Peter Rukavina's Podcast: Recent Episodes
Peter Rukavina
The personal podcast of Peter Rukavina, a Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada-based printer, writer and developer.
The awards for the 2024 edition of Island Fringe were presented last night, and among them was The Oscar Wilde Award, which I sponsor every year, presented to the show that “most effectively celebrates non-conformity.”
This year the jury selected the show So an Autistic Priest and Dog Walk into a Bar…, written and presented by Jean-Daniel O’Donncada, described in the program as a “storytelling emotional comedy about autism, religion, and love, with a dog,” and with this “accessibility note”:
The show is 60 minutes long. It is sensory sensitive with no loud surprises, and no dramatic or changing lights. There is a live dog present throughout the show. Attendees with service dogs are encouraged to come a bit early so all dogs may be aware of each other’s presence before the show begins.
In previous years I’ve prided myself—and benefited greatly—from seeing all, or almost all, of the shows at each year’s Fringe; this year, however, circumstances meant that I saw only a single show, After the Chorus Line.
Olivia, however, did see O’Donncada’s show, and spoke highly of it, and the reaction to the award from the audience last night (and for both the Patrons’ Pick and Artists’ Pick awards that followed, both of which also went to O’Donncada), suggests it was a deserving recipient. As does his biography:
I’m openly, and sometimes unashamedly, Christian, Québécois, Canadian, queer, autistic, and awkward. I get particularly passionate about making sure church and society do better at welcoming those who speak minority languages and those who think in marginalised, neurodiverse ways.
I wrote in my note to the award winner:
The world needs—demands—more of the non-conforming, and that’s why I sponsor this award. Please continue. And, when you are able, pay if forward.
I have every reason to believe that Jean-Daniel O’Donncada will do exactly that.
We’re posted up 50 m from the Adriatic, in Numana.
About 280 km across the water in Croatia is where my grandfather was born.
It is warm and, at least today, gloriously sunny.
While the La Festa dei Ceri on May 15 has a well-documented program, figuring out the timing and route of today’s first-Sunday-in-May repositioning event was more challenging, and involved piecing together bits of information from the web and Google Translated conversations.
As it happens, we need not have worried, as it all played out on our doorstep on the Via dei Consoli.
Anything we might have imagined this might have been was an underestimate by a factor of ten: hundreds and hundreds of people jamming the streets, a drum corps, a brass band, singing, and small children riding the ceri bareback up steep cobblestones streets.
We jammed ourselves right into the middle of it, joining the claustrophobic procession up the street to the Piazza Grande where everything culminated in a cacophony, with the ceri being raced around in circles by their bearers and then up the stairs of the Palazzo dei Consoli where they will spend the ten days leading up to the 15th.
It was all, to say the least, an experience.
Lisa and I walked up to CBC Charlottetown this morning to record an interview with Matt Rainnie about our This Box is for Good project. As usual, Matt was an amiable and welcoming host.
Every year I sponsor the Oscar Wilde Award at Island Fringe, given to the show that “most effectively celebrates non-conformity.” The award-winning show is chosen by a jury, and evidence suggests that the process of jurying the shows is done with considerable thoughtfulness. Island Fringe is one of my favourite things, and watching the Oscar Wilde take on a life of its own continues to be a lovely part of it.
This year’s award went to Riley Jane Carson for her show Transpectrum:
Follow Riley Jayne Carson on a wonderful journey. This neurodivergent trans beauty queen explains how a love for Anne of Green Gables awakened her identity. And after over thirty years of self denial, it took another red headed Ann to help her rediscover her gender identity. Riley Jayne is a Jack (or should I say Jill) of multiple talents. A background in theatre and very basic music allowed her to express her views, humour and attitude in a variety of forms ranging from stand-up comedy to drag.
On the way over to the closing ceremonies I was talking to Olivia about what “non-conformity” means, and used her owning her neurodivergent transness as an example of it; that the award went to “neurodivergent trans beauty queen” was a delightful counterpoint to that.
The birds were alive and musical as I was pottering around with my bicycle in the back yard yesterday.
I have long enjoyed the 1980 Christopher Cross song Ride Like the Wind. Listening to it this morning I realized that one of the reasons I like it so much is the backing vocals by the estimable Michael McDonald (he of the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, and a successful solo career).
Oliver and I listened to the song this morning in the car: McDonald’s contribution–we counted–amounts to only four utterances of “Such a long way to go…” Nonetheless, without those the song wouldn’t be as delightful as it is.
Like salt, sometimes all you need is a little, but without that little the food doesn’t taste nearly as good.
(Clip fromThe Very Best of Christopher Cross, 2002)
The generous helping of topsy-turvy in the air caused me to think Thursday was Wednesday and thus to miss my scheduled 5:00 p.m. Charlottetown Farmers’ Market pickup.
My penance was to ride my bicycle up today, a day late and in the rain; I was happy to find Caledonia House Coffee still open, and so I am currently fortifying myself with an espresso macchiato before heading back into the now-cats-and-dogs-style rain.
Back in mid-March I received an email from Matt Rainnie, personable host of CBC Mainstreet: would I be interested, he asked, in being the “Spin Time DJ” for the show on an upcoming Friday.
Would I be interested? Of course I’d be interested. Had I not been dreaming of this very moment for years!
“Spin Time DJ,” for those from away, is a regular Friday feature on the afternoon radio show where a guest is invited, in 22 short minutes, to relate their life story, punctuated by three meaningful songs. Here’s Ashley Belanger-Birt doing it. And Bill Schurman. And John Connolly.
As a non-Islander of no particular note, I’d long ago given up hope that I’d one day be called up to the bigs. But dreams do come true.
So plans were made to record this morning.
And then the hard part.
Summarize my life in three songs. Not easy, as it turns out.
For a while there I had a strong plan to go completely Kobayashi Maru, and set aside popular music in favour of sounds of Japanese coffee shops and walks in the woods behind my childhood home. Is there not music in nature?
But I pulled myself back from the edge, dug in deep, and came up with three songs I’m very happy with.
Matt and I had a nice chat this morning, backed by the audio engineering prowess of David Rashed, and the segment will air Friday, April 9, 2021 after the 5:30 p.m. news. You can listen live on the radio if you’re near, on the web stream if you’re not, and the episode will be posted to the Mainstreet website on Monday.
——
Postscript: Here are the three songs I choose:
- Jane Siberry and David Ramsden, The Love I Have for You (3:51), from the 1990 cassette “Quiet Please, There’s A Lady On Stage,” recorded live at the Cameron House in Toronto.
- Shawn Colvin, This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) (4:01), from the album 1994 album “Cover Girl,” recorded live at the Bottom Line in NYC, August 1993.
- Karine Polwart, Labouring and Resting (3:14), from the 2017 album “A Pocket of Wind Resistance.”
A previously-unreleased episode recorded on October 1, 2020, Oliver’s 20th birthday. Earlier in the day he’d received a negative COVID-19 test.
It’s tricky to get my Google Home to play CBC Radio One: depending on the way I ask, it’s as likely, for reasons unknown, to play the private radio station CFCY instead.
Here’s a transcript of my attempts:
Me: OK Google, play CBC Radio One.
Google Home: Streaming 95.1 FM CFCY from Tunein.
Me: OK Google, stop. OK Google, play CBC Radio.
Google Home: Streaming 95.1 FM CFCY from Tunein.
Me: OK Google, stop. OK Google, play CBC Charlottetown.
Google Home: Streaming CBC Radio One from Tunein.
I’ve almost trained my brain to do this the right way every time, but I still get it wrong about 20% of the time.
I sat down in the studio the Matt Rainnie yesterday morning (although I wasn’t in the studio, I was on Skype, and Matt, oddly, was standing not sitting) to have a conversation about Using Her Marbles.
You can listen to our conversation, which aired between 5:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. last night on Mainstreet.
Update: the CBC has posted a “web story” version of the interview.
Shortcuts are a delightfully powerful set of digital Lego blocks for iOS, a modern day HyperCard, in a way. This guide from Apple to creating Siri Shortcuts using web APIs prompted me to try creating one for myself, a Shortcut to retrieve the percentage of PEI’s electricity load generated from the wind.
As a starting place, I used this wind energy API endpoint, the same endpoint that my PEI Electricity web app uses. It returns real time data about wind energy load and generation on Prince Edward Island, like this:
```
{
"current": {
"updatetime": "2020-11-05 12:59:00",
"uptimetimehuman": "Thursday at 12:59 PM",
"on-island-load": "202.86",
"on-island-wind": "163.86",
"on-island-fossil": "0.00",
"wind-local": "77.98",
"wind-export": "85.88",
"percentage-wind": "80.77"
},
"previous": {
"updatetime": "2020-11-05 12:44:00",
"uptimetimehuman": "Thursday at 12:44 PM",
"on-island-load": "202.80",
"on-island-wind": "164.65",
"on-island-fossil": "0.00",
"wind-local": "77.36",
"wind-export": "87.29",
"percentage-wind": "81.19"
},
"peak": {
"peak": "213",
"hightime": "10:14 AM"
},
"peakwind": {
"peak": "179",
"hightime": "8:29 AM"
}
}
```
That’s got everything I need in an endpoint to make a Shortcut: I want the Shortcut to use the “percentage-wind” value, 80.77 in this example.
To create the Shortcut, I launched the Shortcuts app on my iPhone, tapped the “+” to create a new one, gave it the name “what’s the wind energy,” and then added my first action, a Get Contents of URL action to get the contents of that endpoint:
Next, a Get Dictionary Value action, as I needed to pull out just the value for percentage wind energy generation, using simple dot notation for current.percentage-wind:
Because that’s returned as a decimal value, and I didn’t need that much granularity, I rounded off the value using a Round Number action:
I added the words “per cent” using a Text action:
Finally, I added a Speak Text action to read the result:
With the Shortcut saved, I can say “hey siri, what’s the wind energy” to my iPhone and it tells me.
You can save yourself the trouble of recreating the Shortcut from scratch by installing on your iPhone here.
That was so much fun I decided to make another Shortcut, this one to tell me how much water our household has used today.
For this one, I used this API endpoint, which returns data, used also by my Consuming.ca web app, about my water usage, like:
```
{
"metadata": {
"serialnumber": "30142394",
"address": "100 Prince",
"location": "Basement",
"role": "Household",
"metertype": "water",
"metertypecode": "13",
"colour": "#30c020",
"public": "1",
"publiclabel": "Miller-Rukavina",
"active": "1"
},
"reading": {
"current": {
"value": "7697",
"datestamp": "2020-11-05 13:56:50",
"formatted": "769.70 m3"
},
"firstever": {
"value": "1171",
"formatted": "0.00 m3"
},
"firsttoday": {
"value": "7696",
"formatted": "769.60 m3"
}
},
"consumption": {
"today": "100 ℓ"
}
}
```
The Shortcut for this is essentially the same as “what’s the wind energy,” but it’s called “how much water have we used today,” and it uses the value consumption.today. If you have particular interest in knowing how much water I’ve used today, you can install this Shortcut on your iPhone too.
Back in the day, when it seemed like Nickelback was playing at the Charlottetown waterfront every second weekend, I developed the reputation of being something of a curmudgeon. Truth be told my protests were always rooted in a feeling that public land should remain public, not given over to concert prompters, but the subtlety was often lost on the readership.
As such, I celebrate the sweet sounds coming out of the third floor apartment next door unreservedly: if I can’t revel in the vigorous music-making of the young, what’s the point of being alive?
When Oliver and I were on the beach at Wood Islands Provincial Park on Sunday, I recorded just under two minutes of the same of the water lapping against the rocks. You’ll hear birdsong in the background if you listen carefully.
An interesting project in these pandemic times would be to stick a permanent microphone at the shore to broadcast sounds of the PEI surf 24/7 to those unable to be on the beach in person.
I was saddened to read of the death of former Member of Parliament, Member of the Legislative Assembly, and Speaker Wilbur Macdonald this morning.
I could not help but think back to the warm summer afternoon of June 27, 2006 when, from the public gallery in Province House, I witnessed him hold forth at some length so as to keep the Legislative Assembly busy while, behind the scenes, the Pat Binns government sought to put the finishing touches on its electoral redistricting plan, An Act to Amend the Electoral Boundaries Act (the “Cletus Dunn map,” as it had come to be known).
With the introduction from the Speaker, “The hon. Member from Belfast-Pownal Bay,” he began (you can follow along in the day’s Hansard, starting on page 3,304):
I rise to speak on the budget which we had brought in in the spring. It’s an opportunity for me to talk about my riding and about what is taking place in the province.
One of the things that has really happened in this province in the last number of years is the expansion of the economy. I think it all started with the industrial malls a number of years ago and is continuing over the last number of years. The federal government has also contributed to that in Charlottetown and in Summerside.
At this point he departed from his prepared notes to address the issue of the lawnmower making noise outside, clearly audible in the background, something that had been on my mind as well:
I must say every time that this House opens that lawn mower seems to be going outside. Is the guy going over and over the lawn or what is he doing out there? If it’s under the department of public works, I wish the minister would tell him to take off. Go someplace else. He can cut the grass in the morning, then we can hear one another. But he’s been going for the last two hours and I don’t know where the lawn is. But anyway.
From there he continued for more than 4,200 words and 30 minutes, covered topics ranging from the lobster fishery to the Northumberland Strait to Lord Selkirk to wind power to the quality of the roads in his district to the life expectancy of males and females.
Eventually the Act to Amend the Electoral Boundaries Act was ready for introduction, and so Macdonald got the nod and finished off with the same good humour he started with:
Mr. Speaker, I could go on for a little longer, but I think I have spoke long enough. I will adjourn the debate.
While Macdonald was simply doing his loyal best to keep the puck in play, his speech, looking back 14 years, is a thorough survey of Prince Edward Island through his eyes, and we are the better for it, and for his years of service as a legislator.
(Audio from the Legislative Assembly of PEI Video Archive).
My friend Dave Atkinson mused that an oral history of how I learned the things I learned the other day came to be learned.
So I recorded one.
In this brave new world we’re all jacked into Zoom (or, maybe, Jitsi) all day long. We’ve been at this for a month, and it’s remarkable how little most of us continue to pay attention to video and audio, as if living the Dick Tracy future is enough, and we don’t really need to be concerned with seeing and hearing other clearly.
Here in my office I mostly use the “Display Audio” microphone built into the front of my Apple Cinema Display. It’s always been good enough. But, I wondered, could I do better.
So I dug the old Live from the Formosa Tea House audio setup (Apex 435 microphone, Behringer 802 mixer) out of storage, bought myself a line-to-USB cable, and set everything up beside my computer to see if that would prove the audio quality.
If you listen to the same here, I think you’ll agree that it did.
I’m taking it out for a real ride in 15 minutes on my weekly conference call with my colleagues in New Hampshire.
I’m also using the opportunity to promote the brand (get your Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook by The Old Farmer’s Almanac today!):
Recorded eight days ago (8 months in quarantine years) on the Charlottetown waterfront at the end of a drive in the countryside on a sunny Sunday.
On Thursday morning I was immersed in a video conference, with the personable Josh MacFadyen, when I got a text message:
As Oliver was across the street, at home, and “five machine” sounds a lot like “fire machine,” which is something someone might say when the house is burning down and they are panicking, I immediately ran across the street to rescue Oliver.
Oliver was fine.
The buzzer on the clothes dryer had gone off, and Oliver was simply, helpfully, letting me know.
Here’s how the text message got to me:
Oliver was upstairs in bed.
The dryer’s buzzer went off.
Oliver has a Google Home in his bedroom, so he asked it to call me:
OK Google, call Peter.
The Google Home dutifully called my office number.
But my officer number automatically goes to voicemail, so Oliver left a voicemail (the one you can listen to above).
The voicemail went to my voicemail system, which is set to automatically speech-to-text transcribe voicemails and email them to me.
Which is how I got the text message “Five machine went off at home.”
Lower shields.
My friend Dave does a regular segment on CBC’s Island Morning called The Things We Do For Love, wherein he interviews people about their esoteric passions.
Tuesday morning Dave dipped into Pen Night.
Things don’t get much more esoteric than pen geeks talking about pens, inks and paper.
I’ve attached the MP3 that aired this morning.
Oliver’s got the death of a cold, so I made my way to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market by myself this morning.
After a healthy amount of Duckduckgoing “how to cycle in the rain,” I decided I was not up for it, so I took the bus instead. It was a soggy walk from Subway to the market, but the passing cars were kind, and slowed down to prevent causing monsoons from driving headlong through the standing water.
In addition to being Thanksgiving-busy, the market was also Elizabeth May-busy this morning, as she made a quick campaign stop en (Tesla) route from Pownal to Cape Breton that included a lunch of Claudia’s Mexican food. And a lot of chatting with a lot of people.
It’s quite humbling to see May in action: her entourage is lean, and she is open. To everyone who approaches. It must be exhausting, and we all owe her a great debt for her tenacity.
I escaped from the melee on to the loading dock of the market for some quiet reflection, and recorded 30 seconds of the suddenly-torrential rain falling on the metal roof.
My friend Ann rescued me from a wet walk back to the bus stop by offering me a ride home; it was on her way.
Where I delivered a smoked salmon bagel and cup of tea to ailing Oliver. Who will, I think, spend most of the day sleeping.
Ten top simple field recording tips from Cities and Memory; includes:
You might think that’s only a gentle breeze, and it can’t possibly do anything to your recording, but IT WILL. Even a light wind sounds like someone’s ripped your mic in half, and will render your recording unusable. Use wind shields, use shelter, avoid wind at all costs.
The recording here is a classic example of it: riding our bicycles by the metal fence surrounding the Charlottetown Event Grounds on Saturday, I noticed the the gusty winds were making beautiful music through the slats. So I pulled out my phone and pressed “record,” trying to shield it from the wind. I failed. So you’ll have to take my word for it.
See also diy (do it yourself) from Quiet American.
Link provenance: William Denton to Radio Apogee to this exhortation to make field recordings of decent quality.
When booking a room at the lovely Latchis Hotel in Brattleboro, Vermont, you can select a “mountain view” room (with windows looking out on Wantastiquet Mountain, just across the border in New Hampshire) or a less expensive “interior view” room (with a view of, well, not much at all).
What they don’t tell you, however, is that an “interior view” room comes with a window that opens out on Whetstone Brook, which runs into the middle of town and into the Connecticut River. I left the window open last night and enjoyed the best sleep of my trip so far due its pleasant sound.
I arrived here in Brattleboro last night, after a short drive from Dublin, NH. This stop has become a trusted airlock between Yankee life and home life (2015, 2013, 2010, 2002), and this weekend was no exception: I had supper at the co-op across the street, and saw Downton Abbey in the Latchis Theatre downstairs.
Today I am heading north, stopping in Windsor at the American Precision Museum (it is Museum Day here in the U.S., so I was able to secure a free ticket!), and ending up at the home of my friends Valerie and Lars in Burlington for the night.
Oliver was dismayed to learn that the 2019 Island Fringe Festival wasn’t going to include any audience-participation activities in its launch event, as it had in previous years.
“For every problem, there is a solution,” I am forever telling Oliver.
