It’s black cat day again. I love (black) cats.
One thing I like a lot less is daylight savings time. It’s unnecessary and annoying. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just tell everyone to get up an hour earlier (or later) if it saves some energy? And I’m not even sure that it does.
I wanted to look up Barry Newman, the star of Vanishing Point, that legendary 1971 road movie. Accidentally, I entered Newman’s name into the URL field in Mozilla Firefox. Rather than telling me that I am full of nonsense or taking me to a search engine, Firefox instantly brought up the Internet Movie Database page on Barry Newman. What can I say… I know how it is done, but that doesn’t mean that I am unimpressed by how well it is done.
I always loved the music of Vera Lynn, especially her “We’ll Meet Again”, featured at the end of the immortal picture Dr. Strangelove.
But, I admit I didn’t even know that Vera Lynn was still alive, much less that her recently re-released “Best of…” album was about to top the UK charts! Which it did, this week, beating a competition that included no lesser stars than The Beatles, with their remastered albums.
Wow. Congrats, Dame Vera. Well deserved.
Now I think I know why Rogers were so perplexed when Ottawa viewers like me complained about the planned change in its cable lineup, replacing WPBS from Watertown with a Detroit PBS channel.
You see, they must have known all along that we won’t be watching either.
Although they were citing signal quality as the reason for the planned change, reality is that the signal quality on cable channel 64 was just fine. I never had any problems watching WPBS there. However, now that they moved this and two other channels to the 95-97 range (cable channels that happen to coincide in frequency with FM radio) this is no longer true: the signal quality on these channels is just unacceptable.
I phoned them and they wanted to send a technician. I talked them out of that. Now my only hope is that some of my neighbors will phone also, and they escalate the problem.
Or maybe it’s time to dump cable TV after all and just get satellite? The main reason why I am keeping cable is the convenience if a set-top-box-less existence… if I need a set-top box, I might as well stick with digital cable. But set-top boxes are such a nuisance, especially when used together with a computer tuner card.
Perhaps it’s time to return to a good old-fashioned aerial. Never mind analog TV, I can get some HD digital channels even with a tiny indoor antenna… who knows what a decent aerial might do?
Rogers blinked. This is highly unusual, as they don’t listen to their customers very often, but I am grateful that they reconsidered their decision, and we get to keep WPBS on cable.
I received a notice from Rogers Cable in the mail this morning, about their decision to shuffle some channels about in the cable lineup. The notice is a little confusing: two stations are moved from channels 61 and 69 to 95 and 96, but does this mean that they are becoming digital-only stations? 95-96 do exist as analog cable channels, but Rogers never used these high channel numbers in the analog lineup, so I am not sure. I am concerned because I am not a fan of proliferating set-top boxes and remotes, so I remain a happy analog cable customer for now… but I fear that the beginning of the end is near, and set-top boxes will soon be inevitable.
But I am even more concerned about another change: the station on channel 64, WPBS from Watertown, is altogether being removed from the lineup, to be replaced by a PBS channel from Detroit. Rogers has done this in the past, replacing US network channels that were coming to us from Watertown with their Detroit equivalents, and I can’t say that we are better off with that change. However, WPBS is special: it has many supporters, even many volunteers in the Ottawa area, and the channel has been serving the Ottawa valley faithfully for many decades.
Rogers claims that they’re doing what they’re doing in response to customer demand. Forgive my French but… piss off, will ya? Months ago I phoned Rogers about a simple problem, namely that the audio on several analog channels (including music channels) is missing either the left or the right channel (yes, I checked, it’s not my equipment.) You’d think that a company concerned about their customers would fix such a simple and embarrassing technical issue. But they didn’t. So I can perhaps be forgiven if I call their sad little excuse a flat out, unadulterated, shameless lie.
Discovery Canada advertises its lineup of programs for next week. On several occasions now they announced the following:
“Destroyed in Seconds… right after How It’s Made.”
I could be wrong but I don’t think that the humor was intentional.
Hah! I just happened upon the blog site of my favorite British writer, actor, and tall person: John Cleese.
I especially enjoyed the video interview with him made shortly before last year’s American presidential elections.
The CBC is tinkering with Radio 2 again. After the devastation last year, they may have made some tentative steps in the right direction for a change. VERY small steps, to be sure.
But there are also some bad news: Jurgen Gothe is no longer on Radio 2 anymore. I admit I didn’t listen much to his Sunday program Farrago this past year, as the time slot was just too inconvenient. But, I still shake my head in disbelief at the CBC’s decision last year to cancel Disc Drive, arguably one of the best damn radio shows ever made.
So I’ve been reading some comments on the CBC Web site. There is near universal condemnation of Radio 2’s management: nearly all who posted comments believe that Radio 2 lost its direction, that taxpayer money is wasted on a radio station that is sounding ever more like commercial radio, that the station got rid of its knowledgeable hosts, and that its choice of music is just awful.
