journalism

Dinner with an old friend

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Whew. I’m glad that’s over. Well, I’m not so sure it’s over. But that was a little too weird for me.
I had dinner last night with a former colleague I hadn’t seen in a while. Too long, really. When I first met him, I was an ignoramus with some ambition. I knew where I wanted to go, but I had no idea how to get there. He took me under his wing and showed me the road. And for a time, we traveled that road together.

I continued down the road after we parted ways, and I still haven’t arrived at that destination, but I’m not sure we ever do. No matter what we accomplish, it’s never enough. We never know enough, see enough, or have enough. The destination always moves. Not that that’s always a bad thing.

We reflected on that, and he shared some wisdom. I’m frustrated. He helped me sort some of that out. Not everyone wants to go along for the ride, it seems. So things change, and sometimes we’re disappointed.

Just as importantly, he brought his new girlfriend along. I was glad to meet her. She’s a nice girl, down to earth, and doesn’t take herself too seriously. She can take a lot of good-natured ribbing, and she’s not afraid to dish it out either. She came across as being more than just pleasant to be around–she was fun to be around.

At one point in the conversation, he started talking about “his girlfriend” as if she wasn’t there, describing her, saying what he liked about her. I could tell part of her enjoyed hearing it, but part of her was embarrassed. I was impressed. I’ve done that in the past. The last girl I did that to was too full of herself to be embarrassed. (The embrace I got afterward was pretty cool. Too bad it was worth about as much as the advice that was dished out in these pages yesterday.)

I just smiled knowingly as he went on and on about her. He was doing good. “Stop it,” she said. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“You know her?” he asked.

Bzzt. Wrong answer, Jack.

She let him get by with it. The cool ones always do.

She left the table for a minute and he told me a few things. Things he didn’t want her to know, at least not yet. I’ve forgotten what they were, which is just as well. He mentioned some potential red flags that never rose. Good signs all. I gave him my observations, for what they were worth, based on living for three years with about 30 guys, most of whom had girlfriends, and from other friends’ relationships. He didn’t have anything to learn from my personal experience.

I looked over my shoulder a few times as I was talking. It would have been awkward if she’d returned in the middle of a sentence, potentially. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I had one last thing to say, and I finished it as she was sitting back down at the table:

“…and you can see it in their choices of where they go to school, or where they start their careers,” I said.

She sat back down. She didn’t demand to know what we’d been talking about when we were gone. She didn’t ask what that was about. Nothing.

I was severely impressed.

We shifted gears in the conversation a couple of times. She has a brother who’s going to be starting at the University of Missouri, majoring in journalism, soon. I told her I’d answer any questions he had. I told her about a few of my misadventures in my four years there. I had more than a few. The head of my sequence still remembers me, to this day, and not because I was one of his most brilliant students (I got an A in his class, by the skin of my teeth). We tangled bitterly. If duels had been legal, I would have challenged him to one. I never backed down. I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me, no matter who he was. And he was somebody–ultimately, the decision whether I got into the program and could continue my major rested with him. He backed down. He won a battle, definitely. But I won the war.

He’s one of two professors who teach that class. When her brother asks which professor to take, I’ll be torn.

She asked if he could call me. I said certainly. Actually she asked me for my phone number.

“I see,” my friend said. “I take you out to dinner with one of my friends, and the next thing I know, you’re getting his phone number.”

She had trouble finding a pen. “And now you’re going to ask me for my pen so you can write down his phone number,” he said.

She found her pen. I told her my number. I look forward to talking about journalism with her brother.

I don’t know what the future holds for them, and two hours does not a final impression make, but I know most guys settle for a whole lot worse.

Full disclosure and integrity

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I feel like I owe it to my readers to disclose a few things, due to the events of recent weeks raising a few questions in some people’s minds.

Read more

Microsoft’s temper tantrum

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , ,

Microsoft is throwing a temper tantrum that if the states’ current proposal goes through, the company will be forced to withdraw Windows from the market.
Pay no attention, move along, there’s nothing to see here.

Remember, this is the company that didn’t sign an agreement with IBM for a Windows 95 OEM license until the day it was launched. At one point during the negotiations, Microsoft told IBM it could buy it at retail. As hard as it might be to remember now, at the time, IBM was still one of the top 5 players in the U.S. PC retail market.

This is a company that plays hardball. It says unreasonable things to get its way. And it’s used to getting its way. And even when it doesn’t get its way, it still says stupid things. Remember, in 1994 Steve Ballmer said a court’s decision against Microsoft in Stac’s favor would be reversed as soon as they found a judge with actual brains.

Reality check: Microsoft can very easily comply with the states’ demands. Or reach a compromise that will benefit everybody. Once upon a time, long long ago, when you installed Windows, you could tell it what you wanted. If you didn’t have any use for Calculator, you could click a little checkbox next to it, Windows wouldn’t install it, and you’d save about 200K of disk space. Hey, back when people were trying to run Windows on 40-meg hard drives, it was nice to have that ability. Or, if you already had a third-party calculator app that put Microsoft’s to shame and thus had no need for the one that came with Windows, you didn’t have to install it.

The same was true of DriveSpace and all the other bundled stuff. I mean, let’s get serious here: Is there any reason whatsoever to install Space Cadet Pinball on your domain controller?

But with Windows 95, Microsoft started to get unreasonable. Yes, you could uncheck that little box next to MSN, but when you did it, Windows didn’t actually seem to do anything. Regardless of whether you checked that box, when Windows was finished, you had an MSN icon on your desktop. If AOL continued to exist, Microsoft’s very existence was threatened. In order for Microsoft to survive, AOL had to die. So you got MSN whether you used it or not. (Some idiot with a journalism degree figured out how to remove it a couple of years later.)

With Windows 95B, things got more sinister. Netscape replaced AOL as the imminent threat to Microsoft’s very survival, so you got Internet Explorer whether you wanted it or not. This time, Microsoft didn’t even bother putting in a checkbox for Windows to ignore. You just got it. With Windows 95 OSR2.1 and 98, Internet Explorer became increasingly more entrenched.

