All posts by Raymond Tomlin

About Raymond Tomlin

Raymond Tomlin is a veteran journalist and educator who has written frequently on the political realm — municipal, provincial and federal — as well as on cinema, mainstream popular culture, the arts, and technology.

Vancouver Sun Civic Affairs Reporter Frances Bula Resigns Her Post

BC Politics, Media, Vancouver

FRANCES BULA

Frances Bula, the Vancouver Sun civic affairs reporter since 1994, abruptly announced her resignation from the newspaper today.
Dear all of my blog-readers,
This will be my last post on this Vancouver Sun blog, as I have resigned from the paper.
As Vancouver-based blogger Rob Cottingham states in his farewell tribute to Ms. Bula today, “Her blog post makes it clear that she thoroughly understands blogging – which makes losing her voice at the Sun doubly painful.” Another Vancouver blogger, Bill Tieleman, weighs in on Ms. Bula’s departure from the Sun, on Sean Holman’s Public Eye Online, writing …

This is indeed bad news for all of us who either report on municipal politics, follow them or are active in local government.
Frances Bula has done an outstanding job for many years and amazingly maintained her sense of humour despite sitting through endless rounds of pointless Vancouver city council meetings and much more.
Good luck to Frances wherever she goes – she will have many fans who will follow.


The Pivot Legal Society’s David Eby writes on his blog, “For her to leave the Sun is, well … shocking.”
In what is shaping up to be the most important Vancouver civic election in almost a half century, Ms. Bula’s resignation from the Sun, and rumoured movement to Vancouver Magazine — with its three month advance deadline, and consequent lack of reportorial immediacy — represents the loss of a critical voice, at a critical juncture, on Vancouver’s civic scene.
Unless Ms. Bula commences with her new blog (which she promises) by early autumn, Vancouver citizens will find them far less informed on the machinations of the fall civic election than otherwise would be the case.
We are all the lesser for Ms. Bula’s departure from the daily journalistic rigours of reporting on the often tempestuous Vancouver civic scene.

Mad Men: The Best New Show of the Summer TV Season

Television

MAD MEN

Broadcast time in Canada, Season One of Mad Men: Sundays, at 10 p.m., on CTV

One of the great delights that VanRamblings has experienced with our new Telus HDTV system occurs each Sunday evening at 10 p.m. when we tune into AMC / CTV’s ground-breaking Mad Men television series, an odds on favourite to pick up a whack of Emmy’s come September 21 on ABC, and most assuredly the best show of the otherwise woeful summer TV season.
Tracking the machinations within a swingin’ 60s ad agency, “when guys wore narrow-lapelled suits and guzzled bourbon”, Mad Men emerges as outstanding period television drama (and far superior to its period drama competition, the pandering 70s CBS summer drama, Swingtown).
Mad Men excels because of its universally superior and eminently identifiable performances, an unusually sophisticated storytelling style rarely found on broadcast television, a wonderful evocation of time and place, as well as its arresting visual style (even more appealing in HD). As Tim Goodman writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mad Men emerges as “an adult drama of introspection.” One could hardly wish for more this summer TV season.

Telus HDTV: 175 Channels and (Almost) Nothin’ On

Television, Web & Tech
TELUS HDTV

Here it is summer, the days are warm and the sun shines, and what has VanRamblings all excited? HDTV. That’s right, High Definition Television.

Yes, in the sweltering days of summer, VanRamblings has signed on to the Telus HDTV package, replete with 57 channels and nothin’ on (well, actually, there are more like 175 channels, and nothing to watch). Be that as it may, we’re still pleased that we switched to Telus TV.

And why might that be? Because we’ve saved money on our home phone, Internet and TV package — with more goodies than we had before — over what we’d been paying previously. Here are the Telus TV packages …


TELUS TV BUNDLES

Being cheap, VanRamblings went for package number 1, including …

  • Telephone: Telus IP phone with crystal clear reception; call waiting and call display (including call display on the TV when someone phones); 200 minutes of long distance free, and 7¢ a minute after that
  • Telus high speed enhanced, which doubles the speed of downloads, and makes surfing perceptibly quicker
  • Telus HDTV, with the essentials, and two theme packs. There’s an additional $15 charge for HDTV.

