Ponderings and Musings
Journalism.
I have recently disconnected my habit of watching podcasts from a well-known tech podcast source. (Well, it’s well known in the geek world). Not only did I decide to calm down on podcast consumption at the beginning of the year when I was redefining my focus on what was important, but there was one other thing that bothered me about the podcasts and I couldn’t let it go unnoticed.
The host of the podcast made the off-handed comment that the developer of an app that the podcast had negatively reviewed was upset. The host then went on to say that if he knew that the developer was a friend of his, he wouldn’t have been as harsh in his review of the application.
This kinda bothered me.
When a person tunes into the media, whether it be the mainstream news media or the tech media or to some extent, a blogger’s work, one expects that there be honest views expressed through such media, especially if this source is sponsored by ad content from prominent companies. When your tagline contains the phrase “from people you trust”, one would think that you’re telling the truth, right? Admitting during a podcast that you wouldn’t have been as, well, truthful with a critique if you realized that you knew the author of the product that was being critiqued is kind of like saying, “I wouldn’t ask the CEO about the money they laundered because we’re friends.” You’re demonstrating bias with this sort of approach, which is fine if that’s how you advertise yourself and represent your work, but when you use “from people you trust” and then do stuff like that, it carries the same amount of weight as the tagline “Fox News, Fair and Balanced” and then you go finding six ways from Sunday to report that Romney must have won and the election was all wrong due to impossible mathamatics.
While it sounds like I’m picking on this particular podcaster, the truth of the matter is that there’s a lot of garbage out there claiming to be fair and balanced news. I read on a blog that a 747 SLAMMED into a Dash 8 at an airport. Writing colorful words like “slammed” does amazing things for click responses (which in turns, generates lots of ad revenue) but the truth of the matter is, the 747’s wing nicked the wing of the other airplane. There were no injuries, no hysterics and minimal impact to either airplane. It’s hard to find any credibility in a blogger or podcaster that claims to be a news source and then embellishes the truth or modifies their public opinion on a topic due to personal connections.
Fair and balanced indeed.
If news bloggers (as opposed to other kinds of bloggers, such as me. I have no idea what I’m talking about most of the time) want to be considered a credible media outlet, they need to stick to the facts without color, bias or prejudice. If you’re not a news blogger but a commentator, just be true to your comments and state that as such on your blog or podcast. That’s all I ask.
Regrouped.
The weather radio has gone off several times today. Apparently we are going to receive a foot of snow. The fun is scheduled to start in about an hour and last through the night and into tomorrow morning. Yay for working from home! I highly recommend a work from home gig if that’s the sort of thing you’d like to do and you can do. I consider myself fortunate in that arena.
Coming off a wonderful long weekend like I just experienced would lead to a return-to-work funk for me, but I’m not feeling that today. I’m actually feeling pretty good. I feel focused. I feel balanced. I feel content. The uneasiness I felt earlier in the month seems to have dissipated. I guess seeing some sunshine for a few hours can make a world of difference. I feel like I can really tackle work this week and that’s not something I have felt for a while.
Perhaps finding balance in my life has helped me regroup. I shouldn’t question the why, I should just enjoy the feeling.
TSA.
So I have complained about the TSA in the past. In all fairness, I have actually complained about the security measures that are enforced by the TSA, I don’t believe that I have actually called out the TSA or at least individual TSA officers themselves. For the most part, they folks that work for the TSA have been pretty nice. Tonight they proved that point even further.
On my way out of town on Friday, like every other airline passenger, I had to go through security measures at the airport before jumping that big bird into the sky. In the United States, this involves taking off your shoes and belts, anything that might be metal and there’s a whole bunch of other things that one had to do to get the green light to get onto an airplane. I have this rigmarole down to a science and for the most part it’s become pretty effortless for me. Friday was no exception. Except now I wear a FitBit One on my belt.
