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(Cross posted to Chelsea Blog)

The chill in the air isn’t just from the change in seasons.

A Chelsea City Trustee has unleashed the first salvo in a public battle over… I’m not sure. But it sure sounds like some people don’t like each other.

Since the story broke in The Chelsea Standard, I’ll have to recap instead of linking.

Back in October, the City Council approved a lease (a link!) for a Ford Five Hundred from Palmer Ford for Mike Steklac, a car provided by the City to Mike in his capacity as City Manager. The approved lease payment was $291.11 per month. When Mike went to pick up the car, the salesman informed him that the offer the City had negotiated was no longer available. The new price was $662.43, a slight increase.

So Steklac went to Faist-Diesing Chevrolet and negotiated a deal for an Impala at around the same price as the Ford lease (actually, $40 less a year). When Steklac brought the new lease to the City Council for approval, City Council Trustee Jamie Bollinger pounced. Bollinger stated that he had spoken with Biff Weber, the owner of Palmer Ford, and indicated that Steklac should have discussed the discrepancy with management before leaving. Bollinger alleges that Steklac only waited 35 minutes before leaving Palmer Ford, “not allowing time for the dealership’s management to address the problem”. Steklac defended this by claiming that “Ford Motor Co. credit department would have ‘kicked back’ the lease if he had pursued it,” an incident, by the way, that Biff Weber felt compelled to apologize for.

But the real stinger came later. Bollinger “suggested Steklac’s behavior [of negotiating a new lease without discussing it with City Council] is emblematic of a larger problem with [his] job performance.” This claim was supported by City Trustee Jim Myles as well. Myles is up for election next week.

By the way, I should mention at this point that the new lease was unanimously approved.

Moving on, Bollinger then confronted Mayo Ann Feeney, who had defended Steklac. The Standard quotes Bollinger as saying “So you approve of (Steklac) going outside of the City Council’s decision?” There is no follow-up comment.And then, we get to the rub. Why is Bollinger so incensed with the lease not coming from Palmer Ford? “Bollinger said Monday that part of the reason he was displeased with Steklac was because Palmer Ford has done favors for the city in the past.” Such as? How about repainting a police cruiser at no cost and donating a vehicle hoist to the city. I did a quick search on Google and vehicle hoists run anywhere from $1600 to $2100 dollars for a basic model. Painting a police cruiser isn’t cheap, either.

Let’s step back a little bit and look this over thoroughly. First, who the hell at Palmer Ford decided to try and bilk the City for an extra $13,367.52? ($10,479.96 for the first three-year lease subtracted from the new quote for 36 months; $23,847.48.) Unless they’re pleading New Salesguy Syndrome, someone seriously dropped the ball. Especially for an organization who is so generous to the City.

Next, I’m not sure how this whole City-negotiated lease things works. Is the City Manager legally bound to take the lease, even if the stated price at closing isn’t the negotiated rate? Everyone better say no to that. Then I fail to see the issue with the City Manager, a person entrusted with, uh, managing the City, negotiating a car lease.

Bollinger’s belabored point was that the lease Steklac brought to the Council wasn’t the same lease they had approved. He has a point; Steklac didn’t bring that back. However, what Steklac did bring back was a better deal. And, he did it on his own. We’ll come back to that.

I also don’t put a whole lot of credence on the statements of a Trustee who appears to have a huge conflict of interest in the lease negotiation process at Palmer Ford. Things went kittywompas and he called the dealership owner? Does the Trustee expect to call Craig Common if he has a bad meal at the Common Grill? Add in this whole kick back tack, and sudden Palmer Ford seems to have a little too much influence with certain members of the City Council.

Bollinger and Myles also accused Steklac of having a performance problem at his job. This is a serious accusation and hardly done justice by The Standard. If the Trustees honestly believe that Steklac’s performance is poor, then tell us why. Don’t throw out accusations from behind the wall of the newspaper. Make your case. If they don’t have one, both of them should not only be ashamed, but removed from City Council.

Bollinger’s last statement to the Standard is hilarious in it’s irony. “We’re still living in a small city, where you can go to an owner and shake his hand if you have a problem.” Of course, in this scenario, that handshake was false. The deal was broken the moment the City Manager wasn’t offered exactly what was agreed to. Handshakes in imply trust. Palmer Ford broke that trust. In my opinion, anyone, City representative or not, who gets that treatment is well within their social rights to scoff at a dealer and walk away. Palmer’s past donations do not earn them the right to sweat out a City official. Apparently the only handshake that’s good in this town is Bollinger’s, not Steklac’s and certainly not Palmer Ford’s.

This whole thing has the smell of a political smear. It reeks of backroom, old boy, cronyism, just the kind of politics that thrive in small towns. (And I know, I’m from one.) There are questions not answered here. Why can a lone City representative negotiate a better deal on his own than a Trustee with a direct line to the owner of car dealership? Why does the dealership with ties to that same Trustee switch the terms of a City-negotiated lease at the last minute? Why does the City Manager get broadsided when he calls the dealership’s bluff and gets a better deal? Why does Bollinger jump Steklac in a City Council meeting with some ethereal accusation of poor job performance, but present no evidence? And then when it’s all said and done, why, if what Steklac has done is such a sin, does the new lease get approved unanimously? Bollinger doesn’t even have the fortitude to vote against it.

Sounds like the new lease just needed a bit of hot air to get off the ground.

One of the arguments for Google Print is that it’s the same as crawling the web and making that index searchable. A comment on Slashdot nukes that theory very, very neatly.

