The Authentic Eccentric

I’ve been quiet here lately. I’ve been busy, though - reading:

Once I digested what I read, I started writing:

I had some awesome editors for the project, but it meant more revisions:

At the end of the day, though, it was well worth it:

Now that it’s done, I’ll be back more regularly to entertain the four or five of you still reading

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Our washer and dryer recently broke, necessitating replacement. For most people, this wouldn’t be a big deal - they’d go out, buy what they needed or wanted and be done with it. However, the entry to our basement is narrower than most - instead of a 32″ opening, we have 25.5″. With 4 folks here, we do a lot of laundry - it seemed our options to getting the right size washer and dryer were limited to a first floor option, which meant construction and significant extra costs.

That is, they did until we talked with Felix.

Keep in mind this isn’t the first time we’ve thought about replacing these units. In fact, when we bought the house, we bought a new washer & dryer to replace the old ones. The delivery people tried for over an hour to figure out how to get them into the basement but the narrow entry kept them from being able to make a turn. We ended up moving the new units to the old house and settled into the cycle of repairing the old, inadequate units until we couldn’t.

After hearing our story, Felix the repair guy found a solution. It’s elegance can’t be understated - for one, it was breathtakingly simple, once I heard it, and for two, nobody else had figured out a solution that would work. His solution?

He took both units apart and easily carried the pieces in through the narrow opening.

He then re-assembled the units once he reached the basement. Voila - clean clothes! (Yes, we checked, this method did not void our warranties)

The lesson here? Anything large can be broken down, addressed in its component parts and then reassembled. Sometimes, breaking things down is the only way to make something work.

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I’ve previously written about the Road Home program, a $7.5-billion housing program established by Congress this year. Prior to the elections, just 22 people had received access to funds to begin rebuilding. Today’s NYT has an update on the program:

In a sign of painstaking progress for Louisiana’s biggest rebuilding program, the state has sent letters to more than 10,000 families stating how much money they can receive to rebuild their homes under the $7.5-billion housing program Congress financed this year, state officials said yesterday.

While that sounds like great progress, but as you dig into the story we discover:

The number of homeowners who have actually received Road Home grants has increased by just 26 in the last month, to a total of 48. Those homeowners received an average grant of $50,715, according to the most recent statistics from the program.

Some program officials said they thought the delays in closing on the grants stemmed not from bottlenecks in the system, but from homeowners’ uncertainty about rebuilding.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with the New Orlean’s friend that has been feeding me images from the recovery. Since I was familiar with the program, I asked about Road Home - she explained that the uncertainty about rebuilding was more a result of money and time - going into the 16th month, many of these people are just now finding out whether or not they are eligible for recovery funds. Buried near the end of the article:

More than 50,000 applicants have not yet had their first meeting with program counselors. Others, who have been to their appointments and had their property inspected, say they still do not know how much money they are eligible for. {emphasis mine}

Would you like to help Gulf Coast residents start the new year with fresh hope? Contact your representative (and if you’re getting a new one, contact them, too) and encourage them to investigate the pace of lending in this area. It’s one thing to promise help, but apparently delivering it depends on the rest of us keeping an eye out to ensure it is done.

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Since October we have been testing Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro for WordPress on Jen Burke’s Transcending Gender. The results have been so significant that I requested permission to share them with my readers.

As you can see, there has been a dramatic increase in visitors and page views:

Google really likes the new service - they spidered 6,013 more pages in November than they did in October (there was no apparent benefit in other engines):

I believe this firmly establishes translation as a safe and effective traffic-building tactic.

Angsuman and his team have been great to work with - it was a fast install and required minimal tweaking from our end. The plugin is also fully supported, so our 2.0.5 upgrade was a snap. At $30, this is low-cost/high-return upgrade worth making.

One last item of geeky interest - note how Ask.com has overtaken AOL and MSN in referred visitors.

< Fine print: >These results are from a niche content site. Jen has invested two years in developing a unique body of resources unlike anything else online, so your mileage may vary if you use this strategy to expand your market. < fine print / >

I’m still finishing my analysis of her server logs, but once I’m finished, I’ll also post a chart breaking down country and language.

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Acephalous is doing an interesting study on the speed and spread of memes for the upcoming MLA conference. He’s asking for help artificially spreading a meme so he can dissect and demystify the process.

