Dear MSNBC

If I watch the news channels it's almost always MSNBC because of the professionalism of the people behind the shows and on the air. But I won't watch them if they focus on one issue, mostly a natural or human disaster, continually, like the the tornado approaching Oklahoma City tonight.

Enough already, as we're hearing the same news repeated or updated every few minutes with interviews from the same people over and over, ad naseum. I'm not discounting the importance of this event especially in light of the last tornado which hit the community of Moore outside of Oklahoma City.

But with all the other things going on in this country and around the world, the events in Oklahoma City don't amount to much that the viewers want the broad scope of the news of the day and the relevance to their lives.

It's why when even MSNBC is going non-stop on one issue I turn off the channel and often the TV. I can easily turn it back on hours later and get the same amount of news without all the repetition. It's not boring but it's boring when it's the same news repeated ad naseum.

So MSNBC, don't be like Fox News, CNN or the other news shows in endless 1 minute news repeated  continually. It's the best way to kill the interest of the viewer. Just update the viewer a few minutes every hour, do the rest of the news and you'll be fine.

Otherwise, I'm not watching.

If as you say

If as you say Mr. President, you, as president, have the authority and power to use drones to target foreign individuals you determine are terrorists and an immenient threat to the US, what right does that give you, or any president, to stop the leader of any other country the right to do the same to an American citizen in the US?

What if the leader of a nation decides one or more Americans, using the guidelines you approved, and decides to conduct drone attacks against these American wherever they are in the world, even without the permission or knowledge of the government of the country, including the US.

If you have established the policy and precedent, then what right do you have to stop them? You don't and you can't. You have put this country at the lead of a long road where any country can use drones anywhere in the world whenever they want to target enemies of their nation.

That's not making us safer, it's making us the target. Don't expect a thank you for it.

Tumblr and Yahoo

If you're a Tumblr member (like me), then you've likely heard Yahoo is buying Tumblr for a reported $1.1 Billion. Yeah, that's a lot of money, but then Yahoo is cash rich and looking for companies to buy. This has been and is the strategy of Microsoft, Apple and Google.

You don't have to develop in-house talent, you just buy small applications companies and either intergrate the product and/or the staff of the acquired company into yours, and reap the products, users, users' information and potential ad revenue.

If you notice almost all of Microsoft's newer applications in the last decade or so didn't come from the company but from buying other companies. And Google has followed suit but less so from their overall products and services.

As for Tumblr and Yahoo, the first reaction was that Yahoo may and likely will integrate Tumblr into Yahoo, forcing Tumblr users to join Yahoo and then use their information and their posts and photos for profit.

But someone has another suggestion which also makes sense. Yahoo isn't buying Tumblr for Tumblr, that can be left alone, it's buying the creativity and innovation in the staff to revive and improve Yahoo which has grown stale and old.

I'm a member of Yahoo for their forums they bought from the original company and integrated into Yahoo but over time I've lost almost all interest there and only go there for a few small special forums. Otherwise, I wouldn't even be a member of Yahoo.

As for Tumblr, I'll continue on it until I see a reason to erase my posts, photos, etc. and leave. And that depends on if Tumblr continues to be popular for what I want and Yahoo doesn't screw it up as it has with everything else it touches.

As Yahoo has proven, you can be filthy rich and entirely useless and stupid. Yahoo has proven you can only buy your way to popularity so far but the younger generation is smarter than them. They're not rich but they're a whole lot smarter and wiser.

Apple iTunes 11.0.3

Well, I updated iTunes to the lastest update, 11.0.3, and they still keep changing the cosmetics of the application but not the underlying work of it, or at least something I've been bitching about for awhile now, which is loading the album artwork.

Under iTunes 10, all the album (both artists and albums) artwork was loaded when you opened iTunes then scrolled to the end, and was kept in active memory where you could scroll and always see the album covers. This changed with iTunes 11.

Under iTunes 11 you still have to scroll to load the album artwork but then after awhile it moves the non-displayed artwork to inactive memory where you have to scroll again to reload it into active memory. This means you have to scroll slow enough so it loads all the artwork again.

And it keeps doing that until you close iTunes. I won't argue this cuts the amount of active memory for iTunes with other applications, but it also means any system maintenance or user command (eg. purge) which clears inactive memory erases all the non-displayed artwork.

This means it's like starting over to scroll from top to bottom again to load it for the time it's in active memory again. Why can't Apple just add a feature with a user preference setting or menu tool to load all the artwork without scrolling and have a setting to keep it in active memory?

You had some of this with iTunes 10 which kept all the artwork in active memory when loaded by scrolling, so why can't you do it again but add a way to load it when opening iTunes? People can ignore it but some like me can use it.

Apple Time Machine V

Update 5/20/13.--After it started its 3 hour backup for the 4th time in a day I shut the backup off and erased the TC's HD. It's been off and will be off for awhile. I have overnight backups running on all 4 HD's in the Mac, a clone of the HD and a sync of the HD users folder, so I'm not losing anything. 

The TC was only used for stuff during the day and running 3 hours when it went beserk impact the rest of the system. The TC is 5 years old so it's hard to know if the problem is the backup or the HD. The only tools to debug or test the HD is with Apple if you bring it to them. They haven't released their tools or has anyone developed them.

The other problem is that even when the backup erases the old 50+ GByte backup it doesn't reclaim the space on the HD. It seem to just keep it flagged as used but not available, so the free space keeps getting reduced by these 50+ GByte backups, which I assume it eventually uses when the HD gets full and it needs the space. In the meantime half the HD is taken with these useless large backups.