I’m going to quote the whole thing, but credit is due to Bulmakau.

I am sure many will ask what the difference between books and sites is. And since we all like google scanning out sites, why should we oppose book scanning?
Well, for several reasons:
1. It is WE who like our sites scanned, and if not, we add a Robots.txt file. We can protect some of the content on our site, or all. and we easily know if its being spidered, so we can take action. How will that be with books? Robots.txt is not probably. You know what? if anything, it already exists in a way. All (most) books say have on them, in print, right in the beginning a text saying “copying of material from this book is not allowed unless permitted, prior, in writing, by the author or the publisher”. I think that resembles a robots.txt file. no? And authors have little ability to “check the web logs” and see who scans their books.
2. We get something directly from it. Fair use dictates that google links to our sites directly. How will that be with books? You have to go to the shop to at least consider buying the book? Not likely. They can send traffic to Amazon maybe? But still, not a parallel (and if they do, I am sure they will collect referral fee ;))
3. Our sites operate in the internet. Books “operate” in libraries, stores. You go to a library? you can search there for a book. On the internet, you can search for sites. Not only that, but internet has shaped to be mostly a free and open medium. Books – not. Books, you have to buy, or at least subscribe to a library (paid, directly or indirectly). Different “market”.
4. Most of our sites are free, and are freely accessed. Most of the sites in google are such sites. As a matter of fact, subscribed sites where their content is protected and paid for (as books are) do NOT have their content on google. And IF they have, THEY take the steps to get it into google. Books are in a sense like protected/paid sites.
A world of difference that is going to be erased very abruptly by google..
Good or bad? You decide (and also authors, publications and libraries which seems to have decided already)

Fark Photoshop theme: Political Flamewar: Use only Magic the Gathering cards.

Awesome

Dire Straights, The Best of.
Blink 182 – Greatest Hits

WinZip 10.0 was released today. Hardly anyone noticed.

WinZip is one of those eponymous applications that has outlived itself. It’s not that no one compresses data anymore, but WinZip has started the downward spiral into obscurity. At one point, one couldn’t get around without WinZip. In the days when hard drives were measured in megabytes and floppy disks were the backbone of the sneaker net, WinZip was The Application, an essential tool in any computer user’s kit.

Now, with native support for ZIP files in Windows and open source applications like 7-Zip and Izarc, WinZip’s hold on the market is slipping. With no native support for common formats suchas RAR files and the ever increasing irrelevance of compression in a terabyte world, and WinZip’s lack of splash isn’t hard to imagine.

That’s not to say that WinZip 10 won’t be a success. But with a slim list of improvements I just don’t see a great push to upgrade or purchase. Especially when I can get the essentials for free. Of course, none of this is WinZip’s fault; the world has just taken the first major steps away from the need for WinZip. It’s a marker of the passing of another standard from the early days of the ‘net (ah, wither Z-Modem).

Just think, some day they’ll say these kinds of things about monitors and hard drives.

Please ignore this post, this is so I don’t lose the link.

Link

I haven’t written specifically about Google Print (although I’ve alluded to it a couple of times), but I thought, hey, better late than never.

There are literally millions of posts all over the Web about this, so I won’t bore you with a recap. What I will do is ask a question that has been bothering me and that keeps me from fanboying about Google Print.

First, some back story. In college, I had more than one professor who chose to use a text that wasn’t in print anymore. What this usually meant was photocopies of the pages of the book in question from the university library. If I made the copies (and didn’t get called out for copying “too much” of the book), the library staff didn’t seem to mind. However, if the professor did so (or his staff) and handed those copies out to the students, that had to be cleared for all the copyright BS, as if the University were reprinting the entire book. (There was some arbitrary threshold if I remember correctly.) It basically boiled down to a huge legal mess if the professor needed to use the text. Some did, some didn’t. In the “didn’t” case, the class was basically left to their own devices to obtain the text as they could.

Google claims that scanning (copying), running OCR, and shoving all the text of these books into their database is fair use. Many claim this should be so because it furthers society somehow (I’m not contending that). For example, David Weinberger says “…as a citizen who wants to live in an ever smarter world, I hope Google Print goes ahead.” Ok, I can buy that. But if University professors, who certainly are making the world smarter, can’t do essentially the same thing as Google wants to do without paying their dues, why is Google suddenly exempt from those rules?

Until someone gives me a clear answer to that, I can’t fault any author that raises an objection. Don’t get me wrong, I think a Google Print-like service is inevitable, but why do we have to strongarm people into the system if they don’t want to? Enough people are dying to get in (*hand up*); Google is wrong to use their muscle to force anything down people’s throats.

I wonder how far off our TV is.

Link

A totally biased, simple, attack on the religious. It’s the same, tired, “religious people are mindless idiots” argument. WIth a clever title. And lots of straw men. Actually, one big straw man, but that never seems to matter.

By the way, God is bad because men are mortal. And he doesn’t exist because the Bible is fake (I love self-referential arguments). Shove that in your philosophical… pipe and smoke it.

If you want an interesting topic for discussion about God, try God, A Biography by Jack Miles.

Link

Imagine all of your windows in a continuous strip, accessible by moving your cursor to the side of your screen. Imagine being able to save an entire set of windows and load them later on. This is Deskloops. Eye candy? Oh yeah. But since when has that stopped anyone (I’m looking at you, iTunes)?

Download Deskloops [via Lifehacker]