Tech/Biz

The New York Daily News “Bloodbath”

Clickford, Steven M.

In New York media today, a massive layoff at the New York Daily News has rivaled as mass layoff, putting the torturous   “Massacre of 1996” that took 6 anchors off a job from the newscast at WCBS-TV (of which one of the papers called it the said title at that time) to put shame very lightly. It’s much worse.

Channel 2’s loss 20+ years ago is pure child’s play. And in fact, this may impact the Daily News in almost a similar PR crisis, unlike local TV, you can beat the odds of bad TV ratings 10 years is not something a newspaper in the 2010s can do, especially in a different business climate.  Over 40 newsroom employees got the boot, most in the sports unit and photogs that got a notice today, as the paper was sold to Tronic last fall, (aka the Chicago Tribune company… for all intensive purposes, I’m going to just call it Tribune because I feel every time I mention it, I have to pay Disney or somebody for mentioning part of a movie of yesteryear.)

When I saw Tronic trending, I was surprised to see the Daily News in the same graph. I didn’t know they were sold. According to The New York Times, it was actually sold for a $1 by Mort Zuckerman, the former owner.

Some of these people are critical for a news operation, such as assignment editors and sports writers, of which now New York Yankees stories may very well come from a blog or a wire service going to a “local” “hometown team” paper. Even worse, the Bronx Bombers are in Tampa Bay and the writer has been relieved of his duties prior to coming back home to the Five Boroughs.

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Howie Carr – Boston’s Disgraceful “Media” Talent

Clickford, Steven M.

So I thought Howie Carr would finally be dumping on Presidant Trump’s really out of line remarks from Russia on Monday… as he would mock libs “Nothing to see here folks… move along”…

But Howie found a story, a puff/fluff/don’t take to literally a story about WBTS (the NBC O&O station) and a few anchors expecting at the same time… Howie took to Twitter…

https://twitter.com/HowieCarrShow/status/1019211075684913152

The shouting on Twitter drives me nuts with the all caps, I am sick and tired of Howie yelling on radio too. And if you never really heard of those “anchors”, How, I suspect it’s because you tune to your non stop shop for entertainment, better known as the Fox News Channel.

It’s so pathetic how Howie has sold himself out to federal politics, and lack of local chatter. And that’s why Howie is a SHADOW OF HIS FORMER SELF!

Giving up on Tech, part three

Clickford, Steven M.

The ongoing series of why I have decided I.T. is the worst avenue for just a “job”

Arrogant Sysadmin: If you don’t keep up with the times, then you’re in the past.

Me: That’s so unprofessional, threatening me of a job like that

Moderator: Don’t get personal on our technical fourms

Me: Get me of your freckin site, your’re a rapist, misongyistic  man!

And you wonder why I respect women over these pricks right?

Giving up on Tech, part two

Clickford, Steven M.

I am not one of those cranky sysadmins who denigrate “end users” for being “stupid” or “idiots”, etc. I’ve always believed the best ethic for this profession was to have a deskside manner.

I hold all my patience in, and I sometimes want to loose it.

Especially when this narrative reminds me of the twentysomething dude in an Xifnity commercial where the parents had him come to the house just so he can help them.

My mother is one of those people who wants her sci-fi, all the time on her iPad. I am someone who doesn’t understand consumer grade products or content, (OK I use iPads and iPhones, etc. – just I don’t watch movies, and I only manage my iTunes for music, OK?)

I honestly have no clue how to get those special digital downloads to work, and to be honest to give Big Hollywood my email address to get a login with a DRM type of download and have to haggle with that. My mother needs to be instructed and if there is no instructions, she’s up the creek with no paddle.

So I know only enterprise grade technology. I can attain a three nines reliability. My mother doesn’t understand that half of the servers are for business purposes only. I am a year to two years behind getting a help desk program and a knowledge base system to help her, and several other initiatives.

These systems are not apps, they are servers, providing at least five instances of services. In order for me to attain a three-nine reliability, I need to be in management and not be pulled way when walking down the house hallway to be her “little helper”. I DO NOT LIKE BEING PULLED AWAY OR BE TOLD TO COME OVER, DROP EVERYTHING AND BAIL OUT THE OL WOMAN! 

I DO NOT have the time to drop everything and talk to someone at a basic level and handicap EVERY FRECKIN PROCESS of how something works!

Do not tell me to be patient!

As you know my social circle is very narrow, and that due to a number of reasons.  I do not have relief support, I can’t have friends come over and help me with a DB project while I could do something else. I have to do this all by myself.

 

I am this close to just say you’re on your own. Fictional sh– movies  is not a use-case for the enterprise grade equipment. Get your  own HDD and google how to ingest your own video and put it into iTunes. I never tell someone in their face to “google this” and worse this is my mother.

I don’t understand dumb consumers. Why are they so stupid to not understand a BASIC principal of internetworking and in order to have a healthy and happy network, it requires a well, logical, planned out network?  Why do they feel entitled to believe that IT can be their slaves and bend over backwards and do ad-hoc tasks? I have a f—–g door and yet no one respects it. I do not tolerate being flagged down.

