ON THE TUBE:
Veep Season One
Starring: Anna Chlumsky, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Matt Walsh, Reid Scott, Tony Hale

This HBO political comedy has more in common with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” than “The West Wing,” but it has a wicked edge and promise for future seasons.

The show circles around Dreyfus’ character, a rising senator whose presidential run crashes and burns, and she is forced to accept the Veep slot (and wins).

She finds that, as VP, she is in an unusual limbo where she is one accident/breath away from the most powerful position in the world – but, as Veep, has far less power than she had as a senator.

And – of course – hilarity ensues.

The writing is a little rough in this first season (here’s hoping for season two…), but the cast is top notch, with running jokes that aren’t dwelled upon, and dialog that I’d be surprised is all scripted. Improvisation seem to really help carry the show.

Great show? No. But it’s in the vein of “30 Rock” – funny, topical and just enough out of the mainstream to have extra cachet. And since it’s an HBO show, plenty of f-bombs. You have been warned.

All reviews

Well, there have been about 100 million stories about the upheaval in journalism over the last [pick your time period], but the last few weeks of journalism upheavals have been more interesting than most. Mainly because the events that have transpired recently are not part of the “slow decay of traditional journalism/print” story arc, but really are milestone events.

Consider the following:

• Newsweek announces sale; print publication to cease (8/3/2013): While not a surprise to anyone with any inkling of the current state of weeklies, the sale was noteworthy for two reasons: 1) It leaves only one news print weekly standing (Time), and 2) It sold to IBT Media. Who are they?? – That was my reaction, as well as many of those who wrote articles about the sale.
• Boston Globe sold (8/3/2013): Purchased by The New York Times about 20 years ago for $1.1 billion, the paper is sold to the Boston Red Socks’ principal owner John Henry for $70 million. That’s an enormous drop, and a blow to one of the nation’s most respected publications.
• Jeff Bezos – not Amazon – purchases the Washington Post’s print and digital products (8/5/2013): An online visionary buys a print publication? I dunno – I think this is a good move for the Post. Print is struggling, and if anyone can make a go of it in some shape or form, it is someone like Bezos, who takes a long-tail view of business. (See Farhad Manjoo’s excellent article on same.)
• Patch.com announces cuts (8/16/2013): AOL’s ambitious content farm/hyper-local sites experiment announces significant cuts – roughly 50% of staff and about 60% of its sites. Not exactly good news for this so-called “new” form of digital journalism, especially by a giant like AOL (yes, it’s past its glory days, but AOL is still huge, especially in content – it’s the parent of huffingtonpost.com and techcrunch.com, for example).
• Interesting note about Patch layoffs (8/17/2013): As noted by allthingsd.com’s Peter Kafka, online layoffs are cheaper than dead-trees layoffs. New Media Pink Slips Cost Less Than Old Media Pink Slips

Any of the above events, taken alone, would be newsworthy. All of these together, in such a short interval, give one pause.

I don’t think journalism is going away – I think it’ll, to some degree, change. And right now, we’re in the middle of the big shake out: Experiments will launch and succeed/fail, we’ll move away from the old before slowly gravitating (to a degree) back to the same.

One thing people keep forgetting is that print media is not dead – it’s actually thriving.

But now much of it is digital print: blogs, tweets, online niche sites and so on.

People I know are reading more fiction/non-fiction thanks to eReaders (of whatever flavor); tablets and smartphones have a lot of those who never got newsprint on their fingers to read the NYT or Chicago Tribune on their devices.

Journalism – and print/digital publication in general – is in chaos right now, no question.

But it’s not dead or dying.

Just rearranging itself. (See the Patch – a new media company – site and its issues.)

Radio was supposed to kill print. It didn’t.

TV was supposed to kill print. It didn’t.

The internet is supposed to kill print. So far, not so much.

One final caveat: The internet/devices may well kill physical print, but they won’t obliterate the need for good, concise, accurate journalism. Or entertaining fiction/non-fiction. That’s the big take-away here.

ON THE TUBE:
Damages – Season 5
Starring: Glenn Close, Rose Byrne

The final season of Damages did not disappoint – Patty (Glenn Close) was just as evil as ever, and the first couple of episodes gave away so much that one wondered how they could keep up the suspense.

It did.

After a disappointing – to me – Season 4, Season 5 was almost as good as Season 1. Close and Byrne are both brilliant, and the writing carries this franchise.

Unresolved issues? Sure – but that is (sometimes) – the fun. You try to fill in your own blanks.

