Coffee rant #1 - Get out of your car! · Friday October 5, 2007 by colin newell
Coffee on the run took on new meaning for a local Starbucks when a thief ran off with the store’s drive-through speaker box.
The speaker box – stolen sometime after midnight Sunday and early Monday from the cafe on Douglas Street across from Mayfair Shopping Center – was dismantled, and its insides stolen, leaving stranded customers in a caffeine valley.
Reacting in typical corporate fashion to the crisis of inconvenience, Starbucks Coffee, rather than lever java drinkers out of their idling vehicles, sent servers, armed with headsets and blanket – outdoors to take orders in person.
Barista Peter Gatt, 19, did his eight-hour shift on Thursday, repeating orders through his headset to staff inside.
“It’s been really, really awful,” Gatt said. “It’s a pain with the rain, even with the umbrella.”
In the day of no request being too small or big, customers ordered the usual array of coffees, to caramel macchiatos to extra-hot half-caf no-fat no-foam lattes with cinnamon.
Begging the question folks – Is it too much to ask to get your big fat tush out of your polluting car into a cafe for 7 minutes?
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Warmonger report #2 · Thursday October 4, 2007 by colin newell
U.S. President George W. Bush on Wednesday vetoed a measure to expand a popular children’s health care program, launching the first in a series of major battles with Democrats over domestic spending.
Picture at left – An afghan boy stands among unexploded cluster bombs in Afghani schoolyard.
Bush was noted saying: “The policies of the government ought to be to help people find private insurance, not federal coverage,” Bush said.”
George. They are poor people. Poor children. They cannot afford any insurance. Hello!
Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat quipped – “Today the president showed the nation his true priorities: $700 billion for a war in Iraq, but no health care for low-income kids,”. “Millions of American children and their families won’t forget that they are on the bottom of the president’s priority list.”
The veto came as a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed more than seven in 10 Americans supported the $35 billion increase proposed under the bill. By contrast, the same poll showed many wanted to see a reduction in Bush’s spending proposal for the Iraq war.
This president is obviously out of control.
In other news, the Korea’s are in the process of mending fences… and this fact alone must set off alarm bells in the Bush-Cheny war camp.
One less country to attack.
The fraud of HD (High-definition) radio · Monday September 17, 2007 by colin newell
I have been a radio kind of guy for years. Versus a television kind of guy that is.
My first transistor radio was pressed into my young hands in the mid-sixties. Yes, folks – I am that old. And that is OK.
Within a few years it was not enough that I owned a variety of radios – I was building them too. At 13 years of age, I built a multi-band shortwave radio from a kit.
I do have a fondness for AM Radio however. For those who have forgotten it, AM radio is that muffled old style of radio from 540 to 1600 (now 1700khz) that carried your early rock & roll music (for those of you over 30 [or 40!] that can remember such a thing.)
There was always something comforting about tuning across an old radio dial at night never quite sure what you were going to hear; the swish of static, the heterodyne of mixing stations, the clear channel trans-continental stations that used to be king.
Times have obviously changed. Media has been concentrated and centralized. Regional and local voices have faded… but not entirely. It is as if there are corporate forces at work to take away individuality and freedom… of choice. Just the other morning I was turning across a portion of the dial and I was hearing the same program every 10khz (in radio world, an individual channel)
Coast to coast AM as it is called is a program on a chain of broadcasters (I think owned by Clear Channel). It sounds to me like a faceless and homogeneous drone of, well, nothing of merit.
Fast forward to 2007. For the last couple of years (in the U.S.A.) a corporation called Ibiquity has been pushing High Definition radio – or HD for short. HD AM and HD FM.
High definition AM. Isn’t that a natural oxymoron?
Anyway. Long story short. AM HD is a hybrid of technologies. Standard old analog AM transmitting techniques exist alongside digital sub-carriers. Problem is, the standard channel separation of 10khz on the AM band becomes unworkable with this format. A station running AM-HD on, say, 810 khz generates interference from 790khz to 830khz! In days of old, interference was limited to about 5 to 7 khz from the center channel, not 25khz!
What this means for smaller stations (in the U.S.) is that their reach or range is diminished by co-channel interference.
If you are a Canadian or Mexican border station trying to serve a rural market, your signal could be crushed or diminished by the U.S. based noise makers. Acceptable? I think not.
What to do?
If you are an American who enjoys long distance or rural AM reception and are getting buzzed make sure you write the station and any stations that are getting slammed.
If you are in Canada, send an e-mail to Industry Canada or the CRTC. Trust me, they do listen.
You will hear more from me on this issue.
It is about radio sovereignty. It is about freedom of choice. It is about a free and accessible media. Radio is one of the last free domains of expression that is open to anyone. Do not let a single corporation take that away.
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Russia deploys the Father of Bombs · Wednesday September 12, 2007 by colin newell
Moscow, Sept. 12 : Russia has tested the world’s most powerful non-nuclear vacuum bomb, the military said, dubbing it the “father of all bombs”.
Russia’s ORT First Channel TV yesterday showed a strategic bomber dropping the vacuum bomb over a testing ground, which exploded in a massive fireball. Pictures of crumpled multi-story apartment blocks were also broadcast.
“Test results of the new airborne weapon have shown that its efficiency and power is commensurate with a nuclear weapon,” Russian Deputy Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Alexander Rushkin told the channel.
According to General Rushkin, the new bomb is smaller than the United States “mother of all bombs” but much deadlier because, due to nanotechnology, the temperature at the epicentre of the blast is twice as high.
“You will see it in action, the bomb which has no match in the world… Despite its destructive qualities, the vacuum bomb is environmentally friendly,” he claimed. The same report was later shown on state sponsored ‘Vesti’ channel.
Wow. The father of bombs. And environmentally friendly too! No carbon credits to buy. Win win if you ask me.
Question: Do the people that get blown up by this bomb not create an environmental impact where their body parts are scattered?
Just asking.
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