editor

Midtown could use an office building about that size. It would help anchor some of the residents and bring in a touch more retail. It's nice that so many people who live in Midtown can commute to Downtown, but for some a moderately sized office building in Midtown would be the best of both worlds.

Mostly to encourage the members to write more. By giving them their own space to express themselves I hope they might feel more secure in sharing their thoughts. I think blogs give people the opportunity to write a little more long-form than in a regular forum post. And I think people might feel less likely to be persecuted by griefers if they have their own space that they're in charge of.

LA Times photo gallery: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fi...ter&index=4

Yeah, I had zero luck with my last project when I went to Guru. The quality just wasn't there, and I was offering double the rate most other people were.

In a one newspaper town, every side will attack you. The only way to know you're doing a good job is if both sides are angry.

But blue is the color of HAIF. What's better than that?

Great listing. Thanks.

I was doing some research today and came across this quote in a New York Times article from the 80's: I think a lot of people in Houston don't realize the significance of these buildings.

Too bad AT&T's web site is so stupid. In order to "Check Availability" you have to already have the service and an account to log in to the web site. Duh! And then you you click the links to E-mail support, all it does is show you a screen with a bunch of phone numbers. You can't e-mail support, even though AT&T states that's the best way to get help. Double duh. So if you wanted to order AT&T Uverse service -- you can't. Because you have to already have an account in order to open an account.

Hopefully not worse than Dish. I had that for a while. Compression levels were Suck (for movie channels), Suckier (for normal channels like HGTV and Discovery) and Suckiest (for local channels). I found a channel lineup on the AT&T web site. This is for the ultimate package: http://www.att.com/gen/sites/iptv?pid=8693 That includes about 320 TV channels plus high-speed internet for $114/month. Other packages go down to $59/month. Channels AT&T has that Comcast doesn't (in my market) that I care about: CNNi, ABC News Now, Fox Business, Sleuth, Biography, Military, Military History. I can't believe AT&T only has FOUR shopping channels! Looks like 37 HD channels for an additional $10/month. Better than the $14.95 I'm paying for 7. For another $10/month you can watch 37 channels on your laptop wherever you are.

More facts. Less hyperbole. Great link. And also very interesting that the residential gateways are those "2Wire" boxes. Every time I check my wifi connection no matter where I am I always see a brazillion 2Wire nodes. If these are all video-capable then Comcast has a lot to worry about since all those people will probably have to do is unplug the coax from their cable connection and plug it into the 2Wire box to make the switch.My apartment is wired with eight pairs of independent phone lines. It would be cool if I could somehow hook them all up. Now if only I had eight TVs.

A common notion, but also very wrong. Small market radio does this. Large market TV does not. For the most part the TV stations look at the wires just for planning purposes and to make sure they didn't miss anything. Radio and print lean on the wire, TV does not. New writers coming up from smaller markets get a serious tongue-thrashing if they do this. Experienced writers would be fired if they just clipped AP wire, and it would be painfully obvious because even the Broadcast Wire isn't written in broadcast style. The only common cut-and-paste you're likely to see is the early morning shows copying stories from the night before. But even if the stations ARE doing rip-and-read AP, who cares? That's what the AP is for. It's not like you've caught the newsrooms in some great big media secret -- that's what the AP was founded to do. Each station pays AP tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars a year for access to AP's original stories, audio, video, and the stories, audio, and video of the other AP stations. Why shouldn't the stations use stories that they've paid for? Do you consider it "regurgitating" when KPRC runs video of a jet crash from WNBC in New York? It's the same thing -- they're both on the same team (in this case, NBC). You don't expect KPRC to have its local reporters run up to New York to cover stories there, do you? The AP serves to fill in the gaps in coverage that the member stations can't. And I say "member stations" because the AP is a non-profit cooperative. So when you think you've caught some media outlet "regurgitating" AP news, very often it's the AP regurgitating the news from a member station or paper. One of the big problems with the internet is that it has made everyone believe they're an expert in things they know nothing about.

I don't live in Houston, so it probably wouldn't help you.

My first generation also still works. The battery doesn't last forever, but usually for at least a couple of hours. I have a little iTrip FM transmitter bunged into it and I put it next to my clock radio when I go to sleep at night. It has a special playlist called "Sleepytime Music."I should probably get one of those battery replacement kits before they stop selling them. If you order online you get free engraving. If you buy in the store you don't have an engraving option.That's because the engraving is actually done in the factory in China. I was very surprised that even with the engraving it made it here in just a couple of days. I used the free shipping option and it still came by FedEx.

