Nothing is more critical to the health of a democracy than citizen participation. The abysmally low voter turnout in most localities on May 3 can’t be spun into anything positive. But it’s encouraging to know some people and organizations are trying to change that.

I want to offer encouragement to The Pilot for its efforts at citizen engagement during this recent election cycle. Besides doing a great job of reporting on the candidates and the issues through its various platforms, the paper also embraced new and innovative methods for engagement. These included the multi-pronged Norfolk Voter Turnout Project and Code for Hampton Roads’ awesome “OK Candidate” web app.

Pilot editors and other staff members are demonstrating that they understand the core of the issue: If we can convince more of the talented people in our community to work on getting more citizens to vote, we have a fighting chance to reverse voter apathy. We would no longer need to cede political power in this country to those who are just in it for themselves.

Michael Rau
Virginia Beach

(This originally appeared as a Letter to the Editor in the May 12, 2016 edition of the Virginian Pilot. It's no longer available on their website.)

So, this is another example of what happens when companies get too big...

As most of my acquaintances know, I make part of my income from developing websites. I lease server space from a company called Bluehost for most of my accounts, including my own.

On my own server, I host about 15 sites pro bono for deserving individuals (mostly artists of one kind or another) and community non-profs. About five days ago, these sites all started malfunctioning. Since then, I have been utterly unable to get any support from Bluehost. I’ve sat on hold on the phone twice now for over an hour. Their live chat system is down, and no one has ever responded to the trouble ticket I filed.

In trying to figure out what was going on, I discovered that there are a whole lot of people having similar problems with Bluehost. I think I also discerned why.

(Note: This essay was originally published in AltDaily)

Ahhh… The day after Election Day.

Are you basking in the afterglow? Smoking a cigarette? Did you just roll over and go to sleep? Or were you one of the 72% who ignored the easy opportunity?

As I see it, there are two major takeaways from this year’s political fiesta:

(Note: This essay was originally published in AltDaily)

I want to take up my space this week with NEON. There’s already been plenty written about the birth, evolution and culmination of the Norfolk Arts District in both the Pilot and here in AltDaily (WAVY-TV also put together a very cool feature report this past weekend), so I won’t use this space to try and recognize all the people who’ve been a part of making this happen, or to point out all the dozens (if not more) of individual artistic endeavors that have blossomed.

I just want to share a little personal perspective, and to some degree, express my regrets for not having much to do with it.