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Beckum likely won’t play today

Madison - Wisconsin senior tight end Travis Beckum, who has been hampered by a strained right hamstring, is in uniform but it doesn’t appear as if he will play today against Akron.

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Beckum loosened up during warm-ups but when the tight ends began running routes he stood to the side and watched his teammates.

Fullback Chris Pressley (broken thumb) and linebacker Jonathan Casillas are both in uniform but it appears neither will play.

Bill Rentmeester is working with the No. 1 offense in warm-ups in place of Pressley. Sophomore Blake Sorensen is working with the No. 1 defense in place of Casillas.

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Two Years of Reading Travelblogs. What Catches My Eye Now?

Shortly after the BlogHer 08 conference, I met fellow Seattelite Debbie from Delicious Baby. We talked about a bunch of stuff that’s relevant to travelbloggers including what makes me, in my role as the contributing editor for this site, pay attention. Debbie suggested that I post my guidelines. What makes me stop and take notice? What makes a travelblog leap off the travel list here on the BlogHer site and on to my own blogroll? (And did you know, I see every new blog that’s added? When you add your blog, I know, and I click. Secret powers.) Over two years ago (!!!!), I complied a list. It’s time to revisit it.

A disclaimer: It should go without saying, but this is personal opinion only. You go ahead and do what you want with your blog, it’s your playground, your self-expression. This list tells you what *I* look for, not some talent scout, not BlogHer as an organization diflucan online, not some blogstar maker, just me. Got it? Okay then.

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Here’s what I said in 2006 followed with some updated comments.

1. Make it physically readable, for starters. I can’t read pink text on a yellow background, for example. And sometimes, wow, there is so much going on that I can barely find the text.

Wow, does this matter more than ever! Just this week I had my specs updated, again. My 40 something eyes are doing what my doc tells me is perfectly normal but don’t think I’m not pissed as hell about it. That means no, I can not read your tiny white san serif text on the black background, no matter HOW much I zoom. Think of the reader. Won’t somebody please think of the reader!

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2. Minimize the design toys, please. Everyone wants a custom blog, but if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you just end up with noise. There are lots of perfectly acceptable templates to use, it’s not a crime to use them, especially if you’re a good writer. I want to read you, not hire you as a designer. This goes for all those widgets too. I’m a minimalist, still. I get that all the sidebar candy can help build community, I get that you want to share the love. I get why you lke those things. I totally do. But as a reader, that stuff hurts my eyes. Think long and hard before you put something on the page. What does it offer your reader? What does it offer you? Do you know? You should.

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3. Reading itineraries is really boring, unless they’re mine. I skip right over blogs that list where the writer went without telling me anything about happened there. These things get hidden in entries - first we went to the Museum, then the park, then we took the subway back to the old part of the city…. Meh. Doesn’t tell me anything. What did you do, see, eat there?

Updates: No changes here. This is still completely true.

4. Turns out I do want to see a picture of you, who knew? I love the surprise of seeing that some big dude in a Hawaiian shirt and a silly hat is writing culturally sensitive stories about visiting holy sites. Or some hard core outdoors climber is a woman of a “certain age.”

Updates: Same deal. Still totally true.

5. Speaking of pictures, bring ‘em. It’s nice when there are thumbnails in the posts, or a single photo up top, and then, after reading, I can go click through to an album. I don’t care for it when people use a linear blog format for photoblogs, however, there are better ways to present photos only. If you’re keeping a photoblog, use a tool that’s designed for it, not one that’s designed for text.

I’ve become a bit more forgiving on this because, I admit it, I love seeing your travel pictures. Love it. I’m the neighbor who will sit through the three hour slide show of your trip to the Mall of America. Crazy, but true. Do pay a little attention to what’s happening when you use text and photos together - sometimes if the photos are too big you’ll end up with a paragraph stacked along one skinny edge and that’s too hard to read. Rather than fuss about how you present your photos, now I’d just like you to make sure they don’t break your readability.

6. In general - though not always - I tend to breeze past Live Journal and My Space blogs. Sorry, but mostly, I’m not seeing compelling reading in those implementations, or they’re too noisy to read.

Yup, this is still true. I also tend to avoid the travelblog hosts - not because I don’t like them, but because something about the way that content is indexed means I rarely find it. This is a shame because there’s good stuff in there, I’m quite sure of it. So I guess I’d add that I pay attention buy cheap topamax mostly to self hosted stand alone blogs. Mostly. It’s not 100% true but if you’re at your own URL, you’re easier for me to find.

7. Negativity can be okay as long as it’s not cultural imperialism. “Oh my god, I ate the most disgusting thing ever!” is all right as long as it’s fol …

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Motorola Insider Blame Game: Engineers Shoved Designers Aside [Motorola]

These days, most in-the-know folks would sooner eat glass than carry a Motorola phone. The company has shredded its reputation by failing to address basic interface design issues: freeze-prone software, head-scratching menus, keys that demand Herculean strength. It’s baffling that such a venerable company could build such frustrating phones, considering the zillions presumably spent on development. How did Motorola make such a bollocks of its wireless division? Now that the company has annointed new wireless division chief Sanjay Jha, we surveyed former staffers for the inside scoop, as well as their advice on how to right the ship.

