One of the projects I’ve been working on for the past few months is a new website, Red Bank oRBit. It’s a sort of entertainment sister-site of Red Bank Green. Orbit’s been up for a couple of weeks now and it’s amazing. I don’t so much mean the site itself is amazing–it’s good, but I think there is still a lot of work to be done on the calendaring and community function, but the quality of the articles–the writing–is just incredible. Tom Chesek just writes some amazing stuff about what’s going on locally. I first started paying to attention to his writing when I read his piece on Blondie a couple of months ago. It’s the kind of writing that used to show up in really good music mags and not the kind of thing you expect to stumble across on a local area news site. Anyway, if you’re not checking out Red Bank Orbit, you probably should be. And if you have any suggestions on how I can improve any of the technical aspects of the site like the calendaring or GPS integration, etc, drop me an email at sjwillis@willisbros.net.

I’m still trying to understand exactly what is going on with the Russia/Georgia conflict/occupation. We’ve had a busy week this week (man how stress makes time fly like no one’s business!). Anyway, looking at this pretty vivid photo documentary from the WSJ I’m reminded so much of the people I met in Romania. I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to travel to eastern Europe and spend some time just simply hanging out with people there, drinking beers and walking around the town of Brasov. It’s so easy to think that people are somehow different than you or I simply because they live in a place that sounds far away. Sure, there may be a cart pulled by goats parked next to a Mercedes but at the end of the day these people come home, put on the TV or radio and crack open a beer just like you and I. And that similarity (especially when I look at these pictures) makes any sort of aggression by another country’s army just that much more heartbreaking.