Essential product

I was looking for the phone number of a local hardware store. In doing that, I came across a mention of this: Father Dom’s Duck’s Doo Compost.

Weed seed free and made entirely of recycled duck poop, cranberries, rice hulls, wood shavings, pickles and vanilla beans, Duck’s Doo Compost is surprisingly sweet smelling. You could say it’s “heaven scent”!

All the marketiing crap aside, the guy’s story — he’s a parish priest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who launched into community work after surviving lymphoma — is actually pretty neat.

Winds of Blog Change

OK, for reasons explained elsewhere and probably in the great scheme of things not all that very exciting or interesting to the world at large, I’m done with the Radio blogware and am continuing my online spouting activities through an outfit called Typepad. My new blog address is infospigot.typepad.com. I’ll also have infospigot.com redirect to that site.

Meantime, this site will remain online at least until I’ve figure out how to make the archived posts available elsewhere or until my Radio subscription runs out, whichever comes first.

Thanks for reading.

Trying Something New

I think I gave Radio a fair chance. I really do. But it does not strike me as a user-friendly piece of software. (And yes, I guess I’m talking from a strictly consumerish/customer perspective here; I don’t pretend to be able to tell whether Radio is a really amazing code-writing feat or how it stacks up programming-wise against Typepad or anything else.) I was fine working with all the little hiccups in Radio — the lack of documentation to help you feel your way through issues and the absence of formal support; the software’s lack of functionality to save posts without publishing them; and biggest of all, the utterly baffling (to me) process of trying to install Radio on a new platform while maintaining the material I’ve written over the past few months. I’m under no allusion that the world will note or long remember my little scratchings. But they might prove useful to me as part of a record of days. Annoying that the software doesn’t let a simple-minded scribe such as myself keep the whole thing together online.

Enough of this.

Names on the Land

A picture named herpoco.gif

I printed out a little map from Yahoo! Maps yesterday because I was driving over to the scary suburbs of northern Contra

Costa County to pick up a box of tile. I noticed this morning that the map contained the name of a place I’d never heard of before and thought was a humorous misprint: “Herpoooo.” I know that some mapmakers salt their products with deliberate errors to catch cartographic thieves who betray themselves by repeating the mistakes. I was wrong on two counts. First, the name is “Herpoco” but was unreadable on my poor printout.

But still — Herpoco? Never heard of it. Though when I thought about it, it occurred to me it might have a connection to nearby Hercules, which itself has a link with an explosives company that ran a plant there (here’s the history).

Still — look where Herpoco is placed on the map — smack in the middle of a freeway interchange. But having too much time on my hands, obviously, I plugged Herpoco into Google. The result shows it’s an actual place name, though I don’t think it would mean a thing to most of the hundreds of thousands of people who live close by or pass through every week. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System delivers this hit when you query the name Herpoco:

Feature Name: Herpoco

Feature Type: populated place

Elevation: 60

State: California

County: Contra Costa

USGS 7.5′ x 7.5′ Map: Mare Island

380042N

1221612W

And the gay-lesbian community search site ePodunk lists Herpoco, too, with a note that it was named after the Hercules Powder Company (successor to the California Powder Works and a long-ago spinoff from DuPont. But that’s another story).

Layoff Land

A brief, non-exhaustive accounting of layoffs at my various workplaces since I left the world of secure employment at the San Francisco Examiner a little more than eight years ago (when I got hired there, one staffer said, “As long as you don’t hit anyone over the head with a two-by-four, you can’t get fired here.” He was almost right: He got axed for trying to impersonate a worker at a hospital that was on strike so he could get the inside scoop). A while back, I started to think of the recurring staff-trimmings as resembling the show “Survivor,” and I wondered when it would be my turn to get voted off the island. My time finally came: As Jeff Probst would say, “Dan, the tribe has spoken. It’s time to go.”

Last shift at the Examiner ended at 2 a.m. Jan. 2, 1996. First day for “Project Gulliver” (Web startup that turned into something called NetGuide Live) began 2 p.m. Jan. 2, 1996.

Layoffs:

1. November 1996: About 75 of 150 temporary and permanent employees let go from NetGuide.

2. December 1996: About 40 of remaining 75 NetGuide employees.

2a. Left NetGuide in February 1997, which laid off remaining workers the following month and closed.

I started at Wired News in March 1997.

3. November 1997: About half a dozen Wired News employees, part of larger Wired layoff.

I left Wired News for Wired magazine in June 1998, and left the mag in December ’98 to freelance. I joined TechTV in January 2001 as part of staff hired to launch 8-hour daily tech/market news show called “TechLive.”

4. November 2001: TechTV laid off about half of 130-person “TechLive” staff.

5. April 2002: Laid off about half of remaining 65 “TechLive” staff members, canceled 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. shows, cut newscast to 30 minutes daily.

6. December 2002: Closed TechTV bureaus, which reported for “TechLive”; laid off about 10 people.

7. May 24, 2004: Goodbye, TechTV. Last daily “TechLive” show aired Friday, May 21; I, with most of daily staff, was laid off the following Monday).

Cement and You

A pretty good story in the Wall Street Journal: A cement shortage is threatening the building boom in the United States. That’s because a lot of the cement used to make the concrete that goes into home foundations and big projects like the Bay Bridge project comes from overseas sources like Thailand and Colombia. The cement can’t get here because a building boom in China is tying up ships bringing construction supplies there.

“The cement shortages exacerbate a headache for the U.S. building industry from increasingly scarce materials. Steel supplies have been tight, with prices for many products soaring more than 50% since January.And wood supplies have been so tight that the composite price of framing lumber — a kind of index price that reflect a mix of lumber products — has jumped more than 60% to $463 as of Friday from $285 a year ago, according to Random Lengths, an industry newsletter in Eugene, Ore. Some of the price increases are being passed on to consumers.”

I also like the fact there’s a newsletter called Random Lengths.

Koppel on the Dead List

The Poynter Institute, the world center for journalistic navel-gazing, has an interview with Ted Koppel about his reading of
the dead list tonight. Koppel expresses surprise at the reaction to the
show, and insists there’s nothing political about it: "I don’t want it
to make a political statement. Quite the contrary." Later he goes on to
contradict himself, apparently unconsciously:

"Why, in heaven’s name, should one not be able to look at the faces and
hear the names and see the ages of those young people who are not
coming back alive and feel somehow ennobled by the fact that they were
willing to give up their lives for something that is in the national
interest of all of us
?" (Emphasis added.)

OK — so he’s on board that the whole deal is in the national interest.
That’s an improvement on the insistence that there’s nothing political
in this and that the show is just acting as a means of venerating the
dead because, well, they died. Although it would be a lot more fitting
to have an open discussion on the merits of the idea that the operation
really has been in the interest of all of us.

View from the Ferry

FerrybuildingCaught the 6:25 ferry back to Oakland after work. Sitting on the top deck, noticed the sun was blocked behind  One Embarcadero Center (that tall building in the middle). Decided to try to shoot it with my camera phone, using my sunglasses as a filter. The building in the center-right with the flag on top is the Ferry Building; that little tiny nub to the far right is Coit Tower, I think. I’m surprised both at the ability to shoot anything with the phone and also at how modest the resolution really is.