Free Olympic Concerts Now as Calendar Files

You may have already seen follow blogger Brenda's handy handouts for the free concerts during the 2010 Olympics in the greater Vancouver area, if you haven't you can find them on either Earbuds & Ticketstubs or NxEW, but for any of you that use iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar or any other calendar program I've cooked up some ics files that you should be able to import into any of those programs.

I've made them into separate calendars for almost each venue so you can easily pick and choose what you want.

Downtown Vancouver
Live City - Yaletown
Live City - Downtown
Robson Square GE Plaza
Ontario Pavilion
Free CBC Events

Granville Island
Atlantic Kitchen Backstage
Atlantic On Deck
Air Canada Stage
Performance Works
Club Adrenaline

Whistler
Whistler Live - Medals or Skiers Plaza
Whistler Live - Village Square

Surrey
Surrey Celebration Stage
Surrey House Stage

Richmond
Richmond O Zone

I'd like to note that I didn't separate out all the Canadian and non-Canadian acts but if it's free and music related it should be on there.

Let me know in the comments below if there's anything I've missed or if I happened to make a mistake.

Enjoy!
- AlexOfAnders

User Friendly Olympic Concert Schedules

As a public service for all music lovers in Vancouver and curious Olympic visitors, I've created 8** (**as of February 1) simple print-outs of mostly free concerts in Metro Vancouver and Whistler. If you've even taken a brief glance at the host of websites featuring this information, you'll know that it was really decentralized. [belated note: and some websites are just awful.] This is a way for you to glance quickly at what's going on in a given day and make a choice about whom to see.

Many local Canadian talents are highlighted, including Mother Mother, Elliott BROOD, Great Lake Swimmers, Arkells, Sam Roberts Band, Jill Barber, Matt Mays, Jenn Grant, Stars, .. and the list goes on and on and on.

If this is helpful to you at all, please forward them on with a link back to the blog. All of the information courtesy of their respective websites.

If you would like a Word document forwarded to you, please email me at brendahlee [at] gmail [dot] com.

Print out #1: Cultural Olympiad (Free AND paid concerts)
Print out #2: Surrey 2010 Celebration Stage (Free)
Print out #3: Whistler Live! (Free)
Print out #4: LiveCity Vancouver (Free)
Print out #5: Richmond O Zone (Free)

Print out #6: Free CBC Events
Print out #7: Atlantic Canada House (Free)
Print out #8: Robson Square GE Plaza (Free)
Print out #9: Ontario Pavilion (Free)

Compilation: Canadian Indie Highlights (a compilation list-- there are shows on here which are not on other schedules, including Alberta House and Saskatchewan Pavilion)

I Heart Radio-- But What Am I Listening To?

As you hopefully know, NxEW founder and all-around productive guy Justin Beach has released a .zip file that contains streams of pretty much every community, campus, co-op, and CBC radio station he could get a hold of. It is, simply put, great. As much as I love the wonders of music blogs and iPods, there is still a place in this world for simply tuning in and listening to someone else's musical choices without having to open new windows, download .rar files, or track down YouTube videos every time you actually want to hear the next song. Even podcasts tend to limit you, since you have to actively seek them out, whereas on radio one program bleeds into another, and after you get sucked into speech on Palestine you find yourself listening to a show specializing in world folk music that you would have never found or sought out in the iTunes library. If you haven't yet downloaded this file, do it now.

Done? Ok, good. Now, if you're anything like me you're going to spend some time flipping between stations just to see what's out there. That's great. But what if you hear something and you want to know what it is you're actually listening to? Or you want to know when you can hear it again? That's where this post comes in.

I've created a spreadsheet using Google docs that, with any luck, will eventually act as a TV Guide for campus and community radio (I've left the CBC stations out for the moment, since they have a pretty comprehensive scheduling format already, including websites for individual shows, and I want to focus on getting this other information filled out first). The trouble is, I'm not nearly as productive as Mr. Beach and have no intention of filling out the entire schedules for all 44 stations by myself. So I've opened it up to the world, and with any luck we can get this done with very little effort. Here's how it works:

1. Go to the spreadsheet (it's at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlgXEKDrwR66dFg2UVN0WkJvdG5jYmFvQTMwQ29MNXc&hl=en)

2. Find the day you want to enter the information for. At the very bottom of the page, it says "Add Sheet" followed by Monday to Sunday. Each day has its own page, so just click on the one you want to view/edit. Make sure you are entering the information for the correct day!

3. Find the radio station you want to enter information for. They are listed alphabetically by call number down the left-hand side, followed by their province, and their website-- the websites, incidentally, are where you should be able to find all their programming information.

4. Find the time you want to enter the information for. USE THE LOCAL TIME FOR THE RADIO STATION. This means if you are in BC and want to enter program information for a Toronto show, put the show in the timeslot that it airs IN TORONTO, not BC. This is the simplest way to do it, for now.

5. Whenever you feel like placing some program information into this schedule, simply click on the box where station meets time slot, and type in the name. Done!

6. If you can/feel like it, you can use colour-coding to indicate what kind of show it is (blue for music, green for spoken word, red for special programming-- I didn't want to get too hung up on genre, but let me know if you think there should be more subdividion). If you don't know or don't want to indicate the type of show, just leave the background colour white. To change the colour, click on the box you want to change, and in the toolbar there's a box with four colours that says "background colour" when you hover over it-- click on it, choose the colour, and you're done.

7. If you want to provide a description of the program, use the "comments" option-- just click on the box, right click, chose "Insert Comment" and type away. Comments are visible when you hover over a program name.

That's pretty much it. I've already entered the compete program schedule for my local campus station (CFUR in Prince George), so you can see what it looks like (I didn't put in many program descriptions yet, though). Do as much, or as little as you'd like. Personally, I'm just going to enter information about whatever shows I happen to be listening to at the time, but if you're a supporter of a syndicated show you may want to enter that show whenever and wherever it airs, or if you're a big fan of your local station, you might want to fill all that out, or you just might want to put in one show at one time on one station-- whatever you can do helps. Once this is done, I'll make new versions for each time zone so you don't have to do any adjustments in your head, and maybe we can start working on some CBC stuff.