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Thursday, August 07, 2003
My Head Hurts
This evening, blogger/blogspot finally started working for me again. But then I discovered that my posts still weren't showing up on my blog. After quite a while of trying to reach anyone with blogger (no responses), I started wondering if my comments had really screwed up the template despite appearing to work. Well, I checked my template, and found it completely blanked. Apparently during the problems, my template got erased.
Luckily, I made a copy of the template in Notepad, before adding comments. Cut and pasted it back in; re-added the comments; and voila! All of the posts are back.
I'm going to bed.
Finally
I'm back. Actually, I never left, just BlogSpot and/or Blogger went down and wouldn't let me publish for the last few days. Of course, I'm about to head out and get some dinner, so I'll post more later.
Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Someday I'll Post again
If BlogSpot/Blogger ever lets me. Hell, I'm even getting "500 Error" messages when I try to check Blogger control for the status.
Testing, testing...
another wasted post.
Fingers Crossed
Well Blogger Control is "investigating." Maybe the problem is solved.
Is this thing on?
This down time is driving me nuts
Why West Virginia will always be a punchline
Unbelievable.
A Powerball winner who has donated more than $3 million of his record winnings to churches was drinking at a strip club when $545,000 was stolen from his sport-utility vehicle, police said yesterday.
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Someone broke the driver's side window and took a briefcase containing $245,000 in cash and three $100,000 cashier's checks belonging to Whittaker, who hit Powerball's richest jackpot on Christmas Day, police said.
There are many things in this story that just cause a "Huh?" reaction. Here's a big one: All of the cash, the checks, the briefcase, a CD player and CDs taken from the SUV were all recovered. They were found in a nearby trash can. What the hell? Even the cash?
Authorities believe the thief has close ties to the Pink Pony strip club in Cross Lanes, but no arrests have been made.
Whittaker first arrived at the Pink Pony on Monday evening. He left shortly after midnight, returning at 2:30 a.m. and leaving his vehicle's motor running, Tucker said.
Whittaker discovered the broken window about 5 a.m. and tried to go back inside to call police, but club employees initially refused to let him in.
Whittaker called deputies at 5:20 a.m. and also called his private investigator, who found the stolen money behind the trash bin less than an hour later, police said.
"There's no confusion on the fact that he didn't have all his faculties," Kanawha County Chief Deputy Phil Morris said.
He left the motor running for 2.5 hours? I'm thinking that whoever broke into the car just wanted to turn off the engine.
Tuesday, August 05, 2003
@#$% BlogSpot
Still can't get the damn posts published
Some Downtime?
Just one of those days for BlogSpot. I haven't been able to get posts out all day.
More Fun in Cuyahoga County
This time from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, where the last three years worth of financial records seem to have disappeared.
Three years of financial records, crucial for audits, have disappeared from a locked steel cage in the basement of Cuyahoga County's elections board.
The missing records include handwritten ledgers and receipts for money that the agency received in 2000, 2001 and 2002.
Proof that candidates paid filing fees is gone. So is proof that top elections board officials reimbursed the county for personal calls made on county cell phones.
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Board officials said they discovered that the records were gone on June 5, the day after The Plain Dealer asked to review bills for cell phones used by acting Director Lynnie Powell, former Director Thomas Jelepis and other employees.
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Board officials did not tell the Plain Dealer that the records were missing until the paper asked on Thursday to review reimbursement receipts for any personal calls made by Powell and Jelepis.
The two officials rang up a total of $12,000 in cell phone charges between August 2000 and December 2001, before the board took away their phones.
The missing records were in three boxes, each nearly the size of a file drawer, and stored with old ballots at the board's downtown offices. Two board administrators said they had seen the records in the cage before June 5, according to a board memo.
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Only three people had keys to the cage that housed the records, but board officials said that employees use them like a bathroom key, handing them out to anyone who asks.
No one noticed anyone walking out with three big boxes of receipts?
The Ohio Secretary of State is going to be investigating. Normally this would fall to the director, but since, in this case, the acting director is one of the main figures in abuse of county resources, they feel that might be a bit of a conflict.
Thinking About It?
Now that Penn State has just learned that on of its professors of the last 4 years had been convicted of killing 3 fishermen in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1965 -- though he was parloled in 1979 -- the school has decided that maybe a background check on its faculty might be a good idea. You know, the same sort of thing that they run on all of their regular employees.
This apparently has gotten the attention the American Association of University Professors
Those advocating the checks cite safety issues and liability. Others not keen on the idea say they are worried about potential abuses.
Though it has taken no official position, the American Association of University Professors says it is monitoring the Penn State case and the national debate.
An attorney for the group based in Washington, D.C., wondered yesterday whether schools imposing checks will make proper distinctions between types of offenses.
"Should a youthful drug use offense bar somebody from getting a faculty appointment? What about a ticket for reckless driving?" asked staff counsel Donna Euben. "What about someone who has filed for bankruptcy? Should that preclude somebody from teaching American literature?"
So, a technician at Penn State needs to get a full background check, but it may not be "fair" to subject a person who is going to be teaching and communicating directly with students to the same. Doesn't sound like too much in the way of academic elitism.
NNNNOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
This should never happen.
About 800,000 gallons of Jim Beam bourbon burned yesterday after lightning struck a warehouse, sending flames soaring into the sky and dumping streams of burning liquor into a nearby creek.
Living in Cleveland, I have to ask. Did the river burn?
