Monday, February 11, 2008

Earth to Earthlink customers

Just a note to any of you who send e-mail through Earthlink.
You can talk to us, but we can't talk to you.
Yes, it's true. We -- The Chronicle -- have been blocked by the Earthlink blocker.
Our IT department has tried repeatedly to get us off the Earthlink spam list.
I even tried again this morning with a live-chat person.

Anyway, if you are an Earthlink customer and haven't gotten a reply from us, it's not because we don't want to answer you.
It's because your e-mail agent won't let us get to you.

School is closed, no, open, no, closed ...

School closings.
Seems easy enough information to obtain, doesn't it?
It's NOT!
Finding out if your school is open seems like something you should be able to get from the local paper, right?
Well, we think so, too.
We usually have to call every district and ask "Have you closed school for tomorrow?"
Seems inefficient. We are trying to set up some sort of system so the schools will automatically inform us.
This is what happened early this morning: Bruce Bishop, our chief photographer and Web site guru, wanted to post school closings online. It was 2:50 a.m.
He looked first to WEOL, the AM radio station owned by the same company that owns The Chronicle. The radio's Web site had nothing. We found out later that the radio posts its school closings around 6 a.m. (That's what I get for having a night-owl instead of early-bird Web guy, I guess.)
When we had spoken to Lorain County Community College at about 11 p.m. Sunday night, the campus was going to remain open. But that decision changed in the morning.
Long story longer, we are doing our best to try to get you the most accurate information on school closings first. I wanted you to know that.
And if anybody has a suggestion on how we might do that more efficiently, I'd love to hear it.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Hurka recipe

If you have come here looking for the hurka recipe I wrote about in my Feb. 4 Chronicle column, you can get it here.

Good luck, all you little hurka makers.