Wow, I just realized after I published my last post that it has been over a week since I last posted to the blog. Did you miss me? Things have been busy at work, but my project is finished now, so I should be able to start posting again.
Did I miss anything this past week? Anything interesting in the news? 🙂
All kinds of news, and no new posts on the Chronicle…. What’s going on?
Answer: Computer problems. My Dell Inspiron 1501 is on the blink. Lately, it’s been shutting off unexpectedly. Not shutting down — shutting off. One second it’s on, and I’m in the middle of typing something, and the next second — POOF! — it’s off. Completely off. Totally off. Kind of disconcerting. Especially when it won’t boot back up again… for a couple days. Then, one day, you press the power button and it boots right up as if nothing ever happened.
So, a new laptop is in our near future. In fact, it’s being assembled now and will ship soon. A powerful motherboard from a pcb solutions company will be installed in my new computer so it should be able to handle my everyday tasks easily.
Well, now I’m getting excited to receive my new computer. I can’t wait to use it for my blog. In the meantime, if I go a couple days without posting, you’ll know why.
In case you’re wondering why there haven’t been any posts lately, it’s because I just haven’t felt like blogging. I don’t have anything I’m just dying to say. And besides, it’s so hot outside, my energy is sapped.
Hope you’re enjoying your summer. I’ll write again one of these days….
I almost forgot to mention, my blog just passed another milestone. I started this little blog as “Summers in Peoria” on Blogspot way back on April 15, 2005. I later changed the name to “Peoria Chronicle” and set up my own WordPress site. I somehow lost all of my May 2005 posts in the transfer from Blogspot to WordPress, but all the rest of my posts are archived.
My perception — and I hope I’m accurate — is that my blog has become a place where we can have civil discourse about the issues facing Peoria. Even though we can all get pretty riled up about certain topics, for the most part I think we’ve all kept our arguments on topic and not let them devolve into personal attacks. When we’ve faltered on that count, I believe we’ve always climbed back up to the high road and continued on.
My first post started, “It’s been said that everyone’s talking these days, but no one is listening. The blogosphere is like being one voice in a roaring crowd.” As it turns out, there are people who are listening here at the Chronicle. Thank you to all my readers and commenters for listening and participating. This blog would be nothing without you.
I’ve been alerted by the company that hosts my site that the server the Peoria Chronicle is on will be down for maintenance for about two hours this weekend:
The server peoriachronicle.com is hosted on will be undergoing a hardware upgrade at approximately
11PM MST Saturday January 17th
We expect the downtime for the account to be 1-2 hours, but could be completed long before that window. This upgrade will greatly increase performance on your server and therefor your account. We apologize for any inconvenience.
That’s midnight central time, which means the site will be down from midnight to 1 or 2 a.m. Sunday. I doubt this will affect very many of you, but I wanted to make you aware of it.
You may notice that I’ve switched my theme. I’ve been using a WordPress theme called Wu-Coco for, oh I don’t know, maybe three years? I rarely fiddle with the theme on my blog since it can be disorienting, but I felt like maybe this January it could use some freshening up. So now I’m using a theme called Paalam (which I’m told is the Tamil word for “bridge”). Let me know what you think of it. If you all just hate it, I can easily switch back to my old theme.
The main thing I like about this theme is that it’s wider. The columns in Wu-Coco are a bit narrow, especially the main column. Anyway, give it a test run, tell me what you think. Thanks!
I’ve been on the precipice of giving up blogging completely, but in the end I’ve resolved to greatly reduce, but not eliminate, my little hobby. That will no doubt be a disappointment to some and wonderful news to others.
In the past, I’ve tried for the most part to put up at least one post every day — to be a daily blog, as it were. I’m no longer going to pursue that. Instead, I’ll write only when I have the time and the desire to say something, and let the blog lie dormant otherwise. This means I won’t be posting press releases or “breaking news” or that type of thing anymore.
I hope you’ll continue to stop by and see what I have to say, even if my posts are more infrequent. I very much enjoy reading the discussions that take place here in the comments section, and I hope you do as well.
