2009 – An Unexpectedly Good Year!

Too much has happened in 2009 for me not write a short note about it. When the year started, I didn’t think I’d be remembering it fondly at all – I’d just been laid off from a job I was very comfortable in, and was forced to join millions of other unemployed people in the toughest job market of the last 50 years. Few positions that I was qualified for were being posted; and of those, I did not get a lot of interest from their HR departments. Over the course of 6 months, I applied to 106 jobs. Only 5 or 6 of those applications resulted in interviews. Of those, only 3 were in-person. It was a frustrating time, to say the least.

For the most part, I think I kept an upbeat demeanor: I channeled my energies into networking and other job-search activities, and generally managed to keep busy. Ironically, on the day I felt most hopeless about my situation, I received a call from the law firm that I would end up accepting a position with. They wanted me to come downtown for an in-person interview – the rest is history. It’s funny the way things work out.

In fact, when I look back on 2009, it has been a surprisingly good year for me – especially professionally. Here are some of my ‘09 accomplishments:

I appreciate all my friends and loved ones who stood by me in the bad times and the good this year, and look forward to more exciting changes in years to come!

Happy New Year, everyone – see you in 2010!


Views of Atlanta

King Plow Arts Center
Twitter and my camera phones have given me the excuse to take many pictures of Atlanta and its skyline.  I was looking through some of them recently, and decided to put them online here.  It really is a beautiful city.

Help Find Pixie a Home

Almost exactly a year ago, I was walking through my neighborhood when I discovered a 5-week old puppy cowering and alone in front of an empty house. She had no tags or other identification, and I felt like I couldn’t leave her there. I brought her home with me and got her enrolled in Atlanta Lab Rescue’s adoption program. She was very cute as you can see for yourself in the following picture and video from that time:


picture of Pixie

The rescue group named her “Pixie” to capitalize on that cuteness. It worked – she was adopted within a couple of weeks to a family we hoped would give her a good home for the rest of her life.

Fast forward to one-year later. It turns out that the people who adopted Pixie (they renamed her “Cocoa”) were not as good of a match as everyone had hoped they would be. They haven’t given her the attention she needs and lock the poor dog up in a crate almost all day, every day. She is a 1-year old puppy, so she has a lot of energy — she has no way to burn this energy off, because these people are more infirm than they originally let on and do not have a fenced-in yard where the dog can run around. It doesn’t sound like she’s getting walked very much, either. They have told Atlanta Lab Rescue that dog ownership is not for them and they are giving Pixie/Cocoa back immediately. This is a little frustrating, because it is much harder to get a 1-year old dog adopted than it is to get a 6-week old one adopted.

I want to help get the message out about Pixie/Cocoa and help her find a home with people who will love her, give her the exercise she needs, and give her a home she can count on for the rest of her life. She is back in the Atlanta Lab Rescue program, and they are going to waive or reduce most of their usual fees to make this transition go as smoothly as possible.

Please help Pixie. Use the “Share This” button below to spread this message as widely as possible and share this page on twitter and facebook. If you are interested in either fostering Pixie/Cocoa or adopting her, we want to talk to you. Leave a comment here or e-mail me at “Joseph [at] geierman.net.” Some recent pictures of her are below.

Life Support for Dying Business Models

When I moved to Atlanta, there was a great bookstore here specialized in mystery and science fiction literature – it was called, appropriately enough, “The Mystery and Science Fiction Bookshop.” It had been around for over twenty years and was a fixture in the science fiction fan community.

By the middle of the decade, though, it was clear that the business was not doing well. Competition from big box bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders was compounded by the new threat from online retailers – sales at the store were tanking, and it needed to do something drastic in order to save itself.

The owner felt that the store’s location, on Cheshire Bridge Road – a somewhat seedy area – was the problem. He thought he might be able to make a go of it in a new location with higher foot traffic. To get the cash to move the store, he asked his customers for donations that would cover the cost of the move. He got those donations and was able to move the store. It closed not even 2 years after moving into the new space.

