by Diane Wild | Jul 18, 2007 | Canadian TV, Pseudo-Techie
It’s finally here:
- The first TV, Eh? podcast (the link takes you to the TV, Eh? post with show notes and a link to the podcast – your computer will make no sudden sounds by clicking on it)
The podcast feed is at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TvEhPodcast.
powered by ODEO
Thanks to everyone who participated and offered support along the way. Actually I’ll post part of the email I sent them:
It’s longer than I’d intended, and in fact longer than it was before I destroyed the thing and decided not to edit as rigorously as I had the first time in order to get it up before *everything* Caroline and I talked about was out of date. And, like the site, it’s a grassroots effort, so don’t expect perfection. And I’m restraining myself from adding more disclaimers and neuroses.
Anyway, thank you so much to those of you who participated, but also to those who supported the project in spirit if not actual words. Feel free to link from your sites, or post the podcast and/or show notes on your own site, and/or distribute at will. I’ll be submitting to podcast directories and otherwise publicize but for now I need to get some sleep.
by Diane Wild | Jul 17, 2007 | Canadian TV, Pseudo-Techie
Good: I’m working on a podcast for the TV, Eh? site and it’s been both fun and a huge learning experience.
Bad: I completely ruined the podcast while completing the last production step, and had to redo it all from the original files.
Good: The redo went much faster because I’ve had practice.
Bad: Forget the Pollyanna attitude, I lost a week’s worth of work.
Good: I’d originally scheduled two weeks to figure all this out, and I’m at one week plus a day since getting all the pieces I needed.
Bad: I’m weeks behind on the original schedule already.
Good: No one cares.
Bad: No one cares.
Good: I’m almost finished.
Bad: The “almost” is because my microphone doesn’t play nice with Audacity.
Good: I think I came up with a solution.
Bad: I’m tired and grumpy and will see if it worked tomorrow.
Good: It can wait until tomorrow.
Bad: I want to throw my computer off the balcony but am afraid of killing someone.
Good: I am apparently not homicidal.
Bad: I really need a laugh.
Good: My stupid Maclean’s magazine RSS feed finally kicked in again and I got to read stuff like this while I contemplated the futility of life, or at least computers:
A survey has found that 18 per cent of adults in our country — in excess of four million individuals — do not know the name of Canada’s prime minister. …
On the upside, while we may not be book smart, or knowledge smart, or actually-knowing-things smart, it’s still entirely possible that we are street smart. Unless you expect us to remember the name of the street, in which case, no, we’re not.
(Further proof of our national not-smartness: on the same day the Dominion Institute announced its findings, Coors Light released its first batch of Cold-Certified cans — which feature “temperature-sensitive thermal chromatic ink technology” that changes the colour of the can when the contents are “ice cold and ready to enjoy.” My fellow Canadians, it has come to this: we no longer possess even the rudimentary intelligence required to determine when our beer is cold. Next up: Timbits stamped with the words Cram Into Mouth.)
I’ve told you to read him before, but then he disappeared and was ostracized from my sidebar. But that was from Scott Feschuk’s new, improved blog. Don’t get too attached.
That led me to his last Maclean’s magazine column, which made me nearly explode. Just to be clear: with laughter.
Good news, everyone: at long last a pharmaceutical company has come up with a drug that combines all the health benefits of losing weight with the unforgettable thrill of soiling yourself in public! …
Unlike certain weight-loss drugs, Alli (pronounced “ally,” as in: if you want to lose weight and all your friends, Alli is your ally!) does nothing to reduce your desire to eat. Instead, it stops the body from breaking down and absorbing fat — a remarkable scientific achievement, really, if you take away the whole crapping-your-pants thing. In fact, GlaxoSmithKline claims Alli is able to block about 25 per cent of the fat you eat while simultaneously grossing out 100 per cent of the people sitting next to you on the bus.
But really — how common can these so-called “treatment effects” be? Well, the actual makers of this actual drug actually advise users to “bring a change of clothes to work,” and suggest that it’s probably a “smart idea” to wear dark pants.
He’s not kidding. I mean, he is, but the makers of Alli apparently aren’t.
