Anyone want to help diagnose Mike Boone’s wireless setup problem? He got suckered in by Sympatico’s “offer” to set him up with a wireless router for “only” $80 (instead of, say, $45). And now he can’t connect to it.
I’m guessing it’s probably that his Gazette laptop is setup with a manual IP address and routing.
Ken Meaney, CanWest’s sole reporter east of Quebec City, has an article this weekend about new PEI license plates.
Actually, not exactly. The article is about anonymous comments left on the Charlottetown Guardian website about PEI’s license plates being available in French.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that any discussion of things like gun control, abortion, gay rights, religion, vegetarianism, immigration, and — in Canada — language rights on an open Internet forum is going to bring out people with strong opinions on the subject. Some of those people will have reasoned arguments and will listen to other points of view. Most will not.
The comments (and especially those of a second copy of the story posted the same day the previous one got national attention) mostly fall into the latter category, and quickly degenerate into Quebec-bashing, making rather outrageous claims about its language laws (Businesses are not allowed to have bilingual signs, people are not allowed to speak English in public, the Canadian government isn’t protecting the English language)
And yet somehow an entire article was written on this story and its 30 comments. One that wasn’t written about the original release of the new plates in April, which generated 76 comments on the Guardian’s website. But that one couldn’t easily be exploited with a stupid story to prod the populace with the language debate.
Is there no real news happening in PEI?
(Side note: The Guardian’s logo has the worst kerning I’ve ever seen)
UPDATE: The Gazette has a short editorial about the issue Tuesday. It theorizes that anonymous commenters on web forums might not represent the moderate views of the populace.
Yeah, I know this is stupid PR-driven non-news advertising crap, but go Vermont! And nice video. Maybe I’ll come visit someday.
Hey, did you know there’s a new Harry Potter book coming out? There’s only been about 12,000 news stories in the past week about it. Why is The Man trying to suppress this earth-shattering news story?
Or more non-sarcastically, WHO THE F&#K CARES?
OK, a new book is being released. And it’s Harry Potter, which is a very popular series. And it’s the last one of the series. This deserves some news coverage. Maybe even a story on the front page of the arts section one day.
But a 14-day Harry Potter Countdown? With stupid trivia like this? On A3? Does the Vancouver Province have nothing better to do with its time than put this together? And do the other papers have no better wire stories to feature? Zimbabwe’s populace is going to starve to death (that gets a 50-word brief in the world section), but gosh darnit, we have to talk about the hype over whether a fictional character is going to die in a book.
Pierrefonds-Dollard’s long-serving MP Bernard Patry, who apparently has spent his 14 years in the House of Commons trying desperately not to be noticed, is speaking out about a post office being moved out of his riding.
It’s kind of a strange issue for Bernie to come out of his coma to tackle. I liked that office, and it was close to where I used to live, but it’s now too small to handle the growing population in the northern West Island.
Would he be as outraged if it was moved to another location but still in an area he represents?
I could spend this post complaining about how my two-week-old futon is broken in two places already, but there’s something far more important to be mad at Ikea about:
Wow. The assignment editors must be really stretching.
A comment about the CP article on police presence: Was the holiday really “often known for violence”? I know hard-liners do their hard-liner thing, but was it really enough to make the entire holiday appear violent? Or is this just an example of a reporter talking out of his or her ass?
The Internet is a pretty cool thing. In the past, to find information relating to a court judgment you’d have to have a Lexis/Nexis account or spend your life at a library going through giant books. Now, you just have to search.
It’s amazing how many legal cases are dealt with every day in this city alone. Some are big, like class-action lawsuits, union arbitration, or big companies going at it. Some are small, with small-claims court rulings about the silliest of subjects.
Here’s a smattering of some cases that were decided earlier this month:
I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, but I’d personally prefer if my tax money was spent on something a little more important than emergency cat rescue.
Warner Bros. is cancelling advance screenings of its blockbuster summer films in order to combat rampant camcording piracy in Canada, and especially Montreal. So we won’t be able to see Harry Potter and Emma’s enhanced breasts before it’s actually released. Who cares? Well, the papers do, since they won’t be able to review films in advance of opening weekend. Instead, they’ll have to do what they did with Snakes on a Plane, and review it with real people sitting in the theatre with them.
