Signs of the Apocolypse?

Natalie is playing the Dead Kennedy's HOLIDAY IN CAMBODIA on Guitar Hero 3 for the Wii. She's rocking too.

Wow

I just caught this on Butler's blog and it blew my mind, in a weird, retro sort of way. Watch for the thrashing bass solo about half way through. What was this tour bus like?

More News From Yesterday

Dow Jones

In a past life, I worked at Dow Jones - specifically between 1990 and 1995 at the DJ Newswire and the DJ Multimedia Division, the company's first step into the world of interactive television. Though I was already in my upper 20s when I got the gig, this was my first serious job and I loved it. I loved business news. I loved the history and professional work standards of the place. I loved being able to get CEOs from all over the world to take my call. After leaving, I missed it for years, though I rarely admitted that to anyone.

In the past few weeks, I've been saddened watching Dow Jones fall victim to Rupert Murdoch's roving bank account. I've mixed feelings about Murdoch himself (his money does fund The Simpson's), but the main source of my discontent is that I'm no fan of media consolidation on that level. Murdoch owns enough. I think it's good for all involved when more (and different) kinds of people own media outlets. An independent Dow Jones is a good thing, even if I hate what they print.

But anyone who worked at DJ in the past 25 years had to see this coming. The one overwhelming sense I had at DJ, was that the people in charge were sitting on incredible assets and had no idea what to do with them. Over and over, huge, silly deals were implemented which resulted in nothing but lost dollars and vast employee dissatisfaction. A reason for this was explained to me by one senior editor who was closing in on retirement. He said DJ had no system for training management. The people who rose to the top were usually mediocre journalists who stayed around the longest. The star writers and editors typically left after a few years for better pay. The worst people didn't get hired (those three day try-outs weeded out the losers). And thus, DJ floated along on the efforts of the middling drones who rose to the top, none of whom were particularly creative or visionary - two rather essential skills for media empires during the past two decades.

A few examples of poor management that I saw - during my first months on the job, I watched management buyout/fire all the most senior guys on the newswire. These were the blue collar editors who had been around for 30+ years. One guy wrote the headlines for the Kennedy assassination. About 150 years years of accumulated knowledge was pushed out the door because this huge organization couldn't find out a way to utilize their skills. Training? Education? Outreach? Nope. Get rid of 'em. After that, it seemed quality of content became less and less of a concern, trumped instead by speed and quantity of output.

Another point - nobody shared information, the newspaper people in particular. They were writing for a paper published tomorrow, so they had no interest in breaking their stories with newswire or TV people working on deadlines in the next hour. The result was up to five or six writers from DJ would have to call a source for every story - one from the paper, the newswire, the radio station, the TV station, the local news desk, etc. We looked like idiots by the time the executive picked up the phone to answer the same question from writer #5. Every time DJ started a new division (like the Investor Network), it had to hire another group of writers and editors because we could never get content (or cooperation) from other divisions.

And then there was the brilliant decision of creating a closed circuit TV-on-demand network for less than 100 clients which required running our own cable and satellite dishes around Wall Street and the country. All this just a few years before the internet would render such a stand-alone system pointless. Ooops.

Working at DJ could be like living in the Balkans. Everybody looked out for themselves and the management never tried to break down walls. Instead, they'd create another tribe with more walls, give them a bit of desk space and budget and hoped they helped solve the problem. They didn't.

I bring this up because I just read the letter written by Crawford Hill, one of the Bancroft kids and published in the WSJ Online. The Bancroft family controls the lion's share of DJ stock and it's up to them to okay the Murdoch deal. In his 4,000-word letter - filled with more than a few WASPy, rich kid memories - Crawford points out that the management problem of Dow Jones went right up through the family ownership. He says: "We never really figured out how to be owners when we needed to most... As my brother Tom has pointed out, it was a special challenge to be owners of this company because of the added "disconnect" of the fact that the real "owners" were really the various trusts. By extension that really meant that the professional trustees were in essence the owners and they were certainly never trained in that capacity."

Crawford's POV is - our family blew it years ago by ignoring the responsibilities for owning such a company so let's take the money and run because it'll make shareholders happy and get us off the hook. It's honest, but sad. I suppose hiring a team of professional, creative managers never crossed their minds...and that's what they were supposed to be doing all along! Well, I suppose Dow Jones will now get what it deserves. When you preach free markets, don't be surprised when you get bought and sold.

