journalism

Before they were Cardinals…

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , , ,

I just finished reading Before They Were Cardinals, a history of the American Association St. Louis Browns, by Jon David Cash.

I have mixed feelings about the book.Most people know the Cardinals are one of the oldest baseball franchises. What most don’t know is that the Cardinals didn’t start out in the National League, were formerly known as the Browns (not to be confused with the later St. Louis Browns of the American League that moved to Baltimore in 1954), and that the tradition of the World Series originated here in St. Louis,

This book gives a nice overview of the early history of the St. Louis franchise and the American Association, the league in which the team had its first early successes.

The upside of the book is that it is very academic. It cites everything and the old maps and photographs prove the author spent hours at the Missouri Historical Society unearthing treasures.

The downside is that the book is academic. While I certainly understand the desire to rise above the sensationalist, opinionated late 19th-century journalism that serves as most of the book’s primary sources, a lot of the color that makes the early history of this team interesting isn’t in the book. The colorful and eccentric owner, Christian Frederick Wilhem von der Ahe, is presented as a German immigrant who bought a bar, noticed one day that his patrons all left in a rush for a few hours on Sunday, then returned to spend a leisurely rest of the day. After asking where everyone went and hearing about baseball, he invested in the team and made (and later lost) a fortune doing so.

That’s all fine and good, but it’s a one-dimensional picture of Chris Von der Ahe. Yes, he was an astute and successful self-made immigrant businessman–the embodiment of the American Dream if there ever was one. While some mention of his nouveau riche excesses is in the book, much of what made him so despised outside of St. Louis isn’t mentioned.

My personal favorite Von der Ahe story, the larger-than-life statue of himself erected outside of Sportsman’s Park to celebrate the successful 1885 season, gets no mention in the book. There is mention that Von der Ahe is buried underneath a large statue of himself, but no mention of where the statue came from.

I did find it very interesting that Von der Ahe, convinced there was no money left to be made in St. Louis, plotted to win the 1887 World Series and then move his world championship team to New York where he could draw bigger crowds, more beer sales, and bigger profits. The team never won another World Series under his ownership, however, so Von der Ahe never put that plan into motion.

Unfortunately, the book ends abruptly with the American Association’s merger with the National League, with only a brief epilogue at the end talking about the slow fall of Von der Ahe and his loss of the franchise.

In the book’s defense, Von der Ahe gets more treatment elsewhere while the American Association is little more than a footnote today, so I can see why the author chose to focus on the more neglected subject. It makes for better scholarship. Since this book is published by the University of Missouri Press and not Random House, I can see why the book was written the way it was.

If you want good history, particularly of what it was that made the American Association what it was–and this is fair, because the St. Louis club was the dominant team of that league and era–then this is a great book. If you’re looking for colorful stories about a guy who was like Ted Turner and George Steinbrenner and Charlie Finley and Bill Veeck all wrapped up into one with a dash of Jay Gatsby thrown in, look elsewhere.

Playing around with LyX

Dave Farquhar Software , , , ,

In what little free time I’ve had the past few days (we have a project that has us in the midst of a death march at work), I’ve been messing around with LyX, a typesetting program for Windows, Unix, and most other operating sytems. I remember messing with it about six years ago, when there wasn’t much else resembling a word processor available for Linux, but this time, I’m more impressed with what I see.LyX is a front-end for a typesetting system called TeX. TeX was developed by the legendary computer scientist Don Knuth when he was dissatisfied with the appearance of his galley proofs for the second edition of The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth had an eye for fine typography, and because hand-set type was increasingly being replaced by machines, he looked for a way to make a computer play by the same set of rules that experienced typesetters have used for the past 500 years.

I had my first exposure to TeX when I was working on a business analysis project with Charlie Sebold. There was a department Charlie and I both did a lot of work for, and supporting these 8 users had ballooned into a full-time job in itself. We had an expensive contractor billing an average of 45 hours a week to the department alone over the course of a year, and when I replaced him, I wasn’t able to knock that down much below 40. We believed there was something wrong with a department of 8 users spending $200,000 a year in computer support. Come to think of it, that may have something to do with why I don’t work there anymore, but I digress. Charlie and I embarked on a project to figure out what we could do to cut those costs. I don’t remember anymore how the writing duties got split up, but Charlie typeset the report in TeX. I remember him being surprised to hear that I didn’t know much about TeX, especially since I had written a book for O’Reilly at that point, and if you look at the early O’Reilly books, they look like they were produced by TeX on the default settings.

Well, intentionally or unintentionally, using TeX for the report was a stroke of brilliance, because the most influential people in the department were design snobs, and TeX produces better-looking output than anything PageMaker could ever do. The text is beautifully justified, with no rivers through it, and the kerning is always set just right, and it will even use ligatures when appropriate. Basically, it does all of the hallmarks of elegant design that they taught me in journalism school–stuff that takes hours to do by hand–and it does it in minutes.

