Anyway, I just finished another set of updates, though this time around the changes are more subtle. Outwardly I added support for geotagging the incident location in the Twitter updates so if you use a Twitter client that supports geotagging, the location of the incidents will appear with the tweet.

Behind the scenes I put in two additional changes. First I converted to Twitter’s OAuth mechanism for authentication, which should provide some more security under the hood and second, I switched to Google’s Closure compiler which provides better javascript compression than YUI Compressor which I adopted back in October.

Last, but not remotely least — and this was something I did back in October — the sactraffic.org code is publicly available via github under an OpenBSD-style BSD license. You can check out the code there and suggest changes.

and yes, this post also serves as a fine test of the Flickr slideshow embed code…

The lettering on it reads:

There were once 7 of those at The Sacramento Bee but today there is just one: and it is mine.

All this brouhaha about newspaper’s “original sin” (see: Alan Mutter, Steve Buttry, Howard Owens, Steve Yelvington and lets not forget Jeff Jarvis for starters) got me thinking about those pre-historic online newspaper days. In looking back, I don’t see any singular “original sin” per se. If anything a Gomorrah-like den of iniquity perhaps, but no single point of failure.

Everything was new and we were pulling the whole thing our of our collective asses as we went (perhaps that was sin #1).

There we’re only 7 of us back then, and of those only 4 who’s day-to-day job was to work on this newfangled web thing. We had a web designer, two content people and me, a “web engineer”. There was also a guy we didn’t see much of at first who had something or other to do with advertising (sin #2 anyone?) and there was, of course, a manager ostensibly in charge of it all. He, in turn, reported to the Director of Advertising.

Yeah, you read that right, sacbee.com was born as a subset of the Advertising department (sin #3?).

We we’re supposed to launch the new site on the 1st of July, but even after months of planning and work we weren’t ready. Our new go-date slipped to the 15th, and that’s when we ultimately launched. I remember staying insanely late that night before, well past midnight, and on the way in the next morning I passed the web designer on his way out — that’s just how we did things then.

I also remember a few days before launch the advertising guy mentioning that we needed a way to rotate the ads on the site, oh and by the way count the “hits” on them too. From scratch, on the eve of launch, I wrote an ad management setup (sin #4?). It was cartoonishly crude by any standards of today, but it did the job — that’s just how we did things then.

On the first day of sacbee.com’s life we broke 100,000 hits. That was damn good for a heretofore unknown site in 1996 and I was pretty pleased about it. The ad guy had mentioned, however, something about hits not being all that important, that he wanted something called “pageviews”. Eh, what the hell was a pageview? (sin #5). A little “grep” action on the Apache logs and we had pageview counts — that’s just how we did things then.

The pageviews were much lower .

After launch all of us got taken out to lunch. Not to the teriyaki place down the street, which would later become a staple, or anything along those lines, oh no. This was still the Golden Age of Newspapers and in case that was unclear they took us out to the Capitol Club, an exclusive, members-only type of place with cloth napkins and actual silver silverware where not having a jacket would generally be enough to keep you out. As we ate, Erwin Potts made an appearance, congratulating us on our accomplishment, as did McClatchy’s then brand new CEO, some baby-faced guy by the name of Gary Pruitt.

Pruitt asked me right off how many hits we’d had and I told him. I was impressed that he knew enough about the operation to even ask that. When he then added, “and how many pageviews?” I was flat out stunned. Crap, I’d just been told about these so-called pageviews earlier in the day, clearly this new guy was sharp.

On the technical side, our operation was supported by Nando.net, the technology company acquired by McClatchy as part of it’s purchase of the Raleigh News and Observer. Nando.net, which would later become “Nando Media” and ultimately “McClatchy Interactive“, was at the time still going through some of the somewhat violent upheaval that came as McClatchy tried to er… align their strategic direction with that of McClatchy’s… ahem (there’s probably a sin in there too).

Because of this, their attitudes toward us were somewhat, fluid. Some of them didn’t give a rip, about us, our needs or their roll in them. Others flat out resented us. Having to watch while 70% of your friends and coworkers are cut loose will do that. It was not uncommon at all in those days to pick up the phone and be told that the person you were working with just last week was no longer with the company.

