Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Moron the Seattle Newspaper Front

I commented a while ago about the possibility that one of Seattle’s two daily newspapers would close as a result of The Times’ attempt to end their Joint Operating Agreement.  In the meantime, the Times’ owner, Frank Blethen,  testified before a Senate committee in opposition to the FCC’s probable loosening of media ownership rules.  While I dislike the idea of becoming a one-newspaper town, I applauded Blethen’s testimony.  He is a bit of a loose cannon, however (literally - he once shot a neighbor’s dog), and seems to have been baited into making some inflammatory comments about a fellow newspaper owner.  I had to snicker at the fellow’s response:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/122519_insider19.html

DEMOCRACY AT STAKE? IDIOTIC, SAYS EXEC: Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen last week told a Senate hearing that letting companies own newspapers and TV stations in the same city — a proposal being considered by the Federal Communications Committee — is a really bad idea.

But he put it a little more personally than that and got a stinging response.

Blethen was asked whether William Dean Singleton, president of the newspaper industry’s lobbying group and chief executive of the MediaNews Group, is a “threat to democracy” because he owns 50 newspapers and supports cross-ownership.

Blethen, who owns three papers in Washington state and three more in Maine, responded, “Yes.” But he himself isn’t such a threat, he told Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H.

The next day, Singleton responded by calling Blethen “the village idiot of the newspaper industry,” according to The Washington Post.

Blethen was “commenting on Singleton’s business model, not Singleton personally,” Times spokeswoman Kerry Coughlin said Friday. Singleton’s comment, on the other hand …

Moron the Seattle Newspaper Front

I commented a while ago about the possibility that one of Seattle’s two daily newspapers would close as a result of The Times’ attempt to end their Joint Operating Agreement.  In the meantime, the Times’ owner, Frank Blethen,  testified before a Senate committee in opposition to the FCC’s probable loosening of media ownership rules.  While I dislike the idea of becoming a one-newspaper town, I applauded Blethen’s testimony.  He is a bit of a loose cannon, however (literally - he once shot a neighbor’s dog), and seems to have been baited into making some inflammatory comments about a fellow newspaper owner.  I had to snicker at the fellow’s response:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/122519_insider19.html

DEMOCRACY AT STAKE? IDIOTIC, SAYS EXEC: Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen last week told a Senate hearing that letting companies own newspapers and TV stations in the same city — a proposal being considered by the Federal Communications Committee — is a really bad idea.

But he put it a little more personally than that and got a stinging response.

Blethen was asked whether William Dean Singleton, president of the newspaper industry’s lobbying group and chief executive of the MediaNews Group, is a “threat to democracy” because he owns 50 newspapers and supports cross-ownership.

Blethen, who owns three papers in Washington state and three more in Maine, responded, “Yes.” But he himself isn’t such a threat, he told Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H.

The next day, Singleton responded by calling Blethen “the village idiot of the newspaper industry,” according to The Washington Post.

Blethen was “commenting on Singleton’s business model, not Singleton personally,” Times spokeswoman Kerry Coughlin said Friday. Singleton’s comment, on the other hand …

iLoo Update

It appears, contrary to my assumption below, that there really IS  a nascent tradition of Cinco de Mayo Fool’s jokes.  Microsoft has issued a statement that the iLoo is a hoax perpertrated by its UK division:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/121744_iloo13.html

One wonders if Microsoft actually did float the idea and is now seeking cover due to the derision it has received from some quarters, but it really did seem like a spoof to me at first.  Most of the corroborations for the story came from a PR firm in London.  Wouldn’t you love to be the person at that firm that takes the call from Steve Ballmer?

iLoo Update

It appears, contrary to my assumption below, that there really IS  a nascent tradition of Cinco de Mayo Fool’s jokes.  Microsoft has issued a statement that the iLoo is a hoax perpertrated by its UK division:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/121744_iloo13.html

One wonders if Microsoft actually did float the idea and is now seeking cover due to the derision it has received from some quarters, but it really did seem like a spoof to me at first.  Most of the corroborations for the story came from a PR firm in London.  Wouldn’t you love to be the person at that firm that takes the call from Steve Ballmer?

