Don't come to Raleigh on Thursday if you want to see the state legislature in action.

The House and Senate are convening in Greensboro at 11 a.m. to honor the city's bicentennial. The session will be held in N.C. A&T University's Harrison Auditorium.

The legislative calendar has not been released for Thursday, but typically such visits are intended to commemorate the occasion and little more.

In recent years lawmakers have held similar sessions in Edenton, Bath and Greenville.

See a short video montage of the House and the Senate as they gavel in a short session at the state legislative building Tuesday at noon. (Staff video by Travis Long and Ted Richardson)

A federal judge may have provided a glimpse this week of how the court is leaning in a lawsuit that could change the way state House and Senate districts are drawn.

A group of Republicans asked the federal court to halt the 2008 elections as part of the lawsuit it brought against state elections officials in November, reports Titan Barksdale.

The lawsuit says the current district lines are unconstitutional because they were based on incorrect census data. As a result, several counties have been wrongly combined to form voting districts, the lawsuit says.

The court has not yet ruled on the merits of the suit, but a three-judge panel ruled in January that they would not halt the 2008 elections.

This week, Chief U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad Jr. issued an opinion related to the January ruling, saying that North Carolina would be significantly harmed if a group of Republicans were allowed to halt the 2008 elections.

Under those circumstances, the redistricting process is presumptive, Conrad said in his opinion for the panel. And legislators —not the courts — can best determine what data to use, he added.

The inherently legislative nature of the redistricting function support granting of deference to the judgment of the General Assembly in deciding which data to use," Conrad said.

State government does not have one Web site—it has hundreds.

Each department and division of state government runs its own site based on its own responsibilities, but this creates a huge problem for users.

Consider a newly registered voter. You've misplaced your registration card, but you'd like to check up on your representation in the legislature.

Let's see. You could go to your local Board of Elections and check. Who runs that again? The county? Hopefully you know that, but you could be forgiven for forgetting.

You could go to the State Board of Elections Web site and search its voter database. Another click and you can see your voting districts as well.

Now, then, who represents the 17th House District and the 8th Senate District? It doesn't say.

You have to go to the legislature's Web site for that and search again. Make sure you open a new window in your browser, though, since you may forget the district numbers by the time you click on Representation, click on Representation again, select a House District and hit go, then repeat the process for the Senate.

Why are these two functions—looking up your voter registration and finding out your representation—on two completely different sites? Because they're run by different departments.

Of the same state government.

The legislature's Web site is useful, but it's not user-friendly.

Consider legislation. You can find current bills by going to the home page, clicking House, then House Member List, then choosing the politician. Under the tab for Introduced Legislation, you can see all of the bills he or she sponsored or co-sponsored.

That's not quite as simple as the U.S. House, which has a Browse Bills by Sponsor pull-down menu on its home page, but it's not that bad.

But if you're looking for legislation from a previous session, you practically need someone to show you.

Go to the home page, click Legislation/Bills, select Bill Inquiry, choose the session you're looking for, click Sponsor on the left-hand side, click Add to Search Criteria, then click Search and you can see all of the bills for that session.

This violates a key principle of online sunshine: Think of the user.

If I'm interested in a state representative, why is it so hard for me to find legislation from previous sessions? Most legislators serve multiple terms, so presumably my interest will be based on their track record over a number of years.

Even worse, it violates another principle: Allow direct linking. The results of your search do not have a distinctive address to allow you to link to them.

Jim Black has gone missing.

The disgraced former House speaker's portrait is no longer hanging on the wall in the 1300 Court of the General Assembly.

When Dome last checked, the picture had been between former speakers Harold Brubaker and Richard Morgan, on the bottom row.

The portrait gallery features every speaker since 1963.

(Apologies for the quality of the photo, but it was taken on my Treo.)

Update: House Speaker Joe Hackney's spokesman says the photo was taken down by housekeeping to change the dates listed on the matte. The photos of Marc Basnight and Beverly Perdue have also been taken down.

The state legislature's new program evaluation division has a director — John Turcotte, who has run similar programs in Florida and Mississippi.

Lawmakers created the new division this year to "promote efficiency and effectiveness in state government," according to the sponsoring legislation, reports Dan Kane.

Legislative Services Director George Hall said Turcotte will be paid $135,000 a year and oversee a staff of nine.