Archive for March, 2005
The boat is at the shop
Posted in General on March 31st, 2005I dug the leaves out of the Tashmoo yesterday, tied down the battery cover, pumped up the trailer’s tires, and dragged it all over to The Boat Guy in Bourne for the spring engine re-commissioning, a new Teleflex and throttle/shifter. Along with the first Claritin for the spring hayfever, boat prep is the surest sign that better things are on the horizon.
I’ll stake out my spot for the dinghy this weekend, call Peck’s to have the mooring dropped, and then go through the annual bureaucratic hell known as the Barnstable Mooring Permit renewal. A trip to the marine supply store for some bottom-paint, an afternoon under the trailer (and this is the year I fix the trailer lights and repack the bearings!) All of this, should, in theory, have me motoring around Greater Cotuit Bay within two or three weeks.
Snag-free permits targeted for ORVs (March 29, 2005)
Posted in Newswire on March 29th, 2005Snag-free permits targeted for ORVs (March 29, 2005) New plan for selling off-road permits for the National Seashore
Funds to study lobster disease harder to find (March 19, 2005)
Posted in Newswire on March 19th, 2005State waters zoning sought (March 18, 2005)
Posted in Newswire on March 18th, 2005State waters zoning sought (March 18, 2005)
Romney wants to zone Mass. waters
C.G. Files Suit to Overturn Mass. Oil Barge Laws (March 6, 2005)
Posted in Newswire on March 6th, 2005Yahoo! News - Tiny eels netting higher prices than caviar as Asians snap them up
Posted in Newswire on March 4th, 2005Meta-FLog
Posted in General on March 3rd, 2005One of the big things that Mark is working on is a way to point all of the Reel-Time FLogs at a single page — sort of a built in RSS reader — that will allow a user of Reel-Time to quickly see all the new FLog postings across the Reel-Time universe. This is meant to provide a shortcut to the casual user who doesn’t want to download and configure an RSS feed reader — which can be a little hairy given that most readers require Microsoft’s .NET framework to be installed.
I suggest you add a link to this to your FLog links. As soon as we debug it and make it pretty, we’ll link this off of the homepage. This is pretty central to RT’s strategy for blogs.
The Tenth Anniversary of Reel-Time
Posted in General on March 2nd, 2005
This is the season for a lot of tenth anniversaries on the World Wide Web. Yahoo is building a micro-site to look back at the last decade, and for sometime Mark Cahill and Thorne Sparkman and I have been discussing how to best mark this milestone in Reel-Time history.
So, I thought I’d start putting down some memories and add to them as time goes by. We’ll probably do something on the site around April when we opened our doors.
I kick myself for not saving the earliest files that comprised Reel-Time. Here’s my memory of how it transpired.
In the beginning was the name Real-Time. It was to be the name of an online news project to be run by me and funded by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus. Mitch was my Internet mentor in the early 90s when I was a technology reporter for Forbes Magazine. He had the first commercial net connection in the state — a T1 line from his Cambridgeport office to Software Tool and Die, the first commercial ISP which was based in Brookline. Mitch invited me to his office and showed me some of the pre-Web Internet technologies such as WAIS, Veronica, Archie, Gopher and USENET. I had been an online community geek beginning in the mid-80s, had really first experienced the first community at a Grateful Dead BBS called "Brokedown Palace" where Deadheads posted lists of their bootleg collections and arranged trades of 90-minute Maxell tapes. That led to the WELL, the first big online community based in Sausalito, California.
Well, in the summer of 94, when the first Mozilla browsers were making their appearance — this is pre-Netscape — Mitch thought it would be cool to re-invent journalism with a real-time news service. So we named it Real Time — an engineering term used to describe things that take place now, as you observe them.