Anyway, I digress somewhat, the point to take from all this is that sacbee.com, in it’s earliest form, was hosted on a single Sun Ultra 1/140, that literally sat on some guy’s desk at Nando.net (sin #… what are we up to?) — yeah, that’s just how we did things then.

Despite some recent revisionist history, our relationship with the newsroom in those days was nothing short of frigid (sin #whatever). There were internal politics which I’ll never understand and there was undoubtedly the fact that we were all 20-something upstarts (mind you, all of us came from newspaper backgrounds) which couldn’t have helped. That the then Executive Editor, Gregory Favre, would have his secretary print out his emails and he’d only reply, in writing, via interoffice mail probably set some kind of “tone” we were unaware of. In hindsight, being a part of Advertising I’m sure made us some kind of radioactive to the newsroom as well.

So, we were at the mercy of the “nightly dump” for most of our content. In those days the “nightly dump” was a series of quasi-formatted text files regurgitated out of the even-then-archaic SII editorial system at around 2:00 am every morning. There were no end of problems with these files and even Perl’s legendary Regular Expressions could only do so much. In the end it was a torturous shift, stepping through news stories via a crude web-based front end at 4:00am, that got the bulk of our content up by 7:00am — that’s just how we did things then.

Wait, come to think of it, not much has changed here (sin #2,643).

So there were lots of sins because we were making it up as we went along. Ultimately we figured it out though, learning from our mistakes (remind me to tell you about the time no one paid the sacbee.com DNS registrar bill and the domain got revoked) and eventually we became the savvy and knowledgeable web staff that you’d assume would be at a mid-size metro daily newspaper.

Over time, however, the various kaleidoscopes wandered off, tucked into boxes and carried off by their owners, off to different jobs or different careers. Perhaps that was the original sin.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. — Voltaire

Man I’ve heard that quote a lot recently, especially in the online news arena. It sounds all impressive and high falutin’, you know, being a quote from Voltaire and all. The problem is the above quote is almost always uttered as an excuse for something less than perfect or good… mediocrity.

Now, some would say that this is an outgrowth of the traditional newspaper mindset where existing in a virtual monopoly state — where “good enough” was in fact all that was needed for 30% profit margins — for so long has dulled that mindset to the realities of actual competition.

I don’t know that I’d go quite that far (tho it is fun to theorize on occasion) but I do bristle at the quote. Online operations are exceedingly competitive — and are becoming more so almost daily with the advent of local news blogs and the like — so if there are people running around thinking we can aim low and still be successful, well…

Since getting a 105mm Micro lens (its real name is AF-S VR Micro-NIKKOR 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED but yeesh…) I’ve been experimenting a lot with macro photography or in other words shooting reeally, reeally small things up close. Since, I’ve never owned a macro lens before, it’s been kindof a learning experience.

The first thing you figure out when working up real close is that as far as focus goes, there’s little room for slop. Tilt your head a little bit and the image is out of focus. No, not “a little soft” but blown-out blurry.

Of course there’s auto-focus, but when shooting macro it’s not always a big help. Generally auto-focus works pretty poorly up close, it simply pushes the limits of the technology. You can hear the motor frantically trying to move the lens back and forth that 1/16th of an inch you need to get that bug or whatever in focus (usually while you’re holding your breath and trying not to wiggle the camera, which when you do throws the auto-focus off even more).

Now if it’s dark, or you’re sporting an astigmatism in your shooting eye like me, we’ll then sometimes you might have to punt and just use AF. But be warned, if you use auto-focus for macro work it has to be dead on accurate. I used the wicked cool “AF Fine Tune” feature of my D300 to kick the focus of my 105mm macro lens back just a bit (+8 if you care). It’s not that the lens isn’t sharp, it’s just that “a wee bit” is the difference between a bug’s eye being tack sharp and nothin’ but blur.

My favorite subject at the moment is bugs and other creepy-crawlies, probably because they look so creepy up close and given the semi-rural area where I live, there’s a healthy pool to choose from.

