My first real professional successes came while I worked at Guy Gannett Communications back in the mid 90’s. It was the dawn of the internet and I spent 5-6 years trying to convince an old dinosaur media company to start pushing its content out onto the web. Ultimately I left that job in a bit of a huff, frustrated at how slowly they moved and how dumb the decisions they were making were. A fine example from that period would be them recognizing the threat ebay posed to their person to person classified ads and deciding to drop 10’s of thousands a year on a halfassed ebay clone one of the big national syndication companies was pitching as the solution.

Shortly before I left the family that owned the company decided to sell it. The crown jewel of Guy Gannett was The Portland Press Herald, and the Seattle Times Company ended up owning it, along with me. I got a nice cash bonus from this sale and an incentive to stay with the company for a year, but their decision to put the Press Herald editorial staff in charge of the online stuff was the proverbial straw on the camel’s back and almost as soon as my contractually obligated year was up, I quit.

I guess the point I’m getting to is that this has stuck in my craw ever since. There’s no real point in rehashing it all, and the truth is it all happened long enough ago that I’ve forgotten much of the detail, but I will confess that the announcement that the Seattle Times company is selling the Press Herald for what amounts to a fire sale price gives me a certain satisfaction of the ‘I could have told you so, fools,’ school. That’s tempered by the the knowledge that friends and acquaintances of mine are going to lose their jobs over this and leaves me a bit conflicted, but man, there sure is some poetic justice in all this from where I’m sitting.

Anyway, I hope for the best for my friends who are still there. It’s been years since I’ve been in close touch with most of them, but I sat through an earlier round of layoffs and uncertainty there and I know how badly that sucks. Here’s hoping a Maine-based white knight shows up to save them from being gobbled up by one of the national syndicates. Meanwhile, I’ll indulge myself in just a little bit of smarmy ‘told ya so’ satisfaction that the karmic balance has been restored when it comes to how that place conducted itself and treated me.

One great way is to snowshoe up to the top of black mountain near Jackson, NH and spend a couple of days and nights hanging in and around a cabin:

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More pictures of the trip can be found here. We had a great time. The hike was a bit on the short side at around 1.3 miles, but given that we had way too much weight in our packs this was a good thing. The weather was perfect, getting into the high teens at night and hovering in the 30s during the day. Each night it snowed, giving us a beautiful new winter wonderland each morning when we woke up. I got to meet a bunch of Susan’s friends along with her sister, drank too much wine, and had a ball with the dogs frolicking in the snow. It’s a tradition with Susan’s family so chances are I’ll be back again next year, this time equipped with a sled to haul the 22 pounds of wine up the mountain.

So I spent last week in Boston. I was at a conference for most of it, covering a content management system (drupal) we use at work. I had a great deja vu moment when I first checked into my hotel – turns out it was a place I stayed with my family ~25 years ago. Susan came Thursday night, and Friday we did a walking tour of the city, making our way from the hotel to the Museum of Science, where we spent a good part of the day checking out the exhibits and taking in a planetarium and Imax theater show. The Imax show was especially cool. I’d never been in an Imax theater before and I loved it, I want to see more of them. After the museum we wandered down to Quincy Market, desperately searching for local coffee houses and getting lost along the way. Sadly Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks seem to have driven all the local coffee houses out of business, and we never did find anything, settling finally for Starbucks in Fanueil Hall. I hadn’t been to Fanueil Hall in over a decade, and perhaps I’m looking through rose colored glasses, but the Fanueil Hall of my youth was full of local companies and fresh food. Today it’s literally just like an upscale mall’s food court. We decided to bail on dining in Quincy, took the T back to our hotel, and cabbed it to a local Tapas joint in Boston’s back bay area.

Anyway, all in all I had a pretty good time. It was tough being away from home for a week, and I missed Susan and Soolin, but I had a great time on my birthday exploring Boston on foot, the tapas was excellent (squid stuffed with tuna and stewed in squid ink? Tastier than it sounds!), the Sangria flowed like water, and the hangover was almost unnoticeable. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

I spent last week in Boston at a conference. I was in a hotel with slow, crappy, unsecured wireless internet which I didn’t trust logging in over, hence the lack of posts from me last week. I’ll get back to my occasional postings this week.

I’ve been posting pictures of my adorable little niece from time to time. Turns out the perverts have been watching some of the pics my sister has been posting on flickr, based on the way she’s been tagging things. To which I have to say:

My poor niece is going to be permanently traumatized when she finds these in the wayback machine when she’s in her teens.