by Diane | Jul 30, 2014 | Canadian TV
I’ve had a couple of conversations lately about the value of blogging, which is kind of hilarious given how little of it I’ve done lately. I just told a recent graduate in an information interview that blogging was a great way to hone her writing, explore what she’s interested in, and enter into a community around the topic.
I’ve written about that before. I’ve written (sincerely yet tongue in cheek) about how blogging has changed my life. And now I’m realizing that even so, I’ve undervalued the connections I’ve made online. Literally.
I retired TV, eh? at the end of last year because after 7+ years I was tired. It was a hobby, I had other interests and opportunities, and it was starting to feel like a burden. Then TV Guide Canada went dark. The Canadian TV world lost two voices within half a year, and I acquired a partner who could not just help relieve much of the burden but help take the site up another level in terms of original, professional content as well as monetization — a word and work I hate.
While Greg looked into advertising, grants and sponsorship, I thought a crowdfunding campaign might be an easy way to help show potential funders that there was a supportive audience for the site, and a way to test the notion that people would pay for professional TV writing, even if not via a traditional model.
I had always felt appreciated in my time running the site (well, not always by everyone). I knew it was valued. I just didn’t know that value would have significant dollar figures attached.
I originally put $1,000 as our goal – enough to get us up and running, pay for expenses and our time, tide us over until we got some steady income. Then I thought I should dream big and put $2,500, allowing us a real head start with the ability to pay some professional contributors. Then I got spooked at the humiliation of failure — and the increased Indiegogo fees if you don’t hit your goal — so I compromised at the posted goal of $1,500.
After 5 days and 3 stretch goals later we have over $14,000 in contributions, with 25 days left to go. We’re stretching to $20,000 now.
I posted to my social networks, Greg posted to his, and from there our stalwart supporters took over, drumming up donations from writers, producers, agents, directors, actors, guilds … anyone who makes a living in Canadian TV was encouraged (sometimes heckled) to donate. Dedicated Canadian TV fans have donated. This isn’t from our friends and family (though a few of them have donated too). This is from people who read the site, who miss the site, who want the site back.
I’m sincerely grateful and sincerely overwhelmed. Our little test balloon has turned into a rocketship, and I’m scrambling to keep up with it emotionally and logistically.
I don’t know how to begin to thank people. I mean, most of the donors get a perk but how do I convey what their support means, whether it’s financial or spreading the word or just cheering us on? It’s validation of my work for the last 8 years — we really raised $14,000 in 5 days and 8 years — plus Greg’s work over the last 15 years, plus the promise of what we can do together.
Which is a whole lot more, now. Our dreams are expanding with our Indiegogo totals, always with an eye to how to sustain what we start, how to keep the momentum without exhausting the crowdfunding model, how to seize the opportunities coming at us, how to make this business model work to support professional-quality Canadian TV coverage and have people paid fairly for their work.
All while stunned at the generous support from this community of people I’ve been lucky to be a part of for the last 8 years. All while working on it during gorgeous summer weekends and evenings, via cross-country email and Skype conversations.
We have a plan. We have the passion. And we have a plethora of people whose support means more than a blog post could say. Thanks everyone.
by Diane | Jul 14, 2014 | Uncategorised
T-46 seconds.
We could hear the anticipation in the voices crackling over the loudspeaker broadcasting from the control room: a calm voice with its rapid-fire listing of each system, and before the last syllable ended a new eager voice would chime in with “go”.
All systems go for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 launch … until T-46 when a failure in the water system made the voices grow somber. A 30 second launch window doesn’t give a lot of time to fix problems that aren’t found until 46 seconds before it begins, but the voices consulted their manual and started another checklist until time ran out and the crowd deflated.
“What does that mean?” we asked our Vandenberg Air Force Base guide for the day, Chief of Community Relations Larry Hill. “What’s a water system failure?”
He gestured helplessly. “I’m just a trumpet player from Albuquerque.”
He’s more than that, with 24 years of active service behind him, including, yes, playing trumpet in the Air Force Band. But no one had clear answers yet at the public viewing site where our NASA Social participants gathered for the 3 am launch on July 1. Bleary eyed, knowing we’d see little through the fog, knowing a scrub was a possibility but excited to be there, together — our little social media mission with our major access to what many – but not us — would consider a minor launch (as in, unmanned and orbiting Earth rather than sexier Mars).
The fact that many of us had travelled a great distance to attend the pre-launch event and dragged ourselves out of bed to the viewing site in the middle of the night didn’t seem to enter into the decision. We’d even eaten the lucky peanuts and sung a few bars of “The Final Countdown.”
It was later explained as a problem with the Vandenberg launch pad, not the NASA satellite itself or United Launch Alliance’s Delta II rocket that would send it into orbit (US space travel is a cooperative effort between NASA, the air force, and private industry): “The system provides sound suppression to dampen acoustic waves at liftoff and protects a launch pad flame duct.” Right, of course.
“Better a good scrub than a bad launch,” said Stephanie Smith, one of our NASA guides and one of the brains behind NASA’s social media accounts, including Mars Curiosity Rover. And indeed, the disappointment of OCO-2’s one-day delay (it successfully launched 24 hours later) was nothing compared to the devastation of OCO-1’s crash into the ocean shortly after launch in 2009.
A small number of our group – those with more flexible itineraries — stayed for the next day’s liftoff and saw not even the promised red glow through the heavy fog. But we all cheered that launch success, and the continuing news that OCO-2 is operating as expected so far.