Anyone with dead iPods, feel free to send them my way. I love taking things apart.

It's my understanding that Uverse doesn't necessarily have to be fiber. It can run on the old copper lines. The difference is that instead of having all of the channels beamed into your home at once all the time on different frequencies like cable, you get a sort of virtual cable box at AT&T's head end so technically when you're pushing buttons on the remote in your living room, the channels are changing at AT&T so they only have to send the one or two channels you're actually watching at the time, which is how they're able to squeeze them into copper. AT&T just won legislative approval to kick Comcast's butt provide Uverse service in Illinois, and I don't think they plan to run fiber to places where they already have copper. I could be all wrong about this, though. I haven't really looked into it because AT&T only just got the green light.

It's supposed to be coming here, too. Does anyone have a link to channel lineups?

Bingo. Of course, there are some influences because people are involved, but there subtle and almost always benign. I know one producer in Houston who always puts news from Hawaii in her newscast as often as possible. She loves it there and takes all of her vacations there and would live there if the cost of living wasn't so high and the pay for TV producers so low. But just about every month she manages to run a story from Hawaii. Maybe when she's depressed. I know another producer (in another market) who hunts high and low for pumpkin stories in October. Preferably giant pumpkins, if possible. Last I heard, he's managed to have a pumpkin story in every newscast he's produced this month. It's an annual thing for him. It's not the big brass you have to worry about skewing your news -- it's the producer -- the person who actually decides what goes on the air. The shirts (and more often than not these days, skirts) in the offices are too busy worrying about budgets and personnel issues to bother getting dirty with the day-to-day business of news. The talent, for the most part, are just along for the ride. They'll cut a dozen promos talking about how much they care about the news and are really plugged in to their community, but then they'll show up 15 minutes before the newscast reeking of booze and refuse to put on their pants until you convince them that yes, they are valuable, and the people do love them, and they can save the world by giving the camera just the right kind of Derek Zoolander glare and yes that transition you made from the dead baby story to the puppies in the sewer great last night, and no, no one faults you for running to Canada during the Vietnam War, and no, no one's going to tell the newspaper about it and ruin your career which has already gone from network to syndication to local affiliate to local independent and is on the fast track to local cable news if you don't shut up about the stone gnomes in your garden laughing at you because I know you don't have any gnomes in your garden because I was at your house for the Halloween party last year when you dressed up as Hugh Heffner and while the silk jammies may have been nice, they don't qualify as a costume if you wear them every day and I know you do because there was another pair out back by the pool near the garden where there are no gnomes, and who builds a pool right next to a bayou anyway how stupid is that what are you going to do when it floods but then I guess you don't worry about that you'll just buy another home since you're making nine figures and never leave the safety of your gated mansion or your BMW SUV or your private yacht which is the only thing you ever talk about other than how you're a man of the people and a Regular Joe even though you spend your weekends on your yacht which you never even bother to take out of the marina so what's the point of paying a third of a million dollars a year for a place to park a boat that never goes anywhere at least you could park it in your driveway so you wouldn't have to run between the marina and your Beemer with a hat pulled over your face so your imaginary fans don't swarm you. Yes, I said they're imaginary because they are. No one cares about you and your golden voice except for you and you only got that authoritative sounding rumble with the hint of a Southern twang from smoking too many cigarettes in the rain. Here's a clue: That isn't fan mail you throw out without reading, that's letters from shut-ins and psychos and stalkers and people in prison who think you're talking to them personally when in reality all you're doing is reading the words that someone else put on the prompter. Someone who does your writing for you. Someone who does your thinking for you. Someone who makes sure that you don't end up homeless and broke in an alley with one shoe talking to the walls because that's his job and he's damned good at it even if he makes four figures less than you and the company just cut the health benefits for people in his tier, but keep on smoking your cigarettes and talking about how you'll quit and then you just start up again next summer when you find some old Cubans on your yacht, and how did you get those anyway? Oh, right from all those "fact finding" missions to Havana where you spend two weeks getting in and getting out and only turn 60 seconds of tape because you're so devoted to your craft that you're a consummate professional, after all you must be because you remind the rest of us of it every day.. every hour, even, but somehow only barely manage to make it to work on time because you're always flying in from Atlanta or New York or Toronto or God-Knows-Where at the last minute and traffic is sooooo bad even though we're located next to the airport and some day you're going to miss the beginning of the show on a day when there's no co-anchor to cover for you and when the newspaper asks WTF happened I'll accidentally let it slip about how you changed your last name to something a little more "Hispanic" and spend two days a week in a tanning booth in order to keep up the illusion that you're one of the Fred Lunchbuckets out there just punching a clock and telling it like it is because you know how hard life is, after all you're only able to make it to Miami three or four times a year and never stay in the condo that you own out there because they know you so well at the Four Seasons back home since you never cook for yourself and when you're lonely you check into the hotel with your stupid smelly dogs who live better at the hotel than most of the Mike Six-Packs that you're broadcasting to do every day because they have to pack their own lunches because they don't have the luxury of calling up the hotel and having room service delivered TO YOUR HOME which is not what room service is for but you don't care because you live in a bubble and haven't given a crap about anyone else since market 179 when you were a good enough anchor to throw up in a garbage can on the set during a sound bite and keep on going for the rest of the newscast but now you can't even walk from your bedroom to the medicine cabinet without someone there to validate your existence and let me tell you that Julio or whatever his name is really isn't all that into you, because "personal trainer" isn't a profession, it's an excuse and if he was really some sort of physical fitness trainer wouldn't he work at a gym instead of in your house and have some kind of training that involves a degree or an education or reading something longer than the back of a bottle of coconut oil? But I digress.

