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December 1, 2003
What, exactly, are we sustaining?
An interesting sidebar from the Discovery Channel web site suggests that the human race is too big to be sustainable. According to the researchers' algorithm, there are 1000 times too many humans, as compared to a representative sample of other species (here's a groovy graphic that says so). Said report co-author Charles Fowler:
"It is probably not unrealistic to say that nothing less than a full paradigm shift is required to get there from here....It requires changes in our thinking, belief systems and understanding of ourselves."
While the report falls into the Chicken Little category a wee bit (somehow, humanity keeps on going despite its bizarre imbalance), it does hold eery parallels to the arts and culture world. The word 'sustainability' is cropping up everywhere these days...among foundations seeking to support 'sustainable' projects (usually meaning revenue-generating), among arts advocates seeking to preserve the current state of the nonprofit arts, and among consultants smelling a new trend in the water.
These conversations in the nonprofit arts world rarely define what 'sustainability' means, or how we might measure it over time. Worse yet, the word has become attached to an organizational strategy (how do we make our region's symphony, museum, or folk arts festival sustainable?), rather than an ecological strategy (how can we sustain our community's access to a broad range of creative experiences that includes these traditional ones?). With such a focus on individual organizations, we often miss the things we are actually trying to sustain: a dynamic cultural life, multiple levels of engagement for many citizens, opportunities to explore, create, discover, remember, and engage the creative process.
In the economics and ecology worlds, 'sustainability' is a property of a whole system, not a specific organism or organization. What you 'sustain' in such disciplines is not individuals, but outcomes...a dynamic economy with breathable air and drinkable water, for example. According to the most-cited definition of 'sustainable development' in the world economy world:
"Sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
--Gro Harlem Bruntland, World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987
In an ecosystem, things are born, things grow, and things die. In fact, ecosystems run into trouble if all three of these things are not on-going: if you work too hard to preserve standing trees, you crowd out future growth and emerging plants, for example. To carry this metaphor to the arts world, we might find our time better spent exploring how to create a context in which a full spectrum of creative and cultural activity exists in our community, rather than the sustainability of its single, long-standing institutions. These organizations still serve a vital purpose, mind you. And I'm not suggesting we kill them off to feed the roots. But focusing only on their sustainability is a short-term strategy at best, and at worst, a myopia that could damage the longterm health of creative communities.
There's a world of discussion out there about creating contexts for sustainable development, social evolution, and world ecology (try this Google search for some examples). It would be wonderful to learn from these fields as we in nonprofit arts and culture stumble into our own 'sustainability' discussions.
Since the Discovery report suggests that we're living on borrowed time anyway, we might as well use that time where it's most useful.
Posted by ataylor at 8:24 AM
December 2, 2003
Where it rains, it pays
Columnist Neal Peirce addresses the issue of cities and population growth in a recent column. According to one report ('The Changing Dynamics of Urban America' by Robert Weissbourd and Christopher Berry, available for download here), a traditional measure of city success is no longer valid. Quoth the report:
For the first time in modern American history, population and growth no longer tend to go together.
Traditionally, the common measure of an urban area's success has been its population growth: we think of a city as doing well if it is growing in numbers of people. This measure has worked well, including as a proxy for economic success, because growth in population historically has correlated closely with growth in income, wages, outputs and other more direct measures of economic performance. This is no longer true.
Instead, income growth in cities has become separated from raw population growth. While cities may grow dramatically in terms of numbers, the income and economic well-being of those cities is increasingly dependent on where higher wage-earners choose to live. Says Peirce:
The findings explode oft-heard claims that virtually all new big-box retailers, or assembly-line factories, or motel and other franchises, are good for an area. The game, instead, is to add wealth -- and life choices -- for existing residents.
In a particularly odd correlation from the report, the authors suggest that poor weather, rather than sunny climates, is a better draw for the knowledge workers:
While better weather attracts population overall, college graduates tend to go to places with worse weather. If there's a silver bullet, it's education. The more an area adds college graduates, the greater its prosperity. Cities do not need to grow big to grow wealthy, and growing big won't necessarily lead to wealth.
It's yet another angle on the 'smart cities' and 'creative communities' conversations that are blooming in city councils around the country (linked to their patron saint, Richard Florida, but also connecting beyond him).
