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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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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Eye pollution in Toronto · Thursday August 30, 2007 by colin newell
There is nothing sweeter than the little guys victory over the big guys – people that profit from bending or breaking the law and generally polluting the skies around us.
IllegalSigns.ca is a team of volunteers who fight illegal billboards and that is their blog. Half the billboards in Toronto are illegal – help them bring the vast, unlawful privatization of our public visual environment to an end.
Banana-Fig Bread · Tuesday August 28, 2007 by colin newell
One of the best companions to a good hot cup of coffee is a slice of sweet bread. And one of the best recipes come tried and true from old standards that have been adapted through time. And how I have adapted this recipe was with the addition of fresh locally grown figs my wife brought home one day! Voila! New recipe. The basic banana bread recipe comes from one of my Aussie cook books – my wife has the whole series. Add a comment if you can remember. This simple banana bread (with a twist) is the perfect concoction for nearly black bananas where the fruit flies fear to tread.
In a mixer bowl add:
3 or 4 ripe bananas
1/2 cup melted butter
Cream the two ingredients with your mixer on low.
1 cup brown, white or raw sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
2 eggs, gradually added to running blender
2 – ripe figs. Cut them in halves and squeeze in the fruit.
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch of salt
2 cups of white flour
Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Power mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the sugar, eggs, figs and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking sodas and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, mix. Pour mixture into a buttered 4×8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour or until toothpick comes out dry. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve.
The figs give a tangy sweetness to the bread that leaves ordinary banana bread in the dust!
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