News I Would Pay For

News I Would Pay For

This article isn’t about telling you what news channel to watch. I can’t recommend any of them because they all suck. The reasons they suck are very simple.

  1. Opinion – They don’t just tell you want happened but news outlets feel obligated to give you their opinions on the matter. I do not care what they think and neither should you. I just want to know what happened. I don’t care about WHY you thought it happened or WHO is to blame or HOW you feel about it. Don’t care. You are simply not smart enough to tell anyone how to think or what to think.
  2. 5 minutes should be enough to tell you what is going on. The closest form of news to actually get it right is the news at the top of the hour on radio. They simply don’t have time to tell you about anything else but what is happening in the world. It is not opinion free but it is pretty darn close.
  3. Negative versus positive. If you want positive news, good luck. The old adage that says “if it bleeds it leads” is still alive and well today. If done correctly, the news can be delivered in a manner that is neither positive or negative. It just is.

Here is an example of good reporting versus bad reporting.

Good Example

“Delta Flight XXX took off from O’Hare airport and crashed 5 minutes later. Five people were killed.”

Bad Example

“Delta Flight XXX took off from O’Hare airport. It crashed after a mere five minutes in flight and killed five people in the process. Sources close to the airline who are speaking on condition of anonymity are claiming that the maintenance records clearly show a lack of regular upkeep on the jets engines and this may have led to the crash. Mrs. Johnson who was baking a cake heard a noise and looked out of her window. “It was a loud bang kind of like a cannon going off.”

If any company can give me the “good example” above, I would gladly pay for it. I don’t care about opinions, side stories, or personal first hand accounts. People suck at remembering things that happened to them only minutes before. I would also appreciate it if we could keep politics out of stories where they clearly do not belong.

Is that too much to ask?

October 23, 2019 by Official Rant

Vacation = Problem Fix Time

I am off for the next week and have a couple of things that will need “fixing” as my southern friends would say.

My watch is essentially bricked. I tried unpairing it from my iPhone to fix an update issue and now, it absolutely refuses to pair. It goes through the beginning of the process but then stops and unpairs again. This could have to do with a software update. I am on bleeding edge so its possible that my iPhone’s software and my Apple Watch are no longer friends.

The 2nd problem is Minecraft on xBox. If you bring it up and try to play it, the entire xBox shuts down. This is not a new problem but it is a new problem for me. The 1st thing I’ve done is to clear the xBox cache and reboot. If this works, great. If not, then I will try to uninstall and re-install. Of course, I am afraid of losing worlds I’ve spent hours and days building.

I’ll keep everyone posted. Everyone = me. The only person who reads this garbage.

Update: I’ve reset the cache on the xBox and was able to play Minecraft for about an hour before the xBox shut down.

October 22, 2019 by Apple Watch Xbox One X

ASMR and What it Means for Writing

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. That is what it stands for. Check out the article over at inkygirl.com.

Writing against a nice background is always soothing for me. I can’t say that I use this technique pertaining to the YouTube channels but my office overlooks a busy intersection in the middle of farm country, USA.

If you write and need some extra help staying focused, this might help.

October 5, 2019 by Writing

PHP Storm – A Small Rant

I like PHP Storm. I use it to write PHP pages and for the most part, it works rather well. Except that is, the debugging part. I’ve always had real trouble getting the debug function to work properly. I have to admit that most of the time, the problem is me.

Fast forward to this past week. I have been working on my computer since Monday trying to identify problems with MacOS Catalina, report them, and try to figure out how we are going to fix them.Part of tat process has been fixing MySQL (which broke really bad) and also working on getting PHPStorm to debug..again…sort of. The port for xdebug has always been 9000.

Until, whenever someone at Jetbrains decided to change it to 9071. I cannot tell you how much time I wasted trying to get debug to work only to find out that the port has changed! Why on God’s sweet green Earth would anyone do that? It wasn’t well publicized and I found the answer quite by accident. In a random post, someone mentioned trying port 9071. What the actual fudge?

Debugging in PHPStorm is great when it works and for now, it does. Of course, when I update the OS it will probably break again. I’ve tried MAMP and XXAMP. The idea is wonderful. It is a contained system that should not care about my constant OS upgrades. Well, I couldn’t get it to communicate properly. I’m chalking that one up to Catalina. There are a number of things that just don’t work right now and it is because of a lot of different things. Security has been ramped up but it also prevents developers from doing basic things. For example, good luck getting a new setup of postfix to work on any level.

Ok. I am done ranting now. I’m blaming travel fatigue and a daughter for making me well, travel.

June 21, 2019 by Drive By Blogging MacOS Catalina

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Banshee's Last Scream

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Series: Tyrus Rechs: Contracts & Terminations

Authors: Jason Anspach and Nick Cole