Chris Hardie's Weblog

Every now and then (and several times recently), I'll hear someone use That Phrase, and it tends to be jolting. They have a troubling experience, and when they are recounting it, they say "it made me want to kill myself." Variations often include "it made me want to slit my throat" or "I [...]

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While I was in Chicago this past week for the professional technical conference some of us from Summersault were attending, we were walking to dinner one night and witnessed the driver of an SUV come within inches of hitting a cyclist. Despite the fact that the driver was rushing to turn through a yellow [...]

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(You can listen to the MP3 audio of this entry, too.)
One of my favorite parts of living in a small city in the Midwest is that many of us tend to wear multiple hats for each other. When you get to know someone new in one setting, if you stick around long enough, it's [...]

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It's not really useful to me when someone tells me that they know what will and won't work for my life, the people around me, my community, and so on.
That tends to scale up pretty far: it's not really useful to me when someone tells me what will and won't work for the [...]

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I've talked about oil prices and peak oil here in the past (on several occasions, really). You may remember that we had a panel of experts here in November to provide an outlook on the economic health of the area, and one of them said that as long as the price of oil doesn't [...]

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Today I felt especially like a mindless automaton checking items off a list. It's pretty rare that I have that experience in my "day job" at Summersault, but sometimes the combination of a burst in client project activity + a bunch of administrative things + an overflowing inbox + accumulated personal tasks from the [...]

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It's an exciting day for those interested in building a better Richmond. Consultant and speaker Rebecca Ryan is in town to talk to business leaders, civic planners, elected officials, community members, and especially young adult professionals about how to move from "Brain Drain" to "Brain Gain" in Wayne County. I'm usually cautious about [...]

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I am hesitant to write more about the conversion of Hayes Arboretum land into commercial shopping space - so much has already been said. But I feel compelled to point out my sense that Richmond, as a community, is finding some good in a situation that, for a while, only seemed to have negative [...]

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A few times in the past week or so, I've had someone use the phrase "To tell the truth..." or, "Honestly..." to begin a statement, usually one in which they're communicating some personal feeling or opinion about a subject they perceive to be "touchy." In most cases I think they mean it in the [...]

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For the last several weeks I have been participating in a broad stroke study of law enforcement practices on city streets across America. I have done ride-alongs with police officers from coast to coast - Portland, Oregon to Austin, Texas to Cincinnati, Ohio to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. These ride-alongs are usually in the form [...]

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