Once it was evident that AOL would never die and Netscape would never rise again, RealPlayer and QuickTime became threats to Microsoft’s existence. So, with Windows 98, we got Microsoft Media Player, whether we wanted it or not. Never mind that the basic Real and QuickTime players are free and both companies would have loved for Microsoft to deliver them with Windows and it would have saved the company development costs.

Microsoft could go a long, long way towards appeasing the states if they’d just put in little checkboxes that let you decide whether Internet Explorer or MediaPlayer was installed, just like Calculator. There’s no need for 8,000 different versions of Windows, like Steve “The Embalmer” Ballmer wants people to believe. Let the consumer decide what pieces he or she wants. Does a deaf person need MediaPlayer? It’s questionable. Does a file server really need Internet Explorer? Absolutely not.

And while there are magazines and book authors who want you to believe otherwise, thousands of people have removed Internet Explorer from Windows. And guess what? The sun didn’t quit rising. The world failed to fall apart. The stock market didn’t crash. Their computers didn’t fall over. The applications they needed to run still ran. In fact, the applications ran better once they got the unnecessary machinery gone. Imagine that, a basic engineering principle applying to computers!

Microsoft execs have complained about a double standard, because Apple, IBM, and Be all shipped Web browsers with their OSs. Of course, there was a big difference. In the case of MacOS, BeOS, and OS/2, you could tell the OS not to install the browser, and it didn’t do it. The same for their other components. In the case of OS/2, you could even remove the entire Windows subsystem. You lost the ability to run Windows 3.1 programs, but you gained speed and stability. I knew people who did that. I’ve done minimalist Mac OS installations that took up less than 20 megs and were completely useless because they lacked the drivers needed to install other software. But if I want to be stupid enough to install a completely crippled OS that can’t do anything besides boot a computer and let me look at its empty hard drive, Apple’s not going to stop me.

The overwhelming majority of people will just leave things alone. But the people who like to get into the nuts and botls of things want (and deserve) the opportunity to change how their computers work. They want Microsoft to fight its battles in the marketplace, not in the memory and CPUs of their computers. I don’t blame them in the least. Of course, I’m spoiled. IBM and Commodore let me have it my way, back when I was buying my operating systems from them.

So, Microsoft has a history of threats, and a history of following through with them, even when the reasoning behind them is totally ludicrous. But in the case of IBM, they ultimately budged, albeit 45 minutes into the 11th hour, and they didn’t budge much. But you don’t just shut out the #3 or #4 PC maker in the country. At the time, Microsoft still needed IBM, and IBM needed Microsoft, as much as both companies hated to admit it.

This is no different. Microsoft can’t just pull Windows off the market. Windows is still its main source of revenue, and Windows runs on more than 90 percent of the computers on the market. Microsoft isn’t going to just give that away. Sure, they make some Mac products, but the Mac is 5 percent of the market on a good day. The cheapest and easiest replacement for Windows, in the unlikely event Microsoft pulled out, is Linux, where Microsoft is a non-player. Microsoft could still sell Windows software to the existing installed base. But it’s ludicrous. Pulling Windows off the market is corporate suicide.

I really don’t think Microsoft would have made IBM buy its copies of Windows 95 at retail. Not everyone remembers it now, but there was some resistance to Windows 95 initially, and a company the size of IBM not shipping Windows 95 on its new computers would have given way to much credence to the naysayers. Microsoft was counting on Windows 95 being big, and it wasn’t going to take any chances. It had spent way too much money on research, development, and hype. Microsoft made that threat to see just how far IBM would go. And that’s what Microsoft is doing now. It’s trying to see how much the states are going to budge.

And that’s all there is to Ballmer’s rhetoric. Nothing more. And nothing less.

Stopping spam.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

Forget what I wrote yesterday. I was going to post the stuff I wrote in Ohio when I realized it isn’t all that good, it’s definitely not useful, and the people who annoy me the most are the people who can’t get over themselves. No one cares what I ate for breakfast, and the only people who care what went on in Ohio already know.
So here’s something useful instead. It’s the coolest thing I’ve found all year. Maybe all decade, for that matter.

Spam begone. I hate spam. It wastes my time and my bandwidth and, ultimately, my money. I’ve seen some estimates that spam costs ISPs as much as $5 per month per account. You’d better believe they’re passing those losses on to you.

There are tons and tons of anti-spam solutions out there, but most of them run on the mailserver side, so for an end-user to use them, they have to set up a mail server and either use it for mail or run fetchmail to pull the mail in from ISP’s mail servers. I’ve done that, but it’s convoluted. But that’s trivial compared to setting up the anti-spam kits.

I was crusing along, vaguely happy, when my local mailserver developed bad sectors on the hard drive, so one day when I went to read my mail, I heard clunking noises. I turned around, flipped on the power switch to the server’s attached monitor, and saw read errors. Hmm. I hope that mail wasn’t important…

Eventually I shut down my mail server and put up with the spam, hoping I’d come up with a better idea.

I found it in a Perl script called disspam.pl, written by Mina Naguib.

It took a little doing to get it running in Debian. Theoretically it’ll run on any OS that has Perl installed. Here’s what I did in Debian:

su (to become root)
apt-get install libnet-perl (Perl couldn’t see the network without this, so the next command in this sequence was failing. This hopefully isn’t necessary on other distros, as I have no idea what the equivalent would be.)
perl -MCPAN -e shell (as per readme–I accepted the defaults, then when it asked for CPAN servers, I told it my continent and country. Then it gave me 48 choices. I picked a handful at random, since none were any more obviously close to me than others.)
install Net::POP3 (as per readme)
quit
cp sample.conf disspam.conf
chmod 755 disspam.pl

Next, I loaded up disspam.conf into a text editor. It looks just like a Windows-ish INI file.