Bugs however tend to move around a lot, and often times pretty dang quickly, so they offer additional challenges. I try to use small apertures to squeeze out the most depth-of-field that I can, in case the little buggers move. f/22 gives a little bit of leeway but the downside is that sometimes a little bokeh is worth having. f/5.6 on the other hand is pushing it. That wide and you can have a spider’s eye sharp but the rest of it too blurred to be recognizable.

I’ve found having a strobe handy is a huge help. Even a small strobe can easily throw enough light for f/22 at close range and have enough left to cycle quickly. I tend to pop my SB-800 on the camera, sometimes with the diffuser, and let the iTTL mode do the right thing, usually matching whatever f-stop I choose. Other times I just use it for fill.

It’s a lot of fun, and along the way I’m picking up a lot about the various critters we share this part of the world with. Did you know there are tarantulas in California?

Of course you don’t need a marco lens for those.

Early in my photojournalism career a Sacramento Union photographer once gave me some simple advice: get a hold of all the film you can and shoot it up. But as I’ve gotten back into photography, even when shooting digital which isn’t constrained by the limits of a 36 exposure roll of film, I’ve found it’s just sometimes easier to say to yourself: nah, I’ll shoot it next time…

You don’t make good pictures that way.

Tonight as the midwest-grade thunder cracked and lightning lit the sky up, I finally remembered those words and decided, no, it was going to be this time and I headed out into the rain.

I’m thinking that’s how you make good pictures.

I won’t repost the whole thing here but I will pull out the interesting bits…

We will begin to move away from putting all of our newspaper content online for free. Instead, we will explore a variety of premium offerings that apply real value to our print content….

Charging for content is of course is all in vogue these days and in some cases might be smart but I think that if Media News tries it (or rather when Media News tries it) they’ll succeed only in driving traffic (and revenue) to the local (free) alternative media sites. As they sit in the middle of a very technology savvy area I think their risks are crazy high here.

They go on with:

We will begin differentiating our sites from the newspaper and focus on strategies designed to reach younger audiences and extend our reach. The websites, newspaper.com as we call them now, will become a different product. This new site, which we have been calling news.com, will be a regional news site that is actively managed to present breaking news. It will continue to draw a content from the newspaper (but probably in a more abbreviated form), but will also have user-generated content, community involvement and third party content. News.com will continue to serve our existing audience, which spends a lot of time on our sites, and drive significant traffic. They like and depend on our sites for their national and local news. We must not alienate them as we strive to expand our audience and attract younger people and non newspaper subscribers. Obviously, our sites must draw upon the content of the newspaper, but the presentation of that content will be different. News.com will be an entry page to new content offerings, local retail advertising opportunities and premium offerings.

This is the real nugget. I’ve always felt that the newspaper and the “newspaper.com” were different things and so should be handled as different things. Most newspapers today see their web sites as just electronic versions of their print offerings which is (to me) a big part of why many are struggling. Media News looks like they finally want to differentiate the two and I applaud this. They even go so far as to want to take it a bit further (note the distiction in “newspaper.com” and “news.com”).

This is a win but then further down they stumble headlong into 2002.

“We will build a new local utility site (Local.com), which is an ecosystem of local information, resources, user content, shopping guides, and marketplaces.”

Er, a portal? Seriously? In 2009? Good luck with that.

But if throwing back to 1998 wasn’t enough. Then someone had to really stir it up with a rousing game of buzzword bingo:

In order to execute this vision, we have agreed that these new strategies will be done with a template approach, using a menu of common tools and vendors. We will take advantage of the size of MNG to leverage enterprise solutions and build off a common platform that allows for fast implementation and a companywide rollout.

What this means is that they’re gonna build one site and change out the masthead for each affiliated newspaper. Epic fail.

Users know when you’re “phoning it in” and nothing says “half-assed” like identical sites with the word “San Jose” crossed out and the word “San Francisco” in it’s place. Especially in a tech-savvy area like the Bay Area. No, someone was simply buzzword drunk here and, if they really do try to leverage enterprise solutions and build off a common platform they will in reality only deploy mediocracy when they need to be competing against the best and the brightest.

