There are often problems when you switch servers. The most annoying one so far occurred in the wee hours of the morning when the network adapter decided to “forget” that it was supposed to be listening to the IP address, so my blog “disappeared” for a little while today. That problem has been resolved (no pun intended!), so it shouldn’t happen again.

I hope.

The latest batch of reality shows includes a number that are based on businesses, which I tend to find more interesting than the look-how-amazing-I-am-and-you’re-not reality shows that are out there.

Here’s my take on some of the reality shows that are on the air right now.

Pawn Stars (History TV)

Pawn shops have been around for thousands of years. Basically, if you need some cash, you can take something you own to a pawnbroker, say a watch, and borrow against its value. The loans have short terms and if you don’t pay it off when they’re due the pawnbroker will sell whatever you brought in. During the 1950s, pawning was the leading form of consumer credit in the US. Even today, it remains one way for people to obtain cash by borrowing against something they own. Many pawn shops will also outright buy items. If you sell something to a pawnbroker, you shouldn’t expect to receive what you’d have to pay for it. Pawnbrokers make their money by buying low and selling high.

History TV’s Pawn Stars follows the people in the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas, Nevada. Owned by the Harrison family, it’s a family-run business with three generations in the shop: Richard (grandfather), Rich (father) and Corey (son). The show follows a number of transactions every episode from when the seller walks in with the item to when the deal is made (or not). Along the way we learn a bit about the items being sold and the negotiations that ensue. Of course, we also see the back and forth that goes on between the Harrisons and the other people that work in the store.

I like this show. It’s well-produced, has more to it than just "hey, I want to sell this ring" and it doesn’t make you want to scream at your television (unlike other shows in this list).

Ice Pilots NWT (History TV)

Canada is big and there’s a lot of it up north where there aren’t a lot of people living. Consequently, there aren’t a lot of roads, so airplanes are the way you get from A to B. Based in Yellowknife, Buffalo Airways has been serving the north for the last 40 years.

Ice Pilots NWT looks at life at Buffalo, from the rampie who wants to be a pilot to life in the cockpit and everything in between. We follow the pilots as they fly into a remote community and the rampies as they try to work their way up the food chain to being able to fly. And because their fleet of aircraft consists of a lot of WW II vintage aircraft like DC-3s, DC-4s and C-46s, things occasionally get exciting when one of these workhorses encounters a problem.

I really like this show. Like other shows produced by History TV, this one is very well-produced. And it seems to have all the elements of the magic formula: the human aspect, the business aspect and a certain "wow" factor in the because of the flying.

Cake Boss (TLC)

In a universe the size of the one we’re in, everyone likes cake. (Anyone you might happen to meet who doesn’t like cake is simply a statistical anomaly and can safely be ignored.) Cake Boss follows Buddy Valastro and his family at the family business, Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, NJ.

Buddy and his team produce incredible custom cakes for weddings, anniversaries and parties. Starting with a consultation session with the clients, the show follows the evolution of the cakes through to their delivery. Along the way we see how they’re created and the talented work of all the people working in the kitchen at Carlo’s Bakery.

Of course, we also get to see the antics that go on. (Pity the delivery boy because more than one has been covered in flower, fruit filling and what not for their ineptitude, but all in good spirit.)

I like this show. Apart from seeing how they create these incredible cakes, we get to know the people at the bakery. The show is well produced and doesn’t have the hostility that you’ll find on some other reality shows based on family businesses. And there’s cake. (It’s too bad that the bakery is in New Jersey because I’d probably be a frequent customer if it was here in Ottawa.)

Operation Repo (truTV)

People who borrow money to buy cars, trucks, and airplanes make regular payments to service their loans. If they start missing payments, the lender is eventually going to repossess their vehicle so as to minimize their risk. This is where the repoman comes into the picture.

They are tasked with the actual repossession of the vehicle. And since most owners are not actually on-board with the whole we’re-taking-your-vehicle-back-now plan, things can become rather heated when the owners and repomen come face to face. This is where Operation Repo comes into the picture.

