The Standard-Times has asked the Plymouth County district attorney to investigate the Board of Selectmen's heavy use of executive sessions in the hiring of a new town administrator.

In response, Assistant District Attorney Mary Lee on Wednesday sent a letter to the town's legal counsel, asking for explanations and for minutes of all meetings involved with the search, both public and private.

1. Become an anniversary sponsor. Anniversary activities will culminate with a celebration dinner and fundraiser on Jan. 14, 2010, at the Colonnade Hotel, Boston. Sponsors will be featured at the dinner and in publicity and other materials throughout the year. CLICK HERE to download a PDF of the MBF's sponsorship opportunity guide.
2. Donate items to the online silent auction. As part of the anniversary initiatives, the MBF will host an online silent auction of fun and unique items. This is an ideal opportunity for vendors to donate a product. CLICK HERE to donate an item for the silent auction.
3. Purchase an ad in the dinner program. The sponsorship guide includes information on program ads.
4. Attend the dinner. Tickets are not yet on sale, but save

more at the Daily Beast

Fin Donnelly, swimming the Fraser River in 1995.

In 1995, Fin Donnelly swam the 1,300-kilometre-long Fraser River to draw attention to the need to save B.C.’s rivers, an epic three-week experience I was fortunate enough to be part of. Tonight, Fin was elected as a Member of Parliament, in a by-election in New Westminster-Coquitlam. Congratulations to one of the most sincere, dedicated and focussed individuals I have ever met.

For one thing, we are all born with an innate music-making ability, but not everyone puts in the effort needed to become a musician. We’re all born (or at least socialized) with story-telling abilities, but not everyone becomes a journalist, either.

Some other similarities:

• It’s much more fun when it’s done with others. Playing with others draws out your best and exposes you to new ideas. So do good newsrooms, even those with only a couple of people in them. Experimenting with support always feels freeing.

• It is (relatively) easy to become borderline competent on the violin; getting beyond that takes hard, repeated work. It’s the same with journalism.

• Understanding and being able to truly play music requires a grasp of underlying principles: scales, musical structure, timing, rhythm and so on. Journalism has it’s underlying principles, too, such as solid grasp of writing effective sentences and understanding of structure.

• Playing the violin relies on “proper” technique, but if you watch enough of them, you’ll soon see that the idea of “proper” technique is different in every player. There are differences in the way bows are held, in arm positions, in the way the strings are attacked. Journalists, too, bring to bear their different strengths and ideals in applying the techniques of the trade.

• There are exceptional

I won’t be doing squibs as stand-alone posts. Instead, I’m saving the links to my Publish2 account, and then using the widget to bring them into the blog. At any time, the widget will show the latest 10 links, along with my comments on them.

You’ll also find lots of links in my Twitter feed, which is being served to the blog by the WordPress Twitter Tools plug-in.

There’s very little overlap between the two. If you’re following the blog through an RSS reader, you may want to also follow my Twitter feed or pick up an RSS feed of my Publish2 links.

False Creek Ferry working the Vancouver waterfront.

Riding the small people-moving ferries that work Vancouver’s False Creek is one of the pleasures of the city.

Portugal's daily i.

As I watch the lusciously designed, mainly Western European newspapers roll out at Juan Antonio Giner’s What’s Next: Innovations in Newspapers, I keep wondering what effect something like i would have on urban newspaper sales in North American cities.

i, according to Giner, is something newish: a daily newsmagazine. As you scroll through the pages at this post, it become pretty clear it’s something different, but still recognizably a newspaper. It isn’t all eye candy: my translation of the headline on the lead story on the front page in this post is “The story of a banker who hit bottom.” Sounds like serious journalism.

i isn’t unique. Through Juan Antonio I’ve seen others, including Publico (also in Portugal) and Eleftheros Typos (sadly, now gone). If you search his site, you can find examples of both. All of these newspapers share a bold, lively approach, with great use of colour, design and images. I’m going to presume the journalism lives up to the image.

Now, we know some stuff about North American newspapers. One is that, hidden behind the current panic over the recession-battered economics of newspapering, there remains the long and steady decline in the circulation of printed newspapers.

As part of the desire/need to reinvigorate my blogging, I’ve re-themed the site (using Valdimir Prelovac’s Amazing Grace). That’s meant some backend work and changes.

Amazing Grace uses categories for the lower of the two top index tabs. Given that I haven’t used categories for my posts since 2006, I’m in the middle of adding new categories that will serve, in effect, as separate sections of the blog. I’ve created one, so far, for photographs, as part of my plan to feature some of my photos more often. As I think of others, I’ll be adding them. The General category above contains just about everything at the site, going back to the early ’00s.

(The best way to find specific content at the site remains either search or the tag cloud.)

One other big change may by in the works: I’m investigating replacing Squibs postings with the Publish2 sidebar widget. I’ll let you know how that works out.

All of this effort will, I hope, lead to much more frequent blogging.

Meanwhile, though, here’s an example of me actually doing interactive narrative – and a newspaper writer, from the Guardian (of course), who seems to totally grok what it is we’re after:

But a Vancouver-based studio named Smoking Gun Interactive may be about to merge the worlds of console and alternative reality gaming into one experimental new form. The team has yet to announce a name for the project – its codename is currently X, and there’s an intriguing online preview named, Exoriare, a title drawn from Virgil’s ‘Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor’ – let an avenger arise from my bones.

more…

• Orin S. Kerr, professor of criminal law at the George Washington University Law School and author of a number of law review articles on the application of the Fourth Amendment to Internet and computer data. 
• Jason Paroff, director of computer forensics operations with the ESI Consulting practice at Kroll Ontrack.

Here’s the preview, along with a trailhead:

http://exoriare.com/

It should be available as a printed volume of 120 pages or so in a few months.

Writing for gamers is harder than writing for regular people because I actually feel more obligated to make it work on many levels at once. Gamers spend thousands of hours in a world, so it really has to be true down to levels of granularity an author could ignore in almost any other medium. But it’s great to know people are going as deep into this material as I am. Way more intimate a sensation, really.

Alas, he’ll be visiting via magnetic recording tape, and not in the flesh. He’s the next in our series of Media Squat Classics – people whose ideas and approaches form the basis of the media squat ethos.

We’ll be talking about Life Inc, especially in the context of how people create value on the net – and whether there’s a way for any significant number of us to make a living at it, anymore.

If you don’t go to Second Life, you can also watch it as live video on the web.