Endopolis

Yeah, we felt the earthquake last night. At first it felt stronger than a 5.6, but when it was over and after I had calmed down I guessed it to be a 5.5. Not a bad guess.

We were getting Nathan ready for bed, around 8pm when it hit. At first, I thought something hit the floor -- the first jolt was fairly strong. Then, when a quake hits, I always get a woozy feeling, the kind you get when you're in an elevator that moves quickly. The shaking intensified, and I yelled at Jo to grab Nathan. I'm totally useless in an earthquake, so I ran around the hallway like a chicken with its head cut off. I thought about going outside, but then I realized I was leaving my family behind, and also about to walk toward our front door which is lined with lots of glass. Jo did the sensible thing, staying put in the door jamb of Nathan's room. It ended, and we're all fine with no visible damage to the house. Nathan thought it was all kind of funny. I freaked out.

I lost any desire to experience earthquakes on Oct. 17, 1989. That's the day the 7.0 Loma Prieta quake hit, and I've been mostly terrified of earthquakes ever since. I was at my high school after a football practice, watching a swim meet with friends. At its peak you could see real waves rolling through solid ground -- it was like looking at the ocean. We grabbed hold of a chain link fence and held on for life. It was unbelievable and totally surreal. Kids were getting sloshed out of the swimming pool. Others were trying to tread water as waves crashed over their heads and the pool's edges. As I walked home from school, the severity of the quake was clear. Glass was shattered everywhere. Sirens filled the air with noise. Electricity was gone. I got home about 30 minutes later, and the inside of the house looked as though it had been ransacked. My mom and sister were terrified and afraid I had died. They had jumped under the kitchen table only to watch the contents of the refrigerator and all our cupboards come down around them.

So, quakes aren't my thing. Last night's event reminded me yet again that I need to put together a survival/preparedness kit, and bolt bookcases to the wall. I'll do it now. No, really. 

Posted by senders at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week I had the good fortune of visiting Toronto and attending the annual Online News Association conference, which is always interesting and fun on many different levels.

First, about ONA. I suppose it's refreshing to hear a room full of journalists and web publishers, most of whom work for their respective newspaper websites, stop whining. No longer do you go to a conference like this and hear "Is print dead?" or "If only my publisher understood the web." These sentiments were the rule in the industry only a couple of years ago, but no longer. Today, most everyone seems to get the value proposition. There's still plenty of refinement available to those publishers (Should I open my archives? Should I embrace user-generated-content?), but most have finally gone online at least and are dedicating resources to building their online businesses.

Publishers and journalists are trying to figure out how to make money and save their businesses. The result is that you're seeing interesting partnerships blossom, and some really incredible innovation coming from traditional print publications that are scrappy and willing to try new things, and their using the web as their testbed. Entire teams are built around multimedia projects and production. Websites are building mini-TV studios solely for online content distribution. Even college kids are getting into the mix. I heard one really interesting project proposal from a group of Kansas University and Kansas State University (who knew the two could get along?) students about a great community/governmental project that they've pitched to the Knight News Challenge. I won't steal their thunder, but I do hope they win a grant. The result would be putting online news readers in touch with their local and federal elected officials.

It's good for journalists to be business-minded. It's what pays our salary, after all. So finding new ways to create and package content while sticking true to journalistic roots and editorial integrity is so important. I'm glad that I've been able to walk this line in my own career.

Finally, Toronto was really an impressive city. I've never been so far east in Canada, and I sure would like to go back again. I didn't see a tenth of the city, but feel like I got the flavor, at least of the downtown area. The photo above was taken on the 56th floor of a building, from a bar just north of downtown during one of our after-hours mixers. I had lunch with an old friend at a cafe up the street from my hotel, and had a chance to walk around just a little bit. The city has a lot going on, and like New York it's really an all-night town. My hotel was across from the famous Massey Hall -- Sinead O'Connor was playing the night I left. If only. Someday, I hope to go back and spend some time there. 

Posted by senders at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I managed to escape for a few hours yesterday afternoon and evening to surf in Capitola. The waves were small but fun, 2-4 foot and glassy at low tide as the fog gently rolled ashore. Somehow, I managed to nab more than my fair share of waves despite about 25 people in the water with me. I was lucky, able to pick off some of the better ones that came through the main peak.

What I love about this particular spot, besides what's usually a mellow crowd in the water, is on the right swell (yesterday's had a little southwest in it) you can go left into a little cove. This is rare anywhere around Santa Cruz (and California, for that matter) because most of the decent reef or rock breaks are point break-like setups. Most of these break from north to south, I guess thanks to to geology and weather and wave patterns. Anyway, for a goofy footer like me, going left is a relatively rare treat.  Yesterday, I went left more than once.