So Media News gets points for the whole differentiating the newspaper and the “news.com” thing but man, they just can’t seem to wait to get their whole face in front of the shotgun with their other ideas. It’s OK though, I figure that in a few years there will be a wicked liquidation sale where I can pick up all kinds of retro newspaper stuff.

So I got a Kindle 2 for my birthday this year and now that I’ve taken some time to get a feel for it, I thought I’d share my thoughts a bit.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Kindle is the latest “e-book reader” from our friends at Amazon.

The attraction of the Kindle is that one can carry a huge number of books around in a package roughly the size of a DVD case with even more books on demand wirelessly from the online Kindle store. This alone is awesome! Add to it bookmarks, highlights, searching and on-the-fly definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ve got a powerful tool. Throw in syncing across multiple readers (like the new iPhone app) and it becomes almost insanely great.

But not quite…

The prevailing theory — written about at length on the web — is that the Kindle was primarily designed for book readers and this seems to make a lot of sense as the book metaphor is used heavily throughout the device. But what happens when an avid screen reader, a user — like me — who’s already familiar with the digital world, finally decides to, excuse the phrase, re-kindle his book reading?

Well, the result is decidedly mixed.

The need for speed…

First off face it, the Kindle, for all its coolness, is dog slow. Crazy slow in fact. Every action, from sliding the power switch to wake it or turn it on to turning pages or scrolling through menus, is slow. I suppose, if you had no prior experience with technology, like desktop computers or mobile phones, you might not notice the molassis feel of the thing (and I’m talking about the Kindle 2 here, it’s supposed to be faster than the Kindle 1 which must have been simply maddening to use) but being familiar with how technology is supposed to work, the Kindle’s sluggishness stands out. Even the iPhone — no speed deamon itself — feels spunky by comparison.

I don’t know if the speed is due to the device itself (perhaps somewhere in the firmware/software?) or due to the revolutionary “e-ink” screen or both. Either way, it requires some getting used to, some “re-adjusting of expectations”, and that’s not a good thing.

About that screen

The screen on the Kindle has gotten a lot of press because it uses “e-ink” technology and it’s easily one of the most talked about aspects of the Kindle. The e-ink screen is said to be great for reading and greater still for low power consumption. Supposedly, it is only when the screen is actually updating that it uses any power but when it’s actually displaying something, it uses no power at all.

While all that is pretty cool, and gives the Kindle an incredibly long battery life, the reality is the screen is no great shakes. It’s lower contrast than I would prefer (so much for “great for reading”) and did I mention it is very slow to update?

Furthermore Amazon gushes about the new Kindle 2 supporting 16 levels of gray. 16 levels of gray?!? When did it become 1990? My old Apple Macintosh SE/30 did that… and was faster at it too.

Nor does it have a damn backlight. Yeah, this seems petty, a missing backlight, but again it is something I’ve grown used to. I have no problem reading off my laptop, or iPhone, or a Handspring before that, or a Newton before that and all with a backlight. I do have a problem sitting comfortably down somewhere after the kids have gone to bed only to realize I need to turn on a light I never had to before.

So is it a book, or isn’t it?

The application of the aforementioned book model is rather interesting. On the Kindle there are no “pages” per se, only “locations”. The idea being that if you change the font size, which you can do quite easily, the page numbers will change but the “location” won’t. Ok fine, but why do the page buttons say “next page” and “prev page” if there are no pages? This hurts my head.

As an avid screen reader I found myself frustrated by the inability to scroll. I like to scroll through documents on the screen as I read them, after all this is the way we’ve done it on computers for years. Now, I get why you can’t scroll on the thing, the e-ink screen can’t update fast enough, but the thing is on more than one occasion I found myself at the top of a page and wanting to reference back only a few lines but this necessitated a “prev page” click. Because the page changes are so slow this becomes almost tedious — not at all like its physical book analog. And multiple page turns, to get more than one page forward or back, are just not worth doing at all.

You can see where the speed issue becomes a problem.

It’s really about the content

Ah the dream of digital content: the exact digital copies, the intra-book navigation from a table of contents, notes being automatically linked… all manner of digital nirvana, right?