So when Charlie handed that report out at the first meeting, he got us a whole bunch of instant credibility.

What I like about LyX is that it removes the markup stage from TeX. You apply an appropriate document style–book, letter, article, report, or whatever–and you mark lines as whatever they happen to be–standard paragraphs, headings, chapter titles, document titles, author, or whatever–and it handles all of the layout and everything else for you. It’ll even generate the table of contents for you. And if you want an index, just flag words as you write or edit, and it can generate an index.

It also handles the most frustrating aspect of writing that I faced when I was writing my book back in 1999. A good book shouldn’t spent a lot of time repeating itself, so there’ll be times when you’ll refer the reader to a specific chapter, or even a specific page. The problem is, these things change. I not only re-ordered the chapters about halfway through the writing process, I actually took a couple of chapters, combined the like topics, and turned them into two completely differently titled chapters. Finding my cross-references and keeping them straight was such a pain that I really didn’t do it all that much. With LyX, cross-references are easy. You just label a section, and insert a cross-reference to the label, and it inserts the page number and the name of the section for you. You can put a cross-reference on every page and not slow down a bit.

Now that I’ve spent a few hours with it, I heartily recommend LyX. In college I found I got better grades when I turned in papers using fonts other than Times and Arial, and the output from LyX adds a whole new degree of elegance to it. Succeeding in college is as much about playing the game as it is anything else, and LyX gives you that slight edge.

And, as you might suspect, I’ve been playing with LyX for a reason. I’m writing again. Over the course of the past year, I’ve prepared a 133-page manuscript (that’s single-spaced Times with no pretty pictures or formatting, so it’s more than it sounds). I’m in the process of editing and typesetting it now. It’s highly specialized, so I’ll be self-publishing it, rather than using a publisher. I’ll be happy if it sells 1,000 copies and thrilled if it sells 10,000, and no publisher is willing to touch a book anymore if they think a book will only sell 10,000 copies. If it sells 1,000 copies, it will have been worth my while to write. Modern print-on-demand technology makes that a much safer risk than it was in 1999, when I wrote and published my first book.

And while there are times when the help of a traditional publisher definitely makes a better book, I think this is a case where I can create a better product working on my own.

I’ll keep you posted.

Well, that was fun.

Dave Farquhar This weblog

We’ve been offline for a long, long time. I don’t know exactly when the problem started. Last month, St. Louis got rocked by a huge storm and we were without power for five days. When it came back, my web server didn’t.

I restored from the last good backup I had, but unfortunately that was a couple of months old. So the last three months’ worth of entries are gone. That wasn’t a lot, but it’s something.On a more personal level–a more personal level than I’ve been willing to write on my blog in several years–I have to admit I’ve been putting it off. Part of it is that I’ve just been completely slammed at work. But I’ve gone through other times in life when I didn’t really have time for anything but work and sleep, and yet I still found time to write, even if it was just a little.

It’s like in baseball, when you get into a slump, you try lots of other things, and pretty soon you forget the things that made you successful in the past, and it’s almost like you’re not the same person anymore.

And I have to be honest. When I look in the mirror anymore, I’m not sure who that guy looking back at me is. It isn’t the real me.

Blogging is dangerous. I learned that several years ago, when a girl I dated briefly e-mailed me after six months and recounted the time since we had last seen each other in greater detail than one of my best friends would have been able to do. There were details in that message that even I’d forgotten about. It was spooky. So I started being a bit more evasive about certain details.

Fast forward another year or two. I found myself in a troubled relationship and I wrote about it. My then-girlfriend didn’t read my blog, so I figured I was pretty safe, but what I didn’t know was that her mother read it. Oops. I still don’t think anything I said then was out of line, but she saw things differently, and that was the end of that. Now that I’m married–to someone else–that doesn’t matter much anymore.

But today there are legal issues too. Threats of being sued by employers or clients have closed down more than one blog, including one that I enjoyed reading.

I have to figure out how to balance that. I haven’t worked in journalism in years, but I still consider myself a journalist and I still find myself referring to myself as one. When I don’t write, I’m not happy. Period.

So I’m going to try to write more often. I don’t know about what. I can’t really write much about work, partly because detailed accounts of what I do at work are only useful for those nights when you can’t sleep, and partly because of the legal issues. The journalist in me doesn’t like that very much. I tried really hard this weekend to make time for my hobbies, but found I’ve pretty much lost interest in them.

Basically I’m facing a reprise of the first crisis of my professional career, which happened back in 1998. I was overworked, underappreciated, and work was a wrecking ball, crashing down every boundary I’d ever set. With no room for a life outside of work, things got ugly fast.

I’m back there again, only now there’s even more at stake because I have a wife and a house to take care of.

Hopefully writing will help hasten the healing process. Boundaries are an important thing. That sounds like a good topic to tackle.