Why does it matter to arts managers and arts organizations? Because if the new name of the city success game is attracting, retaining, and engaging educated and creative individuals, arts and cultural activity can be a major player. As I've said before, it's not why we exist, but it's a powerful byproduct of our work that tends to sway civic leaders.
I recently co-authored a monograph on the subject, with a group of people far smarter than me. The result extends this issue to the arts, and suggests ways for arts leaders to harness the trend in the advancement of their work.
Posted by ataylor at 1:05 PM
December 4, 2003
What about discussing 'worst practices'?
A story on NPR yesterday discussed current research on medical training, and specifically the formalized exploration of errors in medical practice (you can find the audio stream here). The intro to the story, and the report itself, were oddly resonant with issues in the management of arts and culture. Said the intro:
It's a basic principal of education that we learn from our mistakes. And it's an important part of learning in the medical profession. But new research indicates that doctors in training get fewer opportunities to discuss medical errors than their counterparts who are learning to be surgeons.The report, published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (read the abstract here, along with the full article if you like medical journals), compared internal medicine and surgery residency programs at four Northern California hospitals, to see what part discussion of errors played in the training process. What did they conclude?
Our findings call into question whether adverse events and errors are routinely discussed in internal medicine training programs. Although adverse events and errors were discussed frequently in surgery cases, teachers in both surgery and internal medicine missed opportunities to model recognition of error and to use explicit language in error discussion by acknowledging their personal experiences with error.The study brought to mind a similar frustration in nonprofit arts and culture. Given our funding structure, our advocacy efforts, and our culture of feeling constantly under seige, we seem to lack an open place to discuss what we do wrong. Almost every foundation report I read about a funded project carries good news (underserved audiences were reached, goals were achieved, worlds were changed). Much of the research on the public aspects of the arts is done by advocacy organizations or community coalitions with an admitted bias (of course the arts have a positive impact on city economies, education, at-risk youth, and luring the creative class, and we've designed research to prove it). Even at professional conferences, we are more likely to share 'best practices' and handy tips to sell tickets quickly, rather than exposing and exploring times we dropped the ball or didn't even see it.
It's all fine and friendly, but such one-sided and guarded discussions are contrary to learning. In final project reports, I'd like to read about not just what went right, but what elements of the project totally missed the mark, what original assumptions proved to be flawed, and what course adjustments were necessary along the way. In economic impact studies, I want to know where the correlation between nonprofit arts activity and economic benefit were actually quite weak.
Unfortunately, the system we've established has a bias toward vaguely positive spin. Anyone receiving a major grant, and hoping to get another one someday, will want to show how wonderfully they managed the project and the cash. Most publicly promoted research on the benefits of the arts is prepared and presented by organizations with a direct financial stake in showing those connections.
It's not that we're all lying. It's that we don't feel comfortable or rewarded for openly sharing the whole story -- good and bad. If we really want to grow our way into a vital and dynamic society of arts and cultural organizations, learning should be at the top of our lists, despite the discomfort of the process.
The problem only becomes more pronounced when someone steps out of the norm and clearly speaks their mind. Penny McPhee's wonderfully blunt speech to orchestra managers last year was just such an occassion. The fact that her clear statements and tough love were so surprising only proves the fact that we don't hear such things very often. Said Penny:
We continue to claim as one of the primary successes of Magic of Music that it has changed the conversation within and among orchestras. If that's true, the proof should be that there is room for dissent and aggressive disagreement. It should mean that different points of view are not heresy. So, let's find out if we've really changed the conversation.Bring it on.
Posted by ataylor at 8:57 AM
December 5, 2003
The Anti-Annual Report
In response to yesterday's entry about airing our mistakes as well as our successes, weblog reader Tiffany Wilhelm forwarded this link to Ben Cameron's latest editorial in American Theater. Titled 'The Anti-Annual Report,' the reflection on Theater Communications Group's past year does all the things I felt were lacking in such public discussions. It highlights achievements, but also underscores hard lessons and missed opportunities, explores where the organization helps its members, and where it continues to come up short. Writes Ben:
Annual reports, precisely because they give such a complete organizational overview, increasingly double as a tool for financial solicitation from potential donors. But, as a result, annual reports tend to depict an organization in its Sunday best. More rarely do these reports offer a more candid disclosure.Here's to 'greater mutual candor in the philanthropic exchange'! Thanks to Ben (and Tiffany).In a moment of potentially supreme folly, we have decided to dedicate this monthıs editorial to a more reflective discussion of our year, warts and all, in the hopes that the piece will be of greater interest, value and relevance to readers and members of our community and, at the same time, will promote greater mutual candor in the philanthropic exchange.
