And yet it feels like I’m watching science fiction. I experience some combination of awe and creepiness, like I’m peeking into the future. I usually utter “holy crap” under my breath.

I’ve probably reacted this way to dozens of technology demo videos, but these are a few that stand out in my mind. The first one seems totally ordinary in 2012, but it blew my mind in 2006 when Sun Microsystems’ Johnathan Schwartz flipped over a desktop window (it’s at about 3:00–listen to the audience’s reaction). “What?” I thought. “Windows have backs?”

I expect that by now, we’ve all seen the footage of Boston Dynamic’s BigDog robot from 2008. It’s the first time that I ever saw a mobile robot that didn’t seem absurdly frail and delicate, as if it might tip over at any moment. In this video, a man actually shoves the robot with his foot, and the thing staggers but recovers.

The latest example of an awe-inspiring tech demo comes via Jeremiah Owyang on Google+. Touche demonstrates pretty fascinating new frontiers in touch interaction with objects. My favourite bit is when we see a guy changing songs and volume on his music player simply by making gestures with his hands and arms. It’s like we’re teaching objects sign language.

This morning I gave a talk entitled “Trackbacked: A decade of social media” at the iMedia conference in Edmonton. I was intentional in choosing that title, as the term ‘trackback’ (replaced, I suppose, by the likes of ‘reblog’ and ‘repin’) has disappeared from common usage as quickly as it appeared.

The talk is a meandering look back at the last 10 years of social media, and some of the lessons I’ve learned there-in.

As I sometimes do, I created a mindmap to organize my initial ideas about the talk. I thought it might interest iMedia attendees to check it out. Click to embiggen:

These are just early notes, so I may not completely believe (or be willing to argue in favour of) everything in that image. The version above is just an image, so here are the links sprinkled around the diagram:

• http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/fark.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User’s_Guide_and_Catalog
• http://darrenbarefoot.com/flowers/
• http://www.penmachine.com/2011/05/the-last-post
• http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2012/03/blogmoredigital_4f706ae71e5af.jpeg
• http://maps.google.com/?t=8&utm_campaign=8bit
• https://vimeo.com/20465929
• http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/
• http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder/255838/
• http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/

The OFII represented the final step in a process that began in the fall of 2011, when we began assembling documents to apply for a long-term stay visa. As you’d expect, the application requirements were vigorous. We easily each had a stack of documents an inch high–everything from our verified banking records to proof of medical insurance. If you’d murdered us on the way to the French consulate in Vancouver and hidden our bodies, you could have assumed our identities with ease.

A multicultural clump of humanity was ushered into the OFII office the following afternoon. What followed was–and I  write this without sarcasm–French bureaucratic efficiency at its finest. In the space of an hour and 45 minutes, we each had four appointments. We met with:

1. A nurse who weighed and measured us, and completed a short interview regarding our medical history.
2. A nurse who x-rayed our chest cavity.
3. A doctor who reviewed the x-ray (pronouncing my chest “claire et normale”), took our blood pressure and listened to our breathing.
4. A functionary who completed the paperwork and attached the precious ‘vignette’–an official sticker–in our passport.

Just like that, we were official. We celebrated with Thai food, an ethnic food beyond the prowess of our village’s restaurants.

On a related topic, I was very impressed with Montpellier. It has a gorgeous, mostly-pedestrian centre that’s lively and full of bars and restaurants. The city’s spirit is no doubt buoyed by a reported student population of 60,000. And, though it was early in the season, there was a minimum of tourist tatt and related nonsense. I wonder if nearby Carcasonne draws most of the visitors, and so permits Montpellier to just go about its business?

I started a spreadsheet that shows all the media and hockey blogger predictions I could find. I’ve made it editable by anybody, so that should others discover predictions, they can add them to the document.

