Longtext Posts

It all started with FlappyArms.sexy. For those not in the know, it’s an experiment by the NYTimes’ Alastair Coote to clone FlappyBird — the twist being that, instead of using arrow keys or swipes on a phone, you load the game in a desktop/laptop browser, then connect to it with your phone.

Using the sensors in your phone, it detecs when you flap your arms and moves the bird accordingly. I came across it when he tweeted out a link, and immediately played it for an hour.

About a week later, Managing Editor Randy Parker dropped by to ask what I was going to do at our booth at the 2014 edition of the York County Fair. Previously, reporters and editors used their time at the booth to connect with the community in their own ways. Politics reporters might interview a politician live, our graphic artist offered up sketches one year, and this year our photo editor planned a photo walk, taking members of the public around the fair and explaining some of the basic concepts of photojournalism (and helping them compose great shots). Parker specifically said he wanted to make sure that people were doing something that really spoke to what they did/their interests.

I wasn’t lying when I replied with, “Well, the only thing I can think of doing is throwing up FlappyBird and showing people the possibilities of technology.” He even would have let me go along with it, too, I bet.

Then Community News Coordinator Joan Concilio told me about an idea they had for the fair. They envisioned a setup whereby people could tell us the things they thought that made York County special, then display them on a big screen throughout the fair.

Show people what journalism is, what interactive journalism can be. Show them it’s not all “a reporter shows up, talks to people, goes away and later something appears on the website/in the paper.” Show them that journalism can be curation from the public, soliciting input and feedback instanteously, that comes together in a package with our deep knowledge and library of photos of the area.

And I thought, “Damn. That sounds like FlappyArms.sexy, except actually relevant to journalism. I gotta get in on that.”

Together on a Tuesday, we worked out that we’d need a submission form and a display (pictured above and below) for the answers, a curated set of photos from our archives and the #yorkfair feed from Instagram. They also wanted to incorporate it long-term into their blog, Only in York County, which we did here. Oh, and the Fair started Friday morning.

Everything actually went fairly quickly. After looking at a number of jQuery image slider plugins, I ultimately wound up building my own owing to the fact that a) none of them did full-screen very well, since the plugins were by and large designed to work on actual sites, not what amounts to a display, and b) I wanted to be able to insert the newest answers immediately, if I had time to build the feature.

We could have done a quick-and-dirty build that was tech-heavy in operation, but we wanted to leave the display/capture running even when we weren’t there, and that required making things a little more user-friendly. The data was stored in Google Sheets (something we’re likely to move away from in the future, as I ran into a number of problems with Google Apps Scripts’ ability to work with selected cells on a sheet. That bug in and of itself isn’t a huge problem, but that it hasn’t been addressed in so long is worrisome in the extreme), with a custom function for updating or deleting entries (since we were using push and not refreshing the page).

The Instagram API was, as ever, a dream to work with, and a cinch to pull stuff in (cited and referenced back to Instagram properly, of course). Even the part I was worried about, the Push notification, was a cinch to institute thanks to Pusher. Highly recommended, if you can afford it — we could, because this required a relatively small number of push clients open (just the display computer + anything I was testing on at a given time, so we used the sandbox plan). There are a number of self-hosted open-source options — though, if we have need of one and I can’t convince them to pay for Pusher, I’m going to consider Slanger, which uses the Pusher libraries. (Seriously, cannot push Pusher enough).

In fact, the biggest challenge of the buildout was how to handle multiple push notifications that came in either at the same time or relatively close to each other. The easiest route was to just have the second message override the first, the third push out the second, etc. But the entire point of the exercise was to show people that they could be a part of the journalism immediately, and we didn’t want to discourage multiple people from submitting at once.

Thus, the dequeue() function was born — on the first submission, set a timeout that will restart the interval that was paging through the extant items. If a push comes in while that timeout is set, queue the data, get the time remaining, set a new timer (same variable) for the time remaining to fire dequeue again. If no new pushes come before then, take the item out of the queue, use it, and set a new timer to dequeue again (if there’s anything else in it) or restart your main action if there’s not.

It was what you’d call a “hard-and-fast” deadline: Our contract with Caspio for database and data services was changing on July 1. On that day, our account — which to that point had been averaging something like 17GB transferred per month — would have to use no more than 5GB of data per month, or else we’d pay to the tune of $50/GB.

Our biggest data ab/user by far was our user-submitted photo galleries. A popular feature among our readers, it allowed them to both upload photos for us (at print quality) to use in the paper as well as see them online instanteously. Caspio stored and displayed them as a database: Here’s a page of a bunch of photos, click one to get the larger version.

We had to come up with something to replace it — and, as ever, without incurring m/any charges, because we don’t have any money to spend.

Requirements

• Allow readers to upload photos (bonus: from any device, previously limited to desktop)

• Store photos and accompanying metadata (name, address, contact info, caption, etc.)

• Display photos and selected metadata (name, caption) on multiple platforms

• Allow for editing/deletion after upload

• Low/no startup or ongoing costs

• Support multiple news properties without much cost for scaling

• DO NOT create additional work

Research

There are a number of image hosts out there, of course, but the terms of use on their accounts vary wildly. The two main hosts we looked into were Flickr and Photobucket. Photobucket had the advantage of being Not Yahoo, which was a plus in my eyes, but their variable pricing structure (not conducive to multiple accounts, difficult to budget for the future) and lack of apparent developer support (the page you’re directed toward to set up an account no longer exists) made that seem unwise.

Flickr offers 1 TB of storage for reasonable pricing, but a hard request limit (3600/hour) and reasonable usage request (“You shall not use Flickr APIs for any application that replicates or attempts to replace the essential user experience of Flickr.com”) kind of limited its appeal to use a gallery host. Well, there went that idea. Then we started looking at resources we already had.

A few years ago, Digital First Media provided its news organizations with the nifty MediaCenter installations developed at the Denver Post. MediaCenter is an SEO-friendly, easy-to-use WordPress theme/plugin combo that stores its data in SmugMug, another photo storage site we’d looked at but abandoned based on price. But, you see, we already had an account. An in. (A cheap in, to the delight of my editor.) Once we clarified that we were free to use the API access, we decided to do what the pros do: Build what you need, and partner for the rest. Rather than build out the gallery functionality, we’d just create SmugMug galleries and MediaCenter posts, and direct uploaded photos there.

Challenges

The official SmugMug API is comprehensive, though … somewhat lacking in terms of ease of use. Luckily, someone created a PHP wrapper (PHPSmug), which works, more or less. (There are a few pitfalls, in terms of values not corresponding and some weirdness involving the OAuth procedure, but it’s all work-through-able.)

The whole point of user-generated photos is that you want to have the content live forever on the web, but keeping 400 “Fourth of July”-esque-specific categories around in the upload list is going to frustrate the user. We decided to treat categories in two ways: Active and Inactive. Once you create a gallery, it never goes away (so it can live on in search), but you can hide it so it doesn’t necessarily jump in the user’s face all the time.

Print workflow was especially important to us, as one of the major goals of the system was to not create additional work. Due to circumstances out of my control, the server we have to work with does not have email functionality. Using a combination of Google Scripts and some PHP, we weaseled around that limitation and email the original uploaded photo to our normal inbox for photo submissions, thus not forcing the print workflow to require using the web interface.

Allowing uploads from mobile devices is almost a cinch since both Android and the later flavors of iOS support in-browser uploads. The whole thing was built off responsive Bootstrap, so that was the easiest part of the whole project.

One of the biggest reasons we have a photo uploader and web gallery in the first place is to reassure people that when they submit a photo to us, we received it. This helps to prevent a deluge of phone calls or emails inquiring whether we in fact received the photo and when we plan to run it. Having the web gallery gives the user instant notification/gratification, and allows us to remind them gently that we don't have the space to print every photo we receive — but you can certainly view them online.

Method

On the backend, we have one database containing three cross-indexed tables — one to hold authentication info (per property), one for the category info and one for the photos themselves. Because we're using SmugMug as the storage system, there's no need to hold the actual photo ourselves (which helps with data usage from both a storage and transfer perspective). All the photo storage table has to hold is the information for retrieving it from SmugMug.

The user navigates to a specific property's upload form, fills it out and uploads the photo. The component parts of the form are stored separately as well as combined into our standard user-caption format. The caption is used when we send the photo to SmugMug, but we also store it locally so we can sync them up if changes need to be made. The photos are directed to the gallery specified by the user.

After a certain amount of time (about 5 minutes on SmugMug's end, and anywhere from 15-30 minutes on our gallery's end because of the massive caching it was designed with), the photo automatically appears on our photo gallery site. From the backend, users are able to create or retire categories, edit photo caption information and delete photos.

There's hope that we'll be able to do things like move photos around or create archive galleries, but that's down the road, if we have the time.

Results

You can view the final product here, here, here or here (spoiler alert: They’re almost exactly the same). There are still features we’d like to add, but there were more fires to put out and we had to move on. Hopefully we can come back to it when things settle down.

I never went to piano lessons as a kid. It wasn’t like I was skipping out on a planned activity or anything — my parents didn’t play the piano, neither more nor my brother showed any interest, so we never had the “traditional” music education.

In fact, until the fifth grade, the sum total of my musical education involved playing the recorder in fourth grade music class. We played simple things, like “Hot Cross Buns” and the like. There were notes on sheet music, sure, but basically we just learned that notes on a specific part of the staff corresponded to a specific fingering.

In fifth grade, though, that’s when band started. A real band, with woodwinds and brass and drums (sorry, percussion). Well, choir started, too, but I didn’t actually know anyone who wanted to be in choir. We all wanted to be in the band.

They held band in the multi-purpose room, it being the only space large enough for anything larger than your average 26-person class. (The multi-purpose room served as cafeteria, assembly hall and general activity room.) We all sat in folding chairs arranged more-or-less like a traditional orchestra and waited for our teacher, Mr. Mash.

Mr. Mash began with the band program in the district where I grew up in 1968 — when I sat down in that chair (in the back, naturally), he was in his 30th year.

30 years of dealing with children — in any capacity, much less teaching — does something to a person. Actually, it’s probably capable of doing several things. He wasn’t beaten down, letting kids walk over him. He wasn’t a disinterested old-timer, coasting until pension. He very much cared about music, and tried to teach children. He was just a little bit … ornery.

Much like the Sorting Hat, one of the things that determined what instrument you played was your choice. Unlike the Sorting Hat, it wasn’t the ultimate determinant. In that respect, choosing an instrument was more like choosing a game piece in Jumanji — you could have a preference, but you were stuck with whatever the game gave you.

Yes, in this metaphor Mr. Mash was a horrifying board game that seemed to strive to kill its participants, unless they somehow survived and grew stronger for the experience. So, pretty apt.

Anyway, since Mr. Mash had absolutely no knowledge of us prior to walking into the “band room” the first day, the way he made his determinations probably amounted to some amount of individual preference, band balance and the Test.

The test was basically the sole knowledge of our musical acumen. It consisted of Mr. Mash taking you into a small room with a tape recorder. With a notepad at his wrist, he’d go through a series of short tests. One tested the student’s ability to determine pitch — which notes were higher or lower. One involved two series of notes, and it was up to the student to determine whether they were faster or slower than the previous sets.

Upon completion of the test, Mr. Mash then would go over what he thought was the best instrument choice.

I sat at the back because I wanted to play the drums (Percussion! Sorry!), so my test came near the end. When Mr. Mash looked over my results, he shook his head.

“You need higher scores to be a percussionist. I don’t think you’re really cut out for it. Maybe you’d like to try the trombone?”

Now I’m sure there were several good reasons: Of our 70-person band, I think something like 12 wanted to be percussionists. And I’m not disputing the scores — they probably were low. In playing the trombone, I had many years of enjoyment and fun all the way through the end of high school. But there was one thing I realized around ninth grade: The test was flawed.

Having exactly zero musical education beforehand, I literally had no concept of things like “higher pitches,” or designating which was faster of eighth notes and triplets. One can argue that knowing those kinds of things were important to playing in the band, but that’s also the point of the class — to learn more.

Basically, a significant portion of my education (and free time, to an extent), was determined by a test that asked questions without ensuring that I even understood the answers.

I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. I feel like imparting my own takeaway sort of defeats the whole point.

I’ll admit, this one has me a bit flummoxed. I understand why the NSA was able to fool people back when the first allegations came out. In March 2013, Gen. James Clapper, head of the NSA, was asked point-blank by Congress whether “the NSA collect[s] any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” His response:

"No, sir. … Not wittingly."