Thanks For Stopping

I’ve been Googled!  And it feels…kinda dirty.  It appears that folks searching for ‘Destiny Stahl’ (gotcha again!), the topless dancer that  Mike Price spent his last hours as one of the premier sports figures in the country with,  get a hit on my post several paragraphs below.  To their dismay, they find mere erudition, and prose that leaps dolphin-like in the sun-dappled waves of my blog, instead of prurience.  Sorry, no pictures here, at least of Destiny.  Although, after reading this week’s Sports Illustrated article ( http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/news/2003/05/07/mike_price/ ), the owner of Arety’s Angels sounds sort of interesting, in the gutty, entrepreneurial sense. 

TGIF

Headed home, finally.  I managed to salvage kudos, maybe even adulation, from the ashes of Thursday’s mediocrity.  That’s the life of the IT professional - we can work for 20 hours on an elegant, brilliant solution to a problem that seems pretty mundane to a client, and then do some offhand fillip that takes 20 minutes, and be declared a genius.  Regardless, my invoice goes out tomorrow.

PI 86′d?

Although I declared last week that my blog would be Seattle-oriented, my absence has muted my connection, even though I try to skim through the city’s newspapers each day on the net.  The most interesting thing about that sentence is the pluralization of the word ‘newspaper’.  Owing to a JOA (joint operating agreement) struck in the early 80s, plus the serendipity of talented journalists at both papers, we have had the luxury of two major dailies, while many cities have had to resign themselves to only one.  From what I’ve seen, the dailies in these cities become increasingly boosterish, particularly regarding pet projects of the owners, and shed their reportage in favor of purchasing cutesy, Readers Digest-like stuff from wire services.

It looks, however, as if our JOA is about to come apart, as The Seattle Times, which owns the presses and classified ad business, is seeking to jettison the Hearst-owned Post-Intelligencer, basically a death sentence.  I really don’t trust the Times to maintain its journalistic acuity once it doesn’t have to compete for eyeballs, and I believe the city will be poorer if the PI closes. 

More tomorrow - I need to sleep off the sweaty patina of travel.

Thanks For Stopping

I’ve been Googled!  And it feels…kinda dirty.  It appears that folks searching for ‘Destiny Stahl’ (gotcha again!), the topless dancer that  Mike Price spent his last hours as one of the premier sports figures in the country with,  get a hit on my post several paragraphs below.  To their dismay, they find mere erudition, and prose that leaps dolphin-like in the sun-dappled waves of my blog, instead of prurience.  Sorry, no pictures here, at least of Destiny.  Although, after reading this week’s Sports Illustrated article ( http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/news/2003/05/07/mike_price/ ), the owner of Arety’s Angels sounds sort of interesting, in the gutty, entrepreneurial sense. 

TGIF

Headed home, finally.  I managed to salvage kudos, maybe even adulation, from the ashes of Thursday’s mediocrity.  That’s the life of the IT professional - we can work for 20 hours on an elegant, brilliant solution to a problem that seems pretty mundane to a client, and then do some offhand fillip that takes 20 minutes, and be declared a genius.  Regardless, my invoice goes out tomorrow.

PI 86′d?

Although I declared last week that my blog would be Seattle-oriented, my absence has muted my connection, even though I try to skim through the city’s newspapers each day on the net.  The most interesting thing about that sentence is the pluralization of the word ‘newspaper’.  Owing to a JOA (joint operating agreement) struck in the early 80s, plus the serendipity of talented journalists at both papers, we have had the luxury of two major dailies, while many cities have had to resign themselves to only one.  From what I’ve seen, the dailies in these cities become increasingly boosterish, particularly regarding pet projects of the owners, and shed their reportage in favor of purchasing cutesy, Readers Digest-like stuff from wire services.

It looks, however, as if our JOA is about to come apart, as The Seattle Times, which owns the presses and classified ad business, is seeking to jettison the Hearst-owned Post-Intelligencer, basically a death sentence.  I really don’t trust the Times to maintain its journalistic acuity once it doesn’t have to compete for eyeballs, and I believe the city will be poorer if the PI closes. 

More tomorrow - I need to sleep off the sweaty patina of travel.

