By Paula Ashley on August 30, 2010
Five years ago this week, I had just returned from a trip to New Orleans, where I had been visiting friends and doing a site visit of a client’s annual conference. My husband, Dwight, who had traveled there with me, had stayed an extra week to work on compositions for the album he was then recording (later released as Ataxia), and write music for a future project.
For nearly fifteen years, New Orleans had been our second city, the adopted home of our closest friends and a destination for us at least once every year. During his extended stay in the Big Easy, Dwight had decided it was finally time to make “Nola” our home.
But days before his departure, a storm was gathering in the gulf that would change everyone’s plans.
This past week, Nola began haunting me again. Like a proper ghost, she didn’t make herself obvious. It began with obsessively playing a Bix Beiderbecke album, Dixieland accompanying me to work, the grocery, the park… then street musicians echoed her voice at an art fair, and suddenly, I saw her around every corner.
Of course, it was a news story about the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that outed her. As soon as I heard it, I knew what had been following me. And, as every artist knows, the only way to deal with a ghost is to create something from it.
Five years after Katrina, one friend has died, the other has moved… and, just like the song, I miss New Orleans. But if I open my eyes, I see her spirit everywhere around me — even here in Toledo, Ohio.
Posted here today is a booklet that shares the spirit of Nola, captured five years after Katrina, a thousand miles away. I share it with the hope that it might open your eyes to her spirit where you are, too.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged creativity, Dixieland, Katrina, New Orleans, Nola, photography, spirit, writing
By Paula Ashley on June 30, 2010
E-mail allows us nearly instantaneous communication with people across the globe. In addition to the text messages we write in the body of our e-mails, we also can share data in the form of e-mail attachments. But while e-mailing attachments is a convenient method of data transfer, it has its limitations (about two megabytes, to be exact … but more on that in a moment).
E-mail attachments are files sent along with a text-based e-mail message. An attachment can be any kind of file at all, including formatted word-processed documents, spreadsheets, databases, graphics, and even software.
The incredibly rapid rate of data transfer we’ve come to expect from e-mail is achieved by breaking down the data in each message into smaller pieces of data called “packets.” These packets do not transmit together as a message. Each packet finds its way independently, by what is literally “the path of least resistance” through a worldwide network of routers, to arrive at their destination server address. The e-mail you send to colleagues in an adjoining office could travel halfway around the world before arriving at their desktops!
Attachments are transmitted by this same method. Every packet of data carries the address (or, IP number) of the sender and the recipient, allowing your e-mail software to reassemble the packets into the same form in which they were sent.
What this packet-based transfer method gains in speed, it sacrifices in capacity. This process of breaking down and reassembling packets of information is poorly suited to “push” large amounts of data, for two reasons:
Integrity
The more broken-down a file must be to transfer, the more likely it is to be corrupted when re-assembled.
Efficiency
The more packets an e-mail server has to process, the slower it performs. Efficiency can become a particular problem when several large data files hit a server simultaneously.
For these reasons, files larger than two megabytes should not be sent via e-mail. Fortunately, there is an alternative to e-mailing large data files: an FTP client, or File Transfer Protocol application. There are a number of ways of accommodating FTP transfer between two points; in the next update of The Scout, we’ll provide details on the methods most commonly used today.
Posted in Best Practices, Email, File Handling | Tagged attachments, Email, megabytes, packets
By Paula Ashley on November 25, 2009
Fifteen years ago, John Morton published an apologetic in the American Journalism Review entitled “Why Are Newspaper Profits So High?”
That headline now looks like a sardonic joke. But at the time, Morton’s question was posed in earnest. He noted that in 1994, the Buffalo News actually posted a profit margin of 34.6 percent — among the other publishers that Morton routinely tracked, the worst performance was a respectable 7+%. American newspapers posted their most profitable year ever in 2000. And as recently as 2005, Journalism.org reported in its annual report, The State of the News Media, “As businesses, newspapers are strong, highly profitable, and resilient.”
But by the beginning of 2008, the New York Times reported, “The talk of newspapers’ demise is older than some of the reporters who write about it, but what is happening now is something new, something more serious than anyone has experienced in generations.”
What is happening in the world of newspapers has spilled over to virtually all areas of communication that were once dependent on print. In 2007, Condé Nast Publications edged out Time Inc. in total revenues, accounting for almost half the total revenues of its holding company, Advance. But just a year later, Condé Nast began closing magazines and trimming the number of annual editions for other publications, while competitor Time Inc, still #1 in overall circulation, saw magazine revenues fall a shocking 75% in 2008.
Thanks to the “perfect storm” of the Internet explosion and economic contraction, 2009 is looking no better. Outdoor advertising revenues, also largely a print-based media until the recent introduction of digital billboards, took a huge dive in 2009, falling 75% at industry leader CBS Outdoor. Publishers Information Bureau numbers suggest that Condé Nast will post losses of $1 BILLION in 2009. And major newspapers across the nation are slashing staff and closing offices — including the venerable Washington Post, which announced Tuesday that its news bureaus will be closing in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
But does all this really mean that print is dead?
In coming posts, we’ll look at how traditional print media is adapting to changing circumstances, how print can be more effective than ever within a media mix that includes targeted online communications — and how Next Year’s News can help you create compelling messages across a mix of media platforms.
Posted in Printing | Tagged advertising, billboards, Internet, journalism, magazines, media, news, outdoor advertising, print, web
By Paula Ashley on September 21, 2009
In a previous entry of The Scout, we listed the extensions of file formats that we commonly send and receive at Next Year’s News, along with their meanings.
Here, we highlight common file formats that you would NEVER receive from Next Year’s News — and should probably regard as suspect when coming from us or anyone else. In this age of spam, bugs and viruses, it is a good practice to only open files that come from a trusted source — and if the message looks unusual, it’s always best to ask the sender about the message before you open the attachment!
Sometimes harmless, sometimes not:
.asf
Advanced Streaming Format, a file format used for streaming media online
.aiff
Audio Interchange File Format, an audio format commonly used in the Apple Macintosh operating system
.au
The audio file format most commonly associated with Java, a widely used Internet language
.bas Basic Source Code file.bmp >>Windows OS/2 Bitmap Graphics
.exe Windows Self-Extracting Archive, an extension commonly associated with viruses, and one that Next Year’s News is unable to open
.pcp
PC Paint (DOS) Bitmap Image
.ps Postscript file, a printer-language format not readable by humans
.rtf
Rich Text Format
.vcf
Vcard file
.wav
Windows Wave sound file
.abc = Always Be Careful …
with these:
The following are the most common file names associated with bugs and viruses. Before you open one, make sure you know who sent it to you — and why! Also beware of files with double extensions.
.bat
Batch file
.chm
Compiled HTML
.com
Command in DOS, not to be confused with the URL suffix
.dll
Dynamic Library Link
.hta
Hypertext Application
.pif
Program Information File
.scr
Windows Screen Saver file
.shs
Shell Scrap Object file
.vbs
Visual Basic Script file
Posted in Best Practices, Email, File Handling | Tagged Email, file extensions, file format
