Fun facts about Wales - enter fantasyland

• The country is about half the size of Västerbotten but has 100 times the population.
• The majority of the inhabitants live in southern Wales, in cities like Cardiff and Swansea.
• Northern Wales is sparsely populated. Bangor, the biggest town in Gwynedd has 17 600 inhabitants. They have a university where you, among other things, can study mindfulness.
• Three national parks, Snowdonia, Brecon Beacons and Pembrokeshire coast, cover large areas in Wales.
• The climate is maritime, but the mountains in Snowdonia often get snow.
• Wales has three symbols: Dragon, daffodil and leek.
• There are four times as many sheep as people in Wales.
• The town with the worlds second longest name is to be found in Wales: Llanfair­pwllgwyn­gyllgo­gery­chwyrn­drobwll­llanty­silio­gogo­goch. Translated from welsh to english it means "St. Mary's Church in the hollow of the white hazel near the rapid whirlpool and the church of St. Tysilo with a red cave" - according to Wikipedia.
• The smallest house in Britain can be found in Conwy in northern Wales. It's only 3,05 by 1,8 metres, it's got two floors but is still only 3,1 metres tall.

Sean turned an old slate mine into an adventure park

Västerbotten in northern Sweden and the mountainous area of Snowdonia in Wales, UK, are similar in many ways. We've got reindeer herding, they herd sheep. The nature and scenery is spectacular and the area is remote. They speak welsh, a minority language that's spoken by 580 000 people (slightly more than the 25 000 who speak the sami language).

As opposed to southern Wales there were never any coal mining in the north, people have mainly made a living out of agriculture. But mining slate has been one source of income in the area. Most of the slate quarries are now closed, but that doesn't stop entrepreneurs in the tourism business from developing the area. Now tourism is the main employer in the area. In some parts of Gwynedd 25 percent of the income comes from tourism.
When visiting Wales I had the pleasure of meeting with Sean Taylor, an ex-military who has changed an old slate museum into an adventure park. See more in the clip above, or at Västerbottensnytt.

Gravida Marika bor i tältläger

På senaste tiden har allt fler tiggare dykt upp i Umeå, men de syns också på mindre ställen som utanför Ica i Vännäs. Västerbottensnytt har träffat några av dem i ett tältläger utanför Umeå.

Läs mer på Västerbottensnytt.

Här tvångsregistreras tiggare

Situationen med rumänska tiggare i länet har debatterats ivrigt på sista tiden. På andra sidan norska gränsen kan kommunerna sedan i somras införa lokala förbud mot tiggeri, men i Mo i Rana har tiggarna försvunnit från gatorna, trots att inget förbud införts.

Läs mer på Västerbottensnytt.

Norskt tiggeriförbud främmande i Umeå

I flera norska kommuner måste tiggare registrera sig hos polisen - ett sätt att skydda romerna mot människohandel menar de:

– Polisen har nu en möjlighet att gå in och titta om det verkligen är tiggeri eller om det är organiserad kriminalitet, säger Kai Henriksen, kommunalråd i Rana kommun för konservativa Høyre.

Läs mer på Västerbottensnytt.

Varningen: Barn i tältläger i höst

Det är inte omöjligt att barn kommer att bo i tältläger i höst, det tror politiker. Redan nu bor barn i det romska lägret utanför Umeå, men det finns inget som tyder på att de blir utnyttjade. Läs mer på Västerbottensnytt.

Därför är vi Bästerbotten

Västerbotten har många fina meriter. De senaste åren har länet kunnat stoltsera med lägst kriminalitet, minst antal självmord, vi langar minst sprit till unga och vi har landets mest jämställda uttag av föräldraledigheten. För att bara nämna några.

För Västerbottensnytts räkning bestämde jag mig för att gå till botten med Bästerbotten - och jag tog hjälp av en riktig expert, folklivsfanatiker Job Andersson från humorgruppen Klungan.

Se origninalartiklen från Västerbottensnytt här.

Hela intervjun med Job Andersson finns här under:

Unika bilder från himmelska fridens torg

Den 4 juni i år var det 25 år sedan demonstrationerna på himmelska fridens torg kulminerade och hundratals - kanske tusentals personer dödades. En av dem som fick sitt liv förändrat i grunden är Henry Guo i Umeå.

 Läs hela artikeln på SVT Västerbottensnytt.

