Monthly Archives: January 2010

01/31/2010
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Not a Music Journalist doesn’t do Award shows

But thanks to Twitter I can get real-time results on them and flip to see performers I like. But, seriously I don't watch award shows. I went started boycotting them in 1989. I've watched two all the way through since then, the Source Awards the year Suge Knight dissed Puffy (yeah he was Puffy back then) and last years BET Awards in hopes of a Michael Jackson tribute, which was awful and to see Maxwell after his long hiatus (he was last).  In fact I probably haven't been really excited about music award shows since MJ's Thriller days and Prince's Purple Rain days. What I found is that the people that I like never won and the shows were always too long and showed categories that I had absolutely NO interest in.  As for 1989, two egregious things happened that turned me off FOR GOOD!

I was watching the American Music Awards with my sister. The category was Favorite Male Vocalist Soul/R&B, the nominees were Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown and George Michael. George Michael won now granted this was his first solo joint it was hot but he was NOT R&B. My reaction and I'll never forget it, "a white boy who ain't even from here  won best R&B male. My mind was made up I was THROUGH with music award shows.  But this was a double whammy year.  The biggest whammy of all came from the Grammy Awards. 1989 was the first year that Hip-Hop was category at the Grammys, the category was a mash-up called Best Rap Performance. The nominees were all over the place, JJ Fad, LL Cool J, Salt-N-Pepa, Kool Moe Dee and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh.  Hip Hop had ARRIVED or so we thought, the revolution would NOT be televised. The award was not televised and Public Enemy, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince and more boycotted the Grammy's. I joined them. The music was too important, it was moving a nation of young folk, urban folk, black folk and white folk. I was appalled and I still am.
Seems not much has changed since then.  It's 2010 and as I watched the tweets roll by I didn't see ANYTHING about the hip-hop categories being televised. I then lucked up and saw one, best Rap/Sung collaboration (who comes up with these things?) Jay-Z won it and he was there to accept it, but Kanye wasn't.  The story as far as I'm concerned remains the same. The folks you want to win usually don't, people who have zero skills usually do and the categories that the fan really cares about are not televised.  That's the surface stuff. The beneath the surface stuff is that OUR music, music created by US, originated by US STILL after all these years and now gazillions of units sold and gazillions of $$ into the majors pockets and we still can't get air time.  
That's why I don't watch. I can take your word for what happened or read about it on the web later.

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01/29/2010
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Not a Tech Blogger talks about Congestion

Congestion sign
Congestion sign

I don’t mean a stuffy nose, even though I have that going on right now, I’m talking about network congestion.  As customer of Always Troublesome Technology and a former Blackberry user I would get this “Congestion!” message and the call would fail.  Well after many Blackberry  failures (I believe part of my problems were the actual phone) I let it go and picked up the cheapest iPhone I could get after much cajoling from a pretty Nia Long looking lady at the Airwaves Totally Trashed store (but I digress).  The iPhone is a smarter phone than the current crop of Blackberry devices and Android fans say the phones that run that OS are even smarter, which brought me to this article

 

Is 2010 the year of wireless congestion?

It may happen for some until improvements are made to various networks

 

 

and that little message I used to get about congestion.  I haven’t seen the congestion message on the iPhone, it just hangs up or backs out of whatever application I’m in.  I’m not in agreement with the article though. 2010 is NOT the Year of Congestion as far as I’m concerned we’re entering the 3rd year of it as it was three years ago that the first iPhone came out.  That’s not to blame the iPhone but it’s introduction in my opinion made companies like RIM (Blackberry) and HTC and Motorola et all ramp up their game to make phones do more stuff.  The service provider marketing departments did all that they could do get a smartphone into all of our technology hungry little hands.  Now most of us are wired ALL the TIME, which means the networks are busy all the time, which means the technology supporting it all needs to be updated/expanded/tweaked all the time or at least that’s what you would think.