Cursed Cursor

I use a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop that’s a little over 2 years old.  I am mostly happy with it, especially after I jacked the ram to the max, but I have this recurring problem where my cursor becomes unmoored and scurries across the screen to cower in the margins.  The main pointer device (when I don’t have a real mouse plugged in) is a Synaptics touchpad.  There’s also a pencil-eraser device in the middle of the keyboard, but it doesn’t have nearly the sensitivity of the touchpad.  When the cursor has pinned itself against one of the margins, though, I can sometimes use the eraser-mouse to muscle it back out so I can at least save some valuable piece of work.  It turns out that the problem is loose or damaged connections somewhere under the wrist-rests, as I can press them and the cursor dances as if hit with a cattle prod.  Sometimes it gets pissed and starts to record left-clicks as it careens about St. Vitus-like, deleting stuff, exiting programs and, once, doing Start-Shutdown-Restart.  I treat it with a little more respect now that I know it has a temper.

I have a service contract on the laptop, and can call Dell to get it serviced.  I’ve used this service a couple of times - once, when my screen was going south and I was working in Milwaukee, one of their guys showed up at my client’s site and replaced the screen.  The client was mucho jealous.  Another time, when I was having this cursor problem the first time, and a guy came to the house to replace something under the keyboard.  It’s worked fine until about 2 weeks ago, when the cursor got wanderlust again.  You, gentle reader, are allowed to flee from my writing if it displeases you, but I pay the damn cursor to sit there quietly until I need to cut, paste or flat-out ditch some screed I’m working on.

I’ll call Dell soon, but it makes me weary right now to think of dealing with a rookie helpdesk person as he/she works through a checklist of dead-end diagnostics.  I’ll probably have to uninstall & install drivers, reboot several times, at least once in ‘Safe’ mode, before I get passed on to someone who has the authority to dispatch someone to apply the solution I already know is needed.  Noblesse oblige - we all started our computer careers as quaking, clueless helpdesk fodder dreading the next call.

Work Weak

Speaking of dead-end and clueless, this has been sort of a blah week, workwise.  My plane got in late Sunday night/Monday morning, and I’ve been short on sleep ever since.  Also, I’ve had extended periods of struggle with the niggling stuff that clients can’t see.  And after reading Kat’s http://blogs.salon.com/0001068/ experience today, I begin to suspect that she’s working with software that’s a lot more interesting than mine.  Looking forward to my flight back home tomorrow night.

Cursed Cursor

I use a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop that’s a little over 2 years old.  I am mostly happy with it, especially after I jacked the ram to the max, but I have this recurring problem where my cursor becomes unmoored and scurries across the screen to cower in the margins.  The main pointer device (when I don’t have a real mouse plugged in) is a Synaptics touchpad.  There’s also a pencil-eraser device in the middle of the keyboard, but it doesn’t have nearly the sensitivity of the touchpad.  When the cursor has pinned itself against one of the margins, though, I can sometimes use the eraser-mouse to muscle it back out so I can at least save some valuable piece of work.  It turns out that the problem is loose or damaged connections somewhere under the wrist-rests, as I can press them and the cursor dances as if hit with a cattle prod.  Sometimes it gets pissed and starts to record left-clicks as it careens about St. Vitus-like, deleting stuff, exiting programs and, once, doing Start-Shutdown-Restart.  I treat it with a little more respect now that I know it has a temper.

I have a service contract on the laptop, and can call Dell to get it serviced.  I’ve used this service a couple of times - once, when my screen was going south and I was working in Milwaukee, one of their guys showed up at my client’s site and replaced the screen.  The client was mucho jealous.  Another time, when I was having this cursor problem the first time, and a guy came to the house to replace something under the keyboard.  It’s worked fine until about 2 weeks ago, when the cursor got wanderlust again.  You, gentle reader, are allowed to flee from my writing if it displeases you, but I pay the damn cursor to sit there quietly until I need to cut, paste or flat-out ditch some screed I’m working on.

I’ll call Dell soon, but it makes me weary right now to think of dealing with a rookie helpdesk person as he/she works through a checklist of dead-end diagnostics.  I’ll probably have to uninstall & install drivers, reboot several times, at least once in ‘Safe’ mode, before I get passed on to someone who has the authority to dispatch someone to apply the solution I already know is needed.  Noblesse oblige - we all started our computer careers as quaking, clueless helpdesk fodder dreading the next call.

Work Weak

Speaking of dead-end and clueless, this has been sort of a blah week, workwise.  My plane got in late Sunday night/Monday morning, and I’ve been short on sleep ever since.  Also, I’ve had extended periods of struggle with the niggling stuff that clients can’t see.  And after reading Kat’s http://blogs.salon.com/0001068/ experience today, I begin to suspect that she’s working with software that’s a lot more interesting than mine.  Looking forward to my flight back home tomorrow night.