At the time, I wanted to help keep this business open – I felt that it added something to the community, and donated money to them a couple of times. Looking at it in retrospect, though, the donations were only prolonging the inevitable. For a specialty book store, location doesn’t really matter. Someone isn’t going to finish their shopping at Publix and decide to run into the bookstore to buy a science fiction novel. The real problems were:

  • Fewer people are reading, because of many other entertainment options (movies, TV, videogames, etc)
  • It was cheaper to buy a book on Amazon than at the SF & M Bookshop

These were structural changes that a traditional specialty bookstore could not compete with. Without a change in his business model, no amount of donations could have postponed the inevitable.

Fast forward 4 years, and those of us in Metro Atlanta saw a very similar situation happen with a Decatur bookstore called “Wordsmiths.” While I never went there, by all accounts the bookstore was a community gathering place. They featured author signings and other events, and were a very strong independent bookstore. The same forces at work against the Mystery & Science Fiction bookstore, however, were at work against Wordsmiths. There was no way they could sell books as cheaply as Amazon did, and there are just so many more distractions competing against books. Wordsmiths held a big fundraiser in 2008, but went out of business in March of this year.

So here we are in 2009, and another Atlanta-based business is holding a fundraiser. This time, its Paste magazine – the third largest music magazine in the country. They have been negatively impacted by the advertising downturn, and are in the process of restructuring. They need some money to help them with the transition. I wish them all the best, but remain skeptical about their chances. While Paste isn’t a bookstore, it faces a structural challenge similar to the two Atlanta bookstores I mentioned above. The print advertising market is imploding and there isn’t a good revenue model for online media yet. How is a fundraiser going to change that situation?

Donations are an acceptable business model, but the magazine and bookstore weren’t/aren’t changing their underlying mode of operation. These fundraisers are actually meant to prop up dying industries in the hope that a miracle will happen and the tectonic changes happening in our society and economy will reverse themselves. It’s the kind of thing that is easy to support with one’s heart, but not with one’s head. And it probably isn’t going to work.

GA Politics Podcast – Ep 22

This weekend, I hosted my semi-regular show about the state’s political scene, the GA Politics Podcast. This month’s panel was made up of Catherine Smith of Blog for Democracy, Grayson Daughters of Mostly Media, Decatur-based businessman, Larry Kosten, and James Williams of Drifting Through the Grift. We talked about the current governor races in the Republican and Democratic primaries, some dumb political moves in the age of social media and the AJC’s recent redesign and the future of media in Georgia.

You can download the show directly from the GA Politics Podcast website (on the Georgia Podcast Network) or you can listen in your browser by pressing the play button below.

Desert Garden in Atlanta’s Sky

Over the past 10 years, one of the most important trends in Facility Management has been the increased focus on “green” – both in constructing new buildings and in maintaining those facilities once they have been built. As the public becomes more aware of the way humans affect the environment and are affected by it, it has become imperative that a facility manager respond to these concerns in innovative and pro-active ways.

New, eco-friendly ideas range from making changes as small as eliminating bottled water from vending machines (asking employees to drink filtered water instead) to retro-commissioning aging buildings for improved energy efficiency and significantly lower utility bills. One of the most interesting and innovative has been the creation of green roofs – gardens at the top of our cities’ buildings. These sky gardens help prevent water run-off, reduce heat-island effect and provide a relaxing place for a building’s inhabitants to break-up their workday.

The concept of a green roof is still fairly new. They offer challenges for facility managers both in their construction (how do you make sure your building can stand the weight of all that extra dirt, water and plant-life?) and in all the brand new maintenance issues they bring up – this is definitely not the kind of roof you want to have spring a leak! One of the first facilities in the South East brave enough to jump into the unknown and put a green roof on their building was the Atlanta City Hall, which did so in 2003. I was lucky enough to get a tour of this green roof recently — learning much from both its successes and failures.

