Posts from the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Billy Bishop Goes to War – a Gift for our Veterans

I’m very excited to point everyone to this new Kickstarter, months in the making, to try and help us provide hundreds of free copies of “Billy Bishop Goes to War” in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of World War I.

The lack of a commercial quality, physical DVD for “Billy Bishop” has been something that’s been really frustrating over the past few years, as that’s the only format that veterans organizations and veterans care facilities ask if we can provide them (few are set up to work with iTunes or other electronic platforms). I’m incredibly hopeful that with everyone involved in the film on board and the support of the great “Billy Bishop” fan base, we can make a small gesture of thanks this November to amazing service members and worthy organizations, and contributors can get some cool stuff as well.

Even if you don’t have any space in the budget this month, sending out a tweet, e-mail, or facebook post would be hugely appreciated as well.

There’s a nice little video with myself and the great Eric Peterson over at the kickstarter so go watch how terrible an actor I look like next to someone who is really, really, really, good at being in front of a camera.

Predictive Search Outliers (or “One of these things is not like the Other”)

I got my wrist slapped today for not cross posting here more often. The slapper (correctly) pointed out that I e-mail friends and family lots of asides, and post in a number of comment threads on things that interest me, and have started dabbling in tweeting – all of which would make fine content for this here page, which (as you all well know) I tend to ignore when I’m in hardcore “project on the go” mode, and don’t feel like writing anything substantive (or as “substantive” as we get around these parts).

This is all absolutely true. So let’s see if I can’t get better about that, by starting with a quick re-post of a comment I made to Denis McGrath’s great Dead Things On Sticks. Denis wrote a post wondering why he was getting a particularly grim predictive search result about killing babies in Google, and since I’ve been dealing with something similar (albeit on the search side) relating to the High Life website, I thought I’d lay down a quick note on why I believe bizarre, shocking, outliers can get promoted on Google (particularly in lists of predictive results). Read more

Jeremy Hotz beat me to the joke!

What were they thinking?

Jeremy Hotz totally stole my joke this evening. Well, “beat me to the punch(line)” is more accurate. While accepting the Canadian Comedy Award for best male stand-up – he quipped something along the lines of: “Oh great, not winning a Canadian Comedy Award was all that kept me going. Not having one of these was all that got me out of bed each day.” While maybe not quite the same, the RocketAce/Imponderables super-group was racking up an impressive run of nominations for best web video without ever winning the thing (five, last time I checked). I was looking forward to adding to that tally – so I could continue to come up with tortured press release statements such as “Rocket Ace Moving Pictures has been nominated for more Canadian Comedy Awards (in Internet-based comedy) than anyone in history” – all the while avoiding broaching the fact we’d never been able to seal the deal.

Anyway – that’s all done now – whatever will we do now?

Seriously – my sincerest thanks to the incredible RocketAce team (especially Matt, Erin, and Jay) and all the Imp’s. It’s not often you get anything for Internet-based comedy (other than a stack of YouTube commentors saying some questionable things about your mother… which… this is entirely different).

Calgary Flames Radio on the iPhone *Update*

Edit – This post is now out of date. Check out the comments here for information about ootunes, an iPhone app which is pretty much all I now reccomend to people looking to get NHL game radio on their iPhone/iTouch. It costs a couple of dollars, but gets a big thumbs up from me, and saves you having to manually hunt streams every time they change the source!

So we’re less than a week away from the start of another NHL season! Who’s excited?

It’s been brought to my attention that my previous posts on how to get Flames broadcaster the Fan 960 on one’s iPhone/iTouch (it’s like a phone call from Peter Maher) is now out of date.

Have no fear, the good folks at the Fan 960 have just changed their stream address, not locked out iPhone users… the new address is actually much easier to get than the old one since it’s actually in plaintext in the source code of the Flames audio player window (although, ironically, this seems to have entirely broken it’s compatibility with Mac laptops and desktops… well done).

