Author: Steven

VLOB: Don’t Let Data Be the Justification for Your Intellectual Stupidity

I get to my point after 2:00​

After mentioning about how bad my mouse is and how long B&H is delivering my Kensington, and talking about how I got this Kensington from Small Dog Electronics in Manchester ,NH in 2010 before Apple took that very same space a few years later. Small Dog was for the longest time the 3rd highest reseller behind the VARs (CDW and [Mac] Connection) I connect the dots between using data and statistics to justify the reasons that autism is just-a-boy-problem and that parents of autistics have an even higher divorce rate than typicals (nearly half of all American marriages end in divorce.) Why do we say “the stats say it [so do it]’? Why do we treat people worse, because “the stats say so?” Are we this effed up? Do you know most data types are virgins who haven’t fucked a chick nor looked a naked chick?

VLOB: The Emmy Award Goes to Avid Technology…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS0mNlYHFg4&list=PLY4uvyI1FSmHpoh1vXwslKrfveSxFbvjx&index=8&t=3s

EDIT: 02-01-21: I had done some tweaks to my Avid workflow, and overall it’s been a better at exporting. It’s not as speedy as Final Cut Pro, but I love to have multiple tools to help do my job better. And since this recording, on Friday, January 29th, the Emmy to another NRCS went to The Associated Press’ ENPS platform. So everyone-is-a-winner.
—
Another rant the day after I bitched on Avid after that recording: I was being bombarded on social media they got an Emmy for development of a new product Newsroom Computer Systems…better known as NRCS. No Emmy for that new Media Composer tho, just some really old systems with semi fancy GUI facades! 😀
Ironically Avid got into these businesses in the early 1990s before they went to George Lucas and got the Editdroid! Before the Associated Press’ ENPS in the late 1990s, they had almost total domination in terminal or PC-based NRCS networks vis-a-vis NewsStar, Basys and some company that did NRCS for NetWare networks.
Some of the code is older than I and old as CNN itself. Network World actually did a story on Basys on their first ever issue in 1986. I guess yeah for Avid to finally get an award under their name with these legacy products.

SHOW LESS

VLOB: Dear Avid: Please Be more Software Centric

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi_mz5M-4C4&list=PLY4uvyI1FSmHpoh1vXwslKrfveSxFbvjx&index=7&t

I have a lot of Avid swag because I know someone who sells one of their flagship products. Just because I have that possible conflict of interest of being biased; I think Avid had shot their foot in 2008 when a software-centric/CPU-agnostic Final Cut Pro from Apple showed how you didn’t need iron clad boxes to edit video in the 2000s! Sadly, I see Avid being one of these vendors that are fleet-quality. Much like selling Fords in the masses to customers. Large edit houses and local TV stations buy HP and Dells mixed with Nvidia boards in bulk to satisfy Avid’s HCLs. Macs in general are a mixed bag.

Running Media Composer in some ways is like running an emulated application designed for another platform of a former generation. I have not tried anything past 2019 versions because I wanted to build so much knowledge on the legacy platform. I do sense of lapse of business decisions and R&D to just *improve* with modern hardware.

Any computer made after 2010 with a midline CPU and GPU; should be able to handle lower res 720p to 1080p without much hassle. Oh wait it’s possible. Edius for PCs, Final Cut Pro for Macs, and Adobe’s Premiere. Enterprise creative pros should have choices. Freelancers should be able to get a foot in the door. Locking out the environment in both a figurative and literal sense is a really sad message that this Middlesex County company is doing. Thank you if anyone cares to hear my constructive rant.

 

On Outside Broadcast Trailers… IT’S SUPER BOWL SUNDAY!

Today is a big day here in America, where the most popular final playoff game for the NFL ends today. Ironically one of the winning conferences will be playing in their home turf – a tradition that rarely happens (if at all.) Will I be rooting for the Bucs? Maybe not. I think it’s time for Tom to retire. I also do not have much faith with Rob Gronkowski; who like to play when he feels like it. I can say this cuz I watched many of the Tampa Bay games this season. (And I really don’t care for Fox’s coverage of the NFC games… leave it at that.)

