The Blog Turns 10

Hi folks. It’s November 24, 2023 and the blog turns 10. So, how have I done for the past 10 years as a blogger? Well… let’s see…

I have written countless posts on The Simpsons, both in this blog and in another one called Simpsons On Sundays, formerly called Simpsons Sundays. I created it because of having trouble with posting in this blog, in May 20016. My security token needed to be reset so, I had to delete the original app which I used and re-downloaded and log back in. Now, I have two blogs!

Oh, I almost forgot about another aspect to this blog which I had for a couple of years, which was a series of posts called Weather Wednesday. I had been thinking since the end of 2015 that since I had been occasionally posting about my Weather Radio Listeners Newsletter, I should at least consider thinking about creating a blog for it, instead of just having it go out as a pdf every 3 months to an email list. So, in early 2016 I would create the second blog and then, Simpsons Sunday in May of that year.

Then on November 3rd last year, I had decided (out of the blue) to bring into the world yet another blog, this time on one of my favourite rock bands. In this case, it is Queen and I had done posts about them on here too, but not as much as The Simpsons or on weather. So, All Gord’s People was born on November 3rd 2022 and I am posting in all of the other blogs to this day.

So, where does this leave the blog you are reading now? Well, basically I could do whatever I want. I have carte blanche to do whatever I feel like doing and post about whatever I wish, regardless of any potential repercussions. Altho, I do make it a rule not to include any posts from the other blogs in here, but some posts I had done fit nicely in other blogs, such as a few for my Simpsons blog and I even did a post on 3 of them, when remembering the death of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins. So, it’s not a hard rule and because it’s my blog, only I am allowed to break it when I see fit.

Unfortunately, lately I’ve been whining about my trivails with my apartment block and the city I live in, including the Buy election which happened earlier this year and the removal of the bus stop in front of my building, as well as the stoppage of mail delivery directly to us . I have more to say on that in a later post but that’s coming soon.

Even the cOVID-19 pandemic was not immune from this blog, or is that the other way around? Anyway, I had some thoughts about it and even including conspiracy theories because, I feel it’s important to look at both sides. However, I am not fully on board with conspiracy theories because, that is all they are. They are conspiracy theories and not conspiracy fact and it’s time to get back to looking at things from a logical and factual standpoint, as opposed to alternative facts. Alternative facts is just silly and the fact that certain people believe them to be true, is fucking sad. The rise of conspiracy theories and alternative facts was obviously apparent when the pandemic was underway and we all had to wear masks. I had talked about my own feelings on sporting a face covering, so I am not going to repeat it. If you want to know more, just go to the archives to August 2021 and read the entire post on the album Iowa by Slipknot, as it was the 20th anniversary at the time.

It is nearing the end of another year and I am hopeful that things will change, but I have a feeling it will not happen. In fact, things could get worse in that there will be more people who believe bullshit over fact and if this shit happens, this could potentially destroy our way of life and our way of electing our leaders. If the wrong guy gets in and they make the rules that could plunge us all into chaos we as a species could be up shit Creek, using a turd for a paddle. As you know, I hate politics for that reason only, as both the left and right are getting farther and farther apart and the centrist like myself are being silenced by people on both sides. When will the day come that we look rationally at how we are living and how our leaders are leading us? When will we get a more central view on issues, as opposed to extreme left or extreme right? Until then, I can no longer bring myself to vote in an election because it’s either one or the other and no place for the middle ground. I like my extreme metal, but that doesn’t translate to my views on issues and we need to start looking at both sides of an issue and if we disagree with somebody, how about accepting that we can’t agree on everything? We are not the same, we don’t talk the same, we don’t look alike, we don’t think exactly and last time I checked, we are all of different ages and backgrounds. Not everybody was brought up the same way and some of us were born with disabilities, with some more severe than others. I am blind, but the person next to me may be using a wheelchair in order to get around, or they may have schizophrenia, or they may have nothing wrong with them at all on the outside. Some folks suffer from depression and others may have that worse than the person next to us, so let’s try to get back to compassion and not just say that we are and actually do it, as it can save lives and we as a society can get along much better.