Monday, August 04, 2003
Boy I hope this works
I'm giving comments a try. I guess we'll see how badly I screwed up my template this time.
Cleveland Convention Center -- Bad Reporting or Bad Editing?
Maybe it's the lack of competition. Perhaps it's the difference in priorities. If I was truly paranoid, I'd attribute it to some out and out effort to whitewash any controversial news out of the CCC debate. Whatever the reason, it's just another example as to why the Cleveland Plain Dealer is such a mediocre newspaper. That meeting where Mayor Campbell gave the cost estimate also contained some other information, the PD didn't bother to mention. This article in Crain's Cleveland Business (subs. req'd), though explains a good deal more.
If Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell has her way, the Convention & Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland won't be responsible for promoting the opening of a new downtown convention center and will be stripped of the bulk of its financial support.
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At present, the Convention & Visitors Bureau, a nonprofit organization, receives the proceeds of a 3% county bed tax to market Northeast Ohio to meeting and convention planners, businesses and leisure travelers. Of its $8.5 million budget in 2001, the latest year for which data is available, $7.3 million, or 86%, came from the bed tax. The rest of the budget comes mainly from dues paid by hoteliers, restaurateurs and other tourism businesses.
Mayor Campbell wants the bed-tax money redirected to what for now is called the Convention Facilities Authority, which would be created to build and manage the new convention center. Public officials would appoint all but one of the board members of the authority, which also would decide how to market the region as a meeting and tourist destination.
As for the current Convention & Visitors Bureau, Mayor Campbell told Cleveland City Council at a hearing last Wednesday, July 30, "They may elect to continue as a nonprofit with their private money.
The PD story only mentioned that this authority would "oversee the construction and operation of a new convention center, as well as the money for development projects." There was no mention that the GCVCB would become a hollow shell. Surely, in light of the stories of wild spending by the GCVCB in May (and the PD was so willing to take some credit in this), this should at least have merited a follow-up story.
Deb Janik, chief of staff for Mayor Campbell, said as the mayor sees it, the Convention Facilities Authority should be responsible for preparing the budget to promote the region as a meeting and tourism destination because of the public money involved, and that the CVB "or an entity of its type" created by the authority could handle the actual marketing.
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County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, who is handling convention center negotiations for the county, knew of the mayor's statements to City Council but said no decision has yet been reached about the fate of the CVB.
"That's what she (the mayor) said, but we aren't saying that," Mr. Jones said late last week. "I know she would like it to come out that way."
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A state law that permits the county to create a convention authority was created this summer specifically for Cuyahoga County, so the lawyers must figure out legislative intent rather than rely on a well-developed body of legal precedents as they work on defining the authority's responsibilities.
Dennis Roche, interim director of the CVB, said it was his understanding that the bureau will survive in some form.
The mayor of Cleveland wants to gut a quasi-private organization that gets 86% of its money from the county, and this doesn't get mentioned in the only daily? Of course, they still haven't bothered to mention that the president of the GCVCB was fired a couple weeks ago.
Nonetheless, Vern Fuller, president of Marathon Associates, which manages the Radisson Hotel at Gateway Cleveland, said he would not want to see convention marketing handled by a quasi-public building commission.
"My belief is we need a private operator and (that operator) needs to be modeled on what we have," Mr. Fuller said. Hotel operators are key partners in attracting conventions and are private financial supporters of the Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Mr. Fuller alluded to criticism earlier this year of the CVB's spending habits when he said a public convention authority would feel constrained about doing the kind of wining and dining that it often takes to convince convention planners to bring their groups to town.
The convention bureau's president, David Nolan, was placed on leave last May after media reports criticized the CVB for lavishly spending public tax money on entertainment. Mr. Fuller suggested that a privately run convention and visitors bureau would act as a "firewall" that could spend private money on entertainment.
"So when someone comes to peek under our skirts, we don't have to show them," he said.
There is something disturbingly honest in this, that makes you nod your head in agreement; and then want to take a shower. Of course the hotel chains definitely don't want the present system to change since it allows them a great deal of influence as to how the GCVCB spends money and what it promotes and where.
The Plain Dealer is the only game in town. There are two sub-par alt-weeklies; and a weekly business paper. If the PD doesn't report it, most people won't know that it is happening in Cleveland.
Sunday, August 03, 2003
Cleveland Convention Center, Costs and Reality
In light of Mayor Campbell's fascinating cost analysis for a new CCC, even my favorite whipping boy -- the Cleveland Plain Dealer Editorial Board was having a hard time swallowing the figures.
The long-debated convention center project now has some numbers attached. But how hard those numbers are is questionable.
The $422 million overall price tag Mayor Jane Campbell announced Wednesday is the product of dozens of estimates, all of which deserve careful scrutiny.
Campbell has tapped a seven-member team of experts to check the city's figures and report back next month. But if she wants an objective review, she should be asking experts who pledge to remain disinterested in the project. As it is, five of the seven firms involved in the review are local, and it would be no surprise if all bid for a piece of the convention center's construction.
You know there is trouble for the CCC when even the PDEB is saying, "Uh, Jane, look, we want to back this, but, um, do you think you could present figures with, oh ... I don't know, a little basis in reality."
Meanwhile the Cleveland Free Times has a round-up of convention center problems from around the country, indicating that there is already such a glut of new/renovated convention centers that any hopes Cleveland would have for a windfall is strictly speaking, a lie. (And I realize, the piece was simply a reprint from the print weekly, but if there ever was an article crying out for links by the Free Times, this was it.)
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