How to get my job (2006 edition)

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , , , , , ,

It seems like every year or two, somebody asks me how to get my job. Given the way the last year or so has gone, I can’t believe anyone’s asking me that question, but it’s been coming back up again. I’ve made some mistakes in my career–obviously–but since I’m still in the field, I must have done a few things right too.

I guess it makes sense to trace my career and see what I would do differently.1984: Yes, it all started when I was 10. I’d wanted a computer for as long as I could remember, and that year, Mom and Dad finally bought one. I spent as much time messing with that old Commodore as I could. And when I wasn’t messing with that Commodore, I was reading about it. It was an obsession. It bordered on unhealthy. Or maybe it was unhealthy.

In high school, if you’d offered me a choice between a date with the best-looking girl in the school or a new Amiga 1200 or 3000, I might very well have taken the computer. Sure, I was interested in girls, but the computer wouldn’t break up with me, right?

I bring this up for one reason: If you’re wanting to get into the field for money, find something else to do. Go into sales or something. If you don’t absolutely love this stuff, you won’t last, so there’s no point in wasting your time.

1994: I started my career in sales. When polite company isn’t around, I say I whored myself out for a large consumer electronics chain. That might be a bit more accurate. In a way it was a good move. A lot of IT people my age started their careers the way I did. It’s better than fast food, at least in regards that IT recruiters use it as a scouting ground. Work there and do well, and it’s just a matter of time before recruiters will want to talk to you.

What I did right: I started filling in for the store’s technician, who frequently had problems showing up for work.

What I’d do differently: First, I’d find out who the best salesperson was, and really learn how to sell. I’ve worked with IT management people who couldn’t figure out how to make their computer play solitaire, but they know a little bit about selling, so their jobs are safe, even though they had no qualifications.

The other thing I’d do differently is to get A+ certification. It’s not strictly necessary to get a better job, but it opens more doors. A lot of jobs require A+ certification just because some idiot in HR (and yes, most of them are idiots) decided it’s a good idea.

1995: I caught a break because I knew both Macintosh and IBM hardware, I knew OS/2, and I had connections at the journalism school at the University of Missouri. A professor mentioned the job opening to me and handed me a phone number. After class I called the number. The guy on the other end asked me what I knew how to do. I told him, he told me he’d pay me $7 an hour, and asked when I could start.

It was supposed to be a temporary gig. But it turned out I knew how to do a lot more than just the grunt work that needed to be done, so they found money to keep me. And when I was about to graduate, they offered me a full-time job.

What I did right: I showed up for work, I did everything they asked me to do, and whenever somebody else was sick and they asked me to try to fill in, I filled in and actually managed to do a decent job.

What I’d do differently: It wasn’t a bad gig, until Yoko Ono came along. Actually she was from Pittsburgh and she was Scottish-American. But the relationship interfered with the job and the job interfered with the relationship. And when something went wrong with one, it messed up the other too. I’d have done well to learn how to separate the two. That’s a lot to ask of someone who’s 23. Now I’m 31 and don’t know how now either. Neither does my 40-year-old boss.

1998: I moved to St. Louis to take another job in IT. This was also the year I re-discovered God and religion. This was a dream job, working for my church. I took a demotion and a pay cut to do it. Of course I didn’t know until I’d already quit my other job that it was a demotion.

I’ll get off track if I talk about it much more than that, so let’s just talk about what went right and wrong.

What I did right: I racked up a lot of impressive statistics and I learned how to do everything they asked me to do. I usually wasn’t happy about it, but I always did as well or better than the person who replaced me. The guy I replaced was a legend and I don’t think anyone would have been able to replace him adequately.

What I did wrong: I shouldn’t have taken the demotion. Not at 23. If you’re married and have kids, I can see taking a demotion so you can work better hours to spend more time with your family. When you’re 23 and single, you can’t waste time climbing a ladder you already climbed once. A banker in Columbia offered me a job as a systems administrator when he found out I knew OS/2. I should have taken it and called St. Louis and told them I wasn’t coming.

This job really went downhill as another relationship was coming to an end too. No need to re-hash that.

I made one other mistake. I won’t elaborate on it. But if you see upper management doing something unethical, LEAVE.

2005: Mercenary time. My first contract was with a very large and very nearly bankrupt cable company. The work wasn’t nearly as interesting or challenging as my previous job, and my coworkers were at either extreme: Some were among the very best people I’d ever worked with, and some of them were just overgrown high school bullies. But it was work, and the pay was fair, which was nice after working for seven years at anywhere from $15,000-$20,000 less than I was worth. Making a double mortgage payment and still having more money left over at the end of the month than I’d had a year before was very nice.

What I did right: I came in, learned quickly, took things seriously, was very professional and very effective.

