Clearing the mental attic of some odds and ends…
A little bird told me that Fisher Communications is up for sale. I have no idea if this is true. But interestingly, Fisher filed an 8-K on August 24, notifying the SEC of changes in its top executives’ Change of Control agreements. From its preamble:
The Board believes it is imperative to diminish the inevitable distraction of the Executive arising from the personal uncertainties and risks created by a pending or threatened Change of Control, to encourage the Executive’s full attention and dedication to the Company currently and in the event of any threatened or pending Change of Control, and to provide the Executive with reasonable compensation and benefit arrangements upon a Change of Control.
IANAL, but the document indicates that in the event of a change in control, Colleen Brown will receive 2x her annual salary plus any optional bonuses then in effect, and other execs will get 1x their annual salaries plus their optional bonuses. These terms are generous, in my experience.
If you know anything about this, drop me a line at john at seeknuance dot com. Or if you prefer, tack on a comment to this post.
TechFlash just migrated to a new CMS. They chose Krang, which is open-source and based on Perl. I hadn’t heard of Krang before. But that’s unsurprising, since there are a million CMSs extant, and I’m not plugged into the Perl community at present…
A quick search found positive comments about it, including that it’s a good high-powered choice for the publishing world. (E.g., online magazines.) In a comment to their migration post, I asked them to consider writing an article about their CMS selection. I hope they do. Hearing the details about a CMS switch from technology-savvy authors would be nifty!
It’s good to see a Seattle online presence choosing to remain in control of its own destiny. Unlike, for example, Fisher Communications, which axed their Internet division in lieu of continued outsourcing of their sites to a 3rd-party proprietary CMS. In three years, someone at Fisher will ask why their sites look just like any other TV or radio site, and why it’s so hard to adapt to emergent technologies or make timely changes to the site.
At the same time, TechFlash switched to Disqus for their user comments. Disqus wouldn’t have been my choice, but it’ll be better than their previous comment subsystem. (For pan-site UGC technology, IntenseDebate is superior to Disqus. I find Disqus to be clunky.)
I upgraded our household’s Macs to Snow Leopard. My early casualties: Saft for Safari, CoverSutra, World Population Counter dashboard widget, BOINC screensaver, and PGP Desktop.
It’s instructive to contrast the Mac and Windows worlds’ reaction to the prospect of application breakage. The Windows universe is more sensitive to, and impatient about, it; the Mac world takes it more in stride. At least that’s how it seems to me. In my case, I sent a friendly e-mail to the developers of a couple of the broken apps, and I’ll wait for new versions to be released.
For Twitter, I’m now using Tweetie. It’s OK. I wish it had multi-column and grouping capabilities.
It’s been a month since I switched from NetNewsWire to Vienna, after the NetNewsWire Beta update disaster. I’ve been very happy with it. Vienna is missing some smarts in its pane updates, and it doesn’t yet support syncing. But since I don’t need syncing right now, it’s a very good RSS reader for me. Joe Bob says check it out.
Seek Nuance 