Since I wrote earlier about my television woes, I’ve secured the use of an EyeTV unit, and have been using it for a couple of days.

In case you missed my earlier note: EyeTV is a $199 US little box that you plug into your cable TV and into your Mac (it takes about 35 seconds to set up). Then, using the included software (which you can download hereif you want to try it out), you can do any of the following:

• watch television on your computer’s screen
• record television as you’re watching it
• record programmes on a schedule, one-of or things like “every Wednesday night at 9:30 a.m.” or “weekedays at 10:30 a.m.”
• do “instant replays” on live television as you’re watching it
• edit the programmes you record to remove commercials (or other bits you don’t want)
• see the results of all of this on an actual television if you plug your Mac into a TV (which takes a cable that sells for about $30)

In other words, EyeTV is a super-charged “digital VCR” that works with a Mac.

Installation, such as it is, is literally painless. There are no drivers to install, no switches to switch: you plug things in, install the software and you see television on your Mac. It really is that simple.

The user interface is quite elegant — it’s hard to make mistakes and record the wrong program. Watching live television is, well, like watching live television. There are two options for recording, “regular” and “high quality;” watching recorded programmes in the “regular” mode is a little watching television through a sock (or watching television in 1974, take your pick). The “high quality” setting is very good; not “DVD” but certainly better than a video tape.

The one downside to EyeTV, for Canadian users, is that the companion television listings website, TitanTV, doesn’t contain listings for Canadian cable systems. The EyeTV FAQ mentions this, and suggests that some users have had success using U.S. border cities as an alternative. In our case, as there are no U.S. border cities in the Atlantic time zone (and because there are many stations we watch that are Canadian), this wasn’t an option.

Fortunately, Jevon, one of the readership, reminded me of XMLTV, an open source project designed to assist with automated scraping of television listings from websites. XMLTV has no trouble scraping Eastlink’s listings (Eastlink being our cable provider) from Zap2It, and using those listings I was able to create a web-based system that displays my local television listings and lets me record programmes with a simple click, just like the canned TitanTV system allows.

I’ve not had enough use out of the system to know how it will affect my television watching habits. Oliver was able to watch Blue’s Clues at its not regularly scheduled time this afternoon, and that’s something. Stay tuned.

Ritchie Simpson, wise counsel to the company, said about the new design of this space “simple and clean is good, but that’s too simple and clean.”

And so I’ve made some minor modifications to the place — a return of the brazen yellow, albeit in reduced form.

I trust the result will not offend too many in the readership.

Received from the Air Canada website this morning:

Due to the extreme number of customers accessing Interactive Services at this time, Shop for Fares is not available. Please try again later. We apologize for this inconvenience.

While I realize that those in glass houses should not cast stones — I have written some “subtle” error message in my day — surely an airline trying to dig its way through a severe turndown should place a priority on having its servers being able to process requests?

Then there is the Expedia “bait and switch” system. “Wow,” I say to myself, “$203 return to Miami from Charlottetown.” I go through the process to book, only to have returned to me:

We were unable to use the original fare code and used the next available fare code instead (C$2,504.00 higher per adult).

Imagine if this happened at the grocery checkout!

If you are in need of a quick mid-winter break, you cannot do wrong with a weekend in Boston staying at NineZero, a new hotel at 90 Tremont St. I stayed there in October, and found it, quite simply, the nicest hotel I’d ever stayed in.

Although their spring, summer and fall rates are obscene, their winter rates are excellent (relatively speaking, and the context of Boston). I small room with no view is selling for $129, and a larger room, with two queen beds, is $159. These compare to regular mid-season prices north of $300/night.

NineZero is right in the heart of Boston. You’re half a block from Boston Common, a block from Macy’s and Filene’s, 5 minutes walk to Fanueil Hall. There’s an excellent multi-screen cinema about 10 minutes walk down Tremont. And the Park Street ‘T’ stop (aka “the subway”) is right across the street.

