Tag: technology

Tightening up, letting loose and saving memories: Evernote and Spotify

I am now listening to a live version of a favorite ELO song on Spotify that I NEVER would have known existed, if not for Spotify.

Some swear by Rhapsody, others by Pandora – I Googled for comparisons and still feel I’ve settled into the right home.

I’ve followed a few friends there, and they have introduced me to new music that’s up my pop/smooth alley that I NEVER would have known existed if not for Spotify.

I am paying $10 a month, and Spotify’s postings indicate to me some of that money DOES go to the artists – for all I know, the same sliver that actually got to them from the albums, cassettes and CDs I’ve bought over the decades. I hope it’s even more.

All I miss are the liner notes/lyric sheets. The bios are nice, if brief. They have a lot of foreign/compilation albums by artists with outtakes/alternates etc. I again, never would have known existed if not for Spotify.

For example, had no idea Jeff Lynne has yet again returned to ELO and — like Chicago with its recent Nashville Sessions — they re-recorded their hits to, perhaps, make more direct-to-them digital lucre. Good for them! And for folks like me and my aging kindred spirits, because to hear the same artists still sounding great 40 years or so later is a hopeful godsend for someone who hopes his writing these days is as good as way back then — perhaps better, more seasoned in a way, as I still Ride the Tide of the Daily News.

Then there’s Evernote – I bought the ‘Evernote For Dummies’ book about it on my Nook (darn images are too small but otherwise…;-) I am not using it yet for more than  just an always-synced, everywhere (4-5-6 devices) same set of notes without having to print them out or go deep-searching the PC. It’s also an idea-catcher, a to-do list that has bells and whistles I doubt I’ll ever use – heck, just to get things organized enough to organize the notes into notebooks and then stacks of notebooks SOUNDS so simple, but perhaps calls for a greater degree of organization than Messy Yours Truly will ever get to. But at least all those notes will be searchable forever more.

Put Evernote or some future version of it into the future version of Google Glass and an aging, dottering, forgetful Barney will never truly “forget” a thing – names will go with faces, and I can at least for a while “fake remembering.”

The Cloud Memory. The Great Collective. Both reassuring and a bit unnerving at the same time.

But I can’t re-record/post the old news. It’s sort of like Shakespeare or Picasso or Beethoven or The Beatles — some agent or such applauding over their latest masterpiece — and then immediately going, “Great stuff chaps! But what have you got new TODAY?” Always wanting more.

And while some of my tide-riding gets oh-so-dreadfully familiar, even routine after all those decades – crashes, crime, politics, etc. etc. – so much unhappy news, occasionally broken by wonderful good-news stories — at least no two days in my field are exactly the same, and you never know what’s going to come in over the transom (look it up) to change the rest of your day, week, maybe even month. Maybe even life.

Put THAT in your Evernote and remember it. Or let it remember for you!

(PS: Read just today – and I remember! – that they have found another 10 or so genes that deal with the memory Alzheimer’s eats away. It’s like a race against time – will they fix that awful theft of a disease before most of my generation is in its clutches? Only time will tell. I forget who said that first;-)

The new news symbiosis (no blackout when it comes to info-sharing)

I started hearing about power outages this evening near Sunriver and La Pine.

I asked about it on our Facebook page. In minutes, dozens of reports – well before I got hold of the Midstate Electric Co-op representative to start providing reports.

I used the Facebook friends’ info to help tell the story – the neighborhoods and roads in the affected area.

Soon, I had official info to weave in – not just official info, but also from the most sought after thing in the news world – real people.

Put the two together, and you have magic. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen a lot. It’s grown every year in the past several.

The questions are simple and obvious, in this case: No political messes, no angles or subtext.

How big is this outage? How long will it last? Phone lines can melt down, and … people want to know.

People hear sirens, see a bunch of police cars, and they ask … me, us. Often on Facebook, where they hang out. I appreciate their trust in us, and try to answer when I can.

We’ve found out about plenty of things on Facebook from people who wouldn’t e-mail or pick up a phone, but feel comfortable weighing in there. (Do I wish they’d comment on our Website instead? Yes, for a host of reasons, and I’m trying to spark conversations. But people are where they are, and like what they like. We can only affect that so much.) Just about every day, a reporter suggest we seek out some folks willing to help in a story — and sometimes, like last week, they end up on the air.

It’s a wonderful symbiosis — they help us, we help them. Information is shared, news is gathered, from new sources and not-so-new.