Anyway, 10 years has gone by and the time has surely passed quickly. This blog will continue and I will post when I feel the need to do so and you are welcome to check out my other blogs and some of you may be subscribed to one or more of them. I hope you enjoy my posts and you don’t mind that I do not use flowery language or try to write like a writer who writes books. I use a conversational tone because I am aware of the power of words and using a word in a sentence wrong could get me into trouble. I have no wish to make enemies and all I want to do, is give you my thoughts and whether you agree or not, is up to you. As long as we can agree to disagree sometimes and we can at least listen to each other, without feeling like we are being told what to think. There I go again, but this is where we are at with society these days and we have to stop that. Now, I think we are done here, as I hope my next post will be on something positive, rather than me bitching about iOS 17 and it’s problems, or building management, or something else which is bogging me down.

iOS 17.1 And What I Like

Hi folks. Enough of my whining and now I’m going to tell you what I actually like about iOS 17.1. In my postscript to my last post I mentioned that I like the fact that you can favourite songs in your music library and recently, I started playing around with that to see what it was like. Well, I think it’s great that we can do this now and I hear that iOS 17.2 there will be an option to create a playlist called Favourites and to be honest, I think that should’ve been the plan all along for this particular aspect of the software. Besides, there should’ve been a Favourites playlist by default, instead of being an untitled playlist if one chooses not to put their own title to a list. I keep my list small, because I know that they can take up potentially megabytes and possibly gigabytes if they are large enough.

I like Favourites because I have some compilations which are actually collections of band’s albums, such as Van Halen, Deftones, Metallica and LINKIN PARK who are among those with studio album collection boxed sets on iTunes over the years. Even Disturbed and Slipknot are not immune to this trend, but I didn’t snap up studio album collections for every band because I wanted individual albums by the majority of my artists. With Van Halen, I chose them because I know the albums from the David Lee Roth era well enough, that I can listen to an individual album from it as I please. With Favourites, it is much easier to cherry pic for example: the entirety of Van Halen I, or 1984. I did both albums, during the summer on my album listening kick and it felt good, to go back to younger days.

Other things which make me happy about iOS 17.1 is that with emails, I can move messages with known email addresses right to the intended mailbox I created for example: I have one just for Alan Cross and all my emails to him, when I have a question, comment or I am giving him a link to look at, potentially for his website. With iOS 17, I had to manually go to the mailbox, but with iOS 17.1, it has the old option from the past saying “Move to” so-and-so after I decide to move the message, rather than delete it.

I am happy to have more of a choice back, when it comes to assigning ringtones and text tones to people again. With iOS 17, you could only assign ringtones as ringtones and text tones, as text tones. Thankfully, we got half of that back from how it was before in that we can assign text tones from both ringtones and text tones, but not all of the same freedom with ringtones. In a way, it makes sense because these new text tones are too short to be used as a ringtone anyway, but others may not be such as the classic ringtones from way back in the day before 2013. However, I’m not going to knock this one because I’m just happy to have that option back.

About my postscript in the last post, I had discovered that in the music app, compilations are hidden, even if they are unhidden as an option for listening and sorting, by Apple and I wonder if this may be a part of the reason I had gone through all this trouble and upset, with my music library, which is still kinda messy and looks like it had been trampled upon by software bullies. But seriously, my library is still a mess with albums still broken up and no syncing with iTunes, when it comes to downloading new music or TV show episodes as of iOS 17.1. I had reported my issues with the option for compilations being awol to Apple Support in the app and I hope that there are tech experts working on this problem. Right now, I am just happy to be able to favourite songs I want to hear if I am in the mood, even though I am an album person at heart. That is why I had been bitching about this issue, in my last two posts and I will not let go of albums that easily. I am guilty of cherry picking songs, but I’m trying to fix that in my iTunes library as much as I can. Unfortunately, I can’t do that with every single album because not all albums are available in the iTunes Store right now. For example: Flash Harry by Harry Nilsson is not available now, but it was in early 2019. I only purchased and downloaded the song Harry, because I am a Monty Python fan and because it is sung and written by Eric Idle, with help from his friend Charlie Dore. I hope that some day this will come back so I can purchase the remainder of the album, as apposed to running to Youtube to listen to the whole thing, without the option of picking songs on my own time, to listen to again and again. I used to do this as far back as CDs and favourites gives me that option again, without having to create a playlist. There are countless examples of this from back in the day, so I won’t attempt to go through them all. Anyway, I hope that you are enjoying iOS 17.1, even with its flaws I had pointed out and especially the ones in the Music app, which are no less important than anything else on our iPhones and iPads.

