theMediaman.com

Well, in spite of my ranting time and again about Blu-ray, it did win the format war against HD-DVD. And in spite of my misgivings about the format I am overwhelmed that my very first mass-produced DVD was a next-generation video format.

Tonight I picked up a copy of Young People Fucking on Blu-ray. This was the first project I had a hand in authoring after starting at Juice. I didn’t do it alone. Saying I did would be slightly more egocentric than I commonly resort to. However, much of the troubleshooting and debugging (and repetitive coding) was performed on my part.

$29.95 and I have my very first Blu-ray disc on my shelf. I don’t even have a Blu-ray player yet.

It’s a strange feeling to see something I worked on out in the open. Eight years at Livewire and the most exposure my work would get was being projected on a wall behind Frank Stronach’s front page photo in The Globe And Mail. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m unhappy with the extensive work I’ve done over the years, but I find myself standing in awe as my very first month at Juice produced more exposure than any single project (or even the accumulation of all projects) that I have worked on over the last eight years of my professional life.

It’s a very strange feeling indeed.

I think it’s…

…pride?

Following the dismissal of Peter Silverman and the final nail in the coffin of Speakers Corner, it’s been announced that Ed The Sock is also leaving the recently purchased station.

While it’s reasonable to think that Silverman can relax in a belated retirement his services have been invaluable to many “small guys” around the city, even helping out Simone’s parents at one point.

Speakers Corner has been absent for a year or two while the Queen and John corner has been undergoing renovations (although it turns out the episodes are still airing) The outright cancellation isn’t too shocking. However, they’ll soon move into the busiest pedestrian corner in this part of Canada. Why announce that they want to chop it?

Steve Kerzner (aka. Ed The Sock) is accepting it graciously, and I think in the ten years since I hosted the most popular site on the web dedicated to him (including his own, official site), I imagine he’s become tired of the role. What he could do with the character peaked years ago and has sort of lived on in spite of that.

An additional irony is the fact that Ed got his start on the Rogers community channel.

If they were replacing it with good material, then I could understand. Instead, Rogers is just positioning the cross-Canada CityTV stations with American syndicated shows that were rejected by Global and CTV. Pretty much the entire CityTV line-up is crappy Reality TV (not even “good” Reality TV).

My brother, John, hypothisized that the next thing that established CityTV as a unique broadcaster of niche content, Baby Blue movies, might be the next thing to go.

With my cable already cancelled, how could I further protest if such a horror were to come to pass?!?

Not that I’ve ever considered the Toronto Sun to be anything more than a cartoon version of a daily newspaper, but the last three days they’ve been running front-page articles on saving reindeer at the Toronto Zoo.

Canada lost another soldier to the war in Afghanistan, the Democratic nomination is coming down to the final stretch, and the Toronto Blue Jays had two players go on the disabled list last night. The Toronto Sun continues to play the holier-than-thou card and insist that the Toronto Zoo not euthanize overpopulated species in the budget-locked zoo.

It’s not a surprise that they could get the public behind this cause. Each day the cover page says “Rudolph” instead of “reindeer”, adding a childhood emotional personification of the young animals.

If they held a charity drive to save the animals, people would donate. If they insisted that people go visit the Toronto Zoo more, they would promise but I don’t think you’d see the turnout necessary once Summer hits. If they insist that the city raise taxes by 10 cents per-person and generating $300,000 so they could afford to keep them, there would be an outrage.

Of course killing reindeer isn’t a good thing, I’m not heartless. However I also have faith that the people who work at the Toronto Zoo are ‘animal-people’. They wouldn’t euthanize an animal unless it was essential… and it is. Reindeer, in spite of their cute, cartoon selves, are highly territorial. Too many males in a group and things get violent as well as dangerous for the animals and staff.

In a similar way, I pulled myself out of the CBC Radio2 protests when the organizers refused to listen to reason and hold protests outside 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. Face it, the kind of person who listens to symphony music tends to have an office job. I wouldn’t generalize, it’s not everyone. However, I’d be willing to bet serious money that the vast majority of listeners do work those hours.

The response from the Facebook branch organizing the cross-country event was that there would be enough “musicians, students and mothers(?)” out to support the group.

It seems that even the sophisticated protest-hippies don’t want anything to do with us ’suits’ who work day jobs. I had first considered switching my stance after reading the point that an in-house orchestra was once a necessity when recording equipment was heavy and expensive. Now a recording studio can be set up wherever a performance is held. The illogical actions of the protest organizers secured my position on the other side of the fence.

This was another situation where the masses want it all, but are not willing to accept that there are real costs involved… often tax-funded costs.

However, in the end, “Rudolph” was saved. This time. So my question is simply this:

For those of us who wish to be logical and reasonable in our efforts to better the world, does aligning ourselves with front-page grabbing, strategy-free neanderthals hurt or help?

Shortly after the breakdown of talks between the Sony camp and the Toshiba camp to release a unified HD disc format, avoiding a costly format war, I registered the domain name, “HDvsBlu.com”.

I intended to make it a central hub analysing the war and how it affects the most important side, the consumers - a group rarely represented in such discussions. However, for one reason or another, I never finished development.

Tomorrow, the domain renewal is up. After a few years of spending a ten-spot renewing it, I’m going to let it expire. The war is over, and Sony is rewarding itself for the win by jacking up the price of players.

I think I’m sticking with DVDs for the time being. Unfortunately, it looks like some material I want might never be released.  A favourite mini-series of mine was the “Biography of the Millennium: 100 People - 1000 Years”. I remember being particularly proud of myself at guessing the number one and two spots as going to Johannes Gutenburg and Isaac Newton respectively.

Regularly, I would check the Internet to see if they had released it on DVD. I remember seeing it on VHS a while ago, and it can still be found on that antiquated format. However, even if the next-gen format may not make it into my home entertainment system anytime soon, I can’t imagine VHS staying much longer.

I contacted A&E to see if they were planning to redistribute it anytime soon. To be frank, I was a bit surprised at the speed of the reponse. About one hour after sending an email, this is what I got.

Unfortunately, this program is no longer available for sale. Most likely due to a rights expiration issue with certain key elements within the program.

Stupid copyright law. Basically what is being said is that, short of going to work for A&E and getting access to their library of episodes, I’m never going to get to see that mini-series again. What a waste.

Thank goodness the 2nd season of “Joey” is coming out next month. Now there’s something the world needs more of. Short-run spinoff series that history will judge as little more than the answer to a trivia question.

Several years ago I took a trip to Japan and wrote almost daily on my web site. At the time, I wasn’t even using the word ‘blog’… it was an “online journal”. It was only after that when I decided to start writing a regular blog of my thoughts, frustrations and other innane topics.

While I was there, the only thing that astonished me more than the horrible colour schemes in the billboard ads, were that very few of them had imagery. Aside from logos and a telephone wingding, they were almost always just text. For many years I just chalked it up to cultural differences, until I read “The Death of a Copywriter?“.

As Copywriters are prone to do, the situation is initially illustrated as more dire than it truly is. However, the first half of the article does have a valid point in how Canada’s multiculturism and “new Canadians” require more visual cues in ads than are required in Japan.

In Japan, I remember seeing a lot of Japanese, and little else. In 2001 when my life in Toronto was measured in months, I could still remember living in Barrie, where my high school graduating class had less than a dozen people who were not white. However, even Barrie felt culturally diverse when compared to Osaka.

It would seem that Japanese language-only billboards exclude a very, very small percentage of the population, even less than performing the same action in a white-bred, redneck city like Barrie.