On a rough day of ups and downs I won’t bore you with, the biggest up was the boost to our Web page views from CNN.com’s link to our story about the Bend 14-year-old surfer whose severed arm was reattached.
And we, in turn, owe KGW in Portland for helping rush video to us of the family’s news conference.
You’d better bet I’ll be keeping the Web desk at CNN aware of interesting, even wacky news from the High Desert. It’s nice to roll out the welcome mat!;-)
I do think we’re developing something of a community at KTVZ.COM with the article comments.
When the news is slow, most of the “regulars” just snipe at each other, give me grief over typos, others come to my defense, etc., etc.
But in a time of tragedy, like this week’s drowning of a popular, dare I say beloved ER doctor, and … wow.
An outpouring of human emotions – support, prayers, remembrances and salutes – and while I do appreciate the page views (heh), I moreso appreciate how this has become a place to share when there’s really no other public way to do so. And I appreciate every single one of the folks taking the time to make those posts.
I’ll probably do my Friday on-air piece about this wonderful phenomenon, which almost wipes out the icky taste of those who like to hijack discussions, dump on each other, make outlandish accusations, etc.
THIS is why I pushed so hard for comments, despite the risks – not to babysit or referee, but to just sit back and watch a community sharing its views and feelings – be they grief, joy, frustration, what have you.
Thanks to all. It’s a great feeling, and I so appreciate the wonderful use of our little corner of cyberspace.
Leave it to that potently professional combination of Pixar and Disney to tell, in wonderful, enjoyable fashion the tale of a cute little, lonely solar-powered futuristic robot, to make tons of points about today’s society, the dangers we face (rampant consumerism, trashing our planet, etc.) and to do so with many references to the classic movies of the past, from Poseidon Adventure to 2001’s Hal to… well, let’s just say it all goes so swimmingly that I tried to applaud. Just darn few joined me.
A friend who was anxiously looking forward to the movie told me she felt a bit let down about the none-too-subtle save-the-planet messages. But truly, the saga of Wall-E (they sent full-size replicas to the theaters, as shown above) and his love of Eve is a throwback in every good sense of the word to the best movies of the past. (It features a whole lot of 1969’s “Hello Dolly,” which makes nobody’s best of lists but makes for a convenient touchstone.)
And the movie literally toys with the issue I and many others discuss and ponder all the time – will technology save us, or kill us? You could say that in this movie, it does both, sort of.
I mean, it takes one super-flabby starship captain with backbone to buck the company (Buy N’ Large, BNL apparently supplants the world’s governments – and Fred Willard is the presidential CEO! Classic! And the Bare Naked Ladies have those initials, too) HAL-ish autopilot and get those fellow flabby never-walk folks back to Earth, where mankind must clean up the trash, start planting and start all over again. In a sense, it’s teamwork of man and machine that saves the day – and I happen to think that’s a pretty neat point to make, and pretty darn rare.
But the question then arises – if all that were to happen, if we were to survive despite ourselves, would mankind make the same mistakes again? We are who we are, and even if we learn one very painful lesson over centuries as refugees, it seems we can stumble into a whole bunch of others once back home, all too easily – it’s what we do best. 😉
So this movie works on many levels – a love story, a fable, just a fun time. I’m sure some mega-conservatives will call it brainwashing of our children. Balderdash and poppycock. (Oh, and if you have the option, be sure to see it at Regal’s DLP screen, as we did Ratatouille – my eyes don’t like 3-D at all, but this technology makes everything so vivid and bright, it’s like Dolby for the eyes – wowzers!)
All this plot-reflecting will make more sense once you’ve seen the movie, which I, BARN-E (Biological Animated Rushed Nerd-Energetic) highly recommends.
Testing 1-2-3 – is this thing on?
Well, yes and noooo.
You see, for reasons I won’t dive too deeply into, our Internet address got a bit, um, munged up overnight. And while the problem was fixed this morning, A Certain Cable Company – I mean, Broadband company’s servers are sticking to the bad nasty address for KTVZ.COM like glue.
So a sizable chunk of our online audience can’t see us, and I heard from a few – not a ton, but a few – today asking “what’s going on?” I sure wish I could fix it, or that our own techs could, but apparently it’s in the servers at this certain Cabl – I mean, Broadband company that our remaining issues lie.
And of course, technology frustrates you as well, perhaps even daily. Such is life in the 21st Century. 😉
Fridays aren’t as fun when they are the end of a week semi-off.
Oh well, at least nothing big blew up during my week away from the newsroom, and I was able to sort of compose my day rather than rush to the station, etc.
Tonight my darlin wife Deb and I celebrated a) our 25th wedding anniversary and b) her — birthday (hey, ya don’t stay married a quarter-century by blabbing THAT particular number;-)
She’s put up with a lot, and while this is only a semi-personal (and quasi-corporate;-) blog, I think expressing my undying love for my wife here isn’t going to violate any protocols.
Now if only she could find a job in this town. Heh.
Anyway, for any of you who will be AFK (away from keyboard) as the weather turns Wonderful (finally!) and summer finally arrives, one thing I learned this week via my Motorola Q is that our news articles on the mobile side now include our photos, too! Super nifty! Check it out some time.