I think one big misunderstanding is the notion the listeners of the old Radio 2 only wanted classical music. That’s nonsense. Jurgen’s program was great not because it was classical, but because it had the right mix of classical, jazz, folk, and yes, even pop music. This eclecticism is now lost, and they cannot bring it back easily because the hosts who made it possible are gone, too.
Here are two comments, in particular, that I rather agree with, typos notwithstanding:
“Separating the genres works for people who only like clasical [sic!] or only like pop or only like jazz but a very large part of the population quite like an eclectic mix. It is possible to like both Beethoven and Michael Jackson, De Bussy [sic!] and Salsa.”
“Now that Jurgen has totally left the CBC, when will some bright adventure capitalist start up a private subscription radio or Internet station with Jurgen Goth, Danielle Charboneau, Rick Phillips et al. My subscription is ready.”
What can I say. My subscription is ready, too. Where do I sign up?
There is something positively charming about the random nature of the Internet.
I am watching a British comedy, One Foot in the Grave, on Vision TV (as to why a supposedly religious channel is broadcasting somewhat risqué British comedies in the first place, now that’s a question for another day, but I am certainly glad that they do.) At one point, the story features an old Citroen that appears in a trash dumpster in front of the protagonist’s house. The car has a license plate: MOJ459P.
On a whim, I entered this license plate number into Google. Surprisingly, there was a hit: http://www.convergence.cx/. For no discernible reason, the page features nothing else but the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, and an immortal quote from Charles Babbage, pondering the sanity of members of Parliament who were wondering if his machine could give correct answers if given wrong data.
And it is a weird Web site. The page contains an invisible link to a host-side script that barfs back a series of random generated e-mail addresses. Or, I should say, almost random generated; among a bunch of bogus addresses, the e-mail addresses associated with the registration information of the IP number from which I perform the query also appear. What this means, I have no idea. The site doesn’t seem malicious, but then what is it? The top-level domain .cx is the country code for Christmas Island, but the site itself is registered as a “Convergence Organisation Object”, in London, the United Kingdom, since 2001. I have no idea what it is. Curious.
I was channel-surfing for news this morning, and I caught a segment on CTV’s morning show about “dirty electricity”.
I shall refrain from calling the gentleman being interviewed using a variety of unflattering names, because it would not be polite, and in any case, it’s not the person but the message that I take issue with.
Basically, he put a bunch of electronic devices like cordless phones, baby monitors, Wi-Fi routers or even fluorescent light bulbs on a test bench, plugged them in, and then held a contraption with an antenna and a speaker close to them. The contraption was making loud noises, from which this gentleman concluded that these devices “emit radiation”, and “send dirty electricity back through the wires”.
So then… what? The whole Universe is emitting similar radiation at radio frequencies. Any warm object, including the walls of your house, emits radiation at such frequencies and higher. And why should I care?
Of course, it helps dropping a few scary phrases like, “skyrocketing rates of autism”. Oh, he wasn’t saying that they are related. Why should he? Merely mentioning autism while he’s talking about “dirty electricity” is enough to suggest a connection.
Just to be clear about it, almost all electronic devices emit radio frequency radiation that can then be picked up by a suitable receiver and converted into loud and scary noise. When I was 10 or so and got my first pocket calculator, I had endless fun holding it close to an AM receiver and listening to its “song”. Later, when I had my first programmable calculator, I could tell by listening to the sounds on a nearby radio if it was still executing a program, or even if it displayed the expected result or just showed an error condition. Modern calculators use so little power that their transmissions cannot be picked up so easily, but does this mean that the old calculators were a health threat? Of course not.
At such low frequencies, electromagnetic radiation does not interact with our bodies in harmful ways. To cause genetic damage, for instance, much shorter wavelengths would be needed, you need to go at least to the ultraviolet range to produce ionization and, possibly, damage to DNA. At lower frequencies, most emissions are not even absorbed by the body very effectively. The little energy that is being absorbed may turn into tiny currents, but those are far too tiny to have any appreciable biological impact. Note that we are not talking about holding a cell phone with a, say, 0.3W transmitter just an inch from your brain (though even that, I think, is probably quite harmless, never mind sensationalist claims to the contrary); we are talking about a few milliwatts of stray radio frequency emissions not mere inches, but feet or more from a person.
As to “dirty electricity”, any device that produces a capacitive or inductive load on the house wiring will invariably feed some high frequency noise back through the wiring. Motors are the worst offenders, like vacuum cleaners or washing machines. Is this a problem? I doubt it. House wiring already acts as a powerful transmission antenna, continuously emitting electromagnetic waves at 60 Hz (in North America); so what if this emission is modulated further by some higher frequency noise?
