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Sometimes It’s Better to Have a Down Day

Street Art on GranvilleThis weekend shaped up to be a pretty good one. We went to V For Vendetta Friday night, and I liked it. My outlook on movies has taken such a relaxed stance since my college days. Anymore, I just like to be entertained. I like to have a movie take me away from reality, from start to end. This flick was a success.

The only complaint that I have about the whole experience was the theatre itself.

With about ten or less minutes to go, the movie just stopped. No sound, no projector, lights, nothing. Five seconds of 200+ people having a moment of silently being clueless, the lights fade up and someone eventually comes in to tell us that all will be resolved in a few minutes. Putting that out of my mind, I’m pretty sure it was a good movie, but that did phase the whole experience a little bit. The Paramount gave everyone free passes as they exited. Works for me.

After tossing around multiple ideas for our Saturday, we wound up being lazy. I forced Rebecca to watch some of the World Baseball Classic. The Cuba/Dominican Republic game was outstanding! Totally looking forward to the championship game between Japan and Cuba tomorrow night.

Downtown VancouverWe did head to Davie St. for dinner at Stephos. It took about 30-40 minutes of waiting in line, but that’s no unusual. By the looks of things when we left, our wait was much shorter than the line that seemed to double in size at that point. As far as Stephos goes, it is a great place to get greek. Great prices and loads of food. I need to try the roast lamb, my usual favorite when going greek. The calamari was good, but there’s another little place we like to go to that has me more impressed. I’ll have to keep that a secret so the droves of readers that pass by here don’t overtake the place. That and I think Laura would kill me if I didn’t.

That night found us at The Roxy with some of my new extended family members. I think it’s safe to say, I over did it and spent most of today recovering. The cover band was pretty alright, but I had so many flashbacks to the numerous bars that over populate Iowa City. The Roxy is a great place, and hockey stars are known to wander in. Didn’t catch anyone last night. Then again, I’m not sure if I would have remembered. Things were a little fuzzy when my head hit the pillow last night.

The Roxy Really stinks that my girl has to work on a Sunday night, but she’ll get an extra day off in a few weeks. We are planning a get away for then. Either we hit the island or venture into the interior. Right now, we’re leaning towards the later. Be it a ferry ride or an adventure through the mountains, it all sounds really good to me.

I had a lot of things in mind to do today, but for the most part, I’ve watched a lot of TV, read a lot of news on the web, TV, and thought about doing things. The best I could do was this somewhat random post that didn’t turn out to be so random after all. Still, you can amaze yourself as to what pours out once you just set out to blog something.

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The Amber Alert System in British Columbia

I was unaware until this week that BC has its own Amber Alert System in place. I found out about it due to an alert that was issued and resulted in locating the child, fortunately, without harm. I’ve read other accounts where people caught news of the alert flashing on bus signs. That’s pretty impressive. This goes a little beyond the usual highway signs and news outlets that I’m familiar with, but it makes so much sense. You can declare this one a success.

My brushes with the Iowa Amber Alert System gives me some insight on this. My chief engineer back at WSUI/KSUI, Jim Davies, was one of the main guys getting the Amber Alert to work through the Iowa Emergency Alert System (EAS). This stuff doesn’t simply work from the start. It takes a lot of work and testing to make all the information flow correctly, not to mention the politics of what constitutes an alert or not.  Have to give my congrats to BC for this one working so well.

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Shorty On 1040

CKNW Control RoomI’m not so new to Vancouver to know that the word about CKNW losing the contract for broadcasting Canucks games to Team 1040 is big news. To me, it’s huge. I’ve interviewed for jobs at both of those stations in the short time that I’ve been here. They both have very respectable operations going on with really great facilities.

David, chief engineer for CHUM Radio Vancouver, had a lot of projects on his list that he told me about during the few hours that we met. The combining of a couple transmitter sites was of peak interest to me, but that’s the broadcast engineer in me talking. It wasn’t until tonight that I recalled something else that I noted.

There was one studio that was in the process of being vacated that David took me through. I was excited when he told me that he would be completely gutting the room and rebuilding it so Rogers Sportsnet could simulcast programs from there. Of course, I was excited because there was a possibility that this guy could be hiring me and I’d get to help. It was for the I.T. position, but I could tell that David saw my RF experience being handy for situations such as these. Sadly, my work status in Canada prevented me from partaking in said fun, but they did check my references.

Team 1040 put themselves into better position to win the broadcast rights from the Canucks. CHUM looked like a good investment to the Canucks with the investments that CHUM made into itself. Corus, who owns CKNW, loses a long time legacy, but I don’t believe that their programming was hurting so much as to not get the contract renewed. The competition just presented a better, overall product.

I have come to really appreciate John Shorthouse doing play-by-play. He’s good. For those back in Iowa who remember Ron Gonder and the legacy he had with the Iowa Hawkeyes on the radio, Shorty is that to Canucks hockey. It’ll be weird to hear him say, “You’re listening to Vancouver Canucks hockey on Team 1040.”