What I did wrong: I didn’t press in. I did what I was asked, and that was it. That’s what a hired gun does. And the result was I was treated like a hired gun. As soon as the money got tough, I was the first one out the door.

I had coworkers who didn’t want me to learn more about the system. Since they didn’t want to show me, I should have found another way to learn it. And I should have loosened up.

2006: I won’t tell you who I’m working for now, other than to say it’s someone you’ve definitely heard of.

This time, I made an effort to go to lunch with my coworkers. I didn’t do that at the cable company because I was trying to save money. I’d gone without enough money for a couple of months and was deathly afraid of having to do it again. I’m still a tightwad and everyone knows it, but I’m willing to spend $7 to bond with my coworkers once a week. The theory is it’s a lot harder to show the door to someone you like than to someone you barely know.

The other thing I did this time was to steal some responsibility. I volunteer for everything. Sometimes they end up giving it to someone else anyway. But I’m always willing. When people give me some of their old responsibilities, I take them, and I figure out how to do them faster and smarter. After about two months, now my boss is surprised when I do something his way.

My path isn’t the only path. There are two previous bosses I wouldn’t hesitate to work for again. One is a retired U.S. Marine. He went into the Marine Corps as a technician, fixing teletype machines. When teletypes became less important, he moved on to computers. When he retired, he kept on working for the military as a contractor.

Most of my coworkers today took a similar path. Some enjoyed very long careers as defense contractors after their military days came to an end.

That seems to me to be a good route to take if you don’t have a lot of connections. And the upside to the military approach is that you know your job won’t be outsourced to India. That’s a real danger and that danger is going to get a lot bigger before it gets any smaller.

The other previous boss has a degree in psychology. He started working with computers because he found them interesting. I don’t know how he got started in the field, but during the time I worked for him, he was the epitome of connections. He knew everybody, and whenever something goofy came up, he knew how to get in touch with them to get the answer. The result? He’s every bit as entrenched as a tenured professor would be. The difference is there’s no question as to whether that’s a good thing.

Should journalists protect their sources?

Dave Farquhar Writing , , , ,

In the wake of New York Times reporter Judith Miller going to jail for refusing to reveal the identity of an unnamed source, of course I was asked about journalism and confidential sources, and should journalists protect their sources anyway?

I liken this situation to what would go through my mind if the New York Yankees ever played the Cuban Nationals. I would have a hard time deciding which team I wanted to lose.You see, confidential sources aren’t something you’re supposed to use very often. Since the biggest journalism event of the previous century–Watergate–couldn’t have stood without Deep Throat, people tend to assume it happens a lot. In reality, you ought to see a rude four-letter word somewhere on the front page more often than you ought to see an unnamed source in a story.

I was taught that unnamed sources are inherently unreliable. Think about it. Why would you have any interest in what I had to say if I wasn’t willing to sign my name to it? When my name’s not on it, it doesn’t matter what kind of a lie I tell. It’s not going to affect my reputation any. The best source has something at stake by talking to the journalist. A lot of people find talking to journalists to be tedious and unpleasant, but let’s face it: People respect people whose names they see in the newspaper. So a journalist inherently ought to seek out people who have a need to build or protect a reputation.

To my knowledge, I only ever used unnamed sources once. That was in a story about college students drinking underage and getting DWIs. None of the students I interviewed wanted their names used. Every attorney I interviewed did. That’s predictable. And since the unnamed sources’ stories sounded reasonable, nobody questioned me over their use. My assurance that these people really lived and weren’t the product of my imagination was enough. The story ran.

But that’s one problem with unnamed sources: A lot of times they’re just a cover for laziness. It’s a lot easier to make up quotes than to get them. And if you’re not willing to divulge a name and a phone number, and the editor is willing to take you at your word that you talked to these people, unnamed sources can result in a lot of fiction being presented as fact.

That’s why I’m not a fan of unnamed sources. They should be a last resort, not a first resort. If one person’s willing to talk, someone else ought to be as well, and maybe that other person has a name and is willing to let you print it. And two unnamed sources lend more credibility than one. It’s a little harder to fake, for one thing.

But Ms. Miller used unnamed sources. And this unnamed source revealed the identity of a CIA operative during a time of war, which is a crime. Since she wouldn’t reveal the source’s name, she’s doing time.

And that’s why I liken this to the Yankees playing the Cubans. On one hand you have a journalist using an unnamed source. On the other hand, you have a government that considers this a time of war when it’s convenient, but not really a time of war when it’s not–there’s that little bit in the Constitution about only Congress being able to officially declare and wage war, for instance. And that government really seems to be eager to gobble up freedom these days. Without a truly free press, that’s one less check and balance. Thomas Jefferson once said newspapers are more important than government.

So I’m wondering a lot of things, including how Ms. Miller could have broken that law when we aren’t officially at war, but also if we were to lose a free press, how we would get it back. It’s a lot easier for the CIA to get another operative.