The second line gives me an exclude list. It’ll take names and e-mail addresses. So I put in a few important names that could possibly be blocked (friends with AOL and Hotmail addresses). That way if their ISPs ever misbehave and get blacklisted, their mail will still get to me. Then I popped down to the end of the file and configured my POP3 mailbox. I had an account I hadn’t read in a week, so I figured I’d get a good test. Just drop in your username, password, and POP3 server like you would for your e-mail client. If you have more than one account, copy and paste the section.

Bada bing, bada boom. You’re set. Run disspam.pl and watch. In my case, it flagged and deleted about a dozen messages, typical of what I usually get, like mail offering me Viagra or access to horny cheerleaders or how to find out anything about anyone (which I already know–I have a journalism degree). The only questionable thing it flagged was mail from MLB.com. I can’t get off their mailing list ever since I voted online for the All-Star game. No importa, I never read that mail anyway. I could have always added MLB.com to my exclude list if what they had to say mattered to me.

But if you’re like me and get lots of mail–that was my less-busy account–and about half of it is spam, that stuff’s going to scroll by really fast. So here’s what I recommend doing: when you execute disspam.pl, use the following command line:

~/disspam/disspam.pl ~/disspam/disspam.conf >> ~/disspam/disspam.log

Then you can examine disspam.log. If disspam ever deletes something it shouldn’t have, you can add the person to your exclude list and e-mail them to ask what they wanted. It looks to be less work than deleting all that spam. Probably less embarrassing too. Have you ever accidentally opened one of those horny cheerleader e-mail messages when there were people around? Yikes!

I fired up Ximian Evolution, pulled down my mail, and had 15 new messages. No spam. None. Sweet bliss.

It’s just version 0.05 and the author considers it beta, but I love it already.

Unix’s power allows you to string simple tools together to make powerful ones. Here are some suggestions.

You can e-mail the log to yourself with these commands:

mail -s disspam [your_address] rm ~/disspam/disspam.log

If you want the computer to do all the work for you, here’s the command sequence:

cronttab

Then add these entries:

0 0 * * * mail -s disspam [your_address] * 0 * * * ~/disspam/disspam.pl ~/disspam/disspam.conf >> ~/disspam/disspam.log

If you read your mail on the same machine that runs disspam, you can substitute your user account name for your e-mail address and save your ISP a little traffic.

You’ll have to provide explicit paths for disspam.pl and disspam.conf.

The first entry causes it to mail the log at midnight, then delete the original. The second entry filters your inbox(es) on the hour, every hour. To filter more frequently you can add more lines:


* 10 * * * ~/disspam/disspam.pl ~/disspam/disspam.conf >> ~/disspam/disspam.log
* 20 * * * ~/disspam/disspam.pl ~/disspam/disspam.conf >> ~/disspam/disspam.log
* 30 * * * ~/disspam/disspam.pl ~/disspam/disspam.conf >> ~/disspam/disspam.log
* 40 * * * ~/disspam/disspam.pl ~/disspam/disspam.conf >> ~/disspam/disspam.log
* 50 * * * ~/disspam/disspam.pl ~/disspam/disspam.conf >> ~/disspam/disspam.log

This program shouldn’t be necessary for very long. It’s short and simple (4.5K worth of Perl) so there’s no reason why mail clients shouldn’t start incorporating similar code. Until they do, you run the risk of disspam and your mail client getting out of sync and some spam coming through. If you read your mail on a Linux box with an mbox-compliant client like Sylpheed or Balsa or Kmail, you can bring fetchmail into the equation. Then create a .fetchmailrc file in your home directory (name it ~/.fetchmailrc to ensure it goes to the right place). Here’s the format of .fetchmailrc:

poll SERVERNAME protocol PROTOCOL username NAME password PASSWORD

So here’s an example that would work for me:

poll mail.swbell.net protocol pop3 username dfarq password censored

Next, set your mail client to no longer check for mail automatically, then type crontab and edit your disspam lines so they read like this:

* 20 * * * disspam.pl disspam.conf >> ~/disspam.log ; fetchmail (your server name)

In case you’re interested, the semicolon tells Unix not to execute the second command until the first one is complete. If you have more than one mail account, add another fetchmail line.

As an aside, Evolution seems to use the mbox file format but it doesn’t store its file where fetchmail will find it. I think you could symlink /var/spool/mail/yourusername to ~/evolution/local/Inbox/mbox and it would work. I haven’t tried that little trick yet.

But even if you’re not ambitious enough to make it run automatically and integrate with all that other stuff, it’s still a killer utility you can run manually. And for that matter, if you can get Perl running on NT or even on a Mac, this ought to run on them as well.

Check it out. It’ll save you time and aggravation. And since it only reads the headers to decide what’s spam and what’s not, it’ll save bandwidth and, ultimately, it’ll save your ISP a little cash. Not tons, but every little bit can help. You can’t expect them to pass their savings on to you, but they’ll certainly pass their increased expenses on to you. So you might as well do a little something to lower those expenses if you can. Sometimes goodwill comes back around.

Linkfest Friday…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s start things off with some links. Web development’s been on my mind the last few days. There’s a whole other world I’ve been wanting to explore for a couple of years, and I’ve finally collected the information that’ll let me do it.
Redirecting virus attacks — Your neighbor’s got Nimda? Here’s how to get his IIS server to quit harassing your Apache server. (Suggests redirecting to a bogus address; I’m inclined to redirect either to 127.0.0.1 or www.microsoft.com, personally.)

DJG’s help setting up MySQL. Apache, MySQL and PHP are a fabulous combination, but bootstrapping it can be a painful process. People talk about writing a sendmail.cf file as their loss of innocence, but I’ve written one of those and I’ve tried to set up the LAMP quartet. The sendmail.cf file was easier because there’s a whole lot more written about it.