 

Total cost of the package: $95.95 + $15 = $110.95, plus tax.

Telus Optik TV Channel Guide, June 8, 2011

Well, hold on a minute. Things aren’t quite what they seem at first glance. There were some hiccups that occurred on the way to achieving HDTV bliss.

First off, according to the somewhat confused folks who initially answered the phone at Telus TV in late June, if you want almost all of the HDTV channels available in Canada (the few of those that are currently offered), as well as most of the U.S. networks that are broadcasting in HDTV, we were told, latterly, that you have to sign up for theme packs that include those channels. HDTV for those channels is not automatic. Well, if you have a look at the Telus HDTV page all of the HDTV theme packs come in at $15. Which is where Telus
gets its $15 HDTV subscriber "come on" from.

But the Telus TV folks told VanRamblings that subscribers have to subscribe, at a cost of $6 for each theme pack, to the conventional digital theme packs that include those HDTV channels. And pay $15 more to watch those channels in HD. Confusing. Misleading. And off-putting.

So, if you want the Discovery Channel, the Time Choice channels, Movie Central HD, TSN and Sportsnet HD (which broadcast out of Toronto), you’ll end up paying another $24, plus another $15 for those channels in HD! Telus HDTV isn’t quite what it seems, then. Not good. We were not happy.

On top of that, Global TV Vancouver HD is not (currently) available on Telus HDTV, although it is available to Shaw and Bell satellite subscribers.

Locally, only CBC broadcasts the local news in HD. Global news programmes may go HD in the autumn, BCTV’s engineer told VanRamblings; hopefully Telus will have initialed a broadcast agreement with GlobalBC by then. CTV Vancouver broadcasts most American programming in HD, but not their news programmes. CTV Vancouver promises full HD by 2010, in time for the Olympics, which will likely mean sometime towards the end of next year.

Telus also does not currently offer a PVR, as Shaw does, so subscribers cannot record HDTV programming for viewing later.

Shaw, if you indicate that you’re leaving them for Telus will offer you a bundle package, including Shaw High Speed and IP Home phone with unlimited long distance in North America, for $95, plus $29 more for the HDTV package. But VanRamblings did not want to move to Shaw at this point, although we were most recently on Shaw’s digital TV package.

VanRamblings called Telus TV to express concern about their confusing and misleading advertising, and commitments not met, and was forwarded to Telus’ Loyalty and Retention division (where we found some fine folks).

Telus finally stepped up to the plate, and during the course of a quite pleasant discussion about what we had been promised at the time we signed up for Telus TV in May, not to mention the information that appears on their website, we arrived at a joint agreement which offered VanRamblings: 3 months of Telus TV (including HDTV) for free — so VanRamblings won’t begin paying for TV til October — with an additional $144 in credit on VanRamblings’ Telus account, for a total saving of $330.

Beginning October 1st, VanRamblings will pay $136, plus tax, each month, for the phone (with call display and call waiting, plus 200 minutes of long distance, monthly, in North America), high speed enhanced Internet, and the essentials TV package, plus 5 theme packs. VanRamblings will receive almost all of the HDTV channels available in Canada with this agreement.

If VanRamblings deducts the $144 credit offered by Telus, as well as the $186 three month saving on the TV / HDTV that was agreed to by the Loyalty and Retention division, VanRamblings’ monthly HDTV / telephone / Internet package, in reality, will come to only $108.50 per month.

VanRamblings can live with that. Cheaper than Shaw, with a decent service.

Come fall, though, when we switch to the five theme packs from the full-meal deal that VanRamblings is receiving for the next three months for free, we expect trouble with Telus (not to mention, we’re not sure that we want five theme packs).

So far Telus has not been great at keeping their word, or being consistent from Telus salesperson to Telus salesperson as to what Telus offers respecting HDTV, and how much that will cost a subscriber. Come late September, chances are that we’ll end up writing more about Telus TV and what shenanigans, if any, Telus may be up to at that time. Stay tuned.