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.