Infospigot: The Chronicles, May13-24

May 24

One-man town Just a nice readfrom The New York Times on Millican, Oregon, a hamlet that for decades had justone resident, then zero, but is in the midst of a population boom (aseven-person family moved in). 12:49:44 PM    comment []

Layoff land A brief, non-exhaustive accounting of layoffs at my various workplacessince I left the world of secure employment at the San FranciscoExaminer a little more than eight years ago (when I got hired there,one staffer said, "As long as you don't hit anyone over the head with atwo-by-four, you can't get fired here." He was almost right: He gotaxed for trying to impersonate a worker at a hospital that was onstrike so he could get the inside scoop). A while back, I started tothink of the recurring staff-trimmings as resembling the show "Survivor," and I wondered when it would be my turn to get voted off the island. My time finally came: As Jeff Probst would say, "Dan, the tribe has spoken. ... It's time to go." Last shift at the Examiner ended at 2 a.m. Jan. 2, 1996. First day for "Project Gulliver" (Web startup that turned into something called NetGuide Live) began 2 p.m. Jan. 2, 1996. Layoffs: 1. November 1996: about 75 of 150 temporary and permanent employees. 2. December 1996: about 40 of remaining 75 employees. 2a. Left NetGuide in February 1997, which laid off remaining workers the following month and closed. I started at Wired News in March 1997]. 3. November 1997: About half a dozen Wired News employees, part of larger Wired layoff. I left Wired News for Wired magazine in June 1998, and left the mag in December '98 to freelance. I joined TechTV in January 2001. 4. November 2001: Laid off about half of 130-person staff hired for 8-hour daily news show. 5. April 2002: Laid off about half of remaining 65 staff members, canceled 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. shows, cut newscast to 30 mins. daily. 6. December 2002: Closed bureaus, laid off about 10 people. 7. May 2004: Goodbye, TechTV (my first personal layoff). 8:59:16 AM    comment []

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Swallowed up Not to self-promote too much, but it occurred to me while writingearlier that my involvement with TechTV actually goes farther back thanmy employment with the channel. About five and a half years ago, Ireported on ZDTV (the station's former name) for Wired: "You-Gotta-Be-Kidding TV."It was my first assignment after I left themagazine to try my hand at freelancing and my first long feature ever.It's pleasing to read now; I think it's held up pretty well. One small personal irony is that now I'mgoing back to freelancing, at least for the time being (I don'tanticipate doing a story on the channel now, though). A larger ironyis that, through a history that involved ownership and managementchanges and a couple huge shifts in programming philosophy, ZDTV/TechTVmet the big challenges I wrote about. It kept expanding its reach,building an audience (a small but growing one), and establishing an adbase that was far richer than what even the CEO anticipated when Iinterviewed him (the big win there was to get past the reliance ontech-related advertising and bring in consumer companies, like carmakers; in fact, it'ssimilar to the ad mix that made Wired a publishing phenomenon. Butdespite the success, the channel is history. On one level, the swallowing up of TechTV is just the way businessgoes. An early analysis of the sale called it "a teardown": Comcast wasbuying the property to knock down the house (our programming, staff,and other assets), keep the real estate (our access to 43 millionhomes) and put up something new there (its G4 game channel,which has reportedly run through a big pile of money and has just 13millionor so households). Fine, it's their dough, and you can play that way ifyou ante up. That doesn't mean it's a smart play, though you can't really blame the buyers. The perverse partisthe fact the former owner sold the property without any apparentconcern whether it would be torn down or not. All you people who'veworked to build this into something -- get moving, because thebuilding's coming down. 2:01:09 PM    comment []

Another goodbye to TechTV Surely you recall the lovely parting gift we received from TechTV the day after our layoff was announced. Well, someone had a different idea about what to do with it. Very Letterman-esque. 1:19:53 PM    comment []