Could this series have ever happened on network TV. Probably not. (The Good Wife is close, but not as bitter.)

Good TV

All reviews

Watched the last season of “Damages” this weekend (only 10 episodes), but – I’m sorry – any single episode of this show is better than most network shows (of similar caliber Update: By caliber, I mean a serious show that tries to be intelligent and entertaining; not so easy to pull off).

“Damages” is a bit of a soap opera, but done, so so well.

Watch.

I don’t have anything to add to the latest Weiner relevations (that he continued to be an internet horn dog even after he was very publicly busted for same), but I think the online treatment of this event is … interesting. Especially the pictures.

Small sample:

Draw your own conclusions (all screenshots ~ 9pm CDT 7/23/2013)

I dunno. Do we have the beginnings of the next “The Good Wife”?

And by “the family,” I mean the computer tech community.

And by “a death,” I mean a loss of sorts.

We’ve had a few recently.

• Douglas Engelbart pases away: On July 3, 2013, Douglas Engelbart died at 88. Known for his famous, waaay ahead of the (tech) curve “The Mother of All Demos,” Engelbart helped change the way we thought/think about/interacted with computers and, well – frankly – information.
• AltaVista goes offline: On July 8, 3013, AltaVista – once the go-to site for search – was no more. Bought (apparently) by Yahoo!, it became one of the casualties of Yahoo’s continued effort to make itself viable. I don’t blame the company, but it’s still sad: Before Google, there was AltaVista – really, the first search engine that was powerful. (Inktomi – which powered HotBot – was cool for a year or two).
• WebTV death sentence announced: In early July, Microsoft announced that its WebTV property (now called MSN TV) would be shuttered Sept. 30, 2013. I was never a fan of WebTV, but I had to deal with WebTV customers for the web property I was working for in the very late 1990s, and boy, did the folks who had WebTV love it. Mainly (from my conversations), male retirees, but they had no use for a computer, and if other sites worked on their WebTV, then dammit!, so should our site (they had a point…). Yet WebTV never really caught on – at the time I was dealing with the WebTV customers, our site was getting more traffic from Lynx – a text-based browser (mainly *nix) – than WebTV. Whatever. In a short while, it’ll join Netscape, Mosaic and other broswers in software heaven. But honestly – if you heard this announcement, wasn’t your first thought, “Wait – WebTV’s still around??”
• PCWorld magazine exits prints: In another one of those “it’s still around?” moments, PCWorld magazine has announced that the August 2013 issue will be its last print edition, as it focuses on its website and digital edition. No surprise, but just the end of an era. PCW was the biggest of the computer magazines, and lasted way longer than most could have expected. Does anyone under 45 or so even recognize IDG or Ziff-Davis as magazine publishers?*

The computer world is relatively young. Whether you mark its beginning in the 1940s with ENIAC and Bletchly Park – WWII efforts, or the advent of Unix/C in the early 1970s (and resulting mainframes/heavy iron), or even the advent of the personal computer/internet in 1980s & 1990s – the computer industry is young.

While the industry is growing like kudzu, it still takes some time to where it’s so old that one notices the passing of entrenched players, be they tech, software, people or protocols (remember GOPHER??). We’re getting to that critical mass, which is why the passings noted above are, well, notable.

ON THE TUBE:
Alias – Season One
Starring: Jennifer Garner (and others)

The pilot of this show – a two-hour premier – is, in many ways, the best pilot I’ve seen since The West Wing. Smart, sexy, kick-ass and so on.

I’d heard a lot about this series (debuted in 2001), but never got around to seeing same until recently.

Worth watching.

Update: Plot late s1 and s2 silly. So much so that I’m going to have to think hard and long before watching any other episodes. Sad.

All reviews

I’ve only had a smartphone (iPhone 4s) for about 18 months, but it’s definitely changed how I do a bunch of stuff on my “phone.”

I even use it – on occasion – for phone calls!

I’m not at all a mobile power user, and that’s sometimes a good thing – you see that others have created work-arounds/excuses for lack of conventional desktop activity. And power users often have all sorts of reasons as to why is or that isn’t mobile native.

Stuff that should be there (mobile) but isn’t. (To me.)

My current gripe: Search within a search

Example 1 – IMDB.com rocks; I use it all the time. I think I like the mobile app (for the most part) better than the desktop experience in many ways.