I’m currently up to around 450 individual picks from nearly 60 pundits. I don’t claim to be exhaustive, but it’s hopefully representative. Here are some early impressions:

• The longest series is predicted to be NSH/DET, with the shortest being NJD/FLO.
• There’s great consensus in the east, with at least 90% of the media agreeing on the outcome of all four series.
• There’s the most disagreement on the CHI/PHO series, with the media currently going 60%-40% in favour of the Blackhawks.
• Almost nobody picks 4-game series sweeps, which is odd because there’s usually at least one in the quarter-finals each year.
• Confidence in the Canucks is reasonably high, with more than 83% of the media picking them to pick the Kings, in an average of roughly 6 games.
• Hockey writers are almost all Caucasian men.

In completing this little exercise, I couldn’t help but think fondly of Maggie the macaque, who routinely outpicked the TSN staff in years past. This year, I’ll have to settle for a sea lion from Niagara Falls.

In a related note, I’ll be going on something of a social media cleanse in the coming weeks (and months, hopefully). As I’m living in France, I’ll be watching playoff games about 12 to 18 hours after they finish. So, I’ll need to avoid the likes of Twitter and Facebook in order to enjoy the games in a  prelapsarian state, if you will.

UPDATE: I thought I’d better store my first round picks here, which I tweeted the other day: NYR in 4, BOS in 7, NJD in 5, PIT in 7, VAN in 6, SJS in 7, CHI in 5, NSH in 7

When I can walk to work, I find that most of my other needs fall within walking distance, too. Whether we’re living in Victoria, Malta or Victoria, BC, groceries, restaurants, medical services and the like have just been a stroll away. When we can, we plan our living circumstances around this proximity, and I’m the happier for it.

As I think about it, walking reminds me that I’m living my life at a healthy, sustainable pace. I don’t have to hop into a car to beat the traffic so that I can make it to the office on time, or get to a store before it closes.

I appreciate that this kind of lifestyle isn’t for everyone. Your average North American family lives in the suburbs, and so they can’t walk to school, work or the rest of their lives away from home. They routinely need cars to get where they’re going. My choice to walk is the privilege of a childless, middle-class knowledge worker. Of course, in many small towns around the world, walking is still the way of life for much of humanity.

Here in France, I walk every day. Usually it’s down to the local shops–the grocery store, la pâtisserie and la boucherie. I also walk up and down the Canal du Midi a lot. It’s very pleasant to follow the meandering path of the slow-moving canal, shaded by plane trees.

I recently learned about the Camino de Santiago, a Catholic pilgrimage in northern Spain, and one of many such pilgrimages throughout Europe. While I’m not Catholic, I do see the appeal in a moving ritual that lasts a month and leaves you alone with your thoughts and surroundings.

I’ve been delighted to watch it grow, and work its way into the mainstream. There are plenty of indicators of its success, but one is all of the Kickstarter imitators that have emerged.

Kickstarter now processes some serious coin. They’ve recently had several projects raise more than a million dollars, and in 2011 their projects collectively generated just under US $100 million That’s up from $27 million in 2010.

With all that money floating around, there must be an emergent demand for a professional marketer or fundraiser who can help Kickstarter projects achieve their goals. After all, Kickstarter (and its ilk) are simply a particular kind of fundraising, which is itself a popular profession.

Accidental consultants

I did some searches for ‘Kickstarter consultant’ and the like, but Google’s cupboards were surprisingly bare. I found this guy and this guy, both of whom more or less admit to accidentally becoming crowdfunding consultants. Interestingly, they’re both filmmakers who had their own successful Kickstarter projects. I’m always been a little leery of the “I did this, so you can too” approach, but I have no reason to doubt their capabilities. I was surprised not to find any professional marketers or fundraisers positioning themselves for this kind of work. Even searches for the more general ‘crowdfunding consultant’ (and some variations) didn’t produce as many convincing results as I would have expected.

The average Kickstarter project in 2011 only asked for about $8400. If you’re earning a few percentage points, there’s not a lot of money there. But many of the projects are worth tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most projects seem to be founded by artists, musicians, filmmakers and designers. These are, in my experience, people who, on average, aren’t great at marketing themselves and their projects. Most of the artists I know would prefer to make art.

On the other hand, it’s still early days for Kickstarter. So perhaps it’s a prerequisite for a successful project that the people behind it be savvy marketers? In essence, Kickstater filters out the creative people who are bad at crowdfunding?