Short version: Use Debian. Forget all the other distributions, because they’ll install the pieces, but rarely do they put the conduits in place for the three pieces to talk. It’s much easier to just download and compile the source. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, use Debian and save some heartache. If you’re stuck with the distro you have, download ApacheToolbox and use it. You’ll probably have to configure your C/C++ compiler and development libraries. That’s not as bad as it sounds, but I’m biased. I’ve compiled entire distributions by hand–to the point that I’ve taken Linux From Scratch, decided I didn’t like some of the components they used because they were too bloated for me, and replaced them with slimmer alternatives. (The result mostly worked. Mostly.) You’ve gotta be a bit of a gearhead to take that approach.

Debian’s easier. Let’s follow that. Use this command sequence:

apt-get install apache
apt-get install php4-mysql
apt-get install mysql-server

Next, edit /etc/apache/httpd.conf. There’s a commented-out line in there that loads the php4 module. Uncomment that. Just search for php. It’ll be the third or fourth instance. Also, search for index.html. To that line, add the argument index.php. If you make index.php the first argument, access to PHP pages will be slightly faster. Pull out any filetypes you’re not using–if you’ll never make an index page called anything but index.html or index.php, pull the others and Apache will perform better.

Got that? Apache’s configured. Yes, the php installation could make those changes for you. It doesn’t. I’m not sure why. But trust me, this is a whole lot less painful than it is under Red Hat.

But you’re not ready to go just yet. If you try to go now, MySQL will just deny everything. Read this to get you the rest of the way.

Once you’ve got that in place, there are literally thousands of PHP and PHP/MySQL apps and applets out there. If you can imagine it, you can build it. If HTML is a 2D world, PHP and MySQL are the third and fourth dimension.

Am I going to be playing in that world? You’d better believe it. How soon? It depends on how quickly I can get my content whipped into shape for importing.

This is the holy grail. My first editing job was doing markup for the Digital Missourian, which the faculty at the University of Missouri School of Journalism believe was the first electronic newspaper (it came into being in 1986 or so). By the time I was working there in the late summer of 1995, it had been on the ‘Net for several years. About eight of us sat in a room that was originally a big storage closet, hunched in front of 486s, pulling stories off the copydesk, adding HTML markup, and FTPing them to a big Unix cluster on the MU campus. We ran a programmable word processor called DeScribe, and we worked out some macros to help speed along the markup.

No big operation works that way anymore. There aren’t enough college students in the world. You feed your content to a database, be it Oracle or IBM DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL or PostgresSQL. Rather than coding in straight HTML, you use a scripting language–be it PHP or ASP–that queries the database, pulls the content, applies a template, and generates the HTML on the fly. The story goes from the copy editor’s desk to the Web with no human intervention.

There are distinct advantages to this approach even for a small-time operation like me. Putting the content in a database gives you much more versatility. Some people want overdesigned Web sites. Some want something middle-ground, like this one. Others want black text on a gray background like we had in 1994. You can offer selectable formats to them. You can offer printer-friendly pages. You can even generate PDFs on the fly if you want–something some sites are doing now in an effort to gain revenue. If you have content from various sources, you can slice and dice and combine it in any imaginable way.

I can’t wait.

Does God have to heal?

Dave Farquhar Christianity , ,

Strong religious content again. I make no apologies. People who are offended by this kind of stuff are probably long gone anyway.
My friend and co-worker Charles Sebold helped inspire this one. Charlie’s page is worth a read. He writes with considerably more brevity than I do, but if you like the kind of content I produce, you’ll probably like Charlie too.

Charlie pointed out an alternative reading of Genesis 3:16 on Saturday that dovetails nicely with the interview I conducted Sunday night. Genesis 3:16 is a verse that feminists hate, mostly because they read it incorrectly. True, it’s been misapplied over the years. Here’s how it reads:

Then God said to the woman, “You will bear children with intense pain and suffering. And though your desire will be for your husband (or: And though you will desire to control your husband), he will be your master.”

Some men wrongly use this verse to lord over women. Charlie raised an interesting question. Keep in mind that when Jesus spoke, He used parables that people would understand. Doesn’t it stand to reason that He learned the technique from God the Father? Also keep in mind that we, God’s people, are referred to as the Bride of Christ. And keep in mind that Adam and Eve sinned because they wanted to be like God. Pure power trip.

So let’s paraphrase it in light of that:

Then God said to the woman, “You will bear children with intense pain and suffering. And though humanity will desire to control Me, I will be your master.”

Eve undoubtedly already knew the desire to control Adam. Undoubtedly if she desired to control God, she also desired to control Him. I’m sure she got the metaphor instantly. I’m sure Adam got it too–he understood control.

We still have control issues today. It tends to fall into one of two extremes. One extreme denies that God is in control, whether it’s by choice or ineptitude, and believes that God won’t reach down and help us. An awful lot of mainline denominations fall into that trap, wittingly or unwittingly. Many fundamentalists hit the other extreme, teaching that if we say or believe the right things, God is obligated to perform a miracle. St. Louis Rams superstar Isaac Bruce falls into that category. During the Rams’ Super Bowl season, Bruce totaled his car. He threw his hands off the wheel, cried out, “God, save me!” and believed God was obligated to save him. Bruce walked away from the accident. When asked why the same thing didn’t happen to Payne Stewart when his plane went down, Bruce said Stewart didn’t say the words. Now, while it’s very admirable that Bruce’s gut reaction was to say “God, save me!” instead of one or a series of four-letter words your mama didn’t teach you, it’s wrong for Bruce to believe that God is obligated to do anything, and it’s wrong for Bruce to judge people whose lives God chooses not to preserve.

What Isaac Bruce forgets is that God’s priority is to get as many people into heaven as possible. Yes, God loves us and cares about us and cares about what happens to us. He cares when I lose my keys and how many stoplights I have to sit through on my way home late on Friday nights. But if for some bizarre reason me sitting through 10 lights for five minutes apiece could help someone else get to heaven, it’s gonna take me an hour to get home. Every time.