So he reached out to Fringe officials and, to their eminent credit, the decided to correct this oversight, and added something:
DRAMATIC READING OF YOUR FAVOURITE SONG
Come on down and give a truly dramatic reading of your favourite song… channel your best Liam Neeson as you woo the audience with your rendition of Janelle Monáe’s ‘PYNK’… or pretend you’re Viola Davis as you wow the crowd reading the lyrics of Maroon 5’s ‘Moves Like Jagger’!
Of course this parry required a thrust. And Oliver decided that I needed to participate too.
So I gave a dramatic reading of Kim Mitchell’s iconic Patio Lanterns, and Oliver recited Blackbird, by The Beatles, in his take on a Liverpudlian accent.
There is no extant recording of my performance. But I recorded Oliver’s.
There was a baby crow born in our back yard last week that’s been learning to fly this week. Its parents have been understandably protective, and so every time Ethan the Dog goes outside they go on high alert, cawing and swooping. It’s been very effective.
Manitoba fiddler Patti Kusturok accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Rusu at the National Fiddling Day celebration at St. Paul’s Anglican Church on May 18, 2019. Sound engineering in the hall was by Brent Chaisson; I plucked this sound from the back of the church with my phone.
St. Paul’s Anglican Church commemorated the beginning of its 250th year by ringing its bells 250 times at midnight tonight.
St. Paul’s Anglican Church participated in the Bells of Peace initiative today, ringing its bell 100 times to mark the centenary of the end of World War I.
The church generously offered the opportunity to ring the bell to all comers, so Oliver and I lined up, at sunset, with a diverse group, parishioners and otherwise, for our chance.
The stairway up the bell tower turned out to be far more civilized than I imagined, and it was an easy climb up the stairs. We were each given the chance to ring the bell twice; I recorded Oliver’s second go.
The final event of Oliver’s Birthday Season, a trip to Wolfville to bear witness to a live taping of Laurie Brown’s Pondercast podcast.
So, of course, we recorded a podcast while waiting for the show to start.
The first time Oliver used the sink at our Malmö Airbnb, he emerged exclaiming “The sink sounds like a didgeridoo!”
I asked him to record this, and he emailed me this sound.
Which does, indeed, sound like a didgeridoo.
We are heading home, and recorded a quick podcast here in Schiphol Airport after going through security.
Security passage, as you will hear, was greatly aided by advance planning: last week I contacted Condor, our “host” airline, requesting assistance for Oliver. They responded with a “DPNA” PDF file that I could print out that identified Oliver as a flyer-with-autism, and instructed me to print it out and show it along the way.
With the aid of this very helpful blog post from a mother and son in our situation, we knew to go to the “Assistance Desk” upon arrival at the airport. So that’s what we did. They took a look at Oliver’s paperwork and asked us to wait in the nearby “elderly and disabled” waiting area.
About 10 minutes later we were greeted by Pascal (pro tip: always ask assistants for their name; it instantly establishes a rapport) and I explained our situation. Pascal, it turns out, is an intern, halfway through his term at Schiphol, on the way to working in the air. He proved a useful aid, as he was able to be a sort of “advance man” out in front of us, opening the way for the special services (calmness, physical search, no crazy questions) that we needed. He walked us through check-in, and then from check-in to security, took us to the special services line there, explained to the security agent that we needed a physical search, walked through security himself (also getting a physical search), and pointed us on our way. We shook his hand, explained what a great help he’d been, with hopes that he will now go on to a more autism-flyer-friendly career.
The physical search itself was conducted by the kind Patrick (see earlier pro tip), and was done calmly and without delay. Oliver remained calm and happy throughout, even through, deep in our hearts, we were both nervous and a little anxious.
Once we left Pascal, we headed into the departure gates, spotted a “reboost in 5 minutes” massage chair, and Oliver eagerly volunteered. Best €2 we’ve spent today.
And then we made a podcast.
On to Frankfurt!
Young man relaxes with “revitalising shiatsu massage” at the airport after successful, calm passage through security. Best €2 we’ve spent today.
Matt Rainnie produced this spot for CBC Prince Edward Island’s Island Morning that aired on Friday, August 10, 2018 after the 8:00 a.m. news. He interviewed me about the Charlottetown Boulder Park, and interviewed the proprietors of the new food trucks about their role in the park’s revivification.
You may recall my report that Archdeacon John Clarke, who leads the parish here at St. Paul’s Anglican Church, took a sabbatical this summer to learn to play the guitar.
Well, his sabbatical is over, and he’s reflected on the experience on his blog, where he writes, in part:
It has been a challenge, to say the least, but one that I have thoroughly enjoyed. Not being particularly good at something has never stopped me from trying. And have no fear, the guitar will not make it into every sermon.
There were times when trying to accomplish some guitar related skill felt more like work than play, this time has been, overall, a great joy for me. The guitar will be a part of my daily life as long as my fingers will allow it. My hope is that I will continue to improve, add skills and play well with others. I am thankful for all the support I’ve had and am deeply touched by the interest so many people have shown. I hope too, that one day people will enjoy listening to me as much as I enjoy playing.
I am so happy to be housed inside a parish led by such a thoughtful person, and someone so willing write about his adventures in public; his suggestion that “not being particularly good at something has never stopped me from trying” are words to live by.
(The attached song is from the Ceedees 1979 album Hit The Ditch, long out of print).
For my old friend John Muir, who introduced me to BB Gabor 33 years ago, this lovely rendition of Big Yellow Taxi.
When Matt Rainnie was host of Mainstreet on CBC Radio we produced a couple of summer’s worth of eclectic radio pieces, like Everything You Wanted to Know About Ice Tea in 2004.
Matt is inveterately curious and a great interviewer, so when I wanted to flush subscribers to The New Yorker out of the bushes I dropped him a line, and he quickly bit, coming along to the Reinventorium yesterday morning to tape a short piece that aired this morning.
The awesome power of radio has resulted in a half dozen more subscribers outing themselves.
I have an Amazon Echo at home, and one at the office. Both are set to allow “drop in” calls: I can just say “Alexa, drop in on the Reinventorium” and I get a live microphone into the office, no questions asked.
Tonight I had to get home for supper before my 3D printer was finished printing. I plan to go back to the office when it’s done to shut things down. But how will I know when it’s done?
Turns out that I can hear the printer printing through my Echo-to-Echo connection. So I’ll simply “drop in” from time to time and head over when I can’t hear the printer any more.
About a year ago, when Amazon unleashed the ability for third-party developers to create skills for its Echo speaker devices, the first one I created was a skill that allowed you to ask questions about Prince Edward Island’s electricity load and generation.
But I never took the skill to certification (the review process by which Amazon certifies a skill and makes it available to everyone), and so while I continued to use it myself in “developer mode” on our Echo, nobody else could.
I decided to follow through on the last few bits of the skill development a couple of weeks ago, so that others could benefit. And at the end of last week I received a notification that the skill is now live for all Echo users in the U.S. and Canada.
This means that, if you own an Amazon Echo device, you can now ask it things like this:
- Alexa, ask PEI Power for a summary
- Alexa, ask PEI Power about the wind
- Alexa, ask PEI Power for the load
- Alexa, ask PEI Power for the peak load in 2014
- Alexa, ask PEI Power for the peak load in December 2017
- Alexa, ask PEI Power for the peak load yesterday.
Behind the scenes, this skill looks like this:
```
{
"languageModel": {
"intents": [
{
"name": "AMAZON.CancelIntent",
"samples": []
},
{
"name": "AMAZON.HelpIntent",
"samples": []
},
{
"name": "AMAZON.StopIntent",
"samples": []
},
{
"name": "GetLoad",
"samples": [
"the load"
],
"slots": []
},
{
"name": "GetPeak",
"samples": [
"the peak on {Date}",
"peak on {Date}",
"peak {Date}",
"peak load on {Date}",
"the peak load on {Date}",
"highest load on {Date}",
"maximum load on {Date}",
"the maximum load on {Date}",
"high load on {Date}",
"the high load on {Date}",
"the highest load on {Date}",
"the peak load {Date}"
],
"slots": [
{
"name": "Date",
"type": "AMAZON.DATE"
}
]
},
{
"name": "GetSummary",
"samples": [
"a summary",
"the report",
"a report",
"an update"
],
"slots": []
},
{
"name": "GetWind",
"samples": [
"the wind"
],
"slots": []
}
],
"invocationName": "p. e. i. power"
}
}
```
That’s a JSON representation of the skill on the Amazon end; when an Echo device sends a query, Amazon tries to figure out which “utterance” (like “an update” or “a report” or “the wind”) the user is looking for, sends a request to a PHP script on my server that queries the same load and generation data I scrape from the Province of PEI website for other purposes, and my server then returns a script for the Echo to read back to the user.
It’s fundamentally a pretty simple ecosystem to develop skills for; there are some fiddly bits on the initial setup my skill got kicked back to me several times for seemingly minor inconsistencies like “you called the skill p. e. i. power but your sample utterance used the phrase p.e.i. power,” but I managed to resolve those quickly.
If you have an Echo, please take this skill for a ride and let me know what you think.
I popped in to Brìgh Music & Tea after lunch today for a spot of chocolate (they carry Katlin’s, and it is excellent).
It turned out to be a bustling day in the shop, with guitars being sold, and tea being offered, and questions being answered.
Between tea and chocolate I happened upon a Mano Percussion shaker, tucked away in a hidden corner, and, what with it being reasonably priced at $9.38, and the Reinventorium currently lacking a house shaker, I added it to my bill.
As I was settling up, personable co-owner Mary MacGillivray asked me to remind you all that they are open every day through Christmas Eve for all your holiday shopping needs. And until Christmas Eve they have a “buy 1 bag of loose leaf tea, get the 2nd free” promotion.
So now you’ve no excuse not to put a ukulele under the tree, and to infuse your home with the pungent aroma of their Berry Berry tea.
Summer Kitchen is a new restaurant in Charlottetown that’s moved into the space occupied for decades previous by the venerable Noodle House, which moved downtown recently.
The building has received a long-deserved clean-up and renovation; the pervasive pink has been expunged, and replaced by shades of red. The place has never looked better.
Oliver and I stopped in for lunch mid-afternoon yesterday. There being no vegetarian options evident on the menu, we asked our server for recommendations; she called the chef out to speak with us, and we took him up on his suggestion of spicy eggplant and tofu over rice.
The result was very good; indeed it may have been the first palatable version of eggplant I’ve ever been served.
They’re starting off slowly at Summer Kitchen, waiting for additional staff to arrive before they step on the accelerator. Now might be the best time for you to stop in for a meal, before it gets really popular, as I’m sure it will.
Open every day except Tuesday. Our bill was $16 for two, which included a plate of vegetarian spring rolls to start.
I’ve had Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet running through my head all weekend. I finally found an outlet for my earworm in the public piano in Confederation Landing Park.
It’s impossible not to hear this without thinking of the last episode of MAS*H.
Oliver and I took Ethan for a windy Thanksgiving Sunday walk around the waterfront. When we got to the Charlottetown Yacht Club we were greeted by a cacophony of jingle-jangle. Here’s 23 seconds of it.
I mistakenly told my Google Home to make a telephone call this morning–”Hey Google, call Richard’s Fish & Chips.”
This was a mistake, because the Google Home can’t make telephone calls.
Except that it can.
Apparently the Google Home now has a new superpower, which is making free telephone calls in the U.S. and Canada.
So when I said “Hey Google, call Richard’s Fish & Chips,” Google figured out which Richard’s I wanted (it knows where I am, because I told it where my Google Home is located when I first set it up), and placed a call for me.
It also works for “Hey Google, Call Catherine.” And it knew to call her cell phone.
It can’t yet send text messages, it can’t yet receive calls, and its response when you try to call a number it doesn’t recognize is the stock “I don’t know how to help with that” rather than “I don’t have a number for them” or something more specific.
But, it’s still pretty keen. I’m not sure why I’d ever use an actual telephone to call out from the office ever again.
A reminder that the Google Home is now available in Canada: you can purchase one from Best Buy, Walmart, Staples or The Source, or direct from Google.
And remember: once you have yours, be sure to say “Hey Google, ask Farmer’s Almanac about today.”
Sara Fraser at CBC Prince Edward Island asked me and Oliver for a photo of us recording a podcast.
So we recorded a podcast.
And we took some photos.
Art in the Open was wonderful. Again. In a new way. As it always is.
My favourite part of it all was watching people amble—and ambling is truly the best word for it—across the fields and through the forest and around the campfires. The pace, the expressions on the face, it’s not like anything else: it’s not work, it’s not shopping, it’s not entertainment; it’s (only) art. It’s a sight to behold.
When we say “I wish this lasted longer,” I think the amble is what we’re talking about. The disengaged engaged amble that allows the art to leak in when you’re not paying attention.
I wish this lasted longer.
Oliver was very passionate about getting a chance to speak at the “Inaction is Not an Option” rally today here in Charlottetown, organized to give Islanders a chance to gather to speak out against racism, hatred, white supremacy and nationalism.
The organizers generously allowed his name to be added to the speakers list at the last minute; he chose two passages to read, one from Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, and one from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
I have never been prouder: Oliver has a deep-seated aversion to inequity, violence and hatred, and feels a strong common cause with anyone whose intrinsic worth is threatened.
Oliver made this piece of audio art by overlaying multiple TED Talks and then manipulating the audio in GarageBand on his Mac. I love this.
The Island Fringe Festival had its launch party last night at Marc’s Lounge, and Oliver decided that he wanted, at the last minute, to respond to the open call for poets to read “found poetry.”
Fortunately the Fringe team is on the ball and digitally-engaged, so the request-to-perform reached them in time for him to make the list. And so we headed over to secure a seat around 7:30 p.m. for an 8:00 p.m. start.
Because of Prince Edward Island’s antediluvian liquor laws, Oliver was only allowed to be present until 9:00 p.m., and so there was some last minute stress surrounding whether he’d be able to go on stage before turning into a Prohibition pumpkin, but, again the Fringe team rose to the challenge and made sure he was on in the first hour.
Oliver is a master of the acrostic poem, an excellent adaptation that accommodates he’s need to express with his challenges with choices: it’s a poetic hook to hang his hat on, so to speak, and to watch him pull a poem out of the digital ether is a sight to behold.
Here’s the poem he read:
Had
IPods
Pluto
Songza
That are now Things of the Recent Past
Extinct
Revolutionized Cities
Short Vine Videos
Yearning for
Unoriginal Objects
Continuing to Recreate
Completed Things
In the Present
Existing Past
Since Then
Many Revolutionized Cities and Had
IPods and Pluto
Leaned
Lots
Extinct
Now Not New
IPods
Another
Last Generation That are Now Things of the Recent Past
Short Vine Videos and Songza
Growing Generation
Everyday
New
Era
Recreate
Atari
Today
It
Only Continues to Grow
Now
Xenocracies
Everywhere
Really
Soon
I love the phrase “continuing to recreate completes things in the present.”
There was an intermission of sorts just before 9:00 p.m., and Oliver insisted we high-tail it for the door lest the Provincial Treasurer come and haul us out by the coat tails.
Six years ago, at the tail end of a trip to Europe, Oliver and I went cycling on the railway in Skåne, Sweden.
As I was bopping through the filesystem on my recently-resuscitated Nokia N95, I found this very short podcast we recorded, notable not so much for our insights as for the sounds of the railways. And for Oliver’s emphatic rail sound effects.
(Also, I’m pretty sure I didn’t pronounce Skåne correctly).
Being a sole practitioner here on the blog, I’ve no copy editor. In the early days of blogging we all wore the absence of intermediation as a badge of honour: copy editing was a relic of the old school; we were rough and ready and off the cuff.
But as I age, and my mind enfeebles, and my vanity upticks, I’m increasingly sensitive to making obvious mistakes: double words, misspelled words, mistakes in punctuation and so forth.
To try to stanch some of this, some months back I started using the text-to-speech features of my Mac to read posts back to me after I’d written them, leaving an editor window open to allow me to correct errors as I heard them; in doing so I’ve discovered that although it’s no means a skilled copy editor, my aural brain thinks differently from my reading brain, so issues I could not see I can clearly hear. It’s helped. At least a little.
Yesterday I made a discovery that made this even easier: baked right into recent versions of Firefox is a “Reader View,” and that view has a “Narrate” tool that reads the text out, and highlights words and paragraphs as it goes along. This combination is a big aid to proofreading; it looks like this when turned on for this post:
What really clinched it for me, however, was switching the voice for the narration from the default to Moira:
Moira speaks with an Irish accent (you can hear her reading by listening to the sound attached above), which means both that she’s more likely than not to pronounce things as they are meant to be said (she does an excellent job at MacLauchlan, which the default voice just can’t wrap its mouth around, for example). And, more importantly for proofreading purposes, Moira’s voice plays to a different part of my brain yet again, allowing me to hear errors I could neither see nor hear if read in a voice closer to my own.
I’m still as prone to making errors as I’ve ever been, but with Moira’s help at least I have some help in finding them before you do.
Michael Enright interviewed Preston Manning this morning on The Sunday Edition about populism.
I’ve always had a lot of time for Manning, even though, on paper, our politics don’t overlap very much; he made an excellent point in this interview, one that resonates with something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the age of Trump:
Enright: How do we gauge or measure the fact that people, elites so-called, are not listening to what the grassroots are saying?
Manning: Well one way, Michael, is to look at their communication style. I’m not knocking elites, I’m just trying to reflect on the points you’re trying to get to. Why is it that so many people no longer listen or are impressed by them. And the communication style of elites, whether it’s academics, or high business executives, or government executives, is that they’re source-oriented communicators. They say what they want to say, in the language they want to say it, with the media that they are most comfortable with, and that’s a perfectly fine method of communication when you’re dealing with your peers. But the opposite of that is a receiver-oriented communicator, who doesn’t start with what I want to say, and my view, who starts with “who are these people in this audience, what are they thinking, what are their attitudes, what is their vocabulary, what is their preferred media.” Taking that into account, then getting around to saying what you want to say. The later one is the style of a small-d democrat politician; the other is a different style that doesn’t resonate with rank and file people.
So much of what rankles me about how our democracy operates comes down to this notion of communication style. Here, for example, is a sentence pulled from the 2016 Prince Edward Island Budget Address by Hon. Allen F. Roach, Minister of Finance:
At the same time, we must remain mindful of the continued volatility in the global economy. Vast fluctuations in the pricing of resources and other market conditions have placed pressure on government and private industry alike. These pressures, in turn, have impacted both personal and public finances. We, as Islanders and as a Government, are not isolated from these economic realities.
The budget address is the most concrete statement that government has to make each year about how it will govern.
And yet what does that sentence mean?
Nothing. It is entirely without meaning for the regular everyday person–Manning’s “rank and file people”–among which I count myself. While “vast fluctuations in the pricing of resources and other market conditions” might mean something to an economist, to most people this sounds like “blah blah blah, blah, blah blah.”
Compare this to a section from President Donald Trump’s inaugural address:
From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.
Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.
We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.
I will fight for you with every breath in my body – and I will never, ever let you down.
In both cases the speakers are making a macroeconomic point; setting aside whatever you might feel about Trump’s “America First” approach, he is speaking in clear language that anyone can understand. Is it any wonder that he’s capable of making a connection with many electors, even those who don’t share his politics.
You might argue that Manning’s “receiver-oriented communication style” is nothing more than “telling them what they want to hear,” and certainly in Trump’s case there appears to be much of that; but note that Manning finishes his description with “Taking that into account, then getting around to saying what you want to say.”
