Archive for the ‘The Crazy Canucks’ Category

My debut as a SkyTrain poster for the Vancouver Canucks

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 | 13 Comments »
I am a Canuck
Photo credit: Rebecca Bollwitt on Flickr

I’ve also spotted the posters on the sides of buses, and there is a good chance that you will see the rest of The Crazy Canucks crew on them, if not on posters at SkyTrain stations as well. This one is located in Granville Station. Bring on the graffiti.

The Crazy Canucks featured on official Vancouver Canucks website

Saturday, September 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

It was a nice surprise earlier this week to see how the Canucks organization was going to use some of the promotional photographs that they took of The Crazy Canucks crew that I mentioned previously, but I’m not sure that we were expecting to be apart of the launch for the Canucks Fan Zone.

A place for all Canucks fans to gather and share their love for the team. That’s pretty cool, but I’m still wondering if the possibility remains of see my face on the side of a bus or on a SkyTrain poster. Scary still, my face on the jumbotron in GM Place.

Flickr video is thanks to Rebecca.

The Crazy Canucks #63 - Good day and welcome to season three

Friday, September 19th, 2008 | No Comments »

That’s right. Early this week, we launched with the first episode of season three for The Crazy Canucks. Check it out!

We’re back. Season three of TCC kicks off with a quick gathering of the crew to has out what to expect for the coming season as well as some cool things going on with each of our various projects. We take a look back as who we’ve lost, the new faces (that we kinda think we know something about but don’t know half as much as we’d like), hash out the who does what for TV and radio play-by-play, and take assignments for new names of the team for show and tell later.

48:07 minutes
The Crazy Canucks

Gearing up for season three of The Crazy Canucks podcast

Thursday, September 11th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

The Crazy Canucks Things really got busy on us this past week, but I can finally stop blaming work getting in the way and start pointing the finger at hockey. More importantly, we’ve been doing some neat stuff with The Crazy Canucks podcast in anticipation of the coming season.

First and foremost, the new design for TCC has been launched. This is the first step in bringing some new elements of social media to the podcast, and it is an official design by sixty4media.

If you’re on Twitter, then be sure to add @thecrazycanucks to your twitter stream and get all the latest updates as they are published on TCC.com, plus anything else we decide to through into the stream. Also, if you’re drinking the Facebook kool-aid, join the The Crazy Canucks Facebook group and stay in touch with our army of supporters on there.

And there’s more!

Photo by Miss604 on Flickr
Photo credit: miss604 on Flickr

The Canucks (yes, the organization) brought your favorite podcast crew in for a photo shoot at GM Place to get our faces and Canucks gear for some promotional stuff that will launch later this month. We can’t be sure how, where, or to what capacity these photos and video footage will be used, but it was exciting to come in and be apart of something like this, simply because we’re all fans.

Photo by Miss604 on Flickr
Photo credit: miss604 on Flickr

Special shout out to Richard Loat, who also was invited to this promotional gathering. He’s the man (in the middle of this picture above) who created the Vancouver Canucks Fan Facebook Application. Nearly 150,000 people are using that application on their Facebook profile. Not bad for a kid barely over the age of 19.

Photo by Miss604 on Flickr
Photo credit: miss604 on Flickr

So as we hang on to the last days of summer in Vancouver, there is some satisfaction that hockey is coming. It dulls the pain of cooler days, less sunlight, and rain, but I’m certainly beginning to get excited.

Alanah and Rebecca have their posts up about this day as well, and you should stay tuned for more stuff from The Crazy Canucks. It should be a good season.

Prepping for the return of the 2008-2009 Vancouver Canucks

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 | 9 Comments »

As cool as the weather has been in the lower mainland in the past week or so, it makes me think about one thing: the coming 2008-2009 hockey season for the Vancouver Canucks.