Obviously, crowdfunding is becoming big business. And it’s about to become a lot bigger, thanks to a new bill that President Obama is soon expected to sign into law. I expect to meet more and more crowdfunding experts at conferences in the coming months.

Can I look under the hood of your Kickstarter project?

On a personal note, I’ve always wanted to start my own Kickstarter project, but I’ve been reluctant. I wouldn’t be developing a game or making a movie, so I wouldn’t be asking for a substantive amount of money. It seems a little ingenuine, as a successful business grown-up, to crowdfund a creative project that I could manage to fund myself, doesn’t it?

Until I resolve that particular existential crisis, I’d be curious to chat with people who are launching Kickstarter projects. No promises, but if you’ve got a project that interests me, and I’ve got some time, I’d enjoy contributing to making it a success. The one I can probably help the most is through advice and, occasionally, a connection. I’m just curious about watching the Kickstarter crowdfunding process close up.

Michael asks a question that I’ve been wondering about for a while: “should you close comments on older blog posts?”. This September, this blog will be ten years old (the site itself is a couple of years older). I’ve published roughly 5600 posts over that period. A handful of them remain–relative to the others–quite popular.

Why are they popular? Because they accidentally appear high in the results for related searches. For example, last year nearly 25,000 people searched for some variation of “worst baby name ever” and found this paltry post from 2005. It has 910 comments on it.

Lately, this longer piece about Freedom 55 Financial has attracted lots of comments. 5000 people visited it last year, and it’s up 286 comments, mostly of the highly incendiary variety. For search, the most popular post on my site remains this 2005 post about textual tattoos. Over its seven-year lifespan, nearly 750,000 people have viewed it, and 100 have commented.

Any site publisher or blogger has pages like this, where a long tail of visitors carries on and on and on. A page on Michael’s site, for example, has become host to a discussion of tax software. My favourite is probably this one where 101 commenters have shared their weird, creepy tales of sleep paralysis.

There’s over 40,000 comments in all. I wonder who has written more words on this site: me or all the commenters put together?

The deal I made with the Internet

When I started writing this site, what deal did I make with the Internet? When I say ‘the Internet’, I mean all the people who, in the ensuing decade, would visit and possibly comment on this site.

Did I, for example, guarantee that the information I published would remain timely and accurate? I hope not, because much of it is out of date and, in many cases, totally wrong. And some of the sites I linked to are gone. For very boring reasons, I’ve been revisiting some of the very oldest posts on this site. As part of that work, I’ve been sampling the links I’d published in 2002 and 2003. As of now, 48 of 74 old links are still live. Am I going to try to fix those other 26 links? Nope.

And what about the ad hoc communities that form around these unexpectedly evergreen blog posts? Advice is shared and debates rage without any input from me. Why wouldn’t I leave comments open?

The only reason might be comment spam. While Akismet does a fantastic job of killing 99% of spammy comments to this site. 99.93%, to be exact, which means that it’s handled about 2.2 million spammy comments since I installed it in 2006. That 0.07% still represents 10 or 15 spam comments that I have to manually remove every day. It’s less than five minutes of work, and not a burden at the moment.

Occasionally, a commenter thinks better of what they’ve written on this site, and emails and asks me to remove their messages. I’m usually happy to do this.

So, until I get busier or lazier, comments will remain open on all the blog posts on this site. Those ongoing discussions don’t particularly interest me, but nor do they feel like a burden.

One of the unexpected joys of living in France, then, is that I’m surrounded by animals. Our neighbour and landlord has two cats, a dog and a tortoise (named, creatively, Tortoise). One of the cats, perhaps weary of our neighbour’s young children, has taken up residence in our house instead. This is him sleeping on my desk:

In addition to the local animals, there are horses, ponies and donkeys in the fields that flank the canal. I usually feed one lucky equine my apple core when I go for a walk before dinner. Apparently there is a peculiar local practice of feeding one’s old bread to the horses, too. I haven’t tried that yet.

The plane trees along the canal are full of birds, and I’ve seen several species of ducks and swans. At dusk, they’re joined by flapping, looping bats that hunt insects over the water. There’s apparently carp, eel, perch and all sorts of other less familiar fish in the muddy shallows of the canal.

