əכedS s¸uəſ

A month ago, I decided in the wee hours of the morn to try to write a script.  One thing led to another and on August 28th, my first film was created.  A minute long (or 10 frames shy of 60 seconds) was all I needed in order to enter the Rogers Television Minute By Minute contest.  It's now voting time and I have 4 competitors.  Voting continues until September 24th and the winner will be announced on October 1.

 

Now, I'm dead serious when I say this.  I honestly want to win this, so that I can get experience editing and directing, which are my focus areas in the New Brunswick Filmmaker's Co-operative Certificate Program.  I have a feeling that the boys (yes, they're all a decade my junior by the looks of them) submitted theirs as a spur of the moment venture without thinking long-term.  This thing is going to be a heck of a lot of work for whoever wins.  It may sound really easy to crank out a 1 minute film but try 40 of them.  That's many long hours, volunteer hours, given to Rogers Television with no financial compensation whatsoever.  I have to wonder if the other contestants thought that far ahead.  Shooting and editing of my 1 minute submission took about 6 hours from start to finish, not including a formatting issue that arose the following day.  I took into consideration set flexibility, actor flexibility and a story arc from episode 1 through 40.

 

I have friends who want to act - volunteering to act without me even asking them to be in the mini-series if I win.  It's an adrenaline rush to direct but so is watching the pieces come together into the final product and thinking, "Hey, there it is, wow, it's going to be on tv!"

 

So, enough typing!  Please vote for me, as many times as you can before the 24th.  Yes, I'm still a computer geek, so of course I hooked up a domain forward to the voting page...

 

 

Thanks!

Jen

I read today's budget.  I wasn't impressed.

 

So the government decided to increase personal income tax for everyone who makes more than $13,750.  Anyone making less than that gets to pay 0.00 for personal income tax and the "piece de resistance", in my opinion, is that the welfare bums get an increase in their cheques of 3% starting in October.  Please, someone, explain to me the logic in giving more money to people on welfare.  Where is the deterrent for them to get themselves off of welfare?  There isn't one.  Why on earth do we want to encourage people to remain firmly latched to the government teat?

 

At least there were a few increases for funding to health care and education but there were some other oddities. $2 million for a veterinary laboratory incinerator?  Did we really need that?  I have a feeling we don't.

$7.9 million for repairs and renovations to the NBCC network is a drop in the bucket.  Fredericton needs a college and there needs to be more seats in the programs people are desperately trying to get into but can't due to long waiting lists. NBCC and UNB can be perfect academic partners if they only tried a bit harder.

$30.6 million for new and existing schools.  I think we all know where that money will end up - in the French schools.  Instead of ensuring our population is literate in one language, apparently it is better to have them barely functional in both languages.  I always find it ironic that our laws say we can't discriminate on things such as religion, gender, age, sexuality and language, yet the government turns around and discriminates against unilingual people all of the time.  Oh, what a country.

$3 million for a psych ward for 22 patients.  That's a lot of money for a handful of people.

$27 million for Saint John for harbour clean-up.  That money should have gone towards paying off the Harbour Bridge.  Who really cares about how clean the harbour is?  People care about paying $1/day to get to/from work every day.

$173.6 million for highways and roads.  Let me guess, a big chunk of that is for the fencing that is a ridiculous attempt at a solution to the annual moose vs car problem.  Lighting the highway would have been much cheaper and would not have disrupted animal migration patterns.  Fences are only going to give people a false sense of security and they'll speed more than they do now.  I've driven Highway 7 at night plenty of times and it's not great at any time of the year, regardless of moose.  Solar panel powered lights would have been an environmentally-efficient solution but feeble-minded people like MacCollum, who was acting like Chicken Little, had tunnel vision.  No, her daughter did not almost die.  She was in the back seat of a car driven by a friend of mine.  My friend almost died, she had a few cuts and scrapes.  I don't recall her ever mentioning his serious injuries, all she wanted to talk about was essentially lying about her daughter.  I'm not surprised though, driving through Welsford, I can almost hear the banjos playing.  Don't judge me, I can say that, I had to go to grade school in that hick village thanks to my parents moving there instead of staying in Saint John where they both grew up.  Honestly, how many places can you talk about where on Christmas Eve, a crazy guy threatens to kill his neighbour with a rifle but the neighbour isn't concerned, doesn't bother calling the RCMP, lets the guy go on his merry way, then the guy who had been drinking, keeps walking down the road with his rifle, nobody cares, then he goes to the gas station where he takes people hostage, sets the place on fire and ends up killing himself?  That just about sums up Welsford.  Drugs, alcohol, rednecks and only a handful of last names, if you know what I mean.

 

 

To my surprise, I got to direct a live television show tonight.  At first, I thought I would only be watching the producer as he did the directing and switching but after about 1 minute of training, consisting of "those are the camera buttons, that's dissolve, that's fade-to-black" that was pretty much it and the headset was handed to me.