TechLive: That's a wrap Lastnight was our last show. Odd to say it, given all the complaining I'vedone at work and away from work about wanting the show to be better,the stories to be better, everything to be better; and odd to say givenall my doubts about whether what I was, we were, doing was meaningfulat such a dark time in our world and our history; but: yes, I'm sad tosee it end and to have my connection to a pretty great group ofworkmates severed. I was there three years, four months, and two days(not that anyone's counting, and I still have to go in Monday for thefinal handshake and to turn in my laptop and keys and such). Anyway,the picture is a screen capture I ripped off a bulletin board on TechTVhelp guru Leo Laporte's site. I'm there somewhere in the back. 1:13:01 PM    comment []

Thursday, May 20, 2004

What your neighbor gives Hoo-ha today over a New York Times story about FundRace.org, a site that takes public information on campaign donations from the Federal Election Commissionand makes it easy to see who's donating how much to which candidates --and where the donors live. The concern is privacy, whether it's a goodidea to map the donations to names and addresses right in yourneighborhood. Here's the thing: All the information has been publiclyavailable online, and that's a central feature of the campaign laws tokeep things above board. All FundRace does is to eliminate a couplesteps online searchers have to make on the FEC and other sites. I thinkit's a great idea, even if it allows me to discover the embarrassingfact that three-fourths of  the Brekkes who show up in the database have contributed cash to the wrong guy. 3:51:56 PM    comment []

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Cement and you A pretty good story in the Wall Street Journal: A cement shortage isthreatening the building boom in the United States. That's because alot of the cement used to make the concrete that goes into homefoundations and big projects like the Bay Bridge project comes fromoverseas sources like Thailand and Colombia. The cement can't get herebecause a building boom in China is tying up ships bringingconstruction supplies there. "The cement shortages exacerbate a headache for the U.S. buildingindustry from increasingly scarce materials. Steel supplies have beentight, with prices for many products soaring more than 50% since January.And wood supplies have been so tight that the composite price of framinglumber -- a kind of index price that reflect a mix of lumber products --has jumped more than 60% to $463 as of Friday from $285 a year ago,according to Random Lengths, an industry newsletter in Eugene, Ore. Some ofthe price increases are being passed on to consumers." I also like the fact there's a newsletter called Random Lengths. 11:27:15 PM    comment []

Space history Not exactly the Apollo program, but a big piece of space history nonetheless: A bunch of amateur rocketeers actually succeeded in launching their crafton a suborbital flight (altitude 70 to 77 miles) earlier this week.It's the first time a privately funded, nonprofessional group with nogovernment ties or money has managed to put something in space. Theleader of the team is a former movie stuntman who lives in the Minneapolis area.        11:15:30 PM    comment []

Sunday, May 16, 2004

Listening to tonight ... "St. Dominic's Preview,"  by Van Morrison. Great from firstmeasure to last. Indulging in my play it over and over and over andover and over ... and over and over habit ... with one song inparticular: "Redwood Tree." In part: "Boy and his dog Went out looking for the rainbow You know what did they learn Since that very day Walking by the river And running like a blue streak Through the fields of streams and meadows Laughing all the way Oh redwood tree Please let us under When we were young we used to go Under the redwood tree And it smells like rain Maybe even thunder Won't you keep us from all harm Wonderful redwood tree." (Full lyrics at the very good Van Morrison Website.) 11:29:54 PM    comment []

Graduation day Just one small thing: Today, my son Eamon graduated from the Universityof California, Berkeley, one of 36 students in the East Asian Languagesdepartment who got their bachelor's degrees (Eamon's major wasJapanese). I forget the exact words, but after the diplomas were allhanded out, the department chair congratulated the group and saidsomething like, "You're now part of the community of educated men andwomen." What a great accomplishment for Eamon and the rest of thegroup. 11:08:05 PM    comment []

Saturday, May 15, 2004

Commutepicture (2)  From a little earlier on the same May 7 trip. The bridge andYerba Buena Island as the fog and low clouds blow in. Amazing light. 11:42:01 PM    comment []