This, of course, turned to be completely false … from a certain perspective. Why, Edward Snowden released documents that indicated that millions of Americans were being spied upon by the NSA! That proves that Clapper lied!

Actually, he didn’t. He certainly wasn’t what I would consider forthcoming, but he didn’t technically lie. From his viewpoint, the NSA collected “metadata” on millions of Americans, and only incidentally — they did not “wittingly” collect “data.”

You can argue with the veracity of his statement (I don’t think it amounts to lying to Congress, but I certainly think it counts as obstruction), but a very specific tone was set: The NSA would tell exactly the truth, and it was up to those asking the questions to make sure a) they were asking the right questions, and b) to parse the response properly.

Somehow, the news media has utterly failed to do either of those things. You can ascribe it to laziness, to the harried news cycle, to any number of things, but somehow even reporters focusing on national security don’t seem to be doing this properly.

The latest example is with the Heartbleed bug. A vulnerability in a security protocol used by much of the internet was discovered, and two anonymous randos were quoted as saying the NSA has known about it for “at least two years.” The NSA denied this.

“NSA was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL, the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability, until it was made public in a private-sector cybersecurity report,“ NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines told The Post. ”Reports that say otherwise are wrong.”

Here’s the thing: I completely believe the NSA had no knowledge of the Heartbleed bug beforehand. They have no reason to lie. The reason I believe this is because they said it in the report:

“NSA was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL” (emphasis mine).

If you read that statement in the light of everything else they’ve ever acknowledged publicly, you’ll realize that they very likely have a completely different OpenSSL vulnerability they’re actively exploiting. They deny only knowledge of this specific vulnerability, not any others.

Every reporter on this beat should have then asked, “Do you know of any other security vulnerabilities in OpenSSL?” followed by, “Do you know of any other security vulnerabilities that affects software in common usage today?”

Regardless of whether the NSA answered (and I almost guarantee you they would've responded with a "no comment"), both the question and the (non-)response should have been the next sentence of the article. I'm not saying I agree with or condone what the NSA does in terms of public response. I believe they should be required by law to be much more forthcoming than they are.

But until that happens, journalists need to be willing and able to parse their statements with the care and diligence required (e.g., treat them like Bill "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." Clinton) to ascertain the truth. In summation, believe everything the NSA says. Then make sure to investigate, follow-up and publish what they’re not saying.

It’s disdainful in some circles to come out and say this, but there are places in journalism for automatic writing. Not the Miss Cleo kind, mind you, the kind done by computers. This is not a new trend (though news organizations, as ever, think things are invented only when they notice), but it’s received increasing notice given the continued decline of the economic status of most news organizations coupled with some high-profile examples.

The most recent was for the Shamrock Shake in LA, when an LA Times “quakebot” generated a story on the quake three minutes after it happened.

Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.

Where many can (and did) look upon this story only to gasp in horror and pull their hair out in despairing hunks, I saw this and thought, “Huh. That sounds like a pretty perfect system.” Imagine no quakebot existed, and an earthquake happened. The first thing a modern news organization does is get a blurb on their site that says something to the effect of “An earthquake happened.” This then gets shared on social media.

Meanwhile (if the organization is doing it right — if not, this happens in sequence), a reporter is calling the USGS or surfing over to the web page, trying to dig up the relevant information. They will then plug it in to a fairly formulaic story (“The quake was x.x on the Richter scale, with an epicenter there about 2 miles deep. It was felt …”.) If they can get ahold of a geologist who isn’t busy (either geologisting [as we would hope, given that an earthquake just happened] or on the phone with other media outlets), you might get a quote along the lines of, “Yup, there definitely was an earthquake. There will probably be aftershocks because there usually are, although we have absolutely no way of knowing for certain.”

What’s the difference between the two stories, aside from the fact that one showed up much faster? Data-based reporting absolutely falls into my crusade to automate all tasks that don’t actually require a human. The non-computer method of initial reporting on the quake is completely identical to the automated method, except it a) takes less time and b) frees up a reporter to go do actual reporting that a computer can’t do.

The computer can’t make a qualitative assessment on how it’s affecting peoples’ moods, or how anxious people are about aftershocks. Reporters should be out talking to people, rather than querying a computer to get data that another computer can easily understand and process.

Perhaps the most cogent argument against computer-generated stories is the potential proliferation of such content. After all, one might argue, if every California news outlet had a quakebot, we’d have dozens of stories that all said the same thing without reporting anything new.

(This is me laughing quietly to myself. This is the sound of everyone waking up to the current problem with media when you no longer have a geographic monopoly thanks to the internet.)

No one is saying that all stories, or even most will be written by computers, but it’s not difficult to imagine that a good number of them will be simply because most stories today have significant chunks that aren’t deeply reported. They’re cribbed from press releases, interpreted from box scores or condensed from the wire. If we leave the drudge work to the computers, we can free up reporters to do things that computers can’t, and actually producing more, better content. It’s quite literally win-win. The primary losers are those companies who will buy too deeply into the idea that they can generate all their content automatically.

In the darkest corner of the newsroom, bounded on one wall by library-style bookshelves and a long cubicle on the other, there sit two computers. They’re stacked vertically, attached to the same LCD (how fancy!) monitor via a KVM switch.

They sit and hum, silently when they’re first booted up and much louder after any length of time, and one of them grinds horrendously when it tries to seek information from the deepest recesses of its brain, much like me when someone asks a question during WWE RAW. They are vestiges. Relics. Antiquated reminders of the 20-plus-year old system we recently dumped in favor of a new (CLOUD-BASED, we’re so hip!) publishing system.

Together, they jointly ran the vast majority of our automated processes, barely doing together what even a relatively modern machine could do with ease all on its own. Make no mistake, automation is our mantra at the York Daily Record. We don’t want to make people do what robots (/machines) could and/or should be doing. To that end, we have a couple big projects in the hopper in addition to a seemingly endless series of smaller ones that crop up and are dealt with in the course of a day or two.

But the loud, imminent demise of Automator (the name of the program we used to schedule and task) meant that the project was getting pushed to the front of the line. Since we were replacing, we wanted to at least modernize the computer (running Windows 2000 since the old client could go no higher), and hopefully the program.

Since most of the work is now handled in the cloud, filing photos served as the big workflow we wanted to tackle. With the advent of mobile journalism, it’s not uncommon to want photos from the photographers at the scene. Unfortunately, our current setup required a VPN into our local server, then an upload to a drop folder that got pushed to the server. All that effort only took care of the print end, and required a laptop to get the particular flavor of VPN working properly.

What we wanted was an easy way to get photos from any device (photographers frequently work using only their phones or tablets, because it’s one less and/or lighter piece of equipment they have to lug around versus a laptop) and push it to three places — the web, print and our archive. The simplest solution seemed to be getting the file into our system and then moving it around from there.

Enter Dropbox. It’s extraordinary how even free services can do what used to require expensive services that were frequently more unreliable. Using the free 2GB Dropbox plan, we made sure that all of the devices were syncing to the same account, as well as to the “new” automater machine.

(Since a new AutoMate license is somewhere between $995–1495, we grabbed an old 10.6.8 iMac that was lying around and pressed it into service.)

After spending the better part of a day getting Apple’s Automator program to do all of the steps I wanted, four hours of testing proved enough to determine that Folder Actions, succinctly, suck. They were frequently skipping files and then just letting them sit, or worse yet failing and still moving them on. Luckily, a $28 program called Hazel is like Folder Actions, except it actually works. Highly recommended. That, plus the $5 Yummy FTP Watcher, resulted in us having a robust system for filing from the field that’s a) easy for photogs to use, and b) results in us getting the quality of photos we need in the places we want.

We need structure. We need rules, we need frameworks, we (for the love of God) need grammar. We, in this instance, are writers, and the things I refer to are often the crutches we employ in order to quickly impart whatever it is we're trying to get across.

But there's support a difference between support and constraint. One is there for you to fall back on, allowing you the opportunity to test your wings while still giving you a safe fall. The other informs your actions strictly, restricting your abilities and motion to the point where you've almost lost agency.

Guess which category I'm talking about with regard to journalism.

There's a reason the inverted pyramid exists and has been adopted by the journalism profession as the general template for telling a story: It makes sense for a lot of them. You start out with a very specific idea and then go broad the more you write. It keeps young writers from getting too bogged down in specifics, while also making sure they're not taking the 10,000-foot view on everything.

It's a guideline ... And that's all it should be: a guide. It's not inviolate, and it's by no means the best format for every story out there. Even more so than the idea that each story should be expressed in the best format possible, there are almost zero stories where a strict inverted pyramid is called for.

I get why it's taught — it's much easier to both instruct/grade according to a strict rubric rather than arbitrarily [and arduously] reading and weighing the subjective value of every piece of writing. But the problem is there's no point where, after the young journalist is instructed in the use of the inverted pyramid, permission is given to leave it behind when necessary.

I'll use for emphasis the story on a federal judge ruling against one of the NSA's data-collection policies, from Reuters. For starters, like most stories nowadays, it's overly long for its ostensible purpose: To inform readers about the specific case. Indeed, all of the actual data from today is imparted before the "Leaks" subheader, which isn't even halfway through the story. The rest of the story comprises reactionary quotes ("Snowden, in a statement sent by journalist Glenn Greenwald, applauded the ruling"), unnecessary (peculiarly editorialized) background ("Judge Leon has issued headline-making rulings before.") and the wire service staple, tangential information recycled from other stories:

A committee of experts appointed by the Obama Administration to review NSA activities is expected to recommend that the spy agency give up collection of masses of metadata and instead require telephone companies to hold onto it so it can be searched. But intelligence officials and the phone companies themselves are said to oppose such a plan.

Now, you might be able to argue that were this in print, it might be necessary to include some of this information to give readers background. But, since the information is being sent across something literally called the "Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol" (where hypertext is defined as a "format in which information related to that on a display can be accessed directly from the display"), there's absolutely no reason for that information to be there on its own.

Maybe — maybe — you could leave the lines about the judge's past rulings and the NSA review if you linked to relevant stories, as that might be of use to the readers. On their own, though, the lines appear to be nothing more than inch-count padding.

At best, journalists only gradually break away when they feel they can get away with it, either on low- or extremely high-profile stories. This, coupled with the mathematical truth that most stories are not situated on either extreme but rather complacently down the middle, means a majority of news comes across in an outdated, unnecessary and (above all) congenitally boring format. It's a trap that young reporters get ensnared in quite easily, and it goes beyond just the structure.

In the AP story, while the structure isn't quite so rigid, it still includes drop-ins like "The collection program was disclosed by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, provoking a heated national and international debate." This sentence underwhelms so utterly as to be entirely pointless. Reading it contributes absolutely nothing to the understanding of the story unless you've already retained a fairly exhaustive knowledge of the context. It's the equivalent of a series tag, a sort of textual cue to let people know, "Oh, this is part of the Snowden story." It doesn't actually impart any information. I'll resort to a David Foster Wallace quote to drive my point home:

I think the smarter thing to say is that in many tight, insular communities — where membership is partly based on intelligence, proficiency, and being able to speak the language of the discipline — pieces of writing become as much or more about presenting one's own qualifications for inclusion in the group than transmission of meaning. ... people feel that unless they can mimic the particular jargon and style of their peers, they won't be taken seriously, and their ideas won't be taken seriously.

In this case it's more style than jargon, but both manifest themselves eminently on a daily (often hourly) basis, online and in print. Even specific words can easily be overused — and, though they accurately depict something, their frequency of use lessens the impact and clarity.

The standard caveat: I'm not saying it's wrong to use the technique. Just don't become beholden to it. Be willing to take risks. Explore and discover the best way for letting people know (Ibid.) the story you're trying to tell. You can use the inverted pyramid, and the intertextual dog whistle, but you should only do so when you must.

With the advent of the popular internet, there are many literary, journalistic and writerly types who lament the reclassifying of writing as "content." I would think the best way to fight that trend is to stop treating your own output as content, and start reconceptualizing it (even in your own mind) as true writing.

I get why corporations love control. I do, really. The idea that some mere employee, someone whose livelihood depends upon your beneficence, holding the keys to your kingdom in their hands with no external controls? Quick, someone fetch the enterprise fainting couch!