In late 94 MCI launched one of the first attempts to build a Yahoo-like portal, a long-dead thing called InternetMCI. They hired a guy I knew from my reporting named Chris Locke to edit a series of columns on the future of media in an interconnected world. I wrote about the likely effects of the Internet on journalism and predicted that it would be a triumph of niches — focused little sites that addressed the passions and needs of people into stuff like fishing, but even more focused, saltwater fishing, and even more focused than that …
Saltwater fly fishing.
So I talked about a hypothetical website for saltwater fly fishermen — and borrowing from Mitch Kapor — changed the name Real Time to Reel Time. I fired up my scanner and actually made a logo for this theoretical site by scanning a fly reel, not a picture of a fly reel, but an actual fly reel.
For eight weeks I described the building and model behind this niche site. People would post reports of their fishing exploits wirelessly, exchange reviews of tackle and flies, and the editors would provide great feature articles all about fly fishing.
In early 1995, while I was working in New York City, a friend who was working at CNET — www.news.com — told me to get in touch with a guy I had gone albie fishing for the previous summer. Thorne Sparkman. Thorne was also working in New York at Time Warner Electronic Publishing, hosting chats on CompuServe with authors. I called him, invited him out to dinner — raw fish appropriately enough — and over inagi and uni, told him I wanted to build a website based on the concept I developed at InternetMCI.
Thorne was into it. In March he came to the Cape and together, in my house in Cotuit, we started building the site. It was totally focused on Cape Cod and emphasized the FishWire — a weekly report of fishing activity around the Cape and Islands.
Thorne knew a programmer who installed a primitive bulletin board system for discussions called HyperMail. It was designed to archive email discussions into threads sorted by date and subject. We never could figure out how to sort them by date.
We threw our doors open in April, just in time for the arrival of the first schoolies. Reel-Time was born.
I don’t know why we put a hyphen in between Reel and Time, but boy did we regret it later on. Somebody selling alarm clocks that looked like fly reels registered it and siphoned off a lot of our traffic. I also regret that we didn’t spend the bucks and register obvious domains like Striped Bass and Bluefish and stuff like that, but once Reel-Time was launched, there was no looking back.
to be continued ……
Mass DMF Herring and Striper Hearings Schedule
Posted in Newswire on March 2nd, 2005
NOTICE OF PUBLIC
HEARINGS
SCHEDULED FOR MARCH
21st & 22nd, 2005
Under the provisions of M.G.L. Ch 30A and pursuant to the
authority found in M.G.L. Ch. 130 ss. 17, 17A, 80, 100A and 104, Division of
Marine Fisheries (DMF) and the Marine Fisheries Advisory Commission (MFAC) have
scheduled hearings on the following regulatory proposals:
- DMF proposal
to prohibit finning of spiny dogfish (322 CMR 6.35); and establish a declaratory
process for enacting annual specifications consistent with the interstate
plan;
- DMF proposal
to amend winter flounder recreational seasons and daily catch limits to comply
with the interstate plan. In waters
north of Cape Cod, the limit would be 8 fish per person year-round; south of Cape Cod the limit would be one of
the following:
- 2 fish per
person with no closed season;
- 6 fish per
person with a 10 mo. Season (March -April closure);
- 10 fish per
person with a 2 mo. season (May – February
closure);
- 2 fish per
person with no closed season;
- DMF proposal
to enact more consistent statewide regulations governing the taking of river
herring east of the Connecticut River watershed (322 CMR 6.17). These including a 12-fish per person daily
possession limit, no-fishing days, restriction on method of harvest, and a prohibition on the sale of river
herring;
- DMF proposal
to establish area-specific commercial sea herring fishery limits and a process
for annual specifications and in-season adjustments to conform with the
interstate and federal plans (322 CMR 9.00);
- DMF proposals
to amend commercial scup and summer flounder possessions limits. Limits for trawlers would be increased from
300 to 400 lbs. during squid season and through the directed summer flounder
season until the annual scup quota is reached; for all other gears the limit
would be increased from 100 to 200 lbs. during May through July (322 CMR
6.28);
- DMF
proposals to amend commercial fishery summer flounder restrictions (322 CMR
6.22), including:
- an increased
commercial trip limits for summer flounder during the spring/summer season from
300 lbs. up to a higher level ranging from 350 to 500 lbs. per day;
- an amended
commercial fishery season start date to begin earlier than the current June
10th start date with possible
start dates ranging as early as May 15; and
- amendments to
the no-fishing days;
- an increased
commercial trip limits for summer flounder during the spring/summer season from
300 lbs. up to a higher level ranging from 350 to 500 lbs. per day;
Comments will be accepted on a public petition to increase from 200 to 300 lbs. the summer flounder trip limit during the spring/summer season for fishermen using hook gears;
- DMF proposal to amend trawl mesh regulations (322 CMR
8.07, 8.08, and 6.22) by establishing the end of the “squid season” as June
7th. Also the allowance for 4 1/2” mesh during June – October 31
would be eliminated.
