The Intersection of the Misleading
Our ex-namesake and good friend, Bernie Kosar, is managing to stay in the newspapers as reports about divorce action filed by his wife, Babette, gradually shows up in newspapers here in Northeast Ohio.
The ironic thing about the story is that it manages to find an unlikely intersection between two professions which are not exactly at the top of the public admiration scale: divorce lawyers and sports journalists.
Only one of those professions pays well, but both have tendency to warp reality for public consumption, either intentionally or unintentionally.
That we’ve linked the stories about Bernie’s marital challenges on our newswire doesn’t mean that I like them or approve of them. Relaying, reporting and analyzing the news of interest to Browns fans (whether good news or bad) is our gig here, and we don’t censor or selectively filter the news we link for our personal or business ends. If you’re looking for a Browns site that does that, I can point you to several.
I met and talked with Bernie probably a couple of times a year over the past few years, and have met Babette as well. As for the speculation which has taken place on our forums and others about either, all I can say is that none of it ties to what I’ve seen, and I saw Bernie several times a year while he was involved with the site.
Being in the newspapers sucks. There have been a couple of times that I’ve seen the site or magazine written about as an entity (not as the source for a Browns story), and it’s never positive.
For example, one news story about this situation said that Bernie “withdrew his support for Bernie’s Insiders” last year. This makes it sound like we did something offensive or were somehow hurting him, which is misleading and false. We changed names because Bernie sold his piece of Scout and had no reason to be involved with the business, especially as he was being welcomed in Berea, and secondly because we wanted to step of his shadow. If we did something to piss Bernie off so that he “withdrew his support”, it’s news to me.
The journalist (who I hold in high regard) who wrote that story probably never thought of that interpretation, and likely didn’t mean anything negative by it. It’s just another reason why it’s rarely fun to be in the papers.
Unfortunately, if you find information about the OBR from anyone other than the few people who actually are involved in it, you’ll find that it’s generally wrong or, at best, uninformed.
This is why the internet and blogging can be so valuable, or so dangerous. It’s not that blogs are always right, and journalists always wrong, or vice-versa, but hopefully having more sources of information available, with more perspectives, will help readers of the news get more “data points” from which to draw conclusions. At the same time, anybody with access to a web browser can seek to damage or hurt others.
I actually had to threaten to sue someone last year because of falsehoods spread about myself and the site, and I despise the lawsuit-happy nature of our society. I decided not to go through with it, not because it wasn’t justified, but because the guy, who was trying to compete with us, agreed to take down the things he had written.
The days of anyone being able to control the news are ending, and not soon enough, but the replacement is a chaotic, uncontrolled mess of information and disinformation. As always, we have to trust in people (Browns fans, voters, consumers) to sort through it all and see the truth behind the words, because no one can control it.
Death to Papyrus
Oddly enough, this bit of today’s blog is actually tied to the one above.
If Bernie Kosar is guilty of lavish spending and giving away too much money, it is again news to me. What I saw with both Scout and “Bernie’s Insiders” was smart, careful spending and investing.
For not very much money and the temporary use of his name, Bernie established a strong NFL outlet on the Scout network, which has helped to draw tens of thousands of people to the network and helped bring other NFL sites into Scout. The Kosars sold their investment in Scout to Fox and did very well with it.
Truth be told, and that’s what blogs are for, I spent a lot more developing Bernie’s Insiders, in both cash and lost income potential, than the Kosars did. Part of this was because I felt it could be a nice business, but mostly it was simply because running this site and magazine is really what I wanted to do with the vocational part of my life. I was willing to do whatever I had to do in order to make it happen.
Like a lot of small-scale entrepeneurs, this meant scrambling for money whereever I could get it. The Kosars helped a bit, and family members loaned me a little money as well. I also maxed out home equity loans, took business loans, reduced household expenses to the bone, maxed out credit cards, took a second job, took on for-pay web design projects, and was fortunate enough to be married to a woman who was willing to go back to work to help support the family.