It's here! The FedEx guy dropped it off at 7am. The engraving came out really nice. They've vastly improved the process since I got my last one engraved around 2002. It's much crisper now.

You're right -- the cable companies are under tremendous pressure from the cable stations and lots of deals have been made over the years that are not necessarily for the benefit of the customer. For example, if you hate paying for Disney children's channels that you don't watch, blame KTRK and Disney. I'm not really sure how all that will shake out if we get to choose our channels. For the cable companies you'd think it would be easier for them to decide which channels to keep -- just the ones people want to pay for. And I wonder if a la carte becomes mandated by law if that will free the cable systems from the bundling deals they've worked out (willingly or not) over the years. And then there's the problem of the cable companies also being content providers. Comcast is a perfect example of this. It owns a bunch of cable stations, including E!, AZN, Comcast SportsNet, Style, G4, the Golf Channel, and more. And it's in Comcast's interest for these channels to be in front of as many eyes as possible. So does Comcast offer them to customers for free? And if it does, will that violate some kind of policy since the other channels can't get on for free? Or maybe the cable companies will have to let everyone on who wants to be free. Then we're back to the home shopping mess we're in today.

Behold the power of HAIF! I love when people looking for something here find exactly the right person to answer their questions.

Sorry I don't have a direct answer to your question, but I do have a bit of advice: Go through an agency. Most of the women in my office have a nanny (one has two!) and every one who has tried to find a nanny on her own has met with disaster. The ones who go through an agency rarely have problems that they complain about, and when they do it's easier for them to get the nanny replaced. One of the reasons the women here get nannies is to expose their children to a foreign language that's in demand, and often the agencies can fill these special requests so your child ends up influenced with Chinese, Russian, Arabic, French or something else more lucrative than Spanish or Polish.

I remember last year someone got caught on surveilance video knifing an inflatable Frosty in some angry homeowner's yard. Who could hate Frosty?

The Chicago Tribune has ZERO editorial influence on channel 39. Most of the people at the paper don't even know that 39 exists. Heck, the Tribune doesn't even exert editorial influence on co-owned WGN-TV which is just 13 miles away from the paper. The two entities are in very different branches of the company (Tribune Publishing vs. Tribune Broadcasting). The paper doesn't even mess with CLTV (24-hour cable news channel), which it owns, and is part of the publishing division, and is even located in a Tribune Publishing office building. The same can be said for Belo. As much as I like to bash 11News, the Dallas Morning News has nothing to do whatsoever with its operation. As stated above, most local broadcasters don't have the time to think about stuff like that. They're just churning out the news so they can collect a paycheck and go home at the end of the day. TV news sounds glamorous, but it's really very much like working in a plastic fork factory.

