Allan Duffin - Writer/Producer

Paper periodicals take another hit

Time, Inc.  — publisher of Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, and of course the venerable Time magazine  — will be announcing $100 million in cuts. This means that even more magazine staffers will be pink-slipped in large numbers. From the New York Times:

At Time Inc., cuts have already been heavy. A year ago, it announced it was dismissing about 600 people, or 6 percent of its staff. Since 2007, it has shut magazines including Business 2.0, Cottage Living, Southern Accents and Life, which it had revived as a newspaper supplement. A stricter expense-account policy has been in place for some time, and some magazines have decreased the weight of the paper they use.

Though I write for a variety of media, it's particularly heartbreaking to watch the painful demise of the newspaper and magazine industries. I don't think that paper periodicals will ever disappear completely, but online access to the hottest and latest news has made obsolete one of the biggest selling points of magazines and newspapers. It's been a slow process over the last decade or so, but the poor state of the economy isn't helping.

Best wishes to the staff and writers who fall to the latest swing of the sword. Hopefully they'll find new homes and continue to do what they love.

"Staging the Perfect Performance" in DramaBiz Magazine

The July/August issue of DramaBiz Magazine features my article about staging equipment for the theatre. I'm always curious about the hardware that makes the magic, and wow is there a lot of available hardware:

A variety of choices are available depending on your theatre’s requirements and available budget. Vendors like StageRight, Inc., in Clare, Mich., create portable staging equipment like choral, band, and seating risers; pit fillers; orchestra enclosures; acoustical shells; and trap floor covers. According to Kathleen Meadowcroft, sales research specialist and trade show manager for the company, the firm benefits from having its manufacturing and distributing operations located under one roof. Similarly, Serapid, Inc., builds equipment like its LinkLift series of theatrical lifts at its facility in Sterling Heights, Mich., a suburb of Detroit.

Read the entire article here.

Farewell, Prof. Pausch

Sad news today from Carnegie Mellon University, my wife's alma mater. You might recall "The Last Lecture," given by Prof. Randy Pausch, who was suffering from pancreatic cancer. It was an inspiring, life-affirming lecture that you can still watch on YouTube. Here's today's press release in its entirety:

It is with great sadness that I inform you that our dear friend and colleague Randy Pausch passed away today, July 25, after a brave struggle against pancreatic cancer.

Randy captured the minds and hearts of millions worldwide with his Carnegie Mellon lecture, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," and his book, "The Last Lecture."

Randy, who earned his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon in 1988, returned to the university in 1997 as an associate professor of human-computer interaction and computer science. Along with Carnegie Mellon Professor Don Marinelli, Randy was the co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center, a leading interactive multimedia education and entertainment center.

At Carnegie Mellon, Randy was also the director of the Alice software project, a revolutionary way to teach computer programming. The interactive Alice program teaches computer programming by having kids make animated movies and games. A fitting legacy to Randy's life and work, Alice may in the future help to reverse the dramatic drop in the number of students majoring in computer science at colleges and universities. Randy was also known as a pioneer in the development of virtual reality, and he created the popular Building Virtual Worlds class.

An award-winning teacher and researcher, Randy was also a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He used sabbatical leaves to work at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA), and he consulted with Google Inc. on user interface design. He is the author or co-author of five books and more than 70 articles.

Perhaps the greatest lesson, however, Randy taught us all was how to live, even in the face of great challenges, and how to follow our passion. While Randy's greatest passion was clearly his family, he did not shy from sharing his passion for his work as a professor, for his students, and for Carnegie Mellon. We will miss Randy, but we will carry the memory of him and all that he did to make Carnegie Mellon a better university and each of us who knew him a better person.

A memorial service for Randy will be scheduled at a later date. For more information, visit www.cmu.edu.

Sincerely,

Jared L. Cohon
President, Carnegie Mellon University

Thoughtful quotes on a Tuesday afternoon

Some thoughts about writing and reading:

The writing process: write, then rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite again.

