Burnin’

In 2006 I started keeping a list of cities where I spent at least one night during the year.

Turns out 2008 was a big year in travel, made even bigger by a nine-day trip across country to our new home in the Pacific Northwest.

Places visited in ‘08:

• Boulder, CO
• Omaha, NE*
• New York City, NY
• Daytona Beach, FL
• Winston-Salem, NC*
• Austin, TX
• Orlando, FL*
• Marco Island, FL*
• Miami Beach, FL
• Moravian Falls, NC
• Red Top State Park, GA
• Serenbe, GA
• Asheville, NC
• Franklin, NC
• Lexington, KY
• Cincinnati, OH
• Chicago, IL
• Scottsbluff, NE
• Salt Lake City, UT
• Winnemucca, NV
• Eugene, OR
• Atlanta, GA
• Brownsville, OR
• Coralville, IA
• Yachats, OR
• Spring, TX
• Depoe Bay, OR

*indicates more than one visit

We went to Newport Seafood Grill for lunch today—day 10 of a massive winter storm. The staff was incredibly happy to see us.

According to The Oregonian, Portland restaurants are reeling.

Portland’s formerly bustling scene is squeezed as never before. Soaring ingredient costs, escalating gas prices, vanishing credit lines, a looming increase in the minimum wage and consumers who closed their wallets back in October all contribute.

David Machado, owner of the popular Lauro Kitchen and Vindalho says, “This weather is ripping the guts out of restaurants and wiping out one of our busiest times — this micro climate thing is going to tip the balance against a lot of businesses because restaurant margins are as thin as they get.”

“I’ve heard some people say their business has dropped by as much as 40 percent in the last month or so,” says Bill Perry of the Oregon Restaurant Association. “Things weren’t too bad until October — sales were off just 4 percent or so over the year — but then, two or three weeks before the election, things just froze. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Oregon lost 1,900 restaurant jobs in September and October, and suppliers are left with unpaid bills and dwindling orders.

“These are hard times for everybody because we’re all in the same boat,” says Ben Savery of wholesaler Provista Specialty Foods Inc. Savery has been in the business for years and says he’s never seen the likes of 2008. “The economy has been not great for a year or so, but in the last three months it’s become something much worse.”

[UPDATE] We did what we could to prop up the restaurants this holiday season by visiting Fife, Ciao Vito, Toro Bravo, Pok Pok and McCormick & Schmick’s.

I read the book Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach many years ago. In the book, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the nation. I’ve been a bioregionalist ever since.

Now I see in “Sunday Styles” that the book—which sold over 400,000 copies in the 1970s—has caught on with new audiences in churches and classrooms around the nation. A fact which has led Bantam to reissue the title this month.

Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said, “You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.”

The green movement’s focus on local foods and products, and its emphasis on energy reduction also have roots in “Ecotopia,” he said. In fact, much of Portland, Ore., with its public transport, slow-growth planning and eat-local restaurants, can seem like Ecotopia made reality.

Which must be why the copy editor of this section titled the article, “The Novel That Predicted Portland.”

Laura Oppenheimer of The Oregonian put together a feature article on the efforts being made by Portland’s various creative communities to unite and successfully promote themselves.

salon owner, Kahala Orian, sporting a knitty

Here, Oppenheimer shows the two ends of the local spectrum:

If you picture the creative economy as a continuum from corporate giants to part-time artists, Nike inhabits one end. Oregon’s largest company employs more than 6,000 people at its headquarters, on a college-size campus near Beaverton.

A notch away from Nike is the advertising firm that branded it: Wieden+Kennedy. Columbia Sportswear Co. and Adidas USA round out the huge names. A slew of midsize companies design clothing, sports equipment and buildings, make movies and computer games, and promote it all to the world.

To explore the other end of the continuum, you could’ve walked down Southeast Belmont Street last weekend, past coffee shops and neighborhood bars, across from a retro arcade and a vegetarian diner, into KOiPOD salon. The owner, Kahala Orian, hosted a craft show called Handmade for the Holidays.

More than 20 entrepreneurs covered card tables with knit hats, soy candles and hand-stitched pillows, while a DJ wearing giant silver headphones spun tunes.

The article also explores how Steve Gehlen and Tad Lukasik are launching Oregon Creative Industries “to connect people online and in person, lobby for resources to help business grow, and to make creativity the state’s economic signature.”

OCI is a startup in the non-profit sector. They’re looking for volunteers to help grow the business, if you’re interested.

Yesterday was a dramatic weather day in Portland. Given the unique conditions, photographers throughout the city took to the frozen streets to document what they saw.

PDX Pipeline has a great recap of the day in pictures and Tweets. Additionally, Flickr groups sprung up to capture the day in images.

Geoff Kleinman, writing on OurPDX.net looks back at the Web 1.0 tech boom that took place a decade ago and sees similarities to today.

He also looks forward and wonders if an insular community can step up and out for their own benefit.

The brutal truth is that 2009 is going to be an extremely rough year for many people in the community. Local companies have just started layoffs and a lot more are on the horizon. Great adversity can create great opportunities for a community to come together, support each other and find ways to use that community strength to grow. But for the Portland Tech Community to be relevant it takes more than just coming together. If the goal is to ‘put Oregon tech on the map’ then it’s going to take crossing the lines and reaching out to local businesses, involving people from outside the tight knit community and working together to create relevant national stories about Portland and tech.

As I attend various tech events in Portland, people invariably ask me, “How are you connected to all this?” It’s an innocent question for the most part.

The other day, I told one developer that I’m not connected. That I moved to Portland in August and I come to town with a history in, and interest in, marketing technology. Of course, that bit of information makes me something other than an engineer—a person who makes things! So, as I reflect on Kleinman’s call to action, I think yes, the engineers might want to warm up to people from my profession. Not all ad men are exploiters. Some of us are, in fact, as idealistic as the hackers who’ve made it their business to change the world.