Yankee 2.0

Dress for Success is a great organization, so this video is worth watching. But it is here because I am testing something…

Image via Wikipedia

If you don’t live in Maine, and are thinking “staycation”, stop. Pack up the car and go north. Like two hours north of Boston.

Rachel and I just got back from a week in Portland, Maine, and it was a not-so-gentle reminder of why it is a perfect place to vacation, and a pretty nearly perfect one to live in. I admit, I am biased. I spent eight years there working for WCSH 6. So, I may be a little biased. But if you need a few ideas, here you go.

Cruise Peaks Island - Peaks is the largest and most populated of the Casco Bay islands off Portland. It’s a 20-minute ferry ride to the island, which is eminently walkable or rideable, if you want to bring a bike on the Casco Bay ferry or rent a bike on the island. We walked, and on a 90-degree day, walking on the ocean side of the island was akin to the feeling of putting your head in the refrigerator. Fantastic. The views are great, and there are plenty of things to do, including hop the ferry to Portland if you want to get into the “big city.” There are a good number of rentals on the island.

Need more of a cruise? Then grab a Casco Bay Ferry on a scenic cruise. We did the mail run to five other Casco Bay islands: Little Diamond, Great Diamond, Long Island, Chebeague Island and Cliff Island. On a warm, still morning, it was a great way to spend a few hours, watching lobstermen, kayakers and sailors cruise the bay.

Go eat. I couldn’t write up enough about Portland restaurants - there are so many to choose from. From high-end world-renowned places like Fore Street to more homey establishments like Becky’s Diner, there are all sorts of options that you can choose.

Have a clambake. The ultimate reason we were in Maine this weekend was to host a post-wedding celebration for our friends. We got married in December, but decided to wait until the summer for a big party. We used Foster’s Downeast Clambake out of York, and they kicked butt, hauling all the fixins up to Southern Maine Community College in South Portland where they cooked, served, and even put up the sides on our tent when we got a little downpour.

And if you need a wedding cake, we have ideas for that, too… maybe in another post.

And hop aboard a schooner. We took the gang out on the schooner Wendameen for a Casco Bay cruise. It was great, even with basically no wind. We had to “motorsail”, but getting the sails up, getting out on the water, and seeing the bay from Portland Harbor to Portland Head Light is a treat in any conditions.

is there more? Of course. Maybe I’ll do more posting later. But it was a great summer week.

NECN is working on a resizable, embeddable player that helps us keep some ads with the video (because we still need to pay bills, sorry), but allows bloggers and others to embed the player in the size that they want for their site.

It looks like this… and this… and this…

I think I need a grant. A new company. Some personal VC funding. I am reading everyone else’s iPhone 2.0 posts and drooling. I am a Mac guy, love Apple, and know I would love an iPhone. BUT… I am also a guy who is trying to grab his company and drag it kicking and screaming into Web 2.0. So I really should get an N95. Show the station what it can do, even as I personally enjoy playing with it. In the long run, that is something I think could get people interested in the power of streaming video for NECN.com and NECN as a news organization. It’s where we need to be.

One problem. I won’t get help paying for either one, which is an issue I won’t really go into, except to say it’s not that we’re cheap, per se, just that… well, anyway… I’m itching to pull the trigger on one or the other.

So, what would the community do. This is my personal phone - I have a work Crackberry that I will have to keep. So do I go for the cool new tool, the iPhone, that would prob be a little more fun for my here and now life? Or the N95 - pricier, but something I would love to play with and which could potentially play a more critical role in advancing my own learning? (But has drawbacks, too… I’m no T9 wiz… etc.)

(Now is when I appropriately reassure my wife that I won’t do either without telling her. Appropriate married guy response.)

What are your thoughts? Where is the work/life balance? Or is there a box outside of which I have not thought?

World - advise me! Maybe?

Get ready for Convention 2008 Denver, brought to you by the Food Network?

The New York Times has their “Democrats are over budget and behind schedule for the Democratic convention” piece in Sunday’s paper, one day after their “What do we do with George” piece about the Republican convention. Of course, the conventions are always fodder for someone, but in this case, the Democrats have created an issue with the food that will simply feed critics. Apparently, it’s the color, stupid.

After noting the normal painful issues with the Democratic National Convention Committee planning - expensive offices, wasted cash on rented furniture, etc., none of which would provide fodder for much of anything, Leslie Wayne moves to the food, and it might be something to give millions of Democrats indigestion.

“And then there is the food: A 28-page contract requested by Denver
organizers that caterers provide food in “at least three of the
following five colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple and white.”
Garnishes could not be counted toward the colors. No fried foods would
be allowed. Organic and locally grown foods were mandated, and each
plate had to be 50 percent fruits and vegetables. As a result, caterers
are shying away.”

Best intentions gone awry. The organics are a fine thought - and added cost could be easily justified, because organics have all sorts of benefits that go beyond price, especially at an event like this. Pay a little more now, set the tone for a better tomorrow. Take a few hits - no major damage. But the color? Seriously? Are the Democrats going to be paying more for food because they wanted more purple on their plate?

In the end, the only ones salivating over this detail will be the Republican critics. Organic purple food is American red meat for them. Of course, they still have to come up with a way to embrace a President at the GOP convention without holding him too close. And that could be an unappetizing challenge, too.