So, when my work is done, I’m finished, no matter what age I am or what condition I’m in. The reason for that is really simple. Those of you who are married will understand this. Being alive and on this Earth is like being engaged. When you’re engaged, you can spend a fair bit of time together, but not as much as when you’re married. Your desire to spend more time with one another, and to do things you can’t do when you’re not married, are what drive you to get married. And whether you’re willing to admit it or not, you long for that day. Some people lie to themselves and try to tell themselves there’s something better than that day, and their lifestyle reflects it, but in reality by living that way, they’re in their own way longing for that day.

God has that same longing for us. He longs for us to cross over and be in Heaven, where He can spend more time with us, and higher-quality time with us. God looks forward to our deathbed like we look forward to a wedding day.

So, yes, God wants to heal us, because He doesn’t like watching us suffer. But that’s secondary. God wants us to want Him to heal the people we love. Somewhere I read a very interesting study titled, “Why God Needs a Human.” Interestingly, Jesus’ hands were tied when He went back to His hometown, because in His hometown, the people had no faith in Him. He tried to perform miracles there, but they weren’t as spectacular nor as numerous as anywhere else. So our unbelief in what God can or will do does seem to hinder His work.

So yes, we are supposed to want God to perform miracles on the people we love. Intensely. And when He does, the results are often spectacular. My friend Emily totaled her car a few months ago. She didn’t walk away from the accident like Isaac Bruce did. So some might say Emily didn’t have as much faith as Isaac Bruce did. To that I say, well, you don’t know Emily, and I don’t know Isaac Bruce, and it’s not my place to say anything about anyone else’s faith. But Emily should not be alive today. She says the only thing she remembers about her accident is an angel coming and getting her. And Emily was found laying in the road, where there was danger of her being run over. I would argue she was there for good reason–the dangerous place is also the place you’re most likely to be found quickly. And the same angel who could take her out of the car can just as easily be there to protect her. Potentially there was more than one.

When Emily tells that story, people get goosebumps. When Emily talks about her comeback, people get inspired. I didn’t know Emily very well before her accident–we met about a month before it happened–but at the very least, this incident in her life gave her another tool in her arsenal. And thanks to that, God may get another engagement or three He wouldn’t have had otherwise.

God knows–and only God knows–when it makes sense to heal. Our job is to be concerned on behalf of our brothers and sisters. But in those cases when God decides it’s time to call someone home, it’s not up to us to question the timing.

—
That’s much easier said than done. I wrote that bit about 4 pm on Sunday, in preparation for an interview for my documentary. Well, it’s not my documentary. I deliberately separated myself from the story, so I’d go in knowing just the very basics–a young couple from our church, named John and Karin, had twins in early September. Tommy, the boy, is completely healthy. Katie, the girl, has a heart condition. You can instantly tell when you see Katie that all’s not well with her. Don’t get me wrong–she looks fine. But when Katie and Tommy are in the room, you can’t hear Tommy breathing unless you listen for it. You can hear Katie. They’re short, desperate breaths. Tommy breathes about 60 times a minute, Karin said. Katie breathes 100 times.

I had John and Karin tell me the story, more or less from the beginning. Twins, a boy and a girl. Wonderful. Then Karin notices a yellow sticky-note where they were keeping Katie. The nurse wouldn’t give a straight answer. Heart murmur. That’s OK though. A lot of babies have what looks like a heart murmur and it goes away. Katie’s didn’t go away. Enlarged heart. OK, so you wait for the baby to reach 11 pounds, then you do surgery. Katie wasn’t growing.

I saw Katie and Tommy’s baptism, through the camera eye. I filmed the entire service. One of the church members wanted John and Karin to tell their story on video. John and Karin were very open to the idea. I agreed to the project, assuming certain resources would be available to me. It took about 45 minutes one Tuesday afternoon for all those resources to come together. OK, God’s pretty clearly behind this one–all the doors are wide open and the sun’s shining in and I do believe I left my sunglasses in the car. Alright alright, Dave can take a hint or twelve.

Pastor broke down while he was baptizing Katie. I caught the whole episode on tape. You can tell a lot about a Pastor from the way he handles infant baptisms. I’ve seen Pastor baptize dozens and dozens of babies. One has cried. Exactly one. Pastor has cried once, and that was with Katie. He loves her like his own daughter. So do a lot of people in the congregation.

Well, come late November, Katie had a growth spurt. Here she is now, the end of December, 10 pounds. That’s not much for four months, I know–I was born 10 pounds. But 10 pounds is close enough. Her surgery is Wednesday. It’s going to be a 10-hour ordeal. There’s little question that the surgery will make her a normal baby. The question mark is whether she’ll survive the surgery. Many don’t.

John and Karin sat down and talked with me for about 30 minutes, telling me their story. Everyone involved in the project knew what they wanted John and Karin to say–they knew John and Karin and they’d heard them talk. What they didn’t know was how to coax them into saying the good stuff. After a couple of conversations with people who knew them, I knew, mostly instinctively, what questions to ask to bring the story out. Four years of journalism school proved useful after all.

So I rolled the camera, played with the lights to get John and Karin to look good, and started asking questions. They answered the questions I meant to ask, rather than the questions I actually asked. Easiest interview I’ve ever done, far and away. After 20 minutes, Karin had to leave with Katie–she was uncomfortable in the lights. Karin apologized. I told her not to. At that point, John said there were three things he wanted to say. I told him I had plenty of tape. So he poured his heart out. Some of it I can’t use. But some of it was among the best stuff to come out of the interview.

The gist of it: They know God has a plan. They don’t know what it is, they don’t understand everything. But they trust Him. They trust Him more than I do.

By that time, Pastor was there, along with some of John and Karin’s friends. They wanted to pray for the whole family and annoint Katie with oil, as James 5:16 says to do. I caught that on tape too, along with some of the chemistry of the group. Pastor wanted me to emphasize the importance of small groups with the video, so I wanted to capture the essence of the group. The group was an awful lot like mine. That’s good. John and Karin said without the small group’s support and concern, they wouldn’t be what they are right now. I know. Without my small group, I wouldn’t be either. And I thought I had the coolest small group in the world, but this group is just as good. Same love, different people, that’s all.