He is, in other words, saying “listen, then talk” and, further, “when you talk, talk in a way that people can relate to.”
And that doesn’t seem to be asking too much of those who we charge to conduct the public business.
Our current administration here in Prince Edward Island has suggested in past that it will heed this notion; in one of Premier MacLauchlan’s first statements upon assuming office he summarized this as follows:
We must continuously look for new ways to obtain input from citizens and the community, to inform government decisions and priorities. By listening carefully to citizens, we will make better decisions about public policy and its administration. Further, a properly grounded approach to listening will sustain government on a strategic policy course.
Setting aside that this description of a more populist approach was, itself, written in decidedly non-populist language, the spirit appears true.
Too often, though, these “new ways to obtain input from citizens and the community” are conducted, as Manning outlined, in a “source-oriented” way: “they say what they want to say, in the language they want to say it, with the media that they are most comfortable with.”
What results is either “we must remain mindful of the continued volatility in the global economy”-style gobbledegook.
Or neo-populist videos that have all the appearances of being plainspoken but that are, in fact, written in tone-deaf marketingspeak:
We’re the one thing that, despite our size, gives us a leg up: call it scrappy, call it persistent, we call it mighty. It’s the kind of might that makes us an Island of dreamers and doers; it’s guided us from the beginning, with a will and a belief that we can do anything.
To be clear: I’m not speaking about policy here. I’m neither seeking to praise Trump’s administration nor to condemn MacLauchlan’s. I’m not talking about the ideas behind their speech and their approach; my praise and criticism is about style, medium, language, spirit and tone.
The danger in all of this for Prince Edward Island is that we will, eventually, see a leader with a combination of populism, credibility, and crazy ideas, who will lead us, despite our better judgement, into dangerous waters; perhaps all that’s prevented this from happening, to this point, is the absence of a skilled-enough actor, and long-term habituation to the gobbledegook.
Of course it need not tilt that way: it’s possible that we’ll see the emergence of a populist leader, with credibility and laudable ideas, who will guide us in an entirely more positive way.
Whichever way things go, we ignore Manning’s wise words at our peril.
Continuing my drive to spread the City Cinema film schedule as far and wide as possible into cyberspace, I’ve got a “Google Action” all ready to go. It’s working, in private “preview” mode, on both my Google Home device here in the office, and in Google Assistant on my Android phone.
I’ve reached a stumbling block with getting it approved for public release by Google, though: when I try to use “City Cinema” as the “invocation name” I get an error about a “reserved brand name”:
I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do to under “Connected Properties,” and I’ve been back and forth several times, fruitlessly, with the Google Actions support. I’ve submitted another request today, and hope I’m more successful.
In the meantime, here’s what it looks like:
I had my first Alexa Skill certified today, one I built over the past couple of weeks for City Cinema here in Charlottetown.
“Alexa Skills” are custom apps built for Amazon’s voice-controlled Echo line of products; think of them as a very early prototype of the computer on Star Trek, but lacking most of the artificial intelligence.
While Echo devices aren’t yet available for sale in Canada, they work in Canada, at least mostly, and it’s clear they’ll be here eventually. So it’s a good time to build up some “voice app” muscle memory, and City Cinema was a good, simple, practical use case.
Simple and practical because there’s really only one thing people want to know about City Cinema: what’s playing. Tonight. On Friday. Next Thursday.
So here’s a high-level overview of what it took to make an Alexa Skill.
First, I needed to select an Invocation Name. This is the “trigger word” or the “app name” that Alexa will glue to my skill. I selected the obvious: City Cinema.
Next, I created an Intent Schema, a JSON description of the things my skill can do, its methods, in other words.
In this case, it can only do a single thing–tell you what’s playing–so there’s only a single intent defined, WhatsPlaying, that has an optional parameter (called a “slot” in Alexa-speak), the date. There are also a few built-in intents added to the schema to allow me to define what happens when a user answers “yes” or “no” to a question, and when they cancel or stop.
```
{
"intents": [
{
"intent": "WhatsPlaying",
"slots": [
{
"name": "Date",
"type": "AMAZON.DATE"
}
]
},
{
"intent": "AMAZON.YesIntent"
},
{
"intent": "AMAZON.NoIntent"
},
{
"intent": "AMAZON.CancelIntent"
},
{
"intent": "AMAZON.StopIntent"
}
]
}
```
Next, I defined the Sample Utterances, a list of the actual things that users can say that will initiate a “what’s playing” lookup:
```
WhatsPlaying what's playing on {Date}
WhatsPlaying what's playing {Date}
WhatsPlaying what's on {Date}
WhatsPlaying what's showing on {Date}
WhatsPlaying what is playing on {Date}
WhatsPlaying what is playing {Date}
WhatsPlaying what is on {Date}
WhatsPlaying what is showing on {Date}
WhatsPlaying showtimes for {Date}
WhatsPlaying what are the showtimes for {Date}
WhatsPlaying what are showtimes for {Date}
WhatsPlaying showtimes for {Date}
WhatsPlaying the schedule for {Date}
WhatsPlaying schedule for {Date}
```
Defining these utterances is where you realize that a lot of what we call “artificial intelligence” is still very ELIZA-like: a nest of if-then statements.
Finally, I pointed the skill at an API endpoint on a server that I control. There are no limitations here other than that the endpoint must be served via HTTPS.
From this point, I could code the endpoint in whatever language I liked; all I needed to do is accept inputs from Alexa, and respond with outputs.
I opted to code in PHP, and to use the nascent third-party Amazon Alexa PHP Library as a convenience wrapper.
There are a bunch of things the endpoint must do that using this wrapper makes easier: requests must be validated as having come from Amazon, and there must be application logic in place to respond to LaunchRequest, SessionEndedRequest, and IntentRequest requests.
Other than that, the heavy lifting of the skill is relatively simple, at least in this case.
When a user says, for example, “Alexa, ask City Cinema what’s playing tonight,” Alexa matches the utterance to one of those that I defined, WhatsPlaying what’s playing {Date}, and passes my endpoint the intent (WhatsPlaying) and the date (as YYYY-MM-DD).
So I end up with a PHP object that looks, in part, like this:
```
``` [intent] => Array ( [name] => WhatsPlaying [slots] => Array ( [Date] => Array ( [name] => Date [value] => 2017-03-02 )
)
)
```
```
From there I just use the same business logic that the regular CityCinema.net site uses to query the schedule database; I then munge the answer into SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) to form the response. I pass back to Alexa a JSON response that looks like this:
```
``` { "version": "1.0", "response": { "outputSpeech": { "type": "SSML", "ssml": "Playing at City Cinema on ????0302: Jackie at 7:00.
Do you want to hear a description of this film?
" }, "card": { "content": "Jackie at 7:00", "title": "Playing Thursday, March 2", "type": "Simple" }, "shouldEndSession": false }, "sessionAttributes": { "Operation": "FilmDetails", "Date": "2017-03-02" } } ```
```
While I can return a plain text reply, using SSML allows me to express some additional nuance in how dates and times are interpreted, and to insert breathy pauses when it helps to increase clarity.
Note that I also pass back some sessionAttributes values, Operation and Date. This allows me to respond properly when the user says “yes” or “no” in reaction to the question “Do you want to hear a description of this film?”; they are, in essence, parameters that are passed back to my endpoint with the follow-on intent. Like this, in part:
```
``` case 'AMAZON.NoIntent':
if (array_key_exists('Operation', $alexaRequest->session->attributes)) { $operation = $alexaRequest->session->attributes['Operation']; } switch ($operation) { case "FilmDetails": $message = ""; $message .= "Ok, see you at the movies!"; $message .= ""; $card = ''; $endSession = TRUE; break; }
break; ```
```
The Alexa Skills API also provides facility for passing back a “card,” which is a text representation (or variation) of the speech returned.
For example, for a “what’s playing” intent, I return the name of the film and the time; if the user answers “yes” to the “Do you want to hear a description of this film?” question, then I follow up with a card that includes the full film description (I experimented with passing this back for speaking, but it was too long to be useful).
And that’s it. The application logic is a little more complex than I’ve outlined, mostly to handle the edge cases and the required responses to things like a request without a date, or a request like “Alexa, launch City Cinema.” But the PHP endpoint code only runs 257 lines long. It is not rocket science.
There’s an Apple-like certification process that happens once you’re ready to launch a skill to the public; in my case I submitted the skill for certification at 11:00 a.m. on February 28 and got back a positive response on March 2 at 1:46 a.m., so it was a less-than-48-hour turnaround.
The skill is now live on Amazon.com.
I foolishly selected “Canada” as the sole country where it would be available when I submitted the skill for certification; because the Echo isn’t available in Canada, this renders the skill effectively unusable for the moment because to use an Echo in Canada you have to pretend to be in the U.S.
I’ve opened this up to all countries now, which requires a re-certification. So in a few days the world should have access to the skill. And, eventually, when the Echo gets released in Canada, the skill should be of practical utility to Echo owners in the neighbourhood.
In development: an Amazon Alexa skill that delivers information about electricity load, generation and peak on Prince Edward Island.
It’s unseasonably warm this January in Charlottetown. Or, rather, unseasonably warm, then cold, then warm, then cold. Today is warm. Or warmish. And it is raining. Hard. Here’s the sound I hear in my office of the rain hitting the side of The Guild.
One of the most helpful services offered by our provincial government here in Prince Edward Island has always been Island Information Service.
By calling the easy-to-remember 902-368-4000 telephone number, I can talk to a friendly, helpful, knowledgeable information specialist who can help me navigate the complex thicket of the bureaucracy.
Except that now I can’t.
When I call that number now, rather than a friendly voice on the other end, a robot answers the phone and asks me to navigate a telephone tree: “for tax questions, such as property tax, deed registry, HST and pensions, press 2,” and so on.
Setting aside the wicking away of the helpful personal service, this approach is fine if your query happens to fall into one of the 5 options offered. But citizen questions are often more complicated than that, and it’s difficult to tell which bureaucratic box to tick. Talking one-on-one with Michelle or one of her colleagues would always result in an answer; tapping to the robot can quickly get frustrating.
But even setting that aside, robots don’t always work like they’re supposed to. Humans sometimes don’t work too, but with robots it’s often a binary breakdown — they work, or they don’t — rather than the “I’m having a bad day and aren’t as pleasant as I usually am” way that humans tend to degrade.
This was my issue today: I phoned Island Information Service to get information about how to get a voluntary ID for Oliver. I dutifully pressed 4 and then 2, and the robot told me I was being “transferred to Access PEI.”
A pause. And then “the number you have dialed is not in service; please check the number and try your call again.”
Oh no.
Systems are fallible — I’ve made a career out of managing their fallibility, so I know this perhaps better than most. But because I can only talk to a robot, I can’t report the issue: pressing 0 to speak to an operator doesn’t work. There’s no “to report an issue with this system” option. There are no search results on the government telephone directory for “Island Information Service.”
And so I’m stuck.
And thus I pen this bug report here, with hopes that the robot will read it and take corrective action.
And maybe bring Michelle back?
Compelling real political protest in front of Province House meets a fake Father of Confederation and his confused-looking tourist group on a Sunday morning.
Oliver and I spent a lot of time today talking about an app that could be used to make your life easier by doing things like deciding what restaurant to go to, or deciding what to order once you’re there. He came up with the name “EasyLife” and we recorded a little podcast, while swinging in the hammock at the Gardens of Hope, on the topic.
Walking from picking up the mail up the street, past Zion church, across the street to Church Street and by St. Paul’s, where a lone piper stood under a tree, sheltered from the rain. Across Queen’s Square in front of the Coles Building and along Richmond Street to work.
Many, many years ago I happened to be present on the day that Stefan Kirkpatrick was born. His parents were good and trusted friends, and I was happy to be a part of both that day and the early part of his life that followed.
When Stefan was two-going-on-three years old, I was, for a heady couple of months, his nanny. In El Paso, Texas. Which is a longer story for another day.
One of the elements of our daily life during that period, Stefan and I, trapped in suburbia on the cusp of America, was a cassette tape of The Three Little Pigs.
Stefan loved that tape, and wanted to listen to it over and over and over and over. And over.
I am, I think, a patient man at heart, but the 339th listening of The Three Little Pigs almost pushed me over the edge.
But I survived.
That I was able to emerge with my faculties intact from that nannying experience was, in no small way, what gave me the confidence to think that I had it in me to be a father; I owe him a great debt for that.
Young Stefan is now slightly less young: he is in his twenties and lives on the shore in Nova Scotia. He is a parent himself. And, with his partner Desiree Gordon, a farmer of water buffaloes. Which is what you hear Stefan and Desiree talking to CBC Information Morning’s Phlis McGregor about in this radio piece.
My favourite part of the interview is when Stefan talks about the nature of the water buffalo as a large, dangerous, friendly beast:
They’re so gentle. It’s like any kind of large tool that can kill you: you still have to be cautious of the fact that they’re massive creatures. But they’re really easy to get along with. Really friendly.
My small slice of a contribution to Stefan’s upbringing was likely insignificant in shaping what he’s grown into as a human being, but could it be that whatever patience allowed me to play The Three Little Pigs for the 340th and 341st times engendered both the patience for and interest in small scale agriculture? Let’s say yes, just for fun.
At this hour, Sonia Painchaud, an estimable musician, is playing on Victoria Row as part of the Franco Festival.
Alas she is playing to an audience of approximately nobody, give or take.
Which is a shame, because she’s really, really good.
You have another 20 minutes to seek her out.
I’ve returned again to the task of sorting through my various bits of sound scattered across servers and hosts. Deep among them I found this recording of Oliver when he was three years old, singing a song about pie.
Recorded yesterday at the PEI Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival. For kicks, listen to the first episode of our podcast from 10 years ago.
Oliver and my parents and I are spending the day at the PEI Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival in Rollo Bay. Here’s a short taste of the Farm Hands Quartet from Nashville.
I landed in Boston 3 hours ago and it’s been pouring rain since.
Things died down a little as I stopped for supper at Mi Jalisco in Milford, but as I emerge, 30 minutes later, it’s raining as hard as I’ve ever seen it. Here’s a taste.
This was left as a voicemail at the office this afternoon. It’s the kind of thing that they’d bring in a tech from forensics to analyze. Curious.
On Friday night after the performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at the Gielgud Theatre in London, I started recording the sounds of London. I started the recorded while walking from the theatre to the Piccadilly Circus tube station, and kept recording for 22 minutes, down into the station, through the turnstiles, down to the platform, onto the Piccadilly line west, off at Earl’s Court and up to Earl’s Court Road where I stopped recording.
It was was a bustling night: the streets were full of people and sounds. You’ll hear music, tube announcements, the sounds of the street.
Listening to it now, it’s an intriguing was of reliving the experience; much better and richer than a photograph.
I think the sounds alone the way are distinctive enough that you should be able to follow along.
The journey runs between 10:00 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. London time on May 13, 2016.
I recorded the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral in London while walking up Ludgate Hill and along St Paul’s Churchyard on May 15, 2016 after the St Bride Foundation Wayzgoose.
A snippet of the klezmer band that played at Luisa and Olle’s 10th anniversary party. They were very good and very spirited.
I stopped for a snack at Malmö C (the central train station in the city) last night. There’s a piano in the waiting room and a group of young people were clustered around it picking out tunes, the last of which was the opening refrain from Celine Dion’s Titanic theme. Or was it?
I have been an unremitting fan of Jane Siberry since the very beginning. She released a new album, Ulysses’ Purse, earlier this year, a release that, despite my unremitting fandom, I did not discover until earlier this week.
My favourite track is Five & Dime; it is hard not to love a song with this line:
But lead her to a ledger of a hopeless nightmarish accounting mess
and she can bring the columns back to life with her numerical tenderness
As is usual and right with Jane Siberry, you can both buy the album and download its various components freely, as your needs and abilities dictate. You can also simply send her money via Paypal, which is the easiest way to complete a transaction: no shopping carts or registrations required.
Whatever way you choose to confront the album, I recommend you do so: it’s complicated and lovely and rich and melodic and confusing with a dizzying arrange of talented collaborators, including David Ramsden, Rebecca Jenkins, Mary Margaret O’Hara, and kd lang.
It’s 24ºC outside as I write, the warmest it’s been all year. And so it’s a good time to revisit this CBC Mainstreet piece I recorded a decade ago in 2004 about iced tea many years ago with host Matthew Rainnie.
It may be my favourite piece of radio of all those I’ve ever produced, and it’s clear that I was channeling both Ann Thurlow and the late, great Marg Meikle, my radio mentors.
Matthew was, and remains, one of the easiest people to do a back-and-forth on the radio with: he’s inveterately curious and has an appreciation for the quirk. I had so much fun doing the research for this piece.
So pour yourself a tall glass of iced tea, sweetened or not as your preference dictates, and have a listen…
(In September of 2004 I went on to do the piece in radio syndication, deliverying a variation of what I did with Matt with 12 CBC radio hosts across the country in the course of a single afternoon; it was both facsinating and mind-numbing).
As I was rolling across Nova Scotia on the weekend I was listening to a late June episode of Radiolab.
Buried deep inside that episodette you’ll find a song by the Brooklyn band called Lucius. I liked what I heard and so when I got back to Charlottetown I fired up the Rdio and looked them up:
I pressed “play” and out of my headphones came this.
Was this the same band?
The band that Seventeen magazine called “two indie darlings”?
Well, no.
It seems there are two bands called Lucius: the indie darlings from Brooklyn and the Norrköping, Sweden band in the video above, a band that plays, it is said, “today’s best aggressive metal.”
Perhaps music needs to adopt the same conventions as acting and have Professional Name Protection for bands? This would prevent those looking for careful, gentle music from finding violent attack music (and vice versa).
If you’re still in shock from having pressed play on the Swedish aggressive metal, here’s an antidote.
If you’re in the radio game – and it’s something of a family business for we Rukavinas – then This American Life is the bigs. Which makes it both unfortunate and somewhat delightful that there was a Rukavina appearance in this week’s episode. Unfortunate because it’s a not-directly-related-that-we-know-of Rukavina and because said Rukavina is pretending to put his (or maybe his wife’s) finger through a wood splitter, and delightful because, well, it’s This American Life and it’s someone named Rukavina. Gotta start somewhere.
My grandmother, born Natalia Potjahailo and known after she was married as Nettie Rukavina, was born in Fort William, Ontario in 1915. As a child she played in a mandolin orchestra; here she is, sitting beside her cousin Stella at the left end of the first row, in an undated photo from that time:
Many years later, at 80 years old, she was still playing the mandolin. In 1995 my brothers and I gave our parents a large glass jar containing sand from the four corner of the country we then called home (our sand came from Victoria, PEI, gathered on the car right off the Island toward Ontario). My brother Steve captured the preparation and unveiling of that present in video, and he used a duet of my father on guitar and my grandmother on mandolin as the soundtrack
All week long students from the Holland College School of Performing Arts have been rehearsing for in the theatre next to the Reinventorium, readying for this weekend’s showcase event Love and the Lack Thereof (April 20th & 21st, 7:30 p.m., tickets $14.00 general, $12.00 students, at the box office or online).
Here’s what they sound like through the (thin) wall that separates our office from the theatre.