For the most part, enterprises have started to see the value in giving their employees more freedom in terms of things like flex time or BYOD policies. Requiring everyone to use Internet Explorer 6 (for example) only led to a) increased insecurity for those who refused to use inferior products and had to develop workarounds and b) productivity slowdowns for those not able or too lazy to circumvent the system.

But again, that pesky thing where companies refuse to trust their employees rears its ugly head, and now the answer is apparently Snapchat. For enterprise. No, really.

Again, I understand the basic impetus behind this line of thinking, but it fails on two levels, both of them human. One: If you make it in the employee’s best interest to not share vital strategic or business information with a competitor, that employee (provided he/she is acting rationally) will not do so. This worry is, at heart, an admission that a company is not providing its employees with the proper incentive to act against the company.

One (sane) angle of approach would be to properly incentivize your employees, but increasing reliance on and faith in technology over humans (Ibid.) has rendered this a nonstarter. That very reliance, however, is also this policy’s downfall.

The article provides three strategies:

1. Time bombs (Snapchat)

2. Barriers (geofencing)

3. Biometrics

Let’s get through them quickly. As any teenager (or Google search will tell you, Snapchat’s ability to have your photos deleted only works as long as the other party wants them to. Otherwise, one quick screenshot (or app or API call or any of a dozen alternatives) is all it takes to have that naked selfie float around Reddit forever.

So Option 1 works as long as every other advantage that computers offer (universal access, instantaneous/error-free/non-destructive copying, etc.) goes away. Which seems unlikely.

Geofencing! IT administrators can know EXACTLY where your device is and limit your access there. Of course, if you can look at it somewhere, you can also copy it. Because, again, computers. And if you can copy it, you can convert it (either automatically or manually — and though it may take more time, I doubt that anyone who’s letting/helping documents out the door is going to be deterred by a little hassle). And then your fancy geofencing looks a lot more like the actual US-Mexico border fence than you probably intended.

Biometrics. Exact same arguments as above. Then you get hit by the double whammy that implementing these types of policies tends to make the end users (up and down the chain) more lax about security, because they’re putting their faith in the technologies — which have hidden dependencies and assumptions that most people don’t bother to think through, and ultimately wind up being their downfall.

Interestingly, the second and third policies require the utmost amount of trust in the employee (‘You can look at this only in these locations except please don’t then share it’) that the first one explicitly tries to limit ("You can only view this for X amount of time before it self-destructs). And you're employing the most fantastic way of breeding resentment (and therefore increasing the likelihood of the leaks you're trying to prevent) — show someone you don’t trust them in the slightest.

The quickest, easiest, cheapest and most secure form of information control is always going to be hiring, trusting and training the right people. It seems like a lot of work up front, but the weakest link in any chain of security is always the human element. And the smarter/more alert those people are to the risks, the easier it is for them to mitigate tricky situations. There’s no app for that.

The whistle sounds, the kick is up and, just like that, football season is upon us. Most newspapers throughout the years produced some kind of high school football preview, which pretty perfectly meets the sweet spot of subscriber interest coupled with advertising dollars. Moving that over to the digital realm has been a bit more difficult, at least for us.

Our (corporately homegrown) CMS doesn't really do well with one-off tabs short of creating a brand-new section, so previously the only items making the jump from print to digital were the tab stories, as stories. Last year we changed that trend with an iPad-only app we produced using Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite.

With help from a corporate deal, we wanted to explore the ways that an app could help us present our content. At the time of creation, there were options for more device-agnostic profiles, but the way the DPS deal was set up we could produce the iPad app for free; anything else incurred a per-download charge (being a free download, we weren't ready to lose money on the basis of popularity). We were all pretty happy with the way the product turned out, but were disappointed by the limitations. The iPad-only specification severely limited its potential audience, and the fact that none of it was indexable or easily importable made it feel more like producing an interactive PDF than a true digital product. Though we were satisfied with the app, we determined in the future we'd likely steer clear of the app-only route.

Planning

When we decided we wanted to do the preview again for this year, everyone was in favor of going with a responsive design — it allowed for the maximum possible audience as well as the smallest amount of work to hit said audience. The only problem was that our CMS doesn't support responsive design, so we'd have to go around it.

This problem was compounded when we decided on the scope of the project. Our high school football coverage is run by GameTimePA, which consists of the sports journalists from the York Daily Record, Hanover Evening Sun, Chambersburg Public Opinion and Lebanon Daily News. The four newsrooms are considered a "cluster," which means that we're relatively close geographically and tend to work together. Since the last preview, however, GameTimePA had expanded to include our corporate siblings in the Philadelphia area, meaning we now encompassed something like 10 newsrooms stretching from Central Pennsylvania to the New Jersey border.

And we're all on different CMSes.

One of the few commonalities we do share are Google corporate accounts. Though our corporate policy does not allow for publishing to the web or sharing publicly (another rant for another time), it at least gives us an authentication system to work with.

By now, there's a fairly defined set of content that goes into the tab.

There are league-specific items (preview, review, players to watch) and team-specific ones (story, photo, writeup, etc.). Starting to sound like a data table to you yet? By the time we finished, we actually ended up with some fairly robust sheets/tables for things that would generally fall under the category of "administration." But the content was only half the problem. Translating it into the final product still loomed ahead of us. Because we only have one server we can use, ever (thanks, zero dollars to spend on tech!), it couldn't be too resource-intensive — I honestly worried that even using PHP includes to power that many pageviews would overtax it.

Since the site is a preview, it's not going to be updated that often, negating the primary downside of a flat-file build system (longer time to publish). I've mentioned before that we've previously built off of Bootstrap, but the limitations we kept hitting in terms of templating (many elements require specific, one-off classes and styles to work right on all devices) drove us looking in another direction.

The framework that seemed most complete and contained the elements we were looking for was Zurb's Foundation. Though it was not without its own headaches (Foundation 5 is built off an old version of SASS, which can play hell with your compiler — the solution is to replace the deprecated global variables, specifically replacing !default; with !global; and replacing if === false statements with if not statements, as outlined in an answer here. Zurb says they're rewriting the SASS for F6), it ultimately worked out for us.

Build

The basic method for extracting data from the Google Docs turned out both easier and more difficult than expected. The original plan was to query the two main admin sheets (that described the league structures as well as the league pages) and go from there.

That much was easy — I wrote a Google Apps script that I granted access to my Docs that outputs some customized JSON based on which pages are queried.

A PHP build script (which can be set to rebuild the whole thing, a whole league, or a league's teams or league pages) grabs that info, then goes back and grabs the data for the queried pages. It's a lot of calls (hence why each update is referred to as a "build," so that the content desk would understand that this is not a WordPress post they're updating), but the most important thing was to keep the content creation and updating as easy possible — I can convince editors to go back and edit their typos in a Google Doc, whereas it's much more difficult to convince them to dig into an HTML file to find their errors without creating more problems. The PHP script outputs partial templates based on the type of page — again, in the interest of not wanting to have to rebuild the whole app every time a small change is made, I didn't want to rely on the PHP scripts to build everything — they're strictly for extracting data in a sensible manner.

The PHP script outputs a combination of JSON and .kit files. .kit is the file extension for CodeKit 2's .kit language (I heartily recommend CodeKit2 for web devs, by the way), which is essentially PHP includes for HTML. This worked perfectly for our plans, since it allowed the major parts of the templates to be kept in a single location without having to literally regenerate the whole site (the PHP build script takes, on average, about 3-5 minutes to output the site — the .kit compile takes about 20 seconds). Dropping the .kit files into the build folder automatically generates the static HTML files in a different directory, and the site is ready to go.

Challenges

Aside from the obvious challenges of just getting things to work, the biggest challenge was extracting the text from the Google Docs with formatting intact. There are methods using the getAttributes method of the text class, but I could not get it to work reliably. (Of course, when I went to Google the partial answers I saw before I found a Markdown converter script that can email you the document that could be easily adapted. Damnit.)

We did not even look at, much less open the can of worms that is embedded images.

Epilogue

We're beyond happy in our decision to forego the app route in favor of responsive design — we had more visitors to the site in the first hour of its going live than we did downloads of the app to that point (more than a year later). The larger potential audience, the ability to deep-link into the site and the ease of access (get it wherever you are!) combined to make it a much bigger success. There are still a few updates we're going to get in before the start of the season, though — more teams, full rosters and some videos are still to come.

GameTimePA HS Football Preview — The actual site

It’s all Henry Ford’s fault. While it’s almost certainly true that if he hadn’t innovated the production line and interchangeable parts, someone else would have, he stands squarely in the gun sights of history when we rail against technology making humans irrelevant.

He saw that robots and automation could produce a more uniform product more efficiently, and we’ve been off to the races ever since. Computers only make it worse. Thanks to Bill Gates, even before the epidemic of big data, computers and the internet have been tried and convicted of killing the middle class, newspapers and, counter-intuitively, porn, via a variety of methods.

But the first one, the middle class, is the one I want to focus on. It’s beyond true at this point that people have lost white-collar jobs to computers. As any 10 minutes of MAD MEN will tell you, there used to be entire departments engaged in activities that today are done by one person or, at most, one team. Things like secretarial pools (for typing), mockup artists and even broad swaths of accounting have been felled by three words: Word, Photoshop and Excel.

But for the most part, that’s actually OK. Computers are designed to and should be used for streamlining everyday tasks, allowing people to work more efficiently and (because all things must have a Legitimate Business Purpose) even saving the company money by consolidating the number of employees to produce a given widget.

These are what we’ll call sensible (though regrettable) redundancies. But the problem with technological innovation is that we think that any problem, with enough sufficient amounts of tech wizardry thrown at it, will disappear.

The flaw with this philosophy is that, much as with medicine and side effects, sometimes the troubles with the cure are worse than the problem it was trying to solve.

It’s 5 p.m. You’ve come home after a long day of work and, according to Amazon’s website, your brandy new Shiny should be at the door. Amazon queried the UPS database, which confirmed that the driver had scanned the barcode on your package as having been dropped off at your home.

Yet, despite looking on the porch, peeking behind the rosebushes and checking with your neighbor, it’s nowhere to be found. Time for the phone tree.

Everyone’s dealt with phone trees. They do make sense, to a point. Why on earth would you route every single call through one (or more, depending on the size of your organization) person, who would then have to manually shift them off to the appropriate extension?

An automated greeting with options to go through for finding the person you want to reach makes perfect sense in a number of scenarios. But right now you’re waiting for a package that says it’s been delivered, even though it’s clearly not. And when you call up UPS, you damn well know that you don’t 1) Want to Ship A Package, 2) Track A Package, 3) Schedule A Pickup, 4) Inquire About Freight Services, or any of the other options the robot gives you.

You could try Tracking The Package. But you’ve already interacted with UPS system. We know that the system is wrong; it thinks the package has been delivered, when the package hasn’t been delivered. The problem is that the system has no conception that it could be wrong. All it’s ever going to be able to tell you is that the package has been delivered.

Naturally, you started mashing 0 the minute the robot asked whether you wanted to converse with it in Spanish (automatonic show-off). 0 is frequently the magic number that tells the system, “Sorry, I need to talk to an actual human being because you’re so arrogant you can’t even admit the possibility that you could be wrong.”

(Of course, the very first thing the helpful representative does is query the computer so she can tell you, “Ma'am, this says the package was delivered,” adding a third layer of the same information confirming itself, but that’s also another rant for another time.)

This is a design flaw, a self-reinforcing feedback. The system tells the website you're wrong, so when you call to inquire it checks ... the same system, and it of course agrees with itself. And the reason this is a problem is because the implementation of this automation actually makes the jobs (and lives) of humans harder. We’ve so completely bought into the superiority of computers that, faced in a real-life situation, we almost always take their word over that of a human being.

Consider how many times someone’s complained about the technology where you work. Is the software you use every day to do your job completely bug-free? Is it even designed to do the things you’re forced to do with it? Know anyone in the food service industry? Ask them about their Point of Sales system.

Think about all the customer service interactions you were involved in from the buying side that included faulty technology. How often has the employee said, “Oh, that’s clearly wrong, let me fix that.”? The best-case scenario in that situation is that someone gets sent to go check that you were not, in fact, lying when you said the shirt was on sale even though the computer didn’t realize it. Or everyone gets to cool their jets while the manager wanders over from the back of the store to enter the special “override” code that forces the computer to accept the input of the human being operating it.

All it boils down to, essentially, is that these companies trust their computers more than their employees. (Which points, frankly, to absolutely terrible HR work.) This makes sense if all you care about is hiring people you can pay a pittance who will do the bare minimum, and rely on the computers to police everything. It falls apart somewhat if you actually care about your customers not hating the experience of going to your store.

