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Rebecca left this morning for a whirlwind weekend in Toronto and an appearance on CBC’s Test The Nation television program. She got the call a few weeks ago to participate on the team of bloggers, going up against other groups like taxi drivers and celebrity lookalikes, to see who knows their trivia better. Viewers can also participate to see how they measure up.

The program airs live on CBC, January 20th at 8PM. Of course, it will actually live for the east coast, and then we’ll get the tape delayed version here in Vancouver. We don’t have access to an east coast feed, so I’ll have to wait for the pacific time airing, unless someone out east puts it up on bittorrent right after it airs, wink wink nudge nudge.

Going to the CBC’s website for the event, the picture that represents the bloggers team is laughable. How much more slarm can you cram into that generic, over-stereotyped photo?

For the love of god, CBC, get someone like Kris Krug to shoot you some real photos and ditch the bubblegum sets for these things. Seriously, it looks like a promo shot for a new CBC television show, Blogger Force 5!

And what the hell are they all looking at?

I have full trust that Rebecca is going to rock this thing. She is always kicking my butt in anything trivia or Scrabble related, plus she’s basically taught me everything I’ve come to know about Vancouver to Canada in general. She puts up with my stupid questions by knowing everything I don’t, but it goes both ways when it comes to various topics pertaining to the U.S.

Just because I find these things so freaking interesting, I wanted to post this video. I’ve toured the studios in the CBC once with Tod Maffin, and he writes for Inside The CBC. Actually, Tod is basically the new media guru and ambassador for the CBC, at least here in Vancouver. I love that he uses the medium to share information about the substantial renovation that is occurring at their downtown location, and this video really helps to understand what’s going on and how it’s going to look when it’s all done.

Our good pal Bradley gave us a pretty swanky gift for our first year, and we finally got around to checking it out last night. Hockey Night in Canada: The DVD Trivia Game!

Ok, maybe that isn’t swanky to you, but Rebecca is all about the trivia. I’m a bit of the same, but my hockey knowledge gets pretty fuzzy from 1990 and beyond. How hard could it be though? Right?

My biggest problem is the lack of CBC knowledge, so anything about former broadcasters is pretty out of reach for me. We only played two rounds, each splitting the wins. There are some of the guess whatever-you-are-instructed-to before the bell dings, and you have to be the first person or team to do it. This was fun with the picture puzzles or word scrambles, so it becomes a guess by yelling sort of affair, the closer to the end of the round equals being the loudest.

The trivia can be pretty trying, but I was surprised with how much I actually knew. There were some rounds where you get a clip to watch, and then the following questions were in reference to the clip. Still, not all of those questions are directly related to the clip as much as the people or team. It actually taught me a little bit, even made me look up the 1976 game between the Philadelphia Flyers and Russia to get more back story on the questions it asked me that I knew nothing about.

I think we still have a few more games left to play of it. I’m not sure if there are more or will be more editions of this made, but for off season entertainment, it’s pretty good.

I’m going to completely admit it. Before I moved to Vancouver, I had no knowledge of CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada other than its existence. I also had no clue, as a loving hockey fan, how good their coverage is. Of course, I lived my whole life in the U.S. This is Canada. There’s your difference.

To my dear friends who also love hockey and don’t get the coverage that you should, especially in the states, take this information that comes off of Inside the CBC. If you’re not checking out the Don Cherry[wiki], then you’re not getting all the hockey you could be.

CBC.ca will launch a special online version of Coach’s Corner tomorrow with new content, design and features. Enhancements include an improved and larger video picture and an online forum allowing hockey fans to submit their remarks regarding Don’s, uh, “legendary” weekly commentary.

Episodes from the 2006/07 season are available online, and in the coming weeks, a full-screen viewing option and a revamped archive consisting of some of the most memorable Coach’s Corner moments from the past will also be available exclusively on CBC.ca/coach. [insidethecbc]

I was chatting with my buddy, Sushi, back in Iowa about the coverage he gets back there. Even with digital cable, mostly likely the basic package, he hardly gets any hockey on TV. Comcast SportsNet shows Blackhawks games from time to time, and combined with the weekly games on NBC, that’s about it. His cable package doesn’t include OLN (who the NHL has the explicit contract with for broadcasts in the states), and there isn’t an extra package he can buy for the NHL Network, NHL Center Ice, Versus, or an “Ice Pack”.