Operation Repo follows a team of “highly-trained professionals from California’s San Fernando Valley” as they do their thing. Some of them are related to each other, while others appear to be “friends”. A typical segment on the show starts either in the office or in the truck on the way to the vehicle being repossessed. There’s a quick review of the vehicle they’re after, by which point they’ve arrived so they start hooking up the vehicle to their tow truck. It’s at about this point that the owner of the vehicle shows up and almost invariably loses it. After much yelling and occasionally some low-grade aggression from both sides, the team drives off with the vehicle.

Interspersed are short segments with the various members of the talking to the camera, sometimes about the repo they just finished, but often whinging about the other people on their team.

I do not like this show. In fact, of the shows I checked out, this is at the bottom of the list of shows I’m likely to watch again. The show is more or less random repos strung together. Because they don’t know anything about the owners of the vehicles they’re repossessing, there’s no opportunities for the human aspect of the story as there is on Dog the Bounty Hunter. You don’t feel any sort of connection to the team members and may actually find yourself siding with the owners on principle, particularly if it’s a repo that Matt Burch (quite possibly a certifiable sociopath who seems to get off on the aggression) is working on.

Suffice it to say, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll watch this show again.

Parking Wars (A&E)

Once you’ve watched a couple of episodes of Parking Wars, you’ll never park illegally again. Especially in Philadelphia.

The show follows employees of the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) as they go about enforcing the parking laws in Philadelphia. In the third season, they started featuring Detroit’s Municipal Parking Department, too. A typical show has segments on ticketing, booting (what happens when you don’t pay your tickets), towing and the impound lot. They follow a lot of different employees from freshly-minted PPA employees still cutting their teeth issuing tickets to veteran PPA booters like Garfield, as they do their jobs.

I like this show. The producers have clearly done a lot of thinking about how best to portray the people who are the bane of drivers everywhere. You get to see the front-line people as they walk their beat, issuing tickets and talking to drivers and the people in their neighbourhoods. The impound lot segment follows the drivers as they go through the process of retrieving their cars from both sides of the plexiglass window. By the end of the show, you have a good idea of what makes the PPA people tick and that they take pride in their jobs.

Dog the Bounty Hunter (A&E)

Often when people are arrested and go to jail, they’re able to bail themselves out with the understanding that they’ll show up in court at the appointed time. When they don’t have enough money for the bail, they’ll go to a bail bondsman who will loan them the money. If they fail to appear in court when they’re supposed to the judge will issue a warrant for their arrest. Usually the bondsman will be able to sort things out, but when they can’t find the wanted person they may turn to a bounty hunter to get their man (or woman). Enter Duane “Dog” Chapman and his family.

Dog Chapman is probably the most famous bounty hunter in the world (well, after Boba Fett, of course). And unlike other bounty hunters I’ve heard about, he’s not a complete asshat. He actually cares about the people he is returning to jail and tries to set them back on the straight and narrow. Based in Hawaii (and occasionally Colorado), the show usually follows one chase, though sometimes they squeeze two into an episode. A chase sequence consists of some background of the person they’re after, usually some sort of attempt to contact them or their cosigners by phone and then the actual hunt itself. When they eventually capture the person, one of the Chapmans, usually Dog but sometimes his wife Beth or one of the others, will talk to the person on the way to the jail to try and help them get back on the right path in life.

I like this show. It’s been on for a few years now, so the production is quite refined and they’ve got that magic formula that I talked about in Ice Pilots NWT. Not only does the show look at capturing people who have missed their court appearance or jumped bond, but it looks at the Chapman’s family life, too, and the outreach work they do.

So, no one would really tattoo something like a big red maple leaf, a bunch of stars or …. Oh, wait… there was that girl who had a bunch of stars tattooed on her face a few months ago.

Ok, but no one in their right mind would have fake glasses tattooed on their face, right? And they definitely wouldn’t upload a video of it to YouTube, right?