Posted by ataylor at 9:32 AM
December 8, 2003
Owning Culture
The question of who owns creative expressions has been a brain-buster for centuries now. Thomas Jefferson struggled with it in the early days of the United States, as did his lofty peers. The high-speed transmission of the Internet and my cheesy little photocopy machine have just made matters worse.Two articles rehash the troubles in two very different ways. This piece in U.S. News struggles with who owns cultural artifacts...museums or the countries/cultures that created them. Meanwhile, the Durham Independent looks at copyright and the collapse of the public domain, suggesting that "copyright laws are stifling art, but the public domain can save us."
Despite their different angles, both articles juggle the same issues: How can we respect the creators of expressive works (with exclusive ownership in the case of copyright, and with cultural heritage in the case of museums), but still maintain a rich and vibrant access to those works to inform future expressions?
Posted by ataylor at 8:30 AM
December 9, 2003
If you only have a hammer.
There are some great quotes from former Talking Heads artist David Byrne in a recent edition of Wired News, about his use of Microsoft Powerpoint presentation software as an artistic medium. Says Byrne:
"American culture is becoming a culture of pageants....We're surrounded by show, just as the Roman Empire turned to bread and circuses to hide other things that were taking place."In the pageant of everyday business life, Powerpoint has become the performance art of choice...in a deadeningly dull and meaningless way. In the presentation program, the world becomes linear, complex challenges become short bullet lists, and vaguely colorful backdrops and fonts become substitutes for reason and critical thinking.
Like all good artists, Byrne has taken the tool and attempted to stretch it into a medium of expression.
"...people make art out of all kinds of crappy things -- Lite Brites, or Pixelvision cameras. For every odd little tool, there's someone out there who's chosen that as a medium. And in spite of the limitations of a given technology, they turn it around so that each defect becomes a positive quality."It's a great metaphor for using all business tools and strategies to support the arts. If we're not careful, the tools can drag us into their preferred behavior, rather than us harnessing them for ours. Just as Powerpoint can enable soft, fuzzy logic, such business trappings as debt financing or board meetings or market reports or customer surveys bring their own energy to our management processes, and can dull us to the power of what we do.
There's an old consultant's saying that "If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" (Google tends to attribute the quote to psychologist Abraham Maslow). Problem is, we're not working with nails, we're working with the social connection with creative expression. We can still use the hammer, but we can't let the hammer use us.
Posted by ataylor at 8:31 AM
December 10, 2003
Word of the Day: Invidious
Whose Muse?, an upcoming book from Princeton University Press on the conflict of market and mission in the museum world, gets a summary treatment in this month's ARTNews. Among the lectures and discussions of five leading museum directors contained in the book comes this wordplay from MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry:
³There has been an invidious migration of business strategy into the not-for-profit world,² Lowry comments. The notion that ³the same methodology that applies to the for-profit business world can also be applied to the not-for-profit world is profoundly wrong.²While Lowry gets extra Brownie points for working the phrase "invidious migration" into casual conversation, he also raises the familiar question to this weblog: are cultural organizations businesses or are they not?
Websters gives seven definitions for the word "business" (Dictionary.com lists five), the most related to this question are:
Any particular occupation or employment engaged in for livelihood or gain, as agriculture, trade, art, or a profession.Über-economist William G. Bowen took a shot at the question in the context of higher education in a speech at Oxford University (a great speech, by the way, on the role of the university in a digitized and commercialized age, available in PDF format):Financial dealings; buying and selling; traffic in general; mercantile transactions.
