Friday Cat Blogging – 21 November 2008

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FRIDAY NETBLOGGING…. After my Macblogging this morning (or perhaps Macwhining is more like it) (and yes, I have a 3:20 appointment today at the local Genius Bar, thankyouverymuch) (and I can hardly wait to find out if the only option is to buy a new battery at whatever inflated price Apple charges) — anyway, after all that, I figured I should update you on the netbook I bought last week too.

So here it is, propped up next to Inkblot to give you a sense of scale. (And before you ask: yes, the recursive wallpaper idea turned out to be a huge pain in the ass.) (And it didn’t even work all that well, since the white balance of the LCD screen is way different than the white balance of the great outdoors.)

Anyway. It’s an MSI Wind U100 and so far it’s worked pretty well. Very light and convenient. Good performance. Uses Windows XP, not Vista. Sleep mode and hibernation work nicely. Battery life is advertised at five hours, but my guess is that a little over four hours of continuous use is more realistic. The keyboard is quite usable and all the keys are in the right place. The trackpad doesn’t have a scrollbar (why? why?!?), but tapping the upper and lower right corners scrolls up and down, and that works pretty well. The trackpad, as I mentioned earlier, is very sensitive, which is a problem until you figure that out, and still a bit of a problem even after you get used to it. The screen is small, of course (1024 x 600), but very sharp and readable. The card reader gave me some problems until I figured out that internally it’s a USB device and I have to click the “remove device safely” icon before I pop it out. Bluetooth and wireless work fine. The speakers suck, of course, but the sound is OK with headphones. (In fact, it’s a nice little movie player, and I used it last weekend to finally watch The 27th Day, which I had downloaded months ago but never watched on my desktop machine.)

But there’s got to be something wrong with it, right? Yes. And I owe it to the Mac fans to air this on the blog. Here it is: the wireless seems to work fine on all networks except mine. On mine, it continually cycles on and off trying to acquire an address. This could be the router’s fault, of course, but the router works fine with every notebook I’ve tried except the MSI. The only failure comes with the combination of this router and this notebook. If I reboot the router, everything works fine for a while, but the next day it’s bollocksed up again. It’s probably related to the router releasing and reacquiring an address overnight or something, but I haven’t figured out anything more than that yet. I don’t suppose the Genius Bar folks can help me with that, can they?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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