I’ve heard so many bits of the show, puntucated by starts and stops and stage directions, that I feel compelled to attend a performance this weekend. Maybe you should too?
Every Tuesday morning Michael Pendergast, aka “The Music Man,” has a session for young kids in the theatre here at The Guild, right next to our office. The walls are thin here, and so this means that every Tuesday morning we are treated to the sounds of happy children and accordion music. You might think this would be annoying and would interfere with being in the zone. But it isn’t and it doesn’t. I think Jane Jacobs would be happy.
I sat down in the Charlottetown studios of CBC Radio One this afternoon with Matt Rainnie to chat about our June 17 Pecha Kucha in New Glasgow and the piece aired this afternoon in the final half-hour of the program.
I’ve attached the audio of the interview to this post; if you want to watch the entire talk I gave at the 2006 Pecha Kucha in Copenhagen, it’s right here. You can also watch the Pecha Kucha talk on “Small” that Guy Dickinson – “the man on the balcony” – gave as part of the same session.
And remember, if you want to attend, just RSVP right here.
Remember back in the 70s1 when I posted about how we should all have our own domain names and then held a workshop to walk the interested through the process?
Well Spark picked up the notion this week and we taped an interview over the ISDN from CBC Charlottetown to CBC Toronto this afternoon. Thanks to the quick work in the Spark boiler room, you can listen to the raw interview now, mere hours later. Spark will follow with a blog post on Thursday, and the real live radio show will swallow the edited audio later.
I arrived early at CBC for the taping and thus got to spend a pleasant 20 minutes chatting about broadcast audio with the inimitable Kenny Adams. If I ever decide to paddle across the Atlantic in a canoe, and need someone to arrange a live audio remote from the Sargasso Sea, Kenny is my man.
- by “the 70s” I mean “last year at this time.”
Our colleagues at Yankee have suffered a bout of freezing rain today, and it’s made travel difficult and has created power problems; this is something one must suffer from time to time with a company located in weather-rich southern New Hampshire.
So, for today, everyone at Yankee is staying home. The main company telephone number has a message to this effect, delivered in true Yankee style; it starts:
Thank you for calling Yankee Publishing, home of Yankee Magazine and The Old Farmer’s Almanac. The weather has gotten to us and our offices will be closed today…
Is it any wonder I have great affection for this company.
About a month ago Oliver and I had a few hours to kill on a Saturday afternoon. So I fired up the GarageBand, patched the audio gear in, brought in a bed track, and let Oliver have at it. I added some background vocals, did some light remixing, and this is the result. Perhaps only because I’m his father and love him dearly (and am very far away as I write), but listening to this brings a smile to my face every time.
Today was not so bleak, as it turned out: there was sun and some faint (faint) sense of warmth. But this is a brief respite from the alternating bouts of heavy snow and teeming rain we’ve been having since Christmas. Surprisingly, given this weather, we seem to be avoiding the prospect of the “meltdown season” so far. It’s early yet, though, so there’s still plenty of time for complete mental collapse before spring arrives in four months.
There is perhaps no better work that captures this part of the year than In the Bleak Midwinter:
In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.
No rendering of this lyrics captures its spirit better than the version on the now-alas-out-of-print CD A Celebration of the American Farm by David Schnaufer and Stephen Seifert.
If you can track down a used copy of that CD, which was created in partnership with our friend at The Old Farmer’s Almanac, you should; it’s got a bunch of great tracks from artists ranging from Maura O’Connell and Nanci Griffith to the Nashville Chamber Orchestra.
Of course if you’re looking for a somewhat more hopeful take on the season, there is always Raise the Dead of Wintertime from Allan Rankin (clip):
And when at night we’re by the stove
Our bellies full and our stories told
The winds of winter might blow cold
But none of us will feel it
Customers of Charlottetown-based Internet provider ISN began to get word this week that the company is about to be acquired by Nova Scotia-based Eastlink. The sale represents the end of a 14 year project for ISN’s founder Kevin O’Brien.
Kevin and I first met in the spring of 1993. We were essentially doing the same job — taking resources to the Internet — for two different sectors; Kevin was working for the PEI Federation of Agriculture and I was working for the PEI Crafts Council. What began with innocuous conversations about technology that spring led eventually, 18 months later, to the creation of ISN: I, in essence, goaded Kevin into creating his own ISP and was his unofficial technical co-conspirator in the early days.
Over ISN’s colourful history there haven’t been many projects I’ve engaged in, from my work with the Crafts Council to the founding of Digital Island and my work with the PEI Government, to my Okeedokee partnership to Dave Moses to my current setup sharing ISN bandwidth with silverorange, where ISN hasn’t played a pivotal role. The consumption of the company by Eastlink thus represents not only the end of a project for Kevin, but also the disappearance of a human-scale bandwidth provider for the Island. Things will never be the same.
As many of the early conversations where the seeds of ISN were planted took place at The Noodle House here in Charlottetown, Kevin and I returned to the scene of the crime to record a series of conversations about ISN past, present and future. We began with a discussion of what has happened, what’s ahead for existing ISN customers, and you can listen to this in the first of what will eventually be three podcast episodes/
In future episodes we’ll talk about how ISN got started, and about some of the misadventures along the way.
Back in the day, when I was working at Canadian Tire selling Commodore VIC 20s and 64s, Commodore had an advertising campaign in Canada with the tag line “I Adore My 64” with an associated catchy jingle (another proof that eventually everything will be on the web). In French they had the same jingle, but the tag line was “Rien ne peut battre mon soixante quatre” — which translates as “nothing can beat my sixty-four.” All these years later, I’ve still got both versions running through my head.
You’ve watched the show, now download the ringtone! If you’ve got a mobile phone that allows you to set MP3 files as ringtones, grab this MP3 and be delighted with the blaring trumpets of Compass every time you get a call. Better yet, set up a personalized ringtone for calls from 902-629-6400 and know instantly when your favourite Compass reporter or producer is calling!
Although Jaiku provides several ways of updating your presence by mobile phone — you can send updates by SMS, and there’s a nice Series 60 application that runs on my Nokia N70 that does everything but make bread — there are times when I’m away from my mobile phone and want to update.
Enter Asterisk and PHPAGI which, together with class.jaiku.php make Jaiku By Telephone.
It’s not exactly a “ready for use by my grandmother” application because the text input system supported by PHPAGI (documented here) is a little bit like knitting with invisible yarn.
But it’s a cool proof-of-concept, and a good way to procrastinate a couple of hours on Christmas Eve morning.
I call into my Asterisk server, press a key to call up the AGI script I created, hear my current Jaiku presence message read to me, and then update my presence. I don’t quite get the keystrokes correct, but the result is:
The Plazes screencasts I’m recording the audio for demanded a better quality microphone than the $15 mic from Radio Shack I bought last summer. So I went out to Sobers Music this morning and invested in an APEX435 microphone, a tiny Behringer mixing board and assorted cables.
The result is much better audio. At least once I figured out which way to point the microphone.
I celebrated the occasion by recording the XLR episode of The 3LA Podcast, wherein I explore the origins of the “XLR connector” that’s at the end of my new mic.
The guys at Sobers, by the way, were super-helpful. They knew exactly what I needed, and I was in and out in 20 minutes.
I’ve been experimenting with Amazon’s S3 web service, something that’s a sort of cross between a “remote hard drive” and a “remote database.” I’m testing it as a possible repository for a client’s nightly backup of about 40GB of data and scripts, and so far Christopher Shepherd’s PHP scripts (which use Geoff Gaudreault’s PHP S3 class to talk to S3) are the leading contender for a useful S3 toolkit.
I also did a lot of experimenting with s3sync, an rsync-like S3 backup solution in Ruby, but ran into some crashing problems seemingly related to some HTTP timeout problems in Ruby itself, so I left it aside for now.
I’ve enjoyed my thrash through S3 so much that I created an episode of The 3LA Podcast about it. If all of the above is Greek to your eyes, try giving it a listen — I attempted to sum it all up in rather less buzzwordy language in the podcast.
And, yes, I know that S3 isn’t a “3LA”. But it’s awfully close!
The DVR — or Digital Video Recorder — is sometimes known by its most popular manisfestation, the Tivo. Indeed to “Tivo” something has become a verb.
You can think of a DVR as a Video Cassette Recorder, but with a hard drive instead of video tapes used for recording.
More importantly, however, is that DVRs are also computers, albeit ones with a features limited to TV recording and controlled by a remote rather than a keyboard. And because they’re computers, they can be a lot more powerful and easier to use that VCRs.
I don’t think anyone ever got user interface on the VCR to the point where it was universally usable. And it’s not that there weren’t attempts — the crazy “VCR Plus” system comes to mind.
With DVRs, things are getting pretty close to “anyone can use this.” The printed TV Guide is gone, replaced by up to two weeks of electronic TV guide, navigated on the TV screen with a remote. Want to record something? Press the “RECORD” button. That’s it.
DVRs can also be used to record entire series — you tell the DVR to record every new episode of your favourite program and it just does it. Indeed more sophisticated DVRs, like the Tivo, can be set to record automatically based on other criteria, such as actor, or genre.
Because DVRs automatically invisibly save some amount whatever you’re watching “live,” even if you’re not recording a program you can generally “pause” and “rewind”. Which makes it a lot easier to watch credits, and listen to confusing dialog again. To say nothing of making for easier washroom breaks.
We’ve had a DVR for almost a year, and perhaps the greatest change it’s made in our television watching life is that we simply don’t watch commercial anymore. We’ve got the DVR set up to record the programs we want to watch, and we generally watch them anywhere from an hour to a day after they’ve aired, which means that when commercials happen, we just fast-forward through them.
Most cable and satellite providers now have DVRs available, usually as a more expensive version of the digital box you need anyway. We pay an extra $10 a month for ours. It’s not without its quirks — two or three times a month it won’t record something, it’s “crashed” on us a couple of times, and the interface could use some polish. But it’s also changed the way we watch TV completely.
A bonus episode of The 3LA Podcast tonight wherein I take a stab at explaining why the airport code for Charlottetown is YYG.
Today’s episode of The 3LA Podcast pulls apart RSS. In two minutes and fifteen seconds.
A sure sign that the procrastination gremlins are in full form: another episode of The 3LA Podcast. Today’s subject: PMT.
While I tipped my hat to friend Ann (who has nothing to be ashamed about for not knowing how to use RSS in a sentence) there’s something else at work here: perhaps like you, I get lots of ideas in the shower, or on the way to work, or when I’m falling to sleep at night. Usually these ideas involve creating some sort of grand thing — a newspaper, a hovering rocket ship, a website for father with one child. And usually they go nowhere, as real life overtakes (and I realize that parts for hovering rocket ships would probably be too expensive anyway).
I’m pretty sure that if I carried out all of my crazy shower schemes I would explode or be homeless (although I might be homeless and happy). But it occured to me that the effect of so many ideas not carried out was beginning to be a downer. So I decided to take just one — it happened, perhaps at random, to be exposition on three-letter words — and just do it.
The idea actually started off in the shower as a CBC radio series. Then I realized that to make a CBC radio series I would probably have to write a proposal and send it to someone. And there would be meetings, and studios to book, and scripts to write, and T4s to receive. It all seemed Very Complicated. And so I gave up. Then I realized that if I just went ahead and did it — in an hour or two — I would, at the very least, get it out of my system. Wouldn’t be perfect, might not even be useful. But never underestimate the power of actually doing something.
Who knows — I might keep going.
My friend Ann wrote the other day to ask me about RSS. I wrote her back a little description of what RSS is. This morning she wrote back to thank me, and added:
The latent (or maybe not so) teacher in you is a side you should cultivate.
That’s a nice set of gloves to throw down, and inspired me to whip up a brand new podcast: The 3LA Podcast. The idea is that in each episode I’ll decrypt a new “three letter acronym.” Like RSS. Or GPS. In two minutes or less.
Episode one concerns the three-letter acronym TLA.
You can grab the podcast feed, and learn more, over on 3la.ca.
Recorded on the Magdalen Islands during a family vacation in 2006. We both had stuffy noses.
My Nokia N70 has a built-in voice recorder that lets me tape 60 seconds of audio (the one minute limit is an annoying but sometimes useful feature). Over the past month I’ve pulled out the phone at various soundful times and recorded a minute here, a minute there. I’ve pasted all of the clips together, and you can listen to the entire 11 minutes, 11 seconds in one go. Audio is relatively low quality, there are only a couple of bona fide podcast-like bits and otherwise you should just treat it as a sort of raw audio montage of euro-audio.
Among other things, you’ll here lots of buskers, a ride on an antique trolley, roller coasters at LegoLand, an ambulance siren, the bells outside our window in Copenhagen that rang every morning at 8:00 a.m., a minute inside a Porto coffee shop, and a little tour of a water wheel.
On Monday night Catherine decided to go to the movies, leaving Oliver and I to our own devices. Unable to watch Frosty The Snowman another time, and without sufficient energy to properly engage the Little People, of course we decided to record a podcast. This is the result.
We’re both particularly fond of the opening theme. There’s a big jump in volume about 1/3 of the way in — I think I hit the wrong slider in Sound Studio during post-production.
Oliver hits his stride with the telling of the apple picking story.
I reached the zenith of my erstwhile career as a “technology commentator” in 1995. The previous summer I had produced a summer series for the local Island Morning show called “A User’s Guide to the Future.” It was all my friend Ann Thurlow’s fault. And, also, I suspect, due to Ann’s patronage, I found myself in the Morningside rolodex filed under “technology.”
And so it came to be that I found myself standing beside a van in the field outside the Robertson Library at the University of PEI one May morning in 1995. The inimitable Barry Vessey was at the controls in the van and, through the magic of radio, I was hooked up with Peter Gzowski, Kevin Kelly, and Gerri Sinclair talking about, as Gzowski put it, “a swing of the pendulum.”
We were gathered together as a part of a series called “The New World” to talk about the impact of the “new technology” on all of us.
Thanks to my father’s compulsive documentary instincts, I’ve come into possession of a recording of the panel. Oh how young I sound — almost chipmunk like; I’d like to think that is an artefact of the audio compression, but I fear I simply was that young and urgent.
My favourite part of the session comes near the end:
Me: I wonder if we should maybe just all calm down a little bit… ah, not us here specifically, but society in general…
Gzowski: Ah, the voice of Prince Edward Island… calm down!
Me: Yes, indeed… I just… I’m thinking about the fact that I’m sitting here in a field on the campus of UPEI talking into a little metal thing talking to someone in Toronto and someone in Ottawa, that seems pretty amazing to me in the greater context of technology… radio’s been around for 100, 150 years and I still think it’s amazing, and I don’t think we’ve explored the boundaries of it at all yet.
Oh to be characterized as the calming voice of Prince Edward Island. Those were the days.
We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Session Five this afternoon over lunch.
The focus of this episode was on Zap Your PRAM 3, the next incarnation of the Zap Your PRAM conference we organized in the fall of 2003. Zap3 is running February 16 to 19, 2006 in Cavendish, PEI; details forthcoming shortly on the new Zap3site.
There is, alas, an annoying bit of electrical interference that runs throughout the episode — it’s most noticeable at the beginning. I tried various methods for filtering it out, but they all made Dan, Steven and I sound like drunken fish. Here’s a rundown of what you’ll hear:
- 00:00 — The intro and extro stingers are from Royalty Free Music.
- 00:15 — We start off with a somewhat dorky and stilted introduction to Zap Your PRAM (early-episode dorkitude seems to stike us every time). We get better as we go along.
- Video and Audio of Zap Your PRAM One
- 19:45 — The “people standing in from of webcams” phenomenon.
- The Island Cam (Dan stood here).
- The YankeeCam.
- 21:15 — People at silverorange buying digital SLR cameras?
- Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT
- Canada EOS 20D
- Nikon D200 (with GPS capabilities)
- 22:30 — Peter takes a picture of Steven with his T610 camera phone (either Peter or Steven was moving, so the photo is more jiggly than it would be otherwise).
- 24:00 — What podcasts do we listen to?
- Peter: Daily Source Code, The MacCast, Meet the Press, BBC Podcasts, Yankee Foliage Podcast
- Steven: LugRadio, Diggnation
- 26:45 — Peter’s television addiction leads him to rent a Eastlink DVR.
- 28:00 — Steven and Dan love Homestarrunner.
- 28:30 — Steven to make a LongBet with Ray Kurzweil?
- 28:45 — WikiPEI, Wikipedia, Tourism PEI Website RFP.
- 32:00 — The Rukapedia pages for Dan and Steven and the compromising photo.
- 34:45 — Interactive Charlottetown Bus Map, RealCharlottetown.com and Open Locations.
- 41:02 — Dan has an “unbelieveable hate-on” for Web 2.0 so we avoid talking about it at all costs.
- 41:44 — Steven talks about going to The Gnome Summit in Boston: Springboard and Tango Project.
- 51:44 — Queen Street Commons update from Dan.
- 54:15 — silverorange releases Swat, a PHP web application toolkit.
In addition to the RSS Feed for the Podcast, we’ve also registered LiveFromTheFormosaTeaHouse.com where you can always find show notes, links to previous shows and more fun.
We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Episode 4 this afternoon over lunch. At the Formosa Tea House. Live.
We recorded in the coveted back room of the Formosa, with a very simple technical setup. We all sat around Dan James’ APEX435 microphone, which ran into Steven Garrity’s Behringer Eurotrack UB802 mixer. We took the output of the mixer and plugged it into my iMic, which was plugged into a USB port on my laptop. I did the recording in Sound Studio, saved as an AIFF file, then imported the file into iTunes and converted to an MP3 (24 kbps mono, VBR medium quality).
This episode runs one and a half hours. It didn’t feel “too long” when we were recording it, so we’ve decided to release it completely unedited to maintain the “three guys having lunch” feel. It may feel too long to listen to. Things we discuss:
- Our technical setup.
- Recent travels by Dan to Peru and Peter to France and upcoming travel by Steven to London and Paris (for his honeymoon). [starts 2:42]
- London bombings, “terrorists are people too.” [starts 28:30]
- Steven’s Canon PowerShot S330 digital camera motor goes bad [starts 36:00]
- Queen Street Commons update (and QSC vs. ATC). [starts 37:15]
- An extended riff on the differences between employees, entrepreneurs and freelancers, the responsibility to be “open” about what we do, charging for “mind share” vs. “billing by the hour,” refusing to write proposals for new projects, “adults don’t really know what’s going on,” how we price our services, how we select our clients. [starts 43:50]
- Steven is getting married. [starts 1:13:00]
- Wikis, Wikipedia coverage of London bombings, the Rukapedia, the silverorange wiki. [starts 1:14:48]
- A brief mention of Plazes. [starts 1:28:45]
You can subscribe to the Live from the Formosa Tea House RSS feed if you want to become a regular listener. We’re also in the iTunes 4.9 podcast directory — just search for Formosa.
I grabbed the audio of the interview about Plazes that aired this afternoon on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet this afternoon. It runs just over 10 minutes. Thanks to Angela Walker for a good interview and producer and technician Eva O’Hanley for running the board.
In this week’s episode, Stephen Southall reviews Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the new Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie movie.