 

Now Absolutely Tumultuous Telephone is “working "quickly and aggressively" on network enhancements” according to Mark Siegel, spokesman of the above mentioned company.  There’s going to be upgrades to towers and their 3G network, there will be special focus on upgrades to areas that have high traffic like SF and NYC, so on and so forth but before the article even get’s to this discussion there’s a little piece of arrogance that sent me right into orbit.  Here it goes:

 

'Playing around the clock'
"What’s driving usage on the network and driving these high usage situations are things like video, or audio that keeps playing around the clock," said Ralph de la Vega, president of AT&T Mobility.

"And so we’ve got to get to those customers and have them recognize that they need to change their pattern, or there will be other things that they are going to have to do to reduce their usage.”

Whether those "other things" include higher rates for whatever data usage is deemed excessive is not known.

 

The Rant

So we’ve all now bought into the idea that our phones are for work and for play, no longer just a communication device.  We shell out $100-150 a month for the pleasure of using the network as we see fit and now and it’s a problem that we, the customers have to recognize? We have to change OUR behavior?  Now that some ish if I have ever heard any.  The Service Provider needs to change THEIR behavior.

 

The provider got what they asked for: zillions of users, spending zillions of dollars, translating into fat pockets for their execs. Yet Service Provider, you didn’t want to be held accountable for taking those zillions of dollars and investing it into what you created.  That’s not the customer’s problem, that’s your problem.  The idea, thought, or whiff of a scent of an upcharge for high network usage is appalling and arrogant and is a complete disservice to all of us who keep your wallets fat.  Fix your network, make it so fast and seamless that your customers can brag on how good they got it, how much work they get done, how clear their calls are and how clear their videos.  Fix it to the point that the next time and average jane user like me can write something complimentary about you.

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01/26/2010
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Not a Tech Blogger uses Seesmic Look

I started using Seesmic Desktop maybe four months ago because I wanted a multi grid twitter client and Tweetdeck just never cooperated on my Toshiba for some reason. I've been satisfied using it. Looks great, doesn't lock me out or do any crazy stuff. I'm happy. The last week I saw a tweet from @ldbaldwin (thanks for sharing) about Seesmic Look. So since I'm at home with all manners of nose and lung stuffiness I figured today was a good day to try it.

I downloaded Seesmic Look from here. The description says it's been optimized for Windows 7 which I do not have and won't touch so I'm running it on Vista. The download probably took two minutes or less and I think the application is about 13 mb. You sign into it with your twitter name and password and boy does it look different.
When it opens, it opens up to the Trends page which is all the popular hashtags and topics being talked about on Twitter.  You can look at Trends at anytime by clicking on it from the navigation bar which on the left.  As for the nav bar, here's what you get:
Inbox – this is all your public (@) replies, direct messages, and sent (direct) messages
Social – is your timeline, you can click on Friends for all the people you follow as well as the lists you've created to narrow down even further. You can look at the timeline by scrolling or clicking on the Playback button (looks like a tv) where each tweet fades in and out on the screen (not sure if I like that mode much)
Favorites – all the tweets you've saved as favorites (I have way too many)
Interests – this is a great feature. It divides Twitter into some rough categories, you click on each of those categories and get tweets from popular users in each category. I say it's great because you can catch tweets from folk you don't follow or folks you do follow that you may miss in your timeline or lists.
Channels – basically this is featured content from one source. There's only a few channels I suspect there will be more in the future. People who are really interested in these providers content will be the ones who use this most.
Searches – Just type in what you're looking for in the search bar at the top right hand of the screen
IMG_0306IMG_0307IMG_0308IMG_0310IMG_0311IMG_0312IMG_0313IMG_0314IMG_0315IMG_0316IMG_0317IMG_0318
Overall: In my tweets I said the accountant part of me still likes the grid of Seesmic Desktop but Seesmic Look's added features especially Interests and Channels are a WIN.  Not a Tech Blogger has used a lot of twitter apps since I've been on and this one is by far the most appealing visually, the navigation is easy. I'm not sure if this is available for Mac or not but for PC its a WIN.

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