Bye-bye Network TV

The digital revolution has been a hard task master for those industries and companies that didn’t react promptly to the new environment. Witness photography, with many giants now gone or shadows of their past glory. Now our national TV networks say they are in trouble. They spent their money buying rights to import foreign shows to broadcast over the air with local advertising. Today cable companies offer these same programs from local and foreign sources as well as fresh cable-only sources, some even owned by the networks.

TV advertising is dwindling forcing the networks to cut costs and search for other sources of revenue. On the cost side, the smaller stations are being closed, and local programming, including news, is being eliminated. For revenue, the networks are pressing the CTRC to allow carriage fees - charging the cable company and its customers for the right to receive by cable programming now offered free over the air.

Which leads to the question, “What value do we get from the networks today?” Local news? No - cut back and trivialized by attempts to “entertain” the viewer. National programs? Not much - most programming funds are spent competing for foreign programming. PVRs and on-demand services are freeing us from network driven schedules while DVDs and the web let us view missed episodes of favourite shows.

If you eliminate over the air transmissions, our networks have nothing to offer that isn’t already available from other sources. And over the air transmissions are necessary for less and less of our population. Cable serves the larger communities while satellite services bring 100s of channels to remote communities. Our networks are lumbered with soon to be obsolete transmission facilities, and incapable of creating much fresh content. Another Kodak moment? (image copyright Corel Draw 9)

Photographic Canadiana Index

For our 25^th Anniversary in year 2000, I updated the index to our journal, Photographic Canadiana and  Bob Lansdale took my database records and typeset them in QuarkXpress to produce a 42 page paper index. Since 2000, technology has changed. For our 35th Anniversary which begins this May, we plan to include an updated index of 35 years of the journal on a DVD featuring all 35 years of the publication. Meantime, I have the index itself available in a searchable pdf file on the web. The index allows you to search the wealth of material the PHSC has published over the years. The initial web update covers the first 34 years, then as the four issues of volume 35 are published I will add their content to the online index. Enjoy.

Postcards and Photographica

Ed Warner and I attended the Postcard Show today. There is an overlap with photographica - some postcards are photographic cards, like the 1910 picture of the Barrie Market Hall shown here. And some dealers have images like this pretty Notman portrait of Miss Fortescue of Montreal taken in 1891. How did I know this detail? Because Notman thoughtfully included a reference number on the back of each of his photographs - 96548 in this case - and the McCord Museum in Montreal has a search box on its website for such data. I also saw a number of albums - some with quite attractive photographs, and even glass plate negatives that were amateur, not studio. Some dealers also have papers and ephemera - bits and pieces of history, sometimes of photographic interest, like the letter from Kodak that enclosed a number of old brochures on commercial darkroom gear.

A New Home on the Web

I completed the move of our website to a new ISP host over this weekend - the third home it has occupied since its inception April 17, 1996 sharing a server operated by OnRamp in Markham, Ontario. On April 12, 2001 we went live on a shared server at Easyhosting (Look TV) using our new domain name. 

The latest move was prompted by cost and feature considerations. I first discovered A2 Hosting in February 2008, while helping an “accidental client” move and transform his wholesale site to a modern database-driven service. This new site is hosted by A2. I was introduced to A2’s service and features during the time I spent adding customized bits of code to my client’s site. We went live in March of last year and I continued to make small changes into the summer.  

This time, with the PHSC, I was moving a live site making it important to get all the bits and pieces organized and executed in the correct order to avoid any loss of access. Using a temporary URL, I uploaded a copy of the 358 megabytes of files that make up our website. After verifying a random sample of pages, I changed our nameservers at CIRA , completing the switchover in minutes. 

My last step was to establish our email address on the new mail server and point it to my prime address. We still have a bit of our web presence at Easyhosting - they continue to be our domain name registrar.

A Different Bend

One of the problems with my beloved Sony F828 and similar cameras is the degree of distortion at the extremes of the zoom. This is quite obvious with straight objects in the picture. DXO Labs in Europe have a clever solution. They calculate the distorted light path and reverse it in software. The EXIF data in the shot gives the program the necessary data. The program works with selected cameras and lenses - including mine. The program has a number of other adjustments as well and works with Lightroom and Photoshop. The improvement in the image is astonishing. The program allows fast before/after comparisons as you adjust various parameters - the default settings work great. Once the adjustments are selected, you initiate processing to apply the changes to the actual file. Worth a peek at the 14 day free trial.    

Can you bend it?

Years ago I mailed small things like thread in a letter. New standards came in restricting   letters not only by weight but by dimensions. Thickness was limited to 20 mm which put an end to mailing a spool of thread. I could still mail books up to 500 gm. That ends next month when the new rates and standards come into play. Now oversize letters must also be able to bend in a 140 mm diameter - the curve of a cupped hand. Items that fail the latest test must be mailed at the parcel rate which starts at double the maximum letter rate and shoots up from there depending on distance.  

Letters are being replaced by email. Bills are being delivered by the web and paid on the web. And now small packages are too costly to send. This leaves the flyers and junk mail for delivery to your mail box. Perhaps in the near future my mail box can be replaced with a blue box to move the “mail” straight to recycling... 

note: image is ©CorelDraw 9 and used under license.

UPDATE: Jan 12 2009 CPC changes came into play. The "can you bend it" guideline for letter mail apparently did NOT make the cut... In fact the rules call for a stiffening card to be added if the envelope "sags" too much. As Joan Collins sang "maybe next year".

 

Time Machine to the rescue

I continue to find reasons to support my decision over a year ago to switch to the Mac. The other night I removed an Adobe CS3 suite and Adobe Fireworks CS3 after using the CS4 upgrade for a few weeks. When I opened Photoshop CS4 today, I saw an error message telling me a file was missing from the Adobe Application Support folder and to run the Photoshop installer to re-install Photoshop. Problem. My CS4 upgrade was a multi gigabyte download with no separate Photoshop installer. Before I started up the huge upgrade file, I looked at Adobe's knowledge base. It told me my lost file was called "Adobe Unit Types.osax", residing in the Macintosh HD> Library> ScriptingAdditions folder. Using my trusty Time Machine, I rolled back a couple of days to an earlier version of that folder and bingo! there was my file. I told Time Machine to restore the folder and Photoshop was back to normal.