View from the Mountain

A Fourth of July Message for 2019

I posted this yesterday to my friends. The message resonated well with many people so it has now made it to my soapbox for all.

I love my country of birth, but having lived in two countries, I also feel great pride when I hear "Oh Canada." Having visited many countries, I feel great respect for a number of them and understand that there are other paths to happiness besides just ours.

Today the Fourth of July, I salute the vision of our country's founders and hope that we can live up to their thoughts and ideals which have helped us evolve to a better but far from perfect place. We will eventually emerge from this nightmare of children caged along our borders.

Any student of our battle for independence will attest to our founding fathers great fear of standing armies. Changing times have resulted in the need for a professional US military.  There is little doubt that we have the best armed forces in the world but why brag about it?

Our founding fathers would be appalled at a Four of July celebration of military power. There is a big difference between honoring those who have served in the defense of freedom and celebrating military power.

Celebrating military power is no more a part of the American tradition than separating children from their parents and holding them in intolerable conditions. We will overcome this at the ballot box.

Happy Fourth of July!

Fourteen years of posts

On the Friday after Thanksgiving 2018, the View from the Mountain blog will have its fourteenth anniversary. It was not my first adventure on the web but it certainly has been my most persistent presence. We have not lived on the mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia, since 2012 but I have kept the blog going. I am happy that I did since much of my WordPress content written from a coastal perspective is locked away in a difficult to access database. There are close to 1,500 posts here.

I suspect View from the Mountain would have been an even more successful blog if I had picked a focus for it, but I never found the need to do that. I was never looking for commercial success or for mastery of a specific topic. The special topics that interest me are covered by other blogs. I have a blog that talks about the Crystal Coast, another that has a focus on living/gardening/fishing on the coast, and my Applepeels blog about Apple. There are even a few other odd ones that I have written over the years but none with the diversity of content that is here.

This blog has always been my honest view of the world whether it was operating systems, cameras, life, places or how people treat each other.

It seems appropriate today to look back at some of my first thoughts here and speak to some of the changes since I first start writing. It is hard to start this without mentioning that the Crystal Coast, where I live in 2018, as I am writing this is something of a changed world since Hurricane Florence visited us on September 13, 2018.

Even in my early posts, I wrote about how life has shaped my views. The older I get the more thankful I am that I have had the opportunity to see the world from a number of perspectives.  Little did I realize how impactful my time in Canada would be when I became a landed immigrant at Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in the summer of 1971. It is a great privilege and a humbling experience to view your own country through the eyes of others especially a country like Canada which in spite of all the talk has a lot of affection for its southern neighbor.  The deep personal ties between Canada and the United States are far too strong for lasting damage to come from the hateful rhetoric that sometimes spews out of Washington, DC.

American and Canadians have fought shoulder to shoulder in too many wars to have their friendship destroyed. Both countries have their own challenges but like most things in life, the opportunity to solve those challenges is a lot brighter with the help of friends than with hectoring from the leader of one of the countries.

All through my life whether in a Boy Scout troop, with my farm neighbors, or on a corporate team, it has been clear that when people work together they achieve more than when working just for themselves and falling to the temptation to tear down each other. I will always believe that the reason (besides price) Apple's computer market share is stuck in the 12% range is that the sales executives at Apple think that Apple sales teams should compete against each other for business instead of working together.

Taking an adversarial position with everything in life is a harsh and self-defeating way to live. Taking a win-win approach has always worked better for me. Thinking that you can go it alone as an individual or a nation might achieve short-term results but it unlikely to bring lasting positive results. If life is all about making the other person the loser, you can count on that coming back to haunt you at another time.

Even as hard as I have worked, I certainly could not have gotten through life without the help and support of others. It started with my extended family and mother, continued through high school and college, and got even stronger during our days on the farm. I am pleased that even my suburban life has been filled with friendships and support. We could not have moved from Roanoke without the help of friends. I certainly could not have survived the challenges of living in an HOA community with occasional strife without the support of friends and the sanctuary of our Presbyterian church.

When all is said and done, friends and allies are much better to have in your corner because there will always be enemies and competitors in another corner. It is much easier to stand up for what is right when those friends and allies are with you.

Opportunity Based Action

David & Matt at Blacksburg Fiber Cabinet

The third week in April of 2018, I was fortunate to be part of a group gathered in the hopes of sharing information, ideas, and plans to achieve better broadband in the state of North Carolina.