But here is how I often use IMDB: Watching some show. Who is that? Hit the TV episode/movie on IMBD (mobile or desktop), and then wait until I know that character’s name: On desktop, hit Cntr-F or whatever and get highlights on character called, for example, “Linus.” (I just saw Argo, listed 219 actors: with search, no biggie. Scroll/flick to see all of those WITHOUT highlighting/anchors/whatever…icky.)

No equivalent for mobile. Have to scroll through and find, potentially, which Linus is the actor you remember (to get filmography so you can see why you did/didn’t know this actor).

Example 2 – We recently used a smartphone voice search to find a Mexican restaurant in a certain city. Didn’t want to say name of restaurant, because will voice recognize the foreign name – and do I have the foreign name correct?? Like with IMDB, got a list (with links to call and so on…awesome), but in a browser, I’d get results and then do a secondary search of those results (’cause most search today is for the first page of results…another story).

Just a thought – and the secondary search (the Control/Apple-F or whatever) could easily be a search (voice, preferably) within the search via mobile.

But – right now – I don’t see it.

And – if it’s there and I just don’t see it – well, that’s a problem, too. And not just for me.

The actor James Gandolfini, perhaps best know as Tony Soprano on the TV series The Sopranos, died unexpectedly today at the age of 51.

Here’s how CNN.com reported same:

Here’s NbcNews.com’s take:

Which is more “journalistic’ (not to mention respectful) of the two?

Sometime last year, I became aware of an iPhone (I’m on 4s) weather app called “Dark Sky.”

I downloaded, and was blown away. It’s not your traditional weather app (Temp/Humidity etc), but it was more of a forecast app: It would say “Light rain in 20 minutes” – and it would be correct!

A month or two later – I dunno – I ran across a mention that the Dark Sky folks had a web site for weather forecasting, Forecast.io.

It’s amazing.

Totally accurate? Nope.

Impressive in its depth? Yep.

Slick design? Yep deux.

One of the things that caught my (nerdy) eyes was that they had an API of weather data – and free for the casual user (1000 free hits per day; each 10k after that $1!).

So I signed up, and got to work integrating it into my geistlinger.com site.

Forecast.io data on Geistlinger.com

The fun part – and the rough part – was integration entailed the following to make it “work” for me:

• API call to forecast.io
• JSON response
• Use PHP json_decode () function – new to me – to parse the JSON response
• CSS3 (rounded elements and so on)
• HTML5 – Canvas elements (and hacking same with JS)
• Create weather display area (PHP include)
• Jquery to toggle between current and detail screens (still working on same; not quite the UI I want)
• JS AJAX call to get the new data, parse the JSON, pass necessary data back to JS, and then (re-)populate the data points

For me, that’s fun. And right now it works.

Whoo-hoo.

Next: Geo-location, so I can display weather where you are, not where I am. Hmm…good thing?

I needs to do more work with APIs – I love Google Maps, Forecast.io is great. I’ve got to delve into more mashups – work, but fun (dorky) work.

   

OK, Yahoo! has powered the weather iOS app since I got my iPhone (4s).

Yahoo! has a new app for weather – I believe it was released 4/18/2013 – and it is awesome.

Blows the old, built-in app out of the water.

The old app – on the left – has info and so on.

The new app – on the right – is sexier, and integrates (Yahoo-owned) Flickr pics. Brilliant.

On the plus side, the new app adds way more weather info – in a sexier way – and loses, for the most part, none of the original weather app.

On the negative side, it doesn’t give a forecast upon load – have to “drill in” for that. No downside, to me.

Oddly, the new weather app reminds me of an Android screen in look & feel to it – like Samsung phones. A departure for iOS stuff.

Is it just me?

As horrific – and just plain bat-shit insane – as was yesterday’s bombing at the finish line of the annual Boston Marathon, there was one good takeaway from the event: Patton Oswalt’s Facebook response to the act.

In part, Oswalt said:

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”
…
But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out.
…
We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

(Read the full post.)

Well written.

Actually, I did wait.

One of my favorite songs in recent memory is Mumford & Son’s I Will Wait – and, at the Grammys this year, they gave what I consider to be a kick-ass performance of the song. Note: I don’t watch the Grammys, but I kept reading about what a good performance it was…so I sought it out.

Yeah, the Grammys were about six or so weeks ago, and I finally found a clip that I’m comfortable embedding.

Trust me, it’s worth the wait. Just four guys (and a few horns) pile-driving through this live performance. The lead singer is also using a foot pedal to play a bass drum.

As I said, it’s a favorite song. This performance outshines the song.