Respecting our Veterans, in life and death

So I posted the above video a few days ago on my FaceBook page but felt that it was worth posting here again too.

This video is about a 30 minute interview of a friend's father about 9 months before he died of cancer last week.

Our country has been thrust into wars and battles we don't all always agree with. In the Vietnam era this had a direct effect as to how our soldiers were treated upon them returning home, regardless of how they actually felt about the war from a political prospective as well.

Certain sects of our society have brought vile hate towards troops have have died in battle while in Iraq or Afghanistan. Luckily there "protests" are started to be thwarted as groups around the country are answering these pickets by peacefully blocking them from the view of mourners and the families of the troops.

I was thinking about all of this yesterday as I watched current members of the United States Navy fold the American flag with the utmost precision and hand the perfectly folded stars and stripes to my friend as his father was laid to rest.

This video is part of a project to get the voices heard of World War II veterans before they are all gone (we lose more than 1,000 of them a day). If you are a fan of history you will love the clarity and vividness that Paul Rothermich shares in this video.

And if you're like me you will be happy that our society, for the most part, has made huge strides in how we deal with our veterans and ensuring they are given the proper respect upon returning home after battle and eventually when they leave the Earth for good.

The Awesomeness of Pop-Up Ads -- STL Today FoD 2.18.11

Well today's STL Today's Fail of the Day (FoD) isn't so much content or layout related as it is that they seem to be the only site I visit on a regular basis that still can't seem to figure out how to do away with pop-up ads.

No only is it annoying as hell but the ads themselves are irrelevant to anything I would remotely have interest in and are of the "spammy" variety. The best part about this whole deal is that we are always hearing about how traditional media companies, especially newspapers are dying on the vine largely due to the fact that there advertising revenue is drying up. God for bid these people figure out how to make money on rev-share/affiliate advertising or any of the myriad of ways that moder-day web properties do when they do try to have an online presence like STLToday.

Instead they can't get out of their own way when they allow crap like this to happen.

STL Today Fail of the Day -- 2.16.11

I don't know how long it has been since the St. Louis Post Dispatch redesigned their home page (I am going to guess 6-8 months ago). As an avid consumer of news I have always had the home page to my city's daily paper bookmarked. I used to even follow many of the paper's RSS feeds until I realized they were populating many of the same feeds with the exact same story.

So ever since they have come out with the new home page I realized they have a problem when they initial publish a story and then hours, or days, later they publish an updated or revised version of the story. I used to find it quirky that two prominent headlines either on the actual home page or a section page would link to a story on the same subject matter even though they had different headlines.

I know stories can often develop over hours or days, after all I used to work in this space. Not knowing what back-end system they were using to upload stories to the web I figured they were working on it.

A few months ago what I had attributed to a quirky system was starting to frankly piss me off and affecting how regular I visited the paper's web site. I have no idea of anyone at the Post-Dispatch will see this or read this but for my own sanity starting today I am going to post a daily example of this (or other #Fails) that I find on STLToday.com (the Post's online site).

I will post a screen shot along with a link to what I found, realizing that the content on the link could change the screen shot will at least show you how inept they are at updating content or at least not having the same story matter right next to each other.

So without further ado, here is the first installment of the STLToday FoD

(Fail of the Day).

At some point the paper published a story with the headline of "Person is Ejected from Vehicle in St. Charles." The story actually referenced workers "on the scene."

The very next story to be updated (or at least put on the feature spot for the "St. Charles" section of the site), had a headline of "Wentzville Man Killed in Car Crash."

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/stcharles/

Yep, you guessed it, the exact same subject matter in both stories.

Old Blogs

Wow, knowing it has been a long while since I posted on here I was having troubling remembering my log-in credentials.

Low and behold I accessed an old blog of mine that I started in 2005 when I was doing a lot of international travel and was away from friends and family for extended periods of time. It was a way for them to easily keep in touch with me before the days of Facebook and other social media sites.

You may or may not find it interesting, you can go here:

http://celticcommunications.blogspot.com/