Bert Garcia^2.0

When President Obama came on last night and said to the nation that “All in all this has been a tough week…”, you could see us all put down our smartphones and let go of our mouses.

What ultimately will come out of this week was that we turned the page on where we get our news from. We can confidently say that the cable box is no longer needed, it has been replaced by millions of citizen reporters utilizing the latest technological gadgets.

From April 18, 2013, at approximately 5 p.m. EST, to April 19th, around 8:45 p.m., I was glued to my computer screen, not the high definition television in the living room. With my trusty Firefox browser, I had two small windows open streaming local Boston stations WHDH and WCVB. On my main browser window, I had a tab open to a USTREAM channel where a local Bostonian was video recording his police scanner for all the world to hear, and another tab open to the subreddit BostonBombing. While reading the pertinent threads on Reddit, you can imagine the number of additional tabs my browser had opened, multitasking at it’s finest.

The Boston manhunt will go down as a triumph for law enforcement and for crowd sourced news gathering. Here’s a Google doc of all the Reddit update threads compiled of the manhunt from the campus of M.I.T. to the town of Watertown. As you read the timeline, you’ll come across updates that later on down the line are reported to have been wrong, just like leads may turn out to be a dead end in a regular law enforcement case.

How can CNN compete with the likes of Reddit? Well to put it simply, they can’t and they shouldn’t, cause they’re ill equipped. I liken CNN to a lone sniper waiting patiently for the killshot order to come through his earpiece, while Reddit is a group of motivated individuals equipped with automatic AR-15’s aiming at their intended target. Last night, when the police approached suspect #2 hiding out in the boat, you could hear hundreds of rounds being fired at said boat. Did they all make their mark?

Just lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair fall all around me
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence

Warmer weather allowed us to spend the week working on the yard.

There was gutter cleaning duties, raking whatever leaves were left on the ground and the first mowing of Spring.

Gathered up all the dead branches and twigs to make an excellent pile of kindling for the fire pit.

30 bales of pine needles were distributed throughout the yard, where grass does not grow and tall trees abound.

The fish in the pond came alive, thawed and very hungry. Next week I’ll give it a good deserved cleaning.

Today was a rest day, my back needed it. After months of Winter hibernation, it was a welcome break to wear shorts and t-shirts outside. Afternoon beer breaks are now on the schedule, along with BBQ hamburgers and chicken.

Caleb Meyer, he lived alone
In them hollarin’ pines
And he made a little whiskey for himself
Said it helped to pass the time

Woke up this morning to warm weather, a far departure from the last few weeks of supposedly early Spring but all we got was Winter weather. Back in February Phil said we’d be in a warmer place real soon, but we’ve had to re-live the same cold day over and over and over again.

Hopefully, fingers crossed and all that, we can start to work on the yard this week and get out of the house. I think we can all use some Vitamin D on our skin cause we’re molting everywhere, our keyboards could use a shot of compressed air.

Let’s hope that we do have a Spring this year and not an early Summer like we’ve had for the last couple of years. I’m all for warmer weather but not of the skin melting or the let’s check if those pores are working types of heat.

“Go West, young man”, is a quote that’s been resonating in my mind ever since I was a kid. Maybe it’s time to change coasts, I hear the weather in Cali is awesome.

I got flowers in the spring
I got you to wear my ring
And when I’m sad, you’re a clown
And if I get scared, you’re always around

When you don’t want to hear any spoilers in a heavily connected world.

The Formula 1 season started last week in Australia, and I stayed up till 3 AM EST to watch the live event but fell asleep halfway through. This week’s live telecast in Malaysia started at 4 AM EST, so I decided to watch the re-broadcast of the event at 3 PM EST.

What to do if I don’t want to hear who’s won the race?

• Don’t turn on the television till 3 PM:
  Every news and sports channel now has scrolling tickers along the bottom of the screen showing the latest headlines. Duct tape along the bottom of the TV comes to mind.

• Don’t surf the web on my computer:
  Forget about visiting Reddit or making the mistake of doing a search on Google for Formula 1. Oh those helpful engineers at Google, they think of everything.

• Don’t look at my smartphone:
  Those in-the-know news gathering apps, they become a hindrance real quick when you don’t really care to know.

• Fast forward a number of years:
  Open up the Net connected refrigerator and a sultry voice informs you that you’re out of milk and congrats to Sebastian Vettel for winning the Malaysian Grand Prix. Drats!!!

I’d sit alone and watch your light
My only friend through teenage nights
And everything I had to know
I heard it on my radio

30 years of keyboarding and mousing. Green screens to GUI environments. SSP to DOS, Windows and Linux. RPG to Basic, Pascal, C, Perl and PHP. Heavy technical manuals to Google. Netscape to Mozilla. Dumb terminals to personal computers and tablets. Punch cards and 8 inch diskettes to USB thumb drives. 10MB to Terabyte hard drives. 640K ought to be enough. All nighters to repetitive stress injuries. Drag and drop to carpal tunnel syndrome. Folding tables to ergonomic desks. Hard plastic chairs to Herman Millers. Cubicles to home offices.

10 FOR X = 1 to 30
20 PRINT "Bert's been computing for "; X;
30 IF X = 1 THEN PRINT " year" ELSE PRINT " years"
40 NEXT X

Sometimes the lights all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been