At liberty: Writer, editor, manager, geek, chef de cuisine, raconteur

Hi. I’m Barry Campbell, and this is an application for a job.

I’m an experienced writer, editor and manager based in Chapel Hill, NC, although I also have many clients and friends in New York City, where I lived for the last 14 years.

I can do at least a couple of things that are worth paying me for:

• As a manager, I lead highly skilled, cross-functional teams to produce complex and demanding deliverables on tight deadlines and budgets. (Often, these deliverables are documents with significant business and legal importance, such as proposals and statements of work.)
• As an individual contributor, I explain complex technical concepts to nontechnical audiences, and craft compelling, persuasive business cases and presentations for proposals and grant applications.

Whether you need to hire a player or a coach – I happily do both jobs, by the way, and as a manager I strongly prefer a role as a “player-coach” – I have a long track record achieving excellent results despite limited resources and demanding schedules. Besides “player-coach,” other (printable) words colleagues have used to describe me include trainer, facilitator, mentor, problem-solver and creative thinker.

I relocated to North Carolina for family reasons. My wife is going back to grad school at Carolina, and my mother, who lives in Raleigh, is in poor health; we needed to be closer. Besides, I grew up here, and attended UNC myself; who wouldn’t want a chance to return to Chapel Hill to live? I love New York City and will happily travel there as required for business, but the Triangle is now my home.

I’ve spent the last four years working with a very dynamic company in hyper-growth mode (see: “Inside the Tornado,” by technology guru/visionary Geoffrey Moore, if you’re curious about what that was like), and I helped the company grow its proposal-based business eightfold (an 808% increase, to be precise) in the first year, once they decided to let me meddle with the processes a little. (OK, I'll cop to it: I built their processes from the ground up and eliminated a lot of churn.)

Root-cause analysis of the company’s rapid growth in the last several years would lead you, at least in some small part, to a snapshot of me and my team huddled over our keyboards, knocking out a volume of precisely targeted proposals and RFP responses that would likely surprise you. (It surprised us!)

I was also responsible for more conventional technical documentation and training requirements, analyst relations, and some other fairly important things, too.

If certifications impress you, I have some. I’m ITIL v3 Foundation certified (and was v2 certified before that), and a PRINCE2 certified project manager, and a bunch of other things actually; ask to see my resume if you care. (If you’ve been in this business a while and certifications don’t impress you all that much, I like you already. Even if you don’t hire me, we should have lunch.)

I’m at liberty, available May 1, and I’m taking a lot of lunches. ;-) You know how to get in touch.

It came from the sewers of Raleigh, NC

It looks like blob of wriggling pudding staring out through a single, puckered eye. You can see it caught on camera, clinging to the concrete pipes below Raleigh's Cameron Village: the Sewer Monster.

It's really a colony of prehistoric creatures known either as bryozoans or moss animacules, thousands of wormlike animals, biologists report. Clustered together in a glistening mass, they feed through tentacles on whatever floats past. More common in ponds, they have turned up in a set of sanitary sewer pipes under one of the country's oldest shopping centers.

Shacked up in a six-inch sewer main, the clusters of worms are about the size of a golf ball, estimates Ed Buchan, an environmental coordinator with the city. But the video footage, captured with a tiny, snakelike camera, makes the monster appear at man-eating size to viewers watching at home.

Don't be alarmed, but it is alive! Sewer Monster found in Raleigh (News and Observer)

Related:

It took me so long to find out, but I found out...

Bookmarked for later perusal and itinerary-making: Homegrown and Handmade: Art Roads and Farm Trails of North Carolina.

The Customs guys are real friendly, though

Explains Why You Put International Postage on Everything Outside Of Manhattan

Secretary: What are you doing for Thanksgiving?
Nurse: My husband and I are going to North Carolina to visit his family. Why? What are you doing? Do you want to come with us?
Secretary: No. I can't. I don't have a passport.
Nurse: Uh.

--NYU Cancer Center

Overheard by: Destiny Traphofner

via Overheard in New York, Mar 27, 2009

Hat tip: Tarus

Fifth edition of the Krispy Kreme Challenge

In the time it takes most people to read the paper, drink a cup of coffee and eat a donut, Cameron Dorn ran two miles, ate 12 donuts, then ran two more miles. Completing the feat in 29 minutes and 50 seconds, Dorn won this morning's Krispy Kreme Challenge.