Cleaning Up

After many years of delay, I'm finally cleaning up the template to Suburban Limbo. We'll see where it leads. I've dumped a lot of the old stuff - Blogrolling, etc - for which I don't even have password access anymore. Oh well. I'm also starting my link list all over again. Hopefully, they'll be up to date.

Second Life

Pointless? Maybe, but I've started fiddling around on Second Life. More when I figure out what's happening. That's me below, not knowing what to do. As usual.

FROM WONKETTE

Someday I'll crank up the Limbo again, but for now, enjoy this bit of fun from Wonkette. The NY Times has created a handy graphic of Supreme Court mugshots. It's an image they'll get to use often with just minor text changes.

Today's ruling:


Tomorrow's ruling:

UPDATES

I just added an RSS feed to this blog and cleaned up my Blogrolling links. God, I'm so hopelessly out of date here, does anyone even care about Blogrolling anymore? I should add youtube info and myspace pages. Yeah, that's the ticket.

OTIS BALL RUINED MY LIFE
That's how I used to sign stuff when playing with Otis. Even now, he's haunting me...



This is from frat party in Hoboken circa early 1990. We had never played this song before. Otis is singing lead, I'm playing bass. The other guitarist and singer is Freedy Johnosn, who went on to have hit singles and a real career in music. On drums is Chris Butler, who had already lived a real career in music as writer/guitarist of The Waitresses and songwriter of "Christmas Wrapping" "I Know What Boys Like" and "Square Pegs."

The funniest part, I think this was the first song of the second set and we were still pretty sober at this point. I'd love to see video of us during set three.

UPDATING...
A busy few months to be sure. At the request of my employer, I've been attending Grad School for a Masters of Science in Game Design. Long ago they told me this might occupy 6-8 hours a week of time. In fact, the first semester required about 45 hours a week. The second semester (just concluded) was a bit lighter, but still tough. Plus I had a regular job to squeeze in and my work at the Florida Film Festival and a family... I'm glad I didn't think too much about it or I would have realized that I was nuts.

School has been interesting and I've learned quite a bit about the game industy as well as useful producing and scheduling tidbits. But I kinda of wish the Grad School featured a bit more thinking/theory courses and fewer production courses. At one point last semester, the 12 of us in our class were each in three different groups, all of which required meetings, plans, schedules and a project. It was unwiedly to say the least (my fave moment was actually holding a meeting on the way to the bathroom, as it was our only free time). I think everyone in this program needs to think about some bigger issues too - it's good for the mind.

On the personal front, four weeks ago I was greeted with with a CAT scan that told me I had to have my appendix removed immediately. This was after a few weeks of mild lower ab pain. I didn't have any of the classic symptoms of appendix problems, but at 11pm that night, I went under the knife.

The surgeon planned to do it laproscopically - three little incisions and minimum discomfort and recuperation. Before putting me to sleep, he explained, "You might not have an appendix problem, but we're going in and we're gonna take it out anyway." That's what they do. He told me later that once they got inside and saw my appendix on the scope, it was a horrible, infected mass that couldn't be removed through the three little incisions. And thus, my little appendix removal turned into something much more complex. The infection had spread into my intestines, so they had to open me up, remove the appendix, the caecum (a little pouch that links the appendix to the large and small intenstines) along with 4 or 5 inches of my intestines. Then he had to reconnect the large and small inenstines to each other (since the caecum was now gone). This all took a few hours. I don't recall any of it.

My appendix had sort of cocooned itself as it got infected and it had ruptured within that cocoon, but i didn't feel it. In fact, they told me I jumped right onto the operating table and was chatting away. From the size and infection presention, the doctors said I should have been unconscious from pain. Oh well.

That led to 6 days in the hospital, four of which I couldn't eat anything but ice cubes. I did have a button to adminster morphine every six minutes and I enjoyed that dearly for about three or four days. Then it got old. On the plus side, I got to watch the entire Sunday coverage of the US Masters tournament while mildly buzzed on morphine. Lovely.

That was almost a month ago and I've been getting around okay since then. Some of the meds I'm on leave me tired, but on the plus side, I've lost 20 pounds. The weight loss benefits of this process can not be overlooked. I'm actively seeking additional body organs to remove to promote aditional weight loss. I am taking recommendations.

Now I have two weeks off of Grad School and I'm just doing my regular job at the University, which is strangely calm and easy compared to everything else I've done lately. I'm rather bummed that I didn't get to help students with their films this year - I saw one class screening and all I could think of "Ooo, that should be tighter." But I'll just have to jump into that game again this fall, even if it means starting all over again.