Voices.com was the Answer to My Narrator Needs and Then Some
I shopped online at several other sites and even advertised on Craigslist for a narrator. Weeks of trudging through tons of correspondence to find the perfect narrator.
Voices.com was hands down the best experience. At the end I literally had to narrow down my choices of fantastic narrators for my project.
My chosen narrator, Michael Corkill brought my documentary alive with his narration in a way I literally couldn't even have dreamed of.
Top notch narrators and fantastic service. I can't thank you enough!
Sincerely,
Don Kimball
Polytelis Media
View original story : end+his
Feed : Buzz
John Ivison: Where will Jim Flaherty's axe fall?
Remember the Budget? Big thick book, lots of numbers, came out two weeks ago. I mention it because you may have forgotten all about it, given the infrequency with which the opposition has mentioned the Conservatives’ financial plan.
The government is delighted to have emerged unscathed, after unveiling a document that promised an end to its four-year spending binge, and even started to pour morning-after black coffee in the form of department budget freezes.
Jim Flaherty, the Finance Minister, indicated that more cuts are coming and said the government is in the process of a spending review to identify opportunities for additional savings. He may need them. The government estimates that the nation’s books will be within $1.8-billion of being balanced five years from now, if everything goes to plan. But Kevin Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, disagrees, estimating the government’s numbers are too optimistic to the tune of $25-billion.
Mr. Flaherty’s problems are compounded because the government has already ruled out tax increases and cuts to transfers to individuals or other levels of government, which account for $72-billion and $56-billion respectively. If Mr. Page is anywhere close to being right, the government may need to cut one-fifth of the remaining $120-billion it spends on direct program expenses.
So where is the Finance Minister’s axe likely to fall? People who have talked to him say that by instinct and inclination he is keen to go after Canada’s regional development agencies, which will spend close to $2-billion of taxpayers’ money in the coming year.
These organizations — the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, the Economic Development Agency for the Regions of Quebec, Western Economic Diversification, plus the two created by this government, the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency and the Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario — are beloved by governments and loathed by opposition parties, for obvious reasons. This year’s budget even increased their budgets by $100-million.
My colleague David Akin has catalogued more than 3,500 spending announcements the federal government has made since its re-election and there are unlimited numbers of questionable recipients. Take the nine separate towns in Quebec that received snowmobile trail grooming equipment. Or the new deluxe YMCA building in St. John’s, Nfld., funded by ACOA. Or the $50,000 from the same agency for the Sobey’s Slam Curling Tournament held in the riding of then-ACOA minister, Peter MacKay.
A recent study by the Fraser Institute revealed that between 1994 and 2007, Canada’s governments spent $202.7-billion on subsidies to business and other corporate welfare projects. That figure has been growing annually and doesn’t even include last year’s stimulus binge — which will cost taxpayers $950 each for the bail-out to GM and Chrysler alone.
As the author, Mark Milke, noted, business subsidies allow politicians to appear as if they are doing something to preserve jobs, while the amount of money on any one project is seldom enough to provoke taxpayers to break out the pitchforks.
But if they are good for politicians, they are bad for competition. For one, they are unfair — the subsidies to GM and Chrysler clearly had a negative impact on Ford, Toyota and Honda; second, they promote protectionism elsewhere; third, they inevitably provoke suspicions of pork-barrelling; and, fourth, they create an unhealthy demand for yet more corporate welfare from those ineligible for existing grants.
Evidence for the latter point is that every region of the country now has its own regional development agency. What better time, then, to cut them all?
Those inside government urging Mr. Flaherty to do just that point out that the options for finding billions of dollars in savings are limited. Advocates say that the agencies need not necessarily be closed but could be re-designed to focus on areas like infrastructure, where they would use their local knowledge to identify good projects.
But Conservatives with memories of the 2004 election campaign are more cautious about interfering in a funding mechanism that allows politicians to promise bridges, even where there’s no river. Stephen Harper promised to get out of the game of picking winners and losers by lowering corporate tax rates by the same amount as he saved by ending corporate welfare. This proved a difficult concept to grasp for some on the East Coast, such as the Newfoundland Conservative candidate who urged his potential constituents to “vote for Harper — he’s the boy who’ll get us our ACOA money.” He lost but so did Mr. Harper, who garnered just seven seats east of the Ontario border. After embracing the concept of business subsidies, he has seen that number rise to 21.
“They are too valuable to the regions and Flaherty would face the mother of all battles with premiers and Cabinet colleagues if he wanted to do that,” said one insider. “Does he want to torch Atlantic Canada and fight Peter MacKay? It would be a battle royale.”
Yet any Conservative Party worth its salt should be able to persuade voters of the virtue of cutting wasteful spending. Surely, even snowmobilers and curlers would be pacified if they learned that the $1,300 each Canadian taxpayer contributes every year was being spent more productively.
National Post
jivison@nationalpost.com
View original story : end+his
Feed : Full Comment
Digg 2.0 almost ready for prime time: faster, less draconian
Filed under: Internet, Social Software
Late last night in Texas -- at the infamous and indefatigable SXSWi convention -- Digg's CEO Jay Adelson showed the world a new and revamped version of Digg. This overhaul, which has been five years in the making and the primary focus of the Digg team, will elicit a dramatic change in the slow, unwieldy and demagogic nature of the service.
Along with the usual Web 2.0-esque streamlining (rounded corners everywhere, I bet), Digg will become faster, more responsive and instant. Users will now be able to submit pages and Digg other submissions even if they're not logged in. This fundamental change, according to Adelson, will see the number of daily submissions climb from a meager 20,000 to millions per day -- "can you handle that much content?" gloated the proud CEO, no doubt throwing his head back to emit a maniacal cackle.
To accompany the new site, Digg is also dropping its old MySQL back-end in favour of a new, 'very, very fast' infrastructure.
Dubbed 'Digg 2.0' by CNET, there's no sign of when the new version will be rolled out to the general public, but there is a holding page at 'new.digg.com', where you can enter an email address -- presumably to join an open beta, when and if it comes.
Digg 2.0 almost ready for prime time: faster, less draconian originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
View original story : end+his
Feed : Download Squad
Then and Now: I Want My Innocent Ovi Back
It’s seared in my memory in a way virtually no other hockey moment, save the Miracle on Ice, is: the October 5, 2005, debut of Alexander Ovechkin in the NHL. Forty seconds into the new season’s opening game, on his very first NHL shift, Ovechkin slammed Columbus’ Radoslav Suchy so violently into the end boards [...]
View original story : end+his
Feed : On Frozen Blog