A principal theme of this lecture is that universities are not businesses (though they have many businesslike aspects). They are highly unusual institutions with missions and attributes unlike those of any other entity in either the for-profit or the not-for-profit world. Society depends on them to do much more than produce 'products' at a fair price. In keeping with most other economists, I love the market (it is, as it were, 'our baby'). But I also know the limits of markets as definers of values and allocators of resources, and one of my greatest concerns is that, either inadvertently or by design, universities will be so bemused by market opportunities that they will lose sight of, or downplay, their most essential purposes.I gladly agree with both Lowry and Bowen that the dynamic struggle between market-based and mission-based decisions is a central issue for nonprofits in all forms -- especially those supporting creative expression, heritage, education, and similar pursuits. But I'm still not ready to give up on business strategy and business thinking.
Perhaps, like anything else, it's a matter of definitions. To me, a 'business' is a collection of individuals and resources, aggregated through ownership, contract, and common purpose to address a defined goal. That goal can be commercial (to maximize shareholder gain) or it can be non-commercial (to support, foster, create, preserve, and present forms of cultural expression that could not survive in the pure commercial market). More often than not, it's somewhere in between (there are plenty of small businesses driven by passion rather than cash). In any case, the ends may be different, but the tools are the same.
You'll find that sentiment in this weblog's purpose statement, and dusted throughout its entries. Like any tool, business tools can be used for a thousand ends, especially when handled by an innovative craftsperson. We certainly need to understand these tools, perhaps better than our for-profit counterparts. But let's not shun them from the toolbox. In this extraordinarily complex profession, we need every tool we can get our mitts on.
p.s. Invidious was a 'word of the day' on Dictionary.com a few years back. Try to work it into a staff meeting conversation to impress or annoy your co-workers.
Posted by ataylor at 8:50 AM
December 11, 2003
Peter Drucker makes my point better than I do
In recent posts I have complained about the 'all good news all the time' interactions among members of the nonprofit culture community...between funders and funded, between board and staff, between arts administrators and their local legislators. As usual, management luminary Peter Drucker made the same point a decade ago.In the promotional materials surrounding the Peter Drucker Foundation's handy and well-used Self-Assessment Tool, Drucker had this to say:
Nonprofit institutions need a healthy atmosphere for dissent if they wish to foster innovation and commitment. Nonprofits must encourage honest and constructive disagreement precisely because everybody is committed to a good cause: your opinion versus mine can easily be taken as your good faith versus mine. Without proper encouragement, people have a tendency to avoid such difficult, but vital, discussions or turn them into underground feuds.It seems to me that 'tendency' is a great word for such qualities in nonprofits. There's something in the system we've created (the system of financial support, tax subsidy, and the like) that increases our collective tendency to avoid and obscure honest discussions. It's easy to blame the individual players for this outcome, but it seems a more productive effort to look more closely at the 'game' that encourage them to do so.Another reason to encourage dissent is that any organization needs its nonconformist. This is not the kind of person who says, "There is a right way and a wrong way -- and our way." Rather, he or she asks, "What is the right way for the future?" and is ready to change. Finally, open discussion uncovers what the objections are. With genuine participation, a decision doesn't need to be sold. Suggestions can be incorporated, objections addressed, and the decision itself becomes a commitment to action.
There's a great concept in systems and game theory: If you want to change things, don't try to change the players, change the game. When the game is rigged toward certain kinds of behavior, you can change the players all you want, and the results will eventually be the same. The players should certainly be held accountable for their behavior. But they're only part of the problem.
I'd be interested to hear what elements of the nonprofit culture 'game' all of you think lead us to be less than honest with our funders, our supporters, our constituents, and ourselves. Send them along!
