Over the Edge

In the Old Media model, writers would submit articles to a magazine, get them rejected, stick them in a drawer and move on. In the New Media model, the articles are still rejected, but now writers can whine about it publicly and post them online.

Why the hell not? I mean, it's not like the writers are getting paid for the piece, anyway... 

NYTimes piece this morning (by Michael Cooper) about how New York State spends millions of dollars on pork-barrel spending but doesn't actually itemize it anywhere. (Free subscription required.) Turns out that the state budget includes one line -- $200 million for "Community Projects Fund-007" -- that the governor and legislative leaders can disburse without fear of discovery or veto.

Whether or not this leads to abuse, I suppose, depends on your definition of "abuse." But the feeling seems pretty universal that it's a pretty sketchy practice:

"It's bad government, because the grants are not based on any known criteria," said Edmund J. McMahon, the executive director of the Empire Center. "There are no performance guidelines, there is no application process, and at the end, we don't even know if the money was spent on what it was supposed to be spent."

<snip>

Mr. McMahon noted that while members of Congress are debating whether their process for funneling money to pet projects, known as earmarking, is open enough, the federal government at least requires disclosure of each project in Congressional reports that accompany legislation. In Albany, by contrast, the member items are kept secret. The Empire Center's lists, released by the state, do not say exactly what the money is for or even which official requested it.

A couple of groups have managed to tease out where the money -- borrowed money, by the way -- has gone. 

If you discover that you can't reach big chunks of the Internet today, it's not your fault or your ISP's. Network Solutions appears to be down.

NetSol is the company that administers the .com piece of the net, and is far and away the largest domain name registrar on the Internet. For many years, it was the only place to go to buy a domain name. It's fair, even now, to call it one of the Internet's cornerstones. In a lot of cases, people who buy (OK, rent) domain names, just let NetSol handle the technology that translates a people-language domain name (like www.danrosenbaum.com) into the numeric name that the Net itself actually uses.

But when NetSol goes down, all the sites that use that service become unreachable. This is one reason that Network Solutions really really really really is not supposed to crash. Which it has. Bummer.

Fortunately, even though I use NetSol as my domain registrar (old habits are hard to break), my domain name service happens elsewhere. Whew.

 [Update: NetSol came back a couple of hours later. As Fred Allen once said, "There's nothing wrong with putting all your eggs in one basket. Just watch that basket!]

"Nearly 1 in 7 adults in New York City described their mental health as being frequently 'not good,' compared with 1 in 10 adults nationally."

There's a programmer named John Gruber who's got a Mac-related blog called Daring Fireball. He doesn't blog often but his analysis when he gets around to it is always worth reading.

He recently wrote at some length about Apple's release of its Boot Camp software, which allows the newest Macs to boot Windows XP and Vista. Not the tech stuff -- Gruber doesn't write about technology as such -- but the underlying strategy of letting Macs run Windows.

His points:

Good to know that a little water hasn't dampened New Orleans's taste for bizarre politics. First comes my friend Jason Perlow running into Mayor Ray Nagin waiting tables. (Check out the rest of his excellent food blog, too.

Then comes Kimberly Williamson Butler, the clerk of the criminal court and a N.O. resident since just 1999, who announced her candidacy on the steps of the courthouse after surrendering for ignoring a string of court orders. Oh, yes -- it appears that her campaign Web site has a pic of the candidate superimposed not on an actual New Orleans scene, but on Disneyland's New Orleans Square.

It would be all the more entertaining if the election weren't so critical for the city's future.

About 100,000 Disney-branded portable DVD players are being recalled because their batteries have a tendency to explode -- which somewhat detracts from the user experience.

When the MTA screws up the subways in lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn suffers, too -- sometimes to the point where you just Can't Get There From Here. East Side trains run on the West Side, West Side trains run on the East side, and mysterious trains like the J appear more or less randomly on unexpected platforms.

Everyone who's been suffering with the diversion of the Lex during the overnights and weekends will appreciate this sign, posted yesterday in the Brooklyn Borough Hall station.

 "New Lost Av" indeed.

Is this something new? Buried in the redesign of the NYTimes's Web site, I just spotted this: personal ads from the New York Times, powered by Yahoo.

I guess it makes sense. Maybe Times readers aren't likely to be as kinky as the bohos who scan the Voice -- and with Net, why else would you bother with the print paper? -- but that's probably just my own prejudices speaking.

But maybe the real answer is that the paper wants to provide cradle-to-grave (so to speak) relationship services. You meet through The Times, feed your story to the Weddings and Vows pages, maybe register your wedding at a NYTimes bridal registry sponsored by NYT Magazine advertisers.

And if the relationship goes badly? Hey -- the Metro desk is always looking for good crime stories....

Got a PC that's running Windows 98? Starting in July, you may have a problem.

Andy Patrizio, at internetnews.com, reports that Microsoft will stop supporting Win98 in early July. They've threatened that before but this time, with Windows Vista on the horizon after the New Year (honest!), the threat sounds credible. No patches, no security updates, nothing.

Trouble is, upgrading a Win98 box to Vista may not be possible. Vista requires a fairly up-to-date processor and at least 1GB of RAM -- specs that a Win98 computer is unlikely to meet. Windows XP may be a solution because its hardware requirements are less rigorous, but it's not clear how available Microsoft will make XP once Vista gets established. (On the other hand, it might take a good three years for Vista to take hold.)