We go to conferences to be with people who think like we do. When you get together with your tribe, it energizes you. People talk your language.  They value the same things that you do. Sometimes conferences come up with ideas that lead to change.

I came back feeling like there were lots of people who believe what I believe. None of the people at the conference needed to be convinced of the importance of high-quality broadband in North Carolina's future. They were all trying to understand how they could make it happen.  They also understood almost to a person that most of us do not have competition in broadband.  Usually, we have a choice of one provider and often their offerings are designed more for entertainment than for business usage.

I love the analogy given by Grant Goings, the city manager, from Wilson, NC.  Wilson for those who do not know built their own fiber network only to have the state legislature try to make it illegal. While they finally got grandfathered, lobbyists made it impossible for other cities to do what Wilson has done.

Grant told us to imagine that we lived on private dirt toll road owned by a company.  He said to think about going to the private company and begging them to pave your road only to have them say no because it would not make them more money. Then he said suppose you went out and built your own superhighway right beside the dirt toll road only to have the state legislature tell you that you couldn't drive on it and had to keep driving on the dirt road. Those are the roadblocks Wilson had to overcome. I think we were told that 650 technology jobs have come to town in the last year. They credit their fiber network and competitively priced fast Internet access.

This conference was all about helping communities figure out ways to build their own fiber superhighways so that their citizens will not be left behind as cities get better and better connections to the Internet.  The important thing to remember is that those communities who work to build their own community networks often end up with better connectivity than cities around them.  That means this is not a battle that rural communities have lost yet.  It is battle that will be lost unless people mobilize and demand their leaders takes steps to bring fiber to their communities. It does not take forever to get fiber. Our company built 23 miles of fiber in Bozeman, Montana in six months.

Just as the Interstate Highway system and the railroads before it created winners and losers, the world of fiber is going to leave communities behind.  Places like Danville, Virginia jumped on the fiber bandwagon over a decade ago. They had been hit by the perfect storm of a collapse of the furniture, tobacco, and textile industries that defined their economy. Their electric utility built a fiber network and now Danville has a thriving economy with far more technology jobs than in the past.

I am lucky to work in a job that aligns with my passion for better broadband with my job description. The company that I work for has been helping communities take control of their economic future by working towards community controlled networks for twenty-five years. It is easy to wake up in the morning and go to work doing something that can make a real difference in people's lives.

Like the analogy that was used at the conference, this is a lot like rural electrification.  The cities got electricity because it was easy for private companies to make a profit there.  It was much harder outside the cities because the customers were much farther apart. That is why we had the Rural Electrification Act.  There is no simple answer for each community but there are answers and solutions that be put in place to position a community for the future without breaking the bank. The good news is that banks and others are starting to understand how fiber is to a community's future.

Fiber also makes financial sense for individual users. I have done the numbers time and again. If I could switch to one of the community networks that we have built, any upfront costs that I pay would be covered in fifteen months by the resulting savings from my getting out of the grip of the cable monopoly. After that initial period, my savings quickly start to mount up.  Connecting a home to fiber is a better investment than remodeling your kitchen.

I remain optimistic that North Carolina will take up this challenge which former Governor Hunt likened to the challenge of getting all the state's dirt roads paved.  I lived on a dirt road so I can relate. I remember the roads of my childhood being paved and I remember before they were paved that school had to be canceled in the winter sometimes because the roads were too muddy for buses.

This conference was a refreshing change for a year that seems destined to be defined by not so nice politics. Not a single person during the conference mentioned a party label. I did not have a clue about the political stripe of the one state representative who spoke.  Even if I had not known, it would have been a safe bet to assume the former governor, James Hunt, who spoke was a Democrat.  NC has only elected three Republican governors in the last one hundred years. I also knew our current governor, Roy Cooper, was a Democrat but none of that mattered since everyone was focused on the issue at hand, better broadband.

I hope this is a sign that everyone can work together on issues that have the potential to change our lives for the better.

Summer at the Beach

Most folks think about the beach in terms of their annual vacation.  That was the way I grew up in North Carolina during the fifties.  Most summers mother would pile me into the car with as many of her nieces as would fit and off we would go to the magical world of the beach.

The fifties were a time before television and malls homogenized America. Regional differences existed because places were different and not just so some national chain could exploit them for business.  Our simple beach cottages on North Carolina's shores were never oceanfront, but they were always just a short walk to beach.  No one cared about the cottages because we did not come to sit inside and watch television.  We came to play on the beach.

