Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Who Are These People?

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Ever wonder who the people are that leave lots of comments on local news websites?  The folks at the Las Vegas Sun obviously did because they profiled four of their more prolific commenters.

I'm wary to suggest the same type of project for our local news sites, because quite honestly many of their commenters flat out scare me. Still, if they were to profile some of their commenters here are some questions I'd like them to ask:

  • Were you absent that day in fourth grade when they went over the difference between there, their and they're?
  • Were you absent the day they went over the difference between lose and loose?
  • Did you know that insulting subjects of an article, or other commenters, while hiding behind an alias is the definition of a coward? Aliases are for people who are doing courageous things, like blowing the whistle on corrupt politicians. I understand if you want to use an alias due to concerns like people at work seeing what you write, but don't use that as a shield to throw personal bombs at others.
  • Did you know that invoking Hitler in an argument makes you the loser of said argument by default?
  • Are you aware that the statement "we Americans are guaranteed freedom of religion, not freedom from religion" is nonsense?

and finally

  • Did you know that when you're leaving a comment on a story you're not blogging, you're commenting?  Blogging requires setting up a blog, writing something on your blog, having people write a comment on your blog and then replying to those comments.  Go ahead and try it, you might like it.

Experimenting with Pro Sports

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Here's a very interesting article about the NHL's R&D program:

The truth is, such a mess would be improbable at best on Bettman’s watch. Under him, the NHL, sometimes under fierce criticism, has become perhaps the most research-friendly of the major professional team sports leagues in North America when it comes to the conduct and rules of the game. It wasn’t always so. In 1998, when the league had a Fox TV contract and arranged for a Las Vegas IHL game to be played in a four-quarter format, the experimentation was met with catcalls. The improvised research and development camp held toward the end of the 2004-’05 lockout was viewed as a desperation measure.

But the more carefully planned R & D camp held last month has mostly been welcomed and applauded. The scrimmages, held at the Maple Leafs’ practice facility on Aug. 18 and 19, featured some jarring, Martian-looking innovations. The players—who were, in an attention-getting wrinkle, mostly top junior stars eligible for the 2011 draft—road-tested everything from two-on-two overtime to shallower nets to having the second referee view the play from an elevated off-ice platform. On day two, viewers were confronted with the bizarre spectacle of the traditional five faceoff circles being replaced by three, running up the middle of the rink.

Such an exercise is unique among the staple North American sports. If major league baseball’s powers-that-be ever got a notion to play experimental games using five bases and four strikes, they would surely do so on a closely guarded Pacific atoll.

My roommate in college once stated that the NBA would be infinitely more interesting if they put circles on the floor at various places between the three point lines and were rewarded with higher points the farther away the circle was from the basket.  So if you hit a shot from beyond half court you'd get six points.  I laughed at first, but the more I thought about it the more I liked it.  Actually I thought that you could set up zones in between the three point lines (circles being a little to easy to guard). I really think it would bring about the rise of the "designated heaver" which might keep some old guys in the league much like the designated hitter does in baseball.

Oh, and don't get me started on baseball.  Anything they can do to keep me awake past the third inning would be welcome.

Unleashing the World’s Creative Types

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I have no idea what the future holds, but I have an inkling that technology is going to unleash the creative types.  I know, I know the changes being wrought upon the publishing industry are well documented, but sometimes it's hard to grasp what's going on until you see small examples of those changes.  For instance, yesterday at lunch my Mom handed me a "proof" of a book she's been editing and was written by a fascinating man from the Blacksburg, VA area.  The proof was as professional-looking a book as you're going to find and a publisher wasn't involved; it's being self published via Amazon.  (FYI,when it's ready for sale you'll find it here).

But the sea-change that's occurring in the world of the arts really hit home with me when I saw this short done by an amateur Russian filmmaker that's described thusly by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing:

A Russian amateur filmmaker called Alexander Semenov produced this 2.5 minute bootleg Transformers short with a couple of sub-$1,000 cameras, two hours' of footage and a month in the editing suite. It is insanelybadass: a perfect vision of an alternate universe where shirtless Russian thugs go bot-to-bot on dusty distant roads; more fun that the big-budget Hollywood equivalent.

Transformers from repey815 on Vimeo.

I'm really very excited to see where this explosion in artistic availability will take us.

DC Metro System Taken for a Ride

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Technology can be annoying.  Just ask anyone who's dealt with a Blue Screen of Death on their PC, or had to take the car to the mechanic 86 times because the wrench light won't turn off, and they'll tell you just how annoying it is.  I'm thinking that the folks running the DC Metro systems would take those problems over their own situation any day:

"The Washington, DC transit authority contracted with a proprietary company for their RFID-based fare card system,SmarTrip. Now, just six years after getting the system fully installed, the DC Metro system says that their contractor Cubic will no longer sell them the farecards, and they only have enough stockpile to last until 2012. The best solution they've got is replacing every fare box and farecard… again. Kicker: they're paying more than $3 each for bog-standard 13.56MHz RFIDs, which can be purchased singly by normal folks for $.25."

Apparently this is all coming to light because the Metro Board recently passed the largest fare hike ever and at that time promised significant discounts for SmarTrip users, but those discounts are not likely doable because the SmarTrip system can be gamed by riders and it could end up costing the system $1 million a month.  It was during the discussion of this matter that the whole "we're not making the cards anymore" situation came to light. 

And You Thought Electing a Convicted Crack Smoker to Public Office Was Weird

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Only the city that keeps electing Marion Barry to public office could pull this off:

Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty lost the Democratic primary, but the city's Republicans want him as their candidate.

The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics announced Friday that Fenty won the Republican primary as a write-in, but Fenty has said repeatedly that he has no interest in being the GOP candidate in November. The Republican party was not running any candidate in the mayor's race, but a total of 822 Republicans wrote in Fenty's name.

On a totally separate note, why didn't the Tea Party come up with a candidate in DC?

Millionaire’s Club

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Greenwald's reaction to the O'Donnell reaction is spot on I think:  

You want to know why it's so unusual for a U.S. Senate candidate to have what Rove scorned as "the checkered background" of O'Donnell, by which he means a series of financial troubles?  In his interview with me earlier this week, Sen. Russ Feingold said exactly why.  It's not because those financial difficulties are rare among Americans.  This is why:

"It's not a new thing; it's been going on for a couple of decades. If you look even in the Senate, I'm one of the very few people in there who doesn't have a net worth over a million dollars; my net worth is under half a million dollars, after all these years. "

And as poor as Russ Feingold is relative to his colleagues in the Senate, he's still a Harvard Law School graduate who owns his own home and has earned in excess of $100,000 as a U.S. Senator for the last 18 years.  People with unpaid Farleigh Dickinson tuition bills and home foreclosures just aren't in the U.S. Senate.  And there are a lot of people — those who see nothing wrong with the U.S. Senate as a millionaire's club and as an entitlement gift of dynastic succession – who want to keep it that way.  

If you don't feel like clicking through to Greenwald's column I can summarize it for you: he disagrees with much of what O'Donnell says and stands for, but he thinks a big part of the establishment reaction to her is the fact that you're more likely to find her at WalMart than at Macy's. I think he's right.