Journalist-source confidentiality is supposed to resemble that which exists between a doctor and a patient, an attorney and a client, or a priest and a parishioner. And while there are exceptions to those often unspoken confidentiality agreements, they are just that: exceptions. If during the course of gathering a story an unnamed source told me he committed a murder, or another heinous crime such as child abuse or rape, that’s obviously an exceptional situation. A journalist who has just learned such a thing should be compelled to go to the police, as should a priest.

While a CIA operative being unmasked is a more exceptional situation than someone confessing to having run a red light or having spent the previous evening at a disreputable entertainment establishment, I have a difficult time mustering up the same sympathy for the CIA as I would the family of a victim of a violent crime. Murder, rape, and molest ruin lives. Did Ms. Miller’s source ruin the CIA? Ms. Miller’s source certainly changed the life of that CIA operative, but is that along the lines of murder? Isn’t this situation one of the hazards of the job?

So while I don’t like the practice of using unnamed sources, and I’m anything but a big fan of the media as it exists today, I believe that a free press is a necessity. And by that I mean a truly free press–not a press that’s free to print things I agree with. The Soviet Union had that. The Pravda was free to print whatever the government would allow it to print.

Once you lose a truly free press, it usually takes a very bloody revolution to get it back.

Unfortunately, both the far left and the far right tend to want to suppress opinions that don’t agree with theirs. I believe that the people who disagree with me have the right to print whatever they want to print. I’m confident that enough people will see that they are idiots and will agree with me. And in those instances where I’m the idiot, how else would I ever find out that I’m the one who’s wrong?

So while I’m not willing to call Judith Miller a martyr–some headlines have–I believe I can make a case for siding with her. I don’t see how I can make anything but a very wobbly case in support of the government.

Those who don’t agree with me ought to click on that link a few paragraphs back that features some quotes from Thomas Jefferson.

A journalist\’s take on how to eliminate snoring during sermons

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , ,

First things first: I am not a pastor. While I have nine years of Lutheran primary and secondary education, my degree came from the University of Missouri and I have exactly zero days of formal, master’s-level theological training.

But I am a published author, I spent four years and thousands of dollars (and thousands more of scholarship money) studying journalism. So hopefully what I lack in Bible knowledge, I make up for in writing knowledge. And if denominations are to grow, especially the more conservative ones, I think more of the latter is going to be a necessity.I am writing this because I heard a sermon today that was relatively good. It disappointed me mostly because it could have been one of those sermons that people remembered for the rest of their lives. So let’s get down to business.

Write on a sixth-grade reading level. Your morning paper is written on that reading level. Newspapers are publications for the masses, so they are unwilling to assume that the majority of people can digest anything more complex than that level. Jesus made a point of demonstrating that Christianity is simple enough that a child can understand it. Therefore, a child ought to be able to understand the pastor.

And I’ve got something else shocking for you. What about the more intellectual publications? They’re written on a 10th-grade level.

So how do you write on that kind of a level? I’ll give you some tools. Eventually it becomes automatic.

Lose the big words. Most Lutheran pastors are academics. When it takes four years to get your master’s degree, you have to be. And if you want anyone outside of your own congregation to listen to you, you almost have to go back and get your doctorate.

But the problem is that while pastors and their colleagues are academics, the overwhelming majority of the congregation is not. The people who most desperately need to be reached certainly are not. And while I firmly believe that the pastor can stand in front of the congregation and read recipes for 20 minutes and God will make sure the person who needs to hear Him will hear exactly what He wants, I also believe it’s better for God to work through the guy standing up front more than in spite of him.

If your English Composition teachers were anything like mine, they required you to use five words you’ve never used before in every piece. But your English Comp teacher isn’t in the audience. Good writers know the rules of writing. Great writers know when to break them. William F. Buckley Jr. isn’t the rule. He’s the one guy who can get away with breaking so many.

Lose the long sentences and paragraphs. Your English Comp teacher probably told you a paragraph is a minimum of three sentences. That should be the first rule you learn to break. Short, punchy paragraphs are fine, and so are short, simple sentences. There’s nothing wrong with an eight-word sentence.

Practice writing on a sixth-grade level. If you use Microsoft Word, you can easily turn it into a tool for checking your writing. Go to the Tools menu, select Options, click Spelling & Grammar tab 4, and tick the box next to “Show readability statistics.” Now run a spelling/grammar check, click ignore on anything it flags, and it’ll give you your reading scores.

Try shortening up on some words and simplifying some sentences to see how the changes affect your work.

Relevance. A single mother of two who has never had a healthy relationship with a male doesn’t care about the original Greek or Hebrew in any given Bible passage. That’s an extreme example, but virtually everyone who walks through the doors of a church comes in carrying some baggage. It’s usually the only way God can get them there. It’s when life becomes its least bearable that people are most willing to find out what the Creator of life has to say about it. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems like the place you’re least likely to hear what God has to say about life is church.

