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Pat McCormick with daughter Molly and granddaughter Meagan

AM:PM PR Public Relations Professionals Off The Clock: Pat McCormick

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This is part 4/4 in our series sharing more information about our team of Portland-based public relations professionals. The last post is from our Ring Master, Pat McCormick.

 

Name:

Pat McCormick

Currently Reading:

 “Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World,” by Bill Carter. Mike Phillips shared the book with me before Bill came to speak at a special event in our office. I read about a third of the book and then left in the back seat of my car. I found it last week and I’m hoping to finish it soon.

Currently Listening To:

Les Misérables – Love the soundtrack as much as I love the story. I think “I Dreamed a Dream” is the saddest non-Irish song I’ve ever heard.

News Your Are Following:

New Apple products. I’m anxious that it seems so long since the last iPhone, iPad innovations. The new OS announcements are promising, but I need new toys. And a new Apple TV would do wonders to help my mood.

Plans for the Summer:

No big plans. I’ll be down in Florence in July for Granddaughter Kaylee’s Power of Florence day of community service. I’m also toying with the idea of getting a better bike so I can get back and forth to downtown more quickly.

Favorite Restaurant Experience In Recent Weeks:

Several weeks ago I took three grandchildren – Daniel, Ian and Meagan – to lunch at a Red Robin. The food and the place aren’t that special, but the experience was wonderful. Meagan and I were just a few weeks back from our Disneyland adventure. Ian and I had our Disneyland trip last September, and Daniel and I were there in September 2010. The purpose was for Meagan to share about her trip and compare notes with her cousins. We went through hundreds of pictures recalling the fun things each got to do there. It was amazing to listen to their recollections and realize I’d gotten to share those special times with each of them.

 

A Song of Ice and Fire and Apple TV

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Apple TV

Behold, the future of TV, which doesn’t involve cable companies. Unfortunately, much like the music industry, they’ve ignored the will of the consumer for so long that they will die upon their own swords of greed and denial.

by Jake Ten Pas

“There once was a device called Apple TV,
Cable’s customers, it did steal away
But without an app called AirParrot,
No old Mac would properly AirPlay.”
– From “A Song of Device and Ire” by Marillion

I love George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series with every last muscle fiber in my unrepentantly nerdy heart. I’ve only read the first three books, but I’ll soon start “A Feast For Crows,” which means it won’t be long before I start “A Dance With Dragons,” and then commence to bitching about how long the next book is taking, along with every other grown nerd child.

I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed the TV series based on the books, HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” I’ve enjoyed it so much that the unavailability of the second season was the final straw that broke my will and sent me on a quest that ended in me attaining Apple TV.

Regular readers of this blog well know AM:PM PR’s obsession with Apple products, which verges on the fanatical lust for conquest normally reserved for Dothraki hordes. I, on the other hand, temper my fascination with Apple with an ongoing frustration at the company’s nickel-and-diming mentality when it comes to charger cords, adapters and other peripheral products that they don’t need to gouge you for, but seem to take great and wicked pride in doing nonetheless.

 

Dothraki Khal

Even a Dothraki Khal’s ravenous appetite for the spoils of war pales in comparison to AM:PM PR and 7/Apps’ lust for the products of Apple.

Case in point. It all started with a journey to Best Buy. My goal was to pay the gold price for an adapter that would allow me to connect my MacBook Pro directly to my TV, enabling the watching of “Game of Thrones” on a screen large enough to convey the show’s visual majesty. Once there, I realized that I’d have to spend nearly $50 to buy the proper plug/cable combination. For little more than twice that amount, I could own Apple TV, the miracle puck that would open up a whole new world of adventure and exploration, also known as “time wasting.”

Let’s rewind for a moment. As I said, season two “Game of Thrones” is not yet available for purchase, but a traveling minstrel told me about an amazing site where you could stream pretty much every great show of the past five years with no fuss or muss. Because I don’t want this site to get shut down – on the totally slim chance it’s doing something semi-legal – I’ll simply refer to it as Mt. Dew and Whoppers. Now, Mt. Dew and Whoppers, or MD&W, is truly a miracle, sent from The Seven to serve me my stories on a silver tray. If it was possible for me to watch it on my flat screen instead of my computer, by the Lord of Light, that destiny had to be realized.

Picking the brain of the Nerd Herd (Geek Squad?) at Best Buy, I was assured that my TV would be able to mirror any content from my MacBook Pro upon release of Apple’s newest operating system, Mountain Lion, with the help of Apple TV. As an aside, I hope Apple calls its next OS Shadow Cat. What the experts forgot to tell me was that this only would be possible if my computer was newer than 2011, which it most assuredly isn’t.

 

AirParrot

Because Apple decided to be evil and not let AirPlay screen mirroring function with computers older than 2011 (as in MOST OF THEM), a clever company called AirParrot came along and solved the problem, allowing your Mac’s screen to appear on your apple TV, and saving the world from wondering what happened in its favorite TV shows.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this was an issue until I was at home with Apple TV purchased and set up, Mountain Lion downloaded and MD&W cued up and ready to make all my Throne-Gamey dreams come true. After thrashing about, reprimanding both my TV and my computer, choreographing a punch-dancing sequence and trying to will an AirPlay icon to appear on my screen for roughly a fortnight, I took my cyclopean problem to the real Geek Squad, my coworker Cam and the think tank at our sister company, 7/Apps.