The most unexpected creature I’ve seen thus far was near this bridge, where I’d paused on a bike ride. I saw a mammal in the water–it looked like a beaver with a weasel’s tale. Knowing that Europe has very few beavers, I assumed that it must be a muskrat, or a very fat otter. I asked around when I got home, and it turns out they’re coypu or ragondin in French. They’re native to South America, but were apparently introduced to Europe by fur traders.

There’s also both an Australian and an African game park nearby. I think I’ll skip those, as I always find zoos a bit sad.

In a city that cannot afford the cultural loss, the institution lasted 49 years. The closure is particularly saddening as, compared to Vancouver’s other big theatre company, the Playhouse had the riskier, more challenging programming. I have fond memories of seeing many great plays there–and less fond memories, too, of less successful ones.

Skimming their impressive production history, they’ve produced some truly wonderful works of the past couple of decades: The Syringa Tree, Copenhagen (my favourite contemporary play ever, as it happens), Oleanna and so forth. I reviewed a couple of shows recently: This and Beyond Eden.

So what’s the bigger lesson we can take from this sad event? Is it the natural outcome of a time-shifting, cocooning culture with more and better entertainment options at home? Is it reflective of Vancouver’s ethos, which focuses on communing with nature or a vodka tonic, but not so much on connecting with the arts? Or maybe there’s no lesson at all, and the company’s closing is the result of over-spending and under-performance?

In any case, I applaud what the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company has done over its nearly-fifty years in the city, and mourn its passing.

I’m about six months short of this blog’s tenth anniversary, so I know that every second reader out there has a cousin Philippe from Normandy, who loves Slurpees, washing his face with a cloth and Lincoln Continentals. The list is mostly tongue-in-cheek.

But I’m interested in how you experience a new place not only in the enormous differences (People constantly use words I don’t understand! There are vineyards everywhere! It’s sunny!) but also in the small and subtle ones. I’ve written about these changes before, like how in Malta there’s an ice cream season and fish availability depends on the wind.

You discern the foreignness of a place when you experience the prosaic details of your life differently. You’ll have lukewarm Coke, and moist hands leaving the bathroom and the like.

These sounds like complaints, but they’re not. Except for Slurpees. I miss Slurpees.

Because this assortment of minuses is replaced by an equally fascinating miscellany of new quirks. When I lived in Ireland, I discovered the pedestrian wonder that is the trouser press. In Morocco, I was both disgusted and delighted by watching the butcher, well, butcher a chicken right in front of my eyes. France is already serving up its own curiosities. The orange juice is better here. There’s a weird culture of motorcycles getting the right of way. Everyone greets each other in our little town, even the newcomers. The towels are warm.

Some days, the little differences seem to be the real source of a place’s foreignness.

EDIT: Some additional suggestions:

• Dinners out on Monday nights
• Enormous coffees to go
• Shower caps

Our landlord pointed to those two big stones and said, “those are Roman.”

This sort of thing always blows my mind. Here are two human-made objects, likely more than 2000 years old, sitting in our backyard like a couple of discarded lawn darts. They may have been moved here at some point from a local abbey, or they may have always been here. But, of course, much of the world routinely interacts with very old objects. It’s totally routine to have some Roman rocks in your yard if you’re French.

When you’re a Canadian (with apologies to First Nations settlements), everywhere else is older than your nation. Traveling, therefore, routinely blows your mind. I’ve written about Dublin’s Museum of Natural History before, but I remember being shocked to discover that they have a stuffed rhinoceros on display that’s older than my country.

It’s a less spiritual experience, but it’s a little like standing next to a 1000-year-old Douglas Fir. It puts your life in perspective.

As for these Roman stones, we’re thinking they’ll look nice holding up some pots of begonias.

We get our Internet access via ADSL, and the only phone outlet in the house is on the first floor (meaning the bottom floor–in Europe, the ‘first floor’ often refers to what North Americans call ‘the second floor’). So our modem/wifi router from our Internet provider, called a Livebox, is plugged in there. The wifi signal easily reaches our second floor office, but it’s a little hit and miss in our bedroom up on the third floor. This isn’t all that surprising, given that the house has stone walls, and concrete floors.