Posted by ataylor at 11:30 AM
December 12, 2003
Art as Experience
John Dewey's lecture series at Harvard in 1932 has become one of the seminal works of aesthetic theory. I know that sounds deadly dull and exceedingly thick, but Art as Experience is well worth the slogging. Seven decades before The Experience Economy, and the moves by arts organizations to focus on the patron experience beyond the performance or exhibit, Dewey's work reminds us that art is experience, not a performance or a painting or a sculpture. It doesn't exist until it is perceived.A few choice quotes for some flavor:
"As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure." (p. 344)And a longer quote that, to me, describes the ideal nature of arts managementâan ability to foster and channel the energy of creative expression without dispersing its strength, and without devolving into crisis management."For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent....Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art." (p. 54)
"The live being recurrently loses and reestablishes equilibrium with his surroundings. The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life." (p. 17)
âA surgeon, golfer, ball player, as well as a dancer, painter, or violin-player has at hand and under command certain motor sets of the body. Without them, no complex skilled act can be performed. An inexpert huntsman has buck fever when he suddenly comes upon the game he has been pursuing. He does not have effective lines of motor response ready and waiting. His tendencies to action therefore conflict and get in the way of one another, and the result is confusion, a whirl and blur. The old hand at the game may be emotionally stirred also. But he works off his emotion by directing his response along channels prepared in advance: steady holding of eye and hand, sighting of rifle, etc. If we substitute a painter or a poet in the circumstances of suddenly coming upon a graceful deer in a green and sun-specked forest, there is also diversion of immediate response into collateral channels. He does not get ready to shoot, but neither does he permit his response to diffuse itself at random throughout his whole body. The motor coordinations that are ready because of prior experience at once render his perception of the situation more acute and intense and incorporate into it meanings that give it depth, while they also cause what is seen to fall into fitting rhythms.â (pp. 97â98)
see it at Amazon.com...
(any purchase benefits the Bolz Center for Arts Administration library fund...not much, admittedly, but a bit)
Posted by ataylor at 3:27 PM
December 15, 2003
In search of the REAL organizational chart
We're all familiar with those hierarchy charts drafted by most organizations, that convey -- through boxes and lines -- how the command and control structure works among their paid staff and leadership. These are handy tools to show who reports to whom, and how information is supposed to flow through the chains of command. Despite their utility, however, we also all know that they are elaborate forms of fiction.Complex organizations (ie, more than two people) do not and cannot work in a linear, hierarchical form. Certain team members connect at different levels at different times. Projects lead to informal conversations and connections across departmental lines (you hope). And interconnections with individuals outside the chart are often just as vital as those inside (where do the creative and technical team show up, for example, if they are not part of the paid professional staff?).
It turns out that the behavior of such organic and informal networks is a major course of study in other disciplines -- like social science, computer networking, disease control, and the like. And there are some fun and useful things we could glean from what they've learned.
For example, the study of networks has yielded specific measurements for how powerful and connected any individual (or 'node') is within a certain system (there's an overview here):
Degrees: The number of direct connections a node has to other nodes.There are even software tools that help track and discover the hidden, informal networks in large project teams or corporations. InFlow, for example, draws relationship maps using any of a number of inputs. In one project, the software was used to analyze e-mail traffic among a large project team, to discover the individuals who served as hubs of information (see the chart and project description). These were not the official hubs, mind you, but the actual ones.Betweenness: The control a node has over what flows in the network -- how often is this node on the path between other nodes?
Closeness: How easily a node can access what is available via the network -- how quickly can this node reach all others in the network? This measure is less about direct connections, and more about being connected to connected people.
The point here is not to gather some fun new jargon (although that's always great for parties). It's to reinforce a feeling we already have: that there is the formal structure of how we say our organization works, and there's the way it actually works. If you just consider the three measures above when thinking about your staff or peers, you can begin to see the emergent organizational structure: Who has contact with the most people inside and outside the organization (degrees)? Who seems to be between staff and the information they need (betweenness)? Who do you go to when you want to know where to find information or who else is likely to have it, or when you want news to spread fast (closeness)? You can quickly see why office receptionists, executive assistants, and janitors are often the best people to befriend at any organization.
As always, technology doesn't make these structures happen (they've always been there). But it does allow us to see them in new and different ways.
Weblife maven Steven Johnson brings it all home in this great article in Discover magazine, when he quotes another prominent social network analyst, Kurt Vonnegut:
In his classic novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done -- as Vonnegut describes it, 'a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing.' A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a 'false karass,' a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is 'meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.'Sounds like a lot of organizations I know that focus so much on the official org chart, they miss the way they really work.
Posted by ataylor at 9:55 AM
December 16, 2003
Mapping the social elite...
Building on yesterday's post about social network mapping, an associate pointed me to NameBase.org, an astounding on-line database of book and clipping citations of individuals and groups involving:- assassinations, organized crime, and scandals;
- Wall Street and transnational corporations;
- foreign policy and media establishments;
- political elites from the Right and Left; and,
- Cold War history and intelligence.
