All of us at The Canadian Public would like to wish everyone plenty of health and prosperity in the new year, now that we know the world HASN’T ended on December 21st!
Be advised that the live feeds may not work properly this weekend as we’re moving the broadcast servers to new locations. The Eastern broadcast feed will be kept active for as long as possible, but the Western broadcast feed might become unavailable during the next couple of weeks.
The Web site itself will be unaffected by this move.
No, we’re not selling off the channel. We’re simply selling off a few items of interest such as:
The Sanyo Xacti VPC-TH1 camcorder. Best suited as a doorstop. Pay me $1, the shipping charges, and the taxes, and it’s yours!
The Asus Eee PC 900 netbook computer. Still works, but the Celeron processor kills all hope for any decent performance.
A high definition Canon HV20 HDV tape based camcorder. Still produces a very beautiful picture, but the tapes take too long to process, and they can fail unexpectedly. The camcorder can still be used as a high definition Webcam via Firewire.
The OCLENH Developer Application SDK. A feature-rich, low footprint software development kit for building GUI based desktop applications with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 integrated development environment. Includes the Open Class Library ported over to the Microsoft development platform at no extra charge.
We’ve received an answer from LucasFilms concerning our request to broadcast The Star Wars Holiday Special.
It was rejected.
On a more positive note, the rejection letter was short, very diplomatic, and to the point. In a world where rudeness is becoming more commonplace in the business sector, it’s nice to know there are people out there who still know how to be civil.
The broadcast has been cancelled. We’ll put alternate programming on the air.
The Star Wars Holiday Special was ranked at #3 in “The Five Goofiest Moments Of The Star Wars Mythos”, in the 62nd issue of UK’s Star Wars Magazine.
TV Guide ranked this special at number 11 on their “25 Most Hilarious Holiday TV Moments”, mentioning that it was “unintentionally hilarious”.
TV Guide and TV Land ranked The Star Wars Holiday Special at number 59 on their “Top 100 Unexpected Television Moments” in a five part special that aired from December 5 until December 9 in 2005.
Hated by Christmas special enthusiasts, Star Wars fans, and George Lucas himself, The Star Wars Holiday Special might be the most vilified Christmas special ever broadcast on North American television. It’s a special that so bad, even the author of the highly popular Webcomic XKCD sees it as possibly the worst of the worst in terms of modern entertainment.
And we’re considering showing it every day during the Holiday season starting the week of December 19 without first asking permission from the rights holders!Strike that. We’ll first ask for permission from the rights holders if we can locate them. There’s no need to be hasty, or nasty.
Let’s face it. It’s highly doubtful that this horrendous Christmas special will ever be legitimately released to the general public any time soon. Even the people responsible for its production might deny ever having anything to do with it despite having their names in the credits.
And yet, we can’t deny that this feature actually exists. In fact, it’s vitally important that future generations be made aware of this travesty, otherwise they might produce their own Sci-Fi based Christmas special and achieve the same results! A Star Trek Holiday Special? A Babylon 5 Christmas Special? A Battlestar Galactica New Year’s Cylon Extravaganza? Yikes!
The only science fiction based Christmas specials that seem to work are the ones produced by the current Doctor Who franchise, and it might be best to leave it at that. If any other science fiction series tries to produce their own Christmas special with plenty of indecipherable song and dance and a cast of aging actors, we might as well start holding a competition for the year’s worst Sci-Fi Christmas special!
So what do you think? Should we broadcast The Star Wars Holiday Special as a warning to future generations? Or should we put something else on the air so as not to offend lovers of Christmas, fans of Star Wars, or the original rights holders who will probably never release this horrendous Christmas special in their lifetime?
Should we broadcast "The Star Wars Holiday Special?"
To supplement our income, the owner of this channel does contractual software development work for his old employer. One job involved porting over the source code from the IBM Open Class Library that was included with the long discontinued IBM VisualAge C++ software development platform to the Microsoft Visual Studio software development platform.
Although the converted library is still in beta, it does work! Even under Windows 7!
And very soon, a licensed version of the converted library will be available for purchase.
However, be advised that the old IBM VisualAge C++ package had a nasty habit of breaking many basic coding rules. As a result, your legacy code might need to be adjusted to take into account such essential elements such as function prototypes, external references for global variables, and proper sequencing of class declarations.
In other words, you’ll need to modify your legacy C++ code so that it complies with established C++ coding rules.
Now we’re not suggesting you should create new software using this library, although its GUI scaling capabilities are still pretty forward thinking even to this day. But if you absolutely need to port over some old IBM VisualAge C++ developed code to the Microsoft Visual Studio platform without having to rewrite the entire code from scratch (imagine the bugs), this new library will help ease your porting nightmares as well as make your old code work properly with the latest Windows technologies.
If you’re interested in purchasing a license for this product, please contact us.
The Canadian Public ®
Happy Holidays everyone!
To our friends, our comrades, and our heroes, we salute you and thank you as always for your generosity and your sacrifices.
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