Sunday, February 24, 2019

Fixing the Academy Awards

Surprise! The Academy Awards are again really really boring.

And again, the Academy (and all the critics) seem to miss the obvious problem.
The problem is the speeches: they’re boring and repetitive.

Does anybody really want to listen to thirty people in a row race through 45 seconds
thanking the Academy, their mom, their husband, their collaborators, their hair dresser,
their plastic surgeon, their kids, and their plastic surgeon? Actually, it would be fun if
they would be that candid but instead they are uniformly professional thanking their
family and collaborators. No, nobody takes anything away from all those thank you,
thank you, and thank yous.

It’s meaningless drivel.

How does the Academy not know this?

How to fix it? All acknowledgements get written in advance and are scrolled across the
screen when the winner jumps up to give a speech.

The speech can be about anything but they are NOT allowed to acknowledge or thank
people. Now that would be interesting! They could talk about their artistic vision. Or their
challenges. They could talk about their dreams or what they want to do next. They could
talk about how this culminates years of efforts which didn’t get acknowledged.

It would be so much more fun if the speeches, which are the emotional highpoint of the night,
forced the speakers to say something of interest and not fall back on the endless repetitive
thank you, thank you, and thank you.

They’re entertainers. Lets see them do thar thing! Many will bomb. That’ll be fun too!

Google Calendar, Blogger, and iPad Bugs!

One of the amazing, practically disconcerting behaviors of Google Calendar is that it automatically injests all flight reservations cited in my emails and places them on my calendar.

I have a friend coming to town who emails me his reservations? It’s automatically on my calendar.

My son emails me when he is coming home from spring break? It’s on my calendar.

I make a reservation or one of colleagues makes one for me and shares it with me.  Yup, on my calendar.

Once it’s on my calendar, there it is. Unmarked.

I’ve tried to open up these events on my calendar and mark them for what they are.  Can’t!!! I can delete them.  And the pencil appears showing that I can write but really all it allows is for me to write a special alert. I can’t change the title or anything meaningful to signify what these flight reservations are about.

Since my calendar is kept open for all of my colleagues to see what’s going on, there’s some confusion.  Especially since both personal and business visitors often send me their reservations (I often offer to meet people at the airport or tell them that the start time for the meeting is flexibility: when they get here we’ll start) meaning that there are a lot of reservations that keep popping onto my agenda.  And some people change their flights mid trip which of course produces an overlapping array of schedules onto my calendar. Ugh.

BTW, I found another bug this time somewhere in between all the complex vendors and technologies that control my digital life. I recently bought a fancy iPad with a keyboard.  Very cool but full of little issues. The biggest one is that whistle it feels like a computer, it should be treated like a phone. By this I mean that that we should open apps rather than use an living inside a browser.  In this case,

For instance, if I was on a computer, I would jump between tabs inside my browser between my calendar and an email and a blog.  But on the iPad, I should jump between apps.

In this case, I’m in a browser and struggling to update a Blogger blog with this post. (Yes, I know WTF am I doing on a Blogger blog but I’ve had this for around a a decade and it’s been simple and I’ve just never got around to setting it up on Wordpress).

But todays bug is a dousey.  When I’ be written enough text so I’m now writing beneath the bottom of the screen!  So instead of the  screen crolling so that I can see what I’m writing, the viewport stays above the text so I’m typing and I can’t see what I’m writing!!!

I can put my finger on the screen and scroll down to peek but as soon as I release my finger, it slides back up above so that that I’m again typing below the screen.

And another tricky thing is that I can’t seem to figure out how to do a screen capture. It doesn’t seem to work like my Mac or like my iPhone for a screen capture.  Ugh ugh ugh.

The good news is that after an hour of work yesterday, I worked out how to work by Wolf coffee system that came with my new condo work!