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Amateur hour hits a new low at Global News BC

May 25th, 2015
by Craig.
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I have a very different view of what “news” on television is supposed to look like than (apparently) many people, and I have criticised TV news anchors and reporters for calling their news broadcasts a “show”. I’m sorry, a “show” is something that is supposed to entertain me. I do not watch television news to be “entertained”; I watch to see who has been bombed, blasted or burgled in the last 24 hours. OK, that’s not really my motivation, but I certainly don’t watch to see dog-and-pony shows between the glorified teleprompter readers (“anchors”) and the sports and weather talking heads. I appreciate that people at the Global BC TV station like Kristi Gordon, Chris Gailus and Robin Stickley look pretty and (as far as I can tell) have senses of humour, but really? Do we really have to watch them and Squire Barnes (whom, you will notice, I did not include in the list of people who “look pretty”) tell inside jokes to one another, live on air? Give me a break.

At Global BC my heroine on the news desk is Samantha Falk. She just delivers the news … just the facts, ma’am. No emoting (just a slight lowering of tone when delivering news of a death or deaths), no hand gestures, no sad faces, no big smiles, no snide or under-the-breath-type editorial remarks after a news story. She may or may not be the most fun at a party but, as far as I’m concerned, she is the consummate professional journalist on air. Bravo to you, Samantha. Please don’t give in to anyone who might tell you that you need to project more feeling when you’re reporting. Don’t even get me started on her diametrical opposite: Randene Neill (who seems to have taken on the heart-tugging role of the now-departed Deborra Hope). How is this woman higher in the pecking order at Global than Samantha Falk? It boggles the mind.

But back to the point of this post. Anyone who watches the News Hour at 18:00 on Global BC (and probably their other news broadcasts too, considering this is their “flagship” news programme … er, “news show”) is aware of the fact that first year journalism students at BCIT could do a better job of producing the programme than the jokers at Global BC. You know, I hate to be gratuitously critical — and lord knows I am not in the business and wouldn’t do a better job myself — but come on, there are some days it’s a complete gong show. However, the gong show doesn’t usually extend to the actual journalism. I’m not saying that the journalism at Global BC is top notch, that’s for sure — the aforementioned little editorial comments by the teleprompter reader … sorry, “anchor” … at the end of a story really irk me — but on 19 January 2015 there was a particularly puzzling incident.

Watch for yourself and note the second story (which comes after the first weather interlude) which starts at 3:51. At the very end of the story, at 5:19, the reporter (John Daly) concludes his report (presumably filed sometime before the start of the broadcast) by saying that the subject of the story (a man wanted for failing to return to a Vancouver halfway house) has been arrested in Parksville. At that point I reflexively asked out loud, “So, what was the point of the big build up? In fact, was this really news if they got the guy?” I suppose I answered my own question above: this is a “show” (after all), and it’s all about the suspense, which was broken in the final seconds by revealing that this guy isn’t, at this very moment, roaming the streets of Vancouver looking for his next victim. This should have been several reports down the list on this broadcast.

But that’s not the bizarre part. About twenty minutes later the teleprompter reader (Chris Gailus) interrupts the broadcast with “breaking news”! Seems that the missing con has been located and has been arrested in Parksville! Stands back in amazement!

Now, either this is utter incompetence on the part of the journalism staff and the teleprompter reader, or it’s a blatant attempt at misleading sensationalism. Leave the sensationalism to the American news stations, Chris; they have more helicopters buzzing the city chasing every emergency vehicle than Global BC has. Oddly, that “breaking news” is not in the online version of the News Hour, but then they have managed to compress an hour of “news” into less than sixteen minutes. Imagine how much less time we could waste in front of the boob tube if they could just get it over and done with (minus the advertising and dog-and-pony nonsense) in sixteen minutes! (I usually turn it off after the first half hour anyway.)