How’s that for someone living within a four hour drive to Chicago, five hours to Minneapolis, and five hours to St. Louis?

If anyone is complaining about the lack of success that the NHL is experiencing in the U.S., then there’s your reason. Hockey fans can’t get what they want, and there is very little for new fans to get exposed to. If it wasn’t for the NHL on ESPN[wiki] while I was in high school, I don’t think I would have ever come to love the sport. And yes, that was before Fox ever did the glowing puck thing[wiki].

Additional Note

I was just checking out the Coach’s Corner site and had a thought, so let’s see if anyone at the CBC is paying attention to me(which I highly doubt).

Why not publish all this video content to YouTube? Or do Google Video or whatever. The point is, make it so that anyone can embed the video on their website or blog. On top of that, and to sweeten the deal for you guys, tack on a five second ad for CBC programming at the very beginning. Nothing too flashy, but a quick voice over and a slide for a CBC program.

This way, we can share Coach’s Corner with the world, and you CBC folks get to promote your stuff. TV, radio, podcasts, or whatever. Have at it, but just make it simple and to the point. Go beyond five or ten seconds, and I am fast forwarding to the good stuff.

Ok, it’s not an official holiday, but it damn near should be. And to me, this Tim Hortons commercial is what Hockey Day in Canada is all about.

Off we go to GM to watch the Canucks beat the Leafs on the big screen. Should be a good time. Hope your hockey day has been good for you.

Update: The game was pretty cool, and that’s more than just the 6-1 win over the Leafs(who, I might add, suck). It was close to a real game experience. They blew the horn when the Canucks scored, gave away some free stuff at random points, and a fair number of Leafs fans for us to heckle were actually brave enough to hang out for the game.

True highlight? The first intermission of the UBC game that followed the CBC broadcast was a mini-game of some pee wee hockey kids. Check out the video I posted onto YouTube here. We actually left after that. Regina was up by three goals at the end of the first. Good action, but we were a little beat and ready to head home.

I have pictures from the event on Flickr. Pending review for quality control, look for some audio that Rebecca and I recorded at GM Place on The Crazy Canucks in the next few days.

Yeah, the title is enough to make me not want to keep watching it, but I can say that I’ve watched the first episode of Little Mosque on the Prairie. I’m not taken by it, but it is just the first episode of the series.

Once we can get past all the terrorist jokes, people in the town claiming that all these people are terrorists, and something else about stereotyping Muslims being linked to terrorism, this show might be good. It’s too early to tell.

To tell you the truth, I felt like I was watching something on PBS back in the states. It’s like a Canadian version of a British sitcom, if that makes any sense. Blatant humor with elements of being subtle, but not as hugely funny as I find many British sitcoms.

Like I said, at least I can say I saw it. The U.S. media seems to be up in arms over it more than the Canadian side, but maybe that’s just the effect that living in Vancouver has done to me. There’s so much diversity here that it just seems commonplace to me anymore.

Don’t know if I’ll make too much more of an effort to pay attention to Little Mosque on the Prairie from here on out.

I got a pretty interesting text message from J.J. last night while sitting at home with Rebecca. “Whoa cbc was just over my apt and taped a piece on the rory thing“. I got excited and asked if he said anything about The Crazy Canucks because I’m a marketing sucker like that.

The piece turned out pretty great, but at the 49 second mark of the 2:38 long clip, that’s the last you see of J.J. Still, it’s a pretty sweet shot of the Canucks Hockey Blog in the background on his screen. You can also see The Crazy Canucks logo just a tad. This aired last night on CBC: Canada Now at 6PM. Way to go, J.J.!

By the way, did you vote for Rory yet? I know I’ve done my fair share, and you should, too.

Photo credit: Uncleweed on Flickr

Now, there are going to be loads of people who think I am full of crap for saying that. Truth is, I hadn’t seen or heard of Don Cherry[wiki] before moving to Canada. Being a hockey fan south of the 49th, you have to realize that there is this border of ignorance as to what goes on in Canadian media. Unless you know people up here or make an effort to find out for yourself, you don’t get exposure to what goes on up north. That’s the simple truth.