Because I’m a nerd, I brought along our Apple Airport Extreme (it’s extreme, bro!). Hoping for a better signal in the bedroom, I decided to compare the quality of the signal from our Apple router to our Livebox.

I downloaded and installed a free app called NetSpot, which enables you to evaluate the quality of your wifi signal in different parts of your house. First you draw a map of your house and then you walk around testing the signal strength in various locations. It produces a series of heatmaps which you can use to, for example, better position your router.

I drew a really simple map of our bedroom, and then tested a bunch of spots on the default Livebox setup. Here’s the resulting heatmap:

Then I turned off the wifi on the Livebox, plugged in the Airport Extreme and repeated the exercise.

I can only show one test site at a time, but all of the locations were 10 to 15 dBm better (whatever that means) with the Airport Extreme. The wifi access is still a little dodgy up in the bedroom, so I may get an Airport Express to boost the signal from the office. In any case, I was happy to discover that hauling the Airport Extreme all 5263 kilometres was worth the effort.

I was a little concerned that the Internet speed would be pretty shoddy here, but I have no complaints:

I see that we’re only in the 44th percentile for France, but apparently we’re doing better than Ireland, Israel and Saskatchewan.

How does that compare with where you live? Run a test and leave a comment with the results.

I suppose it’s a bit ironic that, after a year of living Canadian, I have fled the nation for foreign shores.

We’re hoping that our year in France will be much like our year in Malta. We’ll enjoy life at a slower pace, and have a chance for some reflection and renewal after a hectic five years in Victoria and Vancouver. Even if you work as much as usual, living abroad affords you the luxury of a lot of extra free time. Until I lived in Malta, I never realized how much of my time was occupied with the, for want of a better word, bureaucracy of my life.

About a month ago, I realized that I hadn’t “announced” in any formal way the fact that we were leaving the country. Not on this site, nor on Facebook or Twitter. I’d wanted to ensure that our ducks were all in a row, I guess, and then I became particularly busy.

As a kind of experiment in discretion, I decided to just hold off on telling the Internet (I know, what a strange world we live in where that’s even a consideration) that we were moving to France. What, if any, are the results of that experiment? I’m not sure yet.

Here are a couple of photos I shot in and around our village. You can also find some photos on Instagram, including me standing in our swimming pool (sans l’eau) and a field full of sheep.

Argeliers is on the Canal du Midi, a 240 km canal system built in the 17th century. It makes for excellent walking and cycling.

This is the impasse or alley where we live. Ours is the orange house on the right. I’ll post some photos of the house soon, but it’s got a nice view over the canal.

When I first saw it, I was reminded of this Improv Everywhere project, in which a local band has the night of its life. As it happens, Improv Everywhere pulled off another stunt, known as Best Game Ever, which does for a little league baseball game what the Budweiser ad does for rec hockey. Lots of people have noticed this connection.

Scott from Unmarketing checked in with the Improv Everywhere folks, and they confirmed that they’d never spoken to anybody from Budweiser. As far as I can tell, neither Budweiser nor the agency that created the ad has acknowledged Improv Everywhere as a source of inspiration.

Copying and giving credit where it’s due

I’ve been thinking about antecedents, copying and credit because we recently launched Drawn to the Wild over at The Big Wild. It invites Canadians to re-imagine a frame from a Sarah Harmer video, and to contribute to wilderness protection while they do so. Some web users will recognize that this campaign is highly derivative of the great, moody The Johnny Cash Project.

On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with borrowing ideas. After all, while talent imitates, genius steals. We all stand on the shoulders of preceding giants.

However, when you create a derivative project, it’s important to acknowledge its source. The idea of attribution is baked into the culture of the web, in back links, in Creative Commons and in retweets. It’s also consistently abused and ignored on the web, where authorship is difficult to trace and creators and copiers have few incentives to give credit where its due.

