I’ve taken the Sentinel ever since I moved to Keene, NH – which is now pushing 18 years. Before that I took the local news where ever I was living – Sunnyvale and LA, California and before that Knoxville, TN. The Sentinel was a nice change from those larger metro papers. I could consume it in less than 30 minutes and it had a nice mix of local, national and regional as well as sports, comics, puzzles, classifieds, etc. When they started a Sunday edition, I took that too.

It’s not that the paper’s gone down hill, lost it’s important coverage or local importance. What’s happened is  my reading habits have changed – from primarily physical (I don’t really watch much TV news) to mostly digital and in particular web-based syndicated news feeds.

Several years ago I started using a service called Netvibes which allows each user to construct web based pages that display different types of information from various online data suppliers, e.g. gmail, Facebook, news feeds, blogs, and the like. Primarily I use their RSS/ATOM feed system to grab web-based syndicated news from national, regional and local sources as well as syndicated technical, lifestyle, book reviews/events, classified and yes, even comics and bring them all together in one spot. In some cases I’ve had to create RSS feeds from raw web pages using services such as Feed43 and Yahoo! Pipes.

At this point my news consumption is primarily on-line via my Netvibes based custom news portal. Yes, having the technical understand of how to leverage web based content and how to create news feeds has helped, but eventually my feeling is that everyone will be crafting their own “newspaper” using feed syndication – even if newspapers and other media outlets start erecting pay-walls for their content.

I’m perfectly happy to consume news and information from sites that offer it for free, including my local paper. But if I have to pay for it I will so long as it’s worth paying for. If news outlets are simply repackaging AP stories, that’s not worth paying for. Original content that’s meaningful and important to me I’ll gladly pay for. Until then I’ll soak up the free stuff as long as it persists.

For now, however, the only thing that I’ll miss about the printed edition of my local paper is the lack of wood stove starting material.

Update: Seems I’m not alone – I wrote this post before I read the article. Coincident?

To make a long story short, the original images were recorded on tapes but the machines to play them back were very hard to find and in most cases didn’t work. A few entrprising individuals decided those images needed to be saved and took great pains to make sure it happened.

The fruits of all that labor are some stunning images of the moon as it was in the 1960. It’s great to be able to record data, but it’s even more important to have the “player”.

The back yard, as you expect faces due south. Still, it’s shaded by the tree density, its natural downward slope, the rear fence and a garage on the side. It’s kind of like a small bowl. It too is one of the last back yards to break loose from winter’s grip.

Tonight, however, an early cool spring rain is making an impact. The steady fall of water from this early  spring rain storm is reducing the white stuff in the shady spots. While flowers and real greenery are still weeks away, there’s hope that maybe, just maybe, we won’t be the last ones on the block to have a color in the yard other than white.

The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

Next time “you’re with stupid”, feel right at home.

It turns out that when capable designers are given real constraints for real products they can end up creating great results.

While the post is about much more, I found that one line worth the read.

We live in a world that is constrained across numerous dimensions – time, space, physical laws, etc. that must be factored in when designing/developing products – be they physical or digital. The best designs/products push the constraint envelope in one or more areas while still living within them. They are the ones we stand up and take notice of – ones that create trends and open markets. But they happen only when constraints are realized, understood and pushed to their limits.