- DMF proposal
to amend recreational scup possession limits to comply with the interstate plan
(322 CMR 8.06), including:
- a 25-scup
possession limit for recreational anglers fishing from shore and aboard a
private vessel, with a 50-scup per day limit aboard private vessels with two or
more persons aboard;
- a 60-scup
possession limit per day for recreational anglers fishing aboard for-hire
vessels for 60-days of the recreational season; and
- a 25-scup
possession limit per day for recreational anglers fishing aboard for-hire
vessels during the remainder of the recreational
season.
- a 25-scup
possession limit for recreational anglers fishing from shore and aboard a
private vessel, with a 50-scup per day limit aboard private vessels with two or
more persons aboard;
- DMF proposal
to prohibit commercial fishing by persons aboard vessels engaged in for-hire
recreational fishing (322 CMR 7.01).
- Take comments
on recent emergency action to prohibit the taking of white sharks in state
waters and a DMF proposal to complement federal prohibition on taking of basking
sharks dusky sharks, and sand tiger sharks (322 CMR
6.37);
Two public hearings have been
scheduled:
Monday, March 21st (7PM) at the Plymouth South
Middle School (488 Long Pond Rd., Plymouth) and
Tuesday, March 22nd (7PM) at the Annisquam
River Marine Fisheries Station (30 Emerson Ave.,
Gloucester).
Contact DMF for draft regulations and further details or visit our website at www.mass.gov/marinefisheries.
NOTICE OF PUBLIC
HEARINGS
SCHEDULED FOR MARCH
29, 2005
Under the provisions of M.G.L. Ch 30A and pursuant to the authority found in M.G.L. Ch. 130 ss. 17, 17A, 80, 100A and 104, Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) and the Marine Fisheries Advisory Commission (MFAC) have scheduled hearings on DMF proposals and a public petition pertaining to the management of the commercial striped bass fishery (322 CMR 6.07 and 7.01).
The proposals
are:
1. Lower the daily
possession limit through the following options:
a. DMF proposal to drop
from 30 fish to 20 fish per vessel; or
b. Public petition to
drop from 30 fish to 20 fish per vessel except on Sundays and the opening day of
the season when the limit would be 10 fish;
2. DMF proposal to reduce
the number of open fishing days per week (currently set at Sunday-Wednesday) from four to three; Comments will be accepted regarding which
days of the week would be open;
3. DMF proposal to
prohibit commercial striped bass fishing aboard vessels engaged in for-hire
recreational fishing;
4. DMF proposal to allow
dealers to sell during April through November striped bass legally caught and
documented from out-of-state. Whole fish
would have to conform to the Massachusetts 34” minimum size and bear an official
tag designating state of origin. This
proposal does not alter the existing rules governing imported striped bass
during December through March.
5. DMF proposal to open
the commercial fishery on July 10.
A public hearing has been scheduled
for:
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 (7PM) at the Plymouth Community
Intermediate School
(117 Long Pond Rd., Plymouth, MA
02360).
Contact DMF for draft regulations and further details or visit our website at www.mass.gov/marinefisheries.