Good morning, Northern Michigan,
and
happy Friday.
And, yeah, we'll talk about the weather. It,
was really warm and rainy yesterday. A lot
of the snow melted,
and then it froze overnight.
And a little dusting of snow happened, which,
was enough to close the schools this morning.
At least the Traverse City Schools and a
whole bunch in the surrounding area
are closed today. So a snow day without
a whole lot of snow,
but,
that's alright.
And let me get to the weather here
today. Snow showers mainly before 1PM. Patchy blowing
snow between
10AM and 3PM.
High near 24, blustery.
Love that word.
With a northwest wind of 15 to 20
miles an hour, gust as high as 40,
chance of precipitation is 90%, total daytime snow
accumulation
around three inches.
I don't know. We'll see. Doesn't look like
it yet, but, yeah, it is what it
is.
Tonight,
chance of snow showers before seven and a
slight chance of snow showers after 1AM.
Mostly cloudy with a steady temperature around 22.
West wind five to 10 becoming south in
the evening. Chance
precipitation is 20%.
And, let's see tomorrow
on Saturday, 50% chance of snow showers, mostly
cloudy high near 35. South wind, 15 miles
per hour becoming west in the afternoon. Winds
could gust as high as 30 miles an
hour.
And, you know, doesn't look like it's, too
much different for Sunday. So,
anyway,
full forecast in the show notes over at
cupoftravertcity.com.
So as promised, I wanted to rant just
a little bit.
The
amount of advertising,
excuse me, the amount of advertising that somebody's
exposed to lately, and this, by the way,
is not a local story. This is everywhere,
mainly on the Internet, but,
anywhere else.
But
it's just amazing to me. I I not
I don't watch a lot of
regular TV,
you know, like,
cable channels or anything like that. But every
once in a while I flip on the
local news. That's not too bad
ads wise, but it, you know, seems like
they do run a lot of ads which,
you know, I guess that's their business,
selling ads,
but other places
where ads pop up. If you try to
watch YouTube now, if you're not paying them
and I am paying them because I don't
want to watch all the
inserted
ads when they insert it halfway through a
sentence, and it's a completely irrelevant
ad.
They're not good at this.
Google, come on. You you should be better.
But, you know, just all the
freaking ads and and in podcasts, you know,
I I have a couple of shows that
I absolutely
love,
but they have the most
insane amount of ads.
And I understand the podcasters need to make
money and I'm in that business, you know.
I don't make money from my podcast necessarily
but working in the business,
but
it's getting to the point where it's ridiculous.
I mean you get a weather app on
your phone and there's gonna be banner ads
and there's gonna be pop up video ads
and things that cover the screen. The one
that ones that really bug me are video
games. I mean you just cannot get any
sort of
casual
video game
on your iPhone, iPad, Android, whatever
without having these insane
ads. You get to the end of a,
you know, end of a hand, so you're
playing a card game or you get
to the end of a level in a
in a regular game, they have these video
ads
of, you know, other video games and you
can't close them for thirty seconds or even
a minute.
And that's not so bad. I mean I
get that as well.
I don't like it and I don't pay
attention to those ads on purpose because I
don't want them to work because I don't
want them to keep happening but they do.
You know, I have a Euchre app, and
I actually have to turn off
the
you know, I put it in airplane mode,
put the iPad in airplane mode, and then
that does sort of prevent the ads
in between hands. But what really annoys me,
I'd as soon as I turn on the,
Internet again, it
there's the ads again. The one that really,
really ticks me off is I have a
security camera system.
And it's you have to use the proprietary
app
to look at your security cameras.
And that app
puts up those stupid video game app ads
where you gotta sit there for thirty seconds.
I just wanna look at my cameras. I
bought the cameras.
I wanna look at my cameras
and
I can't for a minute. You You know,
what if I hear some noise out there?
And I wanna see what's going on. Nope.
Gotta wait for the stupid video game ad.
And
and it's prohibitively
expensive to remove the ads. I think it's,
like, $29
a month for the the security camera system
I have,
and
that's just not right.
You know? And now even
Netflix is, putting ads in certain shows. I
mean, you're paying Netflix for the privilege of
watching the stuff on there, and that should
be enough. But nope. They gotta have ads.
Paramount plus, you gotta pay them extra to
get rid of the ads. For me, it's
worth it because I watch a lot of
Star Trek.
But,
you know, everything
has ads.
And
couple other things related is now, Stellantis,
which is, you know, Chrysler, Jeep,
Fiat, 100 other
company brands, whatever.
Now they're putting ads in their cars on
the infotainment screen.
You know? Excuse me. You can't use your,
car right now because you gotta watch this
ad or listen to this ad or read
this ad.
Like, come on. That's beyond ridiculous.
And on top of that, some car companies
now are charging you to use a feature
that is built into your car that you
bought.
That that's going over the top too. You
know, this
number of subscriptions you have to have now,
you know, no. I don't pay for cable.
I don't pay for cable TV.
And
I don't pay for cable TV, and I
watch other TV. You know, I watch, you
know, my wife watches Netflix. I watch Paramount
and and YouTube.
So we pay those three,
subscriptions.
I pay for, Amazon Prime mainly for,
you know, the
the free shipping and all that stuff, but
on top of that you get the video
app or the streaming app. But guess what?
Every single movie
I wanna watch. I come up, you know,
I said, oh, I haven't seen this movie
in a long time. I type it in.
The only place that has it is Prime,
and you have to rent it or buy
it from them. Even though I have Prime,
I can't
watch hardly anything free.
Anyway, enough for my rants. Everybody have a
great weekend. I may have a special episode
this weekend. I may not. I don't know.
Look for that on Sunday if it happens.
Otherwise, we'll see you Monday.
Happy Friday.