Greg In The Desert

The local TV news station KOB has more on the iPhone balloon tracking application. The app is written by Anthony Cardinale and is a real time tracking application. It’s being tested by 5 ballon pilots and chase crews at this years Albuquerque Ballon Fiasco, I mean Balloon Fiesta.

“At some point, every pilot could be using this, and we are going to have a free version that allows people to come to the Balloon Fiesta and load it up to see where all the balloons are in real time,” Cardinale said.

Might make going to the Balloon Fiesta worthwhile.

It’s been windy as heck yesterday and today, which helped to make for some spectacular fires in the bosqe near Belen. Of course there’s evacuation, peoples property or worse is effected. I expect the news stations to report on it, but there a point where they go too far. Here’s my list of why it gets too annoying.

• The overlay banner at the bottom of the screen causes the High Def programming to switch to standard definition.
• The overlay banner at the bottom of the screen stays on constantly for what seems like hours. They need to just have it on for a minute then turn it off.
• The overlay banner reports the same information over and over, with little or no change. Again, turn it off for a while if there’s nothing new.
• The overlay banner tells me over and over how I can turn into the news station at the next normal broadcast time to learn more. Well no fucking shit sherlock, did I think you were going to forget about it? Lets call this what it is, a attempt to advertise your own ego inflated new show.
• The current show is interrupted with a news person to tell us what the banner has been saying, and the banner is still running.
• The current show is interrupted at the very end, just before the news broadcast, for breaking news and the ending of the current show is never shown. Since we couldn’t wait 2 minutes for the local news.

At this point I’m already annoyed with this channel for ruining the HD show I was watching and have switched to another channel or started watching something on the DVR. When it comes time watch the local news, I won’t be watching your dam channel.