All of this has kept me scrambling over the last five years, but has a less-considered side effect as well: lots and lots of paper. Overwhelming amounts of paper, email, and other information coming from creditors, partners, customers, employees, friends, neighbors, countrymen, Romans, and spammers. And that’s only on the business side of things… the OBR acts as news outlet and a portal for Browns news, so that adds an even more massive amount of paper, email, RSS, etc on top of that.
I don’t have a love-hate relationship with paper. I just hate it. I don’t like seeing it, and I don’t like it piling up in my office. I despise not knowing where things are and go into sort of an endless spiral of non-productivity when I can’t locate something. It’s hurt a lot during the last five years.
While I still struggle with the large amounts of electronic information that pours in, I think I’m winning the war against paper.
What I’ve done is put together three tools – Excel, Scansoft’s Paperport, and a relatively unknown application called Omea Pro and developed a system to get rid of paper as it comes in.
At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Between July and April, paper simply piles up because I don’t have the time to deal with it, even if my system for eradicating it has been refined over and over. The last couple of months has been especially bad because I’ve been working on simplifying and paying off the loans and other items I mentioned above, and have increased my workload at Fox. This allowed more and more paper to pile up until there were stacks and stacks of the stuff around, hiding things I needed and generally slowing me down.
As soon as my schedule cleared up this year, I decided I had to go through a mass purge and recording of paper. That’s what I’ve been doing the last two days, which is why you haven’t seen me on my blog or in the forum as much.
Here’s how it works:
All paper that comes in to the office is scanned (using Paperport) and then fixed up, if needed. All scans are just numbered sequentially with a code like 06–05–019, where 06 is the year, 05 is the month, and 019 is just a number which goes from 1 to 999. The scan (a PDF file) gets this number, and I also write the number on the piece of paper.
Then, I enter the number and info about the document in Excel. Who it came from, what it is, when it was sent, etc. This is my database, for now. The paper is then simply filed in big folders for the year and month, so I have a big 06/05 folder in my file cabinet, on my disk drive, and so forth.
The nice thing about this system is that it avoids hierarchical foldering of paper and computer files. So I don’t have to ask “did I put that in the loans folder, or the insurance folder, or the State Farm folder, or the overdue folder?”, etc. So, if I need a document, I can look it up on the Excel spreadsheet and that tells me where it is on my file system and where the paper is in my files.
It’s pretty damn anal, but it’s borrowed from the much larger systems I used to design as an IT consultant back in the day.
The coolest thing about it, really, is the way that Omea Pro sits on top of all this. What Omea does is provide a desktop where you can see email, files, RSS feeds, web pages, notes and so forth. Combined with this is the ability to categorize each of these types of objects… it’s sort of like applying tags to a blog. So, a file of paper may be tagged both “insurance” and “loan” and might also have a “priority” flag. Same with an email.
At the end of the day, what we have is an ability to, for example, review everything that comes from,say, National City Bank about my business loan. I can click to a single category and have everything there… paper in scanned form, emails, web pages, notes, to-dos, contacts, etc. Omea pulls it all together.
It really is amazing. I haven’t seen anything like it.
The scene snap below shows, as an example, all the different types of information I had on hand inside Omea when doing some research for DE Victor Adeyanju before the draft this year. This doesn’t even include any RSS feed items on Victor, which I didn’t classify for him. You can do similar things for any kind of tag or topic.
The downside about Omea is that it’s a side-project of developers at a company called “JetBrains” which focuses on development tools. It is an amazing app and would be very popular if marketed correctly, I think. I believe inside of a decade that this sort of technology (tagging, smart searches, mixing of email, RSS, files, web) will be built into the operating system and office apps. For now, though Omea is the only product I’ve found that can pull off an information desktop where you can track in a single location all the different types of information you can receive. It’s amazing, and I hope that development continues.
Webdorkian Desperation Metrics
Because of my focus on eliminating paper and dealing with the financial side of my business, as well as my work for Fox, my OBR-related email and news items have fallen behind in the last two days. The war against information and task overload continues.
Queue of Emails Needing Attention: 304
Unread RSS Feeds: 7,509
Overdue To-Do Items in Outlook: 11
Caffeine Saturation: Absurdly Inadequate
Windowblinds shell: Muku 1.0
Mood: “Wha happen?”
Listening to: New Order, Waiting for the Siren’s Call