I suppose I should mention that the claims — that people camcording films in Montreal’s movie theatres is the biggest source of pirated movies — have already been debunked, and that Latin America is more of a problem than Canada. But if I did that then we wouldn’t be able to write big feature stories about Canada’s rampant piracy problem.
In other non-news, the Eastern Townships School Board is in “trouble” because it spent $38,000 sending 34 people to Texas for a conference on integrating computers into the classroom. Who cares? If you ask me, getting people to a conference like this for about $1,000 a person is a pretty good deal, and considering their laptop program costs something like $15 million, spending a tiny fraction of that on proper training seems to me to be a good use of money.
The Justiciers Masqués fooled Nicolas Sarkozy, pretending to be Stephen Harper with his bad French, and inviting Sarkozy to a “diner des cons” with George W. Bush. Listen to it here. Who cares? They did the same thing to Jacques Chirac last year.
I’m sorry, maybe my mad newz ski11z are lacking, but how is this newsworthy? A guy puts a video on YouTube inviting people to call him, yak and run up his cellphone minutes. The point? Who knows! The impact on society? None! The news value? Tremendous!
The thing that gets me about these stories is that they aren’t interesting, but because aging baby-boomer editors are too scared to admit they don’t understand blogging and the Internet, they jump at these non-stories to hide their online illiteracy. Nobody wants to be the one news outlet not to cover the story, so it spreads like crazy, and suddenly everyone is talking about this guy like he’s doing something important.
He’s not. In fact, what he’s doing isn’t even new. Someone else did the exact same thing last fall.
So why all the attention?
Not that it changes the ethical debate, or that everyone didn’t basically suspect as much, but yeah, the ashtray video was staged. Which makes it, like, the worst staged video ever.
As I catch up on news I missed recovering from dental surgery this week, I come across an L.A. Times story about failed TV pilots being leaked to YouTube, in order to drum up fan support and try to Family-Guy them back on the air.
The telling line comes up about halfway through: “So far, none of this Internet buzz has saved a pilot from extinction”.
Yes, that’s right. There isn’t a single case of a failed pilot leaked to YouTube convincing a network to put the show on the air.
So why is it being written about, then? Why aren’t they talkinng about all the supermodels I’ll be dating soon?
Apparently, they needed a study to show that buying from big grocery stores like Loblaws is cheaper than smaller ones like the dep across the street.
Really? What will civilization do once this news gets out? How will we live with this new reality? How will we raise our children? Do I have to accept a new religion because of this?
Yeah, yeah, the study also says, perhaps more significantly, that food in poorer places isn’t cheaper or more expensive, but that’s not what the headline focuses on.
I was thinking today about an episode of Frasier, where our lovable Dr. Crane is annoyed by being the butt of repeated impoliteness. The last straw breaks the camel’s back as a table he had been waiting for at a café is taken by a man who just arrived. Frasier loses it, decides to give him an “etiquette lesson” and physically throws him out.
The moral of the story becomes clear later, as his show’s listeners hear of his “heroic” act and teach others “etiquette lessons” of their own, answering inconsiderateness with more and more violent acts. Frasier appeals for calm, having learned his lesson that fighting fire with fire doesn’t work.
Claude Landry clearly hasn’t seen that episode, or he wouldn’t be whoring this YouTube video to the media. In it, he spots a man emptying his car’s ashtray onto the sidewalk, grabs a handful of it and throws it in the driver’s lap.
Now, the story has been picked up by CTV, CBC and The Gazette (who are still unable to link to YouTube videos in their stories), skyrocketing its exposure to over 35,000 views. According to CTV, the video even got the mayor’s blessing (this according to his brother Marcel — I guess CTV is unable to get quotes from the mayor himself). Since when is assault something that is encouraged by politicians? Did it come in a package deal with the new pro-racist agenda of the Quebec election campaign?
I’m not saying I’m perfect. Just yesterday on my way home, I got one of my buttons pushed as some inconsiderate kid tried to get on the bus without waiting in line. I nudged my way in front of him, pushing him back lightly in the process. I thought it was a bad-ass move, but I don’t consider myself a hero for it.
None of the mainstream press is making this point yet, and the blogosphere (well, the four posts I’ve found so far) is split. Basil is on my side. Dave is not. Neither is Mark. Or Grame. What’s your take?
UPDATE: Dave has a lengthy reply to my post on his blog.