That’s unfortunate. When you read the four Gospels, it’s clear that part of the reason thousands of people followed Jesus instead of the Pharisees was because Jesus talked about the things that mattered to them, while the Pharisees did not. If that contemporary church down the street is growing and your conservative church is not, the reason might not necessarily be the guitars and drums. The reason might very well be that the pastor gives good advice every week on how to get through this life.

I know plenty of people who attend my church for exactly that reason. They have no great love for the electric guitars and distortion–but they put up with it so they can hear how to have a better life every week.

While you don’t want to single out anyone and talk about his or her problems to the whole congregation, speaking about issues in general terms is good. Does the Bible have anything to say about credit card debt? Diet? Spoiled children?

I’m no fan at all of daytime talk shows–I think they’re God’s curse on the unemployed and unemployable–but I do believe that this world would be a better place if pastors would tune in to them once in a while. It gives you an idea of what kinds of problems people think about and face–and may not be willing to talk to you about–and it gives you some idea of what the world is saying about them. Your job is to tell the congregation what God says about those problems.

Get out more. I used to know someone who was required by his congregation to spend some time hanging out in bars. Ostensibly his job was to win converts. But I think it accomplishes some other things too.

First, it gives you a good feel for how people talk. Since these are the people who most need to be reached, you need to sound like them (minus the four-letter words).

Second, it gives you an idea what these people care about. You’ll probably overhear more about women and money than anything else. Significance and security are two very basic needs; if you can manage to illustrate every Sunday how God is the ultimate source of these two things, the size of your church will probably double every five years.

Granted, you don’t have to hang around in bars to hear people talk, but bars are where the broken people are most likely to go, and if your goal is to do what Jesus did and reach broken people, I think it helps to know what one looks for and what a broken person looks like.

The end. Like I said before, I’m not a pastor. I’m just a writer of above-average intelligence. It’s rare that a sermon sails over my head, and that was nearly as true when I was in the 4th grade as it is now.

But I’m not everyone, and the college-level dissertations that are all too common in many denominations every Sunday don’t do much, in my experience, to strengthen the church. Yes, to a degree I am advocating the dumbing down of the Sunday sermon. Hebrews 5 is relevant. You can’t assume anymore, in this day and age, that the majority of the people in the congregation can handle spiritual solid food. The Sunday sermon is the place for milk. The place for solid food is in Bible study, whether it occurs on Sunday morning before or after the service, or on some weeknight. And even then, I believe a lot of studies need to be serving milk.

But if every church serves milk long enough, the general public’s knowledge of the things of God will progress to the point where it can handle solid food on a much more regular basis.

Are blogs credible?

Dave Farquhar net.culture

OK, so 60%+ of Americans don’t trust blogs. Do I need to do a Gomer Pyle imitation?

Blogs are media. People generally don’t trust the media either.Ten years ago, which was a time when the Web had about 12 pages on it and almost all of them were personal pages, I was in journalism school and if there was one point the introductory and history classes tried to hammer home, it was that freedom of the press is in danger. Today, a majority of students, when presented with the exact wording of the First Amendment, believe it goes too far.

There’s an old saying that freedom of the press is for those who own one. To a degree, that presented a large barrier of entry. One can safely assume that it will cost more than a million dollars to start a magazine, and that’s been true for a very long time. Newspaper startup costs will be much higher.

But somehow that hasn’t stopped quacks from getting into print. Some quacks are very wealthy. They can buy media outright, and less-wealthy quacks can just buy some space in a newspaper and pontificate all they want about whatever bothers them and act like a syndicated columnist–some even include their picture–and the only way you would know is by the word “ADVERTISEMENT” plastered across the top and the bottom of the editorial.

In contrast, some people will give you a blog for free, and that lowers the cost of entry even further. Now all it takes is some rudimentary computer skills and the willingness to sit down and write. And if people agree with you and link to you, you might even gain some prominence.

Does that make them credible? No. But do the words “of the [insert newspaper name here] staff” give you credibility? It shouldn’t. Journalism is not a licensed profession like engineering or law or medicine. If I can convince someone to hire me and pay me to write, I’m a journalist. The same goes for you. There are just two barriers of entry: People who can string words together intelligently are much more rare than they should be, and the pay stinks. If your goal is to keep a dry roof over your head and drive a car that isn’t falling apart, you’re better off persuing a career as a garbage man. But if you’re willing to live with pay that makes schoolteachers look like aristocrats, there isn’t much keeping you from being a journalist.

The low pay is one reason I’m suspicious of a lot of journalists. To put up with that lifestyle, you pretty much have to have a hidden agenda.

So do I trust blogs? Generally, no. But don’t feel bad. Generally speaking I’m suspicious of television news and newspapers and magazines and other online news services too.