After receiving some useful comments about the first Southall at the Movies, I did some experimenting with this one: I edited. The original tape was 34 minutes long; the version here is just over 12 minutes. I’m an apprentice digital audio editor, so the cut-down isn’t as smooth as it could be, and there were several instances where I was talking over Stephen so it was hard to make a cut where I would have liked.
There are some other rough edges: I just up and appear half way through out of nowhere (I tried to but myself out, but it just didn’t work). I go back and forth on the trailer clips. And we did sort of ramble on out.
But I think this one is better then the last. And I think we can get a lot better if we keep at it.
Again, comments are welcome.
Evidently all computing innovations that we thought were invented by young technoturks in the 1980s actually sprang to being, formed almost as fully as we use them today, back in the late 1960s. So we learned by watching Doug Engelbart’s 1968 Demo tonight at reboot. Mice, hypertext, outliners, keyword searching, regular expressions, it’s all there. If you ever have a chance to see it do: you will be amazed. I’ve attached a brief audio excerpt from tonight’s showing, captured on my iBook in the hall.
Fifty-three seconds of the main hall at reboot, just before things get going. I left the headphones at home, so I’ve no idea whether there’s any actual sound here. Let me know.
A heavy early morning: woke up at 4:30 a.m., had an iChat with Catherine, who was just getting in, and slowly, slowly fell back to sleep, only yo awake with a shudder at 7:30. World only slowly coming into focus. Here’s 1:22 of sound recorded on the outdoor plaza at reboot, where I’ve just arrived.
Okay, so I wasn’t actually on a bike when I recorded this, but I can’t break the casting concatenation habit. More rambling from Copenhagen: borrowing a bike, visiting the Danish Architecture Centre, chicken salad sandwich, getting lost.
One final podcast before I finally get a good night’s sleep: the tale of how my hotel room door wouldn’t lock, and how I waited 4 hours to get it fixed. Good night.
I arrived in Copenhagen in one piece this afternoon. In an effort to stave off my strong, strong urge to go to sleep (even though it’s only 7:00 p.m. here, and 2:00 p.m. back home), I recorded a little “this is the day that was” podcast that covers the minutae of the trip from Montreal to Denmark. Apologies if my jetlagged mind has made me shout incoherently.
Is there a better way than podcasting to fill the empty hours in the Sargasso Sea of the airport? So taking a page out of Adam Curry’s book, here’s 5:43 from the third floor of the Trudeau (nee Dorval) Airport parking garage.
Recorded on the iBook internal microphone with Sound Studio. I tried recording from here inside the Air Canada lounge (where I’m doing the upload), but this seems to be some sort of electromagnetic vortex — flourescent lights, air conditioning, microwaves, and who knows what else — so I got a fierce background hum that I couldn’t shake.
More from Europe tomorrow morning.
My old friend Stephen Southall will be popping in with a movie review podcast every week or two from his home in Lakefield, Ontario. I’ve seen more movies with Stephen than with anyone else, and trust his opinion more than most.
Today’s review is the Ron Howard film Cinderella Man, which opened in North America last week. Stephen’s take, in a nutshell: “there’s nothing there… it’s empty.”
Today marks the first in an experimental series of podcasts here on the blog. I’m trying out the medium: taking the gear out for a ride and exploring different ways of talking about things that I’m interested in. Putting this piece together brought back a lot of memories about Nouspeak, a weekly spoken word programme on Trent Radio that I was one of the production team for; I enjoyed that experience, and I had a good time editing this piece together.
Today’s podcast: Cindy Burton, owner of the recently-closed Cool Dog Deli in Charlottetown, talks about the ideas behind the deli, the challenges she ran into running it, and how it came to close.
I have long been a fan of the CITY-TV programme The Originals, especially its “interviewless” format. I’d experimented with the format in radio projects before, and decided to return to it for this piece.
Here’s the tech used to assemble today’s podcast:
- My “in studio” voiceovers were recorded into Sound Studio using the Omnidirectional Tie Clip Microphone from Radio Shack connected to my iMac using a Griffin iMic (see this technical note).
- I recorded the telephone interview with Cindy Burton using the Monitor command in our Asterisk telephone system. The result is two WAV-format files, one for each side of the telephone conversation.
- I broke Cindy’s part of the interview up into individual clips using Audacity; I exported each of the eleven clips as a 16-bit, 44 Khz AIFF file.
- I used Apple’s GarageBand to edit everything together: I imported my intros and Cindy’s clips, added a soundtrack, and exported into iTunes.
- I then exported as a 24kbps mono MP3 file from iTunes (which compressed the file from 108MB down to a more reasonable 2MB!).
Thanks to Cindy for agreeing to talk about her experiences; you can email her at cindy@cooldogs.ca or visit her website at bigdogsolutions.ca.
Oliver and I were sitting on the steps of the Perpignan Public Library on Tuesday afternoon drinking our orange juice when a young man with a guitar wandered along and sat down about 10 feet away and started quietly strumming. Oliver noticed that he was drinking orange juice too.
A few minutes later another man, a little older and drinking a bottle of beer, came alone and, out of nowhere, starting singing the most beautiful music at the top of his lungs.
Words cannot do justice to how good a singer he was. Neither can this low-grade recording I made with my phone, although it will give you a little idea. A motorcycle sped down the street just after I started recording; towards the end Oliver starting singing himself, and asked me if he could dance.
We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Episode 3 this afternoon. And because the Formosa Tea House is closed until February 24th, we switched locations and recorded here in the lounge at 84 Fitzroy St. in Charlottetown.
This episode features the best audio yet, with three microphones running into a mixing board running into my iBook. We missed the delivery of the iced tea and dumplings, though.
In this episode you’ll hear:
- Talk about travel. My trip to Croatia last fall, Dan’s trip to Peru coming up this spring, and Steven’s trips to San Francisco and upcoming honeymoon trip to Europe. We also talk a lot about travel in general, using the Internet to make reservations, and the differences between being a tourist and being a visitor.
- News of the new Queen Street Commons project that silverorange and others are working on at 224 Queen St. in Charlottetown.
- Random musings about the nature of web design work vs. “creating real things.” Special bonus “I always thought I’d be an architect” musings from me.
- An update on the Firefox web browser from Steven, including his description of the night Firefox 1.0 was released.
- A Google Alerts success story involving a sunken schooner.
The Live From the Formosa Tea House RSS Feed has been updated; it’s got the MP3 of this episode included as an enclosure for all you podcatchers. Traditionalists can still grab the audio from the web like normal. Enjoy.
Update: Dan has posted photos of our “recording studio.”
Update in March, 2017: thanks to the generosity of Scribie, we now have a complete transcript of this episode of Live from the Formosa Tea House.
Transcript 0:00:01 Speaker 1: Today on Live From the Formosa Tea House, talking about travel.
0:00:06 Dan James: The mannerisms and the behaviors of the people down there were just so much more friendly.
0:00:09 S1: The Queens Street Commons.
0:00:10 Steven Garrity: And so what we’ve been trying to do is take some of the money that we’ve been generating with our web development company and turn it into real world things.
0:00:18 S1: How and why we work.
0:00:20 Peter Rukavina: And I realized that deep in my heart of hearts I had always maintained the illusion that I was someday gonna be an architect.
0:00:27 S1: A Firefox update.
0:00:28 DJ: It ended up that it was like 4:00 in the morning for me and I had prepared the changes to the front page of the mozilla.org website.
0:00:36 S1: And a Harold Stephens schooner update.
0:00:38 PR: And it was about Third Sea and Third Sea sinking in the harbor off Olympia, Washington.
0:00:44 S1: From the lounge at 84 Fitzroy Street, here’s Live From the Formosa Tea House for January 31, 2005.
0:00:52 S?: Go.
0:00:54 PR: I’m Peter Rukavina.
0:00:55 DJ: I’m Dan James.
0:00:57 SG: And I’m Steven Garrity.
0:00:57 PR: And we’re here at 84 Fitzroy Street which is our co-corporate home. I am a tenant and they are the lords of the manor [chuckle] and the Formosa Tea House, we should explain, is closed for an entire month which has rocked our world but not prevented us from podcasting. So we’re back after a long absence because they’re closed.
0:01:18 DJ: Are we really podcasting? Steven you’re against the term…
0:01:22 SG: I would like to make a note that I’m humiliated by the term podcasting. It’s just so goofy that I can’t bear to say it with a straight face.
0:01:29 PR: I find no goofiness in it as all. I’m very proud of it.
0:01:31 SG: I always struggle with the word ‘blog’ too. I always try to say weblog when I could, although I kind of gave up because it became…
0:01:38 PR: Of course this is from the guy who has a radio show on the internet.
0:01:41 SG: Yeah. Well I guess there really is no radio involved, is there?
0:01:45 PR: No.
0:01:45 DJ: So tell us about your fans of your radio show.
0:01:48 SG: I don’t think we should get into that. [chuckle]
0:01:50 DJ: Not on our [0:01:50] agenda?
0:01:51 PR: We’re very organized today. Steven has typed up an outline of the show today.
0:01:57 SG: I copied and pasted it.
0:01:58 PR: Yeah, so we’re gonna start talking about travel because one way or another we’ve all been or will be traveling. Where do we wanna start?
0:02:07 SG: Maybe you could start by telling us about your trip to Europe.
0:02:13 PR: Well my father and I went to… In October, went on a sort of father-son bonding pilgrimage trip to Croatia, and he…
0:02:21 DJ: Why Croatia?
0:02:22 PR: Well, that’s where my grandfather’s from, and 30 years before in the early ’70s he had gone with his father so I was going with my father now, so there was sort of some nice symmetry to that. We were looking for our family roots and getting to know one another as adults and it was lots of fun. We flew to London and then we flew easyJet to Ljubljana and we were there for a night and then we were in Croatia for about five days and then took the ferry across the Adriatic to Italy and then flew back on Ryanair from Italy to London. If nothing else we got to know one another a little more and I gained 13 great-aunts and uncles that I never knew I had.
0:03:02 DJ: Wow. How did you go about finding people?
0:03:05 PR: It was weird. It was all improvisational. My father speaks a little Croatian so we could sort of make due that way and we had a little bit to go on. Our only surviving blood relative in Canada, unfortunately, had a stroke, more unfortunately for him, but had a stroke two years ago and can’t speak. So all our ability to find out from him… He would be the guy who had… Most recently there. All our ability to find out from him was lost, so we talked to his ex-wife and she gave us a little bit to go on. But ultimately the most successful part of the trip in terms of finding relatives is we went to the Catholic parish in PerušIć in Croatia and talked to the priest there who pulled out these dusty records and found my grandfather and his father and his brothers and his sisters. And it was all just a series of related happenstance-y events.
0:04:00 DJ: Sounds like a good movie.
0:04:01 PR: Yeah it would be a good movie.
0:04:02 SG: It would be a buddy movie.
0:04:03 PR: Yeah, yeah. Father son genealogical comedy.
0:04:07 SG: With Tom Hanks and Macaulay Culkin.
[laughter]
0:04:12 PR: Thank you for comparing me to Macaulay Culkin, or do I get to play Tom Hanks?
0:04:15 SG: No, sorry.
[chuckle]
0:04:17 PR: Anyway, the other thing I thought it would be useful to mention here in a webby sort of way is that, we flew from London to Slovenia on easyJet and then we flew back from Italy to London on Ryanair, both of which are the sort of discount carriers. If you’re in the US they’re sort of Southwest-like, if you’re in Canada they’re Jetsgo-like. They really have rocked travel in Europe. It used to be if you were a budget traveller in Europe you would take the train or you would hitch-hike maybe if you were even more a budget traveller and now neither of those make sense. It’s literally more expensive to hitch-hike than it is to fly.
0:04:51 SG: Now, my understanding, just I read a Wired article about Ryanair a while back, was that they’ve managed to circumvent a lot of the costs of the larger airlines by flying to lower traffic airports and cities, is that right?
0:05:05 PR: Yeah, if they were flying to PEI they’d fly to Summerside not Charlottetown.
0:05:08 SG: And avoid the costly Charlottetown airport.
0:05:11 PR: Yeah.
0:05:11 DJ: Busy metropolis.
0:05:13 PR: Well what they do is they convince… They’d go to Summerside and they say, “Do you want us to fly tourists into Summerside? Okay, then we’ll pay no taxes,” and they basically strike deals with smaller towns who want to drive tourists there. It works, we flew from Ancona, Italy which I think it cost us $60 each or something to go to London which was like a good hour and a half or two flight.
0:05:35 SG: Now, I was discussing this with our friend Nick, who’s living in Paris right now and he gave me a bit of a heads up that you have to watch out that though the flights can be cheap, getting to and from the airports without transportation can be a little bit difficult, whereas the train usually goes straight into the center of the city. But you didn’t really run into that, you said?
0:05:54 PR: Well the thing is where you run into that, is in London because you traditionally if you’re flying on Air Canada, from Canada you land at Heathrow and the budget airlines go from Gatwick or Stansted, which are two airports located, it’s basically on the other sides of London, so you have to get there somehow, which either means taking a bus which takes an hour and a half to Stansted or you have to go into London or out of London on rail. So you probably spend, because you have to convert from pounds and everything you might spend $50 or $60 getting around London. But in Italy, it cost us $1.35 to get to the airport on the airport bus.
0:06:26 SG: So it really just depends on the city.
0:06:28 PR: Yeah. Yeah. And you’re gonna face that with airlines. So if you’re comparing airlines to airlines it’s certainly cheaper. And what you get on both easyJet and Ryanair is basically no service. No service for free I should say, because you can actually buy a better selection of snacks arguably than you can on Air Canada. And they really do, especially on Ryanair there was a whole big shopping… You could buy watches and remote control cars.
0:06:55 SG: Does anybody do that? Those are weird.
0:06:57 PR: Well, I think they were looking for change and stuff, so I’m sure there’s a big market in the guilty parents or grandparents going on a vacation.
0:07:06 SG: That’s what it is.
0:07:07 DJ: I forgot to buy my significant other…
0:07:09 SG: I was away on my anniversary so…
0:07:11 PR: But I’ve read articles to suggest that on Ryanair especially… And Ryanair often will fly you for a pound, plus the airport taxes. And they do that because they make it all up on the residuals. They sell you snacks bars, and coffee and they’re gonna start selling you presumably movies, and voice over IP calls, or Wi-Fi, or whatever in the future. But it really does mean you can… Like we’re thinking of going to Europe in the spring and all we’re gonna do is get to London in advance, and then we’ll just decide which countries we want to after that and we’ll just go…
0:07:44 SG: And getting to London isn’t that difficult anymore either.
0:07:46 PR: No. No. There’s a couple airlines that do that there too.
0:07:50 DJ: Do we wanna move on to your next topic about Europe or do we…
0:07:54 PR: Well, I guess that part of it and we can segue from that and talk about your travels too. Because I think the thing about Europe in my life, and you can tell me whether this is true for you, but I can remember one or two times in my life where I received as a kid, a long-distance call, or my parents received a long-distance call from Europe. And it was like the biggest thing that would happen that year. And you would have to talk really fast, ‘cause you were probably paying like $8 a minute or something. And I think that, plus the fact that it took so long to mail to Europe, plus the fact that nobody ever went to Europe in the middle class really, it just meant that it was so far away that you would never go there. And now, especially when you live in, PEI you’re basically you’re closer to Europe than you are to Vancouver and Winnipeg and all those sorts of places.
0:08:42 SG: Both in terms of time and in cost of travel.
0:08:43 PR: Yeah, yeah. We could get in a car right now, fly to Halifax, get on an airplane tonight that leaves at 9:00 and we would be in London tomorrow morning. And that would basically be at 3 o’clock our time. People will go to Halifax for the weekend, for sometimes $300 or $400 more per person they could go to London for a week. It’s not something you would do every week, but it really does put European travel for me in a category which is less of a once-in-a-lifetime type experience and into something that you might do every year if you [0:09:16] .
0:09:16 DJ: Yeah. So instead of going and backpacking around Europe for two months you’d go for a week to one country, come back the next year, another country.
0:09:24 PR: Yeah.
0:09:25 SG: That’s something we’ve talked about before. I think people… It’s kind of a Canadian thing to go backpacking in Europe, or maybe it’s a North American thing.
0:09:34 DJ: With your Tim Hortons mug.
0:09:35 SG: Yeah. [chuckle] But that takes a significant amount of time to dedicate, and for me I’ve always pushed off going to Europe because I wasn’t ready to spend three months hiking around, but now that it’s so inexpensive it does make sense to just go for a week.
0:09:54 PR: Well it means you can go to Europe and not have to have a good time because you can go back. [chuckle] But it’s not your one time in your life that you’re gonna go there.
0:10:01 SG: That’s a good way to put it actually, yeah.
0:10:02 PR: Okay well, talk about where you’re travelling.
0:10:08 DJ: Last year on my honeymoon, my wife Becky and I went to Costa Rica and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We found that the mannerisms and the behaviors of people down there were just so much more friendly and outgoing than they are here. We just loved the area. So this year we decided we’re gonna go down to Peru for two weeks and we’re gonna cover a lot of the country, mainly the middle of the country and the southern half of the country and just really go and do the tourist thing. But doing the tourist thing in Peru is a lot different than doing the tourist thing in Washington, DC or London or something like that. So there’s two of us going and four friends are going as well, and we’re going to Colca Canyon which is the second deepest canyon in the world, it’s twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.
0:10:57 PR: Wow. Are you gonna be in it?
0:11:01 DJ: No. Well, I think actually we do stay in the valley of the canyon one night, and there’s hot springs and things like that, and then the second day of the tour of that area, it’s called, ‘Cruz del Condor’, pardon my horrible Spanish. And you go up to the top of the canyon, I think it’s 15,000 feet you’re at, and you watch Condors circle up from the valley floor and there’s apparently 60, 70 Condors at a time going up so it’s pretty cool.
0:11:29 SG: Condors are big birds?
0:11:30 DJ: They’re the largest birds in the world actually up to 11-foot wing spans I think.
0:11:34 SG: Holy crap!
0:11:35 DJ: They’re massive ugly vultures.
0:11:37 PR: You’re making all the arrangements for this trip online?
0:11:40 DJ: Yeah. We haven’t talked to a human being at all.
0:11:44 PR: Is there a language problem there, in a…
0:11:48 DJ: There is poor broken English on a lot of the sites. Peru is, unlike Costa Rica or the Central American Spanish countries there’s no English in Peru or very little English in Peru. Most things are Spanish only. The airline in Peru does have an English version of its website, and a lot of the tourist destinations do have broken English versions of their website. But it’s gonna be pretty much Spanish. So there will definitely be a language barrier. For booking online, we’ve used travel guides like Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, and all of those things, so we’ve been able to identify places that we can communicate with via e-mail…
0:12:24 PR: So just as an example, like Thursday night when you’re gonna be there, have you booked a place to stay?
0:12:30 DJ: We’ve booked all of our accommodations.
0:12:33 PR: And traditionally, do you go and fill out a form or do you send them e-mail, or how does that work?
0:12:39 DJ: It depends on the hotel. There’s one hotel, it’s actually more of a hostel/hotel, in there they don’t really have a lot of, in our price range, a lot of hotels going, like a Holiday Inn. It’s mainly run by small families. Some of them have forms but I think they’re just e-mail forms.
0:12:56 PR: I’m just trying to think of what a small family is. [chuckle]
0:13:00 DJ: Sorry, yeah, whatever. You fill out a form, but I’m pretty sure that form just e-mails them anyway, because you usually get an e-mail back.