Not so much. Like with physical books, in many cases there are different “printings” of the Kindle versions of books and this makes no sense to me. I still can’t figure it out. With books it makes sense, there is a finite number of copies of a physical book, but with digital copies why would you need more than one?

Unless maybe you were updating a book release with “bug fixes”, but now we’re talking about software and not book, right? Well, once you start putting features and DRM in your books, that become software. Tell me that doesn’t make your head swim.

On that thread, I’ve been surprised to find that all AZW files (the Kindle’s native file format) are not created equal and there’s no indication of the quality of the digital version when you go to buy it. You may or may not have a “table of contents” and if you do, it may not be linked. Chapters may start at weird places on the screen and what’s more stunning is the prevalence of hyphenation in odd places (like in the middle of a line). This is a dead giveaway that the content is not an actual digital copy so much as an OCR scan of an existing book.

Silly me, when I buy a Kindle version of a book, and from Amazon no less, I kinda want… no expect… it to be all “kindley”.

I’m wondering if an SPARS code type of thing is needed for the Kindle files where it denotes if a file is a digital copy of and OCR scan or an actual digital copy of the original files.

What about newspapers?

Well, despite my background and my profession, I must confess that I have not yet even looked at a newspaper on my Kindle. Thing is, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to. The idea of a full sized newspaper reduced to the Kindle screen is comical to me. The idea of a gaggle of random stories (aka a newspaper) delivered to my Kindle magically in the night seems, to an avid online reader anyway, almost quaint. I’d be more interested, I suppose, in a Kindleized version of a web site, which happens to completely defeat the point in the first place. And besides don’t we already call that RSS?

No, newspapers on the Kindle are silly, leave it at that.

It ain’t all bad, tho

Ok, it sounds like I’ve bashed a lot on the Kindle, and I have, but it’s important to consider that the Kindle is very much a step in the right direction. I dearly love its size, that it’s a library in my hand, that I can pick up reading on a completely different device right where I left off on the first and that it’ll run forever on a single charge (well, compared to most other electronics that is).

True, much of the Kindle technology isn’t quite where it needs to be yet, e-ink technology certainly isn’t, but it’s damn close. Certainly close enough for the early adopter crowd (like me) to be thrilled to have one. I know very well that technology moves fast and I fully expect to look back two years from now at what will then be the comically out-of-date Kindle 2 and be amazed that we used to use it… and that we liked it.

It’s no secret these days that newspapers are hurting (well, to be more accurate most newspaper companies are hurting, the newspapers they hold are generally still profitable enterprises) and a lot of people have been wondering what it will be like when the newspapers are all gone.

Well hopefully not like this.

Recently when the Sacramento Bee Newspaper Guild entered into concession negotiations with Bee Management, the local TV stations and “alternative media” jumped all over it and gave us all a glimpse into some ugly dystopian universe where the media eschews accuracy for what, speed? pretty pictures? I’m not sure.

First up was local TV station KXTV News10 with their atrocious handling of the whole story. From their end-of-the-world headline, Sacramento Bee Fights for Survival to their cartoonish editing online:

Advertising assistance Cindi Taylor has worked for the paper for ten years. “It’s pretty grim. It’s hard to watch people lose accounts,” Bee advertising assistance Cindi Taylor, who has worked at the Bee for 10 years.

They got so much wrong in their stories that it was laughable especially when a simple look at the Newspaper Guild blog provided far more information and contradicted a lot of what was being reported on TV.

But the negotiation teams weren’t laughing. The garbage stories (one media outlet at one point suggested the Bee was going to lay off over 500 people in the mistaken belief that the California WARN act was triggered at 500 people and not 50) were causing serious problems with advertisers who suddenly believed the Bee was right on the heels of the Rocky Mountain News which published its last edition last week when clearly it is not.

If TV outlets and other news sources can’t even get a media story right, how can they be expected to get anything else right? Yes the Bee gets things wrong on occasion and of course people think the Bee is as incompetent as the next media outlet, but I know these guys — the reporters and editors — and they really take this stuff seriously. They at least try.

If they don’t, who will?