We were very lucky in the weather we had while on the tour — while we were on the roof the temperature was in the 60s and there was a slight breeze. The first thing I noticed when we walked out was how similar much of the vegetation was to what I had grown up with in the semi-arid region of Southern California. There were cacti, junipers and sedum. The reasoning behind the use of non-native (to Georgia) species of plants is that the windswept conditions at the top of city hall are not “natural” and native plants may not survive them. The 3000 square foot roof area is exposed to constant wind, is mostly unshaded, and there is no irrigation system installed. In a lot of ways, city hall’s roof actually is a very similar to the type of environment that you might find in Southern California, hence the choice in plants.

Even on the roof, though, there are actually several micro-climates. There are a few areas that get a lot of shade, and in those many of the plants that are dried-out or dying in the main sections seem to be thriving. Other areas are occasionally shaded by tall skyscrapers, and in these areas certain species like Rosemary thrive (it does not do so well in the completely unshaded areas). North Georgia’s drought has taken its toll on the green roof in general, killing off many of the plants that had once taken over most of the available soil.

It would be interesting to hear how much more or less maintenance is involved in maintaining the green roof when compared to city hall’s more conventional roof tops. According to Bill Brigham, the project’s landscape architect, maintenance of the plant-life on the roof only requires an average of about one hour per month. Since the roof is Xeriscaped – meaning it uses drought-resistant plants – no watering is required outside extreme circumstances (I believe they have watered the area a few times over the course of the drought in order to keep all of the vegetation from dying). Other janitorial tasks are also required – including a constant vigilance against cigarette butts. Even though smoking is not allowed on the roof, the close proximity of city council and the courts don’t seem to stop people from lighting up. The city has installed cigarette disposal bins on the roof, but there are still butts lying all over the ground which need to be picked up regularly.

There are other challenges to maintaining the green roof which were probably not considered when it was first installed. One of these is the way it was affected by the pressure washing the building recently underwent. The individuals doing the pressure washing needed to use scaffolding which required counterweights be placed on the roof. These were thrown in the middle of the roof garden, and ended up killing many plants over the course of the month this work went on – the plants just could not withstand being crushed by the 500+ pound counterweight. Another challenge has been finding the right mix of plants in a constantly changing climate. What works well in a drought might not be the right set of plants in a more normal circumstance and vice versa.

Being able to see a green roof up close and personal was a fantastic experience. One of the best things about this one is that anyone can go see it – it is open to the public and accessible from city hall’s 5th floor cafeteria. This is one case where Atlanta was truly visionary – doing something here first that the rest of the world has been able to learn and improve from. As more facility and property managers start to see the benefits of going green, I believe we will eventually see sky gardens like this one pop up all over Atlanta and the rest of the country. I can hardly wait!

Future Shock: Newspapers

For a while now, I’ve felt like I’m on the verge of experiencing “future shock,” described by Orson Wells as “the reaction to changes that happen so fast that we can’t absorb them.” Our society is undergoing some massive upheavals – they are happening just slow enough that we don’t yet notice how jarring they are – but they have started picking up speed. In just a few years, the world we wake up in bears no resemblance to the one we started out in – a process that used to take decades. Several things make me feel this way, one of which is the extreme turmoil we’ve seen in the newspaper industry.

Take, for example, this video from 1981:



At that time, “sitting down to your morning coffee and turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper” was a “far-fetched” idea. Indeed, the online newspaper that the story describes took over 2 hours to download and cost $5 an hour to use! How funny, then, that just 27 years later, the Pew Research Center reports that the Internet has overtaken newspapers as people’s primary news source (TV is still in the lead). Among people under 30, the Internet even rivals television as that age-group’s primary source of news!

Honestly, the fact that people are consuming media in a more convenient and more social form is not all that shocking. What is a little gut-wrenching, though, is seeing how established media companies are dealing with the changes. For example, over the last 6 months, there has been an ever-increasing turmoil in the nation’s newspapers (who do not have a revenue model yet that can make utilizing an online platform work). The most prominent paper in the spotlight is the NY Times, about which there has been much speculation about whether or not it can continue publishing while staggering under hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. Closer to home, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is losing $1 million a week and may be considering eliminating its print edition. Even the local alternative paper has been forced into bankruptcy and major cuts to its staff.