Unik utställning: från Kulturrevolution till Ai Weiwei

Förberedelserna inför öppnandet av det gigantiska konstmuseet M+ i Hongkong pågår för fullt. Under tiden har museets chef, Lars Nittve, tagit med sig det bästa av kinesisk samtidskonst till Umeå för en unik utställning på Bildmuseet.

Utställningen ”Right is Wrong” visar kinesisk konst från fyra decennier i Kina.

Läs hela artikeln på SVT Kulturnyheterna.

Important lessons - what Kipcamp taught me

I was one of a lucky few (less than 30) who were chosen to be a Kiplinger fellow this April. The Kiplinger fellowship is sponsored by the Kiplinger foundation to train professional journalists in digital and social media during a weeks stay at the University of Ohio in Columbus.

You can read more about the fellowship, and how to apply, here.

The lectures and seminars were all interesting and thought provoking, but some of them where obviously more useful for larger and national news associations. Others, though, included tips and tools that I find very useful in my everyday work as a local reporter. I'm going to present some of them here.

Crowdsourcing

There is nothing new in asking your readers/viewers to tell you a story. As journalists we are depending on the public to tell us what's going on in their lives, we want to know if someone have done them wrong and we want them to tell the story in front of a camera. Crowdsourcing online is just another way of doing that.

Why is crowdsourcing useful?

Two reasons: You want to get stats or tips that you can't collect from public sources or you want people to engage in your news.

By using online forms you can easily ask people for information, these forms can automatically be transferred into spreadsheets or plotted on maps. Here is a list of tools that can do that.

1. Crowdsourcing - creating news

One of the biggest issues with crowdsourcing in a local newsroom, with a limited audience, is to find a subject that is suitable. It needs to be something that is engaging enough for a lot of people to want to share their story, but not too private and/or controversial, because then people are scared off.  There is also the issue of what you want to use the data gathered for. If it's mainly to get tips for news stories or if it's a strategy to engage people and strengthen your brand. Anyhow, you should not ask for too much information. If you want people to tell you what they voted for, and why, your wise not to ask them for their phone number as well, but if you (as we did) want to make a map of where Skellefteå AIK-fans live, people have no problem writing down their street address.

2. Crowdsourcing - breaking news

Another type of crowdsourcing can be used if you're working on breaking news stories - social media news gathering. Following a hashtag or twitter feed during a breaking news situation is no news anymore, but during kipcamp we were taught strategies to make the job easier.

Imagine the scenario: A breaking news event is happening somewhere that is too far away for you to get there in time, or you don't have resources to send out a team. It's a nightmare, basically. This is what you can do:

Find out where the event is taking place. After that you can search social media by location to find pictures, eye witnesses or first hand information.

Using Gramfeed you can search Instagram for location, hashtags or name. I used it to find images and video during a nazi demonstration in Umeå. If you don't find pictures of what you want, you can search by location to find a "photographer" who you can ask to take pictures for you.

Twitter advanced search is a similar tool for Twitter. You can search location to find eye witnesses or pictures of a specific event, or use a hashtag search to get all available information about something.

Layar allows you to see any picture or tweet that was uploaded in the place where you physically are. That means that if you arrive to a scene too late, you can scan the area with your phone to see if someone uploaded any information from the spot.

By using Foursquare you can see if anyone have checked in to a place that you are interested in. You can also check in yourself, introduce yourself and ask for witnesses. Sadly, Foursquare is not common enough in my part of Sweden to be of any real use.

In my experience, living in the north of Sweden, there are too few people using social media to get useful information from hashtag searches. Location is much more reliable.

Find out to whom it's happening. After that you can search for that person's social media accounts, see who are his or her friends and if there are any connections between people involved in the event.

Facebook graph search can be used to find relationships, background or interests. If you, for example, want to get in contact with someone who lives in Umeå, but is originally from Crimea, you just type "People living in Umeå who are from Crimea" and the relevant matches, if any, will pop up.

Check your information. Sources are neither more or less reliable on social media. This is a list of some spectacular photographs of Hurricane Sandy that have circulated social media. Only problem is that they're fake.     

News gathering in the field

Mobile devices are great for news gathering in the field. But there are a few things to be cautious of:
Know your tools. There is no use having a lot of cool apps on your phone if you don't have enough practise to use them in a real life situation.