To a certain extent, they’re extending Ford’s maxim: Using computers gives them a more reliable outcome. The problem is that they don’t bother to alter course even when that outcome is awful, because they believe that hiring the people to do the task properly would be difficult, expensive or not worth the money.

Thus, homogeneity is prized over efficacy. And that’s their prerogative, I guess. After all, everything must have its Legitimate Business Purpose, and there’s no Business Purpose more Legitimate than “it costs me less money today/this month/this quarter.” And perhaps the giants of various industries (Amazon, UPS, Walmart etc.) are so entrenched — or they’ve devolved everything to the commodity level so that price is the only differentiator — that they’ll never have to worry about the upstart who innovates on service and providing a user experience that’s actually pleasant for the user. Just ask Microsoft.

It feels like summer’s finally over. It’s been pretty hot even through the majority of September, and the rains that came were either parts of thunderstorms or hurricane-driven, so they didn’t really feel like “fall” rain. Then yesterday I read about the fall foliage outlook, which makes it feel like fall … and it started raining.

The change in seasons is more than just a semantic difference for me. I always get a bit doleful this time of year because it signifies a pretty dark anniversary for me — the gut-check realization that things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to. And it always coincides with the first rain of fall.

It was literally my first day at work. The first day of my first job right out of college, and I got a Facebook message from a high school friend I hadn’t spoken to in probably four years, asking for my phone number. He called me later, around 6 p.m.

I remember exactly where I was when I got the call, standing in an empty office, staring at the drops of rain as they rolled down the window. I remember walking home immediately after, lost in thought as I gazed at the trees that had just changed their colors.

My friend called me to tell me a relatively good acquaintance (the technical definition would be “person I was friendly toward who I never happened hang out with”), who I had gone to both high school and college with, had taken her own life. (I wrote an essay about that day some time ago, if you’d like to read it, but it’s much too long to even excerpt here.)

It was the first time I had really dealt with death of someone my own age after high school. Death is unexpected for the young, but at least sometimes it feels like it makes a perverse sort of sense: crazy accidents, car crashes, sudden medical emergencies … none of those really give off the “Well of course it happened that way” vibe, but at least there’s some logic behind it. In those cases, maybe there was a car involved, driving much too fast to stop. Maybe the rope broke when he/she went rock climbing, so nothing could be done.

But this? This felt more like typing something into the computer and having it just freeze up, completely unable to do anything except flash cryptic error messages that don’t actually help you fix the problem. Unexplained error. File not found. Connection unavailable.

It broke my heart, in a somewhat oblique way. I identified with her, as I had known her practically my entire life and even received the same scholarship to the same university 300 miles away from our hometown.

I felt responsible, like there was something, anything, I should have done to help. After it happened, I immediately resolved that I would do better by all the rest of my friends. I promised myself I would do a better job at keeping touch with them on Facebook (which, looking back on it, is like the bare minimum one can do and still be said to be “keeping up”), and making sure to call and visit and … of course it didn’t happen. In my defense, I was still living 300 miles away from the vast majority of them at the time (since increased to nearly 2,700), but the simple truth of the matter is you can’t keep up with everyone you’ve ever met, or even everyone you’ve ever called a friend. It’s just not possible to do that and have any other kind of life (up to and including eating, sleeping and working).

But there are things you can do. Things that I do. Little things. But I think they help — not just to mollify my own guilt, but I think they also might help the people I’m “keeping tabs on.” For example, when I see one of those cryptic depressed Facebook statuses (“Everything is SO HARD lately” or “UGH why can’t it just stop?!”), I don’t immediately dismiss them. I don’t necessarily jump into action right away, but I will keep an eye on things. I make sure there haven’t been a lot of those kinds of posts in a short span of time. If the number starts to worry me, I try to figure out if anyone else has been in touch with them — either through the comments or even something as stupid as the Likes.

If it seems like no one’s been reaching out, I make sure someone does. I try to be discreet about it — if it’s someone I don’t really talk to on a regular basis, I might try to go through a mutual friend or something, but if I can’t find anyone else I will make it awkward and just start chatting them up (via whatever means are available to me).

It may feel weird at first, but it’s completely worth it.

I think about these things all the time, but it gets especially bad around this time of year. When the first rain of fall comes (again, not a calendrical definition, more of an emotional one), I go over the whole thing, again and again. It brings back a little of what I felt that day, walking home from work, leaves crunching underfoot.

Autumn generally has a melancholy feel to it, what with leaves turning brown and falling back to earth. It may have been thematically appropriate from an aesthetic point of view, but it certainly didn’t make the experience any easier to get through. And it makes me all the more resolute to make sure I never have to endure the entirety of that feeling again.

I always try to make sure I write for a purpose, to make sure that I have a point. So let me just leave you with this: Live like you’re responsible for someone else. You don’t have to make sure everyone you know is always happy, you don’t have to be available every time the smallest thing in life goes wrong … but at the same time, make it known that you’re available for people when they truly need help.

In the grand scheme of things, being available for that kind of comfort, advice or help is an incredibly small portion of your time, and will be a minuscule part of your life — but it could be huge for that other person.

I broke my phone. Again.

It's not all that surprising, really. I've lost any number of phones to what I consider "normal use" — and what my father dubs "horrendous neglect" — like dropping it or getting it wet. And for the non-normal usage ... Can I really be blamed for a bus running over my phone?

(It was a flip phone; I was in college, I got off the bus with the phone flipped open, ready to text, whereupon it jumped [jumped! mind you] from my hands and flung itself under the bus. Likely out of envy of other, smarter phones, coupled with pity for me, stuck with it. You are missed, phone. Well, not so much missed. Vaguely remembered.)

This time, it again wasn't my fault, except for the part where it broke as a direct result of my actions. I dropped the phone on my bed (as per usual), whereupon it rebounded onto the floor and struck, screen-first, against the spines of a tall stack of particularly weighty hardback books. When I turned it on, it did not. Well, the buttons lit up, but the screen just flashed blue lightning at me from the visible cracks in the screen. I thought it best to shut the stupid thing down before I Force-lightninged myself.

So I went to Craigslist and eBay, and eventually found an older smartphone Amazon had on sale for about $75. This is actually why I tend to shy away from the newest, most expensive tech — I'm afraid I'll break it. The phone that fell under a bus was a flip phone back when flip phones weren't really in style anymore. The phone I broke a few days ago was a creaking Android phone I got for $100. It ran Gingerbread, for cryin' out loud — for you non-techies, it was about as powerful as an original iPhone.

(OBLIGATORY NOTE TO MY EMPLOYERS: Things that are not mine, in the sense that I did not pay for, I am much more respectful of. I have never thrown [nor even lightly dropped] the shiny things I am given to play work with.)

Am I just unusually careless with my things, the broken litany not even a quarter-listed in the previous paragraph? Anecdotal evidence from Facebook would suggest I am, but only just. Think of how many times you've seen something to the effect of, "lost/broke my phone, so text me your number and your name so I know who you are." I doubt most people go through phones quite as quickly as I do, but the churn rate is higher than the 2-year contract upgrade. Heck, even actual evidence suggests that 1/3rd of the populace has lost or damaged a phone, and 20 percent of the people reading this post have dropped one in the john (one being a phone; definitely don't want an unclear antecedent with that phrasing).

I can't find hard numbers on it, but I'd be willing to bet that more of those damaged phones are at the hands of the young, in this case meaning my generation and below. Those who are older tend to have a few things we young'uns don't: patience. Perspective. Oh, yeah, and a healthy fear of technology.

Maybe there's something to be said for the reverence with which most old people (here defined as anyone over the age of 35) treat their various gadgets, be they smartphones, tablets or even (shudder) feature phones.

Want to see it in action? Hand your mom an iPhone. I almost dare you. My mom rocked an Android for almost 8 months and got nothing but frustrations. When she finally caved into the peer pressure and bought the iProduct — despite having the aforementioned practice on a smartphone — I became the by-phone (my dad's phone) tech support for two weeks while she figured out things like dialing a number, texting one person at a time (which I was more than happy to help with, given the texts I was getting that were meant for other people) and even figuring out how to shut it off properly.

It's a truism at this point that a disconnect exists between so-called "digital natives" and the rest of the world (we'll call them "normal people," but only until we digital natives have a majority. Then WE can be normal [for once]), and I think it comes down to how technology is viewed.

Forgive the overarching generalizations below: They do not represent absolutely everyone in both cohorts, but I think they draw general outlines that most people match up with fairly well.

People who have seen new technology come into use view the technology only in terms of its functionality, a means to an end. Cellphones (and smartphones) are not their lifeline to life itself, they're a means of communication. Sure, they'll learn how to Facebook on the go, post Instagrams to Twitter and message their unruly teen to make sure he gets home before curfew, but if you took it away they'd still survive. They've got paper address books, landlines and actual (still digital, usually) cameras that aren't grafted onto a phone.

I think most younger folks (present company included) treat a phone more as an appendage. Losing it is a lot like amputation, in that we can survive the trauma, but recovery involves actually having to go back and completely relearn how to do things.

Imagine you had to go without a cellphone or a tablet for six months, with no prior warning. How would you communicate with friends? How would you find a restaurant? How would your friends know that "Certain ppl need to lern to respect there bffs and not go behind they're bak." Some people wouldn't even be able to do their jobs properly. (Journalists.)

Paradoxically, this overreliance on technology actually leads some of us treat it as a commodity. It's certainly true in my case. I don't really care what computer I'm using as long as it runs. I don't really care what operating system my phone runs as long as it has Angry Birds. From a physicality standpoint, this non-attachment means I'm probably more wanton in my care than I should be (hence my perpetual progression of buying new phones) but, judging by their Facebook statuses, more of my friends take after me than do resemble my parents.

I don't treat most gadgets like they're shiny objects I'm worried might get scuffed. I treat them like books: I'm not going to go out of my way to destroy them, but bending the pages back or throwing it (literally) on a pile or the floor is perfectly acceptable, because I don't really care if it gets beat up a little.

To me, technology is a tool, in that you use it to create other things — it just happens to quite often be a very expensive tool. But you're supposed to use tools. Screwdrivers are meant to drive screws ... to build a birdhouse. Paintbrushes are meant to brush paint ... to make the birdhouse attractive to birds. Similarly, smartphones are meant to phone smarts ... well, you know what i mean.

You're not supposed to take it easy on tools. You're supposed to use them hard, or at least as hard as you need to. And you just have to live with the fact that sometimes, even though you may be using it properly, a hammer will randomly have its head fly off and see the claw part embed itself in the wall about a foot to the right of your head (true story).

Though I bet a $100 hammer wouldn't. (grumble)

There's always a van. The Scooby gang, ghost hunters by trade if not specifically by design, rolled around in the Mystery Machine. The Ghost Hunters from SyFy flit from haunt to haunt in their souped-up van — black, of course, with "TAPS" stenciled in yellow "COPS" lettering on the side. Even the land boat the Ghostbusters tore through New York City with bears far more resemblance to a modern-day van than a car.

Though you may question whether the contemporary investigators are aping the ghost hunters of their youth, the Whispering Spirits Paranormal Research Society pulled up to Farmington Daily Times building in the quiet northwest New Mexico hamlet in their very own van. It was (appropriately enough) Friday the 13th, with a nice big moon hanging in the sky to perfectly illuminate the aging but still functioning newspaper. It's spooky business, poking around decaying buildings in the dark.

The motley crew that piled out for a night's work wasn't what you'd expect a group of ghost chasers to look like. They come in all shapes and sizes, all manner of hair colors and lack thereof, and range in age from 18 to well into Boomer territory.

Then again, if you really think about what real-life ghost hunting entails — a steadfast belief in the supernatural with an accompanying willingness to sacrifice your nights and weekends in pursuit of proving said logical improbability — they're exactly what you should expect them to look like.

They began unloading their hard plastic cases filled with all sorts of electrical gizmos, some recognizable and some not, around 11 p.m. To a person, the only thing they had in common other than the uniform black T-shirts was a determination, a sense of purpose. They exuded a clear sense of order and efficiency as they transferred the boxes first to the ground, then inside. It almost bordered on urgency — though, since the investigation wasn't set to begin until after midnight, it wasn't quite clear why.

They all wore matching black T-shirts with the name of the society and a very pixelated vortex plastered on the back, but it was rare you'd confuse any of them for another.

