Author: Peter

Trust me

Despite my own love-hate relationship with television, I secretly harbor a mild distrust of people who don’t watch TV.

The ROC

Looking at the new programs in CBC English Television’s 2006-2007 program lineup, I see:

  • two dramas set in Vancouver
  • a comedy set in Toronto
  • a miniseries set primarily in Montreal
  • an imported reality series and a localized version of another

Where are the shows about Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador? Kingston, Ontario? Regina, Edmonton or Calgary? Iqaluit? Yellowknife? For a national broadcaster—one that, an executive recently stated, wants to find the next Corner Gas—the Ceeb continues to look awfully focused on the three major urban centres in this country.

Black Hand at Wilberforce

I’d like to thank Stephanie and her partner Alexis, as well as Stephanie’s parents (who own the posh Wilberforce Inn and Restaurant where we ate), for the nice dinner last night. It’s the first time I’d met Alexis, the other principal member of the theatre company; now all that remains is to catch up with Rob Nelson, their exclusive photographer.

I’m also happy to say that I’ve got a new project with Miss Demas, on behalf of her parents. I hope the redesigned Wilberforce site will be just as successful as Black Hand Theatre‘s; I have reason to think there’s a good chance of that, given that Stephanie and I have gone through three attractive-yet-completely-different iterations of the Black Hand site in the last year. 🙂

New is not always better

Emm Gryner’s webmaster recently recreated her site. It looks fine, I suppose, but he’s dropped the news and tour updates feeds. Worse, because the site is now Flash-based, it’s impossible to link to any of those pages directly.

At least the journal remains outside of Flash space, although it would have been nice to put a redirect in place for the feed instead of requiring people to a) notice, b) find the new site, and c) resubscribe.

Emm has done very well as an independent artist because she’s got a clue about dealing with her fans; it’s too bad that Dirgework Productions doesn’t.

Coffee break

[…] Java SE is a perquisite for other packages like NetBeans […]

No, it isn’t. Java is a prerequisite for NetBeans et al: it is a necessary condition that Java be present in order to use software that depends on it. A perquisite is colloquially known as a perk: a fringe benefit, or a privilege, or an exclusive right.

The other sort of java (that is, coffee) is commonly made by perking, but in that case it’s short for percolate.

Believe it!

Default Programs was designed to help users make choices about their default behaviors. A large part of this is that defaults in Vista and beyond will be primarily controlled at the Per User level instead of the Per Machine level. This allows much more flexibility for the multi user computer environment that we believe is going to become the standard.