But one more complaint about “news” that doesn’t (at this point) merit a separate post. Read my lips: Weather is not news! The fact that it rained hard, or snowed heavily, or blew strongly in some part of the world today is not news. It is if a state of emergency has been declared as a result in the area where the news is being broadcast, but if some other part of the world is having weather, it’s just not news. At the very least, please don’t lead with a weather story, for god’s sake!

This has been an editorial. It is not an attempt at journalism!

But I will admit that I find this kind of stuff highly amusing, even entertaining!:

Happy birthday Elizabeth!

Feb 19th, 2015
by Craig.
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Dear Elizabeth,

I hope you had a really happy birthday yesterday.

Love, Uncle Craig

Happy birthday Melissa!

Feb 4th, 2015
by Craig.
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Dear Melissa,

Wow, what a special birthday for you! I hope you have a great day.

Love from, Uncle Craig

Can I have a DF steer?

Nov 30th, 2014
by Craig.
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The old DF steer came onto my radar today (if you’ll excuse the irony), so not having flown for far too many years I thought I’d look it up, just out of curiosity. Seems they are being or have been decommissioned in a lot of places.

But what really struck me in the few discussions I read about them was the incredibly narrow view of some of the pilots discussing them. Sure, as we all know, the USA is the centre of the universe in many ways, not the least of which is aviation, but the ability to fly is supposed to broaden your outlook (and particularly your world view), especially if you can talk about zipping a couple of hundred nautical miles away (or over to the next continent, depending on your equipment!) to have lunch and be back in time for dinner. And yet, here were all these pilots (most of them US-based) talking about DF steers and radar coverage as if the former are no longer available anywhere on the planet, and the latter covers every square centimetre of the planet.

Weird.

Fashion

Nov 28th, 2014
by Craig.
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Boring. Boooooooring! That one word pretty much sums up my fashion sense, if you can even call it that.

I vaguely remember — in the seventies — having a “parachute jacket” that I thought was pretty cool. All I can remember now is that it was bright yellow (probably not quite as bright in reality as it is now in my memory, or maybe it was brighter!), had zips and press studs and the texture of the material out of which they make parachutes — hence the name. And I think I probably bought (or had bought for me by my parents) a few pairs of jeans that were probably fairly cool back in their day … flares, stovepipes, pockets galore with flaps and/or zips, etc.

But these days — and for most of my life from my teens onwards — my attire has been pretty utilitarian. Truth is, if the law and the weather permitted it and I had somewhere to put my wallet (a sporran perhaps?), I’d walk around buck naked all day. So my default attire in public is shorts (I mean real shorts, not those stupid “short trousers” that go all the way down to your knees, or further!) and T-shirts and slops in the summer, and jeans, T-shirts and shoes & socks in the winter. In the winter I’ll take a jacket if I’m driving somewhere (I’ll actually wear a lighter one if I’m walking), but it will likely stay in the car until my return home. (Friends are always asking me, as I leave their places after an evening, “Didn’t you bring a jacket?!”) My use (or lack thereof) of jackets is a topic unto itself for another time.

I do own khaki pants, golf shirts, plaid shirts and other long- and short-sleeved collared shirts, dressier black Oxford Brogues than my current, everyday, brown Derby-type shoes, a sports coat, suits (double- and single-breasted), about two dozen ties (ranging from plain black for funerals to far more ostentatious and whimsical ones) and half a dozen bow ties. However, the dressier things get the fewer the opportunities I have for wearing them, especially considering I work from home. Actually, I really do lament that as I do like to dress up (and I think I rock a well-fitting suit, even if I do say so myself), but I can’t make up events that don’t exist and I’m too practical to put on a suit just to go and visit friends for the evening.

I do care what I look like when I leave the house, but I don’t care enough to go to ridiculous ends and spend ridiculous amounts of money and time on my appearance. And I mostly will not wear what mainstream fashion tells me I should wear, so I’m a bloody-minded contrarian to boot.

The reason I bring this up is an article on “lumbersexuals” on The Daily Beast. One paragraph really spoke to me:

But the rough-looking, dependably butch lumbersexual, despite his honest-guy uniform, is a drag queen, just as we all are. On go our costumes every day, and so it especially is with those whose uniform is dedicated to looking like they care least of all what they look like. The lumbersexual is the biggest drag queen of them all.