Mel, the undisputed leader of the group — who never was referred to as such by the rest except in their complete obedience to his every order — stood distinguishable by his stocky, muscular stature, his reddish-blond beard and accompanying (though thinning) hair. He got started right away.

"We expect to find whatever we can," he said, unpacking one of the six night-vision video cameras from where they lay in their custom-cut foam holes. He hands one of them to his wife, Krystal, one of the group's co-founders, and has her run it from the flat-screen monitor they brought with to a prearranged point in the other room. "We're doing a small investigation here, it'll be about an hour, an hour and a half."

The sheer amount of electronics the group carries along is somewhat staggering, especially considering the rather small area they're investigating on this trip. A lunchroom and a small bullpen seem like fairly easy ground to cover, but Mel says the total cost of the equipment they have is pushing $4,000. It's not hard to believe how expensive the equipment is. It's just a little hard to believe that the people who run this nonprofit (they're adamant about their IRS status) have nothing better to do with that kind of money.

Of course, it's a little hard to understand what drives a person to do this sort of work in the first place. As people who believe in ghosts, they're actually somewhat less equipped to deal with coming face-to-face with a spirit than a nonbeliever. A nonbeliever would be just as scared at a startling noise or a freaky coincidence, but logically they'd attribute it to just that — a coincidence. True believers, though, are prone to seeing specters around every corner. To them, that hard, bristly thing that brushes lightly against their left arm in the darkened room is out to get them — there's no chance it's just an upturned broom.

It all started with a cellphone. A smartphone, actually, the marvel of modern technology that carries a staggering amount of computing power in your hand. More than enough to solve the most intractable mathematical mysteries that stymied humans for generations. And it finds ghosts, apparently. Sometimes?

"We were messing around with an app on my phone, and it turned out to be fake, and we started wondering kind of a little bit more about the paranormal," says the other co-founder, Natasha. By day Natasha works at a deli, but nighttime is when she can bring out her spiritual, supernatural side.

"We found another app on the Droid called the Ghost Radar, and I was curious as to how it worked because I couldn't find anything on the Internet that said it was either fake or real," chimed in Krystal, interrupting slightly. The two went to a local cemetery to test out the app, which instructed them to look for "Paul."

It's worth noting that, on the website for Ghost Radar, the company's only comment on the app's veracity is that it's "as effective as an EMF detector or a KII." Which is to say they either believe in it wholeheartedly, or think it's a great way to transfer money from the gullible to their bank account.

Krystal, however, seemed to be convincing herself she believed.

"It was like leading us to it, I want to say, because we were looking for this person’s name and we couldn't find a Paul, and it said, 'Beyond,' so we're like, OK, so it's on the other side. It wasn't actually on the wall itself, it was on the ground, so we just kind of went from there and invested ..."

"They were playing, basically," interrupts Judy.

Judy is Mel's mother, something of a skeptic and an utterly devout Christian. She got into the ghost-chasing game after Mel and Krystal kept out all hours of the night and asked her to babysit the kids. Judy doesn't actually believe in ghosts, per se. She mostly tags along to help protect Mel and Krystal from the spirits they face, which Judy believes are all demons. She started asking to help them analyze the recorded evidence, and eventually worked her way up to a starting spot on the squad.

The investigation itself is actually the easiest part of the whole thing, if you can get over the whole "actively seeking out haunted places" thing. The part that Judy broke in through, the analyzing, is actually the most difficult piece — mostly because of the tedium. Hour upon hour of straining to look at grainy, black-and-white footage of something you just witnessed firsthand, all to find some — any — evidence of the supernatural. Since just about anything unusual can be ascribed to the supernatural, just about everything that happens has to be double-checked to rule out the presence of other beings.

Mel couldn't give me a definite estimate as to the man-hours involved, but what he did come up with sounded exhaustively time-consuming.

"Probably two hours for every hour, reviewing just video," he said. "It takes probably a couple of weeks to go over four hours worth of audio and video."

The cameras, recorders and what can only be described as gadgets they carry with them could stun a small herd of high school AV nerds. Each investigative "team" of two people carries at least one personal digital audio recorder. There are also various electromagnetic field readers, something called a "ghost box" (an AM/FM radio that continually scans through frequencies, so as to create "white noise" that spirits can use to make themselves heard more easily) and of course the Ghost TiVo, the digital video recorder that captures of every frame of freaky footage they shoot on their stationary night-vision cameras.

Between the expense, the late hours, the hours (and days and weeks) annihilated by analyzing and the cringe factor that accompanies an adult describing his or herself unironically as a "ghost hunter," it's somewhat bewildering to comprehend why this dedicated — and any group of people that willfully sacrifices this kind of time and money deserves the designation "dedicated," among others — group of people would do this kind of thing. From the variety of their answers, it's clear there's no category they can be slotted into, no on explanation that covers all of them.

Except, maybe — simply — that they like to do it.

"This is probably the best hobby we could ever come up with," says one.

It's time for the investigation to begin. First the entire group clears out to the back door, most to smoke, but ostensibly for the purpose of getting a neutral reading, of sorts. The sensors and video cameras can get a control reading — and maybe pick up some stray ghost bloopers before the spirits see the "ON AIR" light switch on.

The group also needs to let off some steam (slash smoke). This is the part of the play before the play, when the cast gathers backstage to let out the giggles, stretch and warm up their vocal chords. And, of course, pray for a good show.

Religion and ghost hunting don't mix together well when you first throw them in the blender. Though you can (and Mel does) point to the Bible for evidence of evil entities on Earth, the prescribed method for dealing with them involves commanding them into the bodies of pigs and running them off the cliff.

Not only are there no big drop-offs present, we're fresh out of pigs as well. This, however, does not deter the group.

"Basically, we stay in God's word. If I have to take a Bible with me, I'll take a bible with me. I preach God's word," says Mel. "There's no guarantee that we can get rid of what's there, but we do our best."

Mel, Krystal, Judy and Shane (he's the oil worker in his mid-20s with the tattoos and the leather vest that plunk him square in a moderate-to-rough motorcycle gang) are adamant about religion playing a huge role. Shane takes the same demonological hard line about spirits that Judy does, while both Krystal and Mel believe God protects them and their children against the spirits they counter. It might be the couple's biggest worry, actually — unknowingly bringing a ghost home for a spooky reenactment of "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?"

Mel's even had a sit-down with his pastor. Or two.

"He does not agree. He has an issue with me doing what I'm doing and my wife doing what she's doing," Mel recalls.

"He's just real concerned with the Bible and what it says," offers Krystal. "In there it says not to seek the spirits."

After the invocation, the group heads back in and picks up their gear. Each two-person team has the aforementioned voice recorder as well as a walkie-talkie to facilitate to communication and rule out false positives. If one of the teams hears a weird noise, they'll try to ascertain whether another group's nearby before maintaining radio silence in the hopes of hearing it again. Similarly, if the group leader back at base sees something on the camera, he can instruct a team in the field to take a closer look.

The audio devices seem to be the easiest way to catch a ghost, though the reason is never fully explained. Mel tells me he can just sit in his backyard with the recorder and hear plenty of voices. This for some reason makes him think the method is more, as opposed to less, reliable.

In addition to the audio devices, Judy's carrying around a garden-variety digital camera with the flash set to "accidentally staring directly at the porch light when your parents flip it on after the sun goes down." The hope is that you can catch a spirit by surprise? Or something. That was never really spelled out to me, though Mel assured me 35mm film cameras do a much better job than the new-fangled digital ones.

Even ghosts can be Instamatic hipster snobs.

Natasha and Shane are exploring the lunchroom, where unspecified paranormal activity is rumored to have taken place. They carry both an EMF reader and the ghost box. Shane takes the EMF reader and basically runs it over every square inch of the cabinets, walls and as much of the ceiling he can reach, interrupting every so often with a desultory, "Are you there?"

Natasha, on the other hand, immediately takes a seat at the table, lays her cellphone and the ghost box down on the table, and turns on the squawk.

"Are you there?" she asks, though it's more of a demand than a question. "Show yourself. Prove to me that you exist."

This goes on for longer than you'd think tolerable. In the corner of the room sits one of the tethered night-vision cameras, its presence notable for the circle of small red LED lights that ring the lens, staring directly at us. It's watching Natasha decry whatever spirits may be there as "cowards," challenging them to prove her wrong.

One obliges.

As the ghost box flips through the frequencies, every so often you'll be able to make out a word or a partial sentence that slips through a broadcaster's lips.

"Did it say 'press room'?" I ask at one point, pointing at the device even though we can't really see each other.

Natasha confirms she heard it too. Her aggressive patter picks up in volume and intensity, but we don't get much more in terms of aural confirmation.

But there is something strange going on. For some reason, every time the ghost box rolls through the 1300 AM range, you can hear a whine cycle up through different pitches. And when it gets to 1380 AM, it just ... stops.

It stops scanning and hunkers down on some random Latin music station. Natasha says it's never done that before. Shane agrees. When we set it to start scanning again, everything continues as normal. At least, until we hear the whine in the 1300s. And it stops. Again.

The group line is that they're debunkers. Sometimes it's the house settling, other times it's simply in your imagination. They say their job is to go in, gather all the information possible and announce that the ghost was actually just Mr. Jenkins, the creepy real estate developer, all along.

"The main purpose of the group is to go in and debunk, to make sure that people aren't seeing or hearing things that are naturally occurring," says Judy.

That's the spin on natural occurrences. When it comes to the supernatural — that no one spoke out against during the powwow we had before the investigation began — there are no human spirits wandering in search of a loved one or a great burger or a long-lost childhood sled.

Everything is demons. If you hear a voice that sounds like Grandma Lil or knows something only Uncle Jerry could know, that's just a particularly crafty demon trying to trick you. Judy also believes in demonic possession — but they're spirits of Hell, not spirits of people. Tricksy demons.

There's a lot to debunk in this creaky old newspaper office, though one can't really rule out the notion that one or more demons has passed through its halls posing as an editor or a sales rep. But there are plenty of clunks and groans when the air conditioner kicks on, at least twice an hour at random. And since the gigantic printing press used to be just on the other side of the wall, there's a drop-basement that holds the leads and connections to enough juice to power at least one good-size Vegas hotel.

This is where some of the science comes in, the debunking. They're a research society, see. It's right in the name. And their studying is not limited to extraterrestrials and ghost stories; they also read up on common phenomena, and I'm sure the electrician-in-his-other-life has gotten through a technical manual or two. That, the technology and the scientific method the group applies to their investigations (two people to a team, so they have verification; constant communication to rule out false positives; and making sure everyone knows where everyone else is for the same reason) are the values the group holds highest.

But the power plant only explains the crazy readings we're getting on one section of the wall with the EMF reader. We've still got this ghost box that's spooking us all just a little bit with its whine and random-but-not-at-all-random stoppages. We run it through some tests.

"Try stopping it manually once we start hearing the whine," I suggest. Natasha does so, and we both hear the whine skip up through the scale on each of the 1310, 1320 and 1330 AM stations.

"So the octave's not tied to the frequency," I offer, which sounds scientific-ish, at least to my ears.

Natasha nods. She then turns the scan back on, only to have it stop a few seconds later on the same station as before.

"OK, this is pretty weird."

Natasha nods again.

We sit in silence as we let the box run through the same cycle two or three more times. Then we decide to experiment again, so Natasha picks up her phone and hits a button so we can get a better view at the ghost box.

Which proceeds to skip right on by 1380. No whine, either. The ghost is gone.

We're both a little disappointed. She sets her phone back down so we can continue the hunt in darkness, which is apparently the group's guess at spirits' preferred mood lighting. When the whine comes back and the box stops abruptly at 1380, Natasha gasps.

"Dammit. It's my phone."

She moves it away from the box, and we resume the investigation in silence.

Some level of skepticism should be present. As debunking performs a fairly vital part of paranormal investigating, at least for Whispering Spirits, you'd expect the group to be somewhat wary of what it finds. You'd expect each of them (or at least some of them) to examine things with a critical eye, always naysaying each other and operating on a basis of "normal until proven not."

You'd also be wrong. Most of the debunking, it seems, falls to one man — Bobby.

"Bobby is very skeptical," Natasha had told me earlier. "He is the one who does not believe."

The concept was boggling. Why would a paranormal group carry around a skeptic on its roster? More to the point, who joins a group for the expressed purpose of not believing a word it says?

"I think it's curiosity," Bobby says. "I just like to prove 'em wrong. Until they can prove me wrong."