It’s personal
This is our mission too, now. Faced with a disinterested media, budget cuts and questionable political support, NASA has turned to Twitter in particular to build an army of social media advocates. Their NASA Social events gather select social media users to get a crash course on a particular mission or project and maybe to witness a launch first-hand (preferably with no crash included).
The day leading up to that early morning, we had been given incredible access to the people behind the machines, from the mission scientists and engineers to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. They were human beings to us now, and we felt their disappointment more keenly than our own.
When Project Architect Randy Pollock started on the original Orbiting Carbon Observatory project – the one that made a bottom-of-the-ocean synchronous orbit — his son was in kindergarten; now he’s an intern at NASA JPL. That’s’ 13 years of Pollock’s life invested in a mission that was lucky to get a second chance. I suppose more important than our need to see the rocket’s red glare was their need to have a long-awaited success.
At the launch pad site we asked questions of NASA Administrator Bolden, who boldly stated that we’ll send humans to Mars by 2030, and encouraged us to share our excitement about our OCO-2 experience widely. The undercurrent, of course, is that future missions are in jeopardy due to current funding cuts.
One measure of our enthusiasm (apart from the number of selfies taken with the rocket) was our eagerness to see the launch from a prime vantage point. One of our group asked what would happen if we witnessed it from this very spot, metres away. Before enumerating the disastrous physical effects of standing too close, former shuttle astronaut Bolden said “I’ve never been this close before. Well actually I have; I’ve been on it.”
When pressed at the social media briefing earlier in the day what one message they’d like to convey, the OCO-2 team said “Science is fun.” They aren’t just words to NASA – they instill a spirit of fun and awe into their social media advocacy.
All that and a purpose too
OCO-2’s mission isn’t to prove climate change, nor to prove the human contribution to greenhouse gases. NASA’s earth scientists have moved on and call those questions a false debate. Scientists are able to accurately measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – the key driver of climate change — both today and in the past, and see our impact.
“Climate change is real. Period. We have all the data to show it’s happening; we don’t have all the data to know how to address it,” said Annmarie Eldering, OCO-2’s Deputy Project Scientist.
OCO-2 will gather that data about where all the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere comes from and how the various natural “sinks” – oceans and forests – absorb and later release carbon back into the atmosphere. Eldering knows more data won’t convince skeptics, but believes the more we understand and can measure, the more informed our actions and policies can be.
When people found out I was going to see a rocket launch, a common question was “NASAs still does that?” With the demise of the shuttle and the US ability to send man into space, the media and public’s attention has wandered.
Seeing a satellite-bearing rocket head into space, meeting the people who made it happen, and knowing the importance of the mission and the consequences of failure — both in launch and in societal acceptance of climate change — made it personal all right. I’ll be cheering OCO-2 on as it makes its way into its orbit and starts collecting and transmitting its crucial data.
Originally published on Because Geeks.
by Diane | Jul 12, 2014 | It's All About Me
It’s not that grocery shopping is so hard, it’s just that you have to keep doing it. Especially when you run out of cat food.
I’d generally avoid the big grocery shop which meant frequently stopping at Safeway on the way home from work, hungry for dinner, unwise choices hankering to be made. That was the best case scenario: worst was grabbing take out on the way home.
Then I met SPUD. I’d heard of it for a while — a grocery delivery company with a focus on local, organic foods and cute little trucks wandering the city. Think Whole Foods on wheels. Problem is I don’t shop Whole Foods, don’t care much about organic, try to care somewhat about local but do care about price, and it didn’t seem like a great fit for me. Plus there was the concept that grocery shopping isn’t that hard. How pathetic would it be to outsource?
But as life piled up, that kind of pathetic beat out the other kinds of pathetic that found me at Safeway making hunger-based choices. Now every Wednesday I come home thrilled to find a blue box of goodness in front of my suite door, sometimes with a bouquet of flowers on top (SPUD loves me too! Oh wait, I order them. Never mind.)
Every week I make considered choices about the week’s menus and fill my online cart with things like chicken breasts, salmon, produce, some prepared meals like Aussie pies and salmon & dill quiches, snacks, yogurt, and that all-important cat food. Sometimes I even eat all the produce.
Though the individual items are sometimes (though not always) more expensive than what I’d pay at Superstore if I ever psyched myself up enough to go there, or even Safeway, the total without the plethora of prepared foods and hasty choices is less than I was paying for food previously.
There are items I won’t get through SPUD. My weakness is cherries. The short growing season gives me such anxiety that I have to buy all the cherries while I can, and they’re expensive enough without the organic delivered premium.
I won’t often pay for the local, grassfed, yogic, college-educated beef and whatnot either, but I’m more a chickenarian anyway.
Another downside is my inability to visualise what, say, a pound of grapes looks like, so that I end up thinking “I spent how much on this handful?!”
But overall, SPUD not only takes away the burden (don’t roll your eyes) of going grocery shopping and curbs some unnecessary spending, it forces me to plan meals ahead. Now I just have to get better about bringing some of those meals to work for lunch.
If you want to try it out, my SPUD code will get you $20 off your first order (and I think I get the same discount). You earn points with orders and it doesn’t take long to accumulate enough to get $10 off.
If it doesn’t sound like it’s for you, enjoy this Stompin’ Tom Connors song:
