Unnecessary Chatter

In our digital age, I am happy that we have maintained the medium of radio.

Of course, there are those on the radio waves that incite hate and make up a lot of nonsense that we can do without, but if you leave the knob at your local NPR station, you are doing it right.

However, I do not have it in me to lay into the talk radio folks, I believe what they do is synonymous with shouting 'Fire' in a theater and, in some cases, tried for treason.  But that is a rant for another day.

I want to talk about the deejays that still insist on talking over music.  They go on and on about some nonsense or plug some event well into the introduction of a song and cut out before the lyrics start.  Honestly, in our digital age of YouTube, Rhapsody, Slacker, Napster, etc.. we are still accustomed to commercials between songs, but not over the songs.  The bottom line here, is that it is disrespectful.

Back in our heyday, I could understand the chattering over the music, as we were all either holding up tape recorders next to the radio or had a built in cassette player to capture music.  The radio stations and artists were making it more difficult for us to share music by copying it from the radio because some deejay was blathering over the beginning of the song, and sometimes the end of it.  Given the time, I can find it within me to forgive them at that time.  Now, the cutting of songs - that is also a rant for another day.

Why do they still do it?  We have one very annoying deejay in Tampa.  I will not name him, but he is on a popular 'classic format' station in the mornings.  He has all the kind of jokes that appeal to preteen boys and was one to make disparaging remarks about our last President - and again, with a kind of humor found on a Spongebob Squarepants show (and Spongebob is actually funnier, but I am trying to give a better example of the intended demographic).

He's an old school deejay, I get it.  But it is time to stop.  Put the ego aside and shut the hell up.

I will say one thing about this station, they have this tag line that says "the weather tight window studios" or some nonsense like that.  This is Florida, and it is blistering hot outside and it rains often, so maybe having a sealed studio from the elements with all of the gear it takes to run a radio is implied.  Every time I hear this phrase, I roll my eyes.

As I said, the bottom line here is simple - shut up already.  It's annoying and disrespectful to the artists.  We will eventually move away from radio, and one of the driving forces will be the annoyance of deejays.  Oh, and another annoyance is the KIA spokesperson here in the Tampa Bay area.  I will refuse to purchase a KIA just because of him.

Before I go, I will say that there are many deejays out there with insightful information about the music and the artists.  They bring value to the music and will play the songs in their totality whilst respectfully not talking over any of it.  That is what they are supposed to do and not have their egos step on the opening riffs or intros to any piece of music.

Furthermore, future deejays of America, if you really want to talk, there are plenty of talk radio stations out there and I hear that there is thing called podcasting.

The Devil in the Details

If you have a name that can have multiple spellings, then this rant is for you.  It can be your first name or your surname, but at some point in time, someone completely disregarded the time you took to explain that you have a different spelling or that your name begins with a different letter.  And, more than likely, this has happened to you enough times to be reading this and shouting "YEAH!!" like a James Brown backup singer.

I get it.  People make mistakes or 'assume' the spelling of your name and find themselves wrong.  We have all done it at one time or another, but very few of us pay attention to our little gaff and make the effort to not perform the same mistake again.

(Author's note: I have put the word 'assume' in quotes because it is not a word within my vernacular.  I have changed all usage of the word to presume and all derivatives, all conjugations and all varieties thereof, forthwith, henceforth, etc..  I absolutely refuse to allow someone to say to me "well, you know what happens when you assume?" because I will kick them in their nether region.  Instead, by using presume, presumption, presuming, and so forth and whatnot, you disarm the would-be arrogant assailant from eliciting unnecessary harm upon themselves.  Honestly, by removing all variations of assume from your vocabulary, you are saving the planet.  Good job!  There's a gold star in the mail for you.)

Mistakes happen, we forgive and most learn from them.  Others however, choose to forget, ignore, or simply do not care.

My name is Cory.  There is no 'e' in the name.  It is not Corey, it is Cory.  I often employ a little comedic mnemonic for people and say that I had the 'e' legally removed.  Sometimes it sticks and they never forget that there is no 'e' in my name and the rest of the time, they either put the 'e' back in butcher my name further with two 'r's or terminally spelled my name with an "ie" on the end.  And yes, you read that correctly, it was terminal for those that spelled my name Corie or Corrie.  Those folks are no longer with us, but under the fifth amendment I claim I know nothing of their demise - I simply say "Carma" caught up with them.

When the error occurs and the 'e' shows up, I take a moment to cast a dramatic sigh and then go on with my day.  However, the occurrences that press all of my anger issue buttons is when I get the 'e' in an email or, even worse, in a reply to an email.

I can understand the first time, and maybe the second time, but any subsequent email or reply to a chain of emails where someone leaves the 'e' in my name and I am ready to mail them a ticking package.  When this occurs, I will often make the font size of my name a little larger, or make it bold and/or italic.  I try to subtly let them know that they are misspelling my name.

What is more frustrating is that all of my email addresses have my first name in the address.  Ever since the first name.last name paradigm was accepted, all of my email addresses have had my first name in it... and this goes back to at least April of 2005 when I grabbed my Google mail address.  (For those of you attempting the math at home, it has almost been 12 years that I have been getting angry about this.)

So, I ask, what can we do?  How do we make people more cognizant or less callous of name spelling?  This is not a rhetorical question, I am honestly looking for answers that do not involve sledgehammers or other implements of destruction.  Of course,  I will not rule them out!     

Thank you for your time, your patronage and your compassion.

A Question of Email

There seems to be a lot of rhetoric circulating in the political stratosphere concerning emails, email servers and the subsequent administration of all of it.  As someone that has been working with the email beast since before the turn of the century, the bigger question is not being addressed.  But, we will get to that.

An email server is simply what it sounds like: it is a physical computer with a lot of glorified extra parts that make it beefier to perform 'server' tasks, have some physical redundancy built into it, and run some kind of email software.  They are fairly easy to build and implement, and there are plenty of YouTube videos that can assist you through your install.  Moreover, you can have Google, Yahoo, GoDaddy or a whole bunch of other companies 'host' your email server for you.  Honestly, in this day and age, you could have your own domain and your own personal email address and be sending and receiving email before lunch.

So far, we have covered personal email.  Here is where the real questions of email management begins.  How long is your retention period for deleted emails?  How do you share and sync calendars?  How do you connect with your mobile device?  What do you do about spammers? How can you make sure that no one can use your address to perform spamming?  And these are only the very few of the myriad factors that have to be addressed when hosting, administering and managing email servers.  There is so much more, but I will not bore you with those details.  I see you dozing off already.

However, when it comes to storage and retention policies, this is where you need to pay attention.  After being with a company that went through a federal raid (that's right, the FBI came knocking on our door complete with search warrants, hand carts, and guns), I learned a little something about data retention policy.  First and foremost, if your company has a policy for keeping data for a certain amount of time (let's say 7 years), then when any audit or federal raid comes barging in, you had better have those 7 years of data.

Moreover, if you have an email policy of deleting emails older than one year off of your servers to allot for your storage needs, then you had better not have some executive that wants his or her email retained for more than one year on that server.  Because, if you do, then you had better have all the email that is older than one year available for all employees.  The feds were very precise about making sure that companies follow their policy. 

After retention policies, now throw in having to be compliant. The big two are HIPAA compliance and Sarbanes Oxley (SOX).  HIPAA is about the protection of medical information and making sure that all Patient Health Information (PHI) is as secure as possible.  Basically, if any communications between email servers have PHI in them, then the email must be encrypted and that server has to have all the security patches, updates, etc.. etc.. 

Sarbanes Oxley (introduced in 2002) put in place by the SEC and Congress for publicly traded companies to ensure that no tomfoolery of insider trading or any other unethical practices are taking place (thank you Enron), also added more rules, regulations and a five year retention of email of senior management.  Essentially, senior management cannot decide to shred documents and offload email suddenly when the feds come rolling in.

Okay.. those are the basics.

Take all that has been presented and roll back to the Patriot Act of 2001.  This was at a severe heightened time of security and scrutiny of all our communications - replete with copious amounts of controversy and hyperbole about keeping us safe.  Given the urgent and timely push behind the Patriot Act, this would have been the perfect time to create proper rules and protocols for how the governmental departments and agencies conducted their email communications betwixt one another.  Put it this way, the Secretary of State had his email hosted by AOL at the time.  AOL - the "you got mail" people.  Think about that.  This was not an email server being maintained by an internal staff checking for viruses, hackers or if the accounts on it were compromised.  Our national security was in the hands of the AOL.

Here is the big question:  how come the number one method of communication (next to a telephone) was completely overlooked in the drafting of the Patriot Act?  Keep in mind the Executive administration eventually deleted some 22 million emails.  And because no policy or protocol was in place, they did nothing wrong.

Fast forward to 2016, and we are still devoid of policies and/or protocols concerning the maintaining and administration of email in the government.  This means that any government official can host their own server (with AOL, if they want), can delete whatever they want, have no retention rules, and can easily be hacked.  And there is not a governing body that can do a thing about it.  However, if Congress is deciding to pass laws and create policies now and wanting to play retroactive policing, then they had best go all the way back to 2001.  But why now?  (Rhetorical question.)

Ergo, whenever we hear all this talk about improperly deleted emails, illegal email servers, or anything else related to the matter of emails utilized by government folks, remember that the powers that be had their chance to create real policy and protocol in 2001: but, they decided, for whatever reason, that it was best to go down to Circuit City and get more AOL disks to keep their email solutions afloat.  

The point is, they obviously know how to legislate email when it comes to the rest of us (kind of like healthcare)... but when it comes to their own email, the rules do not apply.  And that is why the 'email trials' will continue to go nowhere: no laws were broken, because no laws exist in which to break.

We Choose to go to the Moon

"We choose to go to the Moon.  We choose to go to the Moon."
                       - President John F. Kennedy,  September 12th, 1962

Today, we choose to go to the moon, but not the same moon that we can easily discern in the sky.  We choose to go to Europa: a moon that orbits about the planet Jupiter.  I do not know about you folks, but this news makes my buttcheeks tingle.  This is exciting news.

Why is it exciting?

For one, someone in Congress is seeing that we have these lofty goals in space, we tend to thrive as a nation.  We innovate new technologies in order to solve the problems of space travel.  Those innovations have brought us advances in Health and Medicine, Transportation, Public Safety, Information Technology, and on and on.  We were once the nation at the top of these innovations and we have fallen far, far behind.  I am not saying that we have to be number one, but I think collaboratively with other countries that are way ahead of us, we will be able to do some rather amazing things.

I still get excited about launches and love to watch them.  I grew up making trips over to the east coast to see shuttle launches whenever it could be timed. Of course there were times we had to sadly turn back west after unforeseeable delays or cancellations.  But, the sensation of feeling the rumble of the rockets blasting those shuttles into space, is a memory in and of itself.  If you have not been close to the Cape for at least one launch, put it on your bucket list.  Trust me on this one.

Okay, okay, but why Europa?  It is another moon, just much further away.

Sit down for this one, as this is where the science gets really cool. Europa is covered with ice and under that ice is water.  Water.  The very essence of life (as we know it) in the universe.  (Sure, there is liquid methane on Titan - a moon of Saturn -  that could have a completely different type of life form swimming within its oceans, but we are talking water here.)  Can we mine it, can we reuse it, can we drill through it, can we drink the water below?  Many questions.  The trick is going to be finding a place to land that is near an air shaft or where the ice is thinner.  We are seven years from a targeted launch date, and it will be interesting to hear how it will all be done.

The next coolest item is that the gravity of Jupiter affects the tides and shifting of geological plates on the surface.  Sound familiar?  It is easily hypothesized that the gravity Jupiter is elongating the moon enough to create the necessary heat to keep the water on the moon a liquid.  You could follow the train of thought here to the fact that the moon could be habitable because it has water and is not too cold.  Of course, these are all theories, but that is why we are sending a lander there.  In fact, it is illegal to send only an orbiter to Europa, as Congress has mandated a lunar lander be part of the deal.

Usually, we search for planets that are within what is called the "Goldilocks Zone" where a planet is the right distance from a star and potentially has similar resources (water, air, cable television, washer/dryer hookups) to what we have here.  Europa is far, far outside that zone.  However, because of what the immensity of Jupiter does to the moon's surface by creating heat and tidal motion, the moon now has more potential than the planet Mars for hosting those brave enough to pioneer "the Final Frontier".  That is what is so cool about Astronomy and the possibilities that lie beyond our periphery.  

Finally, I find it rather auspicious that they make an announcement of the sort on the same day that the new Star Wars is released.

We choose to go the moon.  

We choose to go to Jupiter's moon.

Daily Dumbassery

I am not one to easily mock people for their ignorance in Science and will judge silently from afar. But there are those time when simply shaking your head or face palming is not enough.

In Woodland, North Carolina, the town has voted against using solar panels.  They have fears that the panels will consume too much of the sunlight and their other plants will suffer with the lighter load of rays directed to them.  Also, they are concerned that solar panels bring cancer.  And when I say they, both of these 'fears' were presented by a science teacher.  

I could go on with some of the other dumbass reasons, but I am trying to cut back on my rants for my health and for your pleasure.  You can thank me by remembering to donate to a new religion I am devising.  It is all based on The Big Lebowski and Ghostbusters, but I do not want to give away too much in case someone steals my idea before I get everything patented.

As per the usual, I digress.

Let us take a moment and look at these statements made by a science teacher.

1) Sun Thievery

Given the size of the sun, unless your plants are sitting directly under the solar panels or growing in your closet, then I can assure you that there is plenty of sun to go around.  Moreover, the Earth is about the size of an average sunspot.  For those of you non-astronomy folks, that is about the size of a zit on a teenage whale.  Considering that many countries in Europe are using more and more solar power and Disney World has not called to complain that they are getting less sun, I think we can safely surmise, that a few more panels is not going to ruin Spring Break in Daytona this year.

2) Cancerous Panelists

Is there an off chance that some cell or chemical in a solar panel may cause a sickness or cancer.  Sure.  I am not ruling it out.  However, what about our fossil fuel power plants?  Ask the miners that extracted that stuff out of the ground how good it is for their health.  What about Nuclear power plants?  Of course, they are cleaner than the coal burning alternative, but lest we forget Chernobyl and Fukushima.  Both are equally tragic from poor safety measures, although Japan was hit with a massive tsunami.  Of course, I firmly believe in nuclear power, but in the United States it is a bad idea, since we usually allow greedy, incompetent energy corporations to build and run our power infrastructure.  When you go with the lowest bidder, you really do get what you pay for, folks!

Bottom line, whether they can cause it or not, solar energy and solar panels have to be safer than what we currently have!  When I hear these ignorant pontifications, I have to think that they all originate from the same news source that is bought and paid for by the aforementioned incompetent energy corporations that would not want us to use solar energy or drive hybrids.  

As I see it, Woodland, NOrth Carolina... you have won the Dumbassery Award for today!  Bill Nye will be by soon to slap you all around!   Congrats!

New Site, New Hope

Over ten years ago I started the original blog page of cortwist.blogspot.com.  Some of what was posted over its lifespan is still there, and a lot of it has been hidden from view. Oft times I have considered deleting it all, but one day it will serve its purpose.  Maybe.  Not likely, but maybe.  There were two other sites that were reboots, much like this one, but I have also allowed them to rot.  Eventually, I tell myself, I will put all of the better works together into a larger file and create my own little coffee table reader called "Tripe for the Soul".

As it happens, another birthday has passed my by, and it marks yet another year I have struggled to get myself into the writing habit.  What I have forgotten is how much the simple act of blogging works as a pilot light to the bigger picture of writing.  I still have that same novel collecting dust (going on its 21st year) and still idling at 100,000 words.  Shamefully, I have a majority of the final 25-30K in my head ready to go, I need to simply put the time aside and make it happen.

Of course, like any other best laid plans, life gets in the way.  Then there are other ideas being kicked around that have to have some time spent to them to make sure that I have all my ideas written out for them.  I may not pursue these ideas at the moment, but I want to make sure that when I come back to them, that most of my braindump is available - even if I cannot make sense of it.

The bottom line is that I will try to return here often, like I used to do, and place some filler onto the page.  Sometimes, there is actually a spark of entertainment to be found, but more often than not, there will be tripe.  However, if you have ever been present for a sound check for a large concert, there is a lot of static that is blasted out of the speakers.  I have never known the legitimate reason, but for me, that is what I am doing here: I am getting the static out.

With that said, posts will suck.  I admit to it now and accept it.  There will be a few among them that are worth the time spent here, but not many.  I will do what I used to do and not have a format and drop out whatever I want - summer reading lists, shitty poetry, short stories, science stuff, literary stuff and all the other miscellaneous nonsense that I am wont to do.

Buckle up, eat your Wheaties, drink your Ovaltine, and for Thor's Sake, take your pants off... this is not a corporate environment.