Category Archives: Video (misc)
Teletype
I recall visiting the radio station where my father worked and standing in front of the Associated Press teletype, entranced by the endless stream of words. Who was typing? Where were they? Did they ever stop?
Years later, as a young man, I got a job at the station and came to depend on the AP “wire.” It was our only link to real-time (I’m not sure that phrase even existed in 1972) news and information from outside our little town. The daily newspaper was tossed on the doorstep every afternoon (or you could get the Memphis paper a day late). The three national TV networks gave us a half-hour of national news each evening.
Our radio station didn’t have a national news network (until 1974) so we relied on the Associated Press newswire for just about everything throughout the day. During a live “board shift” we would dash to the AP teletype (in the transmitter room) and “rip the wire” which involved tearing a long strip of printed wire copy into piles of news, weather, sports, entertainment news, etc. If the paper jammed or the ribbon broke, we missed whatever was fed. If something the AP considered urgent was fed, an alarm bell on the teletype sounded.
A radio station had to have a wire service. Without it they were limited to playing records and reading local news and school lunch menus. The AP knew this and charged accordingly. Thousands of dollars a year. Contracts were for five years. But there was no alternative.
In 1984 I left the radio station to take a job managing The Missourinet, a statewide news network originating from Jefferson City, Missouri. I worked for (parent company) Learfield Communications for the next 28 years. One of the more interesting projects I worked on was the creation of a low-cost alternative to the Associated Press. We called it Learfield Data (later, Learfield Newswire).
I worked on this (along with bunch of other people) for a dozen years from the late ’80s through 2000. At one time we had 300 subscribers. When the World Wide Web became a reality in the mid-90s it was clear the days of wire services were numbered. Road kill on the Information Highway. You can read (PDF) the story of how it began and ended here: Learfield Data
TED: What reality are you creating for yourself?
“Awfulizing” – When your fears distort your reality
Destin in October
Clean up your computer desktop
There’s a simple, easy solution to your nasty-ass desktop.
Honky Tonk Women – Live Outside
Rough day (Deadwood)
TED Talk: Geography is no longer destiny
Geopolitical futurist Parag Khanna foresees a world in which megacities, supply chains and connective technologies redraw the map away from states and borders. He sees geography and connectivity fusing into what he calls “connectography.” He goes so far as to say “connectivity, not sovereignty, has become the organizing principle of the human species.”
Mr. Khanna predicts “we will build more infrastructure in the next 40 years, than we have in the past 4,000 years.” And “by 2030, more than two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities.
I really liked the part about redrawing the map away from “states and borders.” I was born in Missouri and have lived here most of my life but it’s not something I brag about. I have no pride in this chunk of land or the people who live here for that matter. And they — we — are probably no better or worse than people who live in other “states.” It’s just that the idea of thinking of oneself as a “Missourian” or a “Southerner” or by any other geographic designation seems archaic.
I have much more in common with the people I’ve connected with online than the people in my neighborhood or city. Shame on me, maybe, but there it is. It’s connections I’ve come to value, not geography. This TED Talk made me hopeful. If you watch it, I hope it does the same for you.
The Jackpot
William Gibson defines the Jackpot Years from The Peripheral [ m1k3y on Vimeo.]
“No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.”