Wiremania (Oct 15, 2011)

Radio Wires

Forbes: Sirius XM is set to release its 2.0 version satellite radio "Lynx" this quarter and the new product boasts features like touch screen, WiFi connectivity, satellite connectivity, Bluetooth and most importantly, portability.

All Access: Activist Holds Protest Against KFI's John And Ken, Pushes Boycott.

Randy Michaels arrested for DUI in Ohio.s

Tech Wires

Sunday To Be Steve Jobs Day in California.

ZD Net: Internet Explorer is the safest Web browser!? Ha! Microsoft is trying again to con people into thinking that Internet Explorer is the safest browser around. It's not. At best, it's tied with Chrome.

TV Wires

SoapClassics.com to STREAM Eppys of As The World Turns and Possibly Guiding Light!

SoapClassics.com Also Boasts Distribution Rights to Texas, Search For Tomorrow, The Edge of Night and...ANOTHER WORLD!!!

New York Times: Fridays Becoming a Desert for TV Night. Saturday night has long been the loneliest night of the week in the television business, but lately it's been joined by another evening pining for viewers: Fridays.

Sports Wires

Throwable Ball Camera May Revolutionize How We Watch Sports.

John Maffei: Play-by-play not Berman's strength. Some critics say the announcers have no bearing on whether fans watch or listen to sporting events.

ZD Net: Google engineer calls Google+ a "pathetic afterthought" and "knee-jerk reaction"

Sports Business Daily: NFL, Time Warner Cable End Negotiations Without Deal For NFL Net, RedZone.

Misc Wires

Debris of 'Doomsday' Comet Elenin to Pass by Earth Sunday.

Practical sedans: The most anticipated cars of 2012.

Wiremania (Oct 14, 2011)

Radio Wires

Tony & Kris Return To San Diego. But For Nights . United Stations Radio Networks' Tony & Kris morning show is returning to its longtime home in San Diego, adding country KSON as its 10th affiliate. However, the show will not air there in mornings, but instead will be re-configured as a 7 p.m to midnight show, beginning sometime next month. The team is based in Nashville. KSON is their largest affiliate.

Los Angeles Times: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers will play a rare small-theater show later this month to benefit local public radio station - KCSN 88.5 - so marginal its ratings should be characterized not as off the chart, but in search of one.

Gary Lycan: Bill O'Reilly and Dennis Miller will team up in LA + Dave Williams, ex-KABC, KNX and other stations in Los Angeles, was thrilled to be in Chicago on the new "FM News 101.1" WWWN in Chicago. He e-mailed me how much he loved the city and his new job there as a midday news anchor

WMAL.com: The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet. The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.

All Access: U.S. Attorney In San Diego Vows Crackdown On Stations Running Medical Marijuana Ads.

Sports Wires

Tom Hoffarth: Could Hank Williams Jr.'s firing end up being a crazy idea ... like Fox?

John Maffei: Taylor ready for spotlight game. (from last weekend)

Video: Tigers catch huge break when Cabrera grounder hits bag

Lockout by NBA just might cost you. Networks' loss of revenue could lead to higher cable bills.

Tech Wires

New York Times: Robert W. Galvin, who took the reins of Motorola from his father and built a family-run business that pioneered Depression-era car radios and wartime walkie-talkies into a global maker of color television sets, cellphones and other ubiquities of the electronic age, died early Tuesday in Chicago.

Biz Wires

Bank Transfer Day: A Protest With Your Money.

Is Japan's Uniqlo the Next Great American Retailer?

Top 5 vehicles sold in America in the last 30 days.

Gap to Close 21% of North American Stores

Misc Wires

How To Make Things Last Longer.

Photographer captures rare cosmic sight

Sports on TV (Oct 14-16, 2011)

Canadian Football League: Calgary at Toronto, same-day tape, NFL Network, 5

College football:Hawaii at San Jose State, ESPN, 6

Golf: PGA European Tour, Portugal Masters, second round, in Vilamoura, Golf Channel, 6 a.m; PGA Tour, The McGladrey Classic, second round, on Sea Island, Ga., Golf Channel, 11am; Nationwide Tour, Miccosukee Championship, second round, in Miami, same-day tape, Golf Channel, 2; Champions Tour, AT&T Championship, first round, in San Antonio, same-day tape, Golf Channel, 4:30; Sime Darby LPGA Malaysia, second round, in Kuala Lumpur, same-day tape, Golf Channel, 6:30.