I've got a couple of Win98 machines still running, and it seems I'm not alone:

Power users may sneer at the thought of using the rickety Windows 9x code base, but Jupiter Research has found that one in four homes with more than one PC is running the old operating system, usually on a hand-me-down PC for the kids.

Those machines are usually on the Net. An Internet box with an OS that won't get any more security patches? Not a smart thing to run. Expect a lot of people to do it anyway, so I bet we'll see an uptick in zombie spam this summer.

So Microsoft is forcing a march to new hardware and new software. Gee. If you're replacing your computer anyway for one with a new operating system, maybe you should look hard at a getting a Mac. It'll run Windows, too, you know -- if you have to.

When I became a magazine top editor, it got harder because the job was more complex than most civilians understood. The job is more custodian of the brand than it is assigning and editing copy. (As my friend Louise Kohl used to say, managing is harder than editing because when you tell a sentence to move, it doesn't tell you to go fuck yourself.)

More to the point, a magazine in the year 2006 is a very different thing than it was 10 years ago. It's not the words on paper meted out every month or week anymore; a magazine is the audience that reads it. Smart editors and publishers will use a magazine's brand and interest cohort to address its readers using any appropriate media: SMS, Web, RSS, wireless, fax, whatever. As readers fled print for other media, advertisers at first ignored the move. Not anymore.

According to AdAge, Merrill Lynch is saying that 2006 is the first year that the Net will collect more ad dollars than print magazines. Not good news for print, but not necessarily bad news for publishers. At least, not the ones who understand what it is they publish.

This, of course, is important. It means that if you have a print publication and you're not online in a big way -- and that doesn't mean just putting your print content on the Web -- you're leaving money on the table. You're simply not in business.

So what do I do for a living? I still edit magazines. The thing is, a "magazine" is a different critter than it used to be. Which -- as someone who's been playing in "new media" for 20 years -- is just fine by me. The job's still more complex than most people understand but in different ways than it used to be. Not a problem: It's always more fun inventing the future than replicating the past.

From the Beeb:

There are some new GPS-based products -- in the $50 range -- that are designed to let parents know where their kids are at all times. Or, at least, at all times when they have a clear view of the sky. Which they wouldn't have if they were, say, in a club or a crack house or a friends' basement playing video games.

Simon Davis, director of Privacy International, voices concern that parents might go a little nuts with this stuff:

'What this can result in - and we've seen this through visual surveillance technology and bugs that can be put into children's bedrooms - is parents becoming obsessed, to the point of having an unhealthy and destructive relationship with their children,' he said.

True enough. Of course, parents who use this stuff in an unhealthy and destructive way would very like find other means to behave in an unhealthy and destructive way regarding their kids. Or their spouses. Or their business rivals.

Once again, the problem isn't with the technology, it's with the user.

Look at the full review, but the short version is that it doesn't suck at all. The ability to record and time-shift XM content is pretty cool. But There are two major flaws:

• First, the thing is tied to Napster and is DRMed up the wazoo. Except for the stuff you rip yourself, you're renting the music for as long as you subscribe to Napster or XM.
• Second, XM reception remains kind of dicey. Granted that Brooklyn doesn't give the non-stop view of the south sky that XM really wants, but I don't think a lot of places (like office buildings) do. XM, when all is said and done, is radio -- and radio reception does tend to drop out.
• Oh. There's a third thing. The Helix is Mac-unfriendly. You can't even authorize an XM radio on a Mac, and Napster is tied to WMAs. Macs need not apply.

He somehow doesn't seem to be the type, but Neil Young is apparently a big model train fan. In fact, according to Reuters by way of the New York Post, he owns about 20 percent of Lionel, which is currently going through a bankruptcy reorg.

The story says Young and Lionel have a joint venture to sell some of Young's technology as part of Lionel's Trainmaster control system. I guess when you hit 60, the rock-and-roll thing gets pretty old and you'd rather just stay home and work on your layout.

One of my oldest friends grew up a gearhead/theater tech, then became a computer magazine editor, then evolved into a stay-at-home mom. I remember visiting her and being astounded at her heretofor unsuspected talent for making things like adorable frogs out of edible fondant.

Where do you learn things like that? I wondered. I knew her mom and her dad; she sure didn't get it from them. I was pretty envious, because I've never been good at arts and crafts and this looked like it was just a ton of fun you could have with (and for) your kids.

I read today about a coming-soon magazine called CRAFT: Make Cool Stuff, from the people who publish the excellent Make. But where Make is about doing hands-on hardware techie project things, Craft looks like it'll be about fondant frogs and finger puppets and maybe toilet-paper-roll cars.

O'Reilly, which also publishes tons of *very* detailed books for techies and more less-detailed books for people who wish they were techies, has made the world safe for geeks. Now they're making the world safe for stacking frog sock puppets. Yeah, I'll subscribe to that.

So the magician David Copperfield and his two lovely assistants were robbed at gunpoint in West Palm Beach. The local newspaper reports that while he has a gun on him, Copperfield

pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them.

"Call it reverse pickpocketing," Copperfield said.

He probably was going to make the two of clubs jump out of the guy's ear while he was at it.

The perps were caught about 10 minutes later.