The point of this whole post is that lately I've been so busy with work and life, that my favorite Fall surf season has nearly passed me by without ever getting my hair wet. That would be a crime. I'm heading south in a couple of weeks for my annual camping/hope-for-surf trip to Santa Barbara County. So, besides wanting to taste saltwater again before I go, and remind my muscles what paddling a surfboard is like, I've just been desperate to get back in the water.

It's those intangibles that make surfing so great: the relaxation of bobbing in the water amongst the kelp, looking behind you at dry land as the evening sun hits the cliffs and the fog bounces over them, the thrill of riding a wave, even if the wave is knee-high. My shoulders and ribs are delightfully just a little sore today, but I slept better last night than I have in months. I was glad to get back out -- it's been too long. Problem is, now I'm all the more desperate to get back out there.

Posted by senders at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been trying to find a reason to use the new music download service offered by Amazon.com, and this weekend I finally had an excuse. I wanted to download a handful of random dub reggae tracks from a new album, then remix and mash them up on my Mac for a friend using Garage Band. You can't do this using AAC encoded tracks when they're bought from iTunes.

So when Amazon's service was announced last week, I thought it sounded interesting yet somewhat odd. You have to download and install a special client (Mac and PC versions are supported), and then you can surf the site, pick the songs you want, and get DRM-free MP3s that work on just about any devices and music players, including iPods and iTunes.

Sounds great, until you use it. I have both mainstream and eclectic tastes in music, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the somewhat obscure tracks I was looking for amongst its 2 million song catalogue. On the other hand, I couldn't find some more common mainstream reggae I wanted. ITunes had both.

But the problem with Amazon's new service wasn't the availability of various songs, it was in the purchase flow itself.  Even if I had wanted to download an entire album, there wasn't a single button to click that would initiate the purchase. I would have had to select "Buy Track" on each and every song. What's worse, is that I couldn't find a way to select multiple tracks to buy in one click, either. Instead, Amazon seems to force users to select single tracks and purchase them individually, going through the full credit card validation routine with each song you want to buy.

In short, you have to click through multiple screens in order to buy a single track. If you want more than one track, this gets really annoying. I wanted a few tracks of an album, and so I found myself going back to iTunes for convenience, and easily getting the songs I wanted. Maybe I missed something, but the Amazon service was a pain in the ass.

Also, I'm not sure why I needed to install and use the download application that Amazon forces you to use. If the tracks are MP3s, why can't you just click on the song link from the website and save-as?

To Amazon's credit, the service is the most robust download mechanism online that I've seen for MP3s. The service is advertised as in beta. I hope it improves, because I'm only tied to iTunes because it's my music management service. I have no real ties to the music store itself. If Amazon can make it easier to simply buy the tracks  you want, then I wonder why it won't gain broad appeal. On the other hand, if Amazon can offer 2 million songs as MP3s, why can't iTunes. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Apple ups the ante.

Posted by senders at 08:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been watching the Ken Burns documentary/mini-series "The War" on PBS as much as I can since it started airing last week. Lately, I find myself watching less and less. Despite its incredible scope, I can't really stomach it anymore.

At first, the series was the anti-History Channel view of WWII -- refreshing and also refreshingly gruesome, if that doesn't sound too twisted. There has been lots of blood, and many dead people, which you don't normally see with WWII shows. Most war documentaries or dramas tend to gloss over the nasty bits, sticking on quick snippets of video or photos of Allied troops blasting the faceless bad guys, with an over-reliance of film taken from old Movietone newsreel footage. Or, they over-dramatize the sacrifice at home. Not that I would know what any of that was like to live through.

Burns' series has shed new light on the real stories about the real people who fought or were affected by the war. The story simultaneously has taken us through the horrible fighting that consumed Europe and the Pacific, on both fronts.  And it tells all these stories through four main lenses: from the people of: Sacramento, CA, Waterbury, CT, Mobile, AL, and Luverne, MN.

At times the series has been touching. US Sen. Daniel Inouye has been featured at times as a "witness" to the fighting, and one of his stories has stuck with me. In an early episode, he recalled a touching and incredible transformation in his life as he went from a small-town, church-going boy to killing people on a battlefield. Other times, the series has been incredibly frank and gruesome, by showing in graphic detail what losing thousands of soldiers in a single battle looks like, with mass graves being dug and bodies piled on top of each other.

But there's the rub. So many people died in this war, and it really was the first war in which cameras were rolling to capture the fighting, the death, and the distruction. Wikipedia has an interesting tally of war dead, which seems unfathomable.  Burns doesn't focus on people dying, but he appropriately weaves their stories into the overall picture of the war.  It's the first time I've felt like I was watching a Vietnam War documentary, yet it's the Nazis and Japanese in the crosshairs. For me, all that death and destruction is getting tough to watch, and Berlin hasn't even fallen yet.

Posted by senders at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)