There must have been 15 people in that room who’d have given their hearts to Katie if it would help. Katie didn’t understand what was going on. She looked over at her dad and her brother, then up at her mom and stopped crying. A room full of people confessed their sins to one another, as James 5:16 says to do. That’s awkward, but none of that stuff will leave the room. I’ll destroy the audio portion of the tape if it turned out–I was having problems with the microphones at that point. A room full of people prayed with intensity. And pastor pulled out a vial of oil, annointed Katie, and prayed for strength for her. John and Karin were holding their twins, sitting in front of an altar, Pastor standing right behind them. It was a beautiful picture–John and Karin sitting there. Pastor’s got their back. And God’s right behind all of them. Meanwhile, they were all surrounded by a tight circle of friends, hands outstretched.

By the time it was over, I think everyone except Tommy and Katie was crying.

I took tape home last night, but I didn’t take any equipment. Right now I don’t need to be editing video. I need to be praying that Katie makes it through Wednesday and sees Thursday. And the next Thursday. And let’s see… There are 52 Thursdays in a year, so about 4,000 Thursdays after that.

The tape can wait.

More on video editing

Dave Farquhar Video , , , ,

Last night I found myself watching some old documentaries my Dad had on VHS (mostly episodes of old Discovery channel series, circa 1990), as much to watch how they used footage from varying sources and how they handled voiceovers as for the information they were presenting–although the subject matter was something I find interesting. It’s much easier to deal with poor quality old footage today than it was then–what I’d try to do is digitize it into Premiere, then export it to a Photoshop filmstrip, then export that into PhotoDeluxe and use its automatic cleanup, then take it back into Photoshop and then back to Premiere. The result wouldn’t be perfect but in five minutes you could have a film clip that looks a lot better.
I’m not sure I can ever watch TV for enjoyment ever again–I find myself analyzing it, trying to figure out how I’d do something comparable, or better. Then again, aside from baseball games, I haven’t watched TV for enjoyment with any regularity since 1992 when Quantum Leap went off the air, so I don’t think my new hobby changes anything.

My next video project is a documentary. I won’t be spending much time behind the camera; I’m putting my journalist hat back on and doing the interviews. I don’t know yet if I’ll be the one assembling and arranging the clips. The challenges here are really different from my music video projects, but I don’t see it as being very different from my old magazine projects in college. The biggest difference is that now I can add audio to help tell the story, and the pictures can move. But it’s still a matter of gathering the story, then gathering elements that help tell the story.

This is a big change for me though. In Journalism 105–the second journalism class I ever took–they exposed us to the basics of all the major forms of journalism: newspaper, magazine, advertising, radio, and television. I learned how to write a basic, straight news story in high school, so newspaper writing was easy. Magazine writing appealed to me a bit more because you could get more creative. Radio was a nice challenge, because you had very limited space to tell the story since it would be read aloud. Advertising was the most different unit but I didn’t struggle with it too much, at least not in that class. The only unit I disliked was the TV unit, because I didn’t like storyboarding. I think I know what changed though. When I learned TV writing, we were still in the linear era. Non-linear editing systems existed, but they weren’t widespread, so that wasn’t what they taught us.

Fast-forward six years. A couple of media professionals in St. Louis taught me how to use Apple’s Final Cut Pro. I was competent in an afternoon. To me, it looked almost like desktop publishing software, the biggest difference being that final output was playback, rather than a printed page. Suddenly TV made sense, and I caught myself thinking I’d like to go back to journalism school and get a broadcast degree. Sanity quickly returned.

Video resources online. I’m going to let the cat out of the bag. The biggest obstacle to learning video editing is a lack of footage to work with. Sure, if you’ve got a DVD-ROM drive, you can rip video from DVD and use it, but then you can’t legally use the result for anything unless you go get the appropriate permissions. You want to get permissions before you start on a project, but you don’t want to wait around for permission before you start getting your hands dirty. The answer is to mess around with some public domain video. Then you can do anything you want.

The lowdown: Anything produced in the United States before 1922 is now public domain. This includes video, photos, and music–although a specific recording can be protected by separate copyright. As a general rule, it’ll be 2067 before you see widespread public domain music recordings. Anything produced by the U.S. Government, whether in 1776 or five minutes ago, is public domain. And a large number of works produced since 1922 have fallen into the public domain for one reason or another–the most noteworthy example being the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” If you’ve ever wondered why 800 of your 922 cable channels, seemingly including ESPN, C-SPAN and the Cartoon Network, are showing that movie at any given moment in December, that’s why–any TV station can play that movie without paying anyone a dime.

Public domain video or stills can also be useful if you’re in the middle of a project and need to illustrate a point and none of your sources (whether your own video or other video you’ve obtained permission to use) illustrate it adequately.

Finding public domain stuff is a little harder. So here’s a core dump of all the resources I’ve found in the last couple of days:

http://www.pdinfo.com — public domain music
Links page from above, includes other media
The Internet Archive’s Movie Collection, over 950 downloadable PD movies, mostly short informational or promotional pieces.
Rick Prelinger’s journal, related to the above collection.
Kino International, a distributor of old movies on VHS and DVD, some of which is in the public domain.
Retrofilm.com, a distibutor of public domain material on professional-grade media such as miniDV–they don’t sell material on VHS or DVD. Their catalog is surprisingly large and recent, including a 1980 made-for-TV movie about Jonestown that I remember seeing at least twice.
Tips for handling files from The Internet Archive Collection on various platforms
The Public Domain: How to find and use copyright-free writings, music, art and more, a 300-page book on the subject.

Tools. There’s a non-linear editing project for Linux called Broadcast 2000 that got rave reviews, but unfortunately, DMCA-related litigation caused development of the program to be halted (presumably because of fear of lawsuits, either due to liability or due to people possibly using the program to violate the DMCA) and the developer no longer offers it for download. I did find the source code on Tucows, and recent versions of SuSE and Mandrake are supposed to have it. Since the program was GPL, you can still legally download it and do whatever you want with it. GIMP was abandoned by its original authors early in its development cycle and subsequently picked up by others, so maybe Broadcast 2000 still has a future.

