lectroid.net

Editor’s note: I promised my niece her own post (and photos) here on my blog, so here ya go Mon…

So this last weekend we packed up the kids and managed to get out of the smoke and half way across the country to Kalamazoo, Michigan (or “K-Zoo” as the youngin’s call it) of all places to watch my niece renew her wedding vows (now say “awwwww” everyone).

Now we would have gone to her actual wedding last year, but nooo, she ran off and got married somewhere in New York and apparently, if the alcohol induced speech from her best friend was any indication, may or may not have consummated her marriage on her best friend’s couch.

Sheesh, these kids today…

Anyway, kidding aside (or not…), it was a heckofa time. Lisa and the kids got to dance to “Le Freak“ (c’mon, sing it… you know you know it…) and got to see fireflies for the first time (the bugs, not the TV show). We also got to learn that Michiganders use the left lane on the freeway only as a passing lane which is really, really weird to us Californians.

In a kinda cool twist of time and space, my kids slept in the same playroom beds — now at my brother’s house — that once graced the playroom in my parent’s house and as one of my nephews pointed out they’ve now joined all the other grandkids who’ve slept in those beds as well.

Also since we recently toured the capitol building in Sacramento, we decided to tour the freakishly skinny capitol building in Lansing. Unfortunately, aside from the fact that the Michigan capitol needs to suck down a few more cheeseburgers, the buildings are stunningly similar in design and the kids quickly tired of that nonsense (“…seen it!”). And besides, Uncle C and Aunt K had a basement! You so can’t compete with that.

Alas, we also got to experience the joy that is modern American air travel. Three of our four flights were delayed for over an hour (or two) and usually with us already on the plane (enjoying the spacious seating and the wonderful selection of peanuts). It was lovely. Our kids were great through it all and even though we arrived after midnight both coming and going the kids were real troopers.

More photos from the Michigan state capitol building…
More photos from Monica’s “wedding”…

A (long) while back I spouted off in a comment on a post about newspaper staffing on JI:

In the same vein that there are requirements w/in newsrooms to subscribe to the paper, I’d like to see the “online desk” staffers barred from taking the print edition.

Why? Because it clouds online news judgement. When online staffers are still happily existing in a 24-hour news cycle of monologue presentation, they fail a lot of times to expand their thinking to a web-based, constant news stream, dialog model that will, it seems pretty clear to me, define the future of news online.

In short, they become liabilities.

I recognize the value both financially and functionally of a print product, I truly do. I don’t think such a restriction should be permanent by any means. It’s just that since many newspapers are not hiring “web natives” for their web positions — and therefor crippling themselves — a “print ban” on online staffers seems like a good way to whiplash them into starting to think like web natives.

Sort of a “total immersion” type of approach.

It was an off-the-cuff comment made shortly after arguing some academic point or other with a friend who, while a talented and dedicated print journalist, wasn’t much of a web user, and so didn’t see my point at all (of course my delivery could not have been at fault ;)).

Now that I’ve had the time to think more about it… I like it even more.

*tap* *tap* is this thing on…

You (all 4 of you) may have noticed a little outage over the last few days. For whatever reason AT&T shutdown all of my ISP’s phone lines and this included their DSL lines. Since www.lectroid.net and www.sactraffic.org sit on a server in my closet, this meant they were offline. Oopsie.

Now I know s*** happens in technology but my ISP effectively went dark with only a single little blurb on their web site about their phones being out. No updates, no nothing and not even any mention of their DSL customers. Add to this, the alternate numbers they offered didn’t work. I seriously thought they might have gone out of business. Not really the behavior you want from an ISP.

So I went hunting for a new broadband provider. I’m in a semi-rual area so my options were limited, I was left with Comcast (my cable provider) and AT&T (my phone provider). Comcast was never a serious option for personal reasons so after a single, and rather pleasant, phone call to what turned out to be a call center in Texas, I’ll be getting 6 megs of DSL goodness directly from AT&T and installed on Tuesday. I’m looking forward to 4 times the bandwidth for even less than I was paying before.

This isn’t without some cost however. For almost 15 years I’ve used local ISPs for my internet service. Yeah, sometimes I paid a little more, but I liked being able to call (or IM) an admin directly if something wasn’t working and get it looked at, in fact I was often friends with them so I had the inside track. Oftentimes I was friends with the ISP owners as well. But the last guy I knew at my ISP, or at any ISP, left about 6 months ago, so it was time to move on.

The other change will be for the first time in almost 10 years I won’t have a fixed IP address, so I won’t be hosting my own stuff on a server in my closet. I’m still working out where the web server will go so you can expect another outage while I work that out (email, however, will be fine).

But 6 megs of DSL goodness…

It’s father’s day so I could think of nothing better to do than to go stomping through dry weeds, broken glass and owl poop while carrying thousands of dollars in camera gear. Yep, that’s right, I headed back out to Mather Field to have a look at the those old nuke bunkers once again.

Yep, they’re still there. Yep, still abandoned.

The biggest difference this time around, besides the graffiti and paintball marks on everything, was the owls. Bloody hell, there were lots of owls. Every building out there had at least one owl in it. Like a freaking Harry Potter convention. And the damn things kept waiting for me to walk right up close before they flew off, screeching, and scaring the bejesus out of me every freakin’ time.