There are lots of ways that Budweiser could have acknowledged Improv Everywhere. They could do so in the YouTube video description, in earned media or on a blog post on their own site. A cynic might suggest that Budweiser’s ad agency wanted to claim complete and original authorship of the idea, as it increases their value in the eyes of their client.

For Drawn to the Wild, we prominently cite The Johnny Cash Project as inspiration on the project’s About page, as well as in our email communications with the media and our communities. When pitching the idea, were totally upfront with stakeholders about its origins. The Johnny Cash Project actually acts as a kind of proof of concept. If somebody else has been successful with something similar, then it increases our odds.

A website for the origin stories of ideas

There are lots of ways online for the creator of a derivative work to acknowledge their inspiration. However, there are no systematic ways for anybody else to highlight possible connections. Maybe the original creator has a bone to pick, or other web users want to understand and contribute to the “origin story” of an idea.

I’m imagining a website where users can post links, and drawn connections between them. This wouldn’t just be for web projects, but any sort of creative work.They might post a link to the Wikipedia article or IMDB page for Star Wars, and connect it to pages about The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Hidden Fortress. Or they’d drawn the connection between the Bud ad and its Improv Everywhere antecedent. People could vote up the connections they agreed with, and vote down the ones they didn’t (“Two and a Half Men owes nothing to Aeschylus!”).

My friend suggested a great name for the project: This Came From That.

Do other sites already do this? Wikipedia does, in a way, though one has to establish notability and then find corroborating evidence from mainstream sources before getting such a connection included in an article. Google sort of does this, too, in that you can search for “Star Wars influences” and find some useful information, but neither site is focused on solving this particular problem.

What do you think? Should we care about tracing the origins of ideas?

UPDATE: I’m reminded that I wrote about this topic back in 2010 as well.

I watched a kind of one-hour summary of the show courtesy of a BBC4 show called What Happened Next? I guess when you’re as big and old as the Beeb, you can produce a show that’s entirely about the future of other past shows.

In any case, I really enjoyed this documentary, despite nobody being kicked off the island. You can watch the whole hour-long show on YouTube:

Pinterest.com has exploded onto the start-up scene. In the current parlance, it’s a “push-button curation” site. A cousin to Tumblr, you use Pinterest to collect images from the web and ‘pin’ them to ‘boards’. To me, it’s mostly Delicious for pictures or collages of “stuff I want to buy”.

It represents the convergence of a few trends. First, and most importantly, there’s the crunchy, Etsy, DIY movement that’s popularized knitting and other crafty practices, and is reflected in the hipster ethos. Add to that mix the maturation of online shopping, where a lot of people spend a lot of their time (particularly on tablets like the iPad) browsing online stores. Then bake in the mainstream understanding of social sharing, thanks mostly to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve barely used the site–I haven’t thought of a personal or professional use for it yet. I was wondering about it on Twitter and somebody (I’m afraid I’ve forgotten who) suggested that it wasn’t for me, but rather for “co-eds to make visioning boards for The Secret“. Ouch.

Is anybody Pinterested?

Pinterest is ripe for satire. And I wish I had a good idea about how to satirize it. But life is a bit hectic at the moment, and, as I said, I’m a Pinterest noob.

I suggested on Twitter that the satirical site ought to be at Disinterest.com, but that’s already taken by a mortgage company. Then Paula suggested Dishinterest.com, which sounds excellent to me. So I registered it.

Now what should go there? What are the characteristics of Pinterest that most deserve a critique? In my limited time on the site, I see a lot of these quotations-in-image-form that are popular on Tumblr (ironically, it’s become immediately popular to use this collage site to collect blocks of text). This isn’t a great idea, but maybe the site is just a board full of the most banal objects one can find: a pencil, a clump of dirt and so forth?

What do you think? Any good ideas for Pinterest-related satire?

I have been thinking about piracy lately, though, because I’m considering alternatives to cable television. In truth, hockey is the only thing that binds me to Shaw Cable. I’ve been poking around for alternatives to watching or recording Canucks games on our PVR.