The instructions (for those new to this whole “radio on the iPhone” thing):

1. Download and install the excellent application FStream (either by clicking this link, or searching for it in the app store)
2. Start FStream and select “favourites”
3. click “edit” and then “Add new webradio”
4. For the “Name” box, enter whatever title you want (GoFlamesGo, YeahBaby, 2009isTheYear…)
5. Enter the following in the “URL” box:
   mms://a543.l8090152405.c80901.n.lm.akamaistream.net/D/543/80901/v0001/reflector:52405
   (be careful about capitalization and punctuation… also notice the difference between the letter “l” and the number “1” which messed me up for a day before I realized my mistake). Then click “save”.
6. You’re done! Click on “play”, and your station should appear on the main screen. Tap it, and your iPhone will connect to and start streaming that station!

The usual caveats apply – be careful about streaming radio when on the 3G network. I accidentally left my phone streaming in my car overnight one night and pulled down gigs of data… streaming audio is a good way to burn through your data allotment if you’re not paying attention. Then again, getting to listen to opening night while driving down the 401? Priceless!

Conmattanderins!

See… it’s like “Congratulations” but with “Matt and Erin” mashed up in it…

Sorry – I’d meant to hang up the “gone fishing” sign that it’d be pretty quiet around these parts in September, what with an unusually heavy TIFF schedule (as if the festival’s normally a sedate time of year). Also you may have heard there was this other social event going on.

Congratulations to The Hoosies, whose big day was magical.

Live NHL Radio on the iPhone – Flames / Blackhawks Edition

EDIT – This information is now out of date. Read the comments for information about ootunes – an excellent iPhone app and the most painless way to get a huge assortment of NHL game radio.

Happy Stanely Cup Playoffs hockey fans! By far the most popular thing I have ever written on this blog was this little throwaway post on how to get Calgary Flames game radio via the iPhone. Since traffic to that post remains absurdly high, (and most of the other information on that page is now obsolete) I thought I’d celebrate round one of the playoffs with a succinct version – not just for my hometown Flames – but also our round one nemesis – the Chicago Blackhawks (yes, the same Blackhawks of the great all-star voting ads with the mixed marketing message).

My fake-largess is twofold:

• I will keep updating this information for every opposition team the Flames face – giving fans of other Western Conference teams a reason to cheer on the Flames.
• In the (admittedly unlikely) scenario that the Flames manage to overcome a slew of obstacles to get through the first round – I want Blackhawks fans to be able to listen to every. Single. Second.

HOW TO LISTEN TO CALGARY FLAMES (FAN 960) or CHICAGO BLACKHAWKS (WGN 720) GAMES, LIVE, ON YOUR iPhone

1. Download and install the application FStream (either by clicking this link, or searching for it in the app store).
2. Start FStream and select “favourites”
3. click “edit” and then “Add new webradio”
4. For the “Name” box, enter whatever title you want (GoFlamesGo, Flames Radio, IggyIsBetterThanToews – whatever you want)
5. For Calgary Flames Radio – enter mms://38.99.208.186/fan960?MSWMExt=.asf in the URL Box (be careful about capitalization and punctuation – they’re important). Then click “save”.
6. For Chicago Blackhawks Radio – enter http://www.provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/WGNAM.pls in the URL Box (be careful about capitalization and punctuation – they’re important). Then click “save”.
7. You’re done! Click on “play”, and your station should appear on the main screen. Tap it, and your iPhone will connect to and start streaming that station!

Enjoy – and (regardless of rooting interest) have a great playoffs all!

Footnotes:

1. If you want FStream to work over 3G click on “More” and set the “Cellular Network” setting to “on” (WARNING: FStream can use a *lot* of bandwidth. I fell asleep with it on one night and pulled over a gig and a half before I noticed, use at your own risk on 3G networks)
2. FStream should automatically detect and fill in the “Format” and “Bitrate” setting, but if it doesn’t the Flames format is “WMA” and bitrate is “20”, the Blackhawks format is “MP3” and bitrate is “56”
3. Once you get this up and running on your phone, click this link and send a couple of bucks to j.averous@sourcemac.com – the genius behind FStream, which makes this all possible. Seriously this is major software he’s just giving away. Given that we’ve all spent money on less than stellar apps, support those giving away their hard-work by throwing them some beer money. Knowing the French, he probably doesn’t even like hockey!