Category Archives: Web/Tech

2 appointments, 3 public hearings, 9 considerations, and 2 bids @ LCC 2013-06-24

Who’s applying to be appointed Tuesday evening?


The Commission doesn’t tell you.
Come to the Work Session Monday morning and maybe you’ll be able
to hear the County Manager mumble the names, if he names them.
Those

library board applicants from two weeks ago are finally

on the agenda.
Also

an appointment to Parks and Rec,
three liquor licenses, and many other items,
but nothing about solid waste or trash.

Here’s the agenda:



LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS

PROPOSED AGENDA

WORK SESSION, MONDAY, JUNE 24, 2013, 8:30 a.m.

REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, JUNE 25, 2013, 5:30 p.m.

327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor

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On the LAKE front has moved

How do you like the new wordpress site for the LAKE blog? We’re still settling in here, so there will probably be some changes yet. Meanwhile, all the old content is here in the new location.

Apple: from 35% to 75% renewable energy in two years



All it takes is the will to get it done, and Apple is doing it:

from 35% renewable energy in 2010 to 75% in 2012, and 100%
at all Apple data centers.
Cost? They’ll save more than they spent.
Time for Georgia Power and Southern Company to stop dragging their feet
and help us get on with it in Georgia.

Peter Burrows wrote for Bloomberg Thursday that

Apple got nudged:

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Work Session this morning? Lowndes County web site down again @ LCC 2013-02-25

Is there a County Commission Work Session this morning at 8:30 AM?
Can't find out from the county's website: it's down again.
Is this a good way to demonstrate that Internet access is

"one of the number one issues"?


Firefox
First noticed about 7AM,
http://www.lowndescounty.com/
not responding, same as

three weeks ago.
Once again I also tried it from somewhere far away geographically and on another
ISP, with the same results as last time.

Alert!: Unexpected network read error; connection aborted.

So it looks like the Lowndes County Commission's website is down.
Speaking of far away, why does it seem to be hosted in Dallas, Texas?

Well, let's see if there's any information on their

facebook page.
Nope; still content-free.

Here's a response Gretchen got from County Clerk Paige Dukes
when she inquired after the last outage:

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Speakupaustin: a major MSA and local government transparency

The

Austin reporting program is in addition to
the posting a City Council agenda more than a week in advance


(here’s the 28 Feb 2013 agenda already on 16 Feb 2013)
and
including the entire board packets

with working papers and other backup documentation
with the minutes.
Austin

televises and webcasts its meetings live,
with close captioning and transcripts online.
They don’t limit the number of citizens who can speak,
or the subjects they can speak on, and they televise and webcast
all of them as well.
Plus citizens can speak on specific agenda issues,
and Austin

has an online forum for citizen suggestions on which citizens can vote
on the ones they like.

Is there still back-door politics in Austin? For sure.
But you can see a lot more of what is going on in Austin
than they can about the local governments here,
and citizens have a lot more input.

If Valdosta and Lowndes County
(and Hahira and Lake Park and Dasher and Remerton)
want to be treated like a major MSA,
they might consider following Austin’s lead.
Instead of decreasing citizen input by exiling
all citizen speakers to the end of a meeting and limiting the number
who can speak, while not even putting board packets online,
consider continually increasing local government
transparency and citizen input.

-jsq

Lowndes County web site not responding


Safari
First noticed about 1PM, still down at 3:30PM, for
http://www.lowndescounty.com/

Safari can’t open the page

Safari can’t open the page “http://www.lowndescounty.com/” because the
server unexpectedly dropped the connection. This sometimes occurs when the
server is busy. Wait for a few minutes, and then try again.


Firefox
Similar results with Firefox and Google-Chrome.

I even tried it from somewhere far away geographically and on another
ISP, and got this with lynx:


Chrome
Alert!: Unexpected network read error; connection aborted.

Can’t Access `http://www.lowndescounty.com/’

Alert!: Unable to access document.

So it looks like the Lowndes County Commission’s website is down.

Have you seen their

facebook page?
Here’s the entire contents of it:

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Tourism Board Meeting @ VLCCCTA 2013-01-23



Last week I went to the Rainwater Conference Center to attend the
Valdosta-Lowndes County Conference Center & Tourism Authority Board
Meeting.

I had discovered

the time and date of this meeting by asking at the
information booth at the Conference Center one day when I was there
for another event.

I arrived slightly before the 8:00 appointed time and was greated
warmly by

Councilman Tim Carroll
and

Conference Center Director Tim Riddle.


Being the Conference Center, they served a hot breakfast
(other morning boards have fruits and sweets but this was something
that you might get up for).

As 8:00 came there was apparently not a quorum, so calls went out to
missing

members to see if one more could be attacted. At 8:15 it was
clear that there would be no additional members coming so no formal
meeting was held, no votes were taken but an informal review of the
agenda was performed:

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Videos: new website @ VLCIA 2013-01-15



Both
Meghan Duke (PR and Marketing)
and Andrea Schruijer (Executive Director)
invited comments and additional information for the new website.
They were speaking to their board at its meeting last night, but in the Industrial Authority’s

new conversational spirit,
maybe they’ll take suggestions from the rest of the community, as well.
Both Allan Ricketts (Project Manager)
and
J. Stephen Gupton (Attorney)
said the Hahira well site work was going well.
They’ve got a new intern,
and I reminded them about
the need for fast Internet access.
It was a long meeting by County Commission standards,
yet short for Industrial Authority
meeting: about half an hour.

Here’s

the agenda,
with links to the videos, and a few notes.

-jsq

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Industrial Authority: new website, same old agenda tonight @ VLCIA 2013-01-15





The Industrial Authority has a spiffy new website under a new domain,

buildlowndes.com,
and with their new logo, formerly only on their

facebook page.
Their

meeting agenda for tonight, however,
is the same old recycled content-free placeholder.

I sure don’t miss the old hexagon menu, the new menu is up top and
usable before they waste a bunch of space with stock photos.
The
Our Team
page even links to the Linkedin profiles of

Andrea Schruijer
and

Meghan Duke.
While Allan Ricketts does have a Linkedin profile,
it’s not very fleshed out and they don’t link to it.

The
Recent Investments
page is interesting, although it would be more so if

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