The only legal option is NHL GameCenter LIVE (caution, autoplaying video ahead). Back in October, I could pay $169 to watch nearly any game I want on my computer, iPad or iPhone. They reduce the price throughout the year–it’s currently $119. On the face of it, this seems like a satisfactory offer. I’d rather they amortize the pricing based on the exact day I sign up, but it could be worse.

However, the fine print is pretty hostile to the average customer:

• If you want to cancel your subscription after you sign up, you have five days to do so. After that, you forfeit the entire payment.
• You only get to watch the first two rounds of the playoffs. It’s not immediately apparent, despite some diligent searching, as to how one watches the subsequent rounds.
• Because of league agreements with broadcasters, many games are blacked out. The rules around this policy are pretty inscrutable, though I did read that no games are broadcast through GameCenter in the playoffs in Canada, because they’re televised nationally. There are endless complaints from GameCenter customers on social media and online discussion forums about this practice.
• The reviews of the NHL GameCenter mobile app are not flattering. A typical review in the iTunes store reads “Huge downgrade from the 2010 version. It crashes constantly and it’s way harder to navigate than last years version.”

The NHL seems to be about 60% of the way there to a really great service that enables you to watch all games, live or recorded, over the web.

By the way, there are no current NHL (nor NBA, NFL or MLB) games available through the iTunes store. This seems like an enormous missed opportunity.

Clearly, the NHL has not found its iTunes-esque sweet spot. How do I know this? Because there are a ton of illegal ways to watch NHL games online.

There are streaming sites, usually with multiple options for streams of both the home and away broadcasts for any game, and bittorrent sites. But my favourite example is this grey-market site based in Rotterdam, Netherlands that is a generic clone of NHL GameCenter. They essentially offer the same thing as GameCenter, except with more convenience and at a moderately-lower (a year costs US $99) price point. There are no blackouts, no playoff restrictions and the site seems to be more reliable better than the GameCenter app. In short, this shady Dutch operation out-performs the NHL’s own service.

As is so often the case, when the legal options aren’t satisfactory, illegal alternatives abound. There’s clearly a huge appetite for this kind of on-demand sports content. On my site alone, more than 17,000 people have visited this site alone looking for some variation of “how to watch NHL hockey online”. Not everybody wants the all-you-can-eat package for $169, mind you, but that’s the only legal game in town.

We’ve solved online music. We’re making good progress on television and movies. It looks to me like sports leagues, or at least the NHL, still have a very 20th century attitude towards the web. What’s holding them back?

UPDATE: Coincidentally, I was poking around on my iPad tonight, looking for hockey highlights. None of the CBC, TSN or Sportsnet apps offer video highlights, and the associated sites only offer video highlights in Flash. When I visit NHL.com looking for highlights, I get forwarded to their GameCenter offering. In short, the NHL expects me to have to pay to watch video highlights on my iPad.

Of course, somebody has routed around the bogosity, and hosts a simple site for NHL highlights that runs very smoothly on my iPad.

I thought about Byrne’s “Psycho Killer” as I walked across the floor of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre’s stage last night. I was there to attend Electric Company Theatre’s production of Tad Mosel’s “All The Way Home”.

The play is unusually staged. The audience and the actors share the set, a 1915 Kamloops home. We sat on benches, in chairs and on cushions on the floor. We become part of the set, sitting at one end of the dining room table and hunker around the bathtub. Beyond us are the three bare walls of the stage, and the closed curtain that separates us from the massive, empty auditorium.

Meg Roe and director Kim Collier. Photo by Michael Julian Berz.

It’s a long play, and a sobering one. It’s also full of movement and songs, and so I wasn’t bored despite its 150 minute duration. Actors Jonathon Young and Meg Roe are the heart of the big cast, and they both turned in delightful performances. I was reminded in particular of Roe’s sweet charisma on-stage. In many ways, her work here feels like a natural extension of her excellent work as the matron in “Penelopiad”.

“All The Way Home” is an intimate portrayal of a crisis that befalls a family, and their grief in its aftermath. Thanks to director Kim Collier’s intimate staging, I was occasionally less than a foot from an actor gripped with intense emotion. It’s an odd feeling, to be observing so closely but not participating. I felt a little like the beta gorilla in the troop, averting my eyes when they got too close. I was, to borrow from Mr. Byrne, tense and nervous.