There was always a chance that you might meet someone from a strange, far away place like New Jersey.  At night the beach boulevards changed into magical places with neon lights, open shops with things that made your eyes go wide and then there was the sound of beach music.  Years of television and tiny computers that we call smartphones have changed our lives.  People come to the beach and jog along the tide line with their iPods or iPhones welded to their ears.  Why come to the beach if you drown out the sound of waves.  They expect home theaters so they can watch the same movies as at home instead of wandering the beach at night. We were so tired at night after a full day at the beach that sleep came quickly and the televisions were black and white anyway. Few cottages even had phones, but there were pay phones which are now relics of the past. The waves cannot work their night magic unless they are given a chance.

We are lucky the beach has not changed as much as people have.  There have been changes of course, many small beach cottages have been replaced by sand castles that house multiple families.  I often wonder how five or six families manage to get along for a week at the beach.  There must be special families than can handle it.   We enjoy our grown children but even the most loved child moved out on their own for good reasons.

Summer at the beach does change when you live at the beach.  When we went to the beach in the fifties and sixties, there was always at least one or two big seafood meals at restaurants.  Since we live at the beach, we long ago figured out that the best seafood is what you catch and cook yourself.  Failing that, you find a reliable fish monger and then cook it yourself.  We rarely go to a fancy restaurant during the summer for an evening meal.  They are packed and too expensive.

We do still enjoy the beach itself.  I sometimes walk the beach five or six times during a week in the summer. I usually walk in the afternoons when many of our visitors are back in their beach houses.  There are some lesser known beaches that are favorites of mine. I also fish the area waters but catching fish is not nearly as easy as it was years ago. North Carolina is the only state according to the documentary, Net Effect, "that allows broad and extensive use of gill nets in inshore waters" in the Southeast.  Recreational and commercial fishing is feeling the impact of poor management practices by the state.  If I had it to do over, I might have chosen a different state with more enlightened fishing rules.

Still once in a while I will catch a flounder, trout, or slot drum that brings back lots of memories.  Fortunately we have found that there are plenty of things to do at the beach besides fish or roast yourself on the sand.  There are some very interesting places to visit or to hike that are not even on the beach and we take full advantage of all of them.

Then there is getting out on the water. Most of us live here because we love the water in one way or another.  No one in the fifties had heard of kayaks but they are now a major source of fun and exercise at the beach.  That is especially true in a place like the Crystal Coast which is blessed with many beautiful shallow waters that are perfect for kayaking.  We also take to the water in power boats at the drop of hat in our area since we have some wonderful big coastal rivers.  The Intracoastal Waterway is our superhighway since it provides safe boating between harbors and homes.

There have been other changes. I can remember hauling groceries to the beach because there were few stores.  We brought lots of tomatoes for sandwiches. Now we have a wide-assortment of grocery stores to take care of our visitors.  However, if you live here, you learn to shop from Monday to Thursday for groceries and even then you try to find a store a few miles from the beach.

Of course not all beaches are the same or have changed as much.  The towns on the Northern Outer Banks, Nags Head, Duck and Corolla, and much of the strip down to Hatteras and including Ocracoke are small outposts on thin stretches of sand.  Here on the Crystal Coast, our beaches have more vegetation but are closer to the mainland and the less seasonal populations that live there.  The mainland here happens to be very agricultural.  We have plenty of farm stands and some of them that are exceptional.  That means it is easy to eat locally.

We are also blessed with a communities that do not disappear when the summer leaves.  Few restaurants or stores close along our end of the Crystal Coast.  They may shorten hours for the winter or close during January for a well deserved vacation but for the most part life goes on with or without visitors.  Without the crowds, the shop keepers and restaurant owners get to renew their friendships with locals each year.

True summer at the beach begins around Memorial Day and runs to around the second week in August.  It is not a long time to share our beaches and the truth is that most visitors are gone before the best beach season arrives in the fall. Fall means the water is still warm, the humidity will disappear and the fish bite a little better.  Few complain about  summer beach visitors because we need them to survive and they give our communities a festive air.  Our wave of visitors is a little like a river flooding each spring and refreshing the soils and people along the river.