• Make sure everyone has a task. If four journalists are sent out to a breaking news event there should be one taking pictures for online and social media, one videofilming, one talking to neighbours and so on.
• Settle a hashtag with other media. This benefits all. Otherwise readers have to scan through different hashtags and you might have to end up using two or even three.
• If more than one reporter is tweeting from the field you should take measures to ensure the quality of what you deliver through your main feed. Curate and choose the most relevant information to tell the story. All reporters' feeds can be done available through twitter lists or tweet maps.
• Most importantly. Check reception. There is no use creating a lot of great content if it can't be shared. In my experience, connection in many parts that we cover is too bad to share video, and sometimes even pictures. 
• Here is a list of tools that can be useful in the field in a breaking news situation.

Creating shareable content

Now, let's say we are great journalists who produce interesting and important news, we want people to share them with friends, both in real life, like over the dinner table, and on social media.

During Andrew Springers (of the ABC) seminar we were introduced to the "Hey Martha"-effect. Basically we want people who are watching our news to shout for their family members going "Hey Martha, you need to come see this". This "Hey Martha"-effect is also what makes people share news in social media.

Considering what shows up in my own Facebook news feed sometimes, the "Hey Martha"-effect can seem discouraging for every serious journalist. But it's not about what we share in our news feeds, but how we package it. Just like you don't use the same layout or angle for broadcast and online, you need to find the angle that goes on social media.

These are Andrew Springers lists on what and how to publish on social media:

5 stories that are inherently social:

• Breaking news
• Stories that touch the heart
• Outrage stories
• Listicles
• Long reads

How to package news for maximum reach:

• Mixing up links and pictures make your updates show up more frequently in people's Facebook news feeds.
• Create lists from news (i.e. list of top20 party schools, 22 jobs that men are paid more than women)
• Find the outrage
• Identify your market and your audience - and their interests
• Think about the social media packaging already before you go out in the field - than it's going to be easier to find the right angle.

Where to go from here?

These examples are only a taste of what was taught during Kipcamp. I really enjoyed my time over there, and even though the lectures were of great value for me professionally, the most important lessons were the discussions about journalism with other great journalists. Talking about ethics with American journalists who view protection of privacy in a totally different way than Swedish journalists do, or discussing freedom of the press with a Chinese journalist were great experiences that I've written about here. 

Please, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or if you want to know more about the Kiplinger fellowship. 

twitter and instagram: @flameglory
e-mail: moafrygell@gmail.com

Creating Sharable Content

(photo: Melissa Prax)

"If the news is important, it will come to me" - that's how many people consumes news these days. They know that their friends are going to share what's important on social media, and see no need to go anywhere else for news.

Andrew @springer is Senior social media editor at ABC. He talked to us Kiplinger fellows on how to create shareble content wednesday 9 april. It's the first time ever I've had a lecturer not being there in person. He used Google hangouts, and it worked pretty well.

He started by asking what we, as media organisations, can contribute with? 

Content, obviously, since that's the business we're in. We give them news, entertainment, important information or investigations, online, in print or broadcast.

The problem is that content is king, everybody wants to sell content (even Red Bull), we're living in a content economy. That means that we have to package our content to make it as tasty as possible for the audience. That's is not pretending to be something you're not, but making the best of what you have.

So this is why media organisations should use social media. We are building our brand, and we do that in places where people hang out to look for content like ours.

This means that we might not be journalists when we market content in social media, but the content we market might very well be journalism.

About ABC on social media

ABC news has 7 million fans on Facebook and 7 million twitter followers, but they don't mainly use it to feed the online, but to make sure that everyone who is on social media knows that ABC news is a brand that produces great content.

They have a social team to run the accounts and a social desk that takes part in breaking news. They constantly examine content to maximize sharing

All major companies are now adapting responsive marketing, this means that you have to listen and answer to the consumers needs, in the context that suits him/her, in a way that fits the context. This is also the way to work social media.

So what drives social traffic?

• Branded sharing - what we put out there
• Organic sharing - what people share

How do we get people to share?

• It's all about emotions
• The "Hey Martha"-effect, what makes people look up from the newspaper to share a story by the breakfast table.
• Sometimes it's a slight change in angle - sometimes it's a whole new angle - it's rarely the same angle as in broadcast

5 stories that are inherently social:

• Breaking news
• Stories that touch the heart
• Outrage stories
• Listicles
• Long reads

How to package news for maximum reach:

• Mixing up links and pictures talks to the Facebook algorithm
• Create lists from news (i.e.list of top20 party schools, 22 jobs that men are payed more than women)
• Find the outrage
• Identify your market and you audience - and their interests
• Think about the social media packaging already before you go out in the field - than it's going to be easier to find the right angle.