Commute picture Ashot from the evening ferry on May 7, looking west down the OaklandEstuary past the freighters unloading at the port of Oakland to YerbaBuena Island and the western portion of the Bay Bridge. 11:34:01 PM    comment []

Thursday, May 13, 2004

What's news (2) Our preferred local news show -- amazing that such a thing still exists-- comes on at 10 p.m. But lately, it's had competition: From "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central. I'm sorry -- this might be the only way I can make it through our "Giant Mess O' Potamia". 11:31:22 PM    comment []

What's news (1) A double bankshot from the world of Journalism Navel Gazing: The Online Journalism Review brief on an item on the Poynter Institute site: "A new Intelliseek service could be a godsend for Web-savvy editors, Poynter Online reports. The "automated trend discovery system" Blogpulse.com compiles the most popular names, phrases and links in more than 1 million blogs to find out what issues and personalities might be tomorrow's front-page news. Steve Outing, a senior editor at Poynter, was surprised to see that the top news stories -- prisoner abuse and beheadings in Iraq -- did not top Blogpulse's "key phrase" list. Rather, according to Blogpulse, many Weblogs are more concerned with the Mexican air force's UFO sighting, Ralph Nader's Reform Party endorsement and Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader who allegedly beheaded American Nicholas Berg." Wow. Torturegate didn't make the list. Andparenthetically, but without the parens, I absolutely love the use of"allegedly" in that description of the Berg murder. Yes, journalistsmust pantomime their belief in the presumption of innocence andobjective distance in criminal matters (even though they generallyreport the cops' or government's word as gospel). But this is wherethat exercise turns fatuous. Someone proclaiming himself to be Zarqawiis carrying out the murder on camera; further the reported evidencepoints to Zarqawi's personal role; and finally, there's no legalallegation at issue -- there's a video, a claim, and a bounty on awanted man's head. So if you want to be careful, you could say "theal-Qaeda leader suspected of beheading of Nick Berg" or, "Zarqawi, theapparent self-proclaimed killer of Nick Berg" or something like that.But please, don't use "allegedly." 11:24:32 PM    comment []

Lovely parting gift Well, this is a crummy picture of a lovely objet d'art-- the paperweight TechTV gave us last Friday at the end of the meetingin which our layoff was explained. It's a heavy sucker -- exactly whatyou're looking for if you've got a homemade trebouchet. It took a certain kind of courage, or something, to hand these thingsout (we actually had to sign for them) instead of just taking them outto the landfill. Our camerafolks took the one pictured and put it on asmall turntable lighted from below. Totally prismatic. 4:45:16 PM    comment []

Constructive criticism One of the really disheartening things about Bush's Baghdad Blunder isthe fact we'll be stuck with the consequences for decades beyond thepoint where Laura Bush holds a press conference at the spread inCrawford to announce W doesn't remember who he is anymore, much lesswhy he wanted Iraq so bad. The challenge for the Bush opposition now isto offer some constructive ideas for how to do what the reigningboneheads seem incapable of -- actually improving the situation inIraq, if only as a prelude to our saying, "It's been nice, but now wehave to go home and have a nice cold one." An example of this sort ofconstructive approach comes from the liberal Center for AmericanProgress, which just put out a list of suggestions for what the U.S. authorities ought to do to deal with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. 4:23:11 PM    comment []

Sick Well, I didn't write yesterday. Felt flu-ish, though I wasn't totallyflattened. To break the monotony of aches. nausea and cold sweats, Ispent part of the day reading "The Devil in the White City,"the best-seller that weaves together the stories of 19th centuryAmerica's most marvelous world's fair and its most methodical serialmurders, which unfolded side by side in Chicago. The book's very good.I also pondered the cause of my brief illness -- purely physical, or acombination of a bug and overwhelming Iraq crap, between theBush-Rumsfeld post-Abu Ghraib publicity offensive and theheart-sickening murder of that poor kid from Pennsylvania. 4:09:44 PM    comment []

Last update: 6/30/04; 11:36:12 PM.