Original Post.--This is what happens with the Time Machine and backup:

5/16/13 3:05:18.401 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Using file event preflight for Mac HD
5/16/13 3:05:24.388 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Will copy (1.8 MB) from Mac HD
5/16/13 3:05:24.392 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Found 123 files (1.8 MB) needing backup
5/16/13 3:05:24.413 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: 3.15 GB required (including padding), 351.51 GB available
5/16/13 3:20:31.116 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Copied 2091 files (19.2 MB) from volume Mac HD.
5/16/13 3:20:32.499 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Using file event preflight for Mac HD
5/16/13 3:20:44.024 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Will copy (1.1 MB) from Mac HD
5/16/13 3:20:44.165 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Found 71 files (1.1 MB) needing backup
5/16/13 3:20:44.166 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: 3.28 GB required (including padding), 351.41 GB available
5/16/13 4:20:50.927 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Copied 17.92 GB of 17.92 GB, 79237 of 79237 items
5/16/13 5:21:32.178 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Copied 32.93 GB of 32.93 GB, 150792 of 150792 items
5/16/13 6:21:48.303 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Copied 50.43 GB of 50.43 GB, 490465 of 490465 items
5/16/13 6:28:41.303 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Copied 596836 files (51.62 GB) from volume Mac HD.
5/16/13 6:28:45.282 AM com.apple.backupd[10027]: Created new backup: 2013-05-16-062843

As you can see the backup starts normally but then decides to backup 50+ GBytes of files and at 3-5 am there's nothing happening besides the normal Apple stuff. I have daily backups at 11 pm, 1 am, 3 am and 5am but they only copy and don't interfer with the backup on many days.

This is a puzzler which defies logic to determine the problem since erasing the TC on April 16th, it's happened seven times, with the start time of the backup:

April 17th 5 pm
April 18th 2 pm
April 22nd 5 pm
April 26th 1 pm
May 5th 7 pm
May 6th 1 pm
May 16 3 am
May 16 9 am
May 16 5 pm
May 17 1 pm

Anyway, that's 460+ GBytes for what I don't know. This time I plan to let the TC run out of space where the backup has to erase backups first to see what happens. Normally I stop the backup and erase the TC when it gets below 100 GBytes free space.

IRS & 501-3(C)

The IRS in charge of reviewing applications for 501-3(C) organizations gets a lot of applications for tax-exempt status for their organization from right wing political groups including Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, and others, and the agents do their due diligence to ensure these groups are in compliance with the IRS laws (passed by Congress) prohibiting them from campaigning and only working for the "social welfare" of the country (the words in the law).

In the process the organizations and their answers to the initial questions raise the concern of the IRS agents so they do a more complete audit of these groups to ensure compliance with the law. All of them get approved but now those groups are bitching they were singled out by the Obama IRS for harrassment and undue attention.

Those agents did their job. It's just the sheer number of applications from the right wing political organizations and individuals which made it appear they focused on them as they did because it was the number of them at the time which also raised flags.

Those groups should have read the law about 501-3(C) groups before bitching being audited because they violated the law about their purpose and work. The agents merely did their due diligence, but I expect they'll be the scape goats for political expediency by the President to appease the Republicans.

I expect the IG's report will say they were a little zealous but nothing out of the ordindary considering the circumstances and situation at the time. The agents made the decision that the applications were suspicious under the law and investigated. Their error was then identifying all of them for being like the obvious ones.

The NRA

The NRA is more interested in protecting the rights of criminals than citizens and especially victims of gun violence. The NRA would rather keep the current legal ground where any criminal can get a gun from guns owners, at gun shows and through straw purchases than protect the American people by requiring universal background checks and banning straw purchases.

The NRA is more interested in selling more guns than anything else, even respecting the view of the majority of its members who support universal background checks. The NRA which currently has only about 5 million members acts like it represents the 100+ million gun owners in the country. But it doesn't.

The NRA is a gun manufacturers lobby and nothing else. Wayne LaPierre is their puppet and nothing else. It's time the members of Congress realized this and acted for all Americans, especially the 80 who die every day from gun violence. It's time Congress stood up for us the 97+% who aren't NRA members.

It's time Congress did the right thing. How about it Mr. Reid and Mr. Boehner. Or are you still too coward to do that over the minority opposition? It's not about politics anymore, it's about people and it's time you understood that.

If You Are Wondering

If' you're wondering why the posts here have dwindled a bit, it's in part because I've been posting a lot of my shorter thoughts, ok, often all my thoughts are short and sometimes meaningless, on my Tumblr Web page, which I'm using for thinking out loud at the moment.

I'll be posting back here often enough as events in the world and my life happen, which is more of the latter for now as I'm taking care of some health issues and problems. I still have leg problems with a pinched Sciatic nerve which has left my left leg with balance problems and my right leg numb from above the knee to the ankle.

Recently I've had what any older man fears, prostrate problems. This started last September with a case of prostratitis which disappeared with medication but reappeared two months ago and I'm going in for a biopsy next week. Yeah, one of those proceedures and the fears of being old.

That said, I've been walking a lot, which I'm recording here where I'm up to 7-8 miles 4-5 days a week depending on my work and life schedule. It's the only excercise I can do for now until the lower back heals and doesn't hurt and the legs return to normal.

Anyway, that's what's new on this end.