To help get you and me both prepared for this, I figured I’d go back on some key points from the end of last season while looking ahead to this next one. Of course, these are the things that stick out the most to me, so feel free to add your comments. And if you are a Vancouver Canucks fan, you’re probably doing the same thing as me when someone asks you your opinion on what to expect come this fall. You’re probably shrugging your shoulders and saying, I’m not really sure.
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Photos from the Canucks Open Practice 2008

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 | No Comments »

In light of the recent episode #61 of The Crazy Canucks at the 2008 Open Practice at GM Place, I thought I would post a few of my favorite photos from the event that I took. J.J. had some great, extra seats that we took turns checking out from behind the bench, and Rebecca scored some good shots here as well.

Never afraid to pose
Rebecca poses as an Ultimate Canucks fan.
J.J. tapes the jumbotron interview with Rintoul
J.J. took the reigns on a 30 second shot with Scott Rintoul from TEAM 1040 on the jumbotron in GM Place. The rest of us got in on it as well in the background, including Alanah.
Dave poses with the true, but strangely missing, MVP of the day
DaveO poses with the real MVP of the day, who was strangely missing from the event…

Blocker save

Skating with the troops

Meeting at center ice 2

I have to say that it was a pretty cool day. We didn’t get to see as much of the practice as we did from press row last year, but it was a lot of fun to hang out with the guys behind the Ultimate Canucks Search, who are absolutely hilarious guys. They’re also pretty damn good at what they are trying to do.

One thing worth mentioning was the shootout competition that they had at the end of practice. Willie Mitchell pulled his jersey over his head in a headless horsemen-like fashion, skated all the way from center ice like that, and scored on Luongo. It was priceless. What a guy.

The Crazy Canucks #61 - Searching for Ultimate Canucks at the 2008 Open Practice

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 | No Comments »

We had an amazing opportunity with The Crazy Canucks to officially be apart of the 2008 Open Practice at GM Place about a week ago. In the midst of the forced down time with strep throat, I was able to get the audio turned around pretty quickly. I think it turned out alright.

Aside from covering the usual episode topics, we hung out with and interviewed the guys from the Ultimate Canucks Search, as well as one of the Ultimate Fans, Richard Loat (of Facebook application fame).

JJ got on the microphone to interview passers-by, while we also got the chance to sit down with Kent - the voice behind the We Are All Canuckleheads podcast.

We had a blast, and it was great to have the entire gang together to record one of those rare “face to face” episodes.

45:53 minutes
The Crazy Canucks

Check out the link to the post to get pictures and more details from TCC of the event.

Getting excited for Northern Voice 2008

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Northern Voice kicks off tomorrow night with the super spectacular dinner, followed by MooseCamp and then the main event on Saturday. This week has turned out to be a lot more hectic that I imagined it to be, and it’s going to be non-stop all the way through Sunday.

The Crazy Canucks will have a fairly major part in all of this madness. I’ll be leading a session for an introduction to podcasting on Friday, our session on sports blogging and podcasting is Saturday afternoon, and then Sunday has our podcast crew front and center at GM Place for the Canucks Open Practice. We’ll be on the concourse raising a ruckus and having lots of fun with fellow Canucks fans at the event, media passes and our own location on the concourse included. All brought to you by those super cool folks at the Ultimate Canucks Search.

I hope to have more time to make more detailed posts about each of these things. In case I don’t find the time, you can’t say that I didn’t mention it.

The Crazy Canucks #58 - Cardiac Kids on the Corner

Monday, February 4th, 2008 | No Comments »

This was recorded last Friday night and posted today. Been a tough last few weeks as Canucks fans. But what can I say? I just like hockey, not to mention good drink and talking hockey. Plus it’s a super short one, so listen up!

What would you expect while our team is currently sitting outside a playoff spot? A drunken, raw and rant-filled episode of course!

Record as of this episode: 26-21-6
Northwest Division: 4th
Western Conference: 9th

We go mobile for this quickie episode while our team is on a downward spiral. Dave and John take to the streets and record their thoughts on our recent loses while tossing in some speculation, rumours, and flat out wake up calls to the team and some fans. Just for kicks, Dave even throws in a shout out to the Agridome… and something to do with horses.

11:05 minutes
The Crazy Canucks

The Crazy Canucks #55 - The battle against the New Yorks

Saturday, January 12th, 2008 | No Comments »

Episode #55 was released yesterday.