This was the fifth year of the race, which began as a lark among 10 students at N.C. State University and has since grown into a major university event that attracted 5,200 runners this year, raised $35,000 for the N.C. Children's Hospital and drew a camera crew from ESPN, the sports cable network.

The race attracted serious runners — and a lot of characters. Superman, Wonder Woman and one of the Ghostbusters ran together. So did a man with a three-legged boxer. There were several Santas, a man in a gorilla suit, a number of guys in business suits and two guys pushing a third in a grocery cart.

Krispy Kreme Race Draws Crowd (News and Observer, 7 Feb 2009)

Bambi in the New South

Raleigh, NC, where I was born and raised, was emphatically not a "big city" in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up, but by the time I left, in the mid-1990s, it basically was.

The RTP area of NC has grown dramatically since 1966, when I moved in, and unbroken strands of development connect Raleigh, Cary, Durham, and Chapel Hill along with a host of smaller communities, as well as the actual/aforementioned Research Triangle Park [Google Map link].



Results? Many. Here's one:

Step 1: Development reduces deer habitat, pushing deer and people closer together.

Step 2: State Capitol Police meet an apparently abandoned fawn in the woods near downtown and befriend him - or rather, they seem to befriend each other:

Muller, who often drives from his home in Selma on his days off to visit the deer, runs sprints with Bucky. Muller's wife plays hide and seek with the deer around a tree. "In a screwed-up world, this is one thing that is pure," Muller said. "I go home happy every day."

Fawn captures officers hearts ([Raleigh, NC] News and Observer, 5 Dec 2008)

Related:

• Video: Officer Wayne Muller and Bucky the Deer
• Google map of Research Triangle cities, towns and villages

North Carolina (unofficially) in the Obama column

It looks like Obama will hold on to his slim margin of victory in North Carolina, the state I was born in (and grew up in.)

This is absolutely incredible to me.

As the article excerpted below notes, North Carolina has long had a well-deserved reputation as "one of the more moderate states in the South on race issues," but let's face it, that's a pretty weak statement; major elections were turning on the exploitation of racial issues in North Carolina well into the 1980s and 1990s.

It's about like saying that apartheid South Africa, back in its day, had one of the better human rights records compared to other countries in Africa; it's absolutely true, but it's true only because things were so unimaginably awful elsewhere.

At any rate... check out how far we've come in 50 years.

As part of the Old Confederacy, North Carolina had a legacy of slavery and segregation. But it has been regarded since the 1940s as one of the most moderate states in the South on race issues. And it is a state that has undergone rapid Sunbelt growth in recent decades, with millions of new residents moving here from around the country.

In the unofficial returns, Obama led Republican John McCain by 13,746 votes. Gary Bartlett, the state elections director, said Obama should be considered the unofficial victor. Bartlett said an estimated 40,000 provisional ballots still must be counted, but based on experience, the outcome is not likely to change when the State Board of Elections certifies the results on Nov. 25.

[...]

Henry Frye, a 76-year-old Greensboro lawyer, was the first black elected to North Carolina's state legislature in the 20th century and later became chief justice of the state Supreme Court.

In 1956, as an Air Force captain who had been admitted to UNC's law school, Frye tried to register to vote in his home, Richmond County. He was required to name five signers of the Declaration of Independence and the 12th president of the United States. When he failed, he was not allowed to register. Like Chambers, he did not expect to see a black president in his lifetime.

He said Obama's strength in North Carolina was the result of the nation's problems.

"The right circumstances have to come together," Frye said. "The thing that may have pushed it over the top is the terrible economic news we've had over the last month or so.

"But beyond that, the most significant thing is that North Carolina can vote and will vote for a minority."

By Wednesday afternoon, Obama had won 2,123,332 votes in North Carolina to McCain's 2,109,586.

Obama Turns Tide in NC (News and Observer, 6 November 2008)

Update: AP "officially" calls NC for Obama.

And in the 8th District of North Carolina...