 

As I had mentioned before, training is usually a little "safer" when it's not during live television.  Thankfully I didn't screw up anything - in fact, the biggest problem was the graphics computer, which decided to crash seconds before the credits were to roll.  It was resurrected fast enough to get sponsor pages and the copyright on air so it didn't look like too much of a disaster.

 

I'm still not totally confident in how to switch between taped content and the live show but I think I'll end up directing a bit more in the future, so I should be okay.  It certainly requires a lot of attention for the hour and in my opinion, more work than the other positions.

 

I've done them all now.

CG is pretty easy as long as the director/switcher doesn't flip between cameras too quickly.

Camera is tedious due to the 25C-30C heat in the studio and depending on how fidgety guests and the host are - oh and whether or not the director/switcher gives any notice before cutting to that camera live.

Audio is straight-forward and easy to mess up if a person isn't paying attention to cues and the guests' voices.

Phones are probably the most boring task since most of the time there aren't any callers, with the exception being the Santa call-in shows which were utter insanity.

Coca-Cola continued to amaze me with their idiocy today.  It's been a week since I called them about the two salon vouchers so I called them this morning and asked why they hadn't called me back within the 1 to 3 business days as promised.  The girl had no idea, she checked her computer which showed that I had called a week ago but no explanation as to why they didn't call me.  It sure sounded to me like they didn't even bother to call any businesses in Fredericton.  This time she said she'd escalate it to a high priority and that they would call me back within 24 hours.  Why do I not believe them?  Or that if they do call me back, they won't have any business names for me.

 

 

It seems that I can't go out shopping in this city without encountering incompetence.

 

Shoppers Drug Mart: I had approximately 20 items and it's really not that difficult to scan items and put them into bags.  I had 9 $1.00 off coupons for 9 of the items and I handed the cashier the coupons.  He counted them and put them aside.  He scanned everything, gave me my total and I trusted he hadn't screwed up.  Oh, silly me, I really should assume they're going to screw up a simple task.  So then I looked at my receipt.  Sure enough, he hadn't put in the $9 in coupons and when he started to do the refund for that, he counted the coupons, put in $8 and I corrected him that there were 9.  He argued that there were only 8, so I asked for the stack of coupons then counted them in front of him to show him there were 9.  He has 10 fingers, he really should be able to count to 9, with a little room to spare.  As he's doing that, I looked at my receipt again and noticed he had scanned in 3 bags of Tostito's instead of 2, which I brought to his attention so he started to do that refund as well when I noticed that the price of the Tostito's wasn't right either, they were on sale for $2.49 but still in the computer as $3.29 so he then had to fix that as well.  I feel sorry for the people behind me but geez, we're not talking about rocket science here.  If there hadn't been several people behind me, I would have mentioned the pricing guarantee which should have given me one bag of Tostito's for free because of the pricing error but at that point I just wanted to be out of there.

 

Canadian Tire: I have rainchecks from November.  They haven't called me and they have no idea when they're getting the items in stock.  What a way to run a business.  You'd think that stock ordering would be a high priority.

 

Wal-Mart: I hate greeters.  They may as well rename greeters to be "Shoplifter Accusers" because that's essentially what they're doing by demanding to look at your receipt as you leave the store and putting green stickers on every bag as you enter the store.  I ignore them now.  I'm actually waiting for the day one of the greeters touches my arm to try to stop me.  They'll be charged with assault or at the very least I'll demand the greeter lose his/her job - they can go back to the old folk's home where they belong.

 

Mike's Bakery: If I ran my own business and I had a product that sold so well that I always sold out of it quickly and had more customers coming in to ask for it all the time, I'd be able to figure out the obvious.  Make more of said item and make more money.  Apparently that whole "Supply and Demand" concept is beyond the intellectual capacity of the owner of Mike's Bakery.  Cinnamon bread, that's the popular product.  Somehow I lucked out and got a loaf today.

 

East Side Mario's:  Nothing like eating Funnel Cake and chomping into a greasy old french fry with ice cream.  It took about 6 weeks to get a response from management but the situation has been fixed, they've changed their cooking procedures so it cannot happen again.  I'm amazed.  The problem should have been handled by the waitress at the time.

 

Blockbuster:  They have the "no late fees" thing and they'll call you to inform you of the deadline before they charge the restocking fee but the computers still charge you even if you bring the movie back on that date before midnight.  I brought that to their attention but their illogical response was that I should just bring it back earlier.  Uh, no, they should fix their voicemail system.