Bobby's proved 'em wrong on more than one occasion. Despite being very hard of hearing, the first thing he does when the group shows up on site is to check for any mitigating evidence — do the lights hum, is there a power plant behind that wall, what noises do you hear?

"Bobby's very observant," says Mel. "He'll note everything in his head, and when it comes time to go over evidence, he remembers. He tries to debunk everything that we come up with, because we get excited. He tries to explain everything."

Once, the group set up in an old graveyard. (Despite the ready abundance of dead bodies, nobody ever seems to haunt a new graveyard. Wrong atmosphere, maybe. Not the right aesthetics.) They had been wandering among the tombstones for a while, in the oldest section, running the ghost box.

"We were walking through there, and the radio come off with, 'Scared,'" Mel recalls. "And we stopped and we said, 'Don't be scared of us, we're here to help you' ... The girls come off with, 'What do you have to be scared of?' And it came through, 'Reaper.'"

The electromagnetic spook set the scene perfectly. Armed with their digital camera, the group took a steady succession of pictures of some spooky-looking trees.

"We were shooting pictures, and you see the dark images of trees, and there's the really dark image that looked really tall," says Mel. "It looked like the Reaper."

That one wound up being pretty easy for Bobby to debunk.

"It turned out to be me," he says.

Bobby's disbelief isn't really disbelief, though — more like the suspension of belief. He says he truly wants to believe in ghosts and spirits — he just hasn't had the opportunity yet.

At the very least, Bobby has to be a believer in belief, then, right? He's actually had a spooky experience he couldn't explain — a recorder he set down in a haunted basement recorded a disembodied voice growling, "Lucifer" about 10 seconds after he left a room. He has no explanation for it. But still he doesn't believe.

"Every investigation, though, I go in hoping to find something that I can't (explain) — that's not me. And so far, I've been let down," he says. "I wanna be a believer. And someday, I will be."

The dark is scary, regardless of whether ghosts are present. By far the spookiest occurrence took place in the press building, where the team finished up after scouring the main building. There are no windows in the building's deepest recesses, so the area where huge mountains of five-foot paper rolls are stored dims to the blackest of black with the lights off. So black you can't even discern the movement of your hand as you wave it in front of your face.

Stephen seems like the most normal guy in the bunch. His partner, 18-year-old Kim, isn't the opposite, but she's closer to the other side of the spectrum than to his.

Stephen and Kim set up in a paper-roll canyon that stretched back to the cinderblock wall, towering some 20 feet overhead. Stephen aimed a red laser pointer at the wall opposite, down the length of the chasm, explaining it would be much easier for a spirit to cause a small, weak light flicker than to manifest into a form visible by flashlight or camera flash.

So we waited. In absolute darkness, with only the tiniest, most anemic of red beams shimmering along our sides, barely even visible on the far wall. Your mind starts to play tricks at that point, combining the extraordinarily low light with the sleep deprivation that comes from ghost hunting until well into the 4 a.m. hour.

Then I heard shuffling.

Officially, I was along as an observer, not an investigator. And yet, much like when I asked if anyone heard "press room" on the ghost box, I felt compelled to speak up when no one else did.

For I knew the stories of the press building. Of the suicidal press operator who jumped into the baler (which compresses plastic barrels, cardboard or human flesh and bones, if you ask it, into much smaller and compacter versions of those things) in order to commit suicide. He failed to notice that the baler had been emptied and wound up just being stuck for the weekend, but it's still a bummer vibe to put out there.

I had heard of the full-bodied apparition of the '70s press operator, still dressed in the proper garb, standing watch at the control panel one late night. And the barking dogs and growls heard over by the ink tanks when no other soul, man or beast, was supposed to be in the building.

"I hear feet shuffling," I announced.

"You do?" asked Kim, surprised.

"Is anyone there?" I asked, directing my question toward the tiny point of light on the wall.

"Check the radio," I instructed Stephen.

He did. "No," came the response.

So we waited. Silence can seem oppressive in any situation, but in absolute darkness it's downright suffocating. I strained my eyes, trying to see anything.

Then I noticed the slightest waver in my peripheral vision, right along the left wall of the canyon. The laser beam streamed down almost directly along the right side, so the movement I noticed was so slight I almost missed it.

"I see something," I announced again, this time a little bit louder. I was, I admit, slightly scared. I scooted back away from the light, toward the cinderblocks. And I knew it wasn't Bobby this time, because I had heard him breathing heavily and walking away a few minutes earlier.

"You hear shuffling?" asked Kim.

"No, I definitely see something. Turn on the light, turn on the light!" I finished, my voice getting slightly louder, higher and faster on every word. Stephen fumbled for the laser pointer, which was attached to a flashlight, flipped the light on and shone it on whatever was coming for us. I gaped at what I saw lurching out of the darkness.

I don't know if Judy is right to be keeping an eye out for demons, or if Krystal's prayers do keep the evil away from her home and family. I don't know if Bobby's skepticism is well founded, or if Shane is correct in his adamant belief of evil spirits trying to fool us. I don't know what's on the other side, reaching out to make a connection to the land of the living.

But that time, it was Mel.

In the end, it turned out the newspaper wasn't terribly haunted. In the bullpen, where most of the spooky happenings had been reported, there were only two things to note before they went back to the tapes for analysis.

Judy managed to snap a photo of an "orb," a large globe of light that appears in one frame of a photograph and doesn't appear in any taken just before or just after. On the small screen of the digital camera, it definitely looks like an orb.

This was confirmed by one of the press workers, who exclaimed (multiple times) while looking at it, "Damn! You caught an orb!"

It's not as interesting as expected, given their recitations of other investigations. In fact, their very first time out they visited a location they refer to only as "The Basement," a literal hole-in-the-ground Mel had been told was haunted since he was a little kid.

"Growing up, all the kids used to talk about a lady that lived there that kidnapped kids back in the '40s," Mel recalled. After kidnapping them, locking them in cages and starving them for weeks, "she would take 'em down to the pond and drown 'em, if they were still alive. And she'd throw their bodies down a shaft."

Of course, after a full investigation the team found there was no truth to this story. The woman merely had several citations for cruelty to animals to her name before she was "taken away."

"She lit a horse on fire," according to a neighbor Mel spoke with.

Then the house was demolished and some homeless guy took up residence, kicking all the drunken teenagers out and scaring them by re-enacting "The Blair Witch Project" (back when people would have gotten the reference) before himself getting taken away by police.

Despite the attempted suicide-by-crushing in the press room story, this was no basement. Yes, one team did have a strange encounter with a table in the bullpen area. They sat the recorder and themselves down at one of the tables in a corner of the room where a lot of disturbances (both spectrally and in the flesh) took place. There, when Stephen (Kim's partner) knocked, a distinct rapping sound knocked right back.

"It's very interesting. It was almost like it answered me, so that's what makes me think it's not coincidental," Stephen recalls. "It knocked several times. I think it's something more. I'm hoping."

Kim, however, has no qualms about believing. Ghosts, spirits, demons, she'll root for the existence of everything. And she's even extra religious — though she grew up with her grandmother's Christianity, the deli-worker-by-day also got to hear about the traditional Navajo creation story and myths.

"Yeah, I believe there's a God, but I don't believe, 'Oh, you have to do this and be good,'" she says. "Traditional, they come from four worlds, and it's ... confusing, mainly. They talk about skin-walkers, bigfoots ..."

Of course, as much as religions differ, they also come together in surprising ways. In the same way that Mel and Krystal worry about ghost hitchhikers, Kim's dad employs his own religious cleansing for her ghostly doings.

"He believes that if I do something like this, then something's going to follow me home," she says. "He has to do a prayer with me, medicine man."

Kim's purpose for joining the group is the simplest, which is why it seems like the most honest.

"I just wanna find answers. To know if there really is another side," she says. "You have to find something to believe in, and I want to believe in something."

That may be why Kim appears to the most in tune with the supernatural. For the group's recent (and as of yet, only) UFO outing, Kim was the only one it communicated with, it "only lik[ed]" her. And this investigation — which was her "first big one," according to Krystal, as Kim is still technically training — she got a response in two different places, as opposed to most of the group's none.

Did Kim's search for answers influence her perceptions? Perhaps. Then again, it's possible she's just more attuned to the other side. Her grandmother told her the story of her grandfather, who was murdered before Kim was born. Every few years, her grandfather would visit her grandmother, telling her, "Good job."

"And he's telling her the next time he comes back, he's going to take my grandma with him," she says.

Kim also believes her grandfather is the voice in her head that restrains her from getting too angry or too upset, the voice that tells her, "Stop," or "Don't."

"My grandma says that's him protecting me. And that's what I want to know, I want the answer to it," she says. "I'm not all crazy about the idea of demons."

The intricate weave of belief in ghosts and religion seems to at once make both perfect sense and none at all. Kim's makes more sense than most, as she's already trying to tie together two beliefs that don't have any common threads — in fact, Christianity explicitly refutes much of traditional Navajo religion, If she can make those work, adding in ghosts just requires tweaking a few names.

The rest of the group, the devoutly religious, seems just as out of place on a paranormal investigative team as Bobby does. Are they just on the lookout for exorcism opportunities? Do they actually expect to see something? Do they really not see the parallelism of not believing in earthly spirits lingering after their physical life, but giving full credence to the notion that a heavenly spirit has total dominion over all?

"There's proof that there's a God. In history, and in the Bible itself," Judy says. "So we're guessing about spirits, we're not guessing about God. We believe in God."

In the end, if you ignore the somewhat muddled philosophies and jury-rigged beliefs, the group really does have one motivating idea. Kim is looking for answers. I don't know if she's finding any, but she's found a group of people that give her something to do after work — breaking her out of a rut that she says started when she finished school. Bobby is looking for evidence that will permit him to believe. He hasn't found it yet, but he still keeps coming along on investigations, sure that this one could actually provide the concrete solidity he needs. Mel, Krystal, Natasha, and who knows how many others are really just trying to find out what's out there — and they find something, every investigation, whether the origin of the phenomenon is supernatural or perfectly ordinary.

And when you think about it, that's pretty much what they've done so far. When they piled in and drove away that morning, they weren't trying desperately to convince anyone they'd encountered the supernatural. They had a few things they were going to check, sure, but that's just diligence — much like their other investigations. Despite the few "unexplained" occurrences such as the "Lucifer" recording, the group primarily spends its time finding weird stuff and then coming up with normal explanations for it.

Overall, their catalyzing agent is actually the same one that drives the original Scooby gang — getting to the truth. Demystifying the previously inexplicable.

Or, to use Judy's words, "To help people. So they're not afraid."

There's a lot of baggage that comes with getting older. When you're younger, you hear all about the changes your body's going to go through and how different everything will seem and how uncomfortable showers will be in middle school, but discussions of aging with children (understandably) tend to peter out around right around puberty.

Then you blow right through your teens only to discover (surprise!) that you continue aging even after that. You don't just hit adulthood, coast for 20 or 30 years until one night your hair turns gray and you are, in fact, old. There's a continuum, a process.

You figure that out, though. There's a certain point where it dawns on you that you will continue to get folds and wrinkles and skin spots. You'll find getting up in the morning takes a little bit more effort, getting into bed a night feels a little bit better, and some midnight you'll discover the pure agony of hitting the bar after work when all you really want to do is go home and sleep.

Theoretically. So I've heard. Hey, I'm not in college anymore.

The part no one prepares you for, the part that is so gobsmacking, is when your parents — who've been adults all their lives — photos of some nebulous "before you were born" period notwithstanding — start showing their age. Wait, you mean while I was busy getting older, they were getting older, too?

It's probably a little different for me. My parents were pretty old when they had me, as they've been retired since before I started college. They're the most active people in their retirement community — which isn't saying much — and are a "young 65."

They both exercise, go out and do things regularly, and my mom's even got an iPhone AND an iPad (which I get called upon to fix, over the phone, pretty much every other week). But I've noticed the last few times I've seen them that my dad has more trouble walking around than he used to. My mom has a little bit of trouble texting on her tiny phone, and squints a little so she can see it. Heck, next time I move I'm probably going to have to pay somebody to help me lug those 7-foot bookcases — and accompanying 14 boxes of books — up the stairs. No more free labor for me.
It gets at me because the thing my parents always stressed was adaptability. It's fine to know what you're doing, but it's even better to know how to handle yourself when the situation changes. They seem to have things under control even when stuff goes haywire. Frankly, they make it look easy.

