Apparently Edmonton has a municipal airport a stone’s throw away from the centre of town. It’s called Edmonton City Centre Airport (also known as Blatchford Field), and has been around in some form or another since 1929. Google Maps says it’s 4.4 km from the airport to Edmonton’s City Hall, or seven minutes of driving time.
I gather that the airport is used for regional flights and private air travel. It also gets annually converted into a race track for the Edmonton Indy. Larger aircraft and international flights come through the Edmonton International Airport, which is 26 km southwest of the city centre.
Some of the people who have made submissions to the public hearing want the downtown airport closed and the land developed into a transit-oriented community with housing for thousands of people, along with commercial and retail space.
Other presenters have told city councillors the airport must stay open because it is vital for the business community. They describe it as a hub to the north and argue that it is critical for medevac flights. About 4,000 medevac flights a year go through the facility.
I learned about this whole business from Mack’s site. He’s started NotMyAirport.ca (here’s the associated Facebook group), which argues for replacing the airport with “a new transit-oriented, green community”, as well as an expansion of Edmoton’s NAIT campus. Removal of the airport would also apparently change building height limitations in the city, which is a good thing. A dense city, after all, is a healthy city.
Mack launched his site in response to SaveOurAirport.ca, which argues that the airport “plays a vital role in making Edmonton one of Canada’s leading health centres, as a hub for air ambulance and other essential health services for all of Alberta, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.” This claim is disputed by the CEO of Edmonton Airports in the aforementioned CBC article, who says “”what the City Centre Airport offers is a tremendous amount of convenience for corporate travellers and those people who live in the downtown area and have private aircraft.”
I discovered the podcast for the CBC arts and culture radio program ‘Q’ while we lived in Malta, and listened to it quite regularly. When we returned to Canada and I had less free time, I grew a little weary of the format and host Jian Ghomeshi’s interview style, and unsubscribed.
Having just returned from watching the movie One Week (more on that later), I did a search for Liane Balaban, and discovered that there are a couple hundred video clips from Q on YouTube. As it turns out, the video version of Q also airs on the channel CBC bold (which apparently replaced the very poorly named CBC Country Canada). Never fear, it’s better than that insufferable radio-on-TV talk show on Sportsnet.
On Wednesday, I heard a short CBC piece about an architectural exhibit in London, England on the topic of Vancouverism. It was the first time I’d head the term, so I listened with some interest. The host Jian Ghomeshi interviewed Bing Thom about the exhibit and the concept of Vancouverism. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s a spirit about public space. I think Vancouverires are very, very proud that we built a city that really has a tremendous amount of space on the waterfront for people to recreate and to enjoy.
At the same time, False Creek and Coal Harbour were previously industrial lands that were very polluted and desecrated. We’ve refreshed all of this with new development, and people have access to the water and the views. So, to me, it’s this idea of having a lot people living very close together, mixing the uses. So, we have apartments on top of stores. In Surrey we have a university on top of a shopping centre. This mixing of uses reflects Vancouver in terms of our culture and how we live together.
I did a search in Google, and couldn’t find a Wikipedia article on Vancouverism. I resolved to create one when I found the time. Happily, on Tuesday, somebody already started one. I’ll add this quote.
Last September, CBC Radio launched two new technology shows: Search Engine and Spark. I forget how I first heard about them, but I subscribed to both podcasts from their first episode.
Search Engine is a show about the cultural and politics of the web (they need a copyable blurb on their home page and in iTunes). The most recent episode featured stories on the hacker convention Defcon, gaming the CIA’s website and a rapping Hungarian YouTube star.
Here’s the spiel on Spark:
Spark is a weekly audio blog of smart and unexpected trendwatching. It’s not just technology for gearheads, it’s about the way technology affects our lives, and the world around us.
What’s a Spark story? Wikis in the workplace, Guitar Hero in your living room, or why the new trend in design is the trailer park.
So they cover similar territory, but Spark is less concerned with the Web than Search Engine. Spark has a stickier tag line, because I can remember it: “Tech trends and fresh ideas”.
It’s been educational to watch both shows’ evolution over the past year or so. My impressions:
They’ve taken somewhat different approaches in story development and presentation. Spark seems much more crowd-sourced, while Search Engine has a more traditional structure. I don’t know how successful it’s been (I’d be curious to hear about their objectives and measures of success) Spark has a wiki for developing show ideas. Additionally, host Nora Young regularly cites comments from the show’s blog. They’re usually insightful enough to merit inclusion (I tend to loathe traditional man-on-the-street commentary).
Both hosts seem very well-informed, and (while I’m layman in this) are excellent presenters. Search Engine host Jesse Brown has a more informal style–he seems to be palling around with a lot of his guests. This mostly works, and reflects the DIY culture he documents. I do get a bit tired of the geeky indignation Brown seems to have for a lot of his tech stories. I get that every day in the blogosphere (including this site) and at tech conferences, so I don’t want to hear it from the CBC. Because of this, Search Engine sometimes feels more like commentary than reportage.
I like both shows, but given the choice, I listen to Spark first. Why? Because the topics are fresher (see the tagline) to me. 80% of Spark stories are new to me. I’ve already heard about 80% of Search Engine’s stories. That’s not a criticism of Search Engine–it’s a reflection of the kind of information I consume.
Clearly the CBC made emerging technology and the web a priority last year, and I applaud the results. Keep up the good work.