We’re almost at the tipping point. To quote Atlanta/Georgia blogger, Griftdrift, “I don’t know if papers will survive. I know the news will survive and I know writing will survive. And although it’s going to be tough and it’s going to hurt at times, someone’s going to find a way to make this work.”

Of course, not everyone thinks newspapers are going to completely die out. A friend of mine, Amber Rhea, believes that a subset of newspapers will survive by concentrating on hyper-local events – city council meetings, obituaries, wedding announcements… and of course local advertising:

I think it’s not so much print media that’s declining, but corporate conglomerate print media. Are small papers getting bought out by those conglomerates? Yes, but they’re ultimately not surviving. I think in the coming years we will see more community-driven papers – you might even call them “hyperlocal!” – developing because it makes sense for their community. We all know newspapers survive largely on advertising – well, businesses within the community will advertise in the community paper because that’s how they’re going to reach their customers. They know their audience – we always talk about the importance of that, right? Well it applies just as much when we’re talking about non-internet-based stuff. I just get annoyed because sometimes it seems like people in my generation, of a certain class and inclination, get very zealous about this new media stuff

She may have a point. In December, the NY Times ran a story about a small, hyper-local paper that shuns the Internet and is “double-digit profitable.” Its owner believes that putting information on the web is stupid, because that detracts from its ad revenue.

Personally, I’m skeptical that even these small local rags will outlive the big-city papers by very long. Even the publisher of the NJ paper mentioned above says he doesn’t buy newspapers anymore. The NY Times quotes him: “I just get on the Web site, I look at what I need to and I never look at the ads.” I believe that social networks (Facebook, blogs, whatever comes next) are probably a more efficient way of getting out the message about births, deaths, marriages, etc. Sure, a lot of people will always feel more comfortable with print publications — but I don’t think that’s going to make for a lasting business case. I read an article the other day on the shift from print to ebooks the other day which sums my thoughts up perfectly:

The next generation, though influenced by the prejudices of their parents, are nevertheless more likely to judge new technologies on their merits, and so on for each new generation.

I know that I’m unlikely to ever look at an obituary (or anything else) in a physical paper unless someone points me to it (probably on FaceBook).

I think the changes in this industry are only going to come faster – we all better hold on, because the world we wake up in next year may not resemble the one we’re living in today at all.

The Housing Crisis and the Outer Suburbs

The other day, I came across two articles about how bad the housing glut is in the outer suburbs. I don’t exactly live “in-town”, but I do live very close to Atlanta. Unfortunately, I pass many half-finished developments and other fields of dreams around here every day. Even just a little further outside the city, however, things get much worse.

On January 11, the AJC reported on real estate research group, “Metrostudy’s,” recent findings that there are “148,000 vacant home sites” in 22 metro-Atlanta counties – an increase of 42% since 2006 (at the peak of the market). The article focuses on Carroll county, about 50 miles East of downtown Atlanta, where so many empty lots were cleared before the developers’ credit fell through, that it would take 26 years to develop all of them at the current rate of population growth.

On the same day this local story came out, the New York Times published a complementary essay by Allison Arieff. In it, she focuses on all the houses that were actually built in the suburbs during the housing boom that are now going unoccupied — whether because they were never sold or because they have been forclosed on. The following excerpt cuts to the heart of her essay:

In urban areas, there’s rich precedent for the transformation or reuse of abandoned lots or buildings. Vacant lots have been converted into pocket parks, community gardens and pop-up stores (or they remain vacant, anxiously awaiting recovery and subsequent conversion into high-end office space condos). Old homes get divided into apartments, old factories into lofts, old warehouses into retail.

But similar transformation within the carefully delineated form of a subdivision is not so simple. These insta-neighborhoods were not designed or built for flexibility or change.

How do you re-use whole groups of buildings that were built for a very specific purpose when their reason for being has evaporated? She points to a few efforts — subdividing McMansions; tearing them down and using the salvaged pieces in other construction; even retrofitting them with “green” fixtures as part of Obama’s upcoming stimulus plan. In the end, Arieff admits that she doesn’t know what the final answer should be, and that all of her thoughts on this so far are inadequate to the task.