But even if I am wrong about all of this, and low-frequency, low-energy electromagnetic radiation has a biological effect after all… study it by all means, yes, but it is no excuse for CTV to bring a scaremongerer with his noisy gadget (designed clearly with the intent to impress, not measure) on live television.
I’ve been learning a lot about Web development these days: Dojo and Ajax, in particular. It’s incredible what you can do in Javascript nowadays, sophisticated desktop applications running inside a Web browser. I am spending a lot of time building a complex prototype application that has many features associated with desktop programs, including graphics, pop-up dialogs, menus, and more.
I’ve also been learning a lot about the intricacies Brans-Dicke gravity and about the parameterized post-Newtonian (PPN) formalism. Brans-Dicke theory is perhaps the simplest modified gravity theory that there is, and I have to explain to someone why the gravity theory that I spend time working on doesn’t quite behave like Brans-Dicke theory. In the process, I find out things about Brans-Dicke theory that I never knew.
And, I’ve also been doing a fair bit of SCPI programming this month. SCPI is a standardized way for computers to talk to measurement instrumentation, and an old program I wrote used to use a non-standard way… not anymore.
Meanwhile, in all the spare time that I’ve left, I’ve been learning Brook+, a supercomputer programming language based on C… that is because my new test machine is a supercomputer, sort of, with its graphics card that doubles as a numeric vector processor capable in theory of up to a trillion single precision floating point instructions per second… and nearly as many in practice, in the test programs that I threw at it.
I’m also learning a little more about the infamous cosmological constant problem (why is the cosmological constant at least over 50 orders magnitude too small but not exactly zero?) and about quantum gravity.
As I said in the subject… busy days. Much more fun though than following the news. Still, I did catch in the news that Susan Boyle lost in Britains Got Talent… only because an amazing dance group won:
North Korea today tested two additional missiles. Reason to worry, to be sure.
But there’s absolutely no reason for CTV Ottawa to announce this as “two more nuclear tests”. Not all rockets are nuclear. In fact, as far as I know we have no reason to believe that North Korea is anywhere near mastering the technology to place a nuclear weapon on top of a missile. So please… stop the hype and try to report the actual news, if you would?
Speaking of Rogers, one thing they do is that they substitute local commercials during commercial breaks of American cable channels, including CNN. The local commercials are almost always the same, and almost all of them are advertising services of the Rogers media empire… including radio station Y101.
Y101 is a country station, and its commercial, which I must have heard a thousand times, includes snippets from supposedly popular country songs. Including a song by Brad Paisley.
For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out the lyrics of this one, though. What my ears heard just didn’t sound right: “I would like to check you for ticks.” Surely, he must be singing something else, but what could it be?
Finally I decided to look it up. Now I know. The song says, “I would like to check you for ticks.” And just to be clear that there is no misunderstanding, the song’s title is quite unambiguous: “Ticks”.
Rogers is an interesting company. Sometimes, they are super competent. I remember when cable modems were new… I got one fairly early (and still use a cable connection as my backup Internet connection) and whenever I had a technical problem (which was rare) I was immediately able to get competent help on the telephone. Or when a contractor managed to cut our underground cable… Rogers was here almost faster than it would take for the police to arrive. Within half an hour they had a temporary solution rigged, and by the next day, everything was back to normal. They even apologized that they had to unplug us for another few seconds once the underground cable was repaired and reconnected.
Yet at other times, they are just blatantly incompetent. Such as when it took them months to sort out billing issues that only amounted to a few cents in the end.
Or take this past week. I phoned Rogers because I noticed that on CNN, instead of getting stereo audio all I get is the right channel. Perhaps not so much a problem for a news channel, but I am seeing similar problems with other channels, including MuchMusic, where it can be a bit more problematic, for all the obvious reasons. I reported this over a week ago, but no solution yet, not a peep from Rogers.
And then there is this other thing… being a weekend, Rogers is showing a preview of a premium channel, which this weeks happens to be the CBC’s Documentary Channel. So far so good, and I in fact caught a rather interesting program on it, about the history of the East German Trabant automobile and its current fans. Much of the dialog was in German, and it was subtitled. Except that every so often, the subtitles were covered for an extended period of time by a Rogers banner about the preview. Now yes, of course they want us to know that it is a preview and that this channel can be ordered along with many others… but must they demonstrate at the same time just how little they actually care about their viewers?
Not that Rogers is alone in this regard… many channels have picked up the nasty habit of overlaying a rather large, often quite disconcerting banner advertising the next show, for instance. And not infrequently, they do so while subtitles or other important pieces of information would appear there.
Once again, I clicked on a FOX News link from Google News, and I found a FOX News page that contained not just the Christian mom makes $5K/month ad that I lamented on previously, but also a link to a fake antivirus site… a link which Firefox promptly blocked, but still, what is such a link doing on a legitimate news network’s Web site? Am I seeing things here?