Writing is, for most, laborious and slow. The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in his blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, he must cultivate patience; he may have to work many covers to bring down one partridge. —from Strunk and White, The Elements of Style

While I love technology, I also love holding a printed and bound book in my hand. So while I spend a lot of time reading documents on a computer screen, there's still something special about cracking open a new book and flipping through its pages.

It is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily—for police purposes or technological or scientific purposes. The book, with its intimacy, its forcibility, its accessibility, its freedom from outside energy sources, its ability to reach into tyrannic countries, and be hidden under mattresses, and be smuggled in the false bottoms of suitcases—all these are great advantages. —Daniel J. Boorstin, as quoted in the Reader's Quotation Book edited by Steven Gilbar (Penguin, 1990)

And finally, some numbers:

Number of items checked out of public libraries daily in the United States: 3 million

Percentage of Americans who describe "barbeque" as the aroma that best defines America: 39

Projected average rush-hour speed in Los Angeles in 2025: 15.4 mph

—Peter Strupp

Dying to work

A story that all workaholics would be wise to keep in mind:

A Japanese labor bureau has ruled that one of Toyota's top car engineers died from working too many hours, the latest in a string of such findings in a nation where extraordinarily long hours for some employees has long been the norm.

One of the things my beautiful wife does for me is to give me a polite nudge when I've been working all day, the skies are darkening, and I've forgotten to look at the clock. Ironic that I'm still, day by day, learning how to balance my life. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like the engineer in our story was given that opportunity:

The man who died was aged 45 and had been under severe pressure as the lead engineer in developing a hybrid version of Toyota's blockbuster Camry line, said Mikio Mizuno, the lawyer representing his wife. ...

In the two months up to his death, the man averaged more than 80 hours of overtime per month, according to Mizuno. He regularly worked nights and weekends, was frequently sent abroad and was grappling with shipping a model for the pivotal North American International Auto Show in Detroit when he died of ischemic heart disease in January 2006. The man's daughter found his body at their home the day before he was to leave for the United States.

A fast-paced life and a rough economy work against our need to take a breather every now and then, to step back and spend time by ourselves and with our families. How tragic that this man's dedication and the competitive pressures of his job led to his death, from heart disease, at such a young age.

(Source: Associated Press via CNN)

"Rebirth of a C-17" in Aviation Maintenance Magazine — and an "Army Wives" coincidence

It's always fun to revisit my time as an aircraft maintenance supervisor in the Air Force. So I really enjoyed writing about the rescue and rebuilding of a C-17 cargo plane that was damaged in Afghanistan. Boeing, the manufacturer, brought the aircraft home to Long Beach, Calif., and painstakingly reassembled it over a 10-month period. Today the airplane — which, due to the extent of the damage, was almost scrapped — flies out of its home at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina.

At the airplane’s home station of Charleston Air Force Base (AFB), S.C., Ken Crumpler received a phone call on Aug. 6, 2005 in the middle of the night. Crumpler, an engineering manager, was responsible for Boeing’s field service engineers. "We’ve had a C-17 incident at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan," he was told. Crumpler immediately got to work...

Together the military and civilian teams carefully maneuvered the crippled C-17 off the runway using a crane and a flatbed trailer, which served as a wheelchair for the broken landing gear. Because the aft door was unusable due to the tilt of the aircraft, 55,000 lbs. of cargo were removed, piece by piece, through the crew door. Engineers clicked together metal airfield matting over the ground to keep their makeshift system from slipping, then nudged the C-17 back onto the runway and over to a parking spot.

Incidentally, Charleston AFB currently hosts location filming for the Lifetime TV series "Army Wives." The Reserve Wing on the base — which happens to fly the C-17 aircraft — was one of the units where scenes were filmed. Better yet, the Wing is run by Colonel Tim Wrighton, who's my former commander from when I was in the Reserves.

The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch

Prof. Randy Pausch, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2006. His inspiring fight against the disease is chronicled at his website. Last year he delivered what he called "The Last Lecture," subtitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." It's a wonderful look at what's important in life. I've included the YouTube video of the entire lecture below.