This is barely related, but I note that these CBC sites have a wacky URL structure. For example, the about page for Spark is http://www.cbc.ca/spark/index.html?copy-about. Maybe it’s a symptom of an older CMS?
What happens to your online assets–blog, photos, video, and so forth–after you shuffle off this mortal coil? How long will they last? How long should they last?
I think about this idea every once in a while. A few years ago I posited that there’d be an emerging demand for a sort of digital mortician, who could help families make decisions about our post-mortem online stuff.
Nora Young at the CBC’s Spark recently completed a very thoughtful interview with Derek that covers this ground. Derek’s been online longer than most of us, and has had recent cause to confront his own mortality. So, he’s thinking about this topic too.
The edited version of the interview will appear on upcoming editions of the show, but you can hear the full version on Spark’s blog.
On the CBC’s Ideas podcast, I’m currently listening to “Canada: Nation or Notion” (MP3, 25 MB, 53:46), a debate between two Canadians who live in the US: Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell. They’re both very smart, eloquent speakers, and it makes for an hour of enjoyable listening:
I thought I would begin by drawing on an example that may seem a little far fetched. But trust me, I will circle around and make it make sense. And that is to talk about the success of ethnic Chinese immigrants throughout the world.
Now, those of you who are familiar with my writing will know that this practice of talking about X by discussing Y is my only rhetorical move.
I gather this is just one in a number of discussions that Gopnik and Gladwell have been having over the years. Here’s the text from a 2000 debate about American vs. Canadian healthcare systems.
If you haven’t read Gopnik’s beautiful book Paris to the Moon, I highly recommend it.
I don’t know why I ever listen to or watch the news. I find it extraordinarily frustrating. I turned on the CBC’s Early Edition this morning and the first three local news stories concerned crime (leading off with the eight-day-old Merritt shooting).
At the moment I’ve got CBC TV news on and they led with two crime stories, followed by a story about automated bathrooms, the weather and finishing up with a piece about a piano prodigy. Is this really what amounts to credible news in this country? Has the CBC lost this much perspective?
And this, keep in mind, is the CBC. They’re the best this nation has to offer in TV and news reporting.
Shame on them for fostering the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality that’s so prevalent in our mainstream media. It’s exploitative and irresponsible. When our state-subsidized media is this lousy with FUD, who have we got left?
And just to clear something up: don’t believe the hype on crime. Canada is a very safe country. Crime rates have been more or less in decline since 1990, and are currently at a 1978 level. Unless you’re a criminal, your risk of experiencing violent crime is extremely small.
Any time you hear the media fostering fear about slavering rapists and murderers at your door, think critically about the news. Who does your fear serve, except advertisers?
I’m currently watching the live stream for the NHL playoffs from CBC Sports. The quality isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing.
I had some difficulty getting a reliable stream in Windows Media Player. It worked fine on my MacBook using Flip4Mac, and it worked okay using VLC on my Windows machine. Yet, Microsoft’s media player was showing me five seconds of live video, and then freezing (the dreaded ‘buffering’) for 5 to 30 seconds. Five more seconds of live footage, and repeat.
I checked my connection speed, which was a robust 14 MB/second. Combine that with the reliable feeds on other apps and PCs, and the problem was certainly (and predictably) Windows Media Player.
I eventually solved the problem. Here’s how:
Start up Windows Media Player.
On the Tools menu, click Options.
On the Performance tab, under Network buffering (yes, I’m troubled by the lack of title case), choose the second option. In the box beside Buffer, enter ‘30′. See the screenshot below. This ensures that Windows Media Player will always queue up 30 seconds of video, ensuring that you don’t get jittery or frozen video.
Mimi emailed to let me know that my peculiar fandom project DearRockers.org was featured on the CBC’s culture show Q yesterday. I had pitched the Q’s webby correspondent Mio Adilman on the story, as it seemed like the right thing for his Download Down-Lo segment. And apparently it was.
If you’re interested in listening, here’s the four-minute piece (in which Mio needlessly mocks Vancouverites):
One aspect of DearRockers.org that I was interested in was what the ratio of visitors to letters would be. I thought it would be low, but it’s shockingly minute. Since it launched in early November, the site’s had about 55,000 visitors, and has about 20 letters that I didn’t directly solicit.
That’s one letter for nearly 3000 visitors. Of course, the ‘friction’ to create a letter is quite high–it’s not like leaving a comment on a blog or something. Still, an interesting result. I wonder what the visitor-to-creator ratio is on YouTube or Flickr?
Anne’s Diary is a Canadian social network for 6 to 14-year-old girls (I read about it on the CBC’s Spark blog). It has two interesting security features to fend off child molesters and the like. To sign up for the service, kids need to get a non-parental adult professional as a sponsor (much like applying for a passport).
Secondly, you get a USB fingerprint scanner with your initial package, and I gather the kids use this to log in to the service. And yes, that’s as in Anne of Green Gables. With an ‘e’. No Prince Edward Island gable was ever this secure.
Actually, there’s one other cool feature that I like: “each Christmas the child will be sent a physical copy of their Diary with all of their entries included in it.”
I also wonder what their exit strategy is for girls who turn 15. Do they get summarily booted off the service? Is there another network (besides, you know, Facebook) that they graduate too? I emailed the company to ask, but they haven’t replied.