 

Those are all of the ones I can think of at the moment :)

 

This past weekend marks my last stint volunteering for cable television sports coverage.  I'll still volunteer for nightly live television talk shows where I can probably learn a bit more in a controlled predictable environment rather than the chaos of sports.  Before this week, the multi-billion dollar company would extend a small token of appreciation with a meal in exchange for a volunteer's 6 to 8 hours of time - some nights where a person wouldn't get home until 1-2am.  A quick calculation of a $20 meal in exchange for 8 hours, shows that a person would get an equivalent value of about 1/3 of minimum wage.  Volunteers aren't expecting cold hard cash but a little appreciation goes a long way.  It doesn't take much, it's the principle of the matter, not the actual meal.  There wasn't even a Christmas party for volunteers.  From a psychological perspective, social time provides time for the crew to bond, which helps people work together better for a higher quality product and if people enjoy each other's company, they're also more apt to volunteer more personal time in the future.

 

I'll miss the guys on that crew, they're good guys and fun to be around and share laughs with, but balancing that with the feeling of a massive company's upper management not appreciating their volunteers, the scales were tipped.

 

Things might change, I might start doing them again but until further notice, I'm done with the sporting events.  If I were in a position to do something about it, I'd grab the phone book and start calling businesses asking for sponsors.  Get Boston Pizza or The Hilltop or The Diplomat as sponsors, throw their logo up before the credits or while going to commercial break and get the commentators to plug them a few times.  Surely, in exchange for that publicity, the volunteer crew could get a free meal.  In that scenario, everybody wins - the multi-billion dollar company doesn't have to shell out a penny to thank the volunteers, the volunteers feel appreciated and will continue to give their time and the restaurant gets some cheap advertising and likely more business from the volunteers from alcohol purchases with those meals and future visits.  I know it's already done for Mark's Work Wearhouse in exchange for clothing for paid hosts and it has been done for McAllister Place but I don't know who benefitted from that - the Saint John Sea Dogs (Aliant, Alpine and Irving) or the multi-billion dollar company.

It's entertaining when people call something a charity that clearly isn't one.  There's a big difference between charity and hobby.  Charities are things like the Food Bank, the Canadian Cancer Society and the SPCA.  Charities are not snowmobile associations and arts groups.  The government gave out $450,000 to two groups recently and I'm really saddened by that.  That money could have been better spent in so many other ways.  Literacy programs are a good example.  The funding has been cut and cut and cut.  Improving a person's literacy will help that person better their life and likely find a better job, make more money and contribute more to the tax base and have more disposable income which would help other businesses in the community.  I fail to see how a quarter million dollars to some loudmouthed snowmobilers is going to help the economy.

 

How did this little rant get triggered today you might be wondering?  I bought some items from Radio Price Club and was quickly chastised by the seller for buying the items at the sale price rather than purchasing directly from the seller at the regular price.  I'm still trying to figure out that logic.

 

Coca-Cola doesn't know how to read a map.  I sent away for an offer to get $25 salon gift certificates back in December.  They finally arrived the other day along with a list of participating salons and a note saying that if there was no salon within 50km of me, to call Coca-Cola and inform them of the problem.  Guess where the 2 salons were?  Moncton... a grand total of 183km away from me.  The girl told me they'd call around to try to find one locally for me.  I asked why that wasn't done first, why was I told when I called in December to check prior to sending away that local businesses were participating.  She didn't answer.  She asked me if I had any suggestions of places they could call and ask.  I guess common sense doesn't pop up much in that office.  At this point, I'd be fine if they just sent me $50 in Coca-Cola gift certificates to replace the $50 in salon vouchers that I can't redeem without driving 2 hours.

 

More stupidity.  I was at the Superstore the other night and the cashier had to ask me what the tax on $4 was.  I nearly cried.

 

Yesterday I posted that things in life seem to happen in three's and after my mother's and sister's friends dying in the past month, I had a feeling someone in my life would be affected.  No, nobody has died but I did hear something today that could end up that way.  According to rumours, my neighbour has cancer.  I don't know if it's true, but I do know she's off work for 6 months and I haven't seen her car out of our shared driveway in two weeks.  It's not like we hang out or anything but we have lived a wall apart for over three years so I do care what happens to her.

 

I've been a prize streak this week.  Since Friday night, I won a donair, 3 movie rentals, 2 game rentals and a $20 restaurant gift certificate.  I bought one of the special millionaire lottery tickets that will be drawn on the 28th.  Oh, it would be so nice to win.  I'm eerily lucky at winning things but that luck hasn't moved onto lottery tickets.

 

Now I'm going to say something that's only intended for a handful of people.  Four to be exact.  I'll give some initials if you're not sure I'm talking to you (J, L, I, C) and according to MSN Messenger, each of you still has me on your contact list and you're all still on mine.  If you're reading this right what exactly is going on -  are you mad at me or do you think I'm mad at you about something?  If you dislike me so much to not even say "Hello!" in a year, why am I still on your list?