This time I did screw up enough courage to actually go into some of the bunkers, far enough to lay some strobes for lighting effects. It’s hard to explain, but the dark, cavernous nature of the things just makes them creepy to me. And the weird echos… and the damn owls. Brrrr.

And no, I never got into that room in the far back of some of big bunkers. It’s some kind of ventalation room or something. One had an owl nest in it and that seemed like a good way to piss off mama-owl. Owls have talons.

So after an hour and a half of tromping around out there I was suitably hot and sweaty and ready to leave. I strongly recommend a good set of boots if you head out there as aside from the usual suite of valley stickers there’s all manner of nasties that can seriously mess up your day — and it’s a long way from help. Make sure your tetanus is up-to-date (mine isn’t).

More photos…

Editor’s note: The actual quote was “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The full presentation is available here: http://sites.google.com/site/io/the-worlds-information-in-context

“Our mission is to make information available and make it useful.” — Michael T. Jones, Chief Technology Advocate, Google

When Michael Jones uttered that line at the recent Google I/O conference, I about fell over. Waitaminute, I thought, isn’t that the roll of the newspaper? I mean, if Google’s mission is to make information available and make it useful, how is that any different from the traditional newspaper mission?

Continue reading ‘Making information available and useful online and why newspapers aren’t very good at it.’ »

I had a recent discussion with a non-twitter-addicted friend recently over how best to get news alerts out onto “mobile devices” (i.e.: text messaging). He advocated using a particular vendor to send out SMS text messages (for a small fee) and thought Twitter was “just a fad” (oh now where have I heard that before). I, of course, advocated Twitter.

Continue reading ‘To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question’ »

You know what? Absolutely no one I know outside of work uses text messaging or instant messaging of any kind. No really. And it’s only been recently that someone I know outside of work has started to use Flickr.

No one I know personally blogs either. At least not on any measurable scale (yeah, I see ya, bro). So I’m not even gonna try to explain the idea of “microbloging” so forget sites like Twitter or Britekite.

Even the youngins — those fresh out of college — when I search for them on Facebook I get nuthin’. Weren’t colleges where Facebook got its start?!?

Understand that these are not Luddites locked away in some mountain cabins somewhere, these are smart folks from all walks of life, at varying ages, and pretty much all of ‘em own computers. Heck they even send email on occasion. Some actually work in technology fields!

In fact, judging by my circle of long time friends — not to mention my extended family — all that web2.0 hype is pretty much a freakin’ myth. Is it?

I don’t think so. I think sometimes we in the field sometimes do lose perspective (I certainly know I do) and think that everyone is taking their Flickr KML feed and making cool Google maps out of them or using Reuter’s Spotlight and embedding news in their iPhones or something , but in reality, only a very, very few or our readers/viewers/users even know what an RSS feed is.

But then we return to relevance…

There’s a lot of talk in the “media blogosphere” about what business models newspapers will have to come up with to stay alive much longer into the 21st century, and while no doubt a sound business model is important (duh), something I’ve been mulling over in my head seems to me to be of equal or near-equal importance and that is relevance.

Continue reading ‘Relevance’ »

Sactraffic.org isn’t dead by any means. I’ve been busily hacking on the sactraffic internals now for a while. Most of the changes you won’t see because they’re well behind the scenes, and most own themselves to my discovery of jQuery, a javascript library for, well, building stuff like sactraffic.org.

The jQuery library allowed me to simplify the code a lot and fix some minor annoyances (yay, opened incidents stay open through refreshes).

Of course I made some minor UI changes — this you can see — mostly to make things a little easier on odd size displays (looking at you, iPhone).

More notes in the About page.

Editor’s note: I’m not dead, just insanely busy so I know this is my first update in quite a while….

So I’m loving the new gig in the big paper’s newsroom. Despite the hype, I don’t think I’ve initiated any earth-shattering wizardry that will instantly “save the newspaper” from the perils that it faces.

Instead, what I have done is start with a series of baby steps, and mostly invisible ones at that. For one, I’ve been “fixing” the paper’s RSS feeds, starting with simply adding the reporter’s bylines to them. No, we didn’t have any bylines in our RSS feeds, go figure. Next up came photos: using Yahoo’s Media RSS extension I added each story’s photos to the feeds (yes, including the photoby ;)).

This, while useful in it’s own right (it looks very cool in Google Reader), it is a “baby step” on the way to other things. Now if I wanted to, I could, say, pull stories by reporter — or current photos by story — and place them on other sites. If I wanted to….

I’ve also gotten to play the roll of agent provocateur, a roll that gets little “press” but I don’t mind.

Watching our now photo-capable RSS feeds update throughout the day really illustrated something troubling: we’re really slow with updating photos. We can break a news story in seconds but for photos we usually have to wait for the shooter to come back to the building. It only made sense that I jumped at configuring a Nikon WT-2a for wirelessly sending photo’s off the camera.

While it was originally poopooed, when it was shown to work, it got some interest and now the paper has invested in another unit (a WT-4a for their newer D3 bodies) and when I started asking about Bluetooth GPS adapters for the photographers, I got some real traction instead of, “who are you again?” (geocoding photos and stories is another “on the list” thing of mine).

Also, it was I who passed along the specs of the Nokia N95 and info on Qik (not to mention helping to configure them) to the photographer who ultimately took them to the Olympic torch relay.

So I’m doing my thing… slowly, in baby steps.