Now, I have never until today heard the term “lumbersexual”; I own two plaid shirts that I rarely wear (and only one of them is flannel) and it is quite clear to me that the guys I have seen pictured in articles I have now read about them spent a lot more than “20 minutes of [their] morning[s] delicately trimming [their] beard[s] in the bathroom mirror“. I have also grown full beards, although I’m not that fond of them. But I squirmed uncomfortably at the thought that maybe the attire that results from my “studied disinterest” (to quote my father) in fashion is, in itself, a fashion statement.

If it is, I may as well pull out my wallet and head to the nearest trendy clothing shop and ask someone there to dress me properly in some hip new threads. (Irony intended.) The problem is, I just can’t stand waste, and I’ll still be wearing in five years what is trendy today. I can’t win!

Deleting files under Linux/Unix

Nov 26th, 2014
by Craig.
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Today I came across a comment on a blog post related to deleting files on a Unix/Linux system that was a clear case of bullshit. I tried to post a comment to that effect on the blog in question, but the comment feature was broken. So, since I had already gone to the trouble of writing my response, and since I don’t post nearly as much to my own blog as I would like, I’ll just post it here instead.

To PoorMe, who claimed to have “just lost all of [his/her] files and folders on [his/her] server in just 2 seconds” by running the suggested command, I call bullshit!

I actually intentionally tried this a few years ago on a server that I was decommissioning. First of all, you have to be in the root directory for the dreaded “rm -rf *” command to try and remove everything (unless you craft the command explicitly to remove everything under the root directory), and you’re almost never in the root directory unless you place yourself there for some specific and very unusual reason.

Secondly, in my test (which I did run as root) I ran into many files and directories that threw up errors and interrupted the process, even though I used the “-f” flag. In fact, I ended up having to delete individual directories off of the root to do what I was trying to achieve, and even then I gave up trying to remove anything but directories I knew contained user data.

Thirdly, even without those errors the process would have taken minutes, if not hours, not “2 seconds”. Anyone who thinks it takes two seconds has obviously never tried it. Besides, assuming you’re connecting over SSH, how are you still connected if you deleted everything, including the SSH server?

Bottom line, don’t run commands on your system that you find on the Internet without first understanding and checking them. But even if you don’t take that advice, the chances of you erasing every file and directory on your server in the blink of an eye are close to zero. Sure, you might erase a whole lot of stuff you didn’t want to erase that you may never get back and which may destabilise your system requiring you to reinstall the operating system (and it may happen in as few as two seconds), but what PoorMe claims happened almost certainly didn’t happen.

Happy Birthday Christopher!

Nov 9th, 2014
by Craig.
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Dear Christopher,

Happy birthday.

Love, Uncle Craig

Seventy years ago today

Jun 7th, 2014
by Craig.
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On 7 June 1944 my great uncle, Corporal Leslie John King — of the 6th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, son of Fred Josiah and Lydia Ann King, of Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, and brother of my grandmother Gladys Lydia Marshall (née King), later of South Africa — was killed in Normandy the day after landing on Sword Beach on D-Day. He is buried at the Bayeux War Cemetery in Bayeux, Normandy, France. He was just 24 years old.

Thanks to The War Graves Photographic Project I have photographs of his gravestone and the cemetery where he is buried. However, I hope to obtain and post my own later this year.

Come clean, Christy Clark

Jun 6th, 2014
by Craig.
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As a tax-paying British Columbian, I should love Christy Clark. I should. But I don’t.

She is a divisive character in BC politics. She’s not the first, that’s for sure, but you’d think that people would learn. Not “we the people”, but the politicians themselves. Nobody likes a divisive leader. They didn’t when Bill Vander Zalm was around, and they don’t now, so what does Clark think she’s gaining by her divisive style of leadership that Vander Zalm didn’t back in the late 1980s? If she’s gaining anything, it’s only with her cronies in the BC Liberal Party, not with any members of the voting public. Is that really putting “[BC] Families First”?

