Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Will the war ever end; Take Your Drugs With Water

There are two interesting stories, well actually 3 but two are related.
The first is about how statistics are collected and used. The first case in point
is the US death toll in Iraq. The number is 4000 over 5 years. This number seems
big but consider how they got the number and you will be even more shocked. The 4,000 were US troops. This does not include the mercenaries the US hired to fight.
The second case in point is the Jericho series which will have its finale tonight. The stats for viewership is done using the Neilson ratings system we are all familiar with. A select amount of homes have a device on their set top to track what they watch. Its kind of silly to still use this old approach when the set top boxes of millions of people from their cable companies show them what they watch but anyways. This is a mute point, what about the millions of viewers that watch it streamed on the websites. What about those who go to itunes and buy the episodes? Still there are others who do neither and use the illegal bittorrent sites to get their shows. Are the network execs on drugs?

This leads to the second story, apparently if they are drinking the local tap water they are. It seems that when testing the drinking water in the GTA it has been determined that it contains Pain Killers and other drugs from people dumping their prescriptions. So all those politicians that want to tax bottled water because its a luxury. Maybe they should tax tap water because you are getting your drugs for free.

Monday, March 24, 2008

CRTC To Regulate Online, Earth Hour: The practice for 2012 solar storm

Here are two important events in the course of history that you should be aware of.
CRTC finally awoke and realized the internet is a place to go and watch tv. Now if the
networks would follow suit and realize it now that this dinosaur has.

The other historical event is Earth Hour. For this hour we celebrate the earth and give it a
break from light pollution for a brief moment in time. The earth says thanks to you and hopes
the experience will prepare you for its Earth Day or Earth Week when it turns the lights out on
us for a day or a week, taking for itself a longer break from light pollution.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Wellesly Fire Causes Commuter Chaos on Yonge-Bloor Line

If you ever wondered the state of the TTC or Go Transit simply take a look at this blog for details. Its sounds like a disaster down there. David Miller should step in and do something about it being Mayor.

http://go-transit.blogspot.com/2008/03/wellesly-is-not-well-today-neither-is.html

In other news about another hot topic, March 21 is anti-racism day but I did a google search for event happening in the city and found not very much. If you know of events going on please post them as comments here and I will publish them. This is a big issue we need to support together.
Its nice to have the day but we need to acknowledge it with something. I know this year its awkward being Good Friday too but think, Jesus died to bring peace to the world didn't he. So its only fitting that the days collide we need peace among everyone regardless of race, culture or relious background.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Chase and the Bear. Wake Up Broadcasters to Online

Today there are two interesting stories in the headlines both are a story of people in
the know that don't know.

The first is about Chasing the Bear. All investment banks want to avoid a bear market.
In this case, we are in one and its even killed the bear or almost. Chase has jumped in to save the bear. The funny thing is that everybody knows we are in a recession but the people in the know (government officials keep saying no we are not). Here is the link that will help this story make more sense:

http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=380134

The second story is an interesting one about the conventional broadcasters that are living in their offline world, using their offline rating systems, targeting ads at timeslots. Well to them I say wake up to the online world. Case in point, Jericho was getting low viewership on CBS so they tried to cancel it. Fans poured out and cried are you nuts. Literally they sent a shipment of peanuts to head office. This show is the number one show downloaded from itunes. Online its got a high traffic of viewers but CBS is not making money on it and is again thinking of cancelling it. This is not the first CBS show to suffer this. Cashmere Mafia is suffering the same fate. It has a good fan base of online viewers but not on CBS tv stations. My opinion is its because people don't have time to let tv dictate when they can watch something. They will go online to places streaming it and if its not available there they will rely on PVR or worse torrents.

When CBS says they are not making any money online, my question is why? 24 is doing sponsored mini episodes online. Ever heard of commerials before or after your clips or even between. Hey don't we do that already on conventional tv?

When I hear of things like this it makes me smile when I see stations like Slice.ca pushing the envelope. They are smart enough to feed their audience with a fresh mini series for the web. 8 episodes of a new show online only. Check it out at http://www.slice.ca/love

If we visit the site and support it maybe they will do more of this and show other stations this is what we want.