0:13:05 PR: So you do have some communication with them?
0:13:07 DJ: Some communication, yeah.
0:13:08 PR: Oh, that’s great.
0:13:09 DJ: And then, of course booking flights and things, that’s always done through websites.
0:13:13 PR: Yeah. So why Peru?
0:13:18 DJ: We wanted to go to a country in South America, and there was a really good deal at a bookstore we were at with the Frommer’s to Peru. [chuckle] And so, it was the first one we picked up, and we kinda liked it. I like mountains, most people know that, and the Andes are in Peru, which is fantastic. We’re going to Machu Picchu, which is kind of a hill…
0:13:39 PR: So, you’re like a mountain groupie.
0:13:41 DJ: Yeah, I’m like a mountain groupie. This year at the Andes, next year the Himalayas…
0:13:45 PR: Well, that’s an interesting question because if you are a relatively, in the world context, wealthy North American and can afford to basically go anywhere now in the world, which is not true, certainly of my parent’s generation, both economically and logistically, it means that you can go anywhere so you can get sort of paralysed by that. Like how do you choose, ‘cause you’re not gonna be able to fill the…
0:14:09 DJ: Overrun by choice too.
0:14:11 PR: Yeah. And we went to Czechoslovakia in 1998 because I liked a building in Prague.
[chuckle]
0:14:18 PR: But it was just… You had to pick somehow.
0:14:20 DJ: Yeah. And again, the low cost of travel, we used Flyer Points to book our tickets down, but some of the people we’re going with just bought tickets. And they were $798 return from Charlottetown.
0:14:32 PR: To Peru?
0:14:33 DJ: To Lima, Peru.
0:14:33 PR: Wow!
0:14:33 SG: That’s incredible.
0:14:35 DJ: Yeah. And that’s like Air Canada straight. Charlottetown Toronto, direct Toronto, Peru direct.
0:14:42 PR: It’s interesting, I did a e-mail interview which I haven’t published yet with George Stewart, a local travel agent, and one of the questions I asked him, I sort of assumed that in his case, he’d be booking a lot of trips to Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and maybe some trips to Europe.
0:14:56 DJ: All inclusive resort stuff.
0:14:57 PR: Yeah. But that Islanders wouldn’t be really adventurous travellers, but he said that’s… You couldn’t believe… That’s the furthest from the truth, like islanders go everywhere. He books trips to Africa, and all sorts of places. And maybe it’s just Islanders don’t talk about travelling very much but he said he would see the same profile here as you would anywhere, at a big city travel agency.
0:15:18 DJ: One of the things about Peru that appeals to us is just it’s not Europe, in that it’s a lot cheaper to, once you get there, you can really do quite well on $25, $30 a day, whereas… And that’s staying in single rooms with private bathrooms, and breakfast included in the morning, things like that. So if you go to Europe, I find that you can stay in a hostel for quite a bit cheaper but you’re level of service, I guess kinda declines from there.
0:15:47 PR: Well, that’s like by going to Peru with a $700 return ticket, you’re basically doing a similar… It’s like if you went to Southeast Asia, except to go to Southeast Asia, you’d pay $2000 for tickets.
0:15:57 DJ: Right, right.
0:15:58 PR: That’s interesting.
0:16:00 DJ: Yeah. And I’m just looking at our agenda and the next agenda item is the one country a year plan, and this is something that Becky and I decided on our honeymoon that we’d love to do would be every year go to a new country. This year is Peru. And I think because it’s so cheap, why not? Instead of going to Telefax for a weekend or driving to Montreal for a weekend, why not get on a plane and go to…
0:16:24 PR: Andorra.
0:16:25 DJ: Argentina, Chile, or anywhere for a week or two, and just have fun, it’s just at that price range now where it’s actually possible.
0:16:33 PR: Well, and the other thing I think maybe we take for granted, is the fact [A] that because of the industry we’re in, in that we’re basically self-employed, we can do that. If you’re a teacher, you can’t leave in the middle of January for three weeks or at least as easily. And also that we can work from anywhere, if we wanna do it for longer. And that’s, it’s hard to take your work with you in many professions.
0:16:56 DJ: Yeah. One thing I’ve found is that, there are Internet cafes everywhere. When we were in Costa Rica, we were sitting in a jungle town in a rain forest. And literally the town would be no more than 150, 200 people, and there were two Internet cafes. And for 25 cents, you could use the Internet for three hours.
0:17:16 PR: I found the same thing in Thailand, I found the same thing in Spain, I found the same thing in… I mean I found the same thing in Czechoslovakia in 1998. And you’re right, it’s almost, the further you are from the center of things, the more valuable and prevalent Internet cafes are because they’re so much more useful and integral.
0:17:33 SG: It’s interesting that when hearing you guys talk about this. Now both of you would be more interested in travel almost as a hobby than I would be.
0:17:40 PR: Well, worldly you might wanna say.
0:17:42 DJ: Hey, he is going to London and Paris.
0:17:43 SG: Well, that’s what I was gonna talk about, that the places, that… I’m more of reluctant traveller, but the places I’ve been to and I’m planning to go in the next year are more on the typical travel plan. I’ve been to the West Coast, I’ve been to California twice in 2004 and I’m going to London and Paris in 2005. It’s interesting that it seems that you guys are not very interested in going to the places that are typical travel locations. And it’s more like you’re intentionally seeking places that are off the beaten path.
0:18:16 PR: Yeah. The other thing I have found generally when travelling is that, even if you are going to France or Spain or some of a commonly traveled to country from North America, I often find it… When you’re reading The Lonely Plant book, the way that they rate the importance of things, is relative to the world of travel. So we’ll say such and such a town in Italy is like a barren, industrial town not worthy of a tourist visit but they mean that compared to the Vatican, not compared to Montague. So if you go there, it’s way better than Montague.
[chuckle]
0:18:53 PR: So we were in this town, that my father and I, were in Anchota, Italy. It’s on the far eastern coast of Italy and it was described as this mundane town that you would use it as a utility town. But we spent a good… We were there for 48 hours and there was museums and shops and Italians there. [chuckle] And it was all the Italy we needed. And I got a sense that we probably got more out of it because we weren’t rushing around like to see the Colosseum and the Vatican and all these… There was nothing to “see” so you got to see a lot more of what there is to see.
0:19:27 DJ: I think I do look for things off the beaten path. And part of that’s cost. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to do that, but I think a lot of it’s like, the Indie Rock Pete of travel where you wanna go somewhere…
0:19:41 SG: Go somewhere cool where no one’s been?
0:19:43 DJ: Yeah, exactly. Somewhere cool where not a lot of people go that have really interesting things. Peru has some of the cradles of civilization in it, like the Inca empire. And I think that’s just a lot more interesting for me to see than the Eiffel Tower.
0:19:57 SG: Or the Mona Lisa.
0:19:58 DJ: Or the Mona Lisa, yeah.
0:20:00 PR: Well, I think too. Above and beyond, the self indulgence of travel, there is a responsibility to your home community to bring back stories and…
0:20:10 DJ: Knick-knacks?
0:20:11 PR: Well, no. You go to…
0:20:13 SG: Hotel soaps?
0:20:13 DJ: Yeah.
0:20:14 PR: You go somewhere else, you see that something’s done differently, you come back and that enriches, in theory, your own life but also if you talk about it and share it and say other people should go there. That’s how we learn about the rest of the world, I guess. If everyone just went to London and Paris all the time [chuckle] where would we be?
0:20:32 SG: Man, my trip sucks.
0:20:34 PR: Well, I mean the irony for me is that…
0:20:35 DJ: But it is your honeymoon so it’s not really gonna suck…
0:20:37 PR: Yeah. But the irony for me is that we’re sort of casting going to London and Paris like it’s an everyday thing to do. And I think for most people, it would be like the most dramatic thing you would do in your years.
0:20:46 SG: Yeah, and I actually am planning to have sort of the typical… When we go to Paris, we’re gonna…
0:20:51 DJ: Have a camera around your neck on a lanyard…
0:20:54 SG: Yep, we’re gonna be tourists and we’re gonna do touristy things.
0:20:57 PR: Well, that’s… When we travel, we do the same thing.
0:21:00 SG: It’s like going to Disney World.
0:21:01 PR: Yeah. Yeah. [chuckle]
0:21:02 SG: Now, you have a… One of your goals is to hit a new country every year. I have a new travel goal myself. Never in my entire life do I ever want to be in Los Angeles. I’ve avoided it so far and I think that’s something I could avoid through the rest of my life.
0:21:18 PR: I’ve been in San Francisco and San Diego and I’ve taken the bus by Los Angeles with my father.
0:21:23 SG: But you didn’t go in?
0:21:24 PR: Didn’t go in, no.
0:21:25 DJ: I’ve been in Los Angeles when I was a very young child. I went to Disneyland.
0:21:30 PR: But the thing is, you know what’s gonna happen? There’s gonna be Firefox, the reality TV series next year and you’re gonna have to go down to LA and you’ll do it willingly and that will be that.
0:21:39 SG: No.
0:21:40 DJ: Yeah.
0:21:40 SG: We should probably move on with our agenda if we’re going to have the longest most boring radio show in the world.
0:21:43 PR: Hey, here’s some opportunity for interactive viewer feedback. Or now, what do you call them? Listener feedback. Podcastees? What do you call the… What you would call in the TV world a shot-list. What do you call it on the radio?
0:21:57 SG: Oh yeah.
0:21:57 PR: Prompt-list?
0:21:57 SG: Well, we’ve been calling it our agenda which is pretty lame.
0:22:00 PR: Yeah, it sounds pompous, so I’m not gonna call it a agenda.
0:22:03 DJ: I have an agenda. [chuckle] Steve, you were gonna talk about… You kinda briefly mentioned that you’ve been to the west coast twice this year?
0:22:12 SG: Yes. Both trips were related to the Mozilla Firefox work we’ve done and…
0:22:18 DJ: Which is a reoccurring theme on our radio show.
0:22:21 SG: Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting ‘cause I hadn’t been to the west coast. I had only been to Vancouver but never to California until last year. And we went twice and a couple of the other guys from… Still here at Silver Orange came. Jan was with me on the first show. Actually, both you guys were there on the first show.
0:22:41 DJ: That was the spontaneous trip to California we arranged in three to four days.
0:22:42 SG: Yeah. Very bizarre being in Silicon Valley. I was in Mountain View, and Palo Alto, and San Jose and we stayed at the… [chuckle] So, you can get travel advice. You wanna avoid the travel lodge in San Jose by the arena where the sliding bathroom door had a hole kicked in it. We had to deal with the attendant through a bullet proof glass. [chuckle] And I think I paid twice because I paid online and they didn’t believe me and I paid again. Weird being in Silicon Valley where it’s like the dot com bubble never burst because whoever’s there, are the people who have survived, and I find there’s a whole feeling in San Francisco and in all of Silicon Valley of… Maybe that you would get when you’re in Washington, DC from a government perspective that it’s in a bubble and it’s… There’s a dis…
0:23:42 DJ: It’s like 20 square miles surrounded by reality.
0:23:44 SG: Yes. It’s a disconnect from the rest of the world and people seem to be able to suspend their understanding of normal human beings’ lives when they’re there. So neat place to visit, don’t wanna live there.
0:23:56 DJ: Well it’s a very contrasted place from Prince Edward Island, Canada. I don’t think you could go in North America to any more of a difference spot culturally.
0:24:06 PR: I was in Cupertino once in 1994 and I was at a hotel, and I had to go to Apple. And I asked at the desk, how long will it take me to get to Apple.
0:24:16 SG: You had to go to Apple?
0:24:17 PR: Well, I was going to a conference at Apple.
0:24:18 SG: Okay.
0:24:19 PR: And they said, “Oh, it’s just five, 10 minutes.” And I assumed that they were talking about walking, ‘cause I thought, “Well, I’ll just walk down to Apple.”
0:24:27 SG: But it was actually on the freeway 100 miles an hour.
0:24:28 PR: Well, yeah. It was like, I could actually walk there. But it took me like an hour and a half to walk there because they’d just never heard of anyone walking. And there weren’t sidewalks and it just wasn’t set up that way. I thought that Charlottetown was a car culture, but we don’t have anything on them.
0:24:42 SG: Oh, it’s unbelievable where… And there’s very good public transit around San Francisco, but it was like, we’d go out for lunch and you’d be on a freeway for two minutes to get there, which just means you’re actually travelling quite a distance.
0:24:55 PR: I wonder if it’s actually pleasant to live there in any way.
0:25:01 SG: Well, I certainly didn’t like a lot of aspects of it. But they have a couple of things definitely going for them. The city itself is quite beautiful.
0:25:07 DJ: San Francisco.
0:25:07 SG: San Francisco and most of Silicon Valley is with… I don’t know what actually encompasses Silicon Valley, but the places that I was in, Mountain View and stuff, were all an hour from the city. The weather is beautiful, it’s nice but it’s not particularly hot. And you’re within an hour’s drive of a lot of really beautiful scenery.
0:25:28 PR: Well you see, this is the debate that I go through. I grew up just sort of in the triangle between Kitchener, Guelph and Toronto, within an hour’s drive of Niagara Falls and Toronto, Buffalo and all these places where I could have gone, and we never… Relatively speaking, we didn’t avail ourselves of those.
0:25:46 SG: Buffalo? [chuckle]
0:25:47 PR: Well. Okay. [chuckle] I exaggerate slightly.
0:25:50 DJ: Well, we just alienated all of our listeners from Buffalo.
[chuckle]
0:25:54 SG: Very John.
0:25:56 PR: I was about to make a football allusion, but I couldn’t remember the name of the team in Buffalo.
0:26:00 SG: The Bills.
0:26:00 PR: The Bills, yeah, go Bills!
[chuckle]
0:26:02 SG: Was that your football allusion?
0:26:04 PR: Yeah. [chuckle] that’s as good as I can get. But I just wonder whether people who… And I try asking, this is one thing I’ve found is people who I know who are expatriates in a foreign country, you try and get them to characterize their expatriate experience, and for some reason they can’t. It’s like, they can’t contrast it to their old life. And I don’t know whether they’re unable to do so, or it’s just what it is. So it’s hard to get people to say, like if you’re in Paris, I was talking to Nick, who’s living in Paris now about this. And I couldn’t get a sense of, “Do you wake up on Tuesday morning and you don’t have very much work to do? So I’ll just go down to the Louvre for a while and look at the Mona Lisa.”
0:26:39 SG: I’ve been in pretty close contact with Nick, just through work. He posts photos and stuff. And I do get a sense from him of his life in Paris. I mean, he doesn’t go to the Louvre but he goes to…
0:26:53 DJ: Bakeries every morning.
0:26:54 SG: He goes to the bakery around the corner and he… I get the impression that he’s living the artist-in-Paris lifestyle.
0:27:00 PR: See, Catherine and I are talking about going with Oliver to some European country, maybe Slovenia, for a longer period, and renting an apartment for a month, and being sort of hybrid tourists, not really residents, but more than just dropping in for three days. And I think our great fear on some level unstated, is that we might go there and really like the sort of day-to-day, just the sort of the insignificant things that loom greater in their… Like, having a fresh vegetable market available to you…
0:27:33 SG: Access to quality cheeses.
0:27:34 PR: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And that we might then come back here and just…
0:27:38 SG: There is the Gouda Cheese Lady.
[chuckle]
0:27:40 PR: But that involves driving in a car and only eating Gouda. There’s the ‘grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’ argument. But then, there’s the whole, “What if we came back here and life was a living hell?”
0:27:52 SG: But couldn’t you just stay a few… Don’t you have the freedom that if you really did like it somewhere, you could probably permanently relocate?
0:28:00 DJ: I think we have like a two or three year rent agreement with them.
[chuckle]
0:28:03 PR: Well you know… But the other thing is that, what I have come to not underestimate to the degree to maybe which I once did, is having been here for 12 years, you just know a lot of people a little, and you sort of know where all the streets are, and you know who’s related to who, and that degree of comfort in a place is not to be trifled with.
0:28:22 DJ: Yeah, yeah. And it is a good place to be stationed. Becky and I look at Prince Edward Island, I don’t think we’ll ever intentionally move somewhere else for a long period of time, because all of our family is here.
0:28:35 PR: So if you were kidnapped, you might relocate.
0:28:37 DJ: If we were kidnapped, we may end up living somewhere else.
[chuckle]
0:28:40 DJ: If you can call that living. But we kinda see Prince Edward Island as an ideal place to be stationed out of, and regularly travel, and regularly do things other than Prince Edward Island activities, and go maybe live somewhere for two months. And I think it’s just kinda that place in North America where the cost of living low enough to call home and say “hi” to your families and go to the beach and do all those things.
0:29:01 S?: Yeah.
0:29:02 SG: I think you can say that about most locations, like a lot of locations.
0:29:05 DJ: Except for Palo Alto.
0:29:05 SG: What’s significant for me here is that, this is where I grew up, and this is where my family is, and that’s what makes it the place where I choose to live. I mean, there are aspects of it that are nice and beautiful that I like, but there are…
0:29:20 DJ: Does anyone grow up in Palo Alto?
[chuckle]
0:29:23 PR: There must be. The Silicon people must have children.
0:29:26 DJ: Yes. They have Autism.
[chuckle]
0:29:31 PR: Moving on [chuckle] From trifling mentions of serious mental health issues, [chuckle] Dan, let’s talk real things.
0:29:42 DJ: Yeah. Oh, we’re skipping to that already.
0:29:43 SG: Dan is taking a picture of us with his camera, but…
0:29:45 DJ: Well that was supposed to be a joke on the agenda.
0:29:48 SG: Well, you better make the joke then and then we can move on.
0:29:51 DJ: I don’t even know how to bring this up.
0:29:54 PR: Well, let’s talk about the 84 Fitzroy Street, Queen Street Commons and that will segue us into that.
0:30:00 DJ: For those of you who read my blog, ceoblues.com. You’ll see that we’ve… Silverorange has purchased a building that’s actually just kinda… I don’t know if it’s kitty-corner or what do you call when a…
0:30:13 SG: I’d rather you not use the term kitty-corner ever again.
0:30:16 DJ: Anyway, it’s just around the corner from us, and we actually share backyards with the building. And one of the things that’s gonna happen in this building, we’re not buying it for silverorange’s purposes. We’re not gonna move in and have offices in there. But we’ve kinda seen actually things like this, the radio show, we have a lot of people coming and going in our building, 84 Fitzroy. We’ve had meetings where the room we’re actually recording in right now has been full of city staff members and councillors, and…
0:30:46 SG: Aspiring members of parliament.
0:30:47 DJ: Aspiring members of parliament. And we’ve kind of become this hub of activity in our city for a certain group of people. And as that group of people gets more and more active, I think it’s kind of something that we’d like not to have in our basement or our main floor every day. So, we’re kind of seeing this new place as an avenue and a venue for that to happen where we can be involved with it but at a arm’s length for it too. So, if we’re really busy with the project, we can still work and we don’t have to worry about hosting people, and things like that. And allowing other people to do this because we’re not the only organizers in the city about events like this. So, we’re kinda just creating an open… We’re calling it, and this is gonna be the first time it’s been publicly released, the ‘Queen Street Commons’, and it’s kinda occupy an entire floor of this new building. And it’s basically, going to be an open office concept. Not the open software product called ‘OpenOffice’ but basically, people can for a small price per month, be a part of this commons, and have desk space, lounge space, board room space…
0:31:57 SG: Some telecommunications infrastructure.