Last spring, it came to my attention that former textile mill worker Larry Kissell was running (again) against Robin Hayes (an heir to the Cannon textile fortune) in North Carolina's 8th Congressional District:

North Carolina, first in the South for its share of jobs in manufacturing, long benefited from a form of outsourcing. Decades ago Northern manufacturers shifted jobs to low-wage, Southern states with severe restrictions on organized labor. Now the "old economy" parts of all these states are reeling from the post-NAFTA version of outsourcing. Since 1993 North Carolina has bled more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs, according to state government estimates--one-fourth of its total. The pace of closures isn't slacking, either. Last year 10 percent of the state's textile jobs were lost, with at least 10,000 more manufacturing workers out of luck. In Biscoe after Biscoe, unemployment keeps climbing. Even in relatively prosperous Cumberland County, with its two expanding military bases, Wal-Mart is the number-one private employer. "Good jobs are coming to North Carolina," says Kissell. "They're just not coming here."

[...]

Now a high school social studies teacher, Larry Kissell previously worked twenty-seven years in an even larger (and now closed) textile plant in neighboring Star. Kissell hinged his dark-horse campaign in 2006 on his intimate understanding not only of how people have been kicked in the pocketbook but in the gut as well. "We didn't have time to transition," he says, ambling down Mill Hill for an hour's worth of door-to-door campaigning. "It was gone. It was gone. And so much of the structure of the town just left us."

Kissell was one of the luckier ones: a Wake Forest University graduate who was able to land a job at East Montgomery High when the end was nigh for his plant. But when he decided to challenge four-term incumbent Robin Hayes in 2006, Kissell's only previous elected offices had been president of the Biscoe Lions Club and deacon of the First Baptist Church of Biscoe.

Mill Hill Populism, The Nation, 24 April 2008

The Washington Post, covering the race today (among many others) at The Fix blog, reports:

North Carolina's 8th district (R): Rep. Robin Hayes (R) drew national headlines earlier this week for all the wrong reasons. Warming up a crowd before a John McCain rally, Hayes told the crowd that "liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God." After denying he said it, Hayes acknowledged he did but said he simply didn't remember saying it. Um, ok. Even before this foible Democrats insisted that 2006 nominee Larry Kissell was well positioned to win in a district with a considerable black population (27 percent).

I'd say so. Kissell came within a few hundred votes of unseating Hayes in 2006.

Frank Rich gives a shoutout to my homefolks

To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.

"The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama" (Frank Rich, New York Times, 12 October 2008)

Strange Maps: Barbecue Sauce Styles

Learned discourse from barbecue authority and UNC sociology professor emeritus John Shelton Reed, on the styles of barbecue sauce in use in South Carolina:

* The vinegar and pepper region covers the eastern quarter of the state. This is “a southward extension of eastern North Carolina-style sauce,” states Mr Reed.

* “The tomato region ditto for North Carolina’s Piedmont- or Lexington-style sauce, which is basically the eastern sauce with a little tomato added, still thin and vinegar-flavored.”

* The ketchup region is influenced by what they serve in Georgia “and most of the trans-Appalachian South – or for that matter in grocery stores – a thick, sweet, ketchupy sauce.”

* Unique to South Carolina, though, is “the mustard sauce of central South Carolina, (which) is unique to that state, and (which) gives it more distinct barbecue regions than any other.”

Strange Maps #246: Southern Sauce Sources

Delightfully, a commenter in the thread at Strange Maps made an appropriately-colored Google Maps overlay of the South Carolina Sauce Map.

See here for the North Carolina Google Sauce Map.

And there's much discussion, in the comments, of where the precise dividing lines are.

Barbecue is serious business.

We're all over New York these days, it seems

Now Give Me Your Wallet

Tourist guy: You're from North Carolina. You've got that Southern charm thing going on with the, 'Hey, y'all!'
Tourist chick: Yeah, I'm real damn charming.

--TKTS line

Overheard by: Jess McGins

via Overheard in New York, Dec 9, 2007

North Carolina's predatory-lending laws may travel

...[A]s Washington lawmakers hash out how to deal with millions of potential foreclosures, North Carolina's predatory-lending laws are shaping the debate.

...The North Carolina Home Loan Protection Act bans penalties for borrowers who pay off their mortgages early, mandates that lenders verify income, and is expected to limit the fees brokers collect for arranging certain high-rate mortgages...