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Always Something Going On

The RadioZoom Podcast SetupI’ve been spending a heck of a lot of time lately on the non-programming elements of my podcast. The biggest piece of news is that radiozoom.net is the new URL for the website. I’m working more and more at separating my podcasting from this site. It works better in terms of the marketing portion of the whole project. When you are a one man band, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to every element of your podcast. Promotion, marketing, producing, and hosting, it can be quite the process.

I’ve gone to RadioDaddy.com to experiment with what talent I might be able to find there. If you don’t know about it already, you can submit scripts for voice talent to record and send back to you for free. It’s a great service, but the combination of my audio editing talents and voice over experience finds me being really picky about what I’ve been receiving.

The structure of every episode has been pretty static until now. I’m experimenting with the flow of a typical podcast as well as the ventures in soundseeing and video podcasts. Until I get feedback from subscribers about what they don’t like, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.

What I really need is a new logo. The one I made in the first place isn’t cutting it for me anymore. That’s a whole other issue when I start slipping into marketing mode, figuring out what makes a good logo, something that can be a stand alone logo without lettering, color schemes, etc. I’m open to any and all suggestions, but be warned. I’m picky.

Quit your day job? This is my day job. Well, at least until the government says I’m legal to work in Canada.

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They’re Not THAT Lousy

I understand that people are upset with the current skid that the Canucks are on. It doesn’t make sense that we are able to come out of the Olympic break and strengthen the defense only to have this heartbreaking manner of play perpetuate. No goals in the first period for the Canucks since before the break? And it’s been the Sedin/Carter line to pull us through so far.

Still, it’s senseless that someone found themselves so disgruntled that they sent a letter to GM Place addressed to Bertuzzi with a “mysterious white powder” in it. I mean, come on. There is the fact that you have to have such a low IQ to laugh at a prank like that, but the other element to the story is that the team is on a road trip right now. Do you even think that a letter sent to GM Place would be hand delievered to Bertuzzi?

Instead, you freak out the staff who work there, fearing for their life. I have certain feelings about how the team is doing and how particular people are playing, but that’s just stupid. And if it’s about the lawsuit, you’re hurting Moore’s case more than helping it.

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You’re Not Getting My Messages

An update to Microsoft Messenger was released today for the Mac.  Aside from not having the same ability that Windows to Windows users have in their versions, the last release had a lot to not love about it.  For some reason, I could try to send message after message to Rebecca at work, only to have those IM’s go off to la la land and not know where they ended up.  She would get snipets of what I would be saying or nothing at all.

Let’s hope this update is better.

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Fun Before the Season Starts

I haven’t caught as much of the World Baseball Classic as I’d like, but the bits I have seen were not the most entertaining, but I attribute that to the announcers for ESPN2 that were calling the game between Canada and another country I forget now.  It’s really impressive to see the amount of countries putting their best foot forward though.  I’m more of a die hard Cubs fan rather than an all out baseball fan myself, but it’s good to see the sport succeeding around the world.

I did catch some of the game between Cuba and Dominican Republic this afternoon.  What a good game.  Cuba kind of got stomped on.  They also played their hearts out all the way to the end.  That’s due to the push to keep your numbers up in the event of a tie in the final standings.  I would have loved to be apart of the constant party going on in the stands.  It was like a soccer game in terms of the atmosphere, but with baseball.

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Could We Get One, Steve?

I’d like to see Apple open a store here in Vancouver. I mean, Toronto is getting their third one. Reno, Nevada is getting one, so what about Vancouver?

There is no shortage of places to buy apple products, but when we were over in Kits a few weeks ago, they password protect the computers so you can’t play with them.  It takes a lot to compare to an Apple Store.  I haven’t been to Mac Station yet, but you can’t tell me that Vancouver wouldn’t be a great place for an Apple Store.

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Educating the Masses

SNL did a sketch last night about a couple of guys who do a video podcast called “Joplin: Alive”. It was pretty okay, but it really could have been a lot funnier. The fact that they were doing the podcast live from Bennigan’s was enough to make me laugh. The only true gag here was the amount of people walking through the frame, but I’m not sure that the audience really caught what the joke was. There wasn’t much to distinguish the sketch from being too different from public access television, but I think that’s been done before. There was just so much more that you could have made fun of, but I’m not sure that people would understand unless you knew more about podcasting itself.

Oddly enough, the Vancouver Sun came out with quite the spread on podcasting this past Saturday in the arts section. Rebecca’s mom saved the paper edition and passed it off to me this morning. Tod Maffin had quite the feature in it as well as highlights on a lot of other things going on in and around Vancouver. The article is a really good read. There were a total of about five articles, but only the following two are available to non-subscribers of the online edition.

“Now hear this!: PODCASTS | Millions plug into downloaded audio files — to listen and communicate”

“Is podculture just a return to the past?”

Next week should have a follow up with more podcasting related content.