Blogs

A friend of mine who is a teacher at a local high school asked me to post the following story. My friend requested that I share this without any identifying information so as not to compromise student trust and confidentiality.

One of my students (a 16 year old) is on the email list for Expressions, the shop on Franklin Street. Over Labor Day Weekend, he received an email stating that if he came in to the store and said the words "purple bud" he would get a good sized free sample of some brand of Spice -- synthetic weed.  He did. This particular brand of synthetic weed is "legal" only because the laws regulating most synthetic weed as a class one scheduled narcotic haven't quite caught up to the chemicals that are sprayed on the plants.  Apparently, North Carolina has recently joined an initiative with 28 other states banning these forms of synthetic marijuana.

I wish Kirk Ross had published "A Tale of Two Towns" a week earlier, before 75 or so of us went to Bloomington.

I gently lobbied Kirk to sign up for the trip in late May when it was announced, and he was essentially non-responsive. It looked to be pricey, even with a scholarship, and Kirk's journalistic mission nowadays appears to be mostly NC politics, which he covers well and which needs covering well.  

Tonight the Orange County Commissioners had a work session including two items related to technology. In the first, a consultant from the UNC School of GOvernment (how many of those are there?) presented Strategic Information Technology Plan which prioritized investments in tools for citizen engament and delivery of services. They also heard a brief update on the county staff's attempt to make agendas more electronically accessible through clean, searchable PDFs.