I’m moved to write about this at this time because of the dispute between the BC Public School Employers’ Association (BCPSEA) and BC’s public teachers. I could point fingers at both sides in this dispute for various reasons, but Clark particularly stands out for rebuke. I say that because no member of the British Columbian public really sees this as a labour dispute between a monolithic employer that doesn’t actually employ any teachers (the BCPSEA) and the BC Teachers’ Federation; it’s Christy and her sidekick of the moment in the education portfolio (Peter Fassbender as of this writing) versus the teachers. It’s an open secret that sealed court proceedings accidentally revealed by the NDP show that the current BC government — strongly led by Clark, so there’s no doubt who is driving this — has a policy to provoke a strike by BC teachers. Imagine! Any thinking leader — especially one with an alleged “Families First” agenda — would not set out to “provoke” anything, never mind the total disruption of the lives of BC’s families!

This won’t be a long post because I really want to get to what I believe is the crux of the matter here. This won’t address issues such as liveable wages in one of the most expensive places to live in the world, and a little thing called inflation. It also won’t address Clark’s contempt of the courts and her preference for fighting and defying their rulings on the legality of her actions dating back over a decade, actions that would get you and I thrown in jail!

Let’s look at Clark’s record with the education system. As Education Minister in the early 2000s she implemented changes that were unpopular with school boards and teachers. While it’s not my contention that popularity is the measure of success, popularity is the basis of democracy. And here we are, over a decade later, and the school boards are still struggling to provide services that are expected by the public and the provincial government on the pittance provided by the latter. Quite frankly, if it wasn’t for the dedication of those people on the ground — teachers, administrators and school board employees — the BC public school system would collapse. With her own child in a private school — a privilege affordable for only 11% (2012 figures) of BC pupils — one really can’t help but wonder if this is actually Clark’s intention.

But enough about that. It’s widely known that Clark’s father was a teacher, and one can reasonably assume that she herself attended at least some school. And here is where I get to the crux of the matter as I see it, and it’s the seldom asked question (at least publicly) on the tips of the tongues of just about anyone I talk to about the war between Clark and the teachers: What formative experience did Clark have — either with her father or one of her own teachers — that seems to put her at perpetual odds with educators? (By “educators” I include more than just teachers.) I’ve heard the term “daddy issues” used often enough to wonder if this premier’s divisive style of leadership — if you can call it “leadership” — is personally-driven rather than based on arguable ideology or coherent policy.

Is it, Christy? Is it time to come clean and excuse yourself from any involvement in the negotiating strategy with the BCTF or, for that matter, any of your government’s education policies that so negatively affect families and the education of their children? Is it time to put your son in a public school — like 89% of your constituents in this province, who feel their children are being used as pawns in a fight between grown-ups who should know better — and suffer with them through this labour strife that you have intentionally provoked?

Goodbye Windows! Goodbye Google!

Apr 8th, 2014
by Craig.
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The day is finally here! It’s 8 April 2014, and support for Windows XP has ended. Years ago — I really don’t remember how many — I swore that XP would be the last version of Windows that I’d run. Not because XP was any worse than versions of Windows before it; on the contrary, having finally reached a level of acceptable stability with Windows 2000, XP continued that and I was generally happy, although that happiness (contentedness, rather) has been badly tinged in the last couple of years by the fact that my older machine (still easily meeting the technical requirements for XP) got more and more bogged down by the crap that everyone feels they need to load into their web pages.

But back in the mists of time I saw where Microsoft was going with Windows, and I wanted no part of it. Whether they succeeded or not with their plans for DRM, I wanted no part of their philosophy. (Apple is even worse, not to mention ridiculously overpriced, so that certainly was never going to be an option.) Besides those issues, I recently helped a friend buy a new computer and I was just aghast at Windows 8. It’s horrible! Maybe as someone who got his start on an Apple ][ and then moved to DOS, I’m just an irrelevant old fuddy-duddy now, but I’m still a reasonably productive (no old-age home yet) and paying consumer, and Windows 8 would not do anything to help with my productivity.