0:32:00 DJ: Yeah. Telephony infrastructure, internet, printers, things like that. We’re really hoping to get those people who are consultants that work at home to come in and kind of be part of a community. And then, we’re just laying the foundation for it. We’re not sure what’s gonna happen on top of that but we do expect things like the things we’ve been doing here over the past year, a year and a half to happen, whether bringing in people for debates or sessions, or their members of parliament to grill them on the next issue, or something like that.
0:32:26 PR: This could get some synergy going.
0:32:28 DJ: We’ll get some synergistic airflow.
0:32:28 SG: It’s gonna be synergistic. Part of the, what originally got us driving to look to purchase another building is that, and we’ve talked… This is talking about real things. As a web development company, we sometimes lament that, though we enjoy very much our work and take a lot of pride in it, we don’t produce anything physical or tangible, and that I think can sometimes be difficult that you can take a lot of pride in building a piece of software but you can’t hold it in your hand. And so, what we’ve been trying to do is take some of the money that we’ve been generating with our web development company and turn it into real world things that we can put to use like the building we’re sitting in now. And now, the building next door too.
0:33:15 DJ: Yeah, there’s a real fondness for real estate within a few of the members of silverorange. And real estate, in terms of acquiring and negotiating real estate, as well as fixing it up and keeping good care of buildings, and renovations and things like that. I don’t know if that…
0:33:31 SG: Those are our real estate plans.
0:33:32 DJ: Makes it sound extremely boring.
0:33:35 PR: No. [chuckle] I am one who sits on the fence about this sort of thing. Having sort of been on the periphery, the far outmost Neptune-ic periphery in the arts community, I’ve sort of watched with interest the whole Arts Guild thing. Because I think you could probably take what you’ve just said and put it in the mouth of the Arts Guild people. And it would probably reflect a lot about why the Arts Guild was needed. The Arts Guild for out-of-town listeners is that the old rural bank building in Charlottetown that was taking over by the arts community as sort of space for art to happen. And there’s print makers, and there’s a performance space, and various other things. And I’ve seen this happen in other cities, and the problem that often has run into with these things is that, then the building becomes… You wanted to do all this neat stuff but then the building itself, and the upkeep of the building, and the paying the mortgage of the building… ” And this is, I think probably truer of the arts community than it is with you guys because you have some way of sustaining this, but it sort of becomes the thing that you’re doing. The building becomes your project.
0:34:34 DJ: The building’s the answer in itself. Yeah.
0:34:36 PR: And so, you have fundraisers so that you can pay for the building, so that you can have fundraisers in the building to pay for the building.
0:34:41 DJ: Yeah. That’s kind of, we’re trying to take care of that. This is not the only thing happening in this building.
0:34:47 SG: It’s actually, we’re almost coming at it from the different angle where there was a nice building, that was near our current building. We wanted to invest some money in real estate. And it’s almost for us, the building is the original attraction and this is something that we can do with it. So hopefully, that’ll avoid that pitfall.
0:35:04 PR: Yeah. It’s just interesting sometimes to see that people have an idea about something and they think, “Well, only if we have the space to do this in” and they sort of stop there. And I don’t think the lack of… There’s always space in one way or another.
0:35:18 DJ: Coffee shops and…
0:35:19 PR: Well, yeah. Or you can do something in the middle of a street. Or, like the Confed Centre did, is they rented the old Vogue Optical space to put an artist in residence there.
0:35:27 SG: Yeah. We, Dan and I ran into something, I think that’s somewhat analogous to that where we’re aspiring amateur musicians and we aspire to be amateurs, I guess. And we’ve always thought, if we had some good recording equipment or access to a studio, we could make some really great music. And now, that we’ve got most of the equipment that we’ve always wanted, we actually found ourselves on the weekend sitting around and looking at these great microphones, mixer, computer, and everything. And it was weird, now, our lack of talent is now the biggest barrier, so yeah. People often, you can often hold off on things because there’s something you really need that you think you need but if you we’re really gonna do it you could just get it done anyhow.
0:36:10 PR: Well, I’ve ran into a very similar thing. I was watching Charlie Rose last week and Philip Johnson, the architect had died, and they were talking a lot, they interviewed Frank Gary and they talked about Philip Johnson and I realized that deep in my heart of hearts I had always maintained the illusion that I will someday gonna be an architect. Because I had sort of toyed with the idea of coming out of high school…
0:36:29 DJ: Just like George from Seinfeld.
0:36:32 PR: I had toyed with the idea coming out of high school maybe I would go to architecture school but I didn’t, I went into a general arts program. But I’d always sort of thought deep in my mind that eventually I’d be done with this computer stuff and I’d go on to do the real thing and it would be architecture. And then just listening to Frank Gary talk and Philip Johnson talk and thinking about architecture and why I hadn’t done it yet, I realized that first of all I have none of the basic skills required to be an architect. Like I can’t think in three dimensions. I’m not particularly… I like buildings and I appreciate a good space but I have no idea how you would go about creating that. [chuckle] And I can’t deconstruct it and I’m interested in buildings but I’m not passionate about them. And then I realized with the few exceptions I don’t really like architects as people.
0:37:15 SG: You’re the worst architect ever. [chuckle]
0:37:17 PR: So I decided that maybe I should let that dream go now.
0:37:20 SG: Well, I’m a designer and I don’t like designers by rule of thumb.
0:37:25 PR: Well, there you go. But you’re good at it.
0:37:27 SG: At not liking them? [laughter]
0:37:28 PR: No, no. You’re good at being an… You’re good at not liking them.
0:37:31 SG: Well, thank you.
0:37:31 PR: You’re also good at being a designer which it was even deeper with me, because I realized I didn’t… Like if you said here, “Draw a picture of a cube.” I could literally not draw a picture of a cube I cannot think in three dimensions.
0:37:43 SG: I think you’ve chosen the right career path.
0:37:45 PR: Well yes, but, not to be too real or anything but, [chuckle] it did strike me.
0:37:53 DJ: I was gonna make that comment that while we’re really getting into this next subject…
0:37:55 PR: Just jumping off on your comment about not creating anything tangible. I realized the other danger that you run into doing the kind of work that we do, and I think this is true of all three of us is that we’re not really doing… We are not our own client.
0:38:07 DJ: Anything that matters?
0:38:09 PR: Well no, I think things matter but we’re doing it for other people, for other people’s ends. And part of that is we’re making other people wealthy and we’re skimming something off. But there’s something more to it than that which, we’re sort of dealing with, we are not artists we are craftspeople.
0:38:26 SG: We’re mercenaries.
0:38:27 PR: We’re mercenaries, yes. And I’ve sort of come to terms with that on… I’m not complaining about it, it’s a good living and I enjoy the work but at the same time sometimes I sort of thirst for something which is my own thing. And maybe that’s what my web blog is on some level too.
0:38:43 DJ: And your radio show and…
0:38:44 SG: Yeah that’s what those things are for me. My own web blog, the recording radio stuff, music.
0:38:50 DJ: The lame recording we’re doing.
0:38:51 SG: Yeah. That’s my…
0:38:53 DJ: Musical recording. This recording we’re doing right now is awesome. [chuckle]
0:38:57 SG: Yeah. Shall we move on?
0:39:00 PR: Okay.
0:39:00 DJ: Sure.
0:39:00 PR: I guess we have to talk about Johnny and his bad smelling lamp now. [chuckle]
0:39:04 DJ: Again a joke item on the agenda.
0:39:05 PR: Well, I will use this joke item and morph it into a real thing that has practical relevance for the program and community.
0:39:11 SG: Wow.
0:39:12 DJ: Don’t put a 150 watt light bulb in a desk lamp?
0:39:15 PR: Well, it’s been interesting for me over the past couple of years as Johnny who is the other half of Reinvented has become a computer programmer to watch, to see computer programming through his eyes. Because for me I’ve been doing it now for 25 years and so it’s sort of I can’t think about it because I can’t see myself doing it. And one of the things I realized is that when you’re programming it’s really a process in large part of solving problems because you would think that in an ideal world you just sit down and write a program, but of course it never works that way. It breaks down and it’s like a battle against bugs. And often bugs are, you see things happen and you think, “Well, there’s the cause and this is the effect.” But the cause and effect can sometimes be illusory and the cause is sometimes something completely different so maybe you get error reports about this thing and you think, “Well because this thing is happening these other things must be caused by that.” But it’s not the case. And so the reason that I bring this up at this point is that Johnny has the office beside me had this really weird smell in his office.
[laughter]
0:40:20 PR: Which seems like an insult but it’s not. Stay through to the end of the story. And it was coincident with him going down to our client Yankee for a week. So Johnny left, I was here alone. I moved the fridge, our little bar fridge, into his office and when he came back there was a smell in his office. So logically you would think that there was something in the fridge. So we ended up throwing away a lot of the stuff in the fridge, like we threw away some honey ‘cause it was sort of a honey-like smell and we finally ended up moving the fridge out of his office and we smelled the carpets and we just couldn’t figure out what…
0:40:51 SG: We called in extra guests sniffers.
0:40:53 PR: Yeah and finally I guess, was it you or your father or?
0:40:56 SG: It was my father and I in a combined effort.
0:40:58 PR: We brought in a special hazardous materials team and you found out that…
0:41:02 SG: That there was a… Johnny’s wife had gotten him a lamp at a used store here in Charlottetown, just little desk lamp and they had put a 150 watt light bulb in this little desk lamp and it was literally slowly burning the lamp shade on it. And that’s what we discovered.
0:41:22 PR: And it smelled sort of like rancid burning honey.
0:41:24 SG: We thought for a while that there could have been some kind of dead rodent in a wall.
0:41:28 PR: Yeah, yeah.
0:41:29 SG: And we weren’t really sure how to deal with that [0:41:30] .
0:41:31 PR: So the moral of the story is that the obvious problem is not necessarily the one that is the problem you should be looking at.
0:41:37 SG: Wow.
0:41:38 PR: I think that’s the moral of the story anyway.
0:41:40 SG: I don’t think we ever had morals before.
0:41:42 PR: So Firefox update.
0:41:45 SG: Yeah, I’ll give a little bit of Firefox update. It’s been quite a while since we talked about it last.
0:41:49 PR: I think we were… The last time we recorded it was on the cusp of the Firefox 1.0.
0:41:54 SG: Well 1.0 is here. Whoo!
[laughter]
0:42:00 PR: I hear the passion in your, “Whoo!”
0:42:00 DJ: Lamest radio cheer ever.
0:42:01 SG: There was a lot of fan fair. Actually it was quite a big deal. It was quite a big press event and Firefox has gotten I think even more attention than people who were enthusiastic about it expected. And the number of downloads has been enormous. I don’t know what to make of numbers in terms of downloads but there have been 20 million downloads since it was officially released in, was it early December, I think. And in terms of the actual launch, I wrote a bit about this in my weblog but it was… Talk about lame fanfare. The launch itself, because of the time zone difference between California and here in the East Coast, it ended up that it was like 4:00 in the morning for me and I had prepared the changes to the front page of the mozilla.org website. And so I had set an alarm to wake me up at about 3:30 to get up, and all the people at the Mozilla Foundation were waiting for me wake up and launch the new website. So I did this CVS commit and actually updated the website and Firefox was released. So even though my involvement has been pretty small, I got to be part of the actual launch. But then I found myself… This is… I was sitting in Charlottetown in my bedroom with my laptop.
0:43:20 DJ: Actually in your bed.
0:43:22 SG: In my bed at 4:00 in the morning and there was an enormous feeling of…
0:43:25 DJ: There’s a mental image for folks.
0:43:26 SG: That was quite a anti-climactic launch, I can tell you that ‘cause I launched it and then sat there and then figured, “Well, guess I’ll go back to bed.”
0:43:37 PR: I wonder if that is… We assume… I kind of think if you ask the average person on the street how was Firefox released, if they had a conception of what that was it would be sort of like they’d imagine some sort of NORAD-like command center with a giant switch and a door would open.
0:43:51 SG: People turning keys at the same time.
0:43:53 PR: Yeah. And I wonder if we… Now that we know the truth behind Firefox, maybe when Star Wars 6 comes out and we think it’s like that, maybe it’s just like George Lucas presses the release button on his keyboard and that makes all the copies…
0:44:06 SG: Well, there’s actually a good… Mitchell Baker, who I think is President, I’m not sure of her title, but she’s with the Mozilla Foundation. She wrote a weblog post about the day that Firefox was released and my little story was only one of many that went on that day. There was all kinds of issues about getting mirrors setup for the download servers. There was last-minute internationalizations coming in to release in other languages as well, and right up to the last minute I was making changes to the website. They were saying, “The Japanese release is out. It doesn’t meet the quality assurance standards.” And then five minutes later it was back in ‘cause it’s been reviewed by the team and…
0:44:45 DJ: I think it actually probably was a lot more NORAD-like than the final commit to the website.
0:44:51 SG: Really what I was doing was a lot like doing an update to the website, but there was a lot of different components like that that happened, and anyway…
0:45:00 PR: But the technologies involved and the people involved, it sounds like the NORAD-like aspect is in the… It’s a complicated endeavour. But it’s something that other people just like you are doing. Like they’re not…
0:45:13 SG: Human beings.
0:45:13 PR: Yeah.
0:45:13 DJ: There were no rocket scientists involved.
0:45:15 SG: Some of them smarter than I. And speaking of which, that’s another good segue, I wanted to talk about Ben Goodger who was the lead engineer on Firefox, he still is. There was an announcement just this week or last, I think, that he has moved from being an employee of the Mozilla Foundation and he is now an employee of Google, which is quite a big significant piece of news. And there’s another… Someone who works on the, I think Darren Fisher’s his name, that he works on Mozilla that is now hired at Google as well, he works on networking protocols. But there has been long running speculation that Google might at some point release a web browser of their own, something I don’t particularly think will happen, but that’s further fuel to the rumours. But Ben is gonna continue to work in his role as leading the project, though he’s now doing it as a Google employee.
0:46:12 PR: And does that get… Google, I sense is probably doing this because Google’s a good corporate citizen, but it probably makes sense for them to sort of have someone… I think if Google could have someone working at Microsoft on the Internet Explorer team, they would wanna do that too. It’s probably good for Google.
0:46:32 SG: Oh yeah. That’s a good analogy actually.
0:46:33 PR: But do you think that, I don’t know, like if Yahoo wanted to hire someone from the Mozilla Foundation to work on Firefox, that probably wouldn’t be a problem, would it?
0:46:43 SG: No. I don’t think so. There’s a lot of people who work on… There’s probably more people being paid to work full-time on Firefox for other corporations than there are employees of the Mozilla Foundation. Red Hat has several employees that work on a full-time IBM, Sun, I guess now Google, and there are other companies too. Oracle does too. And if you look at Red Hat for example or IBM, it’s like they’re contributing to this by paying the salaries of a few engineers and they’re getting from it a pretty significant chunk of an important stack of software that they can use in offering solutions.
0:47:26 PR: But are you under the impression that in any of these people, not focusing on Ben particularly, but if IBM thought that it would be good for IBM if something happened at Firefox, it operated differently or maybe if these bugs were fixed then it would work with a particular product of IBM, do you think that those people are instructed to change their workflow so that those problems get looked at first?
0:47:52 SG: Well, in some ways because I think the mechanisms of open source kind of guide that and protect it from being sort of derailed, but if there’s sort of an itch that needs to be scratched for IBM or Red Hat customers, then they will dedicate resources, in terms of people and money.
0:48:12 PR: The payoff is good for everyone.
0:48:14 SG: Exactly, now if… Where it would become a problem would be if leadership decisions were starting to be guided towards the end goals of one company or another, but I think in general that the fact that the code is there is for anyone it could always be forked and if it needed to be, and another project could be started.
0:48:35 DJ: And the fact that the Mozilla Foundation has allowed companies to participate in this manner is good, because there’s so many companies participating in this manner that not one can actually take control and derail a project.
0:48:49 SG: Yeah, when I was at… I went to the GNOME or G-NOME summit for the…
0:48:54 PR: [0:48:54] .
0:48:56 DJ: You’re not wearing your free t-shirt today?
0:48:58 SG: No, I’m not, I’m wearing another free t-shirt actually, I wear a new free t-shirt every day.
0:49:02 DJ: Hey, me too.
0:49:05 SG: There was a GNOME software development, this is the GNOME Linux desktop project in Boston and most of the people there, some of them were students from MIT, but most were employees of Red Hat or Novell, there were few Sun employees, I think IBM, but it’s kind of understood that they’re being paid by these corporations and there are decisions that happen above their heads, because of the open source software and the licences and the governance protects from corruption pretty well, they all work together pretty well.
0:49:45 PR: So, do you think that if, I mean let’s say that this is completely hypothetical, but let’s say, one of these participating sponsoring corporations had a thought that if they change something in Firefox that would ultimately be good or neutral, but it also let’s say broke the MSN search or something. That the open source world would have a way of exposing that somehow and not…
0:50:08 SG: Well, that’s just it. Everything is very public, almost all the discussions happen on publicly accessible mailing lists and every single code commit… Piece of code that’s added or removed or changed from an open source project like Firefox for example is publicly visible. And to make an example of that, I had asked Ben Goodger, who works on Firefox, if there’s kind of a hidden Easter egg in… I think if you go in your location bar type, “About: Mozilla” I think it is, there’s like a quote. And it’s just kind of a hidden little quote about the birth of Mozilla. And I had asked if he was gonna update it for the Firefox 1.0 launch and he said, he hadn’t really thought about it or bothered, because you can’t do it as… You can’t sneak code in to an open source project, because when you make that code commit, a bunch of people get e-mail notifications there’s a public record of it, so that by its very nature is…
0:51:09 PR: So there is an audit trail and then the audit trail is public.
0:51:12 SG: Everyone can see the audit trail and in terms of governance, there’s always the ability for someone to pick up with a code and start a new browser tomorrow. Which is usually in practical terms, more of a threat than actually something that’s useful.
0:51:29 DJ: And that’s where people are suspicious of Google doing right now, but I don’t think they would.
0:51:36 SG: Yeah, I just don’t see the need or benefit of Google having their own web browser because right now if you use Firefox, Google is the default search engine, Google hosts the Firefox start page. And that’s a revenue sharing arrangement between the Mozilla Foundation and Google with the ad money that’s generated.
0:51:57 PR: Well, it’s interesting to see and this really isn’t… I guess it is open source-related on some level, but the fact that the web browser component of MacOS10 is sort of part of the… I don’t know whether you would characterize it as being the part of the operating system, but it’s certainly there when OS10 is installed, so I suppose that means that it is. Is now something that products like NetNewsWire which is an RSS reader can use within a NetNewsWire window. It sort of makes you wonder what the browser is because if I’m reading a website in that Newswire, then it’s basically my browser.
0:52:32 SG: Yeah, you can separate the rendering engine and the component that draws the page from the application that [0:52:39] .
0:52:40 PR: The interesting thing about this in the Mac world is that, [A] it hasn’t been as controversial as it was at Microsoft when there was that whole burning the browser into the OS, and that was all… There was legal action about that.
