Lotzothoughtz

What do you guys thing of the new theme I’ve applied to the blog?  It maintains the colors of the previous one (White, Blue, Green) but its a little more traditional in format.

Roanoke has always been lacking a presence on the internet, no I’m not talking about the city site (which despite a confusing layout has someone garnered some praise) or the multiple (and annoying) big media supported sites (myhometownjobs.com).  What I am talking about are the creators, the innovators, people who aren’t big business trying to make their splash online.

I have yet to see an entirely online based business in Roanoke that wasn’t dedicated to providing services or content to businesses.

And yes what I am talking about isn’t clearly defined because that is the nature of the online world. What online business model will win in Roanoke? I don’t know. Will it be a locally grown social network? Will it be some kind of cult of personality site, with the draw being the opinions or life of a person blogging and such? I don’t know.

But I can’t wait to find out. I feel like Roanoke and the whole SW VA area is on the verge of getting a new crop of local internet innovators.

Took this post down after someone came to the site using the search: how to kill a dog.

What was meant to be an informative thing on what to avoid having around for your dog, took a route I didn’t like.

Dear Creative Labs,

I’m so sorry, I strayed from the Creative pack. I strayed from the way of wide format playability, relative low cost, and sexy stylish player designs. I was seduced by a reduced price hard-drive based player in a time of need; it took advantage of me, I swear. There it was, a 30 gig Zune media player, looking kind of cool in black with a light blue double shot giving it a blue aura. It’s big screen, nicely reduced price, and 30 gig capacity drove me to do the unthinkable: buy it and enter into a DRM controlled universe. What did I do?

Creative, you gotta believe me. My computer at the time was having hard-drive issues, sometimes not turning on, I didn’t want to lose my entire music and video collection again. I could’ve gotten an external hard-drive, this I know, but why not get a dedicated music/video hard-drive with a nifty user interface? Well that and the Zune was cheap, at the time it was just above $200 bux, can you really blame me? I’m so sorry Creative, I didn’t know what I was doing.

Now I’m trapped in a one way relationship. It only let’s me me use the Zune software to load music and videos on to it; all it does is boss me around. Yeah it has a nice screen and a nice interface but in the end if you can’t play a wide variety of music and video formats, if we just can’t get a long then what is the point? Well that and Creative, between you and me, the Zune is a bit heavy in the hand if you know what I mean. There is nothing sleek or elegant about the thing, you put the Zune in your pocket and it weighs down your pants and then the children…they start to taunt you.

It’s true, I had grown unhappy with the limited storage capabilities of my 4 gig Creative Zen V Plus but I should have waited…I should have known you’d have a new product in line for the holidays. And now you do, you have created what I had been looking for: the Creative Zen, a flashed based media player with up to 16 gigs of storage and an SD slot giving it substantial expandability. O Creative, I should have waited. I should have known better than to leave you like that, after our two years of bliss….the Zen Nano Plus, the Zen V Plus, my god they were nothing but good to me.

I’ll make it up to you Creative, I’m promise,

Sincerely,

ATL

Mill Mountain Theatre is a regarded as an “institution” of sorts in Roanoke, despite dismal attendance rates.  As such most people don’t pay much attention to it, it’s always there and will be always be there right?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

Kept afloat not by ticket sales but by grants and donations from people and other organizations (like say the City) the MMT is like a welfare mother with no where left to go.  Several organizations that used to provide key grants to it, like Carilion to name one, no long supply them with those grants because of fund mismanagement by the Theatre’s management team.  Similarly several other key grantors have altered their requirements thus making finding funding much harder for MMT.

To compound this problem, MMT appears to be run in large part by disinterested parties.  What I mean is that they don’t seem to care much about the quality of their shows as much as they care about their jobs and getting paid.  My sources tell me that people directly responsible for the quality of the shows (for example sound) are left alone while customers complain constantly about issues with the quality.  I’ve been told stories of people coming into work at MMT loaded, having same sex (not that there’s anything wrong with that) affairs with managment staff, and just generally being ill equipped to fullfill their job requirements

Mill Mountain Theatre isn’t having a good go of it lately.  I wonder when they’ll go belly up.