Melissa Prax version of this seminar can be read on the Kiplinger website. 

Using mobile for breaking news in the field

With @Sona Patel

Sona was working at the Seattle times at the time of the Lakewood police shooting. This is how they did social media coverage and newsgathering.

1. Reporters were sent out to different locations
2. Each journalist tweeted updates
3. Settle a hashtag with other media, if all use the same hashtag news get out quicker
4. Enable location on reporters' twitter enables you to do a Google map from updates.
5. Every reporter was equipped with an ipad or smartphone to take photos
6. Reporters wrote blog posts from the field
7. Scribble live is a great tool to get social media updates and reporters' coverage into a single (edited) stream.

But the most important thing is to PLAN AHEAD. Different roles make sure everyone knows what they are doing, and get to focus on what they're doing. Don't retweet everything on your main feed, curate what's put out. It needs to be true, and give a fair and balanced version of what's going on. An other option is to point to a twitter list with all the reporters covering the stories on it.

Social media is great for a breaking news situation, but it can also be used for an "everyday"-news situation. Sona Patel used the example of liveblogging from a City Council meeting

1. - One reporter used Scribble live to to provide live updates
2. - Readers commented asked questions during the meeting
3. - Updates were crosspromoted om social media
4. - Scribble live was used to share photos

Sona Patel's apps and tools for mobile newsgathering:

5-0 police scanner allows you to listen to dispatches on the go

Glympse You can share your location with anyone for a specific period of time

Groupme Group messaging service, to communicate with staff during breaking news events.

Camera+ Photo and photoediting in one

Youtube Allows you to shoot video and upload directly. Embeddable and searchable. 

Ustream, Livestream Live video apps

Photosync Take panoramas of a scene of breaking news

Advanced twitter search keep a running search for a specific hashtag. It can be used as a second scanner. Alternative search options are Tweetdeck and Hootsuite

Gramfeed search for Instagram pictures. You can embed them to your feed or livestream.

Foursquare to find out where people are och to find sources.

Tips for shooting with your mobile device: 

• Never use flash
• Use two hands brace your elbows in
• Shoot pictures from hight other than eye level to get a different perspective

Tips on reporting from the field:

• - Don't wait for breaking news to familiarise yourself with the equipment
• - Don't get overwhelmed with doing to much. What are the one or two things that will be a good experience. What do we want to tell our readers. QAs?
• - Communicate with your colleagues. Try not to overlap.
• - Identify mobile reporting strategies for different news events.
• - Focus on what resources you have to work with

Here are Sara Marshalls (of the WSJ) tools for Social media storytelling

Crowdsourcing hockey fans

Last week I tried out a tool that I've been familiar with for some time, but that I never really got around to doing. Skellefteå AIK is a northen swedish hockey team that has been very successful this season and last. They won the Swedish championships last year, and they are probably going to do the same this year. They won the last game in the final series 8 goals to 1 against Färjestad. Game 4 out of 7 is to night.

My collegue in Skellefteå, great hockey reporter Robert Tedestedt, did a piece last week on a kid that lives in Stockholm but who is a big Skellefteå AIK-fan. His dream was to interview the players, and Robert let him do that.
This story got me thinking. There must be plenty of Skellefteå AIK-fans all over the world. People that were born in Skellefteå, but that left for one reason or another, or anyone really who is into hockey and likes their play or a player.

So I created a form that people could fill in details of where they live and what team they support. I shared it on our webpage and in social media. Then I made a map by putting the data from Excel into Google maps. It was really very easy, and fast. The only problem was that too many people wanted to sign up so I lost control over the data collected and published over the weekend. Another problem is that settings in Escenic doesn't allow us to embed external files. I'm going to talk to Stockholm about that.
Thanks to @mjenkins for inspiring this!

People are the same all over the world

(Photo: Kipcamp, Ohio state university)

A great experience, a battle worth fighting and fantastic journalists.

It's been a few days since returned back home after my US experience. I'm still a bit tired, New York is intense, Brooklyn is beautiful and the flight back was long. But even though it was great to be back in NYC the midwest made a great impression on me. Of course Kipcamp itself, with great training and inspiring lecturers, was the most important experience, but I didn't think I was going to have such a great time while I was learning a lot.