Insiders always start by attacking Motorola’s corporate culture, formed decades ago when radio was the company’s bread-and-butter. Motorola made its bones building end-to-end systemsnot just hardware, but the infrastructure that supports it. That, in turn, has led to a culture in which engineers reign supreme, and are allowed to sneer at their more right-brain-inclined colleagues. Marketers? Designers who focus on usability as opposed to circuitry? At Motorola, they’re peons.

“There’s this amazing wealth of engineering talent, but there’s no system for harnessing that talent for the good of the consumer,” says one former Motorola executive. The men in the R&D labs are permitted to indulge their flights of fancy, many of which center on fine-tuning antennas to optimize reception. Meanwhile, no one pays much attention to more prosaic fundamentals such as reliable software.

Another Motorola departee told Gizmodo that the company group charged with consumer research has been marginalized by the engineers, who dismiss its concernsand, to a large extent, its very existenceas inconsequential. “With the engineers,” he said, “there’s this attitude of, “I createwhat do you do? You pick out colors?’”

The engineers could theoretically be kept in check by corporate managers, but few suits are bold enough to act. A Motorola insider noted that long-serving managers have “deity status” at the companyno matter how many of their products flop, they never suffer repercussions.

The RAZR, a design victory as much as an engineering one, only came about due to the gumption of chief marketing office Geoffrey Frost. Following the RAZR’s overnight success, Moto commissioned an in-house team to research the company’s next step. Countless hours were spent pulling together focus-group studies and carrier feedback, but it was all for naughtthe research was simply ignored by Motorola’s top brass. “They have this attitude of, ‘Well, I’ve built phones for 20 years, I know what I’m doing,” says a frustrated member of that team, who noted that once Frost died in 2005, there was no one left with the chops and political capital to route around Moto’s stick-in-the-mud managers.

Motorola’s managerial bumbling has resulted in severe cultural malaisea condition made worse by the mobile unit’s location in the deep Chicago suburbs, hardly a place awash in creative energy. (Few 22-year-old design wunderkinds are willing to forego the Bay Area in favor of Libertyville.)

Keep in mind, too, that Motorola was the birthplace of Six Sigma, a methodology meant to eliminate product defects. But achat viagra Six Sigma was created in 1986, well before the era of ubiquitous cellphones; its focus is engineering, not end-user experience. The methodology is therefore unequipped to address many of the shortcomings that have irked so many customers.

Take, for example, the levitra navigation joystick on the ill-fated first-gen ROKR. It looked cool and worked as intended, but not without minor headaches: The joystick was a hair too sensitive, making it too easy to scroll past your music selection. Or take the Qrelatively powerful, but why in heaven’s name didn’t it auto-capitalize address book names, or allow for copy-and-paste? Sure these may strike you as minor details, but minor details make the difference in a competitive handset market. And Motorola’s aging quality-control program wasn’t designed to catch such annoying foibles.

Six Sigma and its companion product-development methodology, dubbed “M-Gates,” both stress caution in the name of quality. But when it comes to innovation, there’s certainly such a thing as too much wariness. In planning its software path after the RAZR’s smashing success, Motorola knew (to its credit) that its Synergy OS was antiquated. But instead of developing a worthy successor, the company decided to wait around for Windows Mobile, ostensibly because it was a sure thing. Big mistake, as we all now know. Motorola next turned to Linux, which has never lived up to expectations. That’s left the company scrambling for replacem …

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Russell Simmons: Taking Back Our Families

The other day my brother Reverend Run texted me with some exciting news: the parenting book he recently wrote with his wife Justine, Take Back Your Family: A Challenge To America’s Parents, had just made the New York Times bestseller list. While some might be surprised that a parenting book written by a rapper and his wife would hit the bestseller’s list, I wasn’t shocked that people of all backgrounds were interested in Run and Justine’s views on raising a successful family.

For five seasons, their hit reality show Run’s House has inspired families with its’ honest dialogue on how to enjoy the good times and survive the hard ones. Since Take Back Your Family shares their parenting philosophies in even greater detail, it was only natural that the book would reach so many people.

But the full impact of Take Back Your Family was really brought home to me when I got a call from a friend of mine who had just finished the book. “Please tell your cialis brother how inspired I was by his book. I loved how positive and uplifting his message was,” he told me, before adding. “Too bad Obama didn’t use the same tone when he talked about parenting. He might not have rubbed so many folks the wrong way.”

Obama biden

My friend was referring to Senator Obama’s now infamous Father’s Day speech, in which he suggested that too many African-Americans think that parenting “ends at conception” and that they need to show more “courage” in raising their children. Jesse Jackson’s response to that speech might have gotten all the headlines, but the truth is he was voicing frustrations felt by many in the African-American community. There was a perception that not only was Obama speaking down to people caught up in the struggle, but even worse, in doing so he was providing conservatives with another opportunity to point their fingers at Black men.