For example, you can look up major donor and board member Rita Hauser, recently in the news for leaving the New York Philharmonic board and moving to the Lincoln Center board. By typing her last name into the NameBase 'proximity search' (you have to do it, the system doesn't allow a direct search link), you get a graphic representation of her tightly woven web of interconnections to other elites...all drawn from citations of her name with other names in books, articles, and directories. Some names in the network include former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and beltline politico Max Kampelman, among others.
The cool part of the system is that you can click on any name in the graphic and get a new map of that individual's connections. You may feel vaguely squeamish poking around in other people's social networks. As an arts manager, you'll have to get used to that feeling.
We already knew that the rich and powerful were closely interconnected...especially in major metropolitan areas. NameBase gives us a way to visualize those connections, and perhaps work with them to make connections of our own (building our 'degrees' and 'closeness' rankings, if not our 'betweenness') .
p.s. As long as we're tracking our connectedness, try my other favorite search to see how connected your organization's web site is. Go to the Advanced Search feature at AltaVista.com, and enter in the following query in the Boolean search box: ³link:yourdomain.org AND NOT host:yourdomain.org². Don't use the quotes, and of course, replace 'yourdomain.org' with your actual web domain, without the 'www.'. You'll get a search result that shows all the other web sites that have hyperlinks to yours (here's the search for ArtsJournal.com, showing more than 7700 external links...not bad).
Posted by ataylor at 9:04 AM
December 18, 2003
Calm down, keep it simple
As an antidote to the complexity of social network mapping and other systemic ramblings of recent posts, friend and associate Mark Nerenhausen reminded me that most arts managers are running as fast as they can just to keep up. In a world of small resources, small staff, and gargantuan missions, rethinking how the universe works is fun, but quick and basic insights can be even more useful.To that end, he pointed me to the December issue of Harvard Business Review, and an article by Frederick F. Reichheld (not available on-line, but there's an abstract here). Through two years of research, Reichheld searched for the optimal, single-question customer survey, to help companies gain quick, accurate, and actionable information about their audiences. Here's what he found:
It turned out that a single survey question can, in fact, serve as a useful predictor of growth. But that question isn't about customer satisfaction or even loyalty -- at least in so many words. Rather it's about customers' willingness to recommend a product or service to someone else.He goes on to suggest that more complex customer satisfaction surveys actually cloud our ability to act in responsive and innovative ways.
By substituting a single question -- blunt tool though it may appear to be -- for the complex black box of the typical customer satisfaction survey, companies can actually put consumer survey results to use and focus employees on the task of stimulating growth.So what's the single question? Here was the clear winner in the study:
How likely is it that you would recommend [company x] to a friend or colleague?I'll grant you, it's not brain surgery. But imagine encouraging all of your front-line staff to ask this question from time to time, or ask it yourself while wandering the lobby, the gallery, or the special events your organization hosts.
It tells you nothing about 'why' they would or wouldn't recommend you. But at least it's a start. And it might even start a productive conversation between you, your staff, and your audience. Now there's a simple step in the right direction.
Posted by ataylor at 9:50 AM
December 19, 2003
Going mobile...the Artful Manager on the road
Alert readers will notice a new item in the sidebar, offering a mobile edition of this weblog for handhelds, PDAs, and fancy schmancy mobile phones. If you have such a device and already grab and read headlines from your favorite news sources, now there's another to add to your list. (I grab the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Onion...one of them just for laughs...I won't say which.) They are basically stripped-down versions of the top news, formatted to be easier to read on a tiny, tiny, tiny screen (here's what it looks like).I'm not expecting a groundswell of traffic from the new feature, but I figure I should practice what I preach -- delivering message and mission by whatever medium will carry them, and meeting your audience where they are, instead of expecting them to come to you.
For those unfamiliar with grabbing headline news for your PDAs, there are some instructions here. Just remember to not read while you're driving...just at stop lights.
Posted by ataylor at 8:27 AM
December 23, 2003
Time for a holiday break...
I'll be taking a break from this weblog over the holidays, to focus on family and friends, and experience some culture rather than write about it. I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season. See you in the new year!Posted by ataylor at 8:17 AM