Surprising enough, we are all together for this episode, but just for a brief time. Dave chimes in by phone from downtown Vancouver as we gather all of our thoughts on the games against the Rangers and Islanders. We also cover a variety of topics regarding the team in terms of new players, Superskills, ownership of the team, the coming All-Star Game, and other news topics about the NHL.

55:34 minutes
The Crazy Canucks

What does it take to podcast The Crazy Canucks?

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 | 8 Comments »

A first, sneak peak at how The Crazy Canucks is made

I’ve been thinking of doing a more, detailed post about how a typical episode of The Crazy Canucks comes together, but I’m going to make a simple list of all the gear we use to make it work.

  • Skype - Without this, we have no podcast. With Alanah doing her thing on the island, Dave on the north shore, and the rest of us in Vancouver, this is the crucial piece of software that ties us together. This also allows us to bring on any other guests that also use Skype on their PC.
  • Ubercaster - This is the recording software that I prefer to use. I’ve watched Ubercaster go through the ropes of development and been impressed with every step of the way. It also has a built-in function to record Skype conversations, making it even easier to record our conference call. It is worth the time to setup templates for your podcast because it makes it very easy to fire up the program, open a template, conference call on Skype, and you’re rolling.
  • Levelator - Due to the various setups that everyone has and the fact that Skype is really difficult to control audio input levels on, I always export the vocals first to run them through Levelator. You might not get the best audio quality from our “Voice Over IP Hot Stove”, but at least you’ll be able to hear all of us.
  • Apple iMac - This is the work horse that ties together our recording hardware and software. Speaking of…
  • Behringer Eurorack UB1204FX-PRO 8-channel Mixer - With anything you do in the world of recording and/or broadcasting, you can never have enough inputs. Most podcasters don’t need this much, but I’m a geek. You never know what you’ll wanna try to do, and this mixer has a slew of other nice features as well.
  • Shure SM7 and Behringer XM2000S microphones - I have one of each of these, and perhaps a bit more of overkill for the average podcaster. However, I’ve been doing the radio thing for ten years now. I have accumulated a collection of toys.
  • iPod nano (2nd gen) + Belkin TuneTalk Stereo - This is what I’m using to do mobile recordings these days. The quality is really surprising, and for podcasting, you can’t ask for more than something that sounds good as well as being small and very portable. Records stereo WAV’s at 44.1Khz as well as mono. I also put a standard microphone wind screen over the Belkin add. Additionally, I taped down the small switch on it because it had enough movement on it that it caused a slight rattle in the recordings.
  • FeedBurner - We push our RSS feed through their service simply because they are really good at what they do.
  • WordPress + PodPress - This is the CMS/blogging platform that we use to publish TCC episodes. PodPress is a plugin for WP that we use on the site that allows people to listen to our podcasts from the website as well as download them or make them available in our RSS feed.

Making it all come together has taken me about a year and a half to get efficient at. Every episode has something different to it, and I’m very much a fly by the seat of your pants editor. As the recording is happening, I can envision how I’ll go back and edit something, make a mental note as to where it was in terms of time of the epsiode, and get the podcast encoded and uploaded in about 20-30 minutes after we are finished recording. After that, it’s just a matter of making the blog post and publishing it to the world.

The Crazy Canucks #53 - Happy Hockey-days

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 | No Comments »

Recorded and posted today.

So it’s been a while since the last episode. Big deal, wanna fight about it? And truth be told, the end of the year got really hectic for us to all link up and get a new one recorded. We tried a few times, but the real world kept getting in the way, not to mention a string of Canucks games. We love our podcast, but recording during the games? Not unless you’re buying the beer.

Anyhow, the crew is back in form, but Alanah is a healthy scratch. The rest of the crazies gather together to reflect on the past few weeks and talk a little hockey. Of course we’ve got the Canucks, but we also get into the Spangler Cup, World Juniors Championship, and the very impressive Winter Classic in Buffalo.

Nearing the half way point in the season, there is much about the Canucks to discuss, and we do our best to sum up the action since our last episode. As always, we look ahead to the coming games, anxious to see both New York teams come to town for the first time in five years, and there is even some Surrey love.

50:33 minutes
The Crazy Canucks