One thing I’ve been wishing for and which has not happened yet with iOS or iPadOS, is that we should be allowed to choose the sounds for all applications, besides Mail and Calendar. For example: I have sounds which will be great for the Weather app or any Weather app which I use which has Push notifications as a part of what they offer. The native weather app is obviously one of them, but I have others which do not have their own sound and use the default sound, chosen by Apple. The other reason I mentioned this is because I don’t like the current sound which is used for iOS 17, as it gets away from tradition as for the past 16 years, the default sound for a third-party apps and some native apps outside of Mail and Calendar has been Tri-tone and we have all grown used to it. Now, the default is Rebound, which sounds nice and is not too jarring. However, the fact that it doesn’t make you start like Tri-tone is rather counterintuitive, when it comes to alerting people to my mind, none of the new ringtones or alert tones for iOS 17 are especially outstanding and the fact that the default is changed, it’s not great. As similar sentiment with Siri and its classic tone being replaced by the quieter tune, rather than tone.

For one thing, these new alerts are hard to hear in noisy environments and the classic alerts are perfect for that, so why screw something up like this and have people miss alerts, which could be related to business or something else important, such as a Transit application Alerting one to their bus arriving, or a critical weather alert such as rain headed our way in the next 10 minutes. I mean, not everyone uses their iPhone the same way and Apple should know this, but it seems that some people who work there and who make decisions as to how the latest iOS software is constructed, have forgotten. So, my hope is that someday either with future iOS 17 or iOS 18 updates, we will get The option of assigning a sound to all applications, besides Mail, phone, messages, reminder and Calendar. I use certain sounds for certain reasons, some of which I cannot explain in this blog. Others I leave alone because they just don’t suit me and they are simply too quiet. Hopefully something will give and will be allowed this option in the future. Otherwise, besides my problems with iOS 17 I think it is pretty good so far. Let’s hope that things get patched up and fixed soon, so that future updates will be more or less like they were, before iOS 17 came along with no missing options and as little bugs as possible.

Remembering Iron Mike Bensson

10 years ago today, rock radio in Southern Ontario got a little less fun. It was 10 years ago today on November 7, 2013 that I learned that a rock radio icon in Southern Ontario had unfortunately passed on too soon. If the name Iron Mike Bensson rings a bell, that’s who I’m talking about and every year, I think about him and everything he did on the air, to make us listeners and the people whom he worked with laugh. Mike (whose real name was Mike Miller) encouraged you to call him a funny name and he had a few names of his own, in his box of tricks. If you have ever heard him on 103.3 The Fox in Bufalo, he was the same back then too, before moving his act to St Catharines in 1995 at 97.7 HTZFM, where he worked until his last broadcast in July 2013. By the way, he got the name Mike Bensson from his father named Ben, as Mike was Ben’s son.
I met him a few times when picking up a prise, or just going to the station to be a part of the fun of the morning show, when he would sometimes broadcast outside the studio. He had worked in both the afternoons and the mornings and during both shifts he did a segment called The Teaser. The idea was to guess how 3 songs connected and some days it was really easy. For example: once I won when the connection was that all 3 songs appeared on the bands respective debut albums. Once he played 3 songs from bands from Seattle and someone had figgured it out 2 songs in. Sometimes, he would make it hard and it would take as long as half an hour, before someone would get the correct answer.

Also, on September 11th 2001, he wasn’t able to get across the border, as he lived in Western New York and this also shows his dedication to the listenership. He drove to and from work and he only missed shifts if he was either sick or on vacation. September 11th was the exception to this and it was totally understandable.

He was always nice to me, as everyone at 97.7 HTZFM has been so far. I remember when I went to the station in September 2004, just to give him a welcome card, as he had just been moved to doing mornings. I would send him a birthday card every year, including 2013 and I don’t know if he ever got it. By the way, his birthday was October 17th and he was 60 when he died.