Pausch's thoughts on life have been collected into a book that Hyperion released a week ago. You can order it on Amazon.com. As he told them in an interview:

A book allows me to cover many, many more stories from my life and the attendant lessons I hope my kids can take from them. Also, much of my lecture at Carnegie Mellon focused on the professional side of my life--my students, colleagues and career. The book is a far more personal look at my childhood dreams and all the lessons I've learned. Putting words on paper, I've found, was a better way for me to share all the yearnings I have regarding my wife, children and other loved ones. I knew I couldn't have gone into those subjects on stage without getting emotional.

Thanks to my wife Michele, who is a Carnegie Mellon graduate and pointed me toward Prof. Pausch's story. It's an amazing look at a man who, despite the odds, maintains a positive view about life and the people in it.

"The Ups and Downs of Dimmers" in DramaBiz Magazine

Hot off the presses in the new issue of DramaBiz Magazine, which just hit the newsstands and the Web: "The Ups and Downs of Dimmers: How to get the best lighting control for your theatre." Here's the lede:

A gorgeous mix of light, color and shadow creates the kaleidoscope that brings a stage performance to life. “Besides the obvious need to provide visibility,” says Jeffrey E. Salzberg, a lighting designer whose productions include dance, theatre, opera and puppetry, “lighting can direct focus, reinforce mood and theme, and furnish punctuation. It can create a universe—realistic or not—for the characters to inhabit.”

Careful choices make all the difference, says James David Smith, president of the Canadian company RC4 Wireless in Etobicoke, Ontario. “Just as music is not turning on all the notes at the beginning of the show and turning them all off at the end,” he says, “the fluid and dynamic art of lighting design demands control of the available lighting instruments. The lighting designer is the conductor, and the lights are his orchestra.”

For articles like this one, I typically interview at least one expert along with a variety of manufacturers and vendors. That way the reader gets information about the equipment available and how it's installed, along with a "from-the-trenches" viewpoint of a consultant who has to make it all work for specific productions.

Read the entire article here.

The Amazing Vanishing Media Job

Magazine and newspaper writers like me have to keep one eye on the future, as the Internet monster continues to chomp away at traditional media. I don't think that print media will ever completely go away, but it's scary to watch publications cut back staff or close up shop as their readers migrate to the Internet.

Advertising Age reports that the media workforce has slumped to a 15-year low. While newspapers are bleeding staff, the marketing arena is actually adding employees: "Marketing consultancies over the past year added 14,500 jobs (up 10.8%), nearly matching staff cuts at newspapers (down 16,900 or 4.7%)." Here's some more from the article:

U.S. media employment in December fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry. But employment in advertising/marketing-services -- agencies and other firms that provide marketing and communications services to marketers -- broke a record in November (769,000). Marketing consulting powered that growth.

Here's the reason behind the disparity: Marketers still invest in marketing, but they have options far beyond paid media: digital initiatives, direct marketing, promotions and events, just to name a few. That creates more opportunities for consultants to help define strategies.

You can read the entire article by clicking here.

"Wide Load: Elephant Transport" in Air&Space/Smithsonian Magazine

Maggie the Elephant followed in the shoes of Keiko the Killer Whale in getting a ride from the U.S. Air Force to a new home in a natural habitat. Thanks to the Performing Animal Welfare Society, this African elephant now lives on a reservation in northern California. In the new March 2008 issue of Air&Space/Smithsonian we visit Maggie as she travels in a C-17 cargo plane:

The U.S. Air Force’'s C-17 Globemaster III transports everything from troops to ammunition. Last November it hauled an African elephant named Maggie. A resident of the Alaska Zoo for nearly a quarter-century, Maggie was having increasing difficulty in her chilly concrete habitat. A grassroots campaign convinced zoo officials to move her to a warmer home, the 2,300-acre Ark 2000 wildlife sanctuary in northern California, operated by the Performing Animal Welfare Society.

This is an inspiring story. Airplane + Elephant = Happy Life in Animal Preserve. Not many aircrews have the distinction of flying a gigantic animal. Keiko the Killer Whale, who appeared in the various "Free Willy" movies in the 1990s, was relocated to the cold waters off Iceland back in 1997. Maggie is the second such animal to be transported this way by the Air Force.