I’m done being the sysadmin for my household. I’ll leave the semi secure Netgear Prosafe Firewall as a thank you, because according to FBI, we are supposed to listen them for cybersecurity advice, when if you had some enterprise gear, this was no-news, but it got your mother all sensed up.

I cannot stand parents and their exploitation of their sons with IT without IS backgrounds. I cannot be your hand holder forever!

The Lack of General News Coverage

Clickford, Steven M.

The sudden death of designer Kate Spade was basically non existent amongst most of the media except for the breaking news nature when the story started to peculate around 12:00 ET yesterday when a call to the NYPD by her housekeeper found her dead with a note nearby. Early and late reports are classifying this as an “apparent” suicide.

There has not been much follow up on the national media (I didn’t check the “breakfast TV” shows), the Fox News Chanel, CNN, CNBC, did not have this as a lead. The local New York TV stations had this on their lead, but not even their all newsradio station had no blurb online.

Online it was worse, it took me from heading home from Nashua, half way through the ride before I found a story on foxnews.com vis-a-vis an article that combined other sudden deaths.

The stories of yesterday, the alleged sudden cancelation of the Philadelphia Eagles’ trip to the White House, and Presidant Trump replacing the ceremony to honor our country; lingering legal scandals in the White House, CNN on fire for releasing a story that had to be retracted (via Fox News); CNBC having other stories focusing on President Trump’s political dramas, etc.

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Exiting out of IT!

Clickford, Steven M.

(I meant “IT” as an acronym to be silly!)

Life is all about changes. Sometimes changes happen suddenly, not just technology, but people. I have changed over the last few months. I am no longer interested in technology. It’s not to say I am going off the grid, but I may not be purchasing more IT gear in the going forward. It’s not to say I don’t have interest tinkering around with a server or two it’s just that…

  • I do not like the direction Big Tech is going to.
  • I personally hate Microsoft’s roadmap post Win32 (this includes Windows XP/2003/2000 and some of the other pre NT Windows). I am tired of reteaching myself an entire new operating system with the same brand name. Windows 7 to this day makes me swear and get peeved off often figuring out why something can’t work because the thing is so damn secure, even a moderate genius can’t figure it out!
  • I personally am skiddish on Apple’s roadmap as well and how selling phones and internet connected computers will sustain product development. I do not like how Apple has abandoned servers, server appliances, the networking gear, and others alike.
  • I am skiddish on the cloud, and feel that leasing apps will cost me more than spending some apps refreshed every decade on a CapEx (savings account.) I don’t like the consumerization of IT, even in the business sense. Why would a company spend cash in the long run on operating expenditures and get half rate quality of applications only because people want to touch screens more than using a USB rodent and a keyboard?
  • The idea of perpetual upgrading because of “planned obsolesce” because breaking websites is the only way to keep “innovation” afloat by forcing users to upgrade operating systems or buy new hardware to “defend” the small growth the industry makes. 20 years ago it made sense that PCs had to be swapped out every 3 years.
  • AI, social media and other ethical concerns also make me skiddish of the future.
  • People are so happy about the future, but what about jobs?

I’m really tired of messing around with PCs, Macs and other stuff. It’s like a “job” and I do not like how the industry is going all apps, and other glorified garbage for pro-consumer solutions.

I just want to create things now…

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In Memory of the Old SportsCenter

Clickford, Steven M.

I’ve been doing this stuff on Photoshop as of late

a Photoshop image of a reversed engineered graphic package of SportsCenter from the 1990s retrofitted for HD if they ever went back to their roots
Coming up next on SportsCenter: The Bruins got struck by Lightning in the Gahden
(Notice sexy graphics for the time meeting with gentle, amusing, one liner voice overs of context of hockey, if they kept with this format.)
This is a recreation of the 1 minute intro to the show at the time from 1994 to 1999 designed by me.

Once upon a time in Bristol, Connecticut from the studios of the once known Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, a 6 and 11PM news program called SportsCenter used to air the pre game stories, and a post game highlights on the respective time slots. In the beginning; the show was very stale because in the 1980s cable TV was not a profit making business. Like the Internet and dot-coms, they were loosing or hemorrhaging cash.  Continue reading →

I’m Ashamed to Admit my Hatred to Men.

Clickford, Steven M.

I’ve posted recently being a man who hates men. Men are disgusting. Men lack compassion, men lack empathy, men like to show off their dicks when they can, they like to have power and control and abuse it without any repercussions.

Men in general lack these skills and they have been in careers where they are known to abuse vulernable people, ranging from the disabled to mostly women. Men like to blame everyone else for their lack of empathy and compassion. Men like to use manipulative practices to get what they want, often in a criminal threatening manner.

