Central Park Pics
Posted: June 25, 2011 Filed under: New York | Tags: central park, photos 2 Comments »It’s a beautiful day in New York, figuratively and literally.
Went for a run in Central Park today and snapped a few landscape-type pictures afterward on my iPhone. Hope you like them.
Sunny weather has people embracing their inner Huck Finn.
Who says everyone in the city is in a big hurry?
I love this statue for an admittedly shaky reason: The reference to the Union in the inscription makes me think of New York’s role on the right side of the Civil War.
Granted, Webster’s political career predated the war. But the statue was put up in 1876, toward the end of Reconstruction. I like to think that was a symbolic fuck-you at the time to the people who tried to break up the country not too long before.
Anyway, I’ve been doing a fair amount of this sort of shooting lately, for a mix of reasons. I live fairly close to the park, I’ve been trying to run regularly as a way to shed a few pounds, and my work on Roscoe has piqued my interest in mobile photography in general.
Bottom line: I’ll probably be posting more stuff along these lines in the future, unless there are any vigorous objections from the peanut gallery (C;
Three Things I’m Trying to Figure Out
Posted: June 24, 2011 Filed under: Technology, Work-Life | Tags: CAPM, development, facebook, PMI, use cases, Winklevi Leave a comment »Below are three development-related issues I’ve been wrestling with this week. Interested to hear in the comments or by email from folks who are in the same boat:
- I’m studying for the Project Management Institute’s CAPM certification. If you’re in New York and want to form a study group, I’m definitely game. Could use a little reinforcement to keep me on track (C;
- I’m writing use cases for v1.0 of the Roscoe news app. I’m new at this, so if you have any tips to pass along, I’d welcome them. So far, I’m going on advice from one of my co-founders who has some experience with this stuff, plus a lot of good info I found via the online community TechRepublic.
- I find it peculiar that in six-plus years since Facebook’s founding, the Winklevoss twins haven’t come up with an unrelated killer idea. Who knew that true genius had such a limited shelf life? For me, speaking as a Facebook user, this question just won’t quite go away. Sort of like the twins themselves.
New Mobile Themes
Posted: June 19, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment »I’ve just added mobile themes to this blog, allowing easier access and an optimized presentation of the content on a mobile phone or iPad. Please try it and let me know what you think.
From the browser on your mobile device, you can now add an icon to the device’s home screen to access pmckay.com as if it’s an app you’ve downloaded. To do this in the mobile version of Apple’s Safari, for instance, you would:
(1) Navigate to pmckay.com the usual way.
(2) Tap the button on the toolbar at the botton that has an arrow pointing to the right, depicted looking as if it’s popping out of a box.
(3) On the list of options that pops up, choose “Add to Home Screen.”
That’s it. There should also be a similar trick for the Android browser that will work the same way. (Alas, I use an iPhone, so I know that browser better.)
As an added bonus on the iPad in particular, the blog now displays with a page-through sorta layout that’s similar to the app Flipboard.
Honestly, I’m still playing with this feature. Not sure whether I prefer it or a plain ol’ website view. If any of you who have iPads have an opinion one way or another after you’ve taken look, I’m definitely curious to hear it.
Three Distinct Questions About Journalism’s Future
Posted: June 18, 2011 Filed under: Media, Technology | Tags: journalism Leave a comment »Just finished watching a matinee of the new movie Page One, a documentary about the New York Times’ attempt to keep up with the changing landscape of journalism in an electronic era. It’s pretty good, a solid 3-1/2 stars out of five, I’d say. Would definitely recommend catching it at your local multiplex if it’s showing. It falls victim at a few points to the pitfalls inherent to tackling a complex, insidery topic. But, hey, I admire the filmmaker for taking that challenge on head-first.
The film also helped crystallize for me the distinctions among three questions in the broader “future of journalism” discussion that’s been taking place for some time now:
(1) Can we continue to deliver news as a social good to help citizens participate in democracy (or establish it from scratch where necessary)?
(2) Can we maintain the livelihoods of individual journalists and/or journalists collectively as a small fraternity?
(3) In what form will we deliver news?
It strikes me that, in many cases, journalists would prefer to discuss Question #2 as if it’s synonymous with #1 and #3. It’s not, in my opinion. We really need to parse these things better and more often if we want to have a productive conversation as a society regarding the future of news delivery.
The NYT’s media reporter David Carr, both in the film and in his regular dispatches for the paper, is often guilty of this conflation, in my opinion. (That said, I do read his work avidly, since the raw detail is impeccable. The Tribune story shown in the movie was a flat-out classic, for instance.)
The conflation of these three questions is also why you sometimes see old-school journalists in the absurd position of implying that the Internet overall is harmful to democracy (a matter related to Question #1 in my outline above) because it disrupts their fraternity’s way of life. (A Question #2 thing.)
C’mon now. Does anyone believe, in the grand scheme of things, that the ‘net has been bad for democracy over the 15 years that’s it’s now been in mass use? It strikes me that a lot of foreign dictators would beg to differ.
Loeb Nomination
Posted: June 10, 2011 Filed under: Media, New York 1 Comment »Found out a little belatedly yesterday that I’m a finalist for the second time in the breaking news category of UCLA’s 2011 Loeb Awards for business journalists. Seems that a team of several Wall Street Journal reporters, including me, was nominated for coverage of the stock market “flash crash” in May 2010, just a little before I left the paper to start Roscoe Labs. Will know whether we won June 28.
Crossing my fingers. Seems we’re up against a bunch of other great entries, including another from the Journal on a different story, two from the New York Times, and one from the Detroit Free Press. Tough competition.
In a similar situation in 2007, when I was a finalist for WSJ’s team coverage of the merger of the major Chicago financial exchanges, our entry lost to another from the Journal.
Oh, well. At least we kept it in the family that year. Hoping we can do that one way or another this time, which will be my last Loeb go-round with this particular family.
[UPDATE: Wow. We won it! A big thank-you to the Loeb committee members and congrats to my teammates on the "flash crash" coverage.]
Roscoe Revamped
Posted: June 7, 2011 Filed under: Media, Roscoe Labs | Tags: Roscoe 2 Comments »I’ve been doing a lot of work lately on the website of my news startup, Roscoe Labs. Check out the changes and let me know what you think, please. I’m always glad to get feedback to drive improvements.
Jist of the changes is that my co-founders and I are moving into a mode in which we want to tell our story more directly to potential users, investors, and our fellow developers. There are still a lot of sensitive aspects of what we’re doing, since our first app is still pre-launch. But there’s also enough that we are excited to talk about to warrant some significant changes to the old site, which was essentially a placeholder.