Major League Baseball: National League Championship Series, Game 5, Milwaukee at St. Louis, TBS, 5

Saturday, Oct. 15

Boxing: Bernard Hopkins vs. Chad Dawson, for WBC light heavyweight title, in Los Angeles, HBO pay-per-view, 6

Canadian Football League: Winnipeg at Edmonton, delayed tape, NFL Network, 12 a.m.

College football: Michigan at Michigan State, ESPN, 9am; Indiana at Wisconsin, ESPN2, 9am; Utah at Pittsburgh, ESPNU, noon; Baylor at Texas A&M, FX, 9am; Regional, Ohio State at Illinois or Oklahoma State at Texas, ABC or ESPN, 12:30; LSU at Tennessee, CBS, 12:30; Central Florida at Southern Methodist, Fox Sports Net, 12:30; Georgia Tech at Virginia, ESPNU, 12:30; Penn at Columbia, Versus, 12:30; Alabama at Mississippi, ESPN2, 3; Florida at Auburn, ESPN, 4; Clemson at Maryland, ESPNU, 4; Kansas State at Texas Tech, Fox Sports Net, 4; Stanford at Washington State, Versus, 4:30; Oklahoma at Kansas, ESPN2, 6:15; Arizona State at Oregon, ESPN, 7:15; Prairie View at Alabama State, same-day tape, ESPNU, 7:30

Golf: PGA European Tour, Portugal Masters, third round, Golf Channel, 6 a.m; PGA Tour, The McGladrey Classic, third round, Golf Channel, 11am; Nationwide Tour, Miccosukee Championship, third round, same-day tape, Golf Channel, 2; Champions Tour, AT&T Championship, second round, same-day tape, Golf Channel, 4:30; Sime Darby LPGA Malaysia, third round, same-day tape, Golf Channel, 6:30

Horse racing; NTRA, Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup Stakes and Keeneland 75th Anniversary Stakes, in Lexington, Ky., NBC, 2

Major League Baseball:American League Championship Series, Game 6, Detroit at Texas, Fox, 4:30

NHL: Boston at Chicago, NHL Network, 5:30

Soccer: English Premier League, Manchester United at Liverpool, ESPN2, 4:30 a.m.

Sunday, Oct. 16

Golf: PGA European Tour, Portugal Masters, final round, Golf Channel, 6 a.m.; PGA Tour, The McGladrey Classic, final round, Golf Channel, 11am; Nationwide Tour, Miccosukee Championship, final round, same-day tape, Golf Channel, 2; Champions Tour, AT&T Championship, final round, same-day tape, Golf Channel, 4:30; Sime Darby LPGA Malaysia, final round, same-day tape, Golf Channel, 6:30

Major League Baseball: National League Championship Series, Game 6, St, Louis at Milwaukee, TBS, 1 or 5; American League Championship Series, Game 7, Detroit at Texas, if necessary, Fox, 5

NFL: Regional, CBS, 10am - KFMB 8, KCBS 2: Buffalo Bills at New York Giants from MetLife Stadium
NFL: Regional, Fox, 10am - KSWB 5, KTTV 11: San Francisco 49ers at Detroit Lions from Ford Field
Regional, CBS, 1
Regional, doubleheader game, Fox, 1:15 - KSWB 5, KTTV 11: Dallas Cowboys at New England Patriots from Gillette Stadium
Minnesota at Chicago, NBC, 5

Pan Am Games: Events TBA, in Guadalajara, Mexico, ESPN2, 12pm

Soccer: Major League Soccer, CD Chivas USA at Los Angeles, ESPN, 6

Wiremania (Oct 13, 2011)

Radio Wires

Randy Dotinga: Word up! Supremes consider four-letter freedoms.

TV Wires

Hollywood Reporter: Seth MacFarlane writing "Family Guy Movie," talks new "Flintstones," wants to reboot "Star Trek".

