More News, Really I'm as surprised as you

Here's an article.
I just thought exploding squirrels were a neat idea.

picture provided by The Beaver County Militia, protecting us from Amish Terrorists since 2001

Because I am journalist, here's news

someone is going to get it for that masquerade breach

Politics

the best explanation of Somalia ever

What He Said

This is the best poster ever.

Journalism homework, after trying daily for a week.

Here are my blog posts for journalism 367 for some reason the site won't let me post

I have not been able to past how is everyone else getting their posts up? why won't mine appear. I'm making one last attempt before class starts

All green to me:
I was not a big fan of the color scheme and I didn't understand why I was supposed to be interested in the material. I didn't like the double navigation bar. Perhaps its just that I'm so technically inept that I can't even post a blog entry but I couldn't navigate well.


CNN versus Mightygodking.com
Mightygodking went more deeply into what people think the law currently is and how they are mistaken. The CNN article assumed a great deal on the part of the reader. First assuming the audience knows the current law and then how the change would affect the reader. All in all I think reading both rounds out the story

Trying to Get a Sandwich, Finding Child Porn

So I went to Trabant in search of a meal. Normally I count this as a mistake due to overpricedness but today it was a mistake for a far different reason. I'm apparently engaging that part of my brain that cares about journalism again so I'm listening to all the conversations around me. Frat boys in ties for their frats in front of me talk about how the announcer for their hockey games has been arrested with six computers full of child porn, the girls behind me lament about how they forgot that chick-fil-a is closed sundays so what on earth should they eat. They then start talking about social events. The man making sandwiches talks about under staffing and changes in Trabant. A boy I walk past, looks to be in high school bumps me and looks out after his sister, clearly a freshman, she is showing him the campus and it turns out he's involved in some sort of skate something happening soon.
I choke back the urge to ask questions of any of them and all of them. Eventually I decide that even normal people would ask about the child porn so when most of the frat boys leave their friend on the sandwich line I ask, he tells me what he can. I find out he's wearing a tie for a chapter meeting, but there are a thousand threads of story that lead out from here.
I decide not to eat there and immediately go home to find out if the story has hit the papers yet. It turns out it (or something like it) has. I link to it in my blog. They didn't take the tactic I would've. I might have had a sentence about the Wilmington Man. At least I used to, I would have asked, where does he work? how is he known? did he make the films himself or were they sent. I do have an advantage over the reporters, I started hearing about the story as a piece of someone's life with a connection to the community. I know he announced at college hockey games. The person who wrote the piece probably only saw it on a police blotter.
Something interesting about the even shorter story here, it says there were 30 videos and 29 counts of child pornography. What's in the 30th video? What is the disconnect? Also why didn't they at least google the offender's name. one of the firts hits when I goolgled it, after the child porn thing is this.

Bill Panuski
Director of Broadcasting

Email: xxxxxxx (email and phone hidden by me as some sort of vague attempt at responsibility)
Phone: xxxxxxx(if the university takes the site down thoug I want to keep this copy of the bio here)

Bill Panuski is in his 6th year, as the Voice of the Fightin' Blue Hen Hockey Club. He is the Public Address Announcer, as well, as the Radio / Internet Play-by-Play Broadcaster. In addition, Bill became the ACHA Director of Broadcasting, for the Division I National Tournament. He is also, the Voice of the Blue Hens Volleyball Team and the Men's and Women's Lacrosse Team

This is a far more interesting story. The way I would have written it and its still short and only takes 30 more seconds.

Wilmington/Newark
Local Sports Announcer Charged With Child Pornography
Ben Walker March 6 2009

Delaware State Police have charged The Director of Broadcasting for the University of Delaware Hockey Team with more than two dozen counts of child pornography.
State Troopers carried out six computers out of thirty-eight-year-old William Panusik's home today. A forensic preview has so far found 30 videos depicting child sexual exploitation.
The source of the videos is as-yet unreleased.
The University so far has no comment.

Here is where you show the mugshot.

The whole thing would have been in 12 point courier new.

Then again what the hell do I know.

If You're Thinking 'Bout My Blog

Does it matter if this is black or white? Apparently according to every study everywhere, yes all of them, Websites work best as black text on a white field, not white text on a black field. This is odd as I generally prefer sites that are white on black. Come to think of it almost everything I browse are white on black, its mostly webcomics and music but still. It makes the site hurt my eyes less. So now I have Dark text on a light field on a grey field. I wonder if the compromise is worth it.



comic from Edible Dirt by Matt Rosemier

Getting in shape

Well the thing about a blog is to get used to writing regularly, so here is my every-other-day post until Monday when I try to get used to twice-a-day.

Now, because at least part of my audience is made up of journalists, we begin our first regular feature, pithy quote from famous journalist.

The famous Journalist in question is Paul Boutin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Boutin_(journalist)

I first came across the work of Paul Boutin oddly through something called the Jargon File. I read the Jargon File pretty religiously in the late 80's early 90's in the old BBS days of computing.

in the jargon file Paul Boutin is quoted

TLA: /T·L·A/, n.
[Three-Letter Acronym]

1. Self-describing abbreviation for a species with which computing terminology is infested.

2. Any confusing acronym. Examples include MCA, FTP, SNA, CPU, MMU, SCCS, DMU, FPU, NNTP, TLA. People who like this looser usage argue that not all TLAs have three letters, just as not all four-letter words have four letters. One also hears of ‘ETLA’ (Extended Three-Letter Acronym, pronounced /ee tee el ay/) being used to describe four-letter acronyms; the terms ‘SFLA’ (Stupid Four-Letter Acronym), ‘LFLA’ (Longer Four Letter Acronym), and VLFLA (Very Long Five Letter Acronym) have also been reported. See also YABA.

The self-effacing phrase “TDM TLA” (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin “What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?” Paul's straight-faced response: “There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms.” (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.) There is probably some karmic justice in the fact that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.

Wikipedia gives the reason behind the math:

Statistics

The number of possible three-letter abbreviations using the 26 letters of the alphabet from A to Z ( AAA, AAB ... to ZZY, ZZZ) is 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576. Another 26 × 26 × 10 = 6760 can be produced if the third element is allowed to be a digit 0-9, giving a total of 24,336.
In English, WWW is the longest possible TLA to pronounce, requiring nine syllables. Although in written English it is an abbreviation, in spoken English it may use more syllables than that which it is abbreviating.[9] See also Pronunciation of "www".

what makes the quote so amazing to me is not its pithyness or its accuracy but how quickly Boutin could calculate a remarkably accurate estimation of the number of TLA's possible in the English language.