But anyways… CBS is touting a lot of fancy hardware for this year’s Super Bowl. This year, they’re playing on the cinema route, making use of 4K and 8K… quoting TV Technology

“In total, CBS says that it will have more than 120 cameras placed throughout the stadium, including 12 4K and 8K cameras to capture close-up shots during the game. The 4K cameras will be controlled robotically from the stadium concourse levels, while two Sony 8K cameras will be fixed on robotic gimbals from the lower field.”

Citing COVID-19 as the reason where “alternative production facilities” will be the method in producing the event; which means there will be many sterilized spaces  on West 57th St. in Manhattan at the CBS Broadcast Center… which tells me a lot of things. I have 3 points to make:

Continue reading “On Outside Broadcast Trailers… IT’S SUPER BOWL SUNDAY!”

The Lack of Joy with Email

I used to love email. I seriously thought it was more professional, more methodological and more formal and more meaningful than text/SMS or chat/IM, etc.

Other groups of people who either do not respect the medium or have given email a bad name.

I thought owning a BlackBerry was cool, but one of the big flaws was I couldn’t have full IMAP email, then I went onto the iPhone in December 2011 and realized how cool it was to have an entire inbox on the palm of my hand like I could on my desktop. (POP3 is perfect for small email servers or the ol days of dialup, where once it downloads onto the client, it “pops” away off the server, is the non technical way to describe it.

But with everything, joy disappears. The alleged honeymoon period lasted a decade plus.

It wasn’t necessarily the tech, but the people on the other end. Apparently I showed too much love to email that people took advantage of it.

In the last year it got worse. People in professional circles would send me longwinded emails with up to twenty sentences per paragraph. The biggest pet-peeve was the excessive, liberal use of High Priority, and was used completely indiscriminately. It was more of “Look At Me, Smell my ugly Pits! I am so great you must drop everything and you’ll get back to me!” Worse was professionals would accidentally send out emails; with the failed attempt to recall emails –  assuming I am an Exchange shop (of which I am not), and that the email would magically disappear. Do these people realize no one is using Outlook in the masses as much?  In fact I haven’t used Outlook in years! I still liked the overall Outlook interface; but do not support the O365 approach.

I also had clashed with the millennials, and intra-generation fights.  One former professional was so overwhelmed of a 2 page email, despite it being properly written with appropriate sentences per graphs and it being outlined. Younger people today treat email like SMS or chats; I find that alarming because this leads to a culture of inappropriate communications and if you mix Slack-talk in email, it can really bite you if a discovery is required. I think chat-like emails are more apparent then than back in the 90s or early 00s by boomers and Gen Xers.

The biggest pet-peeve was the excessive, liberal use of High Priority, and was used completely indiscriminately. It was more of “Look At Me, Smell my ugly Pits! I am so great you must drop everything and you’ll get back to me!”

Oh the multi-thread replies… that was the worse. If developments occurred over the weekend, I had “professionals”; would literally react to every reply. If say there was an instance where I had  threads, both were responsive replies, one was a correction to the other, the person would still react to all three and personalize each one. This individual was under high stress and was known in circles for being a chain-smoker. The job didn’t need to be high-stress to begin with.

The joy is no longer. There is no sense of happiness as much as I used to. This isn’t because my responsibilities changed; it’s the other groups of people who either do not respect the medium or have given it a bad name.

Introducing… The Spokesman Podcast

If anyone who knows the history of telephony, the brand name of a loudspeaker tided to an ole Ma Bell phone was called the Spokesman. And unlike a Polycom, the quality may had been suspicious. It was designed to listen in to “morning calls” from Wall Street firms. In fact groups of people would huddle to what was nicknamed “the squawk box”…

This ol device was what inspired CNBC to introduce a “pre game show” in 1995.

