Wayne D's Blog

Friday night was the last night for Northern Lights a CBC radio show hosted by Andrea Ratuski that ran from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. There were many nights when I fell asleep to the dulcet tones of Andrea Ratuski. With a decidedly classical flavour the mix of music provided by Northern Lights was the perfect blend music and talk to unwind too. I missed the announcement of it's demise back in January when CBC announced their decision to migrate music programming off of Radio One and focus on news and current affairs. In the shuffle Northern Lights was killed off to be replaced with repeats of CBC shows heard earlier in the week including Vinyl Cafe and Tapestry.

Perhaps I'm cynical but it seems more like a cost cutting measure to me. The second hour of Northern Lights has been filled by moving the start of CBC Overnight forward by one hour. CBC Overnight is reruns of shows from other public broadcasters from around the world. Two hours of original programming has been replaced with nothing new. I'll give the offering CBC Radio 2 a chance but I'm not hopeful, it's a contemporary music show and I'm not sure it will be music to go to sleep by. I'll probably end up going back to programming my own go to sleep music with iTunes and my USB powered FM transmitter.

I know I've written about this before but I'm going to do it again. I want to buy a TV show from iTunes but I can't because I live in Canada. If you look on ebay.ca you'll see iTunes U.S. gift cards selling above face value to, I can only assume, video hungry foreigners who would rather pay for their digital content than steal it. Come on you idiots rights holders, work out your issues and start making money because if you don't you are only encouraging people to circumvent the screwed up system you have in place now.

I have another cold. How did I catch this cold? Last weekend the Explorers and Timberwolves had a four day March Break camp at Scanlon Creek. The March weather is too unpredictable to camp out side so we slept inside. The Timberwolves in the dormitories , the Explorers slept on the floor in one of the other buildings. It was quite common to see people pull into the parking lot and get out with their dogs. The dogs enjoyed the chance to run free and it was soon apparent that the owners appreciated for another region. The weather was unseasonably warm resulting in the melting of some of the accumulated snow. As the snow melted nuggets dog poop began to appear. It was necessary to walk very carefully on the paths close to the parking lot to avoid fouling your boots with dog droppings. Yuck. Our conservation areas are not toilets for your dogs. If you aren't going to clean up after them don't take them there.

You are probably wondering what this has to do with catching a cold? Not much, but I do like to rant. when you take a bunch of kids, put them together in a confined space for 4 days it is inevitable that one will be sneezing and spreading their cold germs to everyone in the building.

When I heard that Veronica Mars was going on hiatus for eight weeks, replaced by the search for the next Pussycat Doll, I thought that this was the death knell for the show and it wouldn't be renewed for the next season. Though critically acclaimed and sporting an extremely loyal fan base it has never built the audience numbers that are required to be considered a success. Evidently the series creator thought so too. One of my friends sent me a link to article on Geeks of Doom reporting that Rob Thomas who created Veronica Mars is filming a trailer for the CW Network in which the series skips Veronica through college to when she joins the FBI academy. It may be called Veronica Mars but the strong secondary characters in the show have always played a big part in what attracted me to Veronica Mars. I'm willing to give it a chance, we'll see if the CW Network is in a couple of months.

Yahoo 360 is getting a reprieve, I looked at the default Wordpress blog format that my website hosting company offers and I decided I wanted to tweak the look a bit so it may be a while before I switch over. This is yesterday's lost posting recreated to the best of my recollection. I may lose this one too, my router keeps power cycling because someone jammed the cable leading from the power brick to the router around the edge of the computer desk and it's probably got an intermittent power connection now.

Yesterday on my Saturday chore trip I stopped in at FutureShop to see what CD's they had on sale. While I was there I dropped by the TV department to look at the new big LCD screens they had on display. They had two big HD displays going one with a movie and the other with a Bluray demo disk. I was disappointed with the picture quality, the pictures looked sharp but there was a noticeable amount of noise in the background. There were also noticeable compression artifacts visible around the text on the Bluray demo screen. This was a new 1080p set with a digital connection to the Bluray player. At times the picture looked no better than I get on my video iPod. I did a quick search on the Internet and found that what I was seeing was not unique. High Definition blog has a good article on HDTV artifacts. The sorry state of HD television also discusses how the promise of HDTV isn't always evident in the implementation. If you want to be snowed under with numbers DTV bandwidths explains why these problems occur. The crux if the matter is that all of the digital TV and HD formats use compression. The idea behind compression is that you can reduce the size of a digital file by removing things that people can't see. The MP3 format is an example of comrepssion used on music files, jpg files are also compressed to reduce their size. The problem with compression is that it's more of an art than a science. The amount of compression you can get away without people noticing depends on the content of the image. Unfortunately the pipe for HDTV and high definition DVD's is only so big so sometimes it may be necessary to compress to fit the pipe irrespective of the quality.