But while I respected my friends’ view, I had to tell him I thought his frustrations were misplaced. I encouraged him to see that while he felt inspired by Run and frustrated with Obama, in fact they were both promoting a very similar message. “It’s just that you’ve never felt any sort of judgment coming with Run,” I told him. “You’re so used to him promoting love and acceptance through Run’s House that you were open to everything you read in the book. Obama wasn’t really saying anything other than, “Take back your families.” It’s just that since he was delivering that achat cialis message from the political stump, you heard it as a judgment instead of as encouragement.”

What I wanted my friend to understand is that both Run and Obama are incredibly dedicated family men and are qualified, because of the commitments they’ve made in their own lives, to deliver a message of parental responsibility. And I really believe that when someone like Reverend Run or Barack Obama encourages you to make family your first priority, they’re not saying it out of judgment or a sense of arrogance. Instead, they’re just trying to help you tap into some of the joy, stability and tranquility that family has brought to their own lives.

But ultimately, I was just thrilled that family has become such a passionate issue, especially in the African-American community. When I hear a very healthy debate about the responsibilities of fathers, when I see Take Back Your Family on the bestseller list or pictures of Barack Obama playing with his daughters in every newspaper, it lets me know a very positive change is taking place in this country. You don’t have to dress a certain way, speak a certain way, hold a particular kind of job or even look a certain way to be considered a “family man” anymore. Your race, your religion, your background, the kind of music you listen to–thankfully all of that is becoming irrelevant. Instead, all that matters is that you make a commitment to putting your family first.

That’s why I’m so excited about a Barack Obama presidency. It’s going to be incredibly healthy for this country to address the issues surrounding families with a new voice and a new perspective. I’m also extremely proud of my brother— while he first became famous as a rapper helping introduce America to hip-hop, I believe he’s ultimately going to be remembered as the rapper who helped re-introduce this country to family.

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Fighting Memetic Emails: Truth Fights Back

some of you may remember that i raised some be pertinent over email fetter letters that flow circa the internet. particularly the ones about obama being a muslim which bring a popular difficulty into specific relief. i have borrowed the concept of “memes” invented by professor richard dawkins to refer to these as “memetic emails” - emails that flow and ebb according to how likely each recipient is to forward the message.

I’m happy to say that someone is now trying to do something about this, and I’m pleased to point you all to Truth Fights Back. TFB is a project run by John Kerry’s internet director, Brian Young and funded through Kerry’s PAC Campaign for our Country. It is an effort to build a piece of (hopefully permanent) infrastructure that will combat the memetic nonsense (which I believe is generally more harmful to Obama and liberal causes generally).

Obviously John Kerry has more reason than most to be concerned with the power of negative information to play on the irrational fears of voters and turn them away from candidates they might otherwise support. It is fitting that it comes from him. Inside some more commentary on the site, and the thinking behind it. Of course, the site will draw obvious comparisons to Obama’s Fight The Smears site, but I can attest that this idea predates that effort. Young contacted me after my earlier posts (linked above) on memetic emails looking for input in doing something about it.

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Now I have no illusion that this site will by itself solve the problem. We’re talking about millions of low-information voters making millions of disconnected decisions to forward these emails. That’s not a simple problem to solve, but it has to start somewhere.

What’s more, unlike Fight The Smears, Truth Fights Back is not specific to Obama and will address smears about any Democrat.

The other thing I have suggested to them, is the potential to make TFB into a true user driven initiative. It has the beginnings of that, in that it allows you to submit smear letters either to a form on the site, or through a submission email. Hopefully they enhance that aspect of the site, and add more user driven features so that it can be run by grass roots volunteers with little intervention by admins.

Mainly what I hope comes from efforts like this is an improved picture of how the memetic emails start, and which ones Stromectol Ivermectin Online spread best (and in what numbers). When researching the earlier pieces viagra kaufen, I realized almost no one is looking at this in any kind of systemic way. Short of having access to the NSA’s internet copying machines at AT&T and elsewhere, I can’t think of any organization that would have enough of a picture of internet traffic to produce accurate statistics on this. Instead, we have to look at indirect clues like Google Trends.

Even engaging the network of netroots activists to start forwarding anti-Democratic memetic emails to one central place will at least provide some metric on how prevalent each one is in comparison to others. Right now we’re mostly fighting this problem blind. There are a number of email debunking sites like MyRightWingDad and snopes.com, but no one is quantifying the problem.

So please Check it out. As you receive the emails from your crazy uncle, send them to smear@truthfightsback.com. Every data point matters, and being able to put numbers to these things means priorities can be set as to which ones might merit concerted push back through paid advertising.

See John Kerry’s announcement

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We Don’t Need Another Hero

I knew there was a reason I called this blog “The Quantum Pontiff.” Amazon-ing my name:

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