Even so, it can be jarring when life catches up. The little things I noticed may help subconsciously prepare me, but it's still disorienting when the big stuff hits. When I got that phone call (nonchalantly, because my parents are weird): "Yeah, your dad got out of Christmas shopping when he passed out at the mall and they had to pick him up in an ambulance." When my mom sent that (poorly typed, let's be honest) text message that said, "I had to go the emergency room last night because I felt like I was having a heart attack. I wasn't, but it sure felt like it."

Now, I don't think my parents are in any immediate danger of dying, but I've a handful of aunts and uncles who have passed, all at younger ages than my parents are now. It's sobering every time you lose someone close to you, but none of those really hit home the way it did when my dad almost passed out a few weeks ago after he woke up (which I at least partially blame on the ridiculously hot and humid York weather).

It's an eerie parallel, because as I see them coping with the changes that come with aging, so too do I have to come to terms with the changes they're dealing with, on top of my own aforementioned "Hmph! I get tired earlier" nonsense.

Part of growing up chronologically means growing up mentally and emotionally, and learning to deal with these kinds of new — and sometimes scary — situations. All you can really do is hope that your parents (of all people) prepared you to be able to handle the unexpected when it crops up.

Unless, of course, it's Siri, which my mom still can't figure out.

INT. HOUSE

MARGE: Mail call! [The rest of the family comes down the stairs in the same manner and with the same sound effect as in "The Brady Bunch," before lining up according to height]

MARGE: Let's see here ... Here's Pacifier Monthly, for Maggie. [Maggie makes a sucking sound, takes out her pacifier and starts sucking on the magazine]. For Lisa, there's The Weekly Nerdlington.

LISA: Ooh, I hear this issue has Dennis Miller referring to Christopher Hitchens like he's Sarah Shelton circa 1773. [Cut to the family staring blankly at Lisa]

LISA: [joylessly] Yay, Justin Bieber, woo.

MARGE: Oooh look, Ricky Gervais' How to Win Friends and Influence People for me! [cover shows Ricky Gervais painted to look like an Oscar statue, but flashing both middle fingers at the camera.] Bart, you got another letter from that Dick Cheney person.

BART: All right! [opens letter] Aw, man. This says I'm still six years too young to join the Dastardly League of Evil.

MARGE: Well, at least he sent you a neat button! [Marge takes the envelope, shakes out a button into her hand and puts it on his shirt. The button's face has Mt. Rushmore, with Glenn Beck, Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly's visages on it. The flag serves as the sky, Glenn Beck is crying tiny dollar signs and the inscription at the bottom reads, "REMEMBER WHAT OUR COUNTRY STANDS FOR".]

MARGE: And for Homer ... Oh lord, it's another letter from ABSTNES.

HOMER: Abstinence? Marge, you said it's OK if I drink as long as other people are around.

MARGE: Not alcoholism, ABSTNES — the Association for Businesses of Springfield for Tourism and Negating the Effect of the Simpsons. Besides, drawing a face on your hand doesn't count as having other people around.

HOMER: Quiet, Marge! [in an undertone] He knows things. [talking with his right hand in a crude British accent] Yeee-es. You chaps won't be rid of me that easy.

LISA: What's it say, Mom?

MARGE: (reading the letter) Dear Simpson Family: Because of the many instances of indecent blah blah blah ... Given the prestigious nature of Founding Day and your husband's propensity for intoxication, we've decided it's in the town's best interests to send you ... [gasps] They're giving us a free trip to Albuquerque!

LISA: I want to visit a Pueblo settlement!

BART: I want to go to a cactus factory!

HOMER: Pssh, stupid kid. Cactuses aren't made in a factory, they grow on trees, like money. And candy. [Drools] Mmm, candy tree.

MARGE: Well, we'd better hurry up! The plane leaves in half an hour.

LISA: The Simpsons are going to New Mexico!

In the 20-odd years The Simpsons have been on the air, they've had some ... shall we say, flimsy premises for episodes that see them jetting off to exotic locales like Africa, Brazil or Japan. At one point, back when the writers still had a modicum of integrity, they made nods to the eccentricity of the plot setups somewhat akin to the parody above.

At this point, facing my third move (to a third state) in a year and a half, my life is starting to feel like a Simpsons episode.

Rest assured — or be disappointed, for that matter — my next stint does not involve starting my own snowplow company or buying an old ambulance and renting myself out as a medic for hire. I've managed to snag myself a gig as an online editor for the Farmington Daily Times, a small outfit in northwest New Mexico that produces some darn good journalism ... but could use some help on their interwebs (and, hopefully, I'll get to do a little copy editing and page design while I'm at it).

It's not the only option I had, but it was the best. I was recruited for a copy editing position in Chicago for Groupon, the online-local-coupon dealer. But I decided to stick with journalism, at least for one more go-round, for several reasons. One, I still have that hankering to have a new product to deliver constantly. Straight-up website copy editing, like the stuff at Groupon, is so intangible — even the deliverables are at best one page that looks pretty much the same as the rest. Two, the chance to get into the web stuff and mess around with it, figuring out how to better to tell a story or keep readers informed, is a much greater (and infinitely more interesting) challenge — interesting and challenge being my two favorite words when it comes to finding something to do.

Once again, I'm moving to a new place where I don't know anybody outside of work, essentially the same situation I was in when I moved to Coeur d'Alene. But I muddled through it once, I figure I can survive again. What disappoints me the most is reading this post, with lines like "The hope is to keep this apartment for quite some time, to break the moving cycle. At least long enough so that the next time I have to move, it actually means something again" ... only six months after I wrote it.

In the most technical of terms, I did accomplish what I set out in that post: Moving this time will mean something to me. It's perhaps not for the reasons I would like (having spent a number of years setting down roots in a place, both professionally and personally, meeting people and creating lasting relationships), but it's there. I also take more than a little solace in the idea behind the sentiment: To create enough of a home base that it feels like an upheaval when I moved. It happened a little this time, the roots tugging when I tried to pull them up, but there's every hope and opportunity that this next move might be the one that gets it right, for however brief or long I might be there.

Am I sad Spokane didn't work out? Of course I am. There are tons of people I'm going to miss; unique opportunities I missed that I'll regret, and ones I experienced I'll treasure. Does it mean I'll give up when I try the next place? Hardly. And though my moves are at this point reaching the level of fodder for a past-its-prime animated sitcom, it doesn't mean it won't wrap up with a nice, sentimental (sometimes bordering on the verge of sappy) wrap-up. Episodes from the early seasons of The Simpsons prove you can have fun, slapstick-y humor with an emotionally uplifting conclusion. The first, funny part is already on the books. All I have to do now is figure out how to write the ending.

"When I ask 'What's next?', it means I'm ready to move on to other things. So, what's next?" — Jed Bartlett, The West Wing

Six months ago, I quit my job as a "Web Publications Specialist." The hours were absurdly long (overtime was expected and uncompensated), and even herculean efforts — like the time I put in a 25-hour day in order to help finish a website for launch — went unnoticed, save to be exploited for publicity purposes later. I enjoyed my co-workers, but I didn't really enjoy the work, didn't really get anything out of selling overpriced things to people who really didn't need them in the first place.

So I started looking around. I regularly surfed journalismjobs.com, trying to find something that suited my skill set. I mostly applied for sports editing, copy editing and page design positions, though I would occasionally branch out if it was in Washington state somewhere. For the first few months it never really went anywhere, but around February/March I started to get responses.

Some were in-state, others were from elsewhere. I had set up a few phone interviews a couple weeks in advance when all of a sudden I got an email from The Inlander, which had the tripartite advantage of a) being close, b) being snarky and c) being a copy editing position, which is where I've often felt I can do some of my best work.

I was actually on vacation in British Columbia when I got an email asking me to come in for an interview later that week. I had no problem with this, as I really wanted the job, so I cut it a day short and drove back across the state on Friday morning in anticipation for an interview that afternoon. When I got the job, I just couldn't stop smiling. It felt like one of those perfect moments — I was just coming off vacation, I was happy, and to celebrate I went to a friend's barbecue and got completely black-out drunk and passed out around 10 pm.

When I woke up at 2 am, my mind was clear and I immediately started figuring out what I had to do: resign, find a place to live, figure out how I was going to move everything. I had one thought, derived from an episode of The West Wing I always enjoyed. It's partially encapsulated by the epigraph above, but it doesn't tell the whole story. The idea behind is that there are things you can change and there are things you cannot. Oftentimes, when circumstances come at you, the best thing to do is not to whinge about how bad everything else and how unfair life is treating you. When the variables change, all you can do is survey the situation and figure out: What's next?

Six months ago, I plunked down in a low-slung chair, facing a brilliantly sunlit window the Inlander's publisher sat in front of. After asking the traditional "Why do you want to do this?" and "What are you hoping to get out of this?" questions, he turned to a topic intimately dear to my heart: loyalty.

"How long are you planning on staying in Spokane?" he asked. "We're looking for somebody who's in this for the long haul, five or 10 years."

Loyalty describes almost everything I've ever done in a professional setting. It's why I always worked so hard, both at the Evergreen and later at my former job. At the Ev, the loyalty was to the paper, to the profession, to the ideal that the news was a vital cog in society's machinery, but mostly it was to my friends. My friends, who toiled tirelessly day in and day out, trying to put out the best newspaper they possibly could. It was why I didn't mind staying late or taking on extra tasks: Out of loyalty. Even later, at a job I didn't feel any particular respect for, I was more than happy to stay late or help other people out because I knew they'd do the same for me if asked.

One month ago, I was called into the publisher's office for a meeting with him and the managing editor. As I sat down, I was told we were there to "talk about my position" — more specifically, the lack thereof. Due to budgetary constraints for 2011, they said they couldn't afford to keep me on. I could either take my leave then, with one week's severance, or continue to work through the end of December. I chose the latter, figuring that a week's pay ("completely fucked") was inferior to a month's pay ("mostly fucked").

When I went home, I did as any self-respecting Coug would: I drank. Heavily. I started when I got home at 4:30 pm and finished around 11 (when I passed out), taking most of a bottle of Scotch and a goodly portion of a bottle of Everclear with me. (This was actually a few days before Apple Cup, which I originally intended to attend but decided that — given my financial and emotional state — was probably not in the best interests of either my liver or my wallet.)

When I awoke the next morning (a Friday, which meant work), I stumbled out of bed and into the shower. I fashioned myself into the closest approximation of a functioning human being I could muster, put on my coat and marched out the door to work.

What next?

I gave myself one night to bask in self-pity, and then I started to get to work. I updated my resume, started rooting through my computer to find my portfolio website, couldn't, got three-quarters of the way through making a new one before I found the old one, ditched the new one and updated the old one. I started crawling JJobs again, firing off resumes and cover letters.

It's incredibly easy to get caught up in blaming people. Lord knows there's enough to go around. I could angrily denounce the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers for fucking over our generation so royally, leaving us with an endless carousel of education, internships, jobs that we get thrown off of well before the ride ends. Or to start scrutinizing and finding those tiny little things that don't seem like much when everything's going along swimmingly, but blow up to gigantic proportions when everything's going to hell. Things simply are what they are.

But none of that does any good. I know that's a tough prescription to take (much akin to a "Tough shit" offered when an accusation of unfairness is raised), but it's true. I struggled with it myself in those first few minutes after I went back to my desk after the meeting. I kept flashing back to that first meeting with the publisher, with the thoughts of loyalty running through my head: "I moved to Spokane, I quit my job, I gave my word that I wouldn't jump at the next incrementally better job ... You, on the other hand, laid me off/let me go/fired me six months in."

(These phrases sound like they're different, but only if you're not on the receiving end.)

It would have been easy (believe me) to level an accusation of hypocrisy, but that would have been intellectually lazy of me — and not changed a damn thing, besides. They looked at the numbers and decided what was best for them moving forward, what was best for the company. Obviously it's not the outcome I would have preferred, but it does me no good to carry bitterness for their ensuring the paper's continued existence. And, again, such vituperation can't help me; they can only function as distractions.

I enjoyed my time at the Inlander. I'm immensely fond of all the writers, production people and even some of the advertising folks (no, really!), and take great pride in a few of the stories I wrote (and had a great time writing sarcastic, cynical comments on just about every cultural product imaginable).