So this year the wife and I decided to go to San Diego for this year’s family “vacation”. I say “vacation” in quotes because as any parent knows, there’s not a whole lot of vacationing that goes on during family vacations. There’s running after kids, who’s got the snacks, honey where are my socks, STOP HITTING ME, turn left here… NO NOT HERE, where’s your boarding pass, I’M HUNGRY!… eh, you get the picture.

We’d originally planned to just hit Sea World and then spend a few days at Legoland when the idea of checking out the USS Midway Museum came up. Since my father-in-law was stationed on it during Vietnam it seemed like a cool idea. Then since Ryan just did a report on it, we tacked on a trip to the Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcala. For any readers not in the 4th grade, that would be the Mission in San Diego (and for non California readers, the Missions are a California thing… look ‘em up).

Anyway, here are some notes on each:

• The USS Midway

  The first stop upon landing was a run through the USS Midway Museum which was mildly interesting. Katie, of course couldn’t care less and Ryan didn’t really grasp what it was all about, although he found the maze-like passageways through it kinda fun (more on that theme later).

  I found it kinda “just OK” too until I wandered into the CIC. The CIC was done up just as it was during Desert Storm when the USS Midway served as the command center for the US Navy operations in that theater. When I say done up I mean right down to the actual CNN broadcasts from the night of January 17th, 1991. That was over-the-top cool.

  I was also taken by how cramped the thing was. An older gentleman who was as tall as I am casually commented, “I’m glad I was in the Army.” I couldn’t agree more.

• Sea World

  Next up was a day at Sea World. The neatest attraction there — after the dolphins and Shamu of course — was this huge, elevated play area. That kept Ryan’s focus for over an hour while he ran amok across the various bridges, nets and tubes and such (aka “maze-like passageways”).

  Then there were the various enclosures (yay sharks!) and Ryan and I “flew” to the Arctic and we had a lot of fun with that. Our course all of us also enjoyed the Pets Rule show immensely as well. Did you know they can train house cats?

• Legoland

  The main event, of course, was two days at Legoland. Ryan’s favorite “ride” was the Pharaoh’s Revenge, which was basically a two-story cage where you could shoot foam balls at each other. That and The Hideaways, where he could again run amok all over the place… yep, you guessed it, through the “maze-like passageways”.

  Katie liked the smaller rides, and getting her face painted. We stayed off the many water rides as it was too cold for getting wet. We also stayed off the roller coasters because we’re all wusses.

  Speaking of the weather, it was cool but not overly cold and we only got a little rain at the end of the day Friday. What was somewhat sad was that we reportedly got a few inches of snow at home while we were down in San Diego (we only get snow once or twice a year so it’s still fun when it happens).

  The Sea Life aquarium at Legoland was pretty good too, smaller than Sea World of course but just as good aquarium to aquarium.

• Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcala

  The last stop was the San Diego Mission. It was pretty neat in it’s own way, being that it was the first church in California. By this time, however, we were all pretty tired but Ryan still found some of it interesting.

  It was neat to walk around the actual Mission that Ryan did his 4th grade report report on. I have to say, after seeing the real deal, his cardboard mockup was pretty good.

• Other stuff

  Instead of lugging my laptop and the Nikon D300 (and the suite of lenses and gunk that go with it) along like I did for Disneyland last year, this year I elected to go über light, carrying only my iPhone and my new Panasonic DMC-LX3.

  The camera performed admirably, putting up with all manner of the bad shooting conditions I shoved at it. It does shoot a little “hot” so a -2/3 EV adjustment made it all good. 400 photos made for a decent pool to pull a Flickr set from.

  However, on the phone side, the iPhone ate itself on the flight down. The music I was listening to stopped and the screen went all static-y (seriously, it was kinda neat). And then it went dead as, well, a brick. This was of moderate seriousness because we’ve found the iPhone’s GPS a real plus on far away trips and both parents having working phones is a must in large amusement parks.

  So I looked up an Apple Store in San Diego and took it in. They happily replaced the dead iPhone with a new one but then that one turned out to have a bad ringer switch — which broke off the next day — so that resulted in another stop at the Apple Store in Carlsbad for another new iPhone. Two iPhones later and I was good-to-go.

All in all, a good time.