Well, there are lots of ways, because we have made all of our feeds wonderfully distributable, through RSS, embeds and so on. But if you just want one place (other than the obvious - the NECN website) where you can quickly scan the latest from NECN, go to the page in my navbar called NECN RSS, and you can quickly scan the headlines of the latest stories in the NECN pipeline.

Let me know what you think.

A state ethics commission has found former Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette violated ethics rules by not scalping two World Series tickets he sold to the mayor of Pittsfield during his efforts to get a negotiate a deal for his minor league franchise in the city.

I just want to make sure I understand this. Duquette sold the tickets to Pittsfield Mayor James Ruberto for their $190 face value in 2004. The commission says that since scalpers were getting two grand for the seats, Duquette may have been trying to curry favor. Talk about a no-win situation. a) He gives the tickets to Ruberto - clear gift, ethics violation. b) He makes Ruberto buy the tickets for like $1500 each, and is denounced as a scoundrel (again) by pundits up and down the Mass Pike. Somehow, though, this would be OK under the state’s insane scalping laws, which allow ticket brokers to charge an arm and a leg for tickets, even as franchises pull the season tickets of ticketholders who consider charging more than face for their tickets. So c) He sells the tickets for face value - and still gets in trouble.

In a statement, the commission said, “In offering World Series tickets to Ruberto, Duquette intended to influence Ruberto as to their future negotiations regarding the licensing and concession agreements,” the commission said in a statement. “By selling the World Series tickets to Ruberto at face value, where the general public could only obtain such tickets at prices more than $50 over face value, Duquette provided something of substantial value to Ruberto for or because of official acts to be performed by Ruberto as mayor.”

The man can’t catch a break.

I’m not the first to write about this one, but I have to admit that I am enjoying Snackr, the Adobe AIR based app that runs your RSS feeds as a scrolling ticker at the bottom (or side) of your computer screen. It’s a great way to keep one eye on your feeds as you try to get other things done. The application is simple to load and manage, and is especially nice for people who can pick a relatively small number of feeds they want to follow. With 30 feeds in it, I feel like I am actually seeing everything. With my full complement of 150+ feeds (I’m a news nerd, OK?), I feel like new stuff coming in gets lost in the wave.

In my ideal world, new versions of the program would have the ability to subset feeds a little - and in this world of heavy-duty RSS, I’d love to see the “don’t show items older than…” preference to go even shorter than 1 day. If I could just see a scroll of new items in the last couple of hours, I might find it more valuable.

Web producers and others who need to keep an eye on what the newest of the new is will love this program - as long as you can tune it out enough to be able to actually get the rest of your job done.

So, here we go again. Now it’s my cable company getting on my nerves with online billing, and while it’s not their fault officially, it does show the problem with the “savings” of paperless billing. Recently, I noticed my auto-paid bill for my cable, phone and modem had jumped by about $60, no doubt as my one-year special ended. Don’t like it, but hey, I signed it.

The problem is - I didn’t really realize it was about to happen, because the company doesn’t have to let me know. It’s all there online for me to find. Of course, I have to a) remember to look and b) actually remember the steps to get to the billing site. Naturally, I can’t remember my password - so now I have to wait for a PIN to be mailed to me so I can reset my password. So, this is turning into a 4-day endeavor, unless I want to call customer service.

If I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t have set up all the online stuff in the first place.

This comes after a problem I had with Time-Warner Cable in Maine. Again, not their fault, by the letter of the law. I had thought my bill was being paid on my credit card, but it wasn’t. I never received any notice of past due balances, etc. - and found out there was a problem only when my service was disconnected. Could I have checked? Sure. Should I have? Definitely. But pulling the plug without reaching out a little harder - not a great way to build loyalty.

My point here is not that these companies (and others) didn’t anything WRONG. That’s all on me - I need to be more organized. But they didn’t do anything right, either. Their online presences, instead of attaching me more closely to their community, actually made me a less informed, less responsible member. They distanced me from the brand.

One aside - I also received a certificate the other day that I was getting a discount of $20/month from the cable company for being such a loyal customer (having completed my first year). There’s a whole club, and discounts, and more. It’s begging for opportunities for me to become engaged… to love my cable and become an active part of a community.

That came by snail mail. And then made me log into a website and create a separate account from my payment account. Which (eventually) gave me a coupon for a free movie. Which I would need to mail in with the statement I don’t receive.

Missed opportunity.

A post from Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism Blog directed me to this one. It’s a site called twellow, which has been constructed as a yellow pages for twitter users. And for journalists on Twitter, it has the potential to be a huge resource.

Need to track down people by field? Location? It’s a searchable resource. It has its issues. For example, a huge number of people in journalism and blogging are just listed under the media category, and there is no clear way to edit your listing or add yourself to categories - which twellow apparently pulls from people’s Twitter descriptions. So for example, Twitter queen Laura Fitton (aka Pistachio) only shows under one category - geeks. (I’m not saying the one category is *wrong*, mind you.) Clearly, she brings more to the table than geekiness. I’m in media, but not news.

Steve Garfield… has no category. (Hmmm, I don’t know where I’d put him either.)

And it doesn’t seem to recognize tweets into the system from some platforms. None of my posts via twhirl show up, for example.

Despite the flaws, it’s an interesting start. And a great entree to find new and interesting people you might not have known were on Twitter in a given field. I’ll be playing with it more.