Month: March 2008

One Hour Without Lights – I Feel Like I Cheated

That one hour without lights was a fairly poorly-timed hour, smack dab in the middle of a night where I needed to get some renovation stuff done. So a few things went through my head … I could kick back for an hour and relax, listening to music, or I could read a book by candelight … Oh! I could chop some wood and relax with Alisa in front of a fire! Or, I could fire up my 120 grit sander and ground off the surface of oil paint so I could apply a coat of primer ….

125 MegaWatts were saved though – so that’s not so shabby. Now if we did this on a regular basis instead of once a year …

1 Hour Of Less Light

An international effort to reduce electricity usage is happening in a few hours (my local time).  I suppose it is already underway for many people already!

A small, simple gesture – but with what results?  It’s like voting, no complaining about it if you can’t do small simple things like, well, turning your lights out for an hour tonight.  Have fun in the dark!  I know I will (sleep …. sleeeeepppppp …….)

Nanaimo B.C. – Google Earth Capital Of The World?

Did anyone else know that Nanaimo, a small town on Vancouver Island here in BC, is leading the world in getting its city mapped?  Did you want to check out the downtown core in 3D, or see the exact lot size of a potential land purchase?  It’s all available in Google Earth.

Privacy issues cannot be ignored here, particularly when the residents don’t seem to be aware of these things.  But that’s the power of Google’s business approach.  Until recent years there has been a lot of information publicly available, but nobody knew about it.  Google lets its bots spider across all this data and mash it all into one place where suddenly people are sitting up and taking notice.  I can do research on cemetery headstones in Nanaimo today from my desk.  In the old days that would have been a trip to Nanaimo and some skulking about in the cemetery – all perfectly legal.  But now that people can do it anonymously … it seems to have changed people’s opinion of the entire thing.  Interesting.

Our First Contest – Still Here!

Worry not those of you who have entered into the Inaugural theBside contest … I have not forgotten you!  I’m just taking a lot longer to get my CDs cataloged, that’s all.  And since Dale was so easily foiled by Nath and Louis (ahem) last time, let’s do a little update here.

I’ve just started to catalogue the “P” artists, and my current count is 529 albums.  Note that a double disk album will count for two albums in most cases.

Updated rules: you cannot guess within 25 CDs of another person’s guess, so get your guesses in early for those obvious numbers!  I’m not going to bother trying to estimate when I’ll be done, as that didn’t work out so well last time.  I’m still hoping for “soon”.

Again, the winner will still get the album of their choice as a reward.

Canada’s Most Controversial Music Video – Thank You!

I’ve been a big fan of Hayden as a musician for many, many years now. I’ve never really thought his videos were much to speak of though, so I stopped watching for them. His latest album (which is excellent) includes the lead track “Where and When”, and CBC Radio 3’s R3TV showcased it last week. And rightfully so. Hayden introduces it and its premise, we get a glimpse of the Radio3 people’s reactions to it, and the video rolls.

Now, the video itself is actually a fabulously created and delivered observation on today’s video obsessed Internet culture. Through it I learned about another video that this one is riffing off of called “2 Girls 1 Cup“. After reading about the video I understand how it could become so notorious in Internet-land, and heartily recommend that you don’t even try to find a copy of it – it is disgusting and the epitome of all that is bad with Internet video. I stopped trying to find a copy once I read that Wikipedia description, as that was enough for me (and any sane, normal person).

So Hayden has caught part of this video’s momentum and created a video that looks back at those who are watching these kinds of things, at those who are surfing YouTube looking for a certain type of video. He reflects on the state of music on the Internet and in concert halls. He poses questions about who is the audience and who is the performer. Maybe I’m seeing more in this video than I should be, but damnit I really like it. Heck, I love. OK, fine, I think you should go watch it. Oh, and the tune is mighty fine so don’t think you’ll be losing time or anything.

Here’s a link, where you can also see all the previous episodes of R3TV – a podcast that I firmly believe deserves a lot more attention and love than it currently receives.