A bit of Django this afternoon, and a dazzling, if utterly confusing, panel about “smart text” at The New York Times. I’ll confess to not understanding large portions of the technical aspects, but it appears as though the NYT people are building the newsroom information equivalent of WMD. They probably have this very post indexed and searchable already, while I’m still typing it.

Elsewhere, Matt Waite allows himself a bit of a rant, in which he advises: “Stop trying to find the next Adrian Holovaty.” I’ll simply echo Matt’s echoing of Adrian’s point that newspapers should be looking to their own staffs, particularly the computer-assisted reporting folks. As for the title of Matt’s post, I wonder how many top newsroom managers even know what “looking for the next Adrian Holovaty” means.

Finally, my hotel appears to be hosting some, if not all, of the teams participating in the MAC basketball tournament, a fact that would no doubt please my work colleague, and Toledo grad, Will Sullivan. Call me dense, but it took me fully 24 hours to figure out why so many exceptionally tall men were hanging about.