It shows up in standard TV research. Yeah, it's a cesspool on the low channels here, too. Our HD stuff is in the 190's. But loading crap into the lower tier is a standard Comcast tactic whether you're on analog or digital (strictly speaking, we have no analog cable on Comcast here. Comcast pulled the plug and went all digital back in July). Federal regulations require cable companies to carry local TV channels on the same channel as their broadcast or as close as technically possible, if that's what the local channel wants. If it's not possible for technical reasons the local TV channel gets to choose where it wants to be. Usually it's within one or two channels of its broadcast location (11 might end up on 10), but sometimes the locals put in odd requests thinking they'll be more memorable for the viewers (I know a channel 2 that requested to be on 22). To make things even muddier, the regulations also give the local stations preferences of lower channel numbers on large cable systems, which is why you'll often see a gaggle of high number UHF Spanish-language and LPTV stations filling the gaps below 13. Now, here's where it gets even messier. Municipalities that have public access channels sometimes place regulations on the cable companies requiring them to carry the crappy public access channels on lower channel numbers so that people with old TVs and no cable box can see them (basic basic users). But Comcast doesn't have a financial interest in people having the most basic cable package. But all the lower channels are filled with the broadcast TV stations (which still beat the ratings of cable stations by an order of magnitude or more) which is enough for most people. So they're content to pay very little a month for just the very basics. So Comcast loads up the lower channels where it can with garbage that nobody wants to see in order to encourage them to upgrade to the next tier of channels, thus extracting more money from the customer who would have been otherwise happy with paying less for the basics. Essentially, Comcast fills the lower end with as many annoying channels as it can in order to make the customer think he can improve the quality of programming (by adding USA, TBS, etc..) for just a few dollars more. The cable company gets more money, the cable channel gets more viewers (and thus more money) and everyone gets more money except the viewer who now has pretty much what he should have had before, but now is paying more for it. That's one of the many reasons why cable companies are fighting a la carte cable selection laws. Oh, and then there's this little tidbit: The cable companies get a kickback (5-10%) from every purchase made on a home shopping channel. Now you know why they get cherry placement and a crapload of ads and coupons in your cable bill. Does it have to be this way? No. I've lived in a few places where the cable companies were smaller or independent and offered excellent channel lineups for great value. Typically these had the regular English broadcast networks, plus TBS, WGN, Weather Channel, E!, and a few others in channels 2-13 for about 20 bucks a month, including taxes. They then offered all the other stuff for people who felt like paying more, rather than annoying their customers into wanting more channels in order to drown out the drek. Interestingly, these cable systems typically had HBO on channel 3. In fact, most cable companies did that in the early days because lower channel numbers on analog cable mean a better quality picture. The best thing that ever happened to cable companies was the switch to digital so they could put HBO and the other channels that customers will complain about if they're not perfect on whatever channel the cable company wants because the cable company knows that the people who are interested in these channels are not casual viewers and will hunt for them. That's good for you. You're what the industry calls a "leader." You're moving away from the channel number paradigm that the cable companies have hated for so long. They'd rather you flip and flip and flip because it builds the perception that the cable company is giving you more than you're actually getting. What works against the cable companies are "trailers" who still associate NBC=2, ABC=13, etc... But the TV companies have the research and they know that psychologically it's easier to reach their audiences with a channel number than a name. That's why most TV stations have dropped their old branding for channel number-based branding (Local2, 11News, ABC13). To be fair, it was actually the radio stations that did the preliminary research on this and why the radio stations became Rock101, 700WLW, 92Q, Z100, etc... back in the 80's. That association between channel number and brand is so strong in the viewers that the broadcasters made sure that HDTVs understand "virtual channel numbers" over the air. When you watch KHOU-DT your HDTV tells you you're watching channel 11-1. But you're not. You're actually watching 31-1. When your TV tells you you're watching 13-1, you're actually watching 32-1. KPRC-DT isn't channel 2, it's 35. KUHT-DT is 9, not 8. The TV companies have spent billions over the years getting you to associate "ABC shows"=13, or even better (in their eyes) "news"=13, "Matlock"=39, etc... They don't want to waste all that time, money, and effort and start over. Sure, the minds of the next generation are going to see less difference between KTRK and HGTV, and your viewing patterns are evidence of that. But channel numbers are still very powerful. If not, then Time Warner wouldn't have put its 24-hour local news program in it flagship market on channel 1. Comcast wouldn't have put its massive revenue-making On Demand machine on channel 1. And I don't know if you have it down there, but Comcast up here reserves Channel 100 for its own purposes (the so-called CN100 channel). I'm kind of inbetween. I know where my habitual channels are. For instance, when I wake up each day I like to turn on the Noon news, which I know is on channel 192. But if I want to see what's on Food Channel I have to scroll through the on-screen guide. I think we'll all be long dead before channel numbers are.