One Canuck's Radio Weblog

  Friday, 12 August 2005

. .< 3:40:09 PM >
Canadian performers to join CMG in action against CBC

CKNW is reporting that the union representing 21,000 Canadian performers will join the Canadian Media Guild for what could be the CBC's largest-ever labour disruption. A strike or lockout involving the Canadian Media Guild could come as early as Monday, and if it does, ACTRA is pledging its support.

Executive Director Steve Waddell says his union is in a position to employ pressure tactics. "It could be anything from a strike or potentially a lockout," he says, "to taking other action like exercising our rights under the collective agreement, not to allow for certain re-use of programs."
ACTRA has not taken a strike vote, but is considering it.

< 3:34:22 PM >

For die Dinge an sich you’ll have to go to other sites, such as Richard Ishida’s Unicode character picker or Unicode viewer, truly fine sites that allow you not simply to find a particular glyph but also to construct a string of characters click by click which you can then copy.

All of this is interesting, but is it practical for someone creating web pages, like Gruber? There are serious problems getting HTML to produce the glyph you’re after. Anyone considering the use of an unusual character in a web page would do well to consult “Using national and special characters in HTML.” And if you’ve still got an appetite for this business as it applies to the Internet, Jukka Korpella’s gnarly tutorial on “Character code issues” is an absolute must.

UPDATE: I found this Unicode test material site, which lets you check your browser against a long list of Unicode symbols.

< 3:33:42 PM >

The CBC Radio weather report just blithely reeled off the following: a heat alert, humidex and smog advisories, a thunderstorm watch, and a power warning. (The last is a new disaster euphemism, meaning in fact that an aspect of the public infrastructure can’t cope.)

What a lovely summer day.

I was in Banff when this happened but TO has been a real mess all summer.

< 12:40:27 AM >

At dinner with my Yankee friends last night I was called on to provide iPod technical support. Young Jamie's iPod mini wasn't being found by iTunes on his iBook when he plugged it in; it would show up as a mounted drive on the desktop, but he couldn't get music onto it.

Turns out that his iPod spent a brief time, before Jamie got an iBook, as a "Windows iPod" and it seems that once an iPod has suffered that fate it is rendered unusable in the Mac world until it undergoes gender realignment.

The solution: get the latest iPod Updater from Apple, run it, and select the "restore factory settings" option. This will erase everything from the iPod, but leave you with a fresh, clean, Mac-compatible iPod. It worked, and Jamie is rocking out to Billy Joel as we speak.

< 12:40:21 AM >

The Canadian Broadcast Corporation is one step closer to a massive labour disruption that threatens to seriously affect its programming.
The CBC this evening provided the Canadian Media Guild with 72-hour lockout notice. If an agreement is not reached by Monday at midnight, CBC will be locked out. Earlier in the day, CBC presented a “revised comprehensive offer.” Despite the offer, no language has been agreed to since Sunday.
In a statement, CBC said it “doesn’t want a work stoppage and we are extremely disappointed to have to take this action. However, after almost 15 months of negotiations, our key issues remain unresolved - issues which are crucial to CBC’s success as Canada’s national public broadcaster and as a well-managed company in a competitive media marketplace.”

The CBC won't be locked out but it's employees will be. Sigh.