Ah, nothing like laughing at mass stupidity to make me feel better about my own.
by Diane Wild | Jul 6, 2007 | It's All About Me, Pseudo-Techie
Here’s a bit of a “found post” (in other words, a lazy way to post something in the summer downtime). Last year, when I was their volunteer web editor, I was named volunteer of the year by my professional association. So recently, when promoting the nominations for this year’s awards and introducing me as a new board member, they did a Q&A with me for their members-only publication. They’d actually done one before the awards, too, and the questions were nearly identical, so I tried to answer differently this time while still in the realm of truth. Anyway, here’s the interview, with a few boring, identifying details cut out to preserve my illusion of privacy:
During work time what do you do?
I sit at a computer an awful lot, managing the employee newsletter and the website among other things.
In your spare time, what’s your claim to fame?
I created a website called TV, Eh? What’s Up in Canadian Television to promote homegrown programs, which has led to some great experiences, including meeting some people in the industry virtually and in person, being interviewed for my thoughts on the state of Canadian TV, and, a Canadian TV geek’s biggest thrill, having the site mentioned in John Doyle’s column in the Globe and Mail.
Why do you choose to volunteer your time?
I think it’s important to have a broad variety of activities in life to keep things interesting, so I always try to have a volunteer activity on the go. This is a great way to use my professional skills while working with a fun group of people.
Any funny stories to share from your volunteer experience?
Nothing outrageously funny – mostly I sit by myself at a computer so there’s not a lot of scope for comedy – but recently I was editing the website and ran into a technological glitch that caused all the navigation on the site to disappear: no menus at all, no easy way to get from one page to another. That’s not generally considered a good thing. I had to send a frantic e-mail to our web sponsors saying “Help! What did I do?” Turns out it wasn’t my fault (really) but I had several hours of thinking I broke the Internet.
I guess that’s not funny so much as sad.
Volunteer wisdom to live by:
I think the most important thing for me is to have fun with volunteering but take it seriously, too.
Inspirational book/movie/song:
I recently read Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign by Pico Iyer and found it inspiring, though that’s likely partly because I have serious travel lust right now. I love what he says about forcing ourselves to look outside of our own perspective: “The physical aspect of travel is, for me, the least interesting; what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don’t know, and may never know.”
Who is your mentor/hero:
I shy away from thinking of people as mentors and heroes, but I admire a lot of web geeks talking about things relevant to communications, people such as Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Shel Holtz, Mark Cuban.
by Diane Wild | Jun 24, 2007 | Banff, Pseudo-Techie, TV Interviews
I got to talk to Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder of JibJab, at the Banff World Television Festival. That’s the company behind some of the best political and social satires on the web – I’ve even posted a few here. We talked about JibJab’s vision, the future of television in the Internet age, and he gave me a peek into a business that doesn’t just pay lip service to building a relationship with its audience:
For all my articles from the Festival, check out the feature section at Blogcritics.
by Diane Wild | May 23, 2007 | Pseudo-Techie
On WordPress.com, the free blogging platform I just switched away from for the TV, eh? site, the top blog listed on the dashboard stats always used to be Scobleizer, former Microsoft “technical evangelist” Robert Scoble’s blog. Then I started noticing this site called I Can Has Cheezburger? hitting the top spot most often. How could I resist checking out a site with that title?
Turns out, checking it out didn’t really solve the mystery. The subtitle of the site is “lolcats tagged for your convenience (also for ur lol*s)”.
Um … huh? What’s a lolcat? Wikipedia tells me it’s an image macro used on forums. Um … huh? My forum experience is pretty limited, and I’d never seen anything like these out in the wild, but I Can Has Cheezburger has pages and pages of cat pictures – and dog pictures and walrus pictures – with mangled English captions. And it gets more hits every day than one of the most popular tech geek blogs out there. It gets over a quarter million hits a day. Crazy.
Slate has a hilarious slide show essay on the lolcat phenomenon, Cat Power: You Cannot Resist Lolcats. It taught me even more:
A reader pointed Dash to a San Francisco Chronicle article about MeowChat, where people maintain cat identities online and speak in a cat language that slightly overlaps with lolcat speak. (Genius detail: Some cat lovers disdain MeowChat because it implies that cats are not intelligent, evolved creatures.)
