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She sings like an Angelil

chrisdye — 2008-10-09T11:19:56-04:00

Sigh. Look what I miss while away. Did anyone see this?

Jingle all the way

chrisdye — 2008-10-06T16:05:43-04:00

CBC has announced their five finalists to replace the Hockey Night in Canada theme:

http://anthemchallenge.cbc.ca/home

The choice here is, in my humble opinion, so obvious that the contest isn't really necessary.

CBC: Competitor Buyout Completed

chrisdye — 2008-06-09T16:04:49-04:00

Poor, poor English CBC television. Degrassi, the Olympics, the Junos, the Grey Cup, and now the coup de grace.

What's next: Beachcombers TNG on CTV? HGTV buying the I.P. rights to Rusty and Jerome?
Global buying the perpetual exclusive rights to boring documentaries on the Royal Family?

CBC- Chrisdye before cable

chrisdye — 2008-03-30T11:16:38-04:00

When I was very young, I watched altogether too much CBC. Sometimes, I would get up really early to watch it sign on (!) It would begin with this awesomely hokey montage anthem (although I only really remember the last 15 seconds, where the kids cheer the highjumper): http://youtube.com/watch?v=U_vloXL52DI

At about 7AM, there was a 10-minute show called "Parlez-moi", which tried to teach French to kids. But they spoke so fast and introduced so many words at once that I watched hundreds of episodes without learning a word: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vilHNrxUdgs

Strombeshi

vinny9 — 2008-03-28T10:33:13-04:00

I Agree With The CBC

vinny9 — 2008-02-12T21:39:58-05:00

Stolen from insidethecbc.com

Note to Self: My Brother Works at the CBC

vinny9 — 2007-12-18T17:38:22-05:00

Waiting for God in a Haitian orphanage

Isn't That, Like, Surfing Or Something?

vinny9 — 2006-11-07T11:34:08-05:00

Waterboarding

Nice place to visit...

vinny9 — 2006-10-27T15:56:51-04:00

Wow.

CBC vs $

vinny9 — 2006-10-11T11:00:10-04:00

From the CBC blog:

Richard Stursberg (on financing Canadian shows vs. American simulcasts):

The CBC, as Bob pointed out, is the only broadcaster where deep prime time is actually available for Canadian shows. Having said that, the economics of this is brutal. To give you a very straight-up example, if I want to buy an hour of high-end dramatic programming right now, I can buy an American program that would cost $3 million to $4 million an hour to make, for $200,000. At $200,000, I can put it on TV and make $425,000 in revenue. A parallel Canadian program, even if I�m not even in the same ballpark�despite the fact that whether we like it or not, we will be judged by the same production standards as American programming�is going to cost me, say, $1 million to $1.5 million to $2 million an hour. What can I recover by way of revenue? Maybe $120,000 to $150,000, because of the relative performance of the programs. Big problem.

BarCamp Vancouver post-unconference report

dustin — 2006-08-27T03:52:36-04:00

This weekend I was a participant in BarCamp Vancouver, a 24-hour localized geekfest. I met a bunch of interesting people in a pretty wide variety of fields, learned some funky new stuff, further grokked stuff I was already aware of, and had a general fun time.

Here are some short notes on some sessions (that I can remember):

Hacking the CBC (hosted by Tod Maffin (Inside the CBC)):
Lots of discussion about podcasts, music licensing, radio 3, regional representation, HNIC, ratings in TV/radio/web (can the current CBC be considered a success if it doesn't crack the top ratings?), and how to get the CBC to deal with the changing participatory news/blogging world of today.

I think the answer to that last bit is to create a Canadian style digg or reddit where any Canadian can post a link to relevant stories (written by the CBC, the Globe, the Star, canada.com, or any other blogger/publisher) and the entire country can vote up the news that we care about. All of Canada shares in ownership of the CBC, and with the new social news technologies out today, there's no reason that all of Canada can't help program the CBC, and use it to amplify ordinary Canadian voices on the net.

Photocamp (moderated by Kris Krug):
A bunch of different topics were covered. Questions were asked about the future of cameras. It was said that digital photography is capable of doing a lot more more then traditional film photography. New methods are being used (HDR) or researched (post-production re-focusing, physical place mapping from photos), and the future looks to have some serious goodies in store for digital photographers.

Warwick Patterson shared some photoshop processing tips: Filter->Sharpen->Unsharp Mask command as the first and last thing, with Curves (or Levels), and switching to sRGB mode (for display on the web) in between.

Open Source Business Practices (hosted by Robert Scales):
Talked about some techniques for open business practices, along with goals and possible consequences of it. Stuff like releasing your sales numbers to the public, building relationships with other shops in your field and related areas to help each other out (help push the rising tide that will lift all the boats).

Tagging for World Domination from Alexandra Samuel.

SEO and the Long Tail by Jason Billingsley from Elastic Path:
Create lots of (valuable) content targeting the long tail around your area of expertise. General SEO tips: the title tag is key, put your important targeted words at the front, etc.

The Meme Epidemic - A Case Study from Darren Barefoot.

CACert by Robin Johnson:
CAcert.org is a web of trust based Certificate Authority that issues certificates free of charged (as long as you're accepted into the trust web). It doesn't currently come installed in the major browsers, but looks like promising for the future. The worst case scenario is that it sucks just as much as the existing security authorities (that charge you a pretty penny for their trust).

There's tons more text in the blogosphere and photos on flickr reporting on BarCampVancouver...

Cha Cha Cha!

vinny9 — 2006-07-24T12:47:19-04:00

Bird scaring in Zambia

Why are these awesome stories buried so damn deep at the cbc site?

Collateral Damage to the English Language

vinny9 — 2006-07-14T11:37:13-04:00

From cbc.ca:
In 1811, Shelley was an undergrad student at the University of Oxford. He wrote and printed the pamphlet to sell to raise funds to support imprisoned Irish journalist Peter Finnerty. After spending time embedded with British forces, Finnerty reported critically on the nation's leadership, its war efforts and colonies.
(Emphasis mine)

Buy, for the public good...

vinny9 — 2006-07-06T12:12:06-04:00

30% off CBC related goodies.

I picked up this last night.

Some of you may be interested in this t-shirt which called to mind a certain other t-shirt...