25 years later, your’s truly wants to record about 5 minutes of hard-news plus no-so real time quotes and numbers and snatch that degraded brand that is like chewing gum for day traders into ear candy for people who live to crunch numbers… and no I am not talking about the ol Macintosh kids game. I love using that as an idiom.

If I learned anything during COVID19, there is not enough analysis; likewise there is not enough information. Back when Squawk aired on CNBC, it was in the early days of the web; and not everyone had access to the overall Internet. Today it’s so efffing hard to find detailed market information that The Wall Street Journal used to put in the C-section. Our Presidant doesn’t care about the more long term indicies that are measured like a pool; all he cares about is the market of public opinion – The Dow.

Once a week, on my YouTube, my SoundCloud, etc, you’ll hear roughly 5 minutes of reading stories of the previous night’s earnings reports; before the opening bell market reports; and little on politics. Tech stories may dominate the lead.

The audience is for people who follow markets, understand business; understand the over-zealous “profit” culture of todays corporate governance, and trying to put a news story one reads on the web into something that’s broadcast-able; and covering beats that the traditional cable business channels left behind ages ago.

I don’t want to be your daily teacher. I want help you be informed on weekly and daily basis.

Our principal sponsor is Techie Crafts

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Demagoguery

[Wikipedia Link banned by Facebook…]

A demagogue /ˈdɛməɡɒɡ/ (from Greek δημαγωγός, a popular leader, a leader of a mob, from δῆμος, people, populace, the commons + ἀγωγός leading, leader)[1] or rabble-rouser[2][3] in contemporary usage is a leader who gains popularity by exploiting emotions, prejudice, hatred, and ignorance to arouse the common people against elites, whipping up the passions of the crowd and shutting down reasoned deliberation.[1][4] Demagogues overturn established norms of political conduct, or promise or threaten to do so.[5] Demagogues frequently present themselves as populists, to the point where “populism” itself has now acquired a negative connotation.

Historian Reinhard Luthin defined demagogue as “…a politician skilled in oratory, flattery and invective; evasive in discussing vital issues; promising everything to everybody; appealing to the passions rather than the reason of the public; and arousing racial, religious, and class prejudices – a man whose lust for power without recourse to principle leads him to seek to become a master of the masses. He has for centuries practiced his profession of ‘man of the people’. He is a product of a political tradition nearly as old as western civilization itself.”[6]

Demagogues have appeared in democracies since ancient Athens, where the word did not originally have a negative connotation. They exploit a fundamental weakness in democracy: because ultimate power is held by the people, it is possible for the people to give that power to someone who appeals to the lowest common denominator of a large segment of the population.[7] Demagogues usually advocate immediate, forceful action to address a crisis while accusing moderate and thoughtful opponents of weakness or disloyalty. If elected to high executive office, demagogues typically unravel constitutional limits on executive power and attempt to convert their democracy into an authoritarian system, even a dictatorship.

This is what America is up against since the days following Election Day.

If you dispute this as fact; then there is something fundamentally wrong with you.

The Defense of Graphical User Interfaces in 2020

This may be a moot point to many, but to some like to carry their command line interface skillset card and shove it down your throats. Those people are probably as creepy as Mark Zuckerberg. I also think a Graphical User Interface, or GUI, as an acronym has to be effective too.

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“Monopolies” Then vs. Now

“Monopoly” basically means a company owns one sector and sniffles any other company getting involved. In the early 1900s, Standard Oil used to own 90% of the country’s gas and oil distribution. Now basically many of those descendants had merged and some sold to global entities.

By the 1950s, the American Telephone and Telegraph company owned 90% of the US telephone lines and interconnects. AT&T was the Department of Justice’s top enemy. That same decade, they were ordered to sell off their Canadian and Asian arm; and in 1956, they were ordered not go into the data processing business (“computers”) despite Bell Labs inventing the transistor that would be the key component in all computers by the 1960s.

Continue reading ““Monopolies” Then vs. Now”