I’m sure this is exactly why those Clean Slate Internet guys want to make sure the Internet can handle future demands on it. Gotta make room for the lolcats.
by Diane Wild | May 23, 2007 | Pseudo-Techie
I find this kind of news interesting, even though I don’t understand half of it. Over the weekend, the technology section of the Globe and Mail had an article on the Clean Slate Design for the Internet Project. Untangling the World Wide Web touches on the ad hoc way the Internet has grown, with resulting security and bandwidth issues. Writer Christopher Dreher says:
Because of ad-hoc innovations, the Web has become a kind of unwieldy trailer park of technology – where security and even fundamental stability remain highly problematic.
For me, this is all interesting partly because of what anyone who’s anticipating the convergence of the Internet with television and movie delivery systems — or the possible evolution of the world wide web into a three-dimensional virtual world, or who wants to watch a lot of porn — has probably heard by now: the Internet as it exists today does not have the ability to handle that traffic.
The Internet was not designed for Second Life or “adult entertainment” videos either – high-volume, resource-consuming uses of the network. If just 1 per cent of the DVDs that NetFlicks sends to customers every day were downloaded, we would need a tenfold increase in the current core capacity of the Internet.
So a group of scientists at Stanford University are not looking at ways to continue “jury-rigging” solutions for what they see as fundamental flaws of the current structure. They’re looking at wiping the slate clean, starting over, in a controlled and planned manner. It all sounds so … scientific.
“In every other high-tech field, it’s usually typical to see massive innovation,” Prof. (Nick) McKeown says. “And although we’ve seen huge implementation of new applications, Internet technology is built on the same ideas it was built on 40 years ago.”
Even those involved in the Clean Slate project don’t necessarily believe it will wipe out the existing web — they’re cautious scientists out to test a hypothesis, after all — though it might offer a parallel system with fewer of the limitations.
Although the work at Clean Slate involves highly technical considerations – such as a redesign of the wireless spectrum allocation to better use limited network capacity – its success could greatly affect our daily lives.
Better wireless spectrum allocation, for instance, would finally mean faster and more foolproof data communication between handheld wireless devices such as phones and PDAs. It would also fulfill at last the promises of devices that combine the capacities of a television, a DVD player and a home computer.
Likewise, improving network security would mean that instead of spending billions of dollars preventing spam, virus attacks, malicious hacking and other dangers, businesses could expand on some of the life-altering real-time uses imagined by pioneers of the Internet.
Remote surgery, for instance, has been performed on a very limited basis since its first success in Canada in 2001. But it can take place only over dedicated fibre-optic cables because the Internet networks used by the general public have too many unforeseen variables, including security concerns and possible blips in connectivity.
These issues also prevent a range of other industries and many critical infrastructures – such as water and electric plants or airports and highways – from fully using the Internet. “If air-traffic control were run over the public Internet,” Prof. McKeown says of the current system, “then I wouldn’t fly.”
Even a clean slate solution might have issues of its own, though. Besides the admission that innovation is unpredictable (“No one could have predicted that the Web would come along,” Prof. McKeown says. “And the same type of unforeseeable thing could happen.”), there are challenges the project expects to face:
The real hitch? Ask telecommunications companies such as Bell and AT&T, which became Internet providers in the mid-1990s in the hopes of making huge fortunes. “One of the dirty little secrets of the network is that the network infrastructure is not economically sustainable or profitable,” Prof. McKeown says.
In fact, he wonders if the only economically sustainable model for the Internet may be a nationally funded or regulated infrastructure – or some sort of government monopoly. (Though he adds that, “in the current economic and political climate” of the U.S., proposing this idea “is nearly suicide.”)
Another thorny issue facing advocates of a “clean slate” approach to the Internet is how to balance privacy and security concerns. Making the network less open to spam and viruses, for example, also means curtailing the freedom and anonymity of the Internet.
Still, it’s exciting stuff. Whether they’re on their way to a whole new Internet structure, or coming up with solutions that can run in tandem with the current Internet, or just taking a hard look at how to improve a flawed system, it’s a huge step towards even more innovation in an arena that has been nothing but mind-blowing innovation in a short period of time. Well, innovation, and a whole lot of porn.
For more, see Stanford’s Clean Slate Design for the Internet site.
“I’m fairly sure that if they took all the porn off the Internet, there’d only be one website left, and it would be called Bring Back The Porn.“
– Dr. Cox, Scrubs