Though nothing's certain yet, I'm fairly deep into the interview process for one job, and I'm sure the hiring machinery for others will kick into a higher gear once the holidays are over. I would have preferred to have a gig lined up by now (as I tend to get all twitchy and stabby when I have nothing to do), but there's nothing I can do about other peoples' decisions — I can only influence my own. And however this interview or the next turns out, it's not that big of a deal. I'll simply do what I can: Examine what I did, try to figure out what I can do better next time, and ask myself the only question that matters ... What's next?

Note: This story was originally published in the Pacific Northwest Inlander.

15:00, Q1 – 156 yards to go

It's an inauspicious setting to set a record. At opening kickoff at Joe Albi Stadium, the home team’s student section (Mead), celebrating Senior Night, looks anemic. The visiting team’s side is even worse.

Besides the actual game itself, the running subplot involves Gonzaga Prep’s standout running back Bishop Sankey, who entered the game with 3,782 career rushing yards, 155 behind the all-time Greater Spokane League record of 3,937. One could safely assume that Sankey, averaging 253 yards per game, would be able to surpass it.

Sankey runs it up the middle following a G-Prep interception on the first play of the game, spins to avoid a defender, keeps churning, breaks free and sprints down the field for a 56-yard touchdown.

14:32, Q1 • 100 yards to go

Sankey says he knew about the record before the game, but it wasn’t the most important thing on his mind.

“Each game, I just try to help my team as much as I can,” he says. “I’m just trying to get the longest runs I can, trying to score every time.”

It’s pretty clear to everyone — people in the stands, his coaches on the sidelines, the other team’s defense — that the best way for G-Prep to win is to put the ball in his hands. Even if you know what’s coming (and since Sankey had 41 carries en route to 359 yards, it wasn’t exactly a secret), it’s still really hard to bring him down.

Sankey’s picked up gains of four yards here, six yards there, in between giving the ball to other backs a few times and G-Prep airing it out. His second TD comes after he runs right, head-fakes and dips in and out of the defense before finding the goal line.

1:46, Q1 • 49 yards to go

It’s difficult to ascertain at first glance what exactly makes Sankey such a great runner. He’s fast, but not the fastest; he’s not particularly tall, at 5-foot-9, but he’s solidly built. Really, it’s a combination of things.

“His vision is great, his explosiveness, his power, is phenomenal. He’s got great balance,” says G-Prep’s head coach Dave McKenna. “I mean, everything’s pretty good.”

Sankey keeps whittling down the magic number: pounding it up the middle for 12 yards; dragging a player who’s caught his jersey for five yards before going down. Then, needing 7 yards to break the record, he sees a hole and dives through for an 8-yard gain.

5:21, Q2 • -1 yards to go

The record is announced over the PA system, and the fans give him a standing ovation. McKenna calls a timeout to talk things over.

“I just wanted to congratulate him and tell him it was a huge achievement, but it wasn’t about him — it was about his teammates as well. He understood that, and wanted to get the W,” McKenna says.

Sankey proves it by going out and scoring his third TD of the game on the next play. He got the next two yards, the score and another 201 yards, to boot. G-Prep won the game, and a spot in the playoffs, 35-21.

Even though Sankey’s on the verge of setting more marks, for most rushing yards in a single season at the GSL and state levels, he says he’s focused on something else: next week’s game against Ferris, ranked No. 4 in the state (G-Prep is No. 6). About setting records, he has one philosophy.

“I was just trying to take it each game, each carry at a time,” he says. “If it happens, it happens.”

Hoo boy! As a [technology writer/reporter without a story idea/old person], I've seen my share of changes in life. But [new product] is about to completely alter [area in which new technology will have extremely slight impact].

I was at [public place] the other day when I saw a young person extricate [latest technological obsession] from her purse. Now, I don't disparage [Generation X or newer] their technological revolutions, but it seems to me that [outdated technology people don't use as much but is still prevalent] works just fine, for my purposes.

See, my generation, the [****any generation older than X, whose name invariably invokes a more positive connotation than more recent ones], we didn't need your fancy new [latest technological obsession] for [arduous chore made easier by modern advancements, but still possible to perform "the hard way"]. We were happy as [animals commonly presumed to be in a constant state of rapture] with [old technology] — it may have taken longer, but that was the way we liked it.

You see, with the [fancy new technology], people aren't able to [incidental advantage of old technology no one noticed/cared about until new technology]. Why, when we wanted to talk to one another, we just [verb for specific type of communication]-ed on our [technology two generations removed; old enough to be nostalgic about, but young enough to masquerade at least a passing interest in technological advancements].

[Obligatory reference to that goddamn Nicholas Carr article/book about about how the Internet is imploding our brains].

I don't see why young people today feel the need to live their lives so quickly, or expensively. Sometimes, you just need to take the time to [verb indicating the activation of one of the senses] the [pages/roses/other noun that often evokes nostalgia or pleasure]. That's why I refuse to buy [advanced technology]. I'm perfectly happy with [older technology that's itself a vast improvement over how things "used to be done"] — the way things used to be [until a newer version of the advanced technology comes out and I can bitch about that while upgrading to the previous generation without seeming hypocritical].

One day, when [generation too young to have a name yet] grows up, they won't remember the feel of [physical object being replaced by technology], or the joy of browsing [physical store replaced by Amazon, et. al] to spontaneously find [physical object]. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think being [verbified formation of name of new technology] necessarily means [pun-ish play on verbified name of thing being replaced by new technology].

See the inspiration for this guide here.

Note: This story was originally published in the Pacific Northwest Inlander.

I’m not entirely sure what I expected when I ordered my tickets for ArenaBowl XXIII for “STANDING ROOM ONLY.” Perhaps a corral where we would be led and allowed to roam around, like free-range chickens.

“This is your pen, and this is where you must stay,” they’d say sternly, but we’d mill around and laugh and visit and generally enjoy ourselves.

I certainly didn’t expect to be renting my own little patch of airspace, all of 18 by 20 inches. The only indication of its existence was a one-row duct-taped grid, barely distinguishable from the concrete floor, with a little “1” scrawled in Sharpie.

But I was there to support the team, our Spokane Shock. My job, such as it was, revolved solely around screaming my lungs out while simultaneously sticking my fingers in my ears in an attempt to block out the steady low hum of the vuvuzelas so thoughtfully sold by the host team.

And so I stood in my box, eagerly.

The game got off to a bit of a slow start. I scanned the crowd, noticing some of the very same people who had stood out so conspicuously while waiting in line.

Most of the fans were properly outfitted in jerseys, official ArenaBowl shirts and other Shock-branded tees. Even among the less officially authorized clothing, some managed to nail the particular garish shade of Shock orange. They looked like human Cheetos, though decidedly of the “puffed” as opposed to “crunchy” variety.

Over there, a three-pack of neon redheads stood grinning in their sea-blue shirts like buzz-cut Troll dolls in policemen’s uniforms. And over there, next to the vuvuzela-clutching headache-in-waiting, a man who either tried to paint his face Avatar-blue and misplaced his hairline, or else applied his hair dye before going to sleep and passed the night in a frenzy of macking with his beloved pillow.

What I noticed about all of these fans was their location: in seats. Standing in front of their seats, to be more precise, as if taunting those of us who lacked accommodation for our posteriors.

I shifted uneasily, trying to fend off a nice-looking middle-aged couple who unilaterally commandeered three squares, forcing me into a no-man’s land ungoverned by the duct tape.

And so I stood outside my box, warily.

There was still a game going on, I think — the Napa Auto Parts ArenaBowl XXIII. A thrilling sequence, that started with a “Toyota game ball in the stands” and was followed by a pair of “Dishman Dodge first downs,” culminated in a rather pedestrian “touchdown.” Fortunately, after the YMCA Kickoff Kid grabbed the tee — and on the heels of another Toyota game ball — the Shock defense managed a Papa Murphy’s takeaway, setting up the offense for some more Dishman Dodges and ultimately another … touchdown.

It was all terribly exciting. But it was getting to be around halftime, and my legs were starting to ache.

I glanced around at my fellow standees, and most of them — though cheering — appeared to be preoccupied with alleviating pain: Doubled over to ease the strain, crouching, leaning against the wall … I glared at the Sitters, who were of course standing. How dare they take their seats for granted?

How we Standers longed for the gentle cupping of our buttocks by those plastic blue thrones, sinking in to those rigid, unforgiving slabs and literally taking the load off our backs. Where they could pile their hot dogs, their nachos and their taco salads on their knees, we set our popcorn on the floor and kicked over one another’s Bud Lights.

I fantasized a coup, a hostile takeover, in which we would remove from them their laps of luxury and line them up against the wall, just as they had done to us. But they were too numerous, and we too tired.

And so I stood in my box, uncomfortably.

The rest of the game passed in a blur. The paradox of the sports fan began to assert itself. Despite the outrageous lengths you may go to acquire a suit stitched from what can only be melted traffic cones and then wave around a bloated, grotesquely lifelike orange hand, you still must subordinate yourself to the team.

Though you wish to be recognized for your devotion, ultimately it’s not about you. And when your team is on the verge of winning it all, the arbitrary divisions between fans come down. Eight-year-olds and 80-year-olds beam alike, tripping in the heady haze provided by the proximity of champions. Standers and Sitters …

I have one small confession to make: I bailed at halftime. And though the fans at my next stop were more generous with their advice to the players (“Don’t talk to the press, get your head in the game!”) and loquacious in their constructive criticism of the referees (“I don’t even know what that call means, you encephalopathic zebra!”), they cheered all the same as we watched the clock tick down and the ArenaBowl trophy being trotted out.

Whether at the Arena or miles away, a “championship atmosphere” formed wherever the fans congregated.

And so I sat on my barstool, contentedly.

This piece was originally published in the Pacific Northwest Inlander.

Minor league baseball. Even the name sounds so ... inferior.“Minor league” has that connotation in today’s parlance: cut-rate. Second-fiddle.

Not good enough.

Most often, when people refer to something as “minor league,” it’s with the assumption that things aren’t ever going to get any better: a permanent state of mediocrity. When you’re actually referring to minor league baseball, though, there’s another word you should add to the end of the last definition: not good enough yet.

It’s an expression that certainly applies to this year’s Spokane Indians, both as individual players and the team as a whole. The Indians opened their season with a pair of four-game losing streaks split by an 8-1 win against the redundantly named Vancouver Canadians.

The reason for their struggles isn’t readily apparent, at least not after watching just one game. No one’s throwing the ball into the stands instead of hitting the cutoff man; the first baseman isn’t striding out to the batter’s box with his helmet on backwards. The troubles start and end with consistency.

“One night you’ll get pitching, but you don’t get hitting. The next night you’ll get defense, but we don’t get great pitching,” Manager Tim Hulett says. “You’ve got to put those things together.”

The Indians certainly have the roster to contend on any given night. Shortstop Jurickson Profar, a 17-year-old prospect out of Curacao, can hit, field and throw — but then, he wouldn’t be playing professional baseball if he couldn’t do that. Hulett says what sticks out are Profar’s game awareness and highly tuned instincts. Especially when you consider he’s only a teenager.

Big 6-foot-2 third baseman Mike Olt provides some power at the plate, says hitting coach Brian Dayette, and Olt backed that up by knocking in a double and a triple in his first three games. In addition to his offensive prowess, he’s also an asset in the field. “For a big guy, he’s got some great feet, some good hands, and he can make some really good plays,” Hulett says.

Pitching coach Justin Thompson mentions Chad Bell, Zack Osborne and Jimmy Reyes as promising arms to watch. Though the trio has combined for zero wins and two losses thus far, Thompson still sees their upside.

“Once we get those guys stretched out and get their pitch count up, I think we’re going to contend,” says Thompson.

Whether pitcher or position player, the most important thing a minor-league player (assuming there are no gaping flaws in their fundamentals) gets out of a season is experience. The more innings they play, the more chances they have to further their development. But when looking at the feeder-system nature of the minor leagues, there would seem to be two conflicting forces driving a given team: getting wins and developing players.

Hulett doesn’t see it that way. “Our focus is on developing winning players, because I think [winning and developing players] go hand-in-hand,” he says. “It’s hard to develop a player who goes through your whole system [and who] loses at every level and then say, ‘Go win at the big-league level.’”

To a certain extent, using the term “minor league” in a derogatory tone makes sense even in a baseball context: As a whole, the team’s never really going to get all that much better. But that’s only because when the end of the season rolls around, the best players will be moving another rung up the ladder. The worst will find a different career.

And those who need a little more time will be back next year, ready to mix with another crop of guys starting out from scratch. They probably won’t be that good. At least, not yet.