So with the countdown clock winding rapidly down to today, I bought a new machine from System76 that came with Ubuntu Linux. I’m still getting my sea legs on it, but I’m very happy so far. If you’ve ever used swear words when dealing with Windows and you’d like to consider alternatives but you’re worried for some reason about trying Linux, don’t be. So far I’ve found that it feels like all that has happened to my daily experience is that what Windows calls the “task bar” has moved from the bottom of my screen to the left edge (I could probably move it, but I’m not that motivated to do so), the close button has moved to the top, left-hand corner from the right (but Alt-F4 still does the same thing), and I now have a thin combination between a task bar and a menu bar at the top of my screen. In other words, my mind is not preoccupied with figuring out how everything works, and I’m more productive because I have new hardware. It’s a win all around. As someone who has watched former Windows users (including myself) tear their hair out trying to figure out the so-called intuitive Mac operating system, I’m very happy so far.

Even selecting new applications has been a breeze so far, with one exception. Not counting background programs (generally those running in the Windows system tray), on Windows I generally manually run four programs as soon as I log on: an email client, a text editor, a web browser and a terminal window. On Windows these were Eudora, TextPad, Firefox and (of course) a DOS box.

I’ve been a Eudora user since version 2 (in April 1996 when I bought my first GUI-based computer running Windows 95), almost twenty years ago! Over time I tried Thunderbird, Outlook and Outlook Express (and considered others, not the least of which was Pegasus), but they all failed to impress me. Even when Qualcomm stopped developing Eudora in 2006 (version 7 for Windows, 6 for the Mac) I kept using it. (Don’t forget, the standards on which email is based go back to the 1960s!) Qualcomm passed along something — I’m not entirely sure what, other than the name, but not much and certainly no substantial code if any at all — to the Mozilla Foundation and they were supposed to develop a Thunderbird-based “new Eudora”, keeping as many of the features of Eudora as possible that made it such a superior email client. To make a lengthening story shorter (I should have seen the writing on the wall, given my lack of enthusiasm for Thunderbird), Eudora was pissed down the toilet and (known by then by the project name “Penelope” and then as Eudora OSE) died a cruel death. Ironically, the lack of Eudora on Linux (unless you run it in an emulator) was my biggest worry about switching to Linux, but circumstances have conspired to force my hand anyway.

TextPad is a great editor, although a Windows-only program, but Linux is famous for its text editors. (I mainly used TextPad as a note-taking and text-processing application anyway; for coding I used Notepad++ [Notepad Plus Plus, aka Notepad Double Plus].) Firefox runs on Linux; and of course Linux has a far better, more functional and more versatile command line. The fact that I have (with the significant exceptions of Eudora and TextPad that I’ve used for so long) been drawn to open-source software (even on Windows) means that I can keep using on Linux some of the programs I’ve been using on Windows: GIMP, KeePass, the aforementioned Firefox, and more. This is good.

So what am I using now for email on Linux? After some research I have (for now; I’m still evaluating) settled on Evolution as my new email client, but I may also evaluate Zimbra‘s email client. I’m also still using Gedit (the default editor in Ubuntu) with some plug-ins to replicate what I had with TextPad, but I haven’t made a final decision on that yet either.

Hopefully I’ll have more to say about GUI Linux and System76 in the near future.

And what does Google have to do with all of this? Well, the other thing that I am changing after so many years is the Web search engine I use. The last time I did that was when I switched from AltaVista to Google in the late nineties or early noughties! But today is about dumping particularly evil companies, so it seems a good time to double the celebration. Unfortunately, due to the reach of their evil I can’t dump Google entirely, but I’m making a first step by not feeding them with free data about my life through their search engine. I don’t trust anyone online any more, but for now DuckDuckGo seems as good a search engine to use. In fact, if they didn’t have such a stupid name I’d probably have realised what they were and switched much sooner!

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