I ditched out on the Style Weekly reception early to head over to the Downtown Master Plan meeting. Last time we tried to do this thing the Free Press criticized the meeting for being a “sea of whiteness.” Something they did nothing to alleviate before hand, btw. It’s not like they run a paper widely read by black people in the city or anything.

Last night’s meeting, less snarkily summarized by John, was a boring rehash of the first couple of meetings. To be completely honest Valerie and I ducked out to get some coffee and then came back. But hey whatever, a packed room of people got to hear a refreshing and good plan for Richmond’s future — never a bad thing.

The best part of the night was the hour of Q&A moderated by DCD’s Rachel Flynn. Next time I’d love to see two hours of Q&A and one hour of powerpoint — especially if I’ve already seen the powerpoint two times before.

1. A batch of pigs-in-a-blanket that sat in the oven for about 40 minutes as I mixed it up Social Skirmish style. They turned into lumps of carbon.
2. My dogs were outside last night for about an hour because I forgot they inhabited this plane (or any plane for that matter) of existence.

I’m sure there will be more to come.

A couple of years ago I set a personal goal to make Style Weekly’s Top 40 Under 40 list. Well, unlike taking out the trash or cleaning out the refrigerator, this time I actually followed through.

You can read the piece over at style if you like.

Get ready for never talking to me again.

The little ballyhooed RichmondWorks website launched yesterday. You probably haven’t heard about it unless you read either Jon or John. Based on a program used in Baltimore (CitiStat), RichmondWorks hopes to provide “action, access, and accountability” by collecting and analyzing performance data. Sounds like a great idea — as they say: what has two thumbs and loves government transparency and accountability? THIS GUY!! This is an excellent idea.

Unfortunately, the idea is poorly executed and hardly usable and the data is anemic.

Because I love Richmond more than anyone I’m going to offer some free advice for the RichmondWorks website in a convenient bulleted list format:

• First and most important, open up the database to the public! PLEASE! Give the citizens a way to access the data directly. Let us draw our own conclusions. If it is about transparency you shouldn’t have anything to hide. Plus we could always FoIA it anyway.
• Read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I promise, 2d bars display just as much information as 3d bars.
• Get your own domain. It is easy and costs 8$. You could even do “richmondgov.com/richmondworks.” Whatever you decide make it easy to remember and spell.
• Did I mention you should open up the data? Information wants to be free you know.
• I have yet to see a GIS system that doesn’t suck. Maybe it is good for cave dwelling nerds, but for the rest of us the output is usually unusable. The pothole map is WAY too small to be of any use to a human being.
• Speaking of way too small, when I click on the map to get a “larger view” I get a pdf that isn’t high enough resolution to zoom in. That is worthless and frustrating. (PDF’s usually suck too).
• The meetings are the best part of RichmondWorks. Forcing department heads to answer for their decisions in front of a panel is fantastic. Putting video of these meetings up on the web is even more fantastic. However, people using Firefox can’t open your videos. Supremely annoying.

Hey guys, I realize this is your first go at things, and you also don’t have all the data yet. It’s cool. I’m just saying you could fix a few things and have a much better product.

Actually if you wanted to you could pay me some bucks and we could get together and make a really great website for the citizens of Richmond. Seriously though: shoot me an email.

Here is a nice video of Councilman Bill Pantele discussing why the Performing Arts Center is the bees knees. At the end of the video council votes to “pass the papers” or what have you. I’m pretty sure that means another sixty quadrillion dollars funneled to wherever it goes these days. Also Pantele says “country western punk rock” (around the six minute mark) which sounds pretty awesome to me.

Pantele from Scott Burger on Vimeo.

But seriously people “symphony, opera, and ballet?” Are we in Victorian England? Just wondering.

I’ve been meaning to talk about this since Tuesday, but I’ve been too busy being important and self righteous. Every Tuesday Cous Cous has a music trivia contest. Mostly the questions are unanswerable by anyone who doesn’t have fifteen tattoos. Luckily I have some connections with the higher ups as it were, and we were able to convince the Cous to do a movie trivia night!

We talked a lot of shit, but LBH. We had both Valerie and Susan on our team. We were basically unstoppable. We got one question wrong and won 50$ in CousDollars.

Next week it will switch back to music trivia again. But! If there is enough interest maybe we could convince them to do a more regular movie trivia?! You know that would be awesome.