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.

Hunting and gathering: check

A month into The Move, today was a fun-filled day of previously-deferred nesting activity.

After a hearty breakfast at Elmo's and a trip to the Farmer's Market (de rigueur on Saturday mornings), we drove over to Raleigh to check out Hipsteria, a furniture store downtown that specializes in used mid-century modern furniture.

We, uh, bought a few things.



A kitchen table.



A couch and coffee table.



An armchair.

And so on.

Their buyer has a great eye - and I'm looking forward to meeting him tomorrow, when he delivers the furniture. :-)

What a nice surprise to find this thirty minutes away.

Related: Hipsteria in Raleigh (The Estate of Things)

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

Raleigh pix

Some nice photobloggage of my home town:

Raleigh Skyline

Goodnight Raleigh

Memories of The Frog and Nightgown

Over at The News and Observer's web site, there are some very nice reminiscences of the time that North Carolina-born Thelonious Monk did a ten-day stand at The Frog and Nightgown, a jazz club in Raleigh, NC. (See also critic Bill Morrison's thoughtful contemporaneous review; he might not have liked the performance much, but it wasn't because he didn't get it or wasn't thinking about it.)

Raleigh, and the metro area surrounding it, feels more and more like a "real city" to this adopted New Yorker these days. I spend one week a month in Raleigh and the rest of the time in Manhattan for the most part, so I get to make the side-by-side comparison on a frequent basis.

But when I was growing up there in the 60s and 70s, Raleigh was a sleepy, small Southern city of no particular distinction, certainly not in the area of restaurants and nightclubs... or anything else, really.

It was Mayberry, with more stoplights.

But there were, you know, pockets of interest.

The universities in the area, the seat of state government, and the nascent industries and research centers coming into nearby Research Triangle Park brought a lot of intellectual types into the region, and so you got interesting little epiphenomena like "The Frog."

"The Frog" was the Frog and Nightgown jazz club and restaurant, which, for the length of its run (it was, if memory serves, open for about a decade... from the late 60s to the late 70s) was the only club regularly booking major jazz acts in the latitudes between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta.

I was more interested in Captain Kangaroo and Sesame Street than jazz during the Frog's glory years, and it was long closed by the early 80s, when I started tuning in Gary Shivers' jazz radio broadcasts on WUNC-FM and began what would be a lifelong love affair with this music... or by the late 80s, when I was old enough to go drinking in jazz clubs.

But I still have my own personal memory of The Frog, and it's a pretty cool one.

My buddy Eric--we were elementary school classmates--had a birthday coming up. Even in elementary school you could tell Eric was going to be--was already--a gifted musician; he was a piano prodigy. And his parents, who were scientists working in nearby RTP, saw a rare opportunity to give him a really special birthday party.

Believe it or not, they bravely took a bunch of eight year-old kids to an all-ages matinee show at The Frog and Nightgown, and introduced us all to Dizzy Gillespie.

If John Birks Gillespie was surprised to see a table full of children in party hats at a jazz club, he certainly didn't let on. During a break between sets Mr. Gillespie came over to meet and greet us, and even put his finger to his lips and puffed out his massive cheeks for comic effect; later, I recall the band gamely attacking "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with a bop accent, to demonstrate some rudimentary concepts around jazz improvisation to the table with the cake and ice cream.

Despite being gravely informed of the importance of the man we were going to hear, I didn't really get it at the time, of course. I was *eight*.

But you know something? I remember shaking the man's hand.

If you shook hands with Mozart, you'd remember that too.

The Krispy Kreme Challenge

Here's a charity event I can certainly get behind:

The Krispy Kreme Challenge, a road race to test both your cardiovascular and gastrointestinal fitness.

Here's how it works:

In 2004, NC State Sophomore Chris McCoy came up with a challenge. He would gather some friends at the NC State belltower and begin a run toward downtown Raleigh. His jog would take him two miles downhill to the Raleigh Krispy Kreme bakery. There they would each consume 1 dozen of the legendary hot glazed doughnuts. The group would then run back to the belltower to finish the race.

All in less than an hour.

The race has grown in the last three years and morphed into a charitable event; it's being run this morning, and over eight hundred participants are running. Funds raised via entry fees and the sale of T-shirts go to the North Carolina Childrens Hospital.

No word on how many are running in the Extra Krispy category, which is the Full Monty: downing a dozen doughnuts in no more than a minute each while running a couple of two-mile legs before and after on a 12-minute pace.

To Complete the Krispy Kreme Challenge is to:

1) Run from the NC State Belltower to the Krispy Kreme on Peace Street.
2) Eat one dozen donuts.
3) Run back to the Belltower.
4) Do all this in under one hour.

People always ask if puking is allowed. Don’t puke on purpose. That’s not fair to the rest of us. Keeping the doughnuts down is the real challenge, don’t cheat yourself!

Now, truth to tell, a 12-minute mile is barely a jog; a respectable racewalker could do that. Hell, I walk a fifteen-minute mile on crowded NYC sidewalks, and I'm a fat man.

I doubt I could do it after a dozen Krispy Kremes, though.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Krispy Kreme Challenge, my hat's off to you.

The Krispy Kreme Challenge

Mmmmm - 20051101_0047
Originally uploaded by EngelFish.

P.S. Here's the nutritional information:

Doughnuts: 12 Original Glazed Krispy Kreme Doughnuts

• 2400 calories
• 1200 fat calories
• 144g of fat
• 36g of saturated fat
• 48g of trans fat
• 60mg of Cholesterol
• 1140mg of sodium
• 120g of sugar
• 24g of protein

And here's a photo of the famous neon sign outside the Krispy Kreme mothership at the corner of Peace and Person Streets in Raleigh, NC.

Krispy Kreme
Originally uploaded by beebo wallace.

Back in the early 1990s, I lived (with several roommates) in a charming old Victorian house in the Oakwood neighborhood of Raleigh, three blocks away from this 24-hour doughnut mecca.

Being an insomniac who was likely to start jonesing for doughnuts in the wee small hours of the morning, I met every cop, hooker, schizophrenic, and night-owl (and a few people who might have met more than one of these criteria) in the neighborhood over a very short period of time.