Highly recommended.

I’ve been reading for the past several years about TiVo and EyeTV and their ilk — products that combine a computer and a hard disk and some smart software to make what is essentially a “digital VCR” but which, by virtue of its digitalness, is different enough from a VCR to be quite different indeed.

When I was a teenager, my friend Chris used to record every episode of Remington Steele. When I’d go over to his house to visit, we’d watch an episode or two.

I always admired Chris’ organizational abilities and sticktuitiveness: my own ability to “time shift” programs — to make the TV schedule my schedule — has been severely compromised by one or the other of (a) no blank tape available, (b) VCR remote out of batteries, (c) VCR remote lost, (d) VCR too difficult to program quickly and reliably and/or (e) VCR broken. There are simply too many points of failure in the VCR system — too much between “hey, I should record Seinfeld” and actually doing so — that I think the last thing I actually recorded was a spate of All My Children about 10 years ago (don’t ask).

This week, I saw the light.

I am a regular reader of Adam Curry’s Weblog. Back in November, I read a piece he wrote about BitTorrent, a distributed system for sharing large media files quickly and efficiently in a true “peer to peer to peer” fashion.

While BitTorrent’s technology is interesting, what intrigued me more was this page of current episodes of various popular American television programs likeThe West Wing, Friends and ER.

So I downloaded the OS X version of the software (it’s also available for Windows and Linux), fired it up, and about 3 hours later I had this week’s episode of The West Wing sitting on my hard disk waiting for me to watch it.

I copied the file — it was about 420 megabytes, or “almost a CD” in size — over to my iBook, plugged the iBook into the television, opened the file in the QuickTime player and, blammo, I was watching The West Wing on television. It was just like, well, watching The West Wing on television. Not a pixelated, postage-stamp-sized version of television, but actual real television in all its stereo glory.

I’ve repeated the process a couple more times and, I must say, I now “get it” about TiVo: it changes television into something very different when “what’s on” changes from “whatever the networks have decided should be on at this time of day” to “whatever I’ve got loaded up and ready.”

Whether this sort of thing will be allowed to continue or not remains to be seen. The CRTC released an interesting Broadcasting Public Notice on Friday that speaks directly to the regulatory issues involved. It’s interesting mostly because although the usual suspects were dead set against what the CRTC calls “Internet retransmission,” there was an impressive list of parties speaking for the concept, including the CBC and the National Film Board.

The CRTC’s role in this, at least right now, isn’t major, although being the regulator of both telecommunications and broadcasting does give it the potential to be a big enabler or a big squasher, depending on which way the wind blows.

The real issue, assuming we’re not all going to be content watching locally produced, globally distributed open source garage TV, is how to transition from the world of “pay for watching television by agreeing to be deluged with advertisements” to something else.

And the real problem is that with the jackals of industry and the hounds of government tying themselves up in knots about all of this, the opportunity for new models to organically develop and find their place is compromised. It’s hard to invent when you’ve got behemoths circling.

The irony of all this is as follows: right now I pay Eastlink, my local cable company, about $65 a month to run a bunch of big antennas and pipe television down a wire into my house. That $65 a month gets me approximately 72,000 hours a month of programming (100 channels, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week). Of that, I watch, say, 60 to 80 hours a month. And of that, I actively watch and profit from, say, 10 to 15 hours, the rest being background noise that I could easily do without.

Now here’s the rub: if I could, instead, simply deal directly with the production companies, cutting out Eastlink, the networks, the affiliates and the advertisers, I could probably contribute more to the development of quality television programming financially than I do now. If I could shoot Warner Bros. Television two dollars a month to have them give me access to The West Wing for digital download, surely they’d be getting more revenue from me than they’re getting now, wouldn’t they?

Unfortunately, it looks like there is little corporate will to move in this direction and so, like music to Napster, those who are interested in exploring the possibilities of the digital age are left to deal at the fringes, hoping to stay enough under the radar for long enough to learn something interesting and substantial.

