on a television, too.  Install this plug to start creating screen grabs on the fly and doing what you want with them without have to open photo shop, paste, export, fall asleep, wake up, etc.  It’s freemium and the advanced features are attractive … but I’ve never seen them as necessary and haven’t upgraded.
• New Tab Button on Tab Right.  The nice thing about open source software is its ability to clone great functionality from commercial software and improve upon it.  Mocrosoft got it right in my opinion when they gave me a nice little button to slam when I need a new, blank tab - though, of course, IE fills it with “hi, you’ve been online since 1994 and you spend a good ten hours a day staring at a browser, so let me explain tabs to you.”  This add-on adds the button without the condescension.
• PDF Download.  This is a Godsend.  I love PDF documents, except when they hijack my browser.  This plugin acts as a check on that terrible acrobat-in-the-browser plugin by asking you if you want to download a PDF instead of growing old hoping your system doesn’t hang.  If only it sent a nasty email to people who link to PDFs and didn’t warn you, it’d be perfect.
• Web Developer.  You mean Firebug isn’t all you need to throw away Dreamweaver and do all your developing in a text editor?  Well, if I can get more I’ll take it.  This addon adds a toolbar to my browser with a ton of useful links and tools, including the ability to change the CSS of the page in real-time by editing the actual CSS files, lots of diagnostics, and links to validate.  When trying to solve problems, I actually start with this, then move to Firebug to fine-tune.  Unless is Javascipt.  Then I just cry.

So that’s them.  Got any tips for me?

web coding

Be warned: I’m going to type a dirty word to tell you what my new favorite thing to do on the bus is.  It’s a programming language, created purely as a toy, called (ready?) Brainfuck.

Like most great puzzles, it is very, very simple.  In fact, I can give you both a crash course and a complete lesson at once, because it only has eight commands.

Rather than declaring variables and stuff, the language operates on a defined memory space full of bytes, and the only data-type you can have is bytes.  You work with one at a time.  At the beginning, you are working with the first byte sequentially, and all bytes equal 0.

+/-

Increment / Decrement the current byte.

</>

Move the pointer to the previous / next byte.

,/.

Input / Output one byte.

[ ... ]

The only control structure: while the current byte (current at the time of [) is greater than 0, execute the code between [ and ].

Now it will ignore any character other than those eight, so you can comment your code pretty easily. The following code accepts 1 character of input and duplicates it.

This code moves to the next byte, inputs a byte, then makes two copies in the
next two bytes, them moves the last one back to the original position.
>.[>+>+<<-]>>[<<+>>-]

Now, you’ll note that doing things with values is desctructive - since the only control structure we have is the on that loops until a control value is 0. That is why the above makes two copies of the original, then moves one back - copying destroys the original.  You can try the above code at the this handy Javascript interpreter.

Why do I say it’s more fun than Soduko? Try this one: in my bread-and-butter language, PHP, you can check to see if a variable is 0 and then print it out if so like this:

if ($x == 0) echo $x;

With Brainfuck, we don’t have a built-in if per se, and we have no control structures that will run if something equals zero, so we have to get creative:

This code inputs a value into a new byte, copies it twice,
creates a control byte after those with a value of 1, then
makes the control value 0 if there is a nonzero value in
the first copy of the input (erasing it in the process).
Then, if there is still a nonzero control value, it outputs
the second copy, which will be 0.  If there is no value
there, it executes a sort of 'else' statement, outputting the nonzero value.
>.[>+>+<<-] >>>+<< [>>-<<[-]] >>[<.>-]<[.[-]]

Brainfuck: the coolest programming language I will not be putting on my resume.

programming

I was flattered to be asked onto the Columbus Underground Podcast to give my perspective on the tech scene here in Central Ohio.  I encourage you to go subscribe to the show - Walker does a great job and I’m excited to hear more from him, even when I’m not on the show!

There is a lot about Columbus that I love, and our great, enthusiastic, welcoming and growing tech scene is one of the biggies on the list, but I think it’s more: I think the tech scene in Columbus is one example of what makes the city great!  Here is why, in bulleted list form:

• There is no mistake that it’s the big leagues.  Columbus is a big city, the central office of some of the world’s biggest companies, home to huge institutions and a center of government.  However,
• It’s incredibly welcoming and inviting to new-comers and, indeed, is excited to have them.  As I say in the podcast, if you have the passion and the ethic, if you have the follow-through and return this town’s humility and interest, you can make it here.
• It’s about hard work and it’s about business, but it’s also about fun.  This is a tech scene made up of people who love doing what they are doing and love sharing it with others.  Blame it on all the schools, blame it on the fact that the heat’s a little lower here than it is elsewhere, but we love to tinker, to learn and to experiment.

At least, that’s how I see it.  Check out the podcast and, if you’re so inclined, I’ll see you at a meet up, mixer, tweetup or, maybe, at a real life meeting.

Columbus, Podcasts