0:52:50 SG: Yeah.
0:52:51 PR: The other thing though is that… I think Microsoft seemed to sort of try and make everything the browser, like the Windows Explorer that you use to navigate your file system, they tried to turn that into a web browser. And I think Apple resisted, Apple has made that component available for web browsing and other applications, but they haven’t tried to make the finder into a web browser.
0:53:09 SG: Yeah.
0:53:09 PR: Which I think makes a lot more sense.
0:53:10 SG: Yeah.
0:53:11 PR: ‘Cause the notion of your, sort of your finder or your file explorer like loading webpages, while theoretically interesting because you can then modify that HTML, is practically useless. It just I think slows things down.
0:53:26 DJ: I’m gonna bring up a question that’s not on the agenda but the Firefox 1.0 release like 20 million people have downloaded it, spreadfirefox.com put a two-page ad in The New York Times, it’s been on almost every news site technology and just traditional news as well. The logo that’s been put on all these sites that was in the two page spread was conceived kind of in this building just like 20 feet above us.
0:53:55 SG: It was.
0:53:56 DJ: How does that make you feel? I mean you were kind of the… What’s your term? You’re kind of like the creative director or something of the brand.
0:54:03 SG: Yeah, the…
0:54:04 DJ: Visual design coordinator?
0:54:06 SG: Yeah. Something like that…
0:54:07 PR: You’re like the midwife of the logo, not the conceiver of it.
0:54:11 SG: That’s actually, though slightly disturbing a good analogy.
0:54:15 DJ: How does that make you feel when you open up a New York Times and there’s a two-page spread of something you had hands on experience with.
0:54:23 SG: It’s pretty cool. The birth of the concept for the logo, once the name was established, Firefox, I think it wasn’t a huge stretch to go. We explored what visual representations can you have for a web browser and we really couldn’t come with much more than a globe. It’s just an abstract concept that’s hard to render visually. And so the combination of the fox and the globe was pretty obvious but Daniel and Stephen and I here at silverorange we bounced the ideas around and we drew it on a… Daniel and I sketched it on a white board and then Stephen DesRoches, he pencil sketched it out. And what he pencil sketched is very close to what it ended up being finally rendered by John Hicks who lives in the UK, and ending up in the New York Times. Like you said, my involvement was more like a midwife. I was there and trying to get the people who are more talented than myself working on the right problems and the right projects.
0:55:19 PR: It seems to me that the interesting part of the story is that the logo nice as the logo is and it’s so much better than the M or the F or whatever it was before. But it’s not a revolutionary thing. The revolutionary thing is just the fact that a: You can be in Charlottetown coordinating this and that, b: I think it’s a bunch of little steps. Like if Steven had just drawn the sketch and left it at that then it never would have seen life. So it sort of took a midwife or a shepherd to sort of put it all together and to coordinate…
0:55:53 DJ: Yeah but I think there’s very few people in the world, there’s very few times in the world that something like that happens where something that you’ve worked on gets distributed to the masses at that level.
0:56:05 PR: And so quickly and with such volume.
0:56:06 SG: We came in just at the right time because when we started working on these visual aspects of Firefox it was a year and a half ago maybe and it was still called Phoenix and it was already a good browser but very rough around the edges. And in the year that we were involved that was pretty much when Ben Goodger took it over the project and turned it into a 1.0 release project. And it was just the right time and we got involved just before things really started to take off. So some of it was I think good work some of it was the fact that we were we added our small piece of good work to an enormous amount of good work that had already happened and continued to happen that we weren’t really involved in. And some of it was just happenstance.
0:56:54 DJ: But do you lie in bed at night and like…
0:56:56 SG: Think I’m a god. [chuckle]
0:56:57 DJ: I actually remember you designed and you even wrote up the code for the Firefox search page for Google.
0:57:07 SG: Yeah I worked with the Google people to do the layout of that start page.
0:57:11 DJ: And that’s the start page for probably six million people that they see that three times a day.
0:57:17 SG: Yeah.
0:57:17 DJ: Does that boggle your mind in the morning?
0:57:20 SG: Not really. I think what’s…
0:57:21 PR: If there was a picture of you on the Google start page maybe it would’ve been…
0:57:26 SG: What I think is most interesting is that I think it goes to show the motivation for involvement is more… Well there’s definitely… I definitely do enjoy the satisfaction of getting some credit it feels good to…
0:57:39 DJ: You’re not driving a Lamborghini because…
0:57:41 SG: I’m not. I’m driving a small Japanese hatchback. But the motivation behind it was originally that I liked this web browser but it had an ugly icon. And as simple as that sounds that really was what got us interested and involved and there’s been lots… I’ve been to California twice because of it, it’s helped our company generate money because we’ve gotten exposure and contracts that come to us from… But in the end I almost feel like that has a good-looking icon now.
0:58:17 DJ: It’s a better web browser that I can…
0:58:18 PR: My work here is done.
0:58:18 SG: My work here is done what can I do next.
0:58:20 PR: I got to say that’s interesting to hear you say that because the amount of work that I’ve taken on in my life simply because I knew that if I didn’t do it someone else would do it and it would be ugly, boggles the mind. And it’s work that it hasn’t necessarily been pleasant work. Again, I’ve been paid for it and I’m not begrudging it, but at the same time the satisfaction that comes from using something that you’ve created yourself is sometimes more than the satisfaction from the sort of abstract satisfaction knowing that someone in Iowa is also using it.
0:58:54 SG: Yeah. Yeah. And what’s been interesting in the case of Firefox has been, for myself, the particular skills that were needed weren’t necessarily ones that I had. But I felt I had a good understanding of what was needed and who could provide them and that I would have a good… At least be… If I couldn’t do it myself I could tell when it was done well. So in the end I actually didn’t really produce a lot of the things that… I mean, I’ve been involved in the design of the mozilla.org website but even that Daniel Burka here did the most of the… He was the primary designer on it. But I still feel a lot of satisfaction, because someone needed to say, “Hey, let’s get a better version of that icon. Let’s do it and let’s get it done.” And I’m already on to other small however insignificant things. One thing I posted the other day on my weblog was an overview of inconsistencies in the save confirmation dialogue boxes on applications on [0:59:52] …
0:59:52 DJ: Compelling radio.
0:59:53 SG: Which is, it sounds incredibly boring. It’s a small little detail, but if my little involvement can help that a little bit then it’s one little piece that will be better and it’ll be better for everyone else, and if everyone else does that, then… I think I’m becoming an open source software zealot I think is the bottom line.
1:00:14 DJ: And middle manager.
1:00:16 PR: The other thing is that being a Windows user for so long where it was… The things that were wrong with Windows… Part of the frustration of using Windows is that the things that are wrong with it, you have no control over it.
1:00:28 SG: Very much so.
1:00:28 PR: And you know that if you send e-mail to bugs@microsoft.com, that no one is ever going to respond. And so the fact that you can see that, it can bother you and you can do something about it. It’s probably even just… Even if you don’t do anything about it, the mere possibility that you could just probably what makes things [1:00:43] .
1:00:43 SG: Absolutely. I wish I could think of an example right now, but there are things that I’ve complained about, or I’ve filed a bug on or made a feature request in a piece of open source software, and it happened to be something that was relatively easy to implement and an idea people agreed with and it happened and relatively quickly.
1:01:03 PR: Along those lines, although not open source at all really, maybe a little bit under the hood but there’s a Mac OS 10 SFTP or FTP client called, ‘Yummy FTP’, which I’ve never liked the name of and that kept me from using it for many months, and then it has this weird logo with a tongue sticking out of it which drives me crazy too. [chuckle] But it’s an excellent piece of software and the developers are so responsive. Like I will literally say, “I wonder if this could work like this” and I’ll send them and e-mail. And sometimes within a couple of hours they say, “Okay, we’ve released 1.06 and it has that suggestion in it.”
1:01:38 SG: It’s very cool when that happens, and that’s been happening since I’ve had peripheral involvement in a bunch of different open source projects. That’s one of the big attractions to it, I think is the fact that you have, even if you don’t wanna exercise it, you have some control, and it’s not at the whim of a corporation somewhere.
1:02:00 PR: Can I talk about the schooner and then we’ll close?
1:02:02 SG: I think so.
1:02:04 PR: This is an interesting story that happened last week, I have a friend Harold Stephens, who’s a travel writer, and I think ‘adventurer’ would be an accurate term for him, he lives in Thailand. He had literally a life of adventure. And one of his adventures was constructing a ferrocement schooner, and it was sort of constructed in Thailand and Singapore. And this was in the late ’60s, early ’70s. And he did do this with the intention of sailing the South Sea, sort of in the spirit of the South Sea adventures that he would’ve read about as he was a kid. And he did this, and the schooner was beautiful and he sailed the South Sea and took people for hire and did all the things you would think an exciting South Sea adventurer would do. Then eventually the schooner was in Hawaii and he wasn’t with it, it was under someone else’s care, and it was wrecked in a typhoon or a large storm there. And basically that was the end of it. Although he didn’t release it formally, it was sort of salvaged and he assumed that was the end of it.
1:03:08 PR: He ended up writing a book called, ‘The Last Voyage’, which was about the building and the construction and then finally the death of Third Sea. And I read the book, and it’s partially through reading the book that I got to know him. And since that time I’ve put together a website for him and we visited him in Thailand and become quite good friends with him. As a result of all of this, I have what’s called a Google Alert set up for Google news for his name, Harold Stephens. And this is something you can go if you go to Google news, you can set up for any keyword, you can set up a Google Alert so that if that word or phrase appears in a news article anywhere in the news sources that Google scans, you’ll get an email.
1:03:45 SG: I have a quick question on that here. Do you have everyone that you know’s name in as a Google Alert?
1:03:50 PR: No, I have my clients, I have last name Rukavina ‘cause I like to keep in touch with other Rukavinas, although State Senator, Tom Rukavina in Minnesota is 99% of the Rukavina traffic. [chuckle]
1:04:01 SG: He’s a real media whore.
1:04:03 PR: Yeah. But Yankee Magazine, the Old Farmer’s Almanac, Harold Stephens; it works well for some things and not for others. Rukavina’s fine, but Garrity would probably be fine. But James, you wouldn’t wanna, ‘cause you’d get everything. Anyway, so last year…
1:04:18 DJ: So you’re in there Steven and I’m not.
1:04:19 PR: Yeah, that’s right, sorry. Last week I get a hit, which is actually the first hit I’ve ever had on Harold Stephens, remarkably, ‘cause you would think it would be a common name. And it was a story in the Olympian, which is a newspaper out of Olympia, Washington, and it was about Third Sea and Third Sea sinking in the harbor of Olympia, Washington. And as it turns out, someone I guess, somehow Third Sea had been purchased out of salvage in Hawaii 30 or 40 years ago. Someone had acquired it, and we’re not sure of the complete story yet, but somehow it ended up in Olympia, Washington at the bottom of the bay. [chuckle] So I emailed Harold about this, and he got in touch with the author of the article in the Olympian. And now they’re talking about Harold becoming involved in the salvage effort and Third Sea sailing one day again.
1:05:06 SG: That is the most bizarre story.
1:05:09 PR: It is, it was very bizarre being in the thick of it, it’s an addendum to a whole bizarre series of circumstances that got me to know Harold in the first place, so it’s sort of par for the course. But it shows the Google Alerts connection.
1:05:22 SG: That’s pretty cool that something happened through the internet has generated a connection of something real like that.
1:05:30 PR: Yeah. It shows it as more for just keeping track of your recipes. Anyway, we’re an hour and four minutes in so I guess it’s time to say goodbye.
1:05:40 SG: I’m bored.
1:05:40 DJ: Yeah.
1:05:41 PR: Live from the Formosa Tea House I’m Peter Rukavina.
1:05:43 DJ: I’m Dan James.
1:05:44 SG: And I’m Steven Garrity.
[background conversation]
1:05:50 S?: And we’re here to pump you up.
The audio of a radio interview with CBC Prince Edward Island Mainstreet host Matt Rainnie that aired this afternoon.
Note to Matt: “ruk” rhymes with “kook” not with “hook.”
We recorded another episode of Live From the Formosa Tea House this afternoon (the first episode is here).
You can download today’s episode (it’s an 11MB MP3 file) or, if you’re using iPodder or its brethren, you can set up an auto-grab via RSS 2.0 enclosures from our RSS 2.0 feed.
Self-flagellation about this episode:
- We squeezed 30 minutes of content into 60 minutes of talking. We could probably lose a lot of the witty side-banter, and tighten up our conversation 50% and not lose anything.
- The sound is better. We were in the back room of the Formosa Tea House, where it’s quieter and more isolated from the fray. Things got worse the more we went along because we forgot to lean into the microphone as our audio guru John advised. We need a big “LEAN IN” sign.
- We were more focused: we had three set topics (Firefox, silverorange stuff and my phone adventures), and something of a structured “okay, now you’re the host” system worked out in advance. We can get better at this.
- We flipped back and forth between “intended audiences” from “telling Ann Thurlow what Firefox is” (which will bore the techies) to “using FOAF and RSS and GPS to drive location-based Thai restaurant wayfinding” (which will bore the normal people). I don’t know what the solution to this is. Maybe there isn’t one.
- Steven needs to read the how to pronounce Rukavina guidelines.
- We have a nifty intro theme, courtesy of GarageBand on my iMac.
- It was still fun and we’ll do it again next week.
Listener feedback is, as always, welcome.
Update: Here’s Steven’s original outline for the show:
- Steven (me): Firefox 1.0 Preview Release (grilled by dan)
- How did we get involved, how are we involved?
- 1.0PR features/fixes
- RSS stuff (live bookmarks)
- Overall polish
- New Find toolbar
- update notifications
- SSL visibility
- Nice linux keyboard stuff
- Usage trends
- Different types of users
- Default install
- Spyware/popups, etc.
- Numbers — SpreadFirefox.com
- Dan: silverorange stuff site (grilled by peter)
- reputations
- vs. epinions/amazon-review
- Google ads ($$$)
- Peter: The Reinvented telephony setup (grilled by steven)
- Why?
- tech setup
- costs
- future ideas?
- other VOIP stuff
Imagine a horror movie in which a reclusive computer programmer is trapped in the back room of an old Victorian house while a dozen disembodied ghouls are trying to scratch their way into the house so as to be able to eat his brain for lunch.
As there are a dozen workers scraping down the outside of 84 Fitzroy St. today, in anticipation of a paint job, while we work inside, this is pretty much what the today feels at the office.
The second interview I did with Deutsche Welle at the Democratic National Convention has been used as part of a story on bloggers at the Convention for Spectrum their weekly science show. You can listen to the show in RealAudio, or listen to a local MP3 of just that piece.
My favourite part of the bit I taped was my description of bloggers as offering “opinionated narrative.” I think the introductory description of what blogs are by the Spectrum host is pretty good too: it’s a hard concept to sum up, and he did it pretty well. You can read the Dinner for America blog that’s mentioned here.
This is an interview I did with Matt Rainnie for CBC Prince Edward Island’s Mainstreet on Friday, July 23, 2004. We talked about my trip to Boston to cover the DNC for my weblog: why I’m going, how I got credentials, and how I’m going.
I’m scheduled to call into Mainstreet at least once from Boston for a report from the ground there.
Here’s some essential preparatory material for tonight’s big Barn Dance at Robert and Robin’s hacienda.
It also wouldn’t hurt to read up on J. Walter Jones, former owner of their tract.
And remember, nothing could make me happier than if a spontaneous game of charades were to break out.
Maritime Electric held a public session this evening at the Delta Prince Edward. Hosted by President & Chief Executive Officer Jim Lea, the session was an opportunity for the company to make its case to the public over the rather dramatic increase in electric rates that is scheduled for April 1.
For a matter of such importance to the day to day lives of Islanders, the session was poorly attended: there were perhaps a dozen people present. Nonetheless, the presentation by Mr. Lea was comprehensive and compelling. He began with a thorough overview of the electricity marketplace in the Maritimes: where the power comes from, how much it costs, and so on. He then explained Maritime Electric’s position in the marketplace, its regulatory environment, and the challenges it faces going forward.
I’m not a electricity expert, and I don’t have any way of testing the veracity of Mr. Lea’s remarks. But I have to laud him, and the company, for making the effort to meet with the public: it’s certainly more than our other monopoly utilities have done.
I recorded the entire session; the recording is 1 hour and 47 minutes long. Jim Lea’s presentation from the podium is very clear; there was no floor mic for the audience, so the questions are difficult to make out.
The question I wanted an answer to I asked at 1:38:46:
Is there a situation in which it is beneficial to Maritime Electric to have consumption drop?
Mr. Lea responded:
It would depend on, which customers reduced. Some customers we probably supply at a loss. So yah there are some customers — right across the board, generally speaking, from Maritime Electric’s perspective, no it would not be beneficial. All you have is fixed costs that you have to spread over fewer kilowatt hours.
And there’s the rub, if you’re someone like me who thinks we should all work to reduce energy consumption: it’s in Maritime Electric’s best interests to sell more electricity. I don’t fault them for this and, indeed, to pursue any other course would be irresponsible to their shareholders.
On first blush this means that those working to reduce energy consumption are at odds with Maritime Electric (and, in a more general way, with all profit-making investor-owned utilities). At the same time, it’s the utilities who know most about the energy market and how it works, and we depend on the utilities’ viability to toast our toast and power our computers.
I’m not sure how to resolve this paradox.
Several weeks ago I wrote about a radio documentary I co-produced in 1989 called The Emotions of Activism.
I’ve digitized another of the raw interviews I taped for the documentary, this one with Richard Hamilton.
I met Richard for the first time on the same day I met Ken Hone. Richard, like Kenny, was one of the instigators of Projects for Change, and through that group we became friends. Several years later, after I had moved to Texas and Montreal, and then back to Peterborough, Richard was one of my roommates in a big house on George Street. Catherine was my next-door neighbour. The rest is history.
Richard is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guy who came by his activism honestly.
The tape is unedited from the original. As an added bonus, you can hear my old dog Penny barking in the background about half way through.
When I started volunteering at Trent Radio, early in my year at university, I met two guys, Richard Hamilton and Ken Hone. At the time I was an empty political vessel waiting to be filled up, and Rick and Kenny happily facilitated this. They were a couple of the rabble-rousers behind a storefront political group called “Projects for Change.”
Projects for Change was many things: a food bank, a lending library, a place to print leaflets, a place to drink beer. It had a revolving membership of university students, radicals (real and aspiring). The issues we concerned ourselves with ranged from poverty to nuclear power to the arms race.
Although I don’t think I ever made it to bona fide radical status — I always felt like an interloper — I loved the place nonetheless, and was involved, to one degree or another, for four or five years. I still have the old Projects for Change sign, hand-painted by Kenny, hanging on my wall.
Towards the end of my time in Peterborough, I partnered with Oonagh O’Connor to produce a radio documentary called “The Emotions of Activism.” Our goal was to interview a series of people involved in activist politics, but rather than interviewing them about their cause, we talked to them about the underlying rationale for their orneriness, the emotions behind their activism rather than the thoughts. What, in the gut, gets people up and out on the barricades, or behind the printing press or on the radio.
Although I have lost the tape of the final