What they discovered on my behalf is the most amazing invention ever in the history of the past few months. It’s an application for your computer called AirParrot that allows you to mirror your computer screen onto your TV using AirPlay even if your computer is old and decrepit. Mine is about three years old, which in computer years translates to being buried in the ground long enough that your bones are considered fossils.

Once I installed AirParrot, I went home that night, opened MD&W, cued up episode one of season two of “Game of Thrones,” switched to Apple TV mirroring, and pressed play. What came next can only be described as what it would feel like to slap Joffrey Baratheon a thousand times with my own hand. My quest to retake the Iron Throne of my couch (and by iron, I mean of course microfiber) succeeded, and another epic chapter of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” was written in the pages of this blog, which itself has been forged of Valyrian Steel. Winter is coming, after all, and thanks to AirParrot, I now have enough stories to keep me basking in TV’s warm, glowing, warming glow until the wheel of time brings Spring around again.

grimm poster header

Grimm tidings to you, Sam and Dean

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by Jake Ten Pas

Portland has been all a-Twitter about NBC’s new supernatural/fairy-tale-based thriller Grimm filming in town, and with good reason. Given Oregon’s abyss of joblessness, we’ll take any employment we can get. Secondly, for those of us who are tired of unimaginative reality TV, the recent slew of horror, fantasy and sci-fi themed options is like a breath of fresh air straight from an alternate dimension. Whether it’s “American Horror Story,” “Walking Dead” or “A Game of Thrones,” I’ll take it.

Grimm crime scene

But here’s the thing. Whoever scheduled “Grimm” at NBC pulled one of the classic jerk moves in the history of TV programming. He, she, they or it put “Grimm” on at the same time as two of my favorite network shows of the past five years, “Supernatural” and “Fringe.” Obviously, this is no accident. NBC wants to cannibalize the other two, steal their fans and leave the shows to die by the side of the road like zombie victims. If this theory of TV scheduling was, at one time, effective, I sincerely hope it won’t be anymore. I wish this not because I don’t want to see “Grimm” succeed, but rather because I think the notion of trying to kill off other shows that share a common fan base is an outdated, unnecessary, and just plain unwise way of going about the business of ca

rving out a viewer niche.

grimm show
In an era when more people are watching TV at a time of their choosing via DVRs, the Internet and DVDs, why is it necessary to try to gouge out your opponent’s eyes? As a proud geek, I can say that I make time in my week for a multitude of shows, and all you have to do is not A) Make it more difficult to watch your show than it has to be, or B) Piss me off by taking on one of the shows I’m already loyal to. Sadly, the NBC execs have done both. By scheduling “Grimm” at the same time as two of my favorite shows, they’ve shown their total ignorance of the way DVRs work.

While some DVRs will allow you to record three shows simultaneously, most standard ones issued by cable companies will not. With my DVR, we can record two shows and watch a third, but because these shows are on Friday night, I’m never at home to do so. Thus “Grimm” gets the boot, and the only way to watch it later is to hunker down in front of our tiny computer screen and watch it on Hulu. The week that the pilot of “Grimm” aired, NBC did something really smart by rebroadcasting it on SyFy. This not only exposed the show to a wider audience, but it also found a loophole in the DVR dilemma by allowing another time slot at which my DVR could find it and record it. Why they quit this strategy after week one is anybody’s guess.

After watching the first two episodes, I can say that the show potentially deserves better. While it owes a big debt to institutions such as “Supernatural,” I was instantly intrigued and wanted to watch more. Which leads me to wonder why NBC doesn’t try to incorporate some truly social elements into its marketing campaign for “Grimm”? Sure, it already has a Twitter account, but the account basically does nothing but promote itself all day long. Instead, why not subtly court fans of “Supernatural” and “Fringe” by putting your show on right before, or on an entirely different night, and then tout the similarities between them?

A truly social presence means giving props (or recognition) to others while saying what you have to say. It isn’t just about riffing on how rad you are. And in case you think that I’m saying “Supernatural” is doing any better of a job on Twitter, I’m not. That show’s Twitter account is full of the same self-aggrandizing nonsense, which is totally opposed to the self-effacing humor the show specializes in.

This is a new age for TV, in which people can watch what they want when they want. Your petty little network ploys and bickering can only get in the way of our enjoyment and support of an array of shows. With the advent of Apple TV – and who knows how many other technologies coming down the pipeline – it’s time to play nice and cultivate an audience of fans hungry for great stories that you can all draw from.

Quickly, before I leave this rant be, my coworker informs me that he can watch any show directly from NBC’s website via his iPhone used in conjunction with his Apple TV. Even if I simply had a newer model of TV, I could hook my computer up to it and watch “Grimm” on the big screen despite NBC’s attempts to make it as difficult as possible for me to do so. Perhaps this issue is indicative of technological growing pains we’re going through as a culture, particularly as they relate to TV. No matter how specific you want to get as to whose fault it is, I fall back to the basic position that it’s a network’s job to get its programming to me, perhaps more than it ever has been before.

So, if you’re reading, NBC, I’m here, I’m weird, and I’m ready to watch “Grimm.” Can you help a geek out?