When it comes to the Future of News and Is Everyone a Journalist Now? Great themes for hand-wringing and crystal ball-gazing — pontificators can pontificate, consultants can consult, advisers can advise.

Meanwhile, I… we are … just doing it. Day by day, post by post.

And it’s pretty darn cool. A 2-way social media avenue that benefits both parties.

No money changes hands, and that worries a lot of people who justifiably need to find how to pay for things of value that we provide.

It’s like my old T-shirt slogan idea: Information wants to be free! (But I want a raise). Cognitive dissonance that doesn’t help directly pay the bills — but return on reputation IS worth something, right?

Those questions need answers, and one way or another, they will come.

But in the meantime, in between time… ain’t we got fun?

As always, to our Facebook friends: Thanks for the help, folks.

Stop the men’s pants madness! (Or, a pocket full of problems)

Please, men’s pants manufacturers.

I beg of you. Don’t go changing, to try to please me (props to Billy Joel.)

I bought some new pants a few weeks back. No doubt due to the technology advances of the day, and the need to carry smartphones but not want them scratched by keys or something = they have put a DIVIDER in the bottom of the pocket.

Um, no. No thanks.

So now, my keys end up straddling the divider, and of course the change is in one when I need it from the other, so out come the keys and the smartphone and change to get to the buried treasure.

Life was simpler back when a pocket was just a pocket. One pocket, indivisible, for convenience and pleasantry for all.

If I wanted to have 15 compartments, I’d carry a purse, as women do — I can only imagine the frustration THEY feel trying to find what’s where. Unless they are more organized than I am.

I’m not about to become a backpack or fanny pack kind of guy. (Though I do use a duffel bag of sorts that my boss provided years ago from a convention in Vegas. I use just the main compartment, and occasionally futz with the zippers I ignore.

So once again, in an area far removed from technology, technology invades, and makes something simple… not.

I used to just have to see if a pair of pants fit, had a pleasing texture, weren’t too thin a fabric or stiff, right hem length etc.

Now I have to pick a pair of pants precisely to peruse the perfect pocket placement?

Pshaw.

UPDATE: I just remembered (ya get older, you just remember a lot of stuff later;-) that these other new pants of me also have a 2-pocket pocket, but it’s the full pocket, from top to bottom. That’s better, BUT still a problem in that they are so narrow, keys get wedged in there — I don’t have that many – and again everything has to come out, tissues etc. flying, to get out the keys or such. We may be in a Golden Age of Experimentation and Innovation when it comes to pants pockets. But like so many things, I yearn for the good ol’, simpler days. Not all the good ol’ days thought – the Nehru jackets and flared jeans can stay back in the past;-)

Investing in the future (from tech to desks)

We got new desks in the newsroom this week.

Big whoop you say? Well, they are a grand step up from what we had, let me tell ya.

We’ve had one of our periodic waves of staff turnover this year in the newsroom — not unusual for small-market TV stations. But it also scrubs the “institutional memory” of just how far we’ve come in a few short years.

When I started at KTVZ back in early 2005, we had a half-hour 6pm news. The newsroom was cramped and in dire need of updating. We had a few cameras, a few cars, a few reporters and no full-time photographers.

That was early in News-Press and Gazette Co.’s ownership of the station, just after we moved on from Z-21 (boy does that stick) to NewsChannel 21.

We have come a long, long way. I wish my somewhat aging home computer was as good as the newer all-in-one now on my new desk at work. We have 2 full-time photographers, a brand-new master control system, a brand-new editing system, a really full-of-fine-folks newsroom and much to be proud of.

Of course, much of the behind-the-scenes stuff isn’t noticed — or is only noticed during the inevitable hiccups that happen with any big technical upgrade these days. Many companies wrestle behind the scenes with such matters. Ours is just more … public than others.

We’ve had fleets of engineers and techs flown in from afar, working to do what so many companies face challenges with – getting stuff from different vendors to work together as well as they should. (Heck, sometimes it’s hard enough to get one company’s products working right with each other.)

So… all of this came to mind today as I read Bulletin Editor-in-Chief John Costa’s column on changes happening at the paper and more to come to deal with its struggle in today’s economy — and with the changing tastes of readers and viewers. For example, I’m reading more great, fun, interesting magazines than ever – but all on my Nook Tablet. Change happens, and we all struggle mightily to keep up.

