Canadian football, or soccer if you prefer the American pronunciation fans in Canada can thank the CBC for providing live streaming of all the FIFA Confederation Cup 2013 games for football fans in Canada . The Confederation Cup is taking place in Brazil from June 15th to July 30th, 2013. You can find the 2013 Confederation match schedule and the live streaming at http://www.cbc.ca/sports/fifaconfederationscup/watch/cbc.ca/sports/fifaconfederationscup/watch/

Peter Rollins, the edgy, Irish philosopher/theologian is coming to the Toronto area in the only Canadian visit on his calendar.

April 12-14, 2013
Newmarket, Ont. Hosted by Holy Cross Lutheran Church

The Divine Magician: Christ and the Vanishing Act of God
Friday April 12th - 7:30pm
$25.00
@ Dr Denison Secondary School
135 Bristol Road, Newmarket
Peter Rollins new release The Idolatry of God: Breaking the Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction continues Rollins’ practice of turning theology upside down in his effort to subvert the religious establishment’s love affair with the status quo. In contrast to the usual answers concerning what the Good News might be, Peter insists on a radical
and initially disturbing definition: you can’t be satisfied, life is difficult, and you
don’t know the secret. Arguing that God has traditionally been thought of as a
type of product that will make you whole, remove your suffering and give
you the truth, he will contrast that with an approach to faith which invites us to
embrace suffering, face up to our unknowing and fully accept the difficulties of existence.

Spend the Day with Peter Rollins
Saturday April 13th

9:30am to 3:00pm
$65.00 lunch included @ Holy Cross Lutheran Church
space is limited to 95
Enjoy three lectures: Trash of the World, The Decay of the Idol and
The Practice of Transformance Art

Sunday April 14th
@ Holy Cross
Peter Rollins Adult Education Hour
9:30am
“Approaching the Crucifixion”
Everyone is welcome to come to our Adult Education Hour. Come early to get a seat
and stay for Worship.

Worship with Us
10:45am
Guest Preacher: Peter Rollins
“A Revelation of Darkness”
Everyone is Welcome!

Pub Night
“Christ the Bartender”
7:00-9:30pm
Beer & Wine on tap!
Passes will be distributed on request
while supply lasts.
Freewill Donations

Links to more details: http://pastordawn.com/peter-rollins-visit-the-idolatry-of-god-newmarket-ontario-april-12-14-2013/ for tickets email tickets@holycrosslutheran.ca

http://www.holycrosslutheran.ca/PageRethinking.htm

Live sport streaming information for events in 2013 can be found here http://wdawe.com/index.php/live-sports-streaming-in-canada?blog=1

updated with 2013 links
For 2013 there is an extensive schedule of online 2013 Masters content starting on Monday April 8th for Canadian golf fans on tsn.ca. You can watch the Masters streaming on TSN.ca at http://www.tsn.ca/live/golf/masters2013/. TSN.ca will provide Canadian golf fans with up to five video feeds. Before the tournament there will be coverage of the 2013 Master from the range, and during the par 3 contest. During the tournament there will be streaming video from Amen Corner (Holes 11, 12 and 13), the 15th and 16th holes, two Featured Groups, and Masters In-Depth which I assume will be analysis and highlights. TSN also has an iPad/iPhone app for the 2013 Masters for golf fans with Apple products. Nothing for Android users again this year. Come on TSN, Android now has a bigger share of the smartphone market than Apple does and Android users love golf too.

If you happen to be looking for a golf simulator why not check out the golf simulator I helped build.

This post used to be titled "Masters streaming Canada should return tsn.ca, TSN needs some SEO help" when it was written 3 years ago. My how times have changed, http://tsn.ca is now the first search term returned when you Google "Masters streaming canada". I've updated the original article with the 2013 link information but left the rest of the post as is for posterity.

What follows is woefully out of date

TSN should give ChannelCanada.com a great big kiss because ChannelCanada.com seems to have a clue. I decided to catch some of the Masters today. When I flipped through the channels early in the afternoon and realized that it was televised until later in the day I did what Google has trained all of us to do, open firefox and type "Masters streaming Canada" into the search box. Why "Masters streaming Canada"? I'd argue that "live streaming" has become a generic term to denote video available live on the Internet. I didn't bother to include "live" in my query because it seemed redundant and as it turns out it makes little difference in the results.

The first result Google offered was mastersgolf.ca. When I clicked through and clicked on the large "Watch Live" box in the centre of the screen I was informed that "This service is not available in your area". I had been redirected to the U.S. Masters site and hadn't noticed. The second result was "Masters LIVE Streaming Video in Canada Exclusively at MastersGolf.ca", a press release from 2008. I already knew that wasn't true. Luckily for me the third result is a blog post on ChannelCanada.com that talks about TSN's coverage of the Masters on tsn.ca because the fourth result is "Masters streaming in Canada. Nope! [Golf]" a bulletin board post from 2007. Why doesn't tsn.ca show up in the search? Probably because the banner they have on their main page that says "Watch Masters Live Now" is a graphic with only "Watch Masters Live Now" as the alt text. They don't appear to have tried to optimize for other search terms. If you search for "Masters Live Canada" they show up sixth, behind a number of educational institutions who offer Masters degrees. "Master Live Canada" is an ok choice of keywords but not as intuitive as "Masters streaming Canada" at least to me. Maybe TSN believes that everybody in Canada knows that's where to look for Masters golf coverage but I'd argue that many golf viewers may not know that tsn.ca has live streaming of the Masters golf tournament. It's even more important because we have the day off today in Canada and Canadian Masters fans could have watched most of the day.