Our visitors always leave a little of themselves with us and hopefully they take home a little of us with them.  Life on the beach is still special. It is special not only because of the tides and seasons that come and go but also because of our flood of visitors that continues to ebb and flow.  We live in land touched by many people and by a place shaped by the powerful forces of nature.  All that gives the beach character that cannot be duplicated in a mall.  I like to think that with every summer's high tide of people, there are few that are thrown up on our shores and never leave.  The forces of mother nature and the diversity of spirit makes the beach a very special spot.

If you want to learn more secrets of our beaches, try our five-star-rated travel guide, A Week at the Beach - The Emerald Isle Travel Guide. We have a condensed free guide to the area that is online and you can find a map at this site and links to more articles here.  If you do make it to Emerald Isle and want a paperback copy of our books, the Emerald Isle Town Office has them available.  The 142 page color paperback is $20 and the b&w one is $8.

 

 

So Much to Learn, So Little Time

If you are really lucky when you finish your formal schooling, you will have enough skills to get that first job where you will likely figure out that the most important thing you picked up in school is how to learn.

I can still remember taking over the balancing of my mother's checkbook. It happened sometime in my elementary school days.  She was a single mom and worked long hours. I was good at math and it was one less thing she had to do as she worked to keep us afloat.  I got to feel like I was helping and it was the first practical application of my schooling and mother was all about applying what you learned.

There are lots of things you learn in a journey through life.  Certainly I came out of high school knowing how to study information.  College and the events taking place while I was there taught me how to look at information, evaluate it, form my own opinions and put it down on paper in a way that might explain it to others.

I took a somewhat different path after college and moved to an old farm in Nova Scotia. There I ended up learning lots of other things such as wiring a house, doing copper plumbing, painting, roofing, making cabinets and even cooking.  They were more survival skills than skills that would help me in my unusual set of careers.

Sometimes learning only amounts to figuring out that you really do not know as much as you thought you did.  I bought a few head of mixed breed beef cattle early in my days in Nova Scotia.  One of the first things that happened is that a neighbor's dairy cattle got into a pasture with them.  I look back and laugh that I had a hard time telling the difference between my mostly red and brown beef cattle and the neighbor's mostly black and white dairy cattle.  They all looked like cows.

Ten years later just from an all black cow's profile I could tell someone the origin of most the seventy cows that were on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. I could look at a calf and pretty well tell you the bull that was his father. 

When we sold all of our cattle, a gift of Apple II+ computer from my mother in the summer of 1982 presented another learning opportunity and ended up changing my family's life. Mastering VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, DB Master, one of the first databases, and early word processing software propelled me into the world of technology.

Writing and working with numbers became easier because of the amazing power even of an early computer. Doing a printed newsletter for the Angus Association which had hired me as Maritime fieldman went from a week's worth of work to just a few hours.  Understanding the savings in time that came from computers made me a natural for the early days of computer sales and eventually led to a career of nearly twenty years at Apple.

You learn a lot in twenty years.  I learned to lead, motivate, and delegate. I also had to manage large budgets, to hire and fire people, to work with huge corporate egos and I figured out how to publish to the web. Along the way I learned even more about technology especially networking and also got to be on the leading edge of photography becoming digital and going to the web.

It has been eleven years since my exit from Apple. I am back in technology absorbing as much as possible, sometimes writing about it, but mostly using it to help others understand how to help create the infrastructure that will drive job creation in this century.

About a year ago in my second term as a board member for our homeowners association, I felt like I had been thrust into another situation where I had to take some skills learned along the way and apply them to a new and challenging problem.  Our association was spending about $60,000 a year and no one really knew where the money was going and how it was being accounted for on the books.  A lot of spreadsheets and checkbook balancing later, I can guarantee that I know where our money is going and who is paying their dues on time.

Almost sixty years ago I was balancing a checkbook with a pencil and paper. Today I have new tools to do it but the math is the same, the numbers are just bigger and the statements are online on the web.  Now we work with digital images of checks.  No one had a glimmer of the web back in the days of my mother's beauty shop. Today I make the appointment for my haircut with an app on my phone.  While technology has become all pervasive, I also have learned to read the water in our river and inlet almost like a book and I do it just with my eyes.

The world and its endless possibilities will never stop changing. To stop learning is to put the brakes on life.  The only solution is adapting to change through continual learning.  We especially need to learn as much as possible from those folks who have been here longer than us.  The only thing more amazing than the amount of knowledge most people accumulate during a lifetime is how much of it goes to the grave with them and how little of it is ever passed on to the next generation.