This may just be a fascinating way to gather nifty links, but since I’m into research and he’s promised to share his data, I thought I’d play and ask you to do so as well. Be kind, visit his site to understand what he is asking for and help spread some science around

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Fourteen months after Katrina, the pace of rebuilding has slowed to a crawl. As I noted in my earlier post, there remains a significant difference between the “photo op” spots of New Orleans versus what residents of New Orleans are actually experiencing.

Today’s NYT has an update on the Road Home program designed to help New Orleans homeowners to rebuild. The numbers don’t look encouraging:

Though nearly 79,000 families have applied to the program, called the Road Home, only 1,721 have been told how much grant money they will receive. And just 22 have received access to the cash [emphasis mine], which was provided by federal taxpayers and is being distributed by the state.

In some of those 22 cases, the grant amounts were far less than the value of the property:

Michael M. Homan, a professor of theology at Xavier University, is among the few who has been told how much he can get to repair his badly damaged house in the Mid-City neighborhood. But Professor Homan thinks the amount he was offered, about $64,000, is too low.

That is because the program assigned a prestorm value to his house of $146,000, less than he paid for it in 2002 and about $40,000 less than the appraisal when he refinanced his mortgage the next year. So he has appealed, and is hoping that his grant will be increased. Because he writes about his experiences on the Internet his results are being anxiously watched by other applicants.

Much of New Orleans still lies in ruins. Federal and state programs can only help if you have access to them, and the amount and pace of funds flowing into New Orleans isn’t helping those who need it most.

I urge you to take a moment and contact your representative in Congress about the pace of funds flowing into the Gulf so that those who want to return, can.

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This year’s ballot measures to raise the minimum wage passed in six states: Montana, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Nevada.

That means that ~1,561,000 million Americans are getting a raise, which is not only good for them, but also good for the businesses that serve working families.

As an added benefit, all of the new laws are indexed to inflation - meaning that the minimum wage in those states will automatically go up over time as inflation does.

Here’s a summary table, from this Economic Policy Institute page:

The amount of these increases ranges from $1.00/hour in Nevada and Montana to $1.70/hour in Colorado and Ohio. As many as 652,000 children now benefit from their parent’s wage increase.

While this is wonderful news for these families, it is important to note that, indexed against inflation, the minimum wage is nowhere close to a living wage - $820 a month for a 40 hour work week is still a challenge to live on, especially in Nevada.

Despite extensive research and hype, there is no correlation between minimum wage increases and job losses. In fact, a study by the Oregon Center for Public Policy on the impacts of the 1997 and 1998 minimum wage in the restaurant industry found employment opportunities increased.

Businesses actually benefit from having a stable workforce. Employees forced to work overtime and/or another job simply to make ends meet end up less productive. Turnover and replacement costs quickly eat away at any “savings” on hourly wages and can lead to quality and service issues.

The minimum wage increases that passed are great, but they fall short of a federal minimum wage act benefiting all American workers. It has been 9 years since Congress passed an increase in the minimum wage - you might want to contact your freshly elected representative and let him or her know you think that is far too long.

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In the ballot issues up for decisions today, it looks like an overwhelming win for discrimination and minimum wage increases.

In an unrelated matter, I caught this article over at the NYT site while waiting for results:

Do the Rights of the Disabled Extend to the Blind on the Web?

ACCORDING to an advocacy group, Target declined last year to make its Web site fully accessible to blind people with specialized screen-reading technology last year. If true — and Target has denied the accusation in court — it was a public relations blunder, and it may have been illegal as well.

On Sept. 6, a federal judge in California held, in a preliminary ruling on the suit, that in some instances, Web sites must cater to disabled people.

Since 508C compliance isn’t all that difficult or expensive, you have to wonder why Target doesn’t do the right thing and implement a JAWS compatible site as Amazon does.

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I just got back from fulfilling my civic duty at our local polling spot. Things went smoothly and despite some known issues with touch screen voting machines, my final choices appear to have been recorded accurately.

With six hours yet to go, the poll judges said that turnout today was higher than average: over 50% of the district had already voted. Now all there is to do is wait and see whether or not Virginia wants bigotry and fear or freedom and equality.

The best new surprise this year? Curb-side voting for disabled folk. They bring a portable machine right to your car. I, of course, had to go inside - I *love* the voting process and the interaction with my neighbors too much to miss it. I did accept a ride, though - it’s cold and rainy here today, my least favorite weather combination to be out in.

How about you? Did you vote today?

Follow this conversation around the web: 2006 Elections | Virginia | Jim Webb | Virginia Ballot Question #1

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