I took the FitBit off with my belt and left it on my belt. It went through the X-ray machine and came out the other side like it was suppose to. I gathered up my stuff and got myself back together. As I started walking towards my gate, I noticed I needed to tie my shoe. Because of my recent weight loss, I didn’t need to find a stool or bench to accomplish this, I simply kicked my leg up onto the ledge that runs about waist high along the hallway and tied my shoe. I then continued my way towards the gate.
Little did I know that my FitBit fell off my belt when I kicked my leg in the air.
When we landed at Dulles, I stopped at the bathroom and noticed that my FitBit was missing. I knew it wasn’t in the airplane, because I checked my 36-square inches of space on that plane and made sure I had everything. I must have lost it at security, even though I remembered putting it back on my belt. I was heartbroken. I’d had the FitBit for less than a month and it was already lost and I really liked it a lot, it was a good thing to have and it was a Christmas present from Jamie. I decided I would buy a new one when I got home.
On a lark, I stopped by the TSA team leader’s station after landing at our home airport tonight. I asked the supervisor if anyone had found a FitBit on Friday night around 6:00 p.m. She looked at me in a very odd fashion. I felt like I was outside of normal operating procedure. But then she smiled.
“Is it like a pedometer?”, she asked.
“Yes, it is. Real small. Like a flash drive.”
“I saw that the other night and we tagged it for lost and found. You know, no one ever picks their stuff up from lost and found. Yeah, we have it.”
She called the Operations Center over on the secret side of the airport and confirmed it was there. She had the officer at “Command” look for it and then verify that it was mine by trying to get the name to display. They couldn’t get my name to pop up on the screen but the timestamp on the lost and found tag was approximately the time that my flight left, so she gave me directions to get to the secret side of the airport. She was really friendly about the whole thing.
I made my way over to the secret side of the airport, following her directions to the letter. Having to go to the third floor of “command”, I came off the elevator where I was greeted by a TSA agent.
“I saw you coming on the cameras. Here’s that pedometer. Sign here please.”
Sure enough, it was my FitBit. I fired it up to make sure it worked and told him, “You walked 21 steps to get to me.” If he could tell me I was watched on cameras, I could tell him how many steps it took to find me. He smiled, we shook hands and I thanked him several times.
All in all, what I thought would be a bureaucratic mess at best turned out to be dang near effortless. I have to say that the TSA officers at Syracuse Hancock Airport were just as nice as nice could be, while still maintaining a dignified sense of professionalism. It made me realize that I might be too quick to judge others from a scant bit of evidence. I learned something tonight.
I also learned now to kick my heel up onto a shelf when I don’t need to.
Good job to the TSA.
The Color Lite Version.
So I’m sitting in the parking lot near Dunkin’ Donuts during my lunch hour. I’m looking across the lot at the various cars parked in a reasonable order and I can’t help but notice that the color selection of the majority vehicles is, for lack of a better word, muted. There are no oranges or lime greens or yellows like you’d find in the days gone by. Everything is a subtle color, if the color falls outside of a monochromatic selection at all.
I wonder why this is.
People often buy the vehicle that expresses their personality. This isn’t always the case, but people will most likely buy the color vehicle that they are attracted to, and judging by this completely unscientific survey I’m doing here, people are feeling rather subtle these days. They don’t want to stray far from a gray area. There are very few who make the bold choice.
I find this intriguing.
The Modified Illumination.
I just popped a Vitamin D capsule from my husband’s stash. For some reason I have not been taking Vitamin D this winter. This is something that I usually do because it does help with the winter blahs I feel from time to time. I like to think of Vitamin D as a little capsule of sunshine. It helps boost my spirits a bit. Or, at least I think that it’s helping me boost my spirits a bit.
Even though I don’t like being out in the sun, I still really enjoy sunshine. Lots and lots of sunshine. I like to sit in the shade and look out over a sunlit landscape and just feel the warm breezes on my face. That doesn’t happen a lot in January in Central New York. We get a steady diet of gray skies and snow covered landscapes. While it can be quite pretty, it’s kind of monochromatic and that contributes to a ‘blah’ feeling.