There were about 20 teenagers from Arts Umbrella in the audience, and it was fun to watch them watch the action. I rarely experience theatre-in-the-round, and it’s rarer still that I do it flanked by so many young people. You could see dreams of becoming the next Meg Roe forming (or, more likely, solidifying) in their heads.

The play won the Pulitzer in 1961, and it feels very much a show from that period. It’s well-observed, and deceivingly simple in its structure, but it doesn’t have much new to say to today’s audience. There is the tiny joy of hearing local place names (though I did wonder whether Merritt had a movie theatre in 1915).

Yet Electric Company Theatre shows are often as concerned with the ‘how’ as the ‘what’. The blend of the modern and the post-modern–the realistic set furnishings combined with the bare walls of the stage–makes for an intimate if not immersive night at the theatre. It has some similarities to their 2010 “Tear the Curtain”, but it’s much tauter and far more fathomable. Plus there’s a terrific third-act reveal that delivers a rare treat to the audience.

Tickets are sold out for this show, but hopefully they’ll extend their run or remount it soon. You shouldn’t miss it.

The Trifecta of Directorial Tricks

This is kind of a footnote, and unrelated to the review. I mentioned that there was a bathtub on-stage. At one point an actor sits on the edge of it, and I genuinely wondered if she was going to get undressed and take a bath in some unbearably cold water. That might have seriously pushed the audience’s comfort level, but you can never go wrong with water on stage. One of my favourite ever shows at Victoria’s Belfry Theatre featured water. “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” has a trough and a bath tub, if memory serves, and there’s a peculiar pleasure in the elemental sound of it sloshing around on-stage.

In thinking about water on-stage, I thought of two other great audience-pleasing tricks. First, you can never go wrong adding a song to a play. It can change a show’s pace and endear us to a singer. I’m not sure why, but I’m never disappointed to hear an actor break into song.

You also can’t go wrong getting the actor’s to prepare food on-stage. I remember another show at the Belfry–the name escapes me–where somebody cooked an entire meal of spaghetti on a functional kitchen. It worked so well as a kind of steamy, sensuous seduction of the audience.

I’m no theatre director, and maybe these are all rote cliches now. Still, the formula for the best play ever might be a dramedy about a cooking show host/marathon swimmer who occasionally sings negro spirituals for her own pleasure.

UPDATE: I was talking to somebody about a show that had the corner of a swimming pool on-stage. It was right at the lip of the stage, and walled with plexiglass, so that the audience could see into the pool. I asked the Belfry Theatre on Twitter, and they reminded me that the show was “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” by Terrence McNally. Here’s a photo from the show:

This was the first ebook I’d ever read, as it happens. I read it on the iPad, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to include an annotated map with the text. There are some standard ‘extras’ that you get with the Kindle app–lists of characters and memorable quotes, example. The ebook actually included a section entitled “Setting & Places”, but it seems like it’s generated algorithmically, not curated by an actual human. How do I know this? The terms “Cat” and “Hyderabad Mind” (the latter is the name of a circus performer in the book) are listed as settings or places. The Kindle app notes that this content comes courtesy of Shelfari.

I was curious about the route the Oronsay, Ondaatje’s ocean liner, took. So, I plotted the locations where the boat put into port, and made a quick custom Google map:

View The Route of the Oronsay in Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cat’s Table” in a larger map

ME: Yeah, Prince is really not to my taste.

HER: But he’s amazing, what’s not to like?

ME: I acknowledge that he’s a super guitarist, a great songwriter and a fantastic showman. I just don’t care for his music.

HER: Blerg.

I find myself saying a variation of “it’s good, but not to my taste” all the time. And I often find that people seem baffled or disappointed by my response. I guess it’s because they want me to like what they like too.

But–and here’s where I sound like a you-kids-get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon–I feel like there’s been a decline in the idea of taste in our culture. Or maybe it’s a decline in a respect of different tastes.

You would think that, in a increasingly balkanized cultural landscape, people would more readily accept differences like this. But it’s my sense that the opposite is true. What do you think?