I found some Broadcast 2000 tips here.

Regardless of what tools you use for editing, be sure to get Virtual Dub–do a search on Google. You can use it to crop your video clips and convert between formats. I’ve had good results using the Indeo 5.1 codec at a high quality setting. Slice the video you want to use into the segments you want, leaving yourself a few frames on either side just in case you need to stretch the sequence out or decide you want to use transitions.

But that’s just my opinion.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Free PR advice. I see the Taliban hunted down and assassinated four journalists. Well, OK, it’s not proven that they did it, but it looks like that’s what happened. Now, I know journalists are pretty low on the slimeball scale. I have a journalism degree from the oldest school of journalism in the world, after all. But terrorists and third-world dictators are such a completely different league of low that even a journalist-turned-lawyer-turned-politican who put himself through college selling used cars wouldn’t begin to approach it.
Bad move, guys. There’s anti-war sentiment brewing in Europe, but killing four unarmed civilians will do very little to fuel that. Reminding the people that the enemy they face is irrational and unrelentless and unmerciful isn’t a good way to end wars. You lose points in the court of public opinion, and it doesn’t put you in a good negotiating position either.

But even beyond all that, you should never kill that which you can manipulate–unless you’ve lost so much belief in your cause that you’re no longer confident of being able to put the right spin on things to convince anyone else that you’re right.

So we have further evidence that our enemy is mind-numbingly stupid. We have indication that their belief in themselves, or at least in their ability to escape from this alive, is wavering–instead of feeding information to journalists they’ve resorted to suppressing information by killing them. And we have indication of growing desperation. See above.

This is no time for protesting. This is exactly the time to start squeezing harder. Much harder.

I want to believe this. I mean I really, really want to believe…

Incidentally, if Gator isn’t uninstalling for you, Ad-Aware seems to do a nice job of eradicating it.

New toys. My 10,000 RPM Quantum/Maxtor Atlas 10K3 arrived yesterday. It takes the drive a while to initialize (upwards of 30 seconds) but once it gets rolling, it’s incredible. A completely unacceptable 37 seconds passes between the time Windows 2000’s “Starting Windows” screen appears and the time the login prompt appears. The thing’s amazing. Just to be obnoxious, I defragmented the drive while other things were running. They didn’t interfere with each other much–that’s the magic of SCSI command reordering.

I installed MS Office 2000 just to see how that would run. Word launches from a dead stop in three seconds. Kill the Office Assistant and it loads in less than two.

I know SCSI drives don’t benchmark much faster than high-end IDE drives, but the difference I see between a high-end SCSI drive like this one and a fast IDE drive is significant. Everything that ever has to touch the disk runs faster. This includes Web browsers pulling data out of the local cache.

Users who don’t do much multitasking probably won’t see much difference, but for a multitasking freak like me–I’ve only got 8 windows open on this machine as I type this, and I’m wondering what’s wrong with me–it’s unbelievable. I haven’t been this overwhelmed since my days playing with an Amiga (which, come to think of it, had a SCSI drive in it).

Witness the birth of a SCSI bigot.

Let the revolution begin…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

I was called in to an emergency meeting yesterday morning. I was up to my eyebrows in alligators, but my boss was insistent. I had to be there. So I went. When we sat down, the tone was somber and slightly meandering. The guy who called the meeting just didn’t want to get to the point. Finally it hit me: Layoffs. That’s what this has to be about. So… Who’s gone? I’m not the highest-paid guy in my group, I’m probably the most versatile, and I’m not the most recent hire, so I’m probably safe. I was right about layoffs, or, more accurately, one layoff, followed by a restructuring. And the layoff wasn’t me.
I think we’re a better fit in our new structure (under our old organization we were married to a group that really didn’t like my group, or at least they didn’t like me, and now we’re married to a group that does, for the most part, like my group), and my boss’ new boss is so busy we shouldn’t have to worry about him messing with much. But I don’t like change, and my Scottish clan’s motto, “Fide et Fortitudine” loosely translates into “loyalty and guts” today. The loyalty side of me has some problems with what happened yesterday, but looking at it strictly from a business standpoint, I sure can’t argue with it.

Meanwhile, I needed about three minutes’ worth of quality time with that indignant hard drive to get the data I so desperately wanted. I got it. Next struggle: Getting Windows NT to work properly with eighth-rate hardware. This PC has a generic RealTek 8139-based card (so we’re talking a generic clone of a Linksys or D-Link card here… A clone of a clone), Trident Blade 3D video, ESS 1868 sound, and an AOpen 56K modem (at least it wasn’t a Winmodem). The AOpen modem is, by a longshot, the best component in the machine outside of the Gigabyte motherboard and Pentium II-450 CPU. I’ll say one thing for brand-name hardware. Drivers are easy to come by and they generally install correctly the first time, every time. It took me an hour to track down Blade 3D drivers that work, then it took me a good 30-45 minutes to get those working. The Realtek drivers at least worked the first time. I never did get the ESS drivers working. The AOpen modem driver went off without a hitch, mostly because it’s actually a controller-based modem. I stand by my assertion that you can buy $10 components and spend $100 worth of time trying to get each of them working right, or you can buy $50-$75 components from a reputable maker and make them work the first time. Seeing as the more expensive components will probably work well together too and give better performance, it’s a no-brainer for me. Gimme Creative or Guillemot video and sound cards and pair that up with a 3Com or Intel NIC and I’ll be a happy camper.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about my bookstore adventures. I want to go read for a while.

OK, I’m back for a second. I can’t resist. Not quite four years ago, I had a conversation with another Journalism major/history minor (one who, unlike me, actually finished his history minor, if I recall correctly). Over dinner with my then-significant other, he told me all about his theory of generations, as she looked on, entranced. The nasty breakup that soon followed that conversation overshadowed it, and I didn’t think of it again until last night, when I spotted the book Generations, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, on the shelf of a used bookstore. Curious, I looked at it, and sure enough, this was where that guy got his ideas. It was marked six bucks. I bought it, started reading, and gained some insight on myself. Why do I go ga-ga over the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and get chills whenever I read about his personal life because it all feels so familiar? He and I are from parallel generational cycles. His generation thought like mine does, so we grew up in similar peer environments. Why do I understand people 10 years older than me so much better than people 10 years younger than me? I was born 7 years before the end of my generational cycle.