Credibility is earned. I know some people trust me. I know some other people think I’m a quack who blogs because no sane person would pay me to write anything. And that’s fine–in some cases the feeling is more than mutual.

So what to do about those big, bad blogs that have no credibility? Censoring speech is always bad. The solution to speech that needs censorship is more speech. So the answer to bad blogs is more blogs. The best of the best will rise to the top, and quacks always find a way to eventually self destruct.

Graphics software for Windows revisited

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

My girlfriend was asking me about graphics software today. She’d been trying to use Paint Shop Pro as an inexpensive alternative to Adobe Illustrator and, predictably, was disappointed.

The GPL alternatives to Illustrator still lack at least one crucial feature (bitmap pattern fills) but I remembered reading about Serif DrawPlus.Serif is a manufacturer of cheap desktop publishing/graphics software. By cheap, I mean they aim for the $99 price point for their flagship product, then they give away older versions, and, at least sometimes, when you download the older version they offer you a somewhat less-old version for $10 or $20.

So I downloaded DrawPlus 5 and played around with it. It’s a bit basic, but it has all of the fundamentals. After about five minutes of playing around I was able to do some nice effects with text–for example, I was able to add a border to the edge of the letters, add fills, and even add a transparency effect. Cool.

Standard polygon and circle tools are there too, and you can combine multiple shapes into more complex shapes. If you can picture something as boxes and other simple shapes, you can draw a scaleable image of it with this program.

Why yes, I do think I’ll be using this to draw buildings and such for my Lionel layout. How’d you ever guess?

It’s not as powerful as Illustrator, but for a lot of people it’ll do what they need. Someone unfamiliar with vector graphics might be more comfortable with a simpler program like this, then switching to the higher-end software after running up against the simpler program’s limitations. (For years journalism schools taught desktop publishing by teaching students Pagemaker first, then QuarkXPress, since the latter is much less intimidating once one is familiar with the basic concepts.)

Check it out at freeserifsoftware.com. Serif also offers a raster image editor (a la Photoshop) and a desktop publisher under the same plan.

Taking decent photographs

Dave Farquhar Photography , , ,

I’m not a serious photographer and I don’t play one on TV. But I’m tired of looking at dark, fuzzy, tiny photographs that don’t tell anything, so here’s a way someone who knows nothing about photography–such as Yours Truly–can take a decent picture.For some examples of my photography, which I consider barely acceptable, here’s a windup train and an American Flyer electric.

The second photograph is worse than the first, for two reasons. I took the second photograph indoors, and used a rug as a backdrop. The texture of the rug detracts from the photo. As does the lack of light.

I took the first photograph outside. It wasn’t all that sunny of a day, and it was about 9 in the morning on a Saturday. I used a white towel as a backdrop. A neutral-colored sheet would have been even much better, but I had the towel handy. The photograph is small enough that the towel’s texture doesn’t detract as badly as it normally would.

So the first trick is to use a decent backdrop.

Light is trick #2. Get enough light on your subject to not need the flash. Light up the room, take a shot, and see what happens. If the camera flashes, get more light. Better yet, take the object outside. In the daytime, of course. Ideally, the majority of your light should be coming from behind you and the camera, rather than from behind the object. A little bit of light behind the object to eliminate shadows is a good thing, but too much will look harsh.

Focus is trick #3. I assume you know to push the button halfway to focus it. That’s the first step. The second step is to take five or six shots because one of them is likely to look better than the worst of them.

The rule of thirds is something they actually teach you in school. (I spent about a month studying photography in journalism school because they make everyone do that. The rule of thirds is about all I remember.) Professional photographers can disregard this rule the way professional writers sometimes disregard rules about sentence fragments. People like me need to follow it. Look at an existing photograph. Mentally draw two horizontal and two vertical lines, dividing the photograph into thirds. The intersection of each line is what the human eye is going to find interesting. So at the very least, position your object so that part of it is hitting as many of those points as possible.

Use a tripod. You’ll get sharper pictures because a tripod holds the camera steady. I didn’t use a tripod for either of these shots, so it’s not absolutely necessary, but it helps. For small objects, a three-inch pocket tripod from Kmart will do just fine. Mine cost about $5. For larger objects, a larger tripod is necessary. Generally speaking, even a cheap and nasty tripod is better than no tripod, so long as it isn’t so wobbly that it can’t hold the camera straight.

And finally: Crop. After you’ve taken the photograph and you get it into the computer, crop it. This lets you make the picture smaller without losing resolution. It also lets you get rid of unnecessary whitespace and/or objects. Did you catch the edge of your backdrop, revealing the concrete or table underneath? Crop it out. Did you forget the rule of thirds? Crop the picture to move the object into place. I cropped both of the pictures I used as examples because otherwise you’d have seen two pictures with lots of towel or carpet and itty-bitty trains. But I wanted pictures of trains, not man-made fibers.

