Oct 30, 2006 in Ejecta by Sterling | No Comments
I saw in this morning's Times-Dispatch the celebratory headline that Richmond's standing in annual crime ratings has improved:
City ranks as safer in crime survey. According to the Morgan Quitno Press, we've gone from the fifth most dangerous city in America to the 15th. Progress is progress, I suppose. On the other end of the survey, Brick Township, NJ once again has seized the title of safest city in America.
Well, I've lived in Richmond for three years now. I lived in Brick Township from 1972 to 1974, and I also lived in Silverton, right next to Brick, from 1994 to 1996. I am very familiar with Brick. The town used to be known as "Bricktown", and before that "Bricksburg", both of which have at least a touch of flair - but today it's just plain "Brick". It is a colossally uninteresting place - the name alone gives away the game.
Brick is not actually the safest city in America, because it's not a city. It's just a sprawling township that has occupied all of its land with low-density residential housing and strip malls. Compared to other townships in the area (such as Wall, Berkeley or Lacey) Brick is kind of a dump. I moved to Richmond to escape the poor alternatives of suburban vs. urban living in New Jersey - sprawl is no way to live.
Richmond may get a black eye in crime ratings, but it's a great place to live. Brick does incredibly well in crime ratings, but the mere thought of ever living there again makes my head hurt.
Tagged Brick Township NJ, Morgan Quitno, Richmond VA
Oct 30, 2006 in Media by Sterling | No Comments
A friend of mine here in Richmond named Ron Klein has done something pretty novel. About two years ago, Ron set out to buy the rights to a book called
Turn Your Imagination Into Money, which was first published in 1934. Once he'd acquired the rights, Ron set about preparing a new edition, which has just been released. So Ron has salvaged a bit of lost wisdom, made it available to a new readership, and possibly figured out a way to bring in some nice income for himself. Not bad.
Tagged Ron Klein
Mar 19, 2006 in Ejecta by Sterling | 3 Comments
Reporter Piper Weiss - I love that name - penned an article in today's New York Daily News titled
What a tangled Web we weave: Being Googled can jeopardize your job search. I read the headline and thought that was a pretty obvious thing, but she raised a point I hadn't thought of before.
Brief tangent - last year, some clown accused me of hacking into his computer after I posted information from a webserver log showing that he'd posted as two different people on a message board. If you know how server logs work, and he did not, you know that stuff like IP address, operating system and version, web browser and some other data are stored whenever you access a web site. I had access to the server log. The guy was pretending to be someone he wasn't, and when I caught him at it he accused me, on a public message board, of committing a felony to get the data. Which I had not done. That's defamation of character, which I could have sued him for. (But I didn't.)
So one thing not mentioned in Weiss' article is defamation of character, and how that could harm one's ability to get a job. I think that's a very real risk. The thing she mentioned that never occurred to me, though, is that a potential employer might mistake me for someone else with the same name. It turns out two other men named "Robert Sterling" have higher Google moxie than me. One of them is
the famous actor, who according to IMDB is still alive. The other is a semi-famous
leftist conspiracy theorist, which is amusing, but he is not me, either.
Tagged Google, identity, New York Daily News, Piper Weiss
