Understand what the media is, not what you want it to be

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Read it.
Learn it.
Understand it.

If you ask journalists why they chose their profession, they give a range of answers: to see the world, something new every day, I like to write. The most common answer is some variation on: to make the world a better place, to right wrongs and stick up for the little guy. Social justice, in other words. No one ever says, “I went into journalism because I have a passion for being… objective.” Or: “Detachment, that’s my thing. I’m kind of a detached guy, so I figured this would be a good field for me.” #

And yet… When they get there, people who always wanted to be journalists and make the world a better place find that the professional codes in place often prevent this. It’s hard to fight for justice when you have to master “he said, she said” stories. Voice is something you learn to take out of your work if you want to succeed in the modern newsroom. You are supposed to sacrifice and learn to report the story without attitude or bias creeping in. And then, if you succeed in disciplining yourself, you might one day get a column and earn the right to crusade for justice, to move and convince

There is a lot of crap inherent in the way we think about journalism, the only antidote is to think. For your self.
http://pressthink.org/2011/03/the-psychology-of-bloggers-vs-journalists-my-talk-at-south-by-southwest/

A new project

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STYkX

Hmmm, only exports as a link… Ok, try this….

Just toying around with some ideas for a new project. Need to find some better animation software though…

Dance, dance, dance

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Once again Brian Webb Dance Company presents Wen Wei Dance and Beijing Modern Dance Company. We saw them last year and it was pretty darn good, so I have high hopes for a repeat performance.

The performance is entitled Under the Skin, a little less suggestive than last year’s Cock-Tails.


Very interesting water motif and some gorgeous lighting. And, a dancer with a tattoo; very interesting.

Somebody bring me some H2O

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Tonight is Melissa Etheridge and someone Leslie likes called Serena Ryder at the Jube.

Never seen a rock concert at a concert hall before. Hopefully it’ll be better than Hiatt and Los Lobos were at the Winspear.

Well I’ve heard all of Serena’s songs before. Thank god for Leslie and her repeating songs over and over and over :-). Anyway, pretty much a baby Melissa in her hey day. Have to see if she can keep up.

Habbing Fun

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It was a sea of red last night at Northlands as we drank free beer, ate free food and generally lived it up in Northlands’ Skysuite, courtesy of one of my new colleagues.

And yea and verily the Oilers managed to win. Twas a good game and a grand time was had by all… by Leslie and I anyway…

Installing Melody

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So I came across Melody which is a open source extension of Movable Types blog software. It sound interesting so I thought I would give it a swing. One thing that was noted several times in my research is that Movable Type was waaaaay behind WordPress and its famous 5-minute install.

I have to say it’s true. I got most of the install going but nowhere did it mention that the url to initiate the install was http://domain.com/cgi-bin/install.cgi

Kinda an important fact. At this point I am now stuck because the install wizard states that I need HTML::Parser installed and my Snow Leopard machine is choking trying to install it. Part of the problem is I don’t know perl from a hole in the ground and part is because even though I think (though fink) I have got the latest package installed, the wizard doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the face: deep sigh. Now I am into something called CPAN and the coding is getting hot and heavy.
…
At this point I think the issue is I have not set up CPAN correctly because it keeps failing on the make command.
…
&^%$# I don’t have xcode installed since the upgrade to Snow Leopard. #$%@^! 3.5 gb download from the Apple Developer site
…

To enter CPAN: sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
install HTML::Parser

That was phase one. Then it turns out mysql isn’t a default install so I had to go back and try:
install DBD::mysql

My definition of geekery

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Chicago 16 states:
I love Eats, Shoots & Leaves, but I would have preferred to see “and” in the title rather than the ampersand &#8212 which would allow for a serial comma after “Shoots.”

Section 6.2, p. 307
Chicago Manual of Style, Sixteenth Edition

Sheesh!

Waiting for French Toast

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Real French toast tonight with a primativo and company. Why am I blogging? Well others need to visit and I’m a geek. Anyway, wordpress has another app update available and it is supposed to limit the crashing.

An image:

I still don’t get the insert metaphor. Now to try something else…