I have a couple of natural LED lightbulbs in my office that are suppose to help me feel all cheery by simulating sunlight. I definitely prefer the LED lightbulbs over fluorescent lights, and the light is kind of cheery, but it’s not warm and cheery. This zaps my energy levels a little bit. Perhaps the warmth and the energy levels will come in the Vitamin D tablet I just pilfered from my husband’s stash of vitamins.
Now I remember why we sneak off to Virginia Beach around the last week of February. We might have to do that again this year.
In the meantime I’ll look at the LED lamp and hope there’s warmth in the Vitamin D.
The Time Factor.
I must be doing something wrong. There must be something that I’m missing in this grand scheme called life. I look around. I see people in real life having dinner with friends, enjoying drinks, spending hours at the gym. They laugh, they have fun. And they have all the time in the world to do so.
I read blog posts. I see tweets. Same deal. People out having fun, having a grand time with all the time in the world. They seem relaxed. At ease. Ready to par-tay. Woo woo!
I must have signed up for a shortened timeline or something. I feel like my life is frenetic. Packed to the seams with events and activities. And we’re not even that sociable. Sleep, eat, work, eat, gym, repeat. It doesn’t feel treadmill-like, it just feels like I don’t have enough time.
I’m organized. That’s all working and has made things better, but after dinner, working out at the gym and then trying to fold a load of laundry, it’s time for bed. Time to rinse and repeat.
Maybe this is part of some two-decade long mid-life crisis. There’s so many things, both big and little that I still want to do. So many little projects that I want to escape into. So many people I want to meet, so many places I want to see. But who has the time? Something is consuming all of my time.
And I don’t have the time to figure out what it is.
The Lunchtime Whine.
I am working from home today, and as I sit here at the kitchen table and enjoy my lunch, I can’t help but notice that the house is being buzzed by some very large airplanes today. This is not surprising; this sort of thing happens when you live a couple of miles off the end of one of the longest runways in the United States, despite the fact that the Air Force Base that houses this runway has been officially decommissioned for nearly two decades.
He’s bigger than he looks in the photo.
I find these planes fascinating. From what I can tell, they’re Lockheed Galaxy transports and I believe there are students flying the plane. I think two planes are taking turns doing touch-n-gos. One of the planes markedly pulls back on the throttle just as they’re approaching the house and it looks like the jet is coming to a complete standstill. The other plane opens up the throttle and the engines whine about it, higher and louder. The second plane was loud enough to get Tom’s attention (must be the frequency of the whine) but not loud enough to wake up Jamie, who’s still asleep as of this writing.
Maybe they’re both used to the noise.
So the planes go ’round and ’round and I watch them fly over wishing I was up there with the students and whoever else is on the plane. I bet they’re massive on the inside. I could see myself enjoying the view with a parachute strapped on my back and awaiting for the leader to give the signal to jump. That’s a different passenger approach than the planes that most people fly on. There’s probably no first-class section divided from the rest of the plane by a limp, blue curtain. The curtain probably isn’t even camo or anything because there’s no first class. Honestly, skydiving would be a first class experience to me. The idea of skydiving from a big plane like that (or even a small plane) is awesome. I told Earl that I want to skydive for my 45th birthday this year. He looked at me with fleeting panic but then calmed down. He knows that I’m adventurous enough to do such a thing. To tell you the truth, it’d be quite an adventure to just be in one of the Galaxies when they feel like they’re coming to a halt in the air.
For now, I’ll listen to them whine while I whine with envy a little bit.
Just as I was finishing up this entry the whine was replaced by the traditional roar of jet engines usually heard around passenger airports. Since Griffiss doesn’t have commercial service, I had to take a look to see what was flying in and saw that DHL must be having some jets serviced by that does that sort of thing on site. Nifty! I need to work at home on Thursdays more often.
The Weather Coaster.
So yesterday it was bitter cold, which made taking a morning and afternoon walk at work less than as enjoyable as it could have been. It’s important to get exercise, plus walking at work has the amazing benefit of clearing my head and making me more productive when I return to my desk, so one must do what they must do, even if Mother Nature doesn’t want us to do it. Still, it was quite cold.