3 Steps to Cut Your Cable Bill 90 Percent. The power to watch hundreds of channels is in your hand - but what about the price tag? News flash: You don't have to pay for cable TV anymore. Technology has provided other cheap, easy options to get your favorite shows. Cable companies have a dirty little secret: They're not really needed for TV anymore.

Auto Wires

GM announces Chevy Spark fully electric car. General Motors, maker of the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid, will sell a small totally electric car beginning in 2013, the automaker announced Wednesday.

Wiremania (Oct 12, 2011)

TV Wires

Wired: William Shatner Seeks Major Tom With Album of Space Jams. On his new album Seeking Major Tom, William Shatner sing-talks his way through some of rock `n' roll's most famous space-themed songs.

Sports Wires

Hank Williams Jr. discusses ESPN fiasco on "The View". We are all Hank Williams Jr. At least, according to Hank Williams Jr., we are.

See Hank Jr.'s excerpt from "The View."

Multichannel News: Networks Look To Substitute Fare As NBA Cancels First Two Weeks Of Season. ESPN, TNT, NBA TV, RSNs Look For Alternative Programming

Hollywood Reporter: Baseball, Football Rule Monday Night. Baseball playoffs on Fox and football on ESPN resulted in ratings dips at all the other broadcast networks on Monday night. Why This Matters: CBS' Two And A Half Men fell 6% from last week but still posted the night's top ratings with a 5.8 and 15 million total viewers.

Multichannel: TBS Wins Weekly Ratings Race. Rides Baseball Playoffs Coverage To Its First Primetime, Total Day Win Of 2011

Biz Wires

15 Disastrous Product Launches That Were Quickly Killed

Multichannel News: Netflix Nixes Qwikster Switch. Netflix, in PR crisis mode, quickly killed the plan to split off its DVD-by-mail business into a separate unit, which was to have been called Qwikster, while it will keep the pricing changes that raised the price of streaming-plus-DVD plans as much as 60%

Tech Wires

Introducing Dart, Google's answer to JavaScript

Open Letter to Cox Cable (and other cable systems) (Oct 12, 2011)

I have analog cable with expanded cable service with cable channels such as ESPN, ESPN2, TBS, TNT, and other channels that feature sports. 4SD up until last month featured the San Diego Padres.

For the past several months, the analog versions of the cable channels (which are broadcast in a 4:3 ratio) are showing their sister 16:9 HDTV feeds in letterboxed format, meaning, that in order for the 16:9 picture to fit in a 4:3 frame, the picture has to be shrunk so that viewers of the analog version of the channel would see the full HDTV feed without truncation of the sides of the picture.

The problem with that is it's hard to read some of the graphics on such letterboxed pictures. I can't tell if a number is a 2 or a 3, the letters are squashed so bad they're pixelated beyond recognition, some of the faces are barely recognizable, and all it does is reduce resolution from 480 lines to something like 360 lines.

Many program producers are moving towards producing all of their programming in 16:9 aspect ratio without necessarily feeling compelled to go the extra expense and hassle of making sure their graphics and camera shots are center-cut safe.

The sports produced for TBS, TNT, ESPN, ESPN2, and other channels are produced in 16:9 without any regard to have their sides chopped to fit a 4:3 screen without truncating parts of the screen that happens to have the graphics.

TBS is only the latest in a growing number of networks to begin letterboxing 16:9 content for legacy 4:3 viewers. All the Fox channels have been doing it for a while, ESPN does it as well, and eventually everyone will be doing the same, if they're even providing separate SD feeds at all.

The Fox Sports broadcasts are even worse. Sometimes, they will give the 4:3 viewer all of the center part of the 16:9 picture without the letterboxing, but the graphics to the left are chopped off so that only part of the score is displayed. Very annoying. Fortunately, cable companies are forced to offer us the HDTV (or regular) version of Fox 5 San Diego in clear QAM without the need of a converter box so we can see the entire HDTV the way God intended it to be.

It's not the same for the cable channels. The graphics are plain unreadable, and the resolution suffers immensely. Using the zoom feature on the HDTV set only amplifies the problem, rather than solves it. The letters are just plain unreadable.

Adding a cable converter box costs something like $7 a month, and over time, it adds up to $84 a year, plus an extra $240 a month in added electricity costs just to operate it. This is something I refuse to do.