The ironic thing was that after I found the site, watched their 1:15 seconds of Flash commercials I couldn't watch the live streaming after all because they were using Microsoft Silverlight and Silverlight doesn't run on Linux.

Another case of major SEO fail? I'm pretty sure I saw a promo spot for the new Red Dwarf series Back to Earth which is premiering in the U.K. this weekend on a Canadian cable station. Unfortunately I forgot which channel I saw it on and this morning I tried a whole bunch of different searches without success. Sigh.

Recently I ran into a problem with the screen going black on my EL6 Linux system under normal operating conditions. A search of /var/log/messages turned up the following message that occurred whenever the problem occurred.

messages-20130127:Jan 26 12:04:44 localhost kernel: NVRM: GPU at 0000:08:00.0 has fallen off the bus.

After trying a number of solutions suggested by others on the internet without success I used the nvidia-smi tool to determine that at idle the video card temperature was 65C when normally it should have been 35C. Under load the temperature would rise to 80C and above. It turns out the fan on the Nvidia GT430 cards we were using was of poor quality and the fan was barely turning on the video card. When the video card was replaced with another Nvidia card with a better quality fan the problem disappear.

If overheating isn't the cause of your problem check out some of the solutions at http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-rhel-fedora-linux-nvidia-nvrm-gpu-fallen-off-bus/

Ever since I bought my nexus 7 I have run into a number of sites that really don't work particularly well with the Nexus 7 and I expect by extension with other android devices. Everyone days that mobile is the way of the future so in order to improve the mobile experience for all android users I'm going to document the sites that I find that need to be improved.

First up is http://tvlistings.zap2it.com/tvlistings/
As you can see from the screenshot below the grid lines don't line up.

Site #2 is actually an app, Buzztime trivia works but isn't very astetically pleasing with the background not lining up properly.

Linux Chrome users were jonesing for cat videos all weekened because someone at Chromium.org thought it would be a good idea to push a Pepper flash update at about 8 p.m. Eastern on a Friday afternoon. As can be seen on the Chromium issues page this had the effect of breaking flash for Linux Chrome users all weekend. A fix was supposed to have been pushed out and hour ago but it hasn't shown up here as of yet.

Unitl the fix propogates the least offensive way to fix the problem appears to be executing the command
chmod 000 ~/.config/google-chrome/PepperFlash/11.5.31.138/

This is an excellent example of why you shouldn't push software updates on a Friday.

The short answer is if you want to watch purchased or rented movies from Google Play on Linux, use Firefox, not Chrome. Now read on for the whole story.

When I finally got video on my EEBOX running smoothly at 1920 by 1080 in Linux it was thanks to Google Chrome and there implementation of Flash using the Pepper interface. Imagine my disappointment when I found that the free Google Play movie I received when I purchased my Nexus 7 wouldn't play. This was a bit disappointing, since most of the video rental places are now closed it seemed like being able to rent movies from Google Play was a viable legal option to use on the EEBOX attached to my big screen TV. It already has XBMC but XBMC doesn't have a solution for Google Play movies, for that you need to fire up a web browser and use Flash. A bit of Googling and I found an Adobe page that discussed playing protected Flash content on Linux. The page includes a link to a reference video player and a protected video file http://drmtest2.adobe.com:8080/Content/anonymous.f4v.

I tried Adobe's test player and file and as expected it didn't work in the Google Chrome browser. I verified that I had HAL installed and running as instructed on the Adobe page so I thought I might as well give it a try in Firefox. I have abandoned Firefox for Chrome because Firefox has decided not to continue support for the Pepper version of Flash that Google has moved to since the have taken over support for Flash on Linux from Adobe. To my great surprise the test worked in Firefox and when I went to Google Play the movie played too. Though Google taking over Flash support from Linux has produced some benefits the lose of ability to play protected content on Linux is a large step backwards. The ball is in Google's court, when will protected content play in the Chrome browser on Linux? Only Google knows.

My sister moved to Pictou Nova Scotia a few years ago and we decided that we would take a week this summer to go visit her and explore some of the other interesting places in Eastern Canada. Here is a slide show of my pictures from the trip along with a few of my favourites. Along the way we stopped at Edmundston, Moncton, Pictou, Charlottetown, Summerside, Quebec City and Montreal.

Pictou NS harbour, view towards the Hector replica

From Our Great East Coast Adventure

The beach at Caribou/Munroes Island Provincial Park

From Our Great East Coast Adventure

The Hector replica in Pictou Nova Scotia

From Our Great East Coast Adventure

Chelton Beach Provincial Park in Prince Edward Island, note the Confederation Bridge in the background

From Our Great East Coast Adventure

Notre Dame de Quebec Cathedral alter

From Our Great East Coast Adventure