Beware the Ides of March!

This is one of my favorite days of the year because I get to walk around with a look of consternation, a foreboding furrowing of my brow and warn in my best soothsayer's voice, "Bewaaaaaare the Ides of March!" What can I say, I'm a Shakespeare nut.

Unfortunately, just like Julius Caesar, I was unable to remain ensconced in my bedroom chamber today and had to make my bi-weekly commute down to work in San Mateo to complete the prototype and functional specification document for a publishing automation solution I'm.... zzzzzzzzz. Whoa, sorry, almost fell asleep on my keyboard there.

Here's some happy news. Thanks to the encouragement of some good friends, a few weeks ago I checked out photo contests online and entered one for an online travel magazine called InsideOut. A week or so after entering, I checked the site and discovered they are based right here in San Francisco and were hosting a travelers' happy hour at a local art gallery. As I stood there nursing a Cosmopolitan and watching the slideshow of all the entrants, one of the magazine staff introduced himself and informed me my photo had won Photo Editor's Pick. (I'd only entered the one shot of the goat herder, but they asked me for a few more to complete their page layout since everyone else had entered 4-5 shots.)

Evening addendum to today's previously published happy news: in addition to my photos, I just got some writing published online. I'm on a one-month trial writing for Nitevibe and had my first 'weekly pick' chosen as a Featured Event (see Get YER Freak On!). OK, so my editor made a little tweak here and there, but most of it's actually mine. Please note the (AF) at the end and the credit under 'Field Correspondents" at the bottom. Wahoo!

Last night I went to a Q&A/book signing at Cody's Books in Berkeley to hear Robert S. Boynton, author of a new book entitled The New New Journalism, and Eric Schlosser, author of the best-selling and deeply disturbing Fast Food Nation delve into topics such as questioning the increasing preference among readers and editors of non-fiction over fiction, and the emergence of blogging as a new brand of journalism. This topic is quite popular on NPR these days as the controvertial question, Are Bloggers Journalists? rages on. To what standards of ethical and factual reporting could and should bloggers be held? Must they reveal their sources in cases of distributing certain types of sensitive information? My friend danah is a subject-matter expert on this stuff so I'll leave it to her to go there, but all I can say is this all reminds me of the days when the record industry was freaking out about Napster. Hello! Welcome to the 21st century! Opponents of technological evolution who have nothing better to do but try to quash freedom of information/data exchange make my head spin.