Newspapers, like other media,were blessed with the traditional every 2 (or 4) year bump in political advertising (like it or, well…). But those kinds of fairly dependable things (like the Olympics) are factored into corporate budgets. What we really all need is a sustained recovery, and, one must hope, some leadership among our leaders to actually get tough problems solved and give businesses a reason to confidently invest in the future.

I’ve never been prouder of where I work or the people I work with. We’ve seen some great people move on to bigger and better things (one of the more visible – Chris Warren on The Weather Channel! Now owned by NBC, who’da thunk. And what’s with TWC deciding that all big storms need names? Sheesh. But I digress, as usual.;-)

As we await a whole new graphics look on the station and more improvements (and more getting stuff to work right — THANKS for the many long days and nights, to our stalwart engineers!) – I just wanted to offer a reminder that much happens behind the scenes – and when it works right, you’ll never notice the improvements that will, for example, make more of our syndicated shows come to you in crisp, clear HD.

If that sounds like puffy corporate-PR-speak, oh well, please forgive a bit of chest-thumping. Just wanted you to know.

Before Facebook, There Was the Phone Book

OK, I know, comparing Facebook to the ol’ phone book is a little odd, but I’ll try.

First, a funny image – that of Steve Martin in The Jerk, running through the neighborhood, shouting, ‘The new phone books are here!”

Well, I wasn’t THAT over the moon about them, but let me tell you, few things were a reporter’s best friend as much as those always-growing (til now) collections of pulp with shiny covers. We learned to keep the old ones, because sometimes, people paid the EXTRA fee to get themselves unlisted (see some parallels there to the world of headaches of ‘opting out’ of having your name all over the Web?)

I even wrote stories, honestly, where I tracked the growth of a community – this one – by comparing the previous year’s phone book pages to the new one’s. Twenty more pages, etc. Or look for new Yellow Pages categories, like ‘Internet Service Providers.’ Sometimes they’d throw me off by changing the font size or columns, but tallying the pages was just another simple way to see how fast we are – whoops, make that – were  – growing.

I bring this up in a not-totally-random fashion. Last week, trying to help someone with a potential news story, I used Google to find a name, then someone local related to them. Twice, I thought I hit pay dirt – turning to the phone book, they were listed!

But alas, both were disconnected.

Why? Odds are, because they now live their lives on cell phones, so who needs an old ‘land line’ phone to pay for? The terms ‘boat anchor’ (or even ‘buggy whip’) come to mind.

I do understand. We switched to the cheaper cable-modem version of a land line, but I just can’t quite bring myself to cut the cord, one that’s fed me like an umbilical cord so much news over the years.

But you watch – phone books will start to shrink, unless there’s some societal revolution that tells people they want their cell number to be found in one, communal place, rather than catch as catch can in Internet phone number search sites.

This, I highly doubt will happen.

So is the rise of the cell phone a triumph of privacy, in a way? Spam and junk calls still find their way to them – usually by ‘robo-calls,’ where an automated dialer hits EVERY number. (I have to explain that to folks who call about a scam and wonder, ‘How did they get my number?’ They didn’t – they call EVERY number, in a row.)

But in a way, the future dimunition, even possible demise of the lowly phone book as a place everyone turned to as a place to find your and just about everyone’s name, address and phone number is sad, and perhaps another piece of the loss of community – as we all go our separate ways, for better and/or worse.

And that’s a shame. Not just for reporters, but for those young rascals who used to flip through it, eyes closed, randomly point at a number to call and say, ‘Pardon me, but do you have Prince Albert in a can?” (Rimshot.)

It’s not the kind of societal change many will have heartburn over (unless you work for what used to be THE Phone Co.) But it’s sad, nonetheless. To me, anyway.

I mean, not everyone in the phone book was your ‘friend,’ Facebook style. But somehow, connecting only to ‘friends’ seems a bit … insular. (Especially when people ‘friend’ you on Facebook and you have NO clue who they are, then you are stuck on that dilemma of accepting, rejecting or ignoring.)

(Another phone book plus – no profile photo required. Leaves more to the imagination, which is something we need to cultivate in these days of amazing movie special effects that can outshine our wildest dreams. Besides, if you have a ‘face for radio’ like yours truly, who needs everyone knowing what you look like?;-)

I remember reading of a reporter who used to randomly point at names in the phone book, call them and turn their lives into wonderful features. I know that’s possible, because everyone has at least one story to tell – the story of their lives, which can be as fascinating as any novel or movie.