Whoops… wrong again…

Pirate radio station antenna being dismantled (Kenneth Jackson/Ottawa Sun)

The Ottawa Sun just posted a story that after two cease-and-desist orders the RCMP and Industry Canada showed up at the Saadé International Hotel at 11:45 this morning where Jayhaed Saadé has his illegal radio station set up.

Apparently, Saadé Junior is still acting like a spoiled brat and not cooperating with the authorities because he has apparently hidden some of the equipment and isn’t telling anyone where it is, even his father. And he’s not taking it very well, either:

Jayhaed was mad, yelling at the police and was crying at one point, [Georges Saadé] said.

Tracking down the hidden equipment shouldn’t be that difficult because everything will have to be connected via cables. If the cables are hidden, then I imagine there could be some collatoral damage.

According to the story, Georges Saadé (the father) was told there wouldn’t be any charges, just that Industry Canada wants all of the equipment. That is incredibly generous of Industry Canada, who are probably considering the fact that the equipment they’re confiscating is worth about $80000 as punishment enough.

So, it sounds like the plug is finally being pulled. Hopefully, Saadé Junior will learn from this experience and realize that he’s subject to the same rules as everyone else.

Update: The Ottawa Citizen has a story on it, too.

A tip o’ the hat to one of the participants in the Digital Home forums who posted a link to the Ottawa Sun story.

2009 was a busy year for me on a number of different fronts.

Blogging

According to my calculations, I posted 116 entries to my blog in 2009.

The Great OC Transpo Bus Strike provided almost limitless things to write about and generated a lot of traffic for my blog.  I almost had a bunch of buttons with my anti-ATU logo made so that I could hand them out to people. Fortunately, the union more or less saw the light and returned to work just before they were legislated back by Parliament.

I wrote about dragon boating, chasing weather balloons (and here), Rogers’ decision to remove WPBS from their lineup and their subsequent decision to not remove it and celebrity deaths. Climbing, photography and the weather also featured among the things I wrote about.

The year ended with a couple of entries about the pirate radio station run by Jayhaed Saadé, a fourteen-year old spoiled brat in Greely. After being presented with not one, but two, cease-and-desist orders from Industry Canada, he pulled the plug on his illegal radio station, put the equipment into “third party storage” and posted an apology on his website. However, within a few days, he was back on the air and the apology was removed from his site. He’s back in the news as a result of being back on the air, but the media coverage is not as flattering and fellow amateur radio bloggers Bob and Darin have both written about him. (Bob is even quoted in the Ottawa Citizen on this matter.) Sooner or later, Industry Canada is going to confiscate the $80,000 worth of equipment and probably levy some pretty stiff fines, too.

Travel

When I think about the travelling I did in 2009, I find myself thinking about the trips I took for work. I went to Montreal in February for a couple of days to observe focus group testing and then headed straight to Toronto for the weekend to visit my relatives. During the summer, I headed up to the cottage a few times. October saw work take me to Sturgeon Falls, Sherbrooke, Halifax and Winnipeg. The first two were just before and after Thanksgiving, while the last two were in the same week. I was able to head to Halifax a couple of days early and had a great time visiting Peggy’s Cove while I was there. In early November, I ended up in northern New York state while chasing an amateur radio weather balloon. The last trip of the year was to Mississauga for Christmas with my relatives.

Work

It was a busy year at work, too. My first survey report was release in February and I had a couple of other articles published, too. I also did a fair bit of travel, with the five trips I mentioned above. Most of the trips were to monitor telephone interviews for my survey – I was the person who was “monitoring this call for quality purposes”. (It’s not quite as creepy as it sounds.)

Play

But 2009 wasn’t all work (even though it felt like that at times), I had some fun, too. I steered the Singapore Slings at three dragonboat festivals last summer and I’m looking forward to the upcoming season. I went climbing at the climbing gym about once a week and went climbing in the Gatineaus a few times, too.

I logged 55 geocaches in 2009 and went to two Go And Get ‘Em events. I hid my first geocache in about 3 years for the fall GAG.

