The do-it-yourself rolling blackout

Californians who want to protest the state's energy crisis and President Bush's supply-side solution from home now have a new option -- their very own blackout.

An e-mail that's making the rounds online calls for complete darkness between 7 and 10 p.m. on June 21, the first day of summer. On an evening when you might rather be cranking up the AC or watching television, activists are asking people to "unplug whatever you can unplug in your house."

"It's a simple protest and a symbolic act," the e-mail says. "Light a candle to the Sungoddess, kiss and tell - have fun in the dark."

The idea -- an attempt to prove that conservation can help solve the energy crisis -- is promising. But there's one nagging question: What if you're already in the dark when it comes time to protest? What good is turning out the lights if California's public utility commission has already done it for you? And should you find yourself in such a predicament, is there anything else you can do to send a message to the White House?

All suggestions are welcome. -- Damien Cave [3:20 p.m. PDT, May 14, 2001]

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McVeigh execution delay makes dot-com say hooray!

The announcement that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh won't be executed until June 11th at the earliest is good news for the dot-com that wants to webcast his death.

Last month, we reported in "The execution will not be webcast" that an Indiana district judge ruled to keep Entertainment Network, best-known for the soft-core site VoyeurDorm, from webcasting McVeigh's death by lethal injection, claiming that the such a public display of McVeigh's death could lead to prison disturbances

Although the company's CEO, David Marshlack, vowed to appeal the ruling, the company ultimately decided it didn't have enough time to push the appeal forward without risking a delay of McVeigh's death.

Now that a FBI screw-up has delayed it for them, the Internet company is reassessing its case. "We already talked to the attorneys," said CEO David Marshlack, "They're going to reassess the situation, and let us know Monday or Tuesday if we need to go forward. I'd like to appeal. If they feel we have enough time to mount an appeal, we will."

Marshlack says the company would use the broadcast of the execution to launch their new search engine. But adds that their motives are freedom, not opportunism: "I gotta tell you, I'd like to go back out there, because it's an important issue for me. I'm fighting for the right of information. It's for us, for you guys, for everybody." -- Katharine Mieszkowski and Amy Standen [4 p.m. PDT, May 11, 2001]

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Ambrosia of the Web weary: The Dot Goner

Raise a glass to the dot-com downturn.

Spotted on the bar menu at the Potrero Brewing Company in San Francisco's dot-com flatlands: the Dot Goner. It's a drink that consists of Southern Comfort, creme de cassis, orange juice and a splash of soda water.

"We do a lot of pink-slip parties here. It's kind of a joke," says Robert Gray, general manager.

The Dot Goner has been on the menu for about a month. Potrero Brewing used to also have a drink called the Pink Slip (Bacardi lite, O.J., pineapple juice and peppermint schnapps). But the name's been changed to Chuck's Power Puff, because "we didn't want to offend people with too many dot-com jokes," says Gray.

The bar and restaurant first caught waves of downsized dot-commers last October, when employees from neighboring LoopNet, Evite and Protozoa came in to drown their sorrows after the ax fell.

"One person would come in, and say, 'There are about thirty more people coming here.'"

After all, with or without a steady paycheck, who doesn't need an extra shot of Southern Comfort these days? -- Katharine Mieszkowski [4:15 p.m. PDT, May 11, 2001]

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SmarterChild gets benched

On Tuesday, we wrote about SmarterChild, a new "bot" that lived inside the AOL Instant Messenger system and provided instant information like news, weather reports and stock quotes. Today, SmarterChild disappeared from the system.

According to Peter Levitan, CEO of ActiveBuddy -- creators of SmarterChild -- the bot wasn't quite ready for prime time. It was up on the system merely as a demonstration of the service, with AOL's tacit approval, but wasn't intended to be in public distribution. This isn't the first time that ActiveBuddy has had to dismantle an alpha version of a buddy when it became suddenly popular. Says Levitan: "From a viral nature, when the name of one of our buddies gets out, it's like wildfire. which is good."

The official version of SmarterChild (or a similarly named service bot) will launch next month, says Levitan, although a public beta version will be available sooner. -- Janelle Brown [11:45 a.m. PDT, May 9, 2001]

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Harvard sit-in protesters head for the showers!

The student protesters that spent 21 days sitting in at Harvard's Massachusetts Hall to demand a "living wage" for the university's lowest-paid workers have left the building. And what did it take to get them out, after 21 days without a shower? The announcement of the formation of a new committee!

That's right: Harvard didn't readily concede that it would start paying the lowest paid workers on campus the full $10.25 an hour that the protesters had demanded. But the university did announce the formation of a new committee made up of students, faculty and workers to consider the issue, as well as other campus labor practices.

President Neil L. Rudenstine said in a statement that there will be a moratorium on further "outsourcing" of work performed by "custodians, food-service personnel, museum guards, or parking attendants until the committee completes its work and its recommendations are acted upon." Rudenstine also said that any pay increases for custodial workers negotiated with the service workers union will be retroactive.

Retroactive pay increases? No more outsourcing? The Harvard students have already declared victory. But perhaps they should wait to see whether this new committee has any teeth or is just another stalling tactic. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [1:30 p.m. PDT, May 8, 2001]

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The new CEO of Yahoo doesn't speak cubicle

"'My office will be the same size as everybody else's -- well, not an office ... what do you call it?' A cubicle? 'Yeah, a cubicle.'"

-- Terry Semel, the new CEO of Yahoo, quoted by Patricia Sellers in Fortune magazine, "Yahoo Goes to the Movies," May 14, 2001. Semel, a recent transplant from Hollywood where he was once the co-CEO of Warner Bros., apparently knows as much about working in Silicon Valley as then-President George Bush knew about shopping for groceries back in February 1992 when he had his infamous encounter with a grocery-store scanner. --Katharine Mieszkowski [12:15 p.m. PDT, May 8, 2001]

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