October 16, 2011

Sunday Tech Talk

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I have three questions for the hive mind:

  1. What’s the best service out there for syncing up folders? DropBox? SugarSync? Or, since I’m a Windows-only user and only have a few gigabytes of stuff that I care about, should I just use Microsoft’s free service? Are there nonobvious pitfalls to watch out for?
  2. What’s the best travel site these days? I’m embarrassed to admit that I still creak along with Expedia. What things do other sites do better?
  3. For all you Gmail users: what client do you use? Does everyone just use Gmail’s web client, or is there something better out there?

And finally, a tech success story, just because they seem so rare these days. A couple of weeks ago the power went out here, and when it came back up my email database had been corrupted. After diddling around a bit I gave up and figured I’d take another run at it later in the day. But when I got back from lunch, there was an alert on my computer telling me that my RAID drive had finished repairing itself. Sure enough, I rebooted and everything was fine. So the extra few dollars I spent getting a RAID array when I bought my new box a couple of years ago actually paid off. And it worked completely automatically in the background, just like it’s supposed to. I guess it says something about modern computing that I’m a little shocked at this.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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