This brings up a solution. I'm paying for expanded analog cable with the ESPN and Turner networks among others and getting them in analog with a 4:3 ratio. Why can't the cable companies give us paying expanded analog cable subscribers the HDTV versions of the same chanels that we're already paying for in clear QAM?

This is a travesty. Cox Cable, fess up, and make some changes immediately. Free the HDTV versions of the expanded cable channels in clear QAM for real.

Mike Slater's "Substitute" on KFMB-AM (Oct 11, 2011)

Mike Slater of 760 KFMB Talk Radio in San Diego was unable to host his usual morning show on Monday. Luckily, his alter-ego, bizarro-world progressive counterpart "Mark Hayder" was able to fill in!

Mark Hayder hosted the entire show live from the downtown, bathroom-less, neo-hippie tent-city that is Occupy: San Diego. Hayder immersed himself among the 99% - the real America - and talked with former students who run "The People's Library," a table filled with Anarchist literature, Lilly whose occupation is "peaceful human," and Leaf, who managed to stop talking about the evil corporations only long enough to take a sip from his Starbucks double latte.

Hayder also talked with progressive martyrs like "Pirate Jeff" who is on disability AND roller-skates, Frank who is only qualified for - in his own words - "manual labor and grunt work", and of course Ricky, whose goal for the day was to take apart the copper wiring in a television to make a "Nikola Tesla perpetual energy thing". Check it out:

http://media.worldnow.com/kfmbam/podcast/760_audio_clips_5641.mp3

Underneath signs that read "Stay warm, burn the rich!" "Corporations poison food" and "Find something to love", Mike Slater's fill-in host "Mark Hayder" provided the most comprehensive and insightful coverage of the Occupy: Everywhere rally in the country.

Mike Slater can be heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am on 760 KFMB Talk Radio.

Wiremania (Oct 11, 2011)

Radio Wires

USA Today: More than 350 college radio stations - long credited with giving that first break to little-known musicians and offering a voice for idiosyncratic viewpoints - are going to the airwaves today to fight against a steady stream of universities nationwide who have been selling or transferring their FM licenses to non-student operations, typically in response to tighter budgets and a rapidly changing media industry.

Radio Ink: Who were the greatest DJs of the 1960s.

Suit Alleges Woman 'Forced To Listen To Rush Limbaugh'

TV Wires

Variety: Cable Companies Plan More Discount Tiers. excerpt: In the wake of a wave of subscriber losses that cable operators contend are largely driven by the shaky economy, Comcast has quietly expanded a low-cost trial offering in select markets that not only provides fewer channels than basic cable but additional options that group together select channels by programming genre. The package, known as MyTV Choice, began testing in Charleston, S.C. last week, after being deployed in western New England and Seattle over the summer. Read more at the link.

TV Tech: Netflix Drops Plan for Qwikster Spinoff.

Sports Wires

NY Daily News: Hank Williams Jr. to release song blasting ESPN, Fox and Friends after dismissal from MNF. Available at hankjr.com through Wednesday

Multichannel News: TBS Wraps NLDS Coverage With Cable Record 8.4 Million Viewers For Cards-Phils.

Multichannel News: TBS Scores Cable-Best 9.7M Viewers For Division Series With Game 5 Of Tigers-Yanks.

ESPN Radio air Pac-12 Championship. The Pac-12 has partnered with ESPN Radio to broadcast the inaugural Pac-12 Football Championship Game when it's played December 2. Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott says they signed with ESPN because of its broad radio reach and its ability to promote the game. The game will be played on the home field of the team with the best overall conference record.

Misc Wires

13 'Healthy' Foods To Avoid. 1. Fast Food Chicken Caesar Salad. 2. Frozen Chicken and Pasta Dinner. 3. Boxed Rice Pilaf. 4. Fat-Free Cottage Cheese. 5. Regular Jarred Tomato Sauce. 6. Fruit Juice Cocktails. 7. Low-Fat Ice Cream. 8. Fat-Free Salad Dressing. 9. Baked Veggie Chips. 10. Greek Yogurt. 11. Movie Theater Popcorn. 12. Poultry Sausage. 13. Frozen Meatless Indian Dinners.