Worked with Dan at CHUM/CHUM-FM.   Good guy, dependable and consistent.  Sad to hear he's gone.

Back in the day, talking sixties here, spot breaks were limited to two minutes and I think we were allowed 20 minutes of commercials per hour which would be ten breaks for commercials, promos, public service announcements, etc.  We never rolled two records in a row without some sort of announcer input between them, even if it was ten seconds or less or a short station jingle.  We never ran two produced spots by the same voice in any break and never ran competing sponsors in any break.  Nowadays, one commercial is produced and repeated until listeners just tune it out.  Remember Coke and Pepsi ads coming in on 16 inch discs with perhaps 10 different produced spots that were rotated to lessen listener fatigue?   Almost every sponsor had at least five versions for a live read and at least three if they were produced.  Hearing the same ad over and over and over again and six minutes is a definite tune out.  Charlie O'Brien and I had a conversation about his CKLW webcast and I suggested the 2 minute limit because listeners attention spans are so short and they won't put up with long breaks.  Radio keeps shooting itself in the foot. 

The broadcast education industry has turned into just that.  Ask the vast number of people who were teaching broadcasting at the college level why they have quit.  It's just turned into a sausage factory, grinding out "graduates" for mostly non existent jobs.  My classes usually were 40 "students" starting in the 70s.  The screening for acceptance was abysmal, focusing on high school grades, not personality, general knowledge, talent etc.  The job was simply to put bums in seats to collect the per student grants for the college and the tuition fees.  You knew that out of every class you had, you'd be lucky to get two people who actually would end up having a career in broadcasting, rising to the heights where they actually could make a living at it.  Most just thought it a glamorous easy fun rewarding thing to do but ended up being disappointed when they realized and so did prospective employers, that they didn't have the chops.  It's what caused me to stop doing this when you were no longer permitted to fail anyone, even if they did no work and produced no results for given assignments.  Even the award winning and my best radio news friend quit when the bureaucracy and idiotcracy became totally overbearing and time consuming when compared to actual instruction time.  There are fewer and fewer jobs in the business every day, whether it be radio, television or print journalism that continue to be taught simply to bring money into the college system.  Talent, smarts, the ability to communicate and to write brilliant clear copy should be the only qualifiers to enter such programs and to give yourself a chance at succeeding.  One of my jobs was to read the entrance application essays of prospective students, many of whom supposedly graduated high school with honours English.  Atrocious spelling, punctuation, grammar, syntax, improper sentence structure, more like reading a teen's texts to his or her friends.  But the only deal was, get us the 40 paying stu

Very hard to compete with stations that have their transmitters and antenna atop the CN Tower or Commerce Court, both sites far too expensive for an independent operator, just playgrounds for the big boys with infinite funds.  You don't need full power if your antenna is high enough but it's just too cost prohibitive if you're not owned by the multimillion dollar corpse.
 

I asked Iain about Cgrant a few weeks ago with his constant carping about CHUM and the Waters family but never received a reply.  I twigged to the fact he probably was Ziggy re-incarnated when he first showed up on this site.  I hope Radioactive decides to delete his membership again as was done previously. 
 

This has been Sony's problem since the beginning.
They made everything proprietary.
Beta was the best videotape system, far surpassing VHS in technical quality but refusing to license others to manufacture recorders and players until it was already being overshadowed by VHS, it was doomed to fail.
The Elcaset was another disaster and didn't last very long.
Same with the mini-disc.
Only two stations I ever worked at had them and no one liked them.
Computers quickly erased them from use as well.
At one station where I worked, they immediately jumped on the so called "latest" recording technology as it was unveiled.
The basement was a virtual museum of failed recording technology, thousands of dollars invested in stuff that had a useful life of usually less than two years, all of it left rusting in a damp underground room.

 

Thanks for this TV Guy. 
Lots of information that only a few people knew about.
We knew it was a great experiment but it was doomed from the start.
We were given the first demo rides in the DAB demonstration van and when the signal could be picked up, it sounded pretty good.
But going with a band that could not be used in the US was the biggest mistake and not going with the same system that most of the rest of the world was using or going to use, especially Europe and Asia was another major blunder. 
To say that the whole project was mishandled is probably the understatement of the 1990s.

Teksavvy cable internet (using Shaw's cable) currently is 39 bucks a month here in Vancouver. 
For that, I get 30mbps down, 5mbps up and 300gb per month.
You also get unlimited free downloads overnight during a four or five hour window.
I added home phone for another 10 bucks a month, ditching Telus which was charging 34 bucks a month for a home phone line.
I've been a Teksavvy customer for over five years, since they first offered service in BC.
They have real techs to help you with any problem and really go the extra mile for their customers when problems arise which almost have been non-existent.
Any problems when I had DSL were with Telus which is why I recently dumped the DSL in favour of cable.
 

Also worth considering, a small basic laptop capable of running Audacity, free software and a USB mic.  You can record, edit then email your interviews very simply.  This basically is my rig when I'm on the road, except I use a much higher quality mic and a CEntrance Mic Port Pro which converts the mic audio to travel to the computer by a USB cable.  This has been standard procedure for CNN radio and the BBC for quite a few years.
 

I did mornings most of my career and was in the station usually by 4:30am starting the day's news run.
I'd usually be done by ten or noon and I'd go home and sleep for two hours. 
I'd be able to stay up until 10pm so I still could have a life.
Weekends were to sleep in late and party late.
And there were those days in the 70s and 80s that you would often go out weeknights as well and sometimes keep going in after hours joints until it was time to go to work again.
But we were young ones then.
After all these years (55 in the biz,) I still automatically wake up at 3:30 every morning but go right back to sleep again.
Everyone has a different life rhythm so you have to find the solution that works for you.

My problem with all of these "Ask the Experts" type of program and yes, infomercials, is the amount of fraud being perpetrated during the broadcasts.
My only experience with this type of "programming" was at CFRA and CKNW. 
Both stations continued to run infomercials from the US which had already been banned in the states and the perpetrators were heavily fined and banned from the airwaves.
And the "Ask the Experts" programs were heavily stocked with calls from employees and friends of the sponsor, posing as regular listeners asking questions or praising the product or service.  CFRA continued to run commercials and an infomercial for one of those stupid gas saver add on thingies for your car that both the EPA and the Canada Research Council had declared worthless.   Just a couple of examples and I'm sure these fraudulent practices still continue.

You have to understand the CHUM culture.
Mr. Waters put managers in place at his properties whom he thought could do the job, based on his principles.
Before he would ever interfere, something had to really go wrong, usually financially.
That's why some in high positions (not many, though,) could quickly vanish from those jobs.
He let them run their stations and as long as there were no major problems, he didn't interfere.
Some of those people took advantage of the situation and yes, they were cheap.
CFRA comes to mind.
Some of the staff was so vastly underpaid it was criminal.
There were also numerous infractions of the rules of broadcasting which eventually lead to some high end changes before Jimmy sold out the entire company to Bhell, after telling everyone the company never would be sold.

Same here, Doug.
Sad to see that so many friends have left us over the last year.

His spots still run on Vancouver radio, for Vancouver Job Shop.com.
They really stand out amongst the dreck that passes for radio advertising these days.
Two of the most creative radio geniuses now are gone, Orkin and Freberg.

A real broadcast professional doesn't need windscreens or foam balls on microphones.
They know how to breathe and work all types of microphones and you won't hear them breathe, even with massive compression and processing.
And yes, those foam balls and windscreens are disgusting.
At my last few radio gigs, I brought my own microphone to the station and always had my own headphones.