If you follow these simple principles, you can set your camera to auto everything and get a decent shot. The idea is to make the job as easy on the camera as possible. If you halfway follow the rule of thirds, you get an even better shot.

I almost forgot one other thing. I cleaned the objects in the photos. You might be reluctant to clean objects for sale on Ebay for the legitimate fear of damaging them, but at least brush the dust off with a soft brush, such as a makeup brush or soft paint brush. Chances are, anything you photograph looks better without loose dust covering it.

Following these tips won’t make you look like a pro, but your Wikipedia articles will look better and so will your Ebay listings. And on Ebay, a good, clear photograph means more bids and higher prices.

It\’s that time of month again, time to Slashdot the Wikipedia

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , , , , ,

Slashdot published an interview today with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. I found it entertaining reading. Even though I’m a semi-regular contributor over at Wikipedia, I’ve never encountered its founder, possibly because I do my best these days to stay under the radar over there.The discussion on Slashdot was interesting. As always, someone questioned Wikipedia’s accuracy, wondering how anything but chaos can come from something that anyone can edit at any time. A few people read two articles and came back with the usual “99.9% of Wikipedia articles cite no sources and have inaccuracies in them.” Someone else came back and said he’d made a change to the M1A1 Abrams article and was corrected by an Army mechanic. I always like comments like that. It shows who actually has experience and who’s talking out his butt.

Wales was incredibly idealistic, with a vision of free textbooks educating the world and ridding the world of places where people have no sanitation. Free access to the sum of all human knowledge will solve all the world’s problems.

I wish I could be so idealistic.

Oh well, shoot for the stars and maybe you have a chance of hitting the moon, right?

I found the discussion on credibility more interesting. Someone asked how an encyclopedia produced by anarchy could have more credibility than the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica or even World Book. Linux Kernel hacker Alan Cox weighed in, pointing out that there’s plenty of bias in academia too, that academia is a tyranny of the day’s popular ideas and that generally ideas change by one generation dying out and a new generation with different ideas taking over. At least with Wikipedia, the divergent ideas get a chance to be heard. He had a point.

I disagree with Wales that his project will drive Britannica out of business, but I agree with Cox about credibility. I had an argument with a college professor over using the Internet as a primary source of information. This was in 1995 or 1996. I wrote a short paper on the Irish Republican Army, and I wanted to find out what people sympathetic to the IRA were saying. So I went to Alta Vista, did some searching, and cited what I found. I wanted to know what the people who made the bombs were thinking, and figured the people who made the bombs were more likely to have Web pages than they were to write books that would be in the University of Missouri library. But my professor wanted me to look for books. I decided he was a pompous, arrogant ass and maybe I didn’t want to minor in political science after all, especially if that meant I’d have to deal with him again.

I forgot what my point was. Oh yes. In journalism we have a sort of unwritten rule. You can cite as many sources as you want. In fact, the more sources the better. If a story doesn’t have three sources, it really ought not to be printed. That rule gets selectively enforced at times, but it’s there. Your sources can spout off all they want. That’s opinion. When three sources’ stories match independently, then it’s fact.

So what if Wikipedia is never the Britannica or even the World Book? It’s a source. It’s much more in touch with popular culture than either of those institutions ever will be. Most people will think you’re a bit odd if you sit down with a volume or two of the Britannica or World Book and read it like you would a novel. I know people who claim to have done it, but that doesn’t make the behavior unusual. Hitting random pages of Wikipedia can be entertaining reading, however. As long as you don’t get stuck in a rut of geography articles. But that’s become less and less likely.

So I don’t think it matters if the Wikipedia ever attains the status of the paper encyclopedias. You’ve got what the academics are saying. Wikipedia gives you the word on the street or in the coffee shop. Neither is necessarily a substitute for the other.

I’ve appealed to this before, but I’ll do it again. Visit Wikipedia. See what it has to say about your areas of interest. If it doesn’t say enough, take a few minutes to add to it. Resist the temptation to go to the articles on controversial people like Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler. It’s a good way to get into an edit war and get frustrated. Find something obscure. I mostly write about old computers, old baseball players and old trains. Not too many Wikipedians are interested in those things. Especially the trains, so that’s what I write about most. (Other people seem to be; when I troll the ‘net for more information on those old companies, I frequently find copies of what I’ve already written and put in Wikipedia. It’s flattering.)

I look at it as a way of giving back. It’s relaxing to me. But there’s a community who’s written a ton of software, including an operating system, a web server, and a blogging system, and they’ve given it to me and never asked for a dime in return. I can’t program so I can’t give anything back in that way. But I have interests and I have knowledge in my head that doesn’t seem to be out there on the ‘net, and I have the ability to communicate it. So I give back that way.

It won’t change the world. Maybe all it’ll accomplish is me seeing fewer “Mar” trains on eBay and more Marx trains. But isn’t that something?