In the fall of 2012, it was announced that Mike had cancer and yes, it was oesophageal cancer and a year or so earlier, he had moved back to doing the afternoon drive after 7 years in the morning. I had actually forgotten about the announcement until it was more than a week after Mike’s last shift during the summer of 2013. By that time, it was all about The Simpsons for me and if I remember correctly, Mike did use a Homer clip during The Teaser, before he signed off for the last time. However, the last time his voice was heard on air was on his 60th birthday and he sounded as healthy as he always did and in less than a month, Mike was gone.

I remember the day I found out that Mike had passed, when an announcement that something major had happened would be made at noon on 97.7 HTZFM. It was then, that both my friends Kristy Knite and Paul Morris announced Mike’s passing, of oesophageal cancer. He had gone at around 7:00 AM that morning and to say it was sad, was an understatement. When I was more active on Twitter (now X) it exploded, with comments from all sorts of listeners, including myself, expressing our grief over what had been told to us. It went on for most of the day, meaning the broadcast and the tweets and I couldn’t focus on anything else but this for the rest of the day.

About 8 days later, 97.7 HTZFM did an on-air memorial tribute to Mike, with all of his past co-workers at HTZ past and present, along with his friends who worked at other radio stations with him. For example: if you live in Detroit and you listen to WRIF, you know that the voice you hear in the afternoons on week days is Meltdown, with whom Mike had also worked with at 103.3 The Fox in buffalo. By the way, Meltdown has a podcast called Talkin’ Rock With Meltdown Podcast, where he simply interviews our favourite rock stars, from past and present. Anyway, the tribute to Mike was quite moving and I had told that to my friend Paul Morris and unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the party for Mike, which was held soon after it.

For some reason one of the songs being played in rotation around this time was Say Hello To Heaven by Temple Of The Dog. I don’t know if playing the Temple Of The Dog track was a premonition or not, but it had certainly seemed odd. Then again, it could have also been a coincidence, but I believe that a shoe was about to drop and it wasn’t going to be good either. Obviously, on November 7 2013, we learned what it was and now, 10 years later I and others still miss Mike and I assume, we all think about him every day.

I will mention one more thing about Mike that made him such an enduring part of my life and those of us who knew or listened to him on the radio. As I said earlier, he encouraged you to call him a silly name and it was all in fun and not for trash talk. Some of the names bordered on scatological humour and some names were just playing fun. Also, I will leave you with his memorable line he would always say at the end of his broadcasts. “Stay off the pipe and don’t forget to wipe… AMF.” He was certainly someone you couldn’t get mad at, even if you tried. I never did and never was. Thanks Mike and we miss you, every damn day.

iOS 17.1 Trouble, Pt 2

This is a continuation on a post I had done last week, on iOS 17.1 and my troubles with it and the affects on certain apps, which used to work together. I will review the problems I had and I will go into detail on what kind of hell I went through this week, because of this screw up by Apple.

To review, I had said that my albums were broken up in my music library and they still are. I now know the reason is because they have not been synced using the TV app as a companion, or the iTunes app as the same. Normally, when I receive a new song, or download a new album, what happens is I would go to the TV app, go to an episode of The Simpsons, delete it then re-downloaded again and we’re all good from there. With iOS 17, I had to do something similar, by going to the TV app, delete an episode of The Simpsons, then go to the iTunes app and find the episode in question, redownload it and everything is all right again. This syncs up everything and all albums are as they should be, with all TV show episodes, available in downloads, ready to be watched once and again. The reason I do not download episodes from the TV app is that I have to babysit the download, where is in the past I did not have to do that. I had learned this when closing the app and then reopen it and an alert would pop up and tell me that my episodes could not be downloaded. I would tap on “okay” and I could continue with normal operations of my device. With the new more complicated way of downloading episodes of TV shows and if you really want, the entire seasons of episodes or an entire series, you don’t have to babysit the downloads. However, you can only down one episode at a time and you can download as you go, which is the only plus for this generation of Apple’s iOS software.