I don’t know what the solution is for all these empty houses and lots either. Maybe doing something “green” is the right idea. We could turn them into wind and solar farms, use the land to grow vegetables, or just rip down everything that’s there and plant a bunch of trees. Giving people jobs demoing the shoddy construction could be part of the stimulus plan!

The past decade has exposed me to a lot of things I never thought I’d see — gas shortages, mass foreclosures, the worst economy in 60 years. I’m definitely not insulated from any of those things, but they would affect me even more if I lived in a subdivision surrounded by nothing but fields. The final answer to all of this will be messy and likely won’t be that satisfying to anyone involved. I think this is a good opportunity, though, for us to question the way we build and start brainstorming about new ways to do things.

Atlanta Social Media Club

Last night, I attended the January meeting of the Atlanta Social Media Club. A friend of mine, Amber Rhea, was the facilitator for a discussion covering the following topics:

  • Is your online identity different from your IRL identity?
  • What does it mean to “manage your online identity”?
  • Are there any off-limits topics on blogs? Who decides?
  • Rethinking the personal/professional dichotomy and tearing down the walls of compartmentalization – yea or nay?

Amber, directing conversation about social media
It was an interesting, if sometimes frustrating, discussion. Most of the focus was on whether people should curb what they say online because it might affect their chances for employment. To me, it’s a kind of silly argument. You can argue that what you say online shouldn’t matter to employers, and in some cases it probably doesn’t. That doesn’t change the fact that in a state like Georgia, an employee can be fired for anything that is not protected by the Federal government (race, gender, disability status, etc). There is no one answer about what is acceptable, because each employer is going to have a different policy or outlook.

More interesting to me, but barely touched on, are other reasons people might decide to “censor” themselves online. I also think it is important to consider audience and exactly what one is trying to do online. When I started blogging, in the early part of the decade, my ultimate goal was to get lots of readers. I spent quite a bit of time commenting on other blogs, worrying about who I was linking to (and who was linking to me), and writing things that I thought would attract more readers or generate a lot of comments. It wasn’t “just me” that I was presenting – it was a point of view mediated through my goals at the time (to attract readers and comments).

Later, the types of things that I wanted to write about changed – mainly because I began realizing that people I knew were reading my blog. In some cases, I’d initiated conversations or discussed aspects of my life on my website that I typically wouldn’t share with most acquaintances. If some stranger read about them, I didn’t necessarily care; it was a different matter if someone I interacted with on a regular basis did. For me, this is as big a reason (if not bigger) to consider what one is willing to share online. These days, I typically don’t discuss anything in a publicly accessible forum that I wouldn’t be comfortable sharing with a casual acquaintance.

I think the key thing to remember is that we present different aspects of ourselves all the time. There is nothing all that new or shocking about managing one’s identity – whether it is on a blog or at a cocktail part. We make calculated decisions about how we want others to see us, and those decisions are going to be different for everyone. Overall, it was an interesting discussion. Amber did an good job of leading it in a space that was both loud and chaotic. I had a good time and am glad I went.

Why I Avoid Travel in December

I love traveling, but don’t love the process of getting from point A to B.  In late-November and the month of December, that is doubly true.  My recent travel experience from Atlanta to Southern California really brought home for me why I hate traveling during this time of year so badly.

Things started out OK. We arrived at the Atlanta airport at 9am and our flight was scheduled to take off at 11:30. Getting through security was pretty painless, and we were at the gate by 9:30. The flight itself might have been a few minutes late, but nothing out of the ordinary. We boarded and made it to our seats. It was U.S. Air, which I hadn’t flown for a long time. The thing that did stand out to me was how old the plane looked. It actually still had ash trays in the arm rests of the seats!

