At home (Downtown Vancouver), I subscribe to Novus Entertainment’s basic cable service which in my mind, is a mixed bag. Customer service and technical support is a bit of a drag and they’re a bit more expensive than SHAW (especially given SHAW’s latest promotions) but their Internet speeds are unsurpassed – better than Telus and SHAW, hands down and that portion of the service is cheap.

The other day, while trying to figure out where the HD channels on my TV came from (thinking that I was receiving ATSC over-the-air digital programming coming from Mount Seymour), I unplugged the cable from the TV and momentarily lost service.

So what’s the deal? In the end, after some experimentation and long channel scans and some handy work with the help of Peter Near (HERE), I was able to get free SD and HD content for a few channels via ClearQAM from my Novus cable feed without a digital cable box. Here’s the list – happy HDing:

QAM 112-2 or 112.2 – Global BC HD – CHAN – Analog 11
QAM 123-121 or 123.121 – KVOS SD – KVOS – Analog 12
QAM 126-4 or 126.4 – KSTW SD – KSTW – Analog 14
QAM 126-5 or 126.5 – CityTV SD – CKVU – Analog 13
QAM 126-5 or 126.5 – KING DT – NBC Affiliate
QAM 126-8 or 126.8 – CBS SD – KIRO – Analog 15
QAM 127-11 or 127.11 – CBC French SD – CBUFT – Analog 7
QAM 127-12 or 127.12 – OMNI SD – CHNM – Analog 8

All of the above appear to be modulated with QAM256.

There’s also music channels 84-12, 84-17, 84-18 and 84-32.

For further reading check out an old thread on the topic HERE, Peter Near’s blog post on enabling ATSC and QAM (you still need a QAM capable tuner) HERE and an FAQ HERE.

It’s no secret – twitter has taken the world by storm – major brands have embraced twitter as an opportunity to promote their wares one 140 character ‘tweet’ at a time. Being somewhat of a tech guru, it’s interesting to see that sometimes twitter isn’t the most elegant tool and, with a little work from their development team, it could become much more.

Keith Ferrazzi, author of  “never eat alone” and “who’s got your back” cites one of his mentors in the latter, defining what elegant means: “Elegance is putting the least amount of energy for the greatest return! What could you relax and perhaps do better?” – via twitter.

So what about elegance? Well if you look at major brands (well, all brands) you’ll see sometimes that the brands themselves have multiple twitter accounts for different reasons. Starbucks has their standard twitter account but then they have the StarbucksLive account to convey up to the minute updates of Bumbershoot.

One opportunity I see with twitter, being a web service means that the limitations just don’t stop at twitter.com/username. Imagine sub-usernames and the opportunities they could create for both brands and the revenue they could create for individual users. Example… My name is Raj Taneja. The twitter username “raj” is taken but if twitter would allow sub-usernames, I could negotiate with the owner of “raj” (maybe some cash involved) for the sub-username “taneja” so ideally, twitter.com/raj/taneja could come into existence. Starbucks wouldn’t have to own both the Starbucks and StarbucksLive accounts anymore, live could reside under the main Starbucks account as twitter.com/starbucks/live and that could definitely be elegant.

On that thought, there could be a bunch of options for aggregating statuses upwards etc. but that’s for the future.

Twitter. Thoughts?

Actually, well, more like iDTGV hates us and by us, I mean Canadians.

For those that don’t know, iDTGV (not affiliated with TGV) is a train service in France that I keep calling iDTVG for some reason. Seriously, though, iDTGV is an interesting train service because it caters to my demographic – you know, the one that doesn’t appreciate screaming freaking kids running amok while you’re trying to enjoy some quiet time, a baguette and maybe a bottle of wine en route to Nice from Paris. They have train cars that cater to a number of needs – iDzen for the traveller who may want to chill out or sleep, iDzap which has a jovial and engaging atmosphere, a bar that feels more like a real bar / cafe and iDNiGHT which is the overnight dance party train with DJ and liquor service.

Pretty cool huh?

Sadly, on a recent trip to France, I wasn’t able to actually experience iDTGV. You see, despite booking some reasonable tickets online and being assured everything is copasetic, hours later, the system would tell me that my credit card has been refused. After what seemed like hours on the phone to my credit card company, they noted that no authorization was attempted, so I was like WTF?!

After trying to reach the company, pacing around, trying every credit card in my arsenal, losing my reservation and the likes, I took it upon myself to visit a train station that purports to have an iDTGV booth. Guess what…. it was a freaking Internet kiosk with no people in sight! After making several enquiries, I was told that in most cases, there are no iDTGV staff at train stations except to manage departures. GREAT!

BTW – while I was out on my escapade, and thanks to SFR’s 3G+ internet service, I received the following reply from iDTGV:

From: Service Clients iDTGV [mailto:reclamation@idtgv.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 06, 2009 5:51 AM
To: Rajesh Taneja
Subject: <Ref3688321> Question sur le paiement

Dear Sir Taneja,

We acknowledge receipt of your message on the payment of your order.

Please note that for security reasons you can only pay by credit card French, European or American.

We remain at your disposal for any additional information you consider useful.

Best regards
Nadège
Service Clients
Une question sur iDTGV ? Consultez la rubrique « Besoin d’aide » de notre site !
www.idtgv.com
Du lundi au vendredi
de 09H00 à 18h00
(sauf jours fériés)

<rant>So what? In France, Canadians are chopped liver? What about Vimy Ridge, Juno Beach, Operation Overlord and the Battle of Normandy? Haven’t we paid our dues? If it weren’t for the Canadians’ presence in France, I suspect that Nadège might’ve been Wilhelm and French would be an elective in secondary school.</rant>

After the whole excercise, we wound up at the SNCF booth and booked to be on a TGV train to Cannes the following day, screaming children in tow *sigh*.