About This Web Site

It's that time of year when I go to the beach and many of you hang out with your families and decorate Hanukkah bushes or something. (Oh wait, Hanukkah is already over.) As has become our end-of-year custom, commenting and new posting will be disabled for a while so we can all unwind and spend time aways from our blasted keyboards. OP will be on vacation from about 9pm Dec. 23rd to about 9am January 3rd.

What you can do in your spare time? Play with the new beta version of our site! I will post the address here on this page before we go off the air on Sunday. If testing goes well, you could be coming back to a whole new OP in January! Wish us luck...

Update: Screenshot posted.

Here's my latest video blog entry. Mostly I go over what's been on OP in the last 2 weeks, but if you make it to the end I talk about starting work on the new site! Sorry the audio is so bad, I recorded it sitting on my deck after work today.

Click To Play play_blip_movie_538969();

Well this was a very interesting year. No-one in the survey predicted Jim Ward coming first (by 7 votes!), so we have no absolute victor. In fact as a group, the averages of our predictions were off base in a few places. I guess that goes to show, that we should do more thinking for ourselves, or get out into other neighborhoods more (as I think Fred told us last time).

Where did the hive mind get it right? Collectively, we predicted the correct results for all the mayoral races (cinch), we got the Aldermen right except the top two, and we got the top and bottom right in the school board race. For a bunch of people from Chapel Hill (10 of the 21 participants) we sure did't seem to know Chapel Hill voters very well!

Three people got the order right in Carrboro: Ed Neely, Patrick McDonough, and one person who declined to give their name. And only one person got the order of the School Board race right: Damon Seils!

A lot of us got knocked out of the running by listing incumbents Joal Broun and Jamezetta Bedford as top voter getters, when challengers actually took the top slot in both of their races!