What the press doesn’t want to tell you about Kaycee

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Dan Bowman forwarded me a string of e-mail yesterday that raised a number of questions about the press. Apparently there is at least one reporter trying to find out how many people gave gifts to “Kaycee,” and that’s raising some concerns. Why? And why does the reporter want names and phone numbers? And how do you know if the guy’s legit or if he’s making some kind of sucker list?
Being a former reporter myself, Dan solicited my opinion. Maybe he figured a former reporter would recognize one of his own. And I do.

One concern was the reporter’s apparent use of a free e-mail address. This doesn’t cause me any great concern. Not all newspapers have a mail server because not every newspaper can afford to pay a mail administrator–or maybe they’re just not willing to justify keeping a full-time IT guy on hand who’d make more than the editor in chief. Plus there’s the portability issue–use a free, Web-based mail service, and you can read your mail from anywhere with Web access. No need to mess with VPNs or direct dialins or any of that nastiness.

Another concern is why does the reporter want a phone number. Practicality is one issue; a five-minute phone conversation can glean far more information than a mail conversation that takes all day. And the reporter probably wants to hear your voice; the sound of your voice tells a lot. The reporter can’t print that information, usually, but that gut feeling provides valuable guidance. Plus the reporter needs to verify that you really exist, which is something that anyone who had any contact with “Kaycee” will understand.

But if the reporter were any good, he’d be able to track you down, right? You bet he could. But that’s ruder than establishing contact via e-mail. You want the source to be as comfortable as possible. Plus it takes time to do that. In something like this, you’ll cast a wide net as painlessly as possible. If I were writing this story, my very first step would be to go to Weblogs.com, do a search on “Kaycee,” and when I find sites that mention her name a lot, I’d read the posts to get an idea of whether there was any relationship, and if I find any indication, e-mail that person. I may e-mail 100 people. But it only takes three sources to make a story.

Will the reporter honor your wishes, like not printing your full name, or your real name? Quite possibly. I know MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan knew Julie Fullbright’s identity. (Bob taught one of my journalism classes way back when, back when he was a grad student at the University of Missouri. I e-mailed him after his story hit the Web.) He didn’t publish her name–he said her identity couldn’t be confirmed at press time. A white lie? Kind of. But I know Bob didn’t knock on Julie’s door and confirm it. I don’t know whether he called her on the phone and asked if the pictures were her yet still chose to say her identity was unconfirmed. Bob said he wanted to protect her privacy, and knowing Bob, I take him at his word on that. If this was going to turn into a three-ring circus in the press, Bob didn’t want to be the ringmaster. Once her identity became common knowledge, you started seeing her mentioned by name in the news too, and not just on the Weblogging sites.

Chances are very good that the reporter(s) will talk to dozens of people and probably run the best quotes he gets from some of them. For example, I found a nugget in one of Dan Bowman’s messages: “Shelley would really like to know who ate her cookies.” Yes, on one level that’s funny. But baking cookies for someone is a fairly universal act of love, and just about all of us–even baking-challenged superbachelors–can understand the feeling of betrayal when you bake up a batch of cookies and send them to someone, then find out they never got to that person. And if that person didn’t exist at all, it hurts even more.

If you feel like you should give the reporter a piece of information but don’t want to be quoted, use the phrase “off the record.” Most reporters honor that. If you can give them someone else who’ll corroborate what you say, the reporter is even more likely to honor it. Even if that someone else wants to remain anonymous, once three people say something, a reporter can pretty much count it as fact. And since there is some danger of retribution, a reporter will honor that. Most reporters have a soft spot in their hearts for people in danger.

I know you’re nervous about talking about this with a reporter, because I was a crime reporter. Being taken for money is one thing. People don’t like to talk about that because they don’t like to think of themselves as suckers. I know that. Any reporter you’re likely to talk to knows that. But being taken for love is entirely different. People are far less likely to talk about that. Any reporter you’re likely to talk to knows that too. All too well. He or she isn’t likely to do anything to hack you off when good sources are hard to find.

Why is the press taking this angle? Well, the root word of the word “news” is “new.” This is a very old story by news standards. This is the only angle left to take, and the national media has probably stopped caring. If it turns out that more than $1,000,000 worth of gifts were sent to Kaycee, then it’ll become a national story again. If a few hundred people sent postcards and cookies and trinkets, I doubt you’ll hear about it anywhere but in Kansas and Oklahoma newspapers. But in rural Kansas and Oklahoma, anything new that comes about in this case is news.

Why can’t the reporter just read your Weblog? There’s a decent chance s/he already has. But the reporter will want to know how you feel about this now. (That “new” thing again.) And no one wants to print exactly the same quote some other paper did. If you interview the person yourself, your chances of having verbatim quotes lessen.

Is the reporter in cahoots with the FBI or local law enforcement agencies? Probably not. That would be a conflict of interest. It crosses the boundary between reporting news and creating news.

And how can you tell if a reporter is legit? Do a Web search on the reporter’s name. Chances are it’ll show up somewhere. I did a Google search on the reporter’s name in this case, and the first hit had his name, his employer’s name, his editor’s name, and his newspaper’s phone number. If worse came to worse, I could call that number and ask for him. If he’s not there, you can ask whoever answers the phone if the reporter is working on a story along those lines. There’s no guarantee that person will know, but reporters do talk to one another, and future stories do come up in newsroom meetings.

Hopefully that helps people see this thing from a reporter’s perspective. And I suspect that’s probably the last I’ll talk about Kaycee here–the story seems to be losing momentum and people seem to be moving on. And that’s a good thing.