April saw me replace my faithful 2002 Tracker with a 2009 Hyundai Santa Fe. Up to then, I had been a dyed-in-the-wool GM owner, but with all the chaos in the North American auto industry, and the fact that the GM vehicle in the same class just didn’t compare, led me to stray from the flock and look at Hyundai. I don’t think I’ll be back any time soon.

ARRL Field Day 2009 was held at the end of June and the Manotick Amateur Radio Group set up a station at Long Island Marine. I headed down on Friday and operated one of the radios for most of the weekend. The weather was great and a good time was had by all.

I went to a couple of days of the Bluesfest last summer and saw KISS in concert for the first time. Though I wouldn’t classify myself as a die-hard KISS fan, I have to admit that the show was pretty impressive. I even posted a few pictures online, too.

Speaking of music, I also took part in Ring To The World, a biennial handbell festival that was held at Carleton University in June. I had the privilege of playing some amazing music conducted by some top-notch conductors, who just happened to have composed the pieces we were playing. Lots of fun and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Looking ahead to 2010

There are lots of things I’d like to do in 2010. I’ve already committed to steering for the Singapore Slings, which can’t come soon enough. Climbing in the Gatineaus (and elsewhere) more often is definitely on the list. It would be nice to do a little more geocaching. I got out golfing quite a few times last summer and I recently got a new set of hybrid irons, so I’m really looking forward to get out more often in the upcoming year.

I’ve been wanting to visit my friends Rob and Yuki in the UK for a couple of years now. There’s a geocaching mega-event being held in Scotland at the end of July, so I might just combine the two and visit them in Cambridge before going to the mega-event. Time will tell…

So, what are you looking forward to in 2010?

According to the results of the question on the Wii Everybody Votes Channel, only 32.1% of Canadian Wii users said they could, while 67.9% said they couldn’t, which surprised me because I don’t think it’s that difficult.

Question: Can you recite the alphabet backward?

National prediction accuracy: 71.5%

I didn’t hear his last broadcast, but people in the Digital Home forum said that someone could be heard in the background telling him to turn it off. Whether it was his father or someone from Industry Canada is unknown. He apparently is confident that his application for a broadcast license will be granted, something that most of the posters in the forum think is highly unlikely.

One of his parting comments was something to the effect that when he’s back he’ll have “new equipment”. Does this mean that the equipment he’s been using has been confiscated for good? Hopefully this is exactly what it means because if it were left there, the temptation to turn it back on would probably be too great for him to resist.

And he’s posted the following on his pirate station’s website:

I wish to apologize to the Canadian Radio Television Commission for broadcasting on radio waves 91.9 fm without proper permission and license. At their request, I have voluntarily shut down and will remain so until I can properly obtained their permission to broadcast.

I have disconnected my transmitter and excitor and have put it into third party storage until I can legally operate again. I have hired a broadcast consultant to work with me so that I can get back on the air with the approval of the CRTC.

Even though I am 14 years old and have had a life long passion – a life calling as it were – to be in the radio broadcast industry, I was in the wrong and should not have broadcasted without proper legal permission from the CRTC – our federal government commission that regulates the radio / TV airwaves for the benefit of all Canadians.

My passion for the industry led me from operating on theinternet since I was 7, to desiring to broadcast on the airwaves. I wanted to continue to learn and experiment in this exciting radio industry, but I have come to understand that I was in error and wrong to operate without a proper license.

I sincerely apologize to all concern for my mistake and hope that my youthful enthusiasm will explain and hopefully mitigate somewhat this error.

I want to be a broadcaster amd wish to make it my lifelong career. I will be dedicating myself in the years to come to learn the industry so that I can become the best broadcaster possible.

Sincerely,
J. Saade

So, it looks like we’ve heard the last of him for a while. Hopefully he really has learned from this and isn’t posting this simply to appease Industry Canada.

Time will tell.

A tip o’ the hat to Bob (VA3QV) for writing about the story in the Ottawa Sun.