Whatever my opinion is of the “fair and balanced” editorial policies of FOX News, I had no reason to doubt that the company itself was a legitimate business.
Until now.
As I was searching for news on North Korea’s failed rocket launch, one link I clicked on was that of a FOX News posting on this story. The page came up, along with the usual series of ads… except that one of them looked more than a little unusual. Not the kind of ad you expect to see on a legitimate Web site.
It said, “Christian Mom Makes $5k/M”. And sure enough, it’s a scam. The Web site, registered in December 2008, just reeks of fakeness; fake life story, fake testimonials, further postings “disabled due to spam”. Not to mention that what it actually sells, the so-called “Google Home Business Kit”, is not worth anything… you can make money with Google (google.com/adsense) but you don’t need to buy any “home business kits” to do so, and you’re unlikely to make $5,000 or even $500 a month.
So perhaps FOX was duped when they accepted the ad of a scamster? I was tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt but then I scrolled to the bottom of the page where this ad was repeated along with two other advertisements. One was titled “I’m Happy I Lost My Job”. Same idea: fake Web site, fake testimonials, $5,000/month, Google Home Business Kit. The person this Web site supposedly belongs to claims to have come from the Ottawa area. Does this mean that the ad was, in fact, geographically targeted because my IP address puts me in Ottawa, and any scamster knows that I am more likely to believe an ad if it comes from my local neighborhood? I have a proxy server in the US, so I tried reaching the FOX Web site through that server with a different Web browser. Same result, same three ads. I even tried to run the browser on that remote server (painfully slow, through an X-Window connection) and still, the same ads came up. So the Ottawa thing is perhaps just a coincidence.
Compared to these two ads, the third link, which was for a teeth whitener ranked #1 by Rachel Ray (presumably I’m supposed to know who Rachel Ray is; hmmm, let me check, Rachel Ray is the title of a novel by 19th century English novelist Anthony Trollope, but there is a television personality named Rachael Ray, presumably that’s who they meant) almost seems legitimate. (Of course if it had been authorized by the real Rachael Ray, they’d presumably have spelled her name correctly.)
So what does this tell us? I can think of several possibilities, most quite unflattering to FOX News and their viewers. For instance:
But the real question is, what does this say about the quality of the news they deliver?
If only I had known about it earlier… I am not a theater person, but The Gladstone’s The Radio Show definitely sounds like my cup of tea. Too bad it’s on for only three more days, and these will be three very busy days for me.
I am watching a documentary on BBC World.
BBC World is available here on basic analog cable, which is the only kind of cable I am interested in having in the house. (Mainly, I am put off digital cable because of the need for separate set-top boxes, but DRM also doesn’t help, not to mention the nasty habit of the box to wake up in the middle of the night to perform an OS upgrade, clearly demonstrating that I am not in control of equipment that is in my house.)
However, BBC World is, it appears, a high definition (HD) broadcast, so on analog cable it appears with a black stripe on the top and the bottom of the picture.
This particular documentary, however, was apparently shot in standard definition. So BBC World chose one of three options, each less than perfect: instead of cropping the picture at the top and the bottom, or introducing black stripes on the left and right, they decided to stretch the picture horizontally. Why so many people prefer a distorted picture over black stripes, I have no idea.
But this means that on my standard analog cable, I get a standard definition show that appears at less than standard resolution, vertically compressed, distorted, with unnecessary black stripes at the top and the bottom. Isn’t HD just glorious?
HD madness
Fortunately, as I tend to watch TV on my computer, I always have the option of stretching the video window vertically and get a picture with the correct aspect ratio. This option is not necessarily available on ordinary televisions.
Behind this ridiculousness is the insane decision to change not just the resolution but the aspect ratio of HD broadcasts. Why, you might ask? Very simple. If the aspect ratios were the same, most people could not tell the difference between standard definition and HD even when the broadcast was true HD, which often is not the case (older shows, and even some newer shows, are shot in standard definition.) So how do you convince people to buy HD anyway? By making it apparent that they have a “better” television set because it is wider.
And this has been done before. Back in the 1950s, when movie studios were seriously worried about the competition of television, they changed the aspect ratio of Hollywood movies, intentionally making them incompatible with the standard 4:3 aspect ratio of NTSC/PAL television. What is amazing is how well they managed to convince the public that a wider picture is better, providing yet another example of just how easy it is to manipulate people.
I’m done watching the very final episode of Battlestar Galactica.
Wow. Now this is what science fiction television is supposed to be like. When I saw the pilot movie back in 2003, I simply wondered, how on Earth they could possibly make something this gripping out of the “re-imagining” of a cheesy early-80s space opera? But they did… and the show never wavered in quality. I am sad that it’s over, but I respect their decision to finish the show the right way.