In the second inning against the New York Yankees last night, Scott Baker was pitching for the Minnesota Twins when he felt something snap. "Joe Mauer is asking for Ron Gardenhire to come out. I don't know what ... Baker at the moment is walking off the field ..."

Sports · 2006/04/15 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Remembering Brian Buck

A comment spam showed up today in a year-old Workbench entry marking the death of Brian Buck, a blogger who told the story of his five-year fight with cancer to its end last April.

The entry about Buck was the last before I created an international incident by popesquatting Benedict XVI. So in a nice bit of serendipity, thousands of people drawn here by international press coverage read about Buck, a remarkable person whose blog stands testament to the power of personal journalism. In a seven-day period, his picture was requested on this server one million times.

Buck was passionate about the inequality of health care in this country:

If you don't have good private health insurance, you are not going to be seen by anyone but the complete bottom of the barrel MDs. And this won't be at a nice facility, it will be at the ------ hospital in town, you know, the one on the 5 o'clock news where people die all the time of simple, treatable diseases like bronchitis.

Politics · Domains · 2006/04/14 · Comment · Link

Web Publishers Take Gamble with Casino Ads

I wrote an article for Wired News today about efforts by the U.S. government to go after web publishers who run gambling ads.

One of the biggest losers is Sporting News, the media company owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. In January, the company surrendered $4.2 million in revenue to avoid prosecution for advertising gambling sites between 2000 and 2003 in its magazine, as well as on its website and syndicated radio network.

Tune in Sporting News Radio today and you'll hear the other half of the settlement -- a $3 million, three-year barrage of anti-gambling public service ads.

I've listened to Sporting News Radio since it was One on One Sports in the early '90s. The network began in Las Vegas and had frequent gambling coverage -- hosts Arnie Spanier and Papa Joe Chevalier regularly discussed betting lines with callers -- but the practice seemed to occur less frequently after the network moved to Chicago.

In recent years, the network ran Internet casino and sportsbook ads so frequently I wondered if Congress had legalized the activity.

The announcers on the network's anti-gambling ads have an eat-your-vegetables delivery that's not quite as enthusiastic as the old gambling commercials.

Wired News · Sports · Politics · Podcasts · 2006/04/14 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Denise Lavoie, Associated Press:

Five-year-old Kai Leigh Harriott sat in the front of the courtroom in her wheelchair and looked directly at the man who had just pleaded guilty to firing the shot that paralyzed her.

At first, she broke down, crying harder than she ever had since the night nearly three years ago when Anthony Warren fired three rounds at the house where she was sitting on a porch.

After a sip of water and some consoling from her mother, Kai spoke.

"What you done to me was wrong," she said to the man seated just 10 feet away. "But I still forgive him."

2006/04/14 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

A Florida company has received an $112,500 fine for violating the state's do-not-call list:

A lawsuit filed in 2003 accused Fort Lauderdale-based Sports Authority Florida, a chain of sporting goods stores, of making 77 calls to state residents on the list and playing a pre-recorded message to many of the consumers who answered the calls. Under Florida law, it is a separate offense for a telemarketer to play a pre-recorded message when a consumer answers his or her phone.

I wasn't aware Florida had its own do-not-call list., which looks to be less useful than the national version.

You have to pay $10 to get one number on Florida's list and $5 for each year thereafter. Newspapers, charities and survey companies are exempt.

Florida · 2006/04/13 · Comment · Link

Google Calendar Makes Date with Atom

Google Calendar can import and export calendars created as Atom feeds but does not support RSS, according to Byrne Reese:

Only a small minority of people will care about this obscure technology fact, but in the syndication community I think this is tremendously significant. To an engineer, adding RSS support is trivial, so the syndication industry must ask themselves, and the RSS folks especially, why did Google only support Atom?

Google also introduced their own proprietary Atom elements or what I could only call the "Google Calendar Atom Extension."

Public calendars -- such as the upcoming U.S. soccer schedule -- are available in Atom 1.0 and iCal formats and can be imported into another calendar.

The Atom feeds have items with published dates in the future that coincide with the scheduled date of the event, which sometimes triggers a warning in the Feed Validator.

Rss · Google · Atom · 2006/04/13 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Newspaper's Cheapness Hurts My Circulation

When I worked at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the early '90s, the place was filled to the rafters with copies of the day's newspaper, free for the taking. I loved reading papers that were fresh off the presses and still had "new news smell," and on Saturday mornings I ransacked the place looking for the bulldog edition.

The bulldog, a Sunday edition published a day early for people who wanted 24 hours head start on everyone else, came out ahead of the day's news. Editors had license to fill the news hole with stories they liked, so a bunch of quirky stuff found its way into print that would be replaced in later editions.

If I was working today for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, a recent policy change would've killed me. They're cutting corners by making employees buy their own papers, even in the office:

Taking more than one newspaper from a rack when you have only inserted enough money for one paper is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Employees who steal newspapers will put their jobs at risk.

Journalism · 2006/04/11 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

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