... Critics of that 1999 law argued it would crimp North Carolina's housing market. But academic studies have found no such impact. In fact, the state thrived during the boom and has fared better than most during the downturn. Foreclosure filings rose 39% in this year's first half, far less than the 56% jump nationwide, according to research firm RealtyTrac. In the second quarter, median home prices were up 8% in Charlotte, the state's largest city, and Raleigh, the capital, vs. a 1.5% average drop for the U.S. "The bottom line is that [the regulations are] working," says North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who sponsored the 1999 law as a state senator. "North Carolina has strong banks that are tough but fair, and there's plenty of available credit."

These Tough Lending Laws Could Travel (BusinessWeek, November 5, 2007)

North Carolina Goober Alles

Fry some more goobers, Bubba; the truck's leaving for Manhattan in the morning:

For years, aficionados who liked their peanuts fried in small batches by septuagenarian hobbyists who gather in church rec rooms had but one option: the peanuts prepared by the First Methodist Church Men’s Club in Mount Olive, North Carolina. As you may have read in these pages, Danny Meyer’s business partner Richard Coraine discovered these extra-crunchy, super-salty specimens—which are to other peanuts what Belgian frites are to Munchos—on a reconnaissance trip prior to opening Blue Smoke in 2002. Hopelessly smitten, he’s been buying as many cases as the First Methodist peanut men can produce ever since...

Battle of the North Carolina Church Club Peanuts (New York magazine, October 8, 2007 issue)

New York City just got a little bit hipper.

TalkingAboutPolitics.com

I developed my taste for bare-knuckled politics growing up in North Carolina, where both local and statewide races were often entertainingly tawdry and replete with dirty tricks.

One of the formative political experiences of my young adulthood, in fact, was the 1984 U.S. Senate election between Jim Hunt, the Democratic governor of the state, and incumbent Republican Senator Jesse Helms.

Both sides pulled out all the stops--it was the costliest and arguably the dirtiest Senate campaign in U.S. history at the time--but Helms won in a squeaker.

Today I was delighted to discover that two veteran political consultants who met during the 1984 campaign -- Gary Pearce, who was Hunt's man, and Carter Wrenn, who was Helms's -- are publishing a blog together these days. It's called TalkingAboutPolitics.com, and while it has a definite Old North State flavor, their observations about party and process transcend regional and state boundaries.

Brother Bubba says check it out.

The North Carolina Barbecue Society

North Carolina is the “Cradle of Cue™.” It all started on our shores. The North Carolina Barbecue Society invites you to join “The Fun Tribe™” and help preserve the history, culture and uniqueness that sets North Carolina barbecue apart from all others. Come visit the Old North State and experience the barbecue diversity that makes North Carolina the Barbecue Capital of the World.

The North Carolina Barbecue Society

Needless to say, I immediately made a healthy contribution to the cause and joined up.

They've got a pretty damned fine idea for a road trip, too.

Hat tip: Greg.

Well, not exactly

As Long As You Never Leave Your Room at the Holiday Inn

Tourist to random girl: You go, girl!
Girl: You can't say shit like that. You are not in fucking North Carolina anymore!
Tourist: Whatevs, the only difference between New York City and North Carolina is that there is a Y in the middle of N-C.

--Grand Central

via Overheard in New York, Mar 1, 2007

"If you see the smoke, run away from it"

Spot of trouble in the old hometown last night. Explosion and chemical fire, creating toxic smoke cloud, requiring evacuation of thousands of residents.

The blaze at Environmental Quality Co. on Investment Boulevard started shortly before 10 p.m. Past midnight, people were still walking underneath a black plume that had covered the downtown Apex area -- too close to send in police to warn them, Town Manager Bruce Radford said.

"If you see the smoke, run away from it," Radford said.

Police and other emergency officials went door to door warning residents. About 100 homes in the Briarcliff neighborhood, one of the town's oldest, near Apex Middle School, were evacuated to the Apex Community Center next to the town hall on Hunter Street. Officials activated the "reverse 911" system, calling everyone near the fire.

All the home folks are okay, as far as I've been able to determine.

Thousands Flee Apex Fire (Raleigh News and Observer)