David John Mead

I expect my natural disaster in HD…

On Saturday @jules23 & I were sitting down after digging out the drive when she said about a lot people on Twitter talking about the expected tsunami hitting Hawaii.  This was a result from the recent quake in Chile. We turned on CNN and what did we get? Some guys video (which looked sent from a mobile phone), from a balcony being Skyped through a web site that was not affiliated with CNN. Cut that with voice over from a local Hawaiian TV station and some random shots of a guy surfing.

Paparazzi can get HD video of Jennifer Aniston picking her nose from 300 yards away but world-wide news agencies can’t do better than Skype? C’mon.

After cycling through this same stuff for about 10 minutes we switched to MSNBC.

They were no better. They had similar file footage spliced into a 3 minute reel of camera crews on a cliff watching a helicopter, that was telling some surfers to get out of the water.  The anchor had to keep telling us that this was file footage from a least two hours ago.

Both channels kept saying the Hilo Bay would be first hit but no one seemed to have a camera there.  We were told New Zealand experienced some tsunami effects, but again no video or coverage from their local channels. Same for the Pacific coast beaches on the mainland. Nothing from the helicopters, other islands, people at the scene.

Checking in an hour later we still saw the same, now 4 hour old, file footage! And here’s a news flash. If its 3 hours after it was supposed to happen its not breaking news!  Overall I find this embarrassing for news channels in the 21st Century.

The trend now seems to be:

1. Grab 40 seconds of amateur/file footage
2. Loop continuously
3. Repeat the two facts you have both as on-screen graphics and voice-over
4. Ignore all other news and scheduled programming
5. Bring in an “expert” or “eye-witness” and get them to repeat the same two facts
6. Go to #1 and repeat

I wasn’t expecting a Poseidon Adventure type wave to roll in, but I did expect some research, commentary, and on-camera interviews. Is that too much to ask?

Technorati tags: fail, tsunami, cnn, msnbc, news

Nokia, T-mobile, Google, and a password security problem

So I’ve been happily been using my Nokia XpressMusic 5310 for some time now.  Though I didn’t take a data plan with T-mobile I can still check my Gmail using the phone. That was until I changed my Google password.

I blogged that my Gmail account was comprised recently so I’ve been changing passwords a little and decided on one that I could remember easily.  When I updated it on my phone though it couldn’t sign-in.  I gave it a day but still nothing.  Now here was the confusing thing.  If I changed one or two characters of the password on the phone it gave the standard ‘wrong password’ message.  Type the right password in and it just said “sign-in failed, try again”.

Saturday morning I spent over 40 minutes on the phone with T-mobile support.  They had had a problem with some G1 customers (pure coincidence) so they thought it might have been fallout from that, but no.  As I was on hold for the third time I tried changing one character in my password in Google and then tried logging in on the phone – BINGO!

Seems that whatever Nokia/T-mobile uses to pass your password to Google it doesn’t like ampersands.  Chatting with the support tech he said he’d never come across that before and would log it in the Nokia database (they can’t access Google).  It was odd that somewhere, something was recognizing that it had the right password, but just wouldn’t let it through.

So if you want to bolster your secure password add non-alphanumeric characters, as long as you don’t want to access them from a Nokia phone using T-mobile.

Technorati tags: nokia, xpressmusic, 5310, gmail, password, problem, fail

Help! I’ve lost my blog…

So A couple of weeks ago, when preparing to move RefreshCleveland across, I inadvertanly wiped my Wordpress db clean! Bugger!  Add to that problems I had with RefreshCleveland, it wasn’t a great week.

I’ve managed to get both installed now and reclaimed the older posts for this blog.  They were still being housed at Blogger.  My newer posts however only exists as search results.  Which is a good thing.

I did a search through Google with the term site:davidjohnmead.com "blog archive" which returned all my posts (thankfully not many) and the comments in the cache.

As I grabbed each one into Evernote, which kept the HTML intact (thank you), I’m planning on adding these back in manually, with the same publish date. I know that any SEO “juice” is long gone as they’ll have different URLs.  If I have time I could update the .htaccess, but I think I’ll just wait until Google crawls them again.  The comments will be there but as part of the content. Now I need to set-up some Wordpress backup or cron job to save this and Refresh.

Lessons learned.

Google videochat denied…

I was looking forward to trying the latest whizzbang from Google.  Videochat.  But after clicking on the “get started” button in both Flock and Chrome, all I got was this 404 error.

Maybe it’ll be up tomorrow. Another case of Google running before it can work?

Technorati tags: google, videochat, 404, fail