So catching the latest episode of the Canucks Outsider yesterday, DaveO mentioned that Don Cherry has started podcasting. This isn’t completely the truth, but you can catch him and Brian Williams in your ear buds. Basically you get a snippet version of Grapeline, ripped straight from the airwaves and put into podcast form. I’ve listened to a handful of them, and they’re not too bad. Under ten minutes long, super short ads inserted here and there, and entirely not enough content.

I would have to say that it’s a podcast of a radio program that sounds like radio. That’s kinda of sad. And truth be told, the feed hasn’t been updated since this past march. I can’t find a website telling me anything new or different, so I’m unsure as to if I have the right feed or the show is no longer being podcasted. I was originally excited to get more Don Cherry because we never seem to get him during Canucks games when they are broadcast on CBC. Sure, he’s more of an east coast guy, but I’ve been getting a kick out of him.

Natives to his antics will probably say otherwise. I dig a guy who speaks his mind and ruffles some feathers, even if what he says is a load of crap sometime. I would even equate Cherry to watching the television show House[imdb]. Rude, blunt, and somewhat unforgiving for saying the things they say. Let’s all be thankful that Cherry isn’t in charge of saving people’s lives, but you can argue if the guy has some sort of addiction to pain pills and what not. In fact, I’d go as far to say that Cherry can make Hugh Laurie’s character on House appear sane.

Blogcritics made a post about Don Cherry today that sums up a lot of the love/hate relationship that many people have. No matter how you really feel about the guy, hockey would not be the same without him, not to mention the intense fashion sense the guy brings to the broadcasts. I think he’s the one guy in hockey that could wear glitter and completely get away with it. Chances are, he already has and I just don’t know it.

By the way, it took some good sleuthing in the iTunes podcast directory in order to find The Grapeline podcast. Here is the XML feed for it.

I am consistantly impressed with the way that the press interacts with emergency services in British Columbia, and the same can be true about the rest of Canada.  Sitting here and watching the news coverage of the recent shootings in Montreal, the amount of information coming from the police, in near real time, is really interesting compared to the news coverage I am used to in the U.S.

First off, I should say that my heart goes out to those people affected by this.  Regardless of who or why, things like these are shocking and scary.  While the CBC was covering this, I had sirens going off all around the west end.  Kinda spooky.

The media seems to be included on these events as they unfold, at least for the most part.  I so often see the morning news where there was a fire the night before.  While there are still firemen putting out the flames in the background, someone is talking to the camera, giving an update as to what happened, possible causes, and preliminary info about people affected.

What I’m used to back in the states is official statements that get released to the press or press conferences that happen hours, if not days, after the fact.  That gets printed up in the papers or some person with overly perfect hair tells you the facts on TV.  In between that time, everything is uncomfirmed and speculation.  You get some of that here, but the involvement of people on the scene is much higher.  It’s not some guy, outside of the whole situation, who has the job to collect the information and report it to the press.

It impresses me.  Maybe there is more confidence in the whole spectrum of distributing information, meaning the people on the scene, the media, and the person taking in the news, in Canada.  There is a lot more scrutiny in American media, always making sure that the right people are saying the right things at the right time.

For some reason, the wireless crapped out on me at the very end of the session Tod Maffin led regarding “Hacking the Mothership(CBC)”, and I had a complete blog post vanish on me when I hit publish and lost all bandwidth at that exact moment. Yeah, that totally sucked, but I imagine that this is just apart of the beauty that is BarCampVancouver. Let me see if I can recall a little bit from the last few sessions of the day that I attended, and in no particular order.

Drupal is a powerful platform that I am becoming more and more familiar with everyday. It can do more than just a blog, and the programming aspect is a bit more meaty than WordPress. What I have learned in the past few months about PHP and MySQL tends to make me interested in seeing what I can do with Drupal. It’d be a major jump into a learning binge, but I’d like to give it a shot.

Other interesting elements to the platform is how it can be integrated with podcasting. That is, one site can serve up multiple feeds, and it is all built in to Drupal. Modules can make you site dance circles, and installation is generally simple. Some things do take some knowledge and experience. I’ve done a bit of reading about it up till now, but the session today really gave me a better understanding.