I can’t remember when was the last time I downloaded and installed two new browswers in a day – has to be several if not many years. But with my ‘stay-cation’ trundling along, I figured, no time like the present – especially with the world record being sought today on Firefox 3‘s release. So I also grabbed Opera 9.5, and put them both to the test on my favorite site in the whole wide world.
BOTH loaded KTVZ.COM faster than Internet Explorer 7 does. Each had an issue – some ads are missing (horror!) in Opera and I had to download the latest Adobe Flash Player to make the Top Stories area work right in Firefox 3. (Unlike in IE, where it just shows a snazzy automation when done, you have to shut down Firefox to finish updating the Adobe Flash Player in it – what’s up with that???)
Anyway, each has little whizzy new features, like the beefed up address-bar search capabilities in Firefox. I’ll try to play with more of each browser’s features in coming days, but face it – many of us have to work with our browsers, and for example, the Website’s content management system is only IE-friendly, not to mention the lack of a preview pane in Outlook Web Access when you use non-Microsoft browsers.
Sigh. Still, with IE8 due later this year, it’s nice to see competition still pushing our main “window to the Web” forward, even if they are features many of us will rarely use. And you can’t beat the price! 😉
I’ve made it to ORblogs! It’s a fun place to visit to see what folks are blogging about all over the Beaver State (what a nickname;-)
I’m on ‘stay-cation,’ but I do figure to try out Opera 9.5, released last week, and Firefox 3.0, due out Tuesday. And if we have more fires, whoa nelly, all bets are off;-) I looked again at Ning tonight but it’s just too trendy – I feel KickApps has more meat on its bones and just maybe can be bent to work/look like we want for the online home/forum/message board/blog/upload photo/video thing I’m calling the KTVZ.COMmunity;-) Hopefully we’d draw some regulars with interesting things to say and not just the drive-by article commenters that send a shiver down my spine;-)
Not sure why they took a bad-luck name – there’s a story there, but Pandora is one fun, free, simple and non-intrusive music player.
A product of the Music Genome Project, you tell it what artists you like, it finds similar ones and creates “stations,” much like Slacker and others of its ilk. But it’s a clean interface, and you sure can’t beat the “TURN IT UP” fidelity of the streaming music, at least on my broadband.
I also love the bio backgrounds on artists, always fun.
I’d been meaning to give Pandora a try – am glad I have, and now heartily endorse it for you, too;-)
Wow, check this out: http://echuck.newsvine.com/_news/2008/06/13/1571290-in-memoriam-nbc-newsman-tim-russert – such wonderfully written, heartfelt comments on the passing of someone many of us felt we knew, and liked, even though we’d never met him.
I was in Master Control, prepping to record tonight’s ‘Leave it to Barney” (darn that lint roller!;-) when the golf gave way to an NBC News Special Report slide. Then,Tom Brokaw. Then the sad news of Tim Russert’s passing. It was a shock, I’m guessing, to everyone when they heard the news. Surely at our network, in our profession, and to middle-aged males across America who work too hard, get too much stress and too little sleep, and fear the pain that takes us to the Next Stage.
Tonight also marks the start of time away from the newsroom, a whole week, to mark my 25th wedding anniversary to darling Deb. It’s, to use the new term, a ‘Staycation’ – because until my wife finds a job;-/ we can’t afford to go far, much less to the dreamed-of Hawaii. Plus, there’s this beast called KTVZ.COM that always needs feeding, and the folks in the newsroom only know so much about how to do that. My fault, I suppose. I care too much about every word, want to beat back every typo, so… I can’t let go.
Former station manager Jim DeChant, the Wise Buddha of NewsChannel 21, taught me some good lessons when I arrived a few years back, with only high school and college TV experience. He (and others to be sure), talk of the special power of television to bring people into our living rooms, day and night, to the point where we truly feel we know them (and like them, hopefully), so when we lose them, it’s like a loss in the family.
Those Newsvine tributes show just how true it is. They are almost more tear-inducing than the loss itself. People who don’t know each other and actually never knew Tim Russert, felt they knew him, and with his passing, we shed collective tears. The Internet has that power. So does television. May we use it wisely, and try never to abuse it. It’s too important.
And I’ll do my best to make it less “stay” and more “cation” over the next week. If that means a few less updates of the Website – well, my apologies. Get away from the keyboard, now that the High Desert has finally warmed up. Read a book in Drake Park. Get on that bike. Hug those spouses and kids.
Life’s too short. Who needs another reminder?;-)
Here’s a familiar set of directions; Lather, rinse, repeat. (Do you repeat? Is it necessary, or a clever way to get you to buy more shampoo?)
If I could be the one to place directions on the side of most PCs, they’d say: “BEFORE CALLING CUSTOMER SUPPORT OR A TECH: Clear your cache (temporary Internet files) and cookies, reboot and see if that solves the problem.”
I bet, half the time at least, it does.
It feels like a temporary Band-Aid of a fix, and sometimes, it is. But I believe these boxes we depend on so much sometimes just need the digital equivalent of clearing one’s throat.
I wonder how much dough the Geek Squads of the world make for “fixing” problems that boil down to trying these simple steps. Sure, things can get hideously messed up tech-wise, but it never hurts to do these simple steps first. (You might have to remember some passwords, even if you don’t tell Internet Explorer, for example, to delete them – but that’s a small price to pay to, in my most recent case, stop your hard drive from thrashing.)
There. I feel better. 😉
Leave it to Barney 