Yes, you can probably do the same thing online. But it’s not the same – and these days, I daresay, the percentage who would agree to share some intimate details with a stranger over the phone are probably dropping even faster than those old-fogey landline phones.

No, now we share more such details of our lives than ever before – the crises, the joys, the random day-to-day thoughts (such as this!) with people who are our online “friends.” More open, in a way, than ever before, but more closed as well.

Such is the paradox of modern life, I suppose.

Leave it to wonderful WALL-E to make many points, robotically

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.

Frustration and aggravation

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. 😉

Top easy tech tips (works, oh, half the time at least)

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. 😉

Tech joy (or, ‘Clear your cache’)

Why oh why can’t we make computers that just work?

If I had a nickel for every blog post worldwide that had such a thought, I probably could afford a top-of-the-line computer – and want to bet it too would be balky and aggravating?

And then there’s the harmonic convergence of tech woes, when our 10-Fox news had a full weather forecast, followed by silent NW Cable News, our news audio with black screen and finally, our full package – in time for sports.

It’s enough to curse the Gods of Technology.

I was having a problem too geeky to describe in detail with our Website’s CMS (content management system). I still haven’t seen the updated version of a story show. The East Coast tech, calling before 11 (thankfully), suggested I clear my cache. I said I could, but what do I tell our many Website visitors – they have to clear their cache to see updated stories?

They’ll just go to another site – who can blame them? Plenty of news fish in the cyber-sea.

Oh well. Hopefully our freeze warning (it’s June!) won’t freeze out Balloons Over Bend again in the AM (actually it was the wind, and it sure was blowing this evening. Summer will arrive by July 4, right? Ah, Central Oregon;-)

 

Guilt-driven and proud of it (plus Out-of-This-World Reality Show)

One of the main reasons I’ve started this blog is that I haven’t done the very thing I prod our reporters about all the time – post a text version of our video packages.

Not that I don’t keep busy;-)

Anyway, here’s my riff off what I talked about on-air Friday, being a space nut since I was a little kid.

My father worked for Boeing, as an engineer. When my brothers and I moved to be with him and his new wife (our stepmom) in New Orleans, I had a vague idea what he worked on, and moreso after we moved to Cocoa, Florida, in 1966 (the year Gannett began a little paper there called Today, a forerunner of USA Today).

So he worked on the space program, and I probably told him I was proud of him as often as he told me he loved me – rarely if ever (such were father-son relationships in those pre-Donahue prehistoric days).

But I was a victim of bad timing in this obsession.

We moved to Florida after Gemini ended, left before Apollo really began – I was living there when a fire killed the three astronauts of Apollo 1 on the launchpad. I believe my father worked on the escape system (a guy wire of sorts) after that tragedy.

Then we moved to Kent, Wash., outside Seattle (where he went to work on the ill-fated SuperSonic Transport, or SST project). When man landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. I wasn’t glued to a TV set – I was on my Boy Scout troop’s 50-mile hike, from Stevens Pass to Snoqualmie Pass (a make-up hike for one called off a year earlier, because one of the Scouts got lost and a search ensued).

Those were the days long before VCRs, much less TiVos, so… of course I saw the grainy black-and-white footage later, over and over, but didn’t get to feel that palpable sense of fright and awe and inspiration most of the planet did.

Oh well.

I did follow closely every moon mission after that, had a long-lost (sigh) friend named Gene Tichy and we’d watch them together – he’d even use a rudimentary videotape system to record them.

So ever since, I’ve been thrilled by spaceflight and saddened by the periodic tragedies.

On Sunday afternoon, another nail-biter much like the super-successful Mars Rovers comes up, as the Phoenix Mars Lander is due to make the first try in 30-plus years at landing on Mars, not by bouncing inside a big ball of sorts, but using retrorockets.

And because it’s 432 million miles away, it’ll take 15 agonizing minutes for the signals to reach Earth and to know whether it made it, or crashed. NASA TV again will be watching for all of those pensive minutes, until the cheers erupt, or… no, the cheers erupt. Ya gotta believe.

This is my kind of reality show.

UPDATE: 5/25, 5:45 pm: It did it! Phoenix is on the Martian surface! I just added breaking news atop KTVZ.COM and sent out a breaking-news e-mail. And now – the first image from the surface! Yay!

And here it is - the Phoenix Lander\'s first image of Mars\' northern reaches