This morning when I got up for work I noticed that it was 9F. It was another chilly morning in these parts, just like it’s suppose to be in January. It’s what’s expected. Except now it’s over 40. And now only is it over 40, it’s over 45. The weather folks are saying that it could hit 50 by the weekend but I rarely believe what they say so only time will tell.
I feel like we are on some sort of weather roller-coaster this winter. I’m not complaining about it, mind you, as this appears to be the new norm, where the winters are more mild than they were when I was a kid. Earl tells me that it’s all cyclic and it probably is, we are just in a part of the cycle that I’m not familiar with.
But I have to admit that I do miss having that “really big storm” of the season where we get dumped on with several feet of snow within a 24 hour period. Sure, it’s inconvenient and I’d probably complain about it myself as it’s happening, but it’s a good way to get the adrenaline pumping and nature knows I love the pumping of adrenaline. Maybe after our spring in January we’ll get something wacky like a sno-nado or something.
Good times.
The Positive Intentions.
So the geek in me was rather excited about an announcement coming out of Canonical, the company behind the open-source platform of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux, one of the many operating systems available for computers and computing devices. It serves the same purpose as Microsoft Windows or Apple’s OS X, and like the differences between Windows and OS X, Ubuntu does things in its own way as well.
Now while we are an Apple household, my primary laptop computer is actually a Lenovo ThinkPad T430. A recent purchase, this laptop runs the latest version of Ubuntu Linux (12.10 or Quantal Quetzal). It does take a little extra effort to get my Linux laptop to fully cooperate with everything that goes on behind my walled garden of Apple, but for the most part I love the experience and I really appreciate what Canonical is doing with Ubuntu. (Though I can get cranky and state otherwise once in a while).
Anyways, today Canonical announced the planned release of Ubuntu Phone. This looks like an exciting project, and watching the video now available on YouTube, it looks like it’s going to have a really cool interface. The new guy in the smartphone category is going to have a really tough time competing against the likes of iOS and Android but I think they are coming up with their own spin on things and I wish them the best of luck. I appreciate their excitement. It is infectious.
The thing that has bothered me since the announcement, which was less than an hour ago, is the snarky, naysayer, doomsday comments from the tech crowd. “Good luck with that.” “What commands do you have to type to respond to a text message?”, etc. Folks are already populating my Twitter and Google+ feeds with crappy, barely witty one-liners all in the name of dooming this project before it even gets off the ground.
What a crappy way to start 2013.
So I’ve been deleting people I follow on both services. In fact, I haven’t been limiting this practice to the Ubuntu-commenting folks. I’ve decided that if someone can only repeatedly complain about life on their Facebook feed or whatever, I don’t need the negative energy in my life. I don’t need other people bringing me down when I am looking straight ahead and reaching for the stars.
Do I think the Ubuntu Phone is going to be a success? Who knows. I know that they do have a tough road ahead of them and if I were going to hedge any bets at the infancy of this project, I would say that it has a better chance outside of the United States where the cell providers aren’t trying to financial rape anyone and everyone they can with their overbearing control. Personally, I’ve tried smartdevices outside of the iOS realm and quite frankly I haven’t been impressed. The Nexus 7 looks nice but there were too many glitches. If I were to tag any device that I really liked outside of my iOS world I would say it was the Zune that Microsoft gave up on a couple of years ago.
I like Ubuntu’s idea of plugging your phone into a dock and that it turns into your desktop computer. That is cool to me and I think it’s a step closer to the Corning Glass vision of what’s to come in the relatively near future.
I think the world would be a much better place if people concentrated on the positive and weren’t so quick or eager to find the negative. That’s one of my goals in 2013; to be a positive influence on society and to contribute more than I receive.
I hope others try to do the same with me. And best of luck on your project, Ubuntu Phone. I will be watching your progress and when the time comes, you might end up on the top of my phone consideration pile.