Men in power, as we can tell from the Harvey Weinstein scandals, to Matt Lauer’s sexcepades, to even hyper local issues, like the former police chief whoring international media attention for trying to capture the Groundhog that allegedly gave us 6 weeks of a rough winter in February 2015, to April where i had a personal run in with him that resulted in a disgusting social media to real world exchange where I finally found out he defamed me behind my back in a false police report. Of, that the town manager who has mannerisms of a man didn’t care and treated your’s truly like shit and the “Chairman” who may be a tranny treated me like garbage too. Both women acted like dick-flashing men who don’t care for details and want to control other people like  government officials having power over people.

Worse is in information technology. NOW I know men who are in this field and are well mannered, but many are angry Caucasian men who like to blame users for everything. They have a narrow minded bigotry like thinking, and will often verbally assault “end users” because they are not as smart or have a larger dick then them!

They say the great minds had Asperger’s Syndrome? What about Bill Gates, Larry Page, that freakjob named Eric Schmit (who probably looks like someone who shouldn’t be an elementary school teacher), Mike Bloomberg, Steve Jobs, etc? They abused women. Most likely treated them like trash, and forced their views on them, to the point where they probably took a stapler to their head. That’s what men in high technology do. High technology is on the rise. They are abusive to the most vulernable, exploit them and because they have a dick, they can get away with it. Google encourages abuse to people’s rights. Facebook think’s its OK to monitor specific users because they think they can. Do we need to talk about our current Federal administration?

For research purposes, I found this site, The Lone Sysadmin is also whose borderline anti-female, anti people, etc. Attacks “end users” like they are dumb sheep, and preaches that narrow minded bigotry called “change” and indirectly attacks users with:

Oh, change is scary, too, but that’s really just a subcategory of “people are hard.” – Bob Plankers, The Lone Sysadmin

Can I say sysadministrators are just angry ol pricks who can’t understand that not everyone is nerdy or hell even techie? And that changes is a nature of being a goddamned human race?

Men in power, especially in technology do abuse women, and they are nerds, and there’s a reason why society doesn’t accept them. THEY ARE GODDAMNED DANGEROUS!

I have to close it with this. I hate men as a man. I feel sorry for other people who are abused strictly because an Adam’s apple and a dick gives them entitlement to do whatever the hell they want.

7 Years Ago This Holiday – Steve Jobs’ Attempt for a Holiday News Dump

Clickford, Steven M.

For politicians, if you don’t want to be on the news, you dump unpopular stories on a Friday in the summer. If you want to expose a story, you do it on a Monday or Tuesday morning.

If you don’t want to freak out investors, disclose your story on a bank holiday. In the U.S. Martin Luther King Day occurs on the 3rd Monday every January. Steve Jobs who was getting very ill, thought his PR folks at Apple dump the story that morning, and no one will notice since most Wall Streeters are not in the trading floor – even for a holiday.

Most of the cable business channels, CNBC and Bloomberg do not have staff who come in, except for European closes when there is major events that break. But in recent years, they just run whatever is set on the playout servers.

Fox Business Network, whether they had that year or did since the start, would be on every bank holiday. Even a holy day like Good Friday. FBN was on a regular scheduled Business Day programming with a ticker with Friday’s quotes and live bugs that were of the futures. The story was  Steve Jobs’ leave of absence, and if memory serves, he resigned from Apple in August and passed in October of that year.

The most ironic thing was CNBC and Bloomberg did not touch the story on cable. Their sites had the story, but not one reporter could do a live phoner with a still graphic or have someone come in and do a live shot or what. Since technology and business do go hand and hand, this was a major breaking news story in this realm. The established cable business news channels were MIA. No person did not want to be bothered at CNBC to go into Englewood Cliffs and do a five minute breakin, or Bloomberg for that matter. Bloomberg West I believe came on the air just before or after that time, though did some live program out west I believe by 6:00 Eastern. CNBC by late afternoon ET did ran a crawl of this earth shattering headline in the business world but had limited information prior to. Meanwhile FBN owned this story throughout the day and into the evening, and repeated that story every hour. I remember my mother was ether sick or got snowed in and we learned the news when Don Imus’ then show was on that network since FBN in those days had better news coverage in business.

You wouldn’t think that after a significant member of technology and business made news and a scrappy network on 1211 6th Ave would own the story, that they would have plans in the future. FBN was still a ratings challenged network for the time, but they made major improvements as time went on.

I would bet this story made them look really decent because of their continued business news despite a holiday. And today the tag had the annual “While CNBC is on reruns, we’re open for business!”

Steve Jobs was the winner for choosing to be low key, however he was naive that FBN was the domestic news agency that would ran with the story – the same day – making him not run away of burying a material news story, while the established CNBC was the looser.

Steve Jobs was a man who did transform the world’s technology and Apple was always a popular news story amongst the technical and business press, and on cable news. While I don’t think what he did was wrong, what was wrong was how the competing cable channels just was unable respond – on a holiday mostly for financial workers, and schools and government.

The egg was on CNBC’s face for sure!

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