The kipcamp environment is a fantastic forum for interesting meetings and important discussions. I never thought I would get the chance to meet so many talented, experienced and insightful journalists. I've listened to stories and shared experiences of fun, good, bad and horrible and I'm really thankful to the other fellows that opened up to me.

However, the most important thing I learned is that journalists are the same all over the world. We fight the same battle to do good, to expose injustices, to stop corruption and to tell a good story. We face the same problems with cutbacks in our news organisations and in our everyday work we have to deal with people trying to tell us how to do our jobs, trying to stop us from doing our jobs or threatening us because we do our jobs.

This has only strengthened me in my conviction that what we do is important, and that it's worth whatever shit we have to go through. It doesn't matter if you're an investigative reporter or tell stories of local government, if you cover fashion or go to war zones to report. Because also people are the same all over the world and they deserve the free press, human rights and whichever truth we are able to tell them.  

Make the readers tell the story - Crowdsource

Storify from Andy Boyles introduction to programming

Apps and tools for journalists

This post is going to be nothing but a list of apps/pages to try out. So here you go:

socialmention.com

This allows you to set up a rss-feed or email alert of social mentions. You can export it as a spreadsheet and filter by date/video/pics.

topsy.com

Allows you to filter by time, so you can go back all time. You can use it to see what people tweeted a long time ago or you can see when a story takes off in social media. Alternative: Howlonghaveyoubeentweeting

snagit

Does screengrabs.

batchgeo.com

Allows you to do mapping from an excel sheet. You can also change colour for different categories and such.

Facebook open graph search

A facebook search engine where you can search people for example "American who lives in Umeå" or "photos of people who graduated from Umeå university"

linkedin.com

Do advanced search to find experts or former employees. Premium version seems to be the way to go.

mapalist.com

With this tool you can do crowdsourced map from info from google forms since it connects to you google account. Alternatives are googlemaps or crowdmaps (you can use subcategories, upload more information, video photo, but is not embeddable) or Ushahidi (sms feature) 

Google forms

Forms can be used to crowdsource material, to get people to share their experieces. Link to them, embed them. They come out as a spread sheet. (Youtube tutorial)

tumblr.com

Collect and curate material. You can't add an image or attached file on a google form, but crowdmap and tumblr does that. This is how the Guardian uses tumblr. Interactive and funny.

fotoforensics.com

Can be used to see where a photo comes from, where was it uploaded before? Has it been altered. Also: tineye.com and google reverse image search (Youtube-tutorial).

allourideas.org

Survey tool.

gramfeed.com

I use gramfeed a lot. It's a great tool for finding pictures from places you can't go to. And if you find a photo you also find a photographer. Search by location or hashtag. Alternative: Geofeedia, banjo or for youtube: mappeo (coming soon?).

rebelmouse.com

Collect links and updates from social media. Similar to Storify but I prefer this. Probably because the mouse is awesome!

Layar

App that lets you scan the place you're at for photos. Good tool if you arrive late at a place where something happened.

foursquare 

Where are you? Now we know, and this means that we can ask why you where there. A journalist can check in to find sources or information that only local people know.

whisper

Gossip. Thoughts. And... yeah that's about it.

snapchat

Whisper met Instagram and had a baby - that only lived for 10 seconds.

(This is going to look sooo much better when I edit it on my laptop)

(And oh, you're a journalist not a computer, remember to do what computers don't do very well: TALK TO PEOPLE)

Thanks @springer, @doughaddix, @lcboyd, @webjournalist and @mjenkins!

Comedian does the data viz thing - and gets stuck in Columbus

I say this only once:  Andy Boyle is one of the funniest lecturers I've ever hade the pleasure to encounter. Just reading his tweets after the seminar had me in stitches.

This is the story: Andy misses his flight (he also misses his headphones, since he left them at OSU, but thats a different story) and ends up at a really, and I mean really, dodgy hotell for the night. And he tweets things like these:

This is the inside of the hotel shuttle. I don't even know how to respond anymore. pic.twitter.com/5rAldsTCTD

— Andy Boyle (@andymboyle) 11 april 2014

Waiting for my airport shuttle from this place. Half-assuming I'm just gunna get in the back of here. pic.twitter.com/QdFaL6gMd7

— Andy Boyle (@andymboyle) 11 april 2014

Now that's not the story here. Andy Boyle is a standup comedian, but he is also an web developer at the Chicago Tribune, and that's why he came to Columbus in the first place, to teach us ignorant journalists that programming can be helpful if you want to crowdsource, do cool graphics or just look good.

