Bloody freezing

It's -29 with the wind chill at the moment. Yes really. There will be smoke on the water this morning. Sea smoke, that is. I expect the harbour will have a good coat of it which is always neat to see but when you see it, you know what it means as well. Brrrrrr.....

Rug up, everyone!

If she wasn't nominated for a Darwin Award, she should have been

In the newspaper this morning

After calling out to a friend "Watch to see what i can still do", a 23 year old woman attempted to do a *handstand* on a second floor hotel balcony. And fell to her death into the lobby of the hotel.

Halifax is going to be hosting the Juno awards next year, that's the Canadian version of the Grammy awards, btw for music and music video. Halifax has become a venue for some fairly major events over the last 10 years, hosting the World Skating championships, the World Junior hockey thing, some major university basketball playoffs i think, a G7 conference, Tall Ships twice, some other things but i forget what just now.

Firewall techie question:

If all goes according to plan i should be going to talk to the reporter at CBC radio after work. He said he was going to call me today. I shall have to find out when the show will be broadcast. CBC does a web broadcast through Windows media player in a little popup mini-window, not through media player as an external application though i have to turn off my Norton firewall to get it to actually play. I get the popup window but no sound until i disable the firewall. Any ideas why? That firewall sometimes seems to block web pages and i have to disable it to see the page. It's got a bunch of ad blockers and things so i think it must be blocking spyware or suspicious cookies. For instance: when i look at a photo album index on Fotopic, It only shows a small number of the thumbnail pics if any on the page. When i disable the firewall it shows them all promptly. In either case it will let me view the individual photo with no problem but if the page doesn't display any thumbnails at all, there's nothing to click on to get to one of the photos from where i can then click on the "next/previous" thingo. There can't be any weird stuff on that site unless it's trying to set a cookie. And lots of sites do cookies and the page displays just fine.

Well that was neat

And one to add to the list of new things done this year

Went to the CBC radio station after work and met up with Doug Barron. He's going to be talking to a few local Corrie fans and helping to put together a feature on Corrie and my name was put forward as a knowledgable corrie fan. So there i was in a soundproof booth, headphones on, at a desk with a console and two huge microphones. He sat on the other side of the big window to run the computer and the sound controls and talked to me through the 'phones. The lights were low and i could see my reflection in the window to the control booth. It was very quiet in there. I wish i had brought my camera! I didn't realize i was going to be in a radio booth!

He didn't really chat too much about the history of the show though did ask if i participated in trivia which i do. I talked about corrie fan gatherings, called pingfests, and about the show, the characters, why i liked it, why i think it appeals to people. He's a fan too so he knew what and who i was talking about. We discussed the upcoming appearance of Bruce Jones aka Les Battersby. He's going to be talking to a few other people, at least two of whom i know well and it will be aired on March 1 on Information Morning locally. That's webcast off cbc's website but i meant to ask him if the show is archived to be listened to later in the day. I will email him and ask.

He also referred to a new soap that two writers are being commissioned to do and what kind of things i thought they should aim for or avoid. I compared a soap to CBC's last effort, Riverdale which was dreadful. They tried to cash in on the Coronation Street association (i think they had a former director or producer on board) but it just tried too hard. Most of the acting was wooden and the writing was one cliche after another. I meant to talk about how the soap characters needed to have a sense of community where on riverdale they were all mostly isolated with little interaction really. They can't try to emulate Corrie, they need to find their own personality and the writing and acting has to be top notch.

Anyway, it was fun. He won't be using the whole interview, just picking out sound bites from the various interviews. And something i've never done before :)