Disco Hammers on the CBC, and a Format Rant

Got word from a friend that my ex-bosses business partner Adina Gwatkin was on the CBC today. They were talking about the disco hammers. There’s a tiny mathematical chance that I might have had something to do with one of the painted tools that the host was fawning over in studio.

Turns out there’s a website you can order these things from. Everything is connected to the internet. Even Marpho. At one point in the interview Adina mentions Marpho, but I think she uses a slightly different name, or perhaps adds a last name. Maybe he has one. Who knows?

Went to visit Marpho at the end of summer. Good to see him. He has a license now. Shame he wasn’t on the CBC too. I imagine he would have said something interesting.

You could listen to it here, if you want, except it’s not especially interesting. And they use Real Audio format. God help you if you download and install real audio software on your poor unsuspecting computer. Note also that if you want to listen to the CBC live, they only stream using Windows Media format. It makes me furious to think that someone whose salary comes from Canadian tax dollars made a deliberate decision to use proprietary audio formats which require the use of really bad commercial software to gatekeep access to publicly funded content. Presumably, whoever was responsible for making this decision, they were supposed to be in some way informed about putting media files on the internet for public consumption. I have a real problem with people who do a bad job at their job, especially if I am paying for it. Screw you Mac users. Screw you linux users. Screw you Windows users who don’t want to encrust their machines with Windows Media Player DRM Edition, or Real Audio, which is perhaps the most spyware-esque computer program ever to not be classified as spyware.

At least CBC Radio 3 has an MP3 stream.

1 comment:

[…] I don’t know what it is about streaming media formats and public broadcasters that gets me so spitting angry, but they do. CBC is the classic case. For years and years and years that have streamed their radio in… Windows Media. Why would any broadcaster choose a propietary, anarchronistic, unsupported, unpopular, hard to operate format to deliver their content? Why would a public broadcaster do it to the content that their users have already paid for with tax dollars? […]

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