It’s four days till Ted Hall and I depart for Vancouver.
And right now is the worst part.
(”Worst part” is, of course, strictly comparative; even the worst part is still a heckuva lot of fun …)
I have had the privilege to travel quite a bit for my job, and the most stressful time isn’t the travel itself — it’s the prelude to the travel. It’s making sure you have all the necessary equipment, all your bases covered at home, and all your collective ducks in a row before your bags are packed and there’s no turning back.
And that’s usually for a 2-3 day trip to another state; this is for three weeks in another country.
It all gives a somewhat uneasy feel to these next few days. For the past few weeks, even though the trip has been drawing near, I have been so jam-packed with work that I honestly haven’t had much time to think about it. Now it’s time to focus and prepare — I’m Santa-like in my making of lists and checking them twice, and I have already marked roughly 20 different errands I need to run before Wednesday.
But amidst the housekeeping, there’s also extraordinary excitement.
There’s the anticipation of all the great stories I’ll get to cover; there’s the desire to explore the Vancouver area, which so many folks have told me is absolutely beautiful; and, of course, there’s the exhilaration of knowing we’ll be right in the center of the extravaganza that is the Olympics.
There’s also a certain non-work assignment that I am looking forward to fulfill: the request submitted by friends, family, and co-workers to “pick me up something from the Olympics”. A few days ago, one of my co-workers cornered me in a dark crevice of the newsroom and took out his wallet; as I stood there perplexed, he started thumbing through his cash and finally snared a $20 from the pack. He then gave it to me and said the following:
“This is for pins.”
Pins?
“Yes, Olympic pins. I want as many as this will buy.”
I will do my best.
And of course, I am looking forward to keeping everyone informed throughout the Games. Ted Hall and I each have Twitter accounts (@tedhallnews & @MattPearlWXIA11), and we’ll be blogging all month long. It should be terrific.
In the meantime, Santa’s gotta get back to his lists …
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These tweets are from when I was covering the Silver Comet Trail trial. They’re in reverse time order. If you want to follow me on Twitter, click here. I’ll post more tweets a little later in the day, too.
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Michael ledford will go to crime scene, since it’s part of his trial. Will not be on trail w/ jury. Defense said he’ll stay in car.
about 1 hour ago
School bus is waiting to take jurors to crime scene after lunch break. Defense atty tells me he really wants to do closing arguements today
about 1 hour ago
Jury going home to get shoes, etc. For trip to comet trail. Back in court at 11:35.
10 minutes ago
Trip to crime scene will show where body was found, were items (clothing, etc.) were found, where trail meets nearby dirt road.
21 minutes ago
Media pool camera will go to scene with court & jury with limited access (50 to 100 feet from jury- will not show jurrors).
24 minutes ago
Judge: Jury WILL go to scene of silver comet trail murder.sheriff’s dept. Getting site ready right now. Removing memorial for jury’s trip.
30 minutes ago
1991 rape victim testifies for state in silver comet trail murder case. ‘he grabbed me and lead me into the woods’ she says of Ledford.
35 minutes ago
Lawyers conferencing with judge on request to take jury to site of silver comet trail murder where 53 yr. Old jennifer ewing was killed.
about 1 hour ago
Silver comet murder trail: judge ‘mulling over’ state’s request to take jury to crime scene. DNA expert on stand now.
about 1 hour ago
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Over the past year, popular social networking sites Twitter and Facebook have both undergone changes. Twitter increased their security and made the site a little more user-friendly in terms of finding things, and even now they’re working on improving their search feature. Facebook is in the throes of an extremely unpopular change to users’ pages — their “what are my friends doing” pages, not their profile pages — after taking a major hit a few months back when they simply shifted stuff around without really changing the functionality.
The point of a website, when you get right down to it, is to provide compelling content so advertisers’ ads show up on the page and people (maybe) click on them*. Facebook has very non-intrusive ads on their site, and Twitter doesn’t have any (at the moment).
Now, I’m a power internet user — as most of my colleagues at 11Alive will attest. Instead of going to Facebook.com and Twitter.com whenever I want to know what’s going on with my friends, I go instead to my RSS application, Google Reader, and open a folder that has all of my friends’ status updates in both Twitter and Facebook.
At least, it used to. But in a single day, both Twitter and Facebook have made changes to their sites that prevent me from doing it this way. From a business standpoint, this makes perfect sense — now I actually have to go to Facebook’s site or Twitter’s site to see what’s going on.
Or do I?
Facebook and Twitter both make a big deal out of the fact that they’re great for people on the go — you can update your status and upload your pictures from your mobile phone with relative ease. I do it all the time. And, unlike their on-the-internet counterparts, the Facebook Mobile App and the TwitterFon app for iPhone have not changed their interfaces at all since I downloaded them.
So instead of going to Facebook.com, I’ll hit the little blue-and-white “F” on my phone to see what’s going on on Facebook. Instead of going to Twitter.com, I’ll hit the little blue-and-white “t” on my phone to read and reply to my friends’ tweets**. I won’t see any Facebook ads, and as for TwitterFon… well, that’s free to begin with, but it’s such a useful app to me that I’d probably pay the programmer 99 cents if he started charging.
There are a lot of ways to consume web content — going to sites, reading or watching video on your phone, aggregating everything into an RSS reader (my preferred method). But no matter what, companies should never do anything that makes their web-based consumers go somewhere where ads can’t be seen. Facebook? Twitter? You just pulled that off marvelously.
* Don’t lie. You know you’ve clicked on a few ads this month. We all do it.
** A “tweet” is a status message on Twitter, like “Josh is posting a blog on 11AliveBlogs.com”.
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