Compression means that 7-12 regular definition digital channels can be squeezed in the same space as one regular analog channel. That's why the cable companies are so interested in getting us all to switch over to digital cable.

The upshot is that before you plunk down big bucks for a monster HDTV and HD DVD or Bluray player take a good look at the picture and make sure that your expectations haven't been skewed too much by the hype.

The question now is whether I should explain the Kristin Chenoweth website reference in yesterdays posting. A the time I was writing the blog entry I was listening to Prairie Home Companion and Kristin Chenoweth was singing. I recognized her name from her time on The West Wing but I didn't know she was a singer. It turns out that she it a Tony Award winning stage actress with classical voice training. I would post a picture of her but I've been getting complaints that 4 pictures of women in 57 blog postings is too much. The insinuation was that I did it to increase my traffic. The truth is that the blog posting that offer solutions to Linux problems I encounter are the ones that really drive traffic to my blog.

I think I spoke too soon, my router just reset itself again, I better save this posting before it craps out entirely.

I just got back from the woods, I still smell of wood smoke. The weather was perfect, below freezing so things didn't get too mucky, not too much wind and generally sunny. Camping in the winter time is easier than you think as long as you have appropriate gear. I was going to take my camera but didn't want to share my sleeping bag with it. Instead the picture at the top of this posting is the remainder of the ice that formed in my water bottle overnight. It was frozen solid this morning and 4 hours after coming home is almost completely thawed. The hardest part in rolling over in the sleeping bag, it's a bit of a tight fit but not so tight that it rolls with you. I don't really have a sleeping bag that's good enough for a night at -15 so I took two and put one inside the other. The problem with that is that I have two zippers to do up and undo when I have inevitably have to get up in the middle of the night to pee. For some reason the cold weather seems to have that effect on me. I even cut way back on the tea this time but no matter, I was still out in the middle of the night turning the snow yellow. We sleep in teepee's made from long poles covered by large blue tarps which makes setting up much faster. We also have a couple of prebuilt lean-to's available and firewood that we cut and stacked last year.

My goodness, I am watching Celebrity Poker while I write this one and Gina Gershon keeps getting bleeped. She just flopped an Ace on the river and managed to win the hand against the odds. I decided to include a picture of Gina because those who read my blog on www.wdawe.com don't get to see the pictures at the top of many postings and the page needs some colour.

Picture from Teddy and Moo's

This is the blog entry for this week that you get to see. I made a posting yesterday that I marked as mature content to comply with Yahoo's adult content restrictions. The problem with marking an entry is mature is that only people who are logged into Yahoo and have asserted their adulthood to Yahoo can see it. It doesn't show up in the RSS feed of my blog either. If you want to see it anyways here is a link but be prepared to convince Yahoo you are an adult.

A couple more tidbits I wanted to blog yesterday but ran out of time to do. After hearing about it over and over again I finally got a chance to read Peter Gutmann's excellent article A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. This article is must reading for any computer geeks. Microsoft's response can be found here. I feel a bit sorry for Microsoft and their driver vendors, after they put so much effort into trying to protect the content the encryption has been cracked. It just goes to show, information want to be free. I've always said "No matter how big the safe is, if you put it in someones living room they'll eventually find a way to get it open."

One of the downsides of listening to the iPod in the car is that I don't here the news very often. This resulted in me being completely blindsided by the gasoline "shortage" last night. With barely a wisp of fumes in the tank I drove to three gas stations because there was no way I was going to line up to pay 91.5 cents a litre for gas. That's one of the reasons for last nights short posting.

A big thank you to 1and1.com Internet. They host my website www.wdawe.com and didn't even laugh at me when I inadvertently locked myself out because of a malfunctioning ftp client that managed to screw up the permission on my root directory. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I called their toll free support line at 11:30 p.m. at night, waited on hold a reasonable amount of time and had my problem addressed by their very competent support staff.

No posting this weekend as I am off to the woods for some more winter camping. That's it for now, I may come back if I think of something else.

If you couldn't convince Yahoo that you were an adult here is the text of yesterday's posting.

Imagine my surprise when this morning I took my customary trip to the Yahoo Most Viewed News page and found that the Most Viewed Photos on the right side of the page contained topless images from the Mardi Gras parade in Rio. At least I think it was Rio because when I went to the same page later in the day the pictures had been replaced by pictures from of JFK related to the new footage that had been discovered. There were one or two other Brazilian Carnival pictures that weren't quite as revealing. Did the denizens of Yahoo really find JFK more interesting? I dug into my browser history and tried to head back to the pictures. They returned error messages.


So like a good reporter I dug into my browser cache and retrieved the images which are shown below for editorial purposes only. What do you think, are they too hot for Yahoo? Should they have been removed?


Just got the call, bowling is done so I can leave for my trivia game early. The pictures and the rest of this entry will have to wait until later. I'm back, here are the pictures. You be the judge.