Yesterday’s Leo Broderick activity: Islanders rally against possible war. Apparently:

Five hundred Islanders joined worldwide protests against a possible war in Iraq on Sunday. The “Day of Action” rally took place in front of Province House.

It is a testament to my powers of concentration that I didn’t notice this large rally at all, happening one block from my house. Either that or the cold dulled out the raucous protesting sounds. Or it was a silent rally.

Leo Broderick was quoted:

“It really points to the seriousness of the issue and I really think the only way that we can stop this war is by people getting out on the streets and people on Prince Edward Island have turned out in huge numbers…”

With respect, this is a lie: 500 people is not “huge numbers,” it is 0.36% of the Island population; 134,794 people did not turn out.

If we’re going to work against the lies told by the American war machine, it’s important to be honest ourselves.

As if we needed more reasons to seek alternatives to flying Air Canada: Airline defends flight departure decision [from CBC PEI].

Setting aside the sheer inhumanity of Air Canada’s action — which it is very hard to do — they effectively telegraphed a “we are heartless jerks” message to their customer base while they could have, with some imagination and work, turned the episode into a “Air Canada saves the day.”

See JetsGo for alternatives; they start flying from Charlottetown on February 5th.

When my mother (nee Caswell) pointed me to the Caswell genealogy website, and specifically to the digital version of the comprehensive Our Caswell Relatives [Word file] book, I had high hopes for being able to dredge up some sort of Island connections in my family’s past.

Things don’t start off well; it appears as though my Caswell relatives missed the boat to Prince Edward Island from Ireland, literally:

Some ships advertised individually. For instance, on April 3, 1819, in a Limerick paper appeared an advertisement for passage on the Camperdown to Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and Upper Canada. The 599 ton vessel, sailing about the middle of May, offered “comfortable accommodation.” Actually The Camperdown did not sail until July 3. Carrying 256 passengers it left from Kilrush, farther down the estuary of the Shannon than Limerick, and on the opposite side of the river.

Later on comes what appears to be a death knell. In a section reviewing the history of Canada, the Caswell’s new country, we read:

In 1873 Prince Edward Island, a province as far as I know devoid of Irish Caswells, took its place in Confederation

Much later in the book comes a sliver of hope — an actual mention of a Prince Edward Islander:

William Leslie Kent was born in Content. Alberta, on October 19, 1907. His wife’s maiden name was Doris McFadyen. She was born on July 7, 1913. She lived in Winnipeg, but came of a family of Prince Edward Island Scottish immigrants from the Highlands.

William Kent’s mother was Myrtle Kent; Myrtle’s mother was Mary Jane Wellwood; Mary Jane’s father was William Wellwood; William’s mother was Jane Caswell; Jane’s father was Nathaniel Caswell; Nathaniel’s brother was Andrew; Andrew’s son was Nathaniel; Nathaniel’s son was Edgar; Edgar’s son was Ross; Ross’ daughter is my mother.

So, roughly, my “Island connections” are this: my great-great-great grandfather’s brother was the great-great-great grandfather of a man who married an Islander.

I don’t think I’m in any danger of receiving the keys to the secret Islander’s Only clubs nor being shown the secret Island handshake any time soon.

I don’t know why, but in a TV landscape where I tend to tire of most commercials after one watching, if not before, I love that “student lives in Scotland, misses Tim Hortons, finally gets a taste of home” commercial. Go figure.

My nomination for “news release with the greatest distance between promise offered in the title and reality offered in the body” goes to Unique Invention Helps Cut Work in Half.

Here I was, thinking “wow, I knew some Islander would crack the fusion/fission thing eventually” and what I get, in return, was a cauliflower “banding aid.”

Not to suggest that if I was in the cauliflower business I wouldn’t welcome such a product. But I thought they were talking about my work!