With iOS 17.1, no syncing has occurred and obviously, this is bad. For one thing, if you have two versions of an album they become one in the same thing and you don’t want your deluxe and Standard version of for example: The Game by Queen to be combined. Do you? In case you ask, that didn’t happen with any recent purchases and it did happen in 2020, with a couple of classic Def Leppard albums, which have more than one version on iTunes currently.

So, what can we do about this? On the Apple Support app, they only allow for a 100 character description, which is not enough to explain this problem as it is not as easy as making a sandwich. Clearly, this seems to be a bug with the TV app, but nobody wants to acknowledge it at Apple, or nobody is even trying to report this issue, other than me. I am obviously not happy with what has happened and I will get into how I had discovered what I had explained earlier.

My original thought was that to fix the original problem was to reset the iPhone and redo it, as a new device, with my Apple ID information intact. Well, it seemed to work at first, but I later realized that nothing was sinking. Why is that? Even after everything was synced up in my music, TV and movie libraries and everything was moved around the way I want, it’s still broken with no way of sinking insight. Apples solution is to subscribe to Apple TV and I tried that, with the same result. So, this is clearly in Apple’s court now and they have to do something or else people who actually use their phones for everything, are going to start to rage. I am one of them and I don’t like to rage, but I guess this blog is my way of venting so, that is how I will rage.

I can’t just drop the iPhone completely and go android, because that wouldn’t be possible for me, or even practical. I had explained the situation to Apple and the solution I was given about subscribing to Apple TV just didn’t cut the mustard and I knew it wouldn’t. Why is Apple separating the TV app and the iTunes app, as well as the music app from each other in stages? When it comes to the downloads, you shouldn’t do that because it makes a mess of people’s music libraries if they have a mast a collection of thousands of songs, as well as a bunch of TV shows and complete seasons of said shows. In my case, it is The Simpsons as my default show and is it the problem? Yes and no. Yes, because of this non-syncing issue, I can not watch any episodes in my downloads. No, because having explained what I had done when purchasing new music helps me to know what is going on and I can pass it along to you. So, maybe Apple should have done a deeper dive, into whether iOS 17 and its plans for the TV app and Music app could cause potential chaos. Simply deleting my data and settings and starting all over again doesn’t fix anything, as I had done that twice this week and the result is the same. Hopefully with iOS 17.1.1, this may be addressed, but I am not getting my hopes up, because there are apparently more important issues than having an organized music library and being able to watch all episodes of all TV programs, in your TV app. I wish I could tell Apple this directly, but I know the answer they will give and I understand why they do this, but this just will not do. I keep repeating myself, because I am at a loss as to what I can do, other than trying an older device on iOS 16 and seeing if it can somehow make this pain in the ass go away. I am hopeful, but not exactly holding my breath that this will work.

Postscript

On November 7 there was an update to iOS 17.1.1 and it fixed issues, but not the ones I have been having. Also, after the update I checked through all the options in the Music app and I found that there was one missing (well actually two), but one which really does count when it comes to music listening and sorting things out in the Music app the options appear in the following order: Playlists, Artists, Albums, Songs, Music Videos, Genres, Compilations and Composers. After that there is an option calledTV & Movies which I hadn’t noticed before and I’ve never been able to unhide this option, or expand this option (if you will) in the edit field. Compilations is also hidden and it shouldn’t be, even though it has not been collapsed and with all of the options, you can re-order them including compilations. Why is compilations missing in action? I believe that everything I’ve touched on with both the music and the TV app, combined with what I just said has provided the headache I have gone through with iOS 17.1 and the latest update to it. Hopefully Apple gets off their ass and does something to fix this and I hope that others notice the same thing I do, because if not then things will continue to go downhill for those who wish to purchase and listen to music as well as purchase and watch movies and TV shows on our phones, from iTunes. I don’t mind the option of favouriting music, but I shouldn’t have to favourite an entire album in order so I can listen to it properly and there are many examples of classic and non classic albums in my collection, which have this problem of being split up in a random manner. Again, I hope Apple sees this, or reads all of the comments on the Support application, or at the very least reads comments from Youtubers who do regular videos on their devices and take them all seriously, no matter how little people may have issues with certain applications and in my case, applications not working together due to options missing in action.