So he starts off by explaing the internet to us, the oblivious souls of Kipcamp, like this:

Internet is a bar.

Somewhere, where a lot of guys with neck beards sit, are the server rack.

Your drink is a webpage. So you go "Give me a high quality beer".

Bartender is a DNS, who provides you with that.

And just like getting a beer out of the fridge you get it from your IP.

The different ways you might experience a beer is like viewing a website in different browsers.

Then he goes on telling us how much cheaper everything is now, compared to what it used to be, when it comes to storage, servers and such. We also got great examples of how you could use simple spread sheet information to automatically create lists or even to generate articles from police reports

Today's pictures

The British guy stacked up (that's a lot of free food and soft drinks)

More free food. Omg.

Robert Hernandez has a special relationship to his computer. And check out the glasses!

I hear strange sounds

Today has been really intense.

I just returned to my hotel room and there was music on, that really freaked me out until i realised someone from the hotel had been in here and put chocolates on my bed and turned on the radio.

my head doesn't function normally right now. We have had 4 seminars, to much food, strange/great/unexpected conversations.

First thing after breakfast Knight Kiplinger hosted a discussion about the situation for journalism today, the development the last years and the future. I couldn't really contribute, but it was interesting listening in to the discussion.

In the morning we're inspired by great lecturer Robert Hernandez (@webjournalist), he spoke about social media, why and how we could/should use it. I really don't have the energy to properly write about the lecture right now, but he reminded us of what's important: no matter how useful or attractive social media seems, you're always a journalist, and you have to do your job properly.

Later on Jeff Cutler (@jeffcutler) continued speaking about social media. He presented some tools and practices that I think may be useful in our newsroom.

Around 3 pm my head was already full, and I kind of regret that, because I think that Kevin Z Smiths (@SPJethicschair) discussion about ethics in social media was really interesting. Especially since we do things very different in Sweden. I would like to say that we have higher standards, but thats not really fair, because we really have different standards, and having spoken to Kevin afterwards I have a deeper understanding of how things are done over here, even though I don't always agree.

Now, enough of this rant. Good night.

Best regards from a washed up swede.

Pics from a 15 h journey

This country has many perks. The Coffee is not one of them.

Roy Liechtenstein welcomed me at the airport.

Sadly, the football season hasn't started yet. The arena is huge!

Attention dogs!

Conversations for a 15 hours (+) journey

Go west - were the skies are blue.

Pet shop boys were right. It's not just sunny California - but sunny Columbus today. I slept a good 9 hours and woke up early for a run in the campus area. It's quite chilly out, around 35 F, but running in the mornings gives you a good "feel" of  a place, of a place itself; the soul of the buildings, their material, the way the sun shines on them from a different angle. And those little things, that tend to get lost as soon as people start to wake up, like squirrels, funny birds I've never seen before, street sweepers.

Yesterday was intense. I woke up 5:40 am and got ready. Flights: 1 hour to Stockholm, waiting around, standing in line, safety, passport control, 8 hours flight to Newark (got to see Wolf on wallstreet - ok film, the trailer was better), passport control (border police asked me why I was travelling alone, "Nobody wanted to come with me" I said, honestly, Him: A pretty girl like you?" Me: Smiled and bit my tongue), toll, bagage check, train, safety check, taxi, take off and landing in Columbus.

The plane Newark-Port Columbus was a sad creature, similar to the aircraft that carries passangers between Östersund-Umeå-Luleå. But I got to sit next to a very nice lady from San Fransisco who was visiting her boyfriend in Columbus. We're wearing the same nailpolish, that's a conversation starter!

In Columbus I had to wait for the hotel shuttle for almost an hour, but I didn't mind really, the weather was great yesterday and I had a stroll around the pick up area. The only green was the fenced dog litter area.

The boy how picked me up was a sweet little thing, student at the unversity (like 70 percent of hotel personnel) he played soccer and studied some kind of physical therapy.

Later that night I had dinner in the hotel lounge where I ran in to another Kiplinger fellow, Stuart from BBC. He turned out to be a nice guy, a fast drinker and a good laugh. Welsh by birth and self-taught sports fan.

We'll probably skip some classes to go watch a hockey game. Go Blue jackets!