I Can Take a Hint

Either I’m off the radar or my blog design is average at best, which isn’t good enough.  Either way, I’d rather make this list than not.

I’ve got work to do on both fronts.  I’m a little behind on some other stuff right now, but hope to improve on both fronts by the end of Q2.

A Great Story Opportunity

A while back, I wrote a post about a few advantages newspapers have in the market and how they could use them to remain relevant. Using these assets–excellent writing, investigative journalism, and local marketplace branding–newspapers can give us something no one else can.

Today in the KNS, at least on their web site, there is a relatively short piece from the AP about a man who escaped prison 46 years ago and has been apprehended. This is the exact type of story I’d love to see local newspapers tackle. It’s the perfect opportunity for them to give me something no one else can give me.

Leroy Albert Morgan’s crimes occurred in Hamilton County, he escaped from a Nashville prison, and he was caught in East Tennessee, so it is of local interest. Using great writing and investigative journalism, why not tell us this story? Take us beyond, “he escaped in 1961, he’s been using an alias, and he was arrested this week.”

Tell us the story.

How did he escape prison, and how was he able to avoid authorities for so long? Has he been in Tennessee the entire time? Was he assisted by friends and family–how many people were in on it? What has he done in the time since the escape? What did the State do immediately following the escape to try to catch him, and why did these efforts fail? What (exactly) have they done since? How did they eventually track him down, how long did it take to find him, and how long have they known his whereabouts?

Seriously…this is the stuff movies (or at least made for TV movies) are made of. A good great writer can do some investigative journalism and tell us a great story from so many angles–the escapee, his friends and family, the penal system. And again, most bloggers don’t have the time and resources available to cover something like this.

White-ity White

HT to Coma for introducing me to Stuff White People Like.

After spending a little time here, I’ve discovered I’m a lot whiter than I thought I was, especially with this timely post on The Wire.

Check it out…lots of funny stuff.  It’s definitely one that will stay in the feed reader.

Yahoo! With a Huge Web Hosting Announcement

The other day I mentioned Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo!

Today, Yahoo! made a pretty interesting announcement…Yahoo! Web Hosting
now provides UNLIMITED disk space and UNLIMITED bandwidth for less than $12. That means that those videos you’ve been uploading to YouTube (owned by Google) because they are big and take up bandwidth can now be hosted cheaply and you can keep your assets for yourself.

They are even registering your domain name for free, plus unlimited MySQL databases and email addresses. If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog or getting a site for your small business, this looks like a sweet deal.

My Time Off The Grid

When I go off, I go waaaaaay off.

Very light blogging the last few days, but I’ve written a ton of code. All of it is really good, functionally, but nothing I’m prepared to share with the world. See, I have a tendency to get pretty sloppy with my programming unless I know exactly where I’m going before I start. In this case, I was always fixing this “one more thing”, and now I’ve got some cleaning up to do.

It’s not exactly spaghetti, but calling it ravioli would be fair. The reason I like to start any project with a definite roadmap of where I’m going is to avoid this exact situation.

So It’s Not Just Me

Back before anyone read this blog *wink, cough*, I wrote a fairly snarky post about the absolutely ridiculous commercials for Yaz and Viva Viagra.  It seems I’m finally vindicated, as NewsComa is equally creeped out by the Viagra commercial.

Every now and then I make a mistake that seems fairly common among bloggers.  I come up with an idea that is so damn funny that I absolutely must get it published as soon as possible.  After all, the whole world is probably dying to know how unbelievably witty and clever I am, right?  I then spend the next couple of days checking every now and then to see how many hundreds of links and comments I’ve received.

So far I’m batting .000

I suspected my Yaz/Viagra post may fall into that category, so I went back an re-read it.  My conclusion:

I really am as clever and funny as I thought–maybe even funnier!

Sun Buys MySQL

I don’t write about tech stuff here too often, but since this blog, and most likely yours*, is backended by MySQL, it’s relevant. MySQL’s business model works like this–it’s free (as in beer) to use, but enterprise level users do pay the company for support. That’s what makes it so great for the web. People can back end blogs, content management systems, bulletin boards, and just about anything else they can imagine using freely available open-source tools. In fact, there’s even an acronym for the most commonly used tools working together (LAMP–Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). For the end user, more than likely nothing will change.

So why does it matter to us that Sun now owns it? Because the fact that Sun owns it means that Google, Microsoft, and Oracle don’t own it.

Story

*HM, I know you do your own blog engining…mad props.