Anyway, the plane moved fairly quickly and pulled out onto the tarmac. Once we got there, though, we completely stopped and didn’t go anywhere. The pilot made an announcement and said that there was an alarm that the mechanics wanted him to check, so he was running some tests. About 15 minutes later, he made an announcement saying he was going to go back to the gate so the mechanics could check the problem out themselves. Once we made it to the gate, the pilot kept making announcements saying that the mechanics were tracking down the problem, that the problem was very minor, and that the only thing holding us up were some minor paperwork things. He made these announcements about every 15 or 20 minutes. After nearly 3 hours, he said that people could leave the plane if they wanted, but if they did and we were given clearance to take off, then those people might get left behind. He said he would give us an ultimate determination about whether or not the flight would make it within 10 minutes. As he was making this announcement, we saw that two guys were at the side of the plane removing all the baggage! The pilot was just stalling us for time. Sure enough, 15 minutes later we were given an announcement that the flight was canceled and that we should wait in line to talk to a U.S. Air agent to get a new flight.

By the time we got out of the plane, we were at the end of a very long line. I heard a guy giving out an 800 number to call for U.S. Air customer support, though, so I called that. I got a woman who sounded like she was Indian, but I guess could have been from somewhere else. I had a hard time understanding her accent, though, and I think she had a hard time understanding mine. She kept asking me where I was (“Atlanta! Your plane here broke down!”), if I was flexible on my departure airport (“NO!”), if I was flexible on my destination airport (“No!”) or if I was flexible on the date (Her: “I can get you on a U.S. Air flight for tomorrow”; Me: “NO!”). Despite all my emphatic “No’s,” I did try to be pretty polite. Even when she tried to book me on a flight into Denver where I was supposed to make a connection that would actually leave for SoCal BEFORE the flight from Atlanta arrived! Eventually, I got a flight on Delta that was a direct connection and that would leave at 7:45pm (Our original flight was supposed to leave at 11:30, to give you some perspective). We had gotten off the plane at around 2pm and my conversation with the agent had taken around an hour, so it was about 3pm at this point

I had asked the agent on the phone several times if we still needed to get anything from a U.S. Air agent before we went to Delta, and she said “No – just go to the Delta desk,” so that’s what we did. B.J. and I went from D-21 to the Delta desk at the A-gates. We waited in line at Delta’s help line for about 20 minutes, and when we finally got an agent, she said “Well, you have tickets, but they aren’t paid for – where’s your voucher?” “Voucher?” I said, “I had been told I didn’t need anything!” The Delta agent tried calling U.S. Air, but didn’t get anyone to pick up. She told us she was “sorry,” but we needed to go back to U.S. Air and get a voucher before they could issue us tickets.

At around 4pm, we were back at the U.S. Air desk at the D-terminal – the line wasn’t too bad this time, and we spoke to someone in around 10/15 minutes. This agent was helpful and printed something and told us to take it to a Delta agent in the same terminal (she pointed the station out to us). That Delta agent was really helpful and printed out the tickets AND voucher for each of us. We then headed back to A-terminal, where our new flight from Delta was scheduled to depart. We got food at the food court there, then headed out to the gate.

When we had been at the gate for a few minutes (sometime after 5pm), there was an announcement saying that the flight had been moved to the B-terminal — to a gate all the way at the end of the terminal. We made our way all the way down there, and literally when we walked up to that gate, they put up an announcement saying that the flight had been moved back to the A-terminal, to a gate one down from the one we had originally been at! There were some other people on the same flight who had trekked around with us, and they were grumbling along with us.

Finally we made it back to the gate and waited for the flight to begin boarding. The plane should not have been delayed, since it was originating out of Atlanta – but it actually was delayed 1.5 hours. Apparently, the folks at Delta’s hanger had forgotten to prep the flight until it was scheduled to take off. So we had to wait for it to move from the hanger to the gate, and then get cleaned and security-swept. I half thought it wouldn’t actually take off, but it finally did – just 12 hours after we had first come to the airport!

The plane ride itself wasn’t bad. I was able to watch comedy central most of the way, and slept a little. I’m just glad it’s over, and hope our flight back to Atlanta less eventful!