There have been some problems with the site today, you may have noticed. My hosting account was temporarily suspended due to excessive CPU usage. I’ve optimized my SQL databases and deactivated a couple of plugins, so the site is back up now and (hopefully) will run a little quicker.
One of the plugins I deactivated was the one that puts a toolbar on the comments section. For those of you who liked that feature, I’m sorry I can’t support it anymore (maybe a better plugin will come out sometime that allows the same functionality). For the rest of you, you’ll be happy to know that you can put in your own HTML codes again (like blockquote — a long-standing favorite).
Thanks, everyone!
As regular readers of the Chronicle know, December is my busiest month at work, which means I have very little time to blog. So from now until Christmas, there will not be many posts. I’ll still post occasionally (e.g., I’ll definitely report the outcome of the HOPC meeting this week, and I’ll no doubt have some comments on the hotel development if it gets revealed this month), but I won’t be able to post something every day or do a lot of research on anything during the next few weeks.
In short, posting will be light until after Christmas. Have a great month, everyone, and a Merry Christmas!
Today, I had the privilege of speaking to the Peoria North Rotary. Matt Jones invited me to speak about the role of blogging in politics and public advocacy. This was the first time I had ever been to a Rotary meeting. I’ve always wondered what Rotary was all about; I’ve heard of it ever since I was a little kid and my grandfather would talk about being part of it.
So, to Matt and all the other Rotarians, thank you for having me; I had a very nice time and enjoyed meeting you.
And to the gentleman who asked me where Obama got his data for the assertion that “98% of small businesses make less than $250,000 a year,” it appears no one knows. But the New York Times thinks he may be correct:
According to figures compiled by the Small Business Administration, there are fewer than six million small businesses that actually have payrolls. The rest are so-called nonemployer firms that report income from hobbies or freelance work done by their registered owners, earning as little as $1,000 a year.
Of these, according to a calculation by the independent, non-partisan Tax Policy Center, fewer than 700,000 taxpayers would have to pay higher taxes under Mr. Obama’s plan. But even some of these are not small-business owners in the traditional sense; they include lawyers, accountants and investors in real estate, all of them with incomes that put them in the top tax brackets.
So are there “millions more like Joe the Plumber,” as Mr. McCain contended? Probably not. Mr. Obama may well have been correct when he stated that “98 percent of small businesses make less than $250,000.”
Meanwhile, those who use the Small Business Administration’s guidelines come to a different conclusion:
The US Small Business Administration (SBA) defines a “small business” according to its average annual receipts or the number of its employees. Here are examples from the SBA’s Table of Small Business Size Standards setting forth the maximum average annual receipts by industry that a business can have and still be classified as a small business:
Crop production of all types — $750,000
Animal production except for cattle & chicken/eggs — $750,000
Cattle feedlots — $2.5M
Chicken/egg production — $12.5M
Forestry & logging — $7M
Fishing — $4M
Irrigation, sewage, water supplies — $7M
Housing construction — $33.5M
Heavy and civil engineering construction — $33.5M
Dredging and cleanup — $20M
Concrete, framing, and other housing contractors — $14M
Car dealers — $23-29M
RV, motorcycle, & boat dealers — $7M
Furniture, hardware, clothing & sporting good stores — $7M
Electronic stores — $9M
Supermarkets, gas stations & department stores — $27M
Pharmacies — $7MThere are many more examples at the link. In addition, most of the industries in the Table […] are considered small businesses based on their total number of employees instead of average annual receipts. In those industries, the cut-off between small and large businesses ranges from 500-1,000 employees per business/industry.
It’s difficult for me to imagine a business that has 50 or more employees (let alone 500-1,000) that has receipts of less than $250,000 per year. And, given the SBA definitions of “small business,” it seems likely that many small businesses in a wide range of industries have receipts of more than $250,000 per year.
So, like I said, nobody knows, and Obama isn’t telling where he got his figures.