Monthly Archive for June, 2009

Page 5 of 5

City Republicans Can’t Find a Council Candidate

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 2, 2009 in Politics. 10 Comments

It’s official: Charlottesville Republicans will, for the second election in a row, not field a candidate for the election, Henry Graff reports for NBC-29, leaving the two Democratic nominees challenged only by a pair of independent candidates. Charlottesville consistently delivers the second-highest percentage of Democratic votes of any locality in the state (Petersburg always trumps us), usually around the 75% mark. This fact of demography understandably leaves Republicans uninterested in running anybody.

The trouble here is that Democrats and Republicans are given a special privilege in Charlottesville (as in most—all?—localities in Virginia) which is that they can field candidates who they select. Independent candidates Bob Fenwick and Andrew Williams have to get the signatures of 125 registered Charlottesville voters and submit that paperwork to the State Board of Elections to get on the ballot, simply because they are not affiliated with a party. So with Republicans opting out of elections, I think it’s time to seriously consider whether a third party—whether to the left or the right of Charlottesville Democrats—need to be given the right to nominate candidates, taking over that duty from the unwilling Republicans. I don’t know how that process works, but if Democrats are to be seriously challenged in an ongoing fashion, exchanging Republicans for a third party seems like a route worth exploring.

Red Light Cameras Under Consideration Again

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 2, 2009 in Crime, Government and Transportation. 11 Comments

Albemarle County is considering installing red light cameras at three intersections around town, Jenn McDaniel reports for NBC-29. Two spots on 29—Rio and Hydraulic—and the intersection of 20N and 250 are where they’ve got in mind. County police have studied the intersections, and had police officers run down the light-runners and ticket them, but say that it’s not safe to have officers chasing them, and would rather just ticket them automatically.

We first discussed this in 2001, but the legislature outlawed red light cameras pending further study, until they legalized them in 2007. Two years ago it came up again in the form of Dave McNair’s Hook article, which explained all of the reasons why red light cameras are not the cure-all as promoted by their manufacturers. (VDOT’s own study found that they increase injury rates.) And, most recently, city and county staff recommended the installation of red light cameras in July of 2007.

Hook Acquires cvillemovies.com

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 1, 2009 in Business and Entertainment. 3 Comments

Long-time Charlottesville website—one of the earliest local sites—cvillemovies.com has been acquired by The Hook. It’s long been a really great site. It does one thing, it does it well, and it’s been run as a labor of love since I was a kid. Unless I’m mistaken, it was the first truly local Charlottesville website; back in 1996, the idea of a local website was laughable, since the web was seen as a way to connect with people far away, not people in your own back yard. (No doubt it inspired me to start cvillenews.com and Charlottesville Blogs.) I e-mailed former site owner Doug Ross to ask him how it all went down. He writes:

Cvillemovies.com was the invention of a UVA grad-student in Philosophy and went online in April 1996 (originally as CineVille.com). Control of the site changed hands a few years later, and in September 2003 the site went down and was almost lost. Serendipitously, I was trying to track down the site’s owner at the same time.

There was a bug on the page and when I viewed the source I found an amusing comment in the JavaScript; something to the effect of “if anyone knows how the hell to fix this, please email soandso@suchandsuch.com”.

Well, I knew what was wrong (it was a Netscape 4 / IE proprietary tag issue, the “button” tag), but the email address went nowhere, so I started asking around and making phone calls, until I found the “owner”. An employee of his had been tasked with the site’s maintenance. He’d been hand editing the HTML for the movie times, and uploading via an FTP client with a stored password that he himself did not know; on a laptop that suffered a crash. The poor guy didn’t even know who’d been hosting the site and hadn’t renewed the domain name, which expired at almost the same time I was setting up a meeting with his boss. Further, he hadn’t yet told his boss anything about the disaster that was unfolding and my desire to do a good deed ended up exposing him.

I offered to “save” the site and after a bit of digging through Google Cache and the Wayback Machine for recoverable markup, and tracking down the Philosophy major (moved to the West Coast) I grabbed the neglected domain name and began resurrecting the site.

I scrapped the original markup (Tag Soup) and replaced it with valid HTML 4.01 Strict + CSS, but I carefully kept much of the original look and feel. I built a backend for the site with PHP and MySQL and got it back online by that October. That was five and a half years ago.

I had fun tweaking the site here and there, added space for local and Google ads; put in a rating system and experimented with some (modified) off-the-shelf forum systems. I felt that a forum could keep the site “relevant” in a world wide web where one could just as easily look up times on Google or Fandango, but I just didn’t have the time or energy to put into the project anymore. I felt very responsible for the site and wanted to see it continue in good hands.

After some interviews with different parties, the Hook seemed like the most responsible; the most likely to understand the significance of, and appreciate the history of the site in it’s local context, and they have a proficient technical staff.

Curious about The Hook’s perspective on this, I e-mailed editor Hawes Spencer. He writes:

One of the things that’s so great about the site is that it started in 1996, in the earliest days of the public’s awareness of the internet, so it has a ton of bookmarks and hundreds of incoming links. And according to Google Analytics, it gets well over 5,000 weekly visits. One other thing that’s really great about it is that it’s not bogged down with a million bells and whistles, so it works equally well on computers and mobile phones—even old-school phones and simple computers with dial-up connections. We’ve been operating it since late April, and our changes have been extremely delicate. We respect the 13 years of history that Doug and his predecessors put into this site, and we’re not about to undo such great work.

One other thing cvillemovies.com has always had and always will have, and which the national movie sites can’t match, is info on special indie screenings and things outside the mainstream cinemas. In the past month, for instance, we’ve given times for special screenings at Newcomb Hall, PVCC, and the Paramount. Local, local, local is what we’re all about. And, hey, I’m a former movie theater owner/operator. I love this stuff!

I’m glad to see the site carried on in the spirit with which it’s existed for so long.

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