David Gratton led a session about “Music Social Networking” that was interesting to sit through. He mainly laid out what his company is doing with ProjectOpus.com. It’s a lot like how it sounds, but is learning from its errors, as well as its users, and attempting to put a new spin on how people network in the world of enjoying music. Find friend, new bands, spread the word, and report back to the artist so they know what’s going on with their music.

It’s a really great concept, and I asked about how this can be incorporated to podcasting. They have a lot of local Vancouver artists already on the network. I’ll have to explore their library and see what I can do with their service. If anything, I’ll be in touch with them for sure.

Alexandra Samuel ran a session on tagging and the various ways that one can use them to help promote their blog and network with other bloggers with similar interests. These are classic tools that all blogs seem to have built in these days, but there are many ways to expand their effectiveness. Her blog and company’s website, Social Signal, are full of great ideas about this topic.

And this is where I hate my laptop or the wireless network or the evil spirits who struck down my ability to have bandwidth in WorkSpace at the very moment that I had a long list of points that Tod Maffin covered in his session. That sucked so much.

Basically, Tod opened the floor to everyone in attendance to get ideas on how this new age of media can revolutionize the CBC as it currently stands. How can blogs, podcasting, and interactive media alter or be incorporated into what the CBC does? At the same time, how do we, as the general public, feel about where we can fit in the grand scheme of things.

Damn, Tod. It makes sense as to why you have scaled back on your podcasting projects now. I talked to him briefly and discovered that he is no longer affiliated with the Foursevens Podcast Network as he was before. TodBits still exists. He just hasn’t gotten around to getting something done. Look at what he’s trying to do here with the CBC. Think he’s busy?

There were a lot of interesting ideas thrown around that my tired mind can’t really recall now(stupid wireless). One thing I do recall is the fact that everyone in the session has listened to a CBC podcast. On the flipside, none of us knew that the CBC will pay you to read or perform a piece from your blog if you were to submit it, and, of course, it was chosen for air. That’s something I’m going to keep in mind.

After all of that, even sitting here on the couch at home, there’s still a lot to soak in. I have a variety of contacts that I made, shook the hands of some really cool people, and dropped some business cards that we made up last week. Events like this are dangerous. It doesn’t help that I get ideas in my head, fall in love with them, and then dive in head first until, not coming up for air until I’m happy with the result.

I ran around, taking pictures with my Nokia all day. All the pictures are now in this Flickr set.

I’m beat. After our time spent with Matthew Good last night and today’s excitement, I’m ready to crash and hit the beach in the morning. It was fun.

Tod Maffin posted this on his website sometime ago, but I just had the chance to sit down and watch this recently. The End of Radio is one segment of a three part series on CBC Newsworld that tackles the idea of the way media is changing in the not so distant future, and you can watch this 22 minute program on their website.

The experts have spoken. Mass media is reported to be on its last legs. A handful of new media entities with remarkably silly names: Blogs, Vlogs, YouTube, Podcasts, and Yahoo! are leading the charge, leaving traditional forms of communications to play catch-up or get left behind.

The CBC’s pop culture specialist Jian Ghomeshi ponders the fate of mass media and asks whether we are nearing a world without television, radio or print in THE END, a three-part series airing on CBC Newsworld. [cbc.ca/theend]

I wanted to provide a link on my site as well because it’s a really interesting program. Of course I take intrest in the radio and podcasting portion of this report, but the other segments about TV and print make me curious as well. I should have watched them last week while being down with some sort of chest cold thing.

To follow-up on the previous post about going to this event, it’s really hard to sum up the whole experience. Rebecca posted something yesterday while it was still fresh in our memories, and I probably should have done something similar to give you the best account of the nearly two hours we spent in the same room as David Suzuki[wiki].

He is a remarkable man. He’s more personable than you would think, but there is an obvious sense that he is a very busy man with a lot on his mind and just as much, if not more, to do. Even with the David Suzuki Foundation, he pounds the pavement to spread the message of numerous causes in the world. For a man of his age, he is in shape, healthy, and doing what he loves to do.

I left the CBC building in Vancouver feeling very empowered. For what reason, I was really unsure. Suzuki has that effect on you. He doesn’t butter up the situation. There are some serious, evironmental issues in this world that makes me wonder how a guy like this sleeps at night. These issues blow my mind everytime I think about it, but being a victim of popular culture, I’ve conditioned myself to occupy those concerns with other things that pale in comparison. (more…)