Dan Misener dot com

Need a reason to wake up super-early on a Saturday morning, trudge out into Toronto’s frigid February cold, and visit the CBC Broadcast Centre for a taping of GO?

I’ll give you three:

• The kalimba stylings of Laura Barrett
• Something called a “Facebook Faceoff”
• Me

I’m on GO this weekend and next. Free tickets are still available for both shows.

For a few months now, I’ve been getting email addressed to my dmisener@gmail.com account from a guy named Keith. The emails haven’t been for me, but rather for someone named Diane Misener. Apparently we have very similar email addresses.

For months, I simply deleted Keith’s email. I know I shouldn’t have, but I deleted the first one because it was one of those joke email forwards that people send around, and I figured it was just a mistake. Then another one arrived, and another one, and I deleted those too. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t contact Keith to explain the mistake, because doing so would mean admitting I’d silently deleted all of his email to Diane.

Eventually, I started to feel pretty bad about all of this, so I phoned up Keith and Diane. The whole story is on this week’s episode of Spark.

Looking for full episodes of The Vinyl Cafe on-demand?

You won’t find them at the show’s site on cbc.ca. You won’t find full episodes in their podcast, either.

But if you head over to PRX.org and sign up for a free account, you can listen to full episodes of The Vinyl Cafe (including upcoming repeats) in their entirety.

I work at the CBC’s Broadcasting Centre in Toronto. Just down the hall from my desk, they built something called an “Idea Room.” It’s a nice, big, bright room with a table, and chairs, and whiteboards. We use it for meetings, where presumably, we come up with ideas. Hence the name.

The walls of the Idea Room are made of glass. Which is nice, but can be distracting.

So today they frosted the glass with decals, tag cloud-style. The walls are now covered with lots and lots of words:

Do you see what I see?

“mic bomb?”

I can only guess this is an unfortunately cropped instance of “atomic bomb,” but still.

Is “mic bomb” something you want to read on your way to the radio studios?

As Ouimet observes, much of the CBC’s winter television lineup is available for download via Bittorrent, thanks to some thieving television pirates.

But what you may not know is that The Border, Sophie, and jPod (but not MVP) each have corresponding RSS feeds on tvRSS.net.

What does this mean?

If you paste the search-based RSS feed for each show into a program like the free, open-source Miro, you’ve essentially subscribed to the show, and new episodes will be downloaded auto-magically as they’re released.

Wouldn’t it be great if this kind of activity was condoned?

Miro is about to announce their first round of co-branded players. If CBC Television really wanted to transform itself into a forward-thinking public broadcasting service, they’d be on the list. You’d download a CBC-branded player preloaded with subscriptions to the whole lineup. Shows would be distributed cheaply, and live on the hard drives of the taxpayers who funded them. The licensing would all be worked out, and everyone would get paid.

But I’m not holding my breath.

When you’re doing a radio interview with someone in another city, there are a few options I’ve used:

• Phone - Easiest to set up, but worst-sounding. That said, people are accustomed to hearing phone interviews on the radio.
• Studio-to-studio via ISDN - Sounds pretty good, but requires a studio on both ends. This usually means the guest has to go to a nearby CBC, NPR, BBC, etc. station, so it’s not always convenient.
• Double-ender - When done well, this can sound like the interviewer and interviewee are in the same room, but requires good recording equipment on both ends.

Recently, we’ve been experimenting with Skype to do interviews for Spark, with varying results. Last week, we did an interview with Adrian Bowyer about his 3D printer, RepRap. And it sounds pretty freaking good, considering he was on his hotel WiFi using an inexpensive headset microphone.

The raw interview is posted here. Have a listen. Aside from the occasional blip or dropout (which we edited out for the finished program), the overall audio quality is amazing.

We’re trying to make Spark a radio show that sounds different. Part of that is story selection, and structure, and pace. Another part of that is how we create the show’s sonic landscape. Tools like Skype can help us create an interesting middle ground somewhere between studio-quality and phone-quality.

I wonder if we’ll start to hear more Skype-quality interviews (complete with blips, bloops, dropouts, and walkie-talkie back-and-forth) on the radio in the coming years. Honestly, I’m surprised someone doesn’t make a piece of Skype gear with decent inputs and outputs for studio use.

The sixth season of Go started this morning, and they were nice enough to have me back on the show. This time around, I talked about the many uses for a bicycle bell (outside of riding a bicycle).

You can download an MP3 of the segment here.

Today is the day!

Spark, our brand-spanking-new radio show launches. On-air, the first broadcast happens at 11:30 local time. And online, the podcast is already available as an MP3.

And, through the magic of Creative Commons licensed music, the podcast version and the broadcast version are the exact same.

That alone has me excited. Please, have a listen and let us know what you think.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a new radio show for the CBC. It’s called Spark, it’s about technology and trendwatching, and the first episode airs this Wednesday morning at 11:30. A repeat broadcast airs Saturday afternoon at 4:00, and the podcast (which, thrillingly, is exactly the same as the broadcast version) should be available starting early Wednesday morning.

I really hope you can listen.

This past weekend I moved most of my earthly possessions to Jenna’s. As of August 1, we will officially be cohabitating, and no longer spending enormous amounts of money on two separate apartments. The move was remarkably easy thanks to Rae and her car. There are still a few things at my old place, but all of the big stuff is gone.

Also, I’m happy to report that I have a new-ish job. Starting August 13, I’ll be working on the new Nora Young show Spark. It’s a great concept, a great team, and I can’t wait to get started, but I’m really going to miss all the people I work with now.

As well, I’ve been offered a job at my alma mater, Ryerson. I’ll be teaching audio production part-time in the School of Radio and Television Arts. I have one section of BDC101, and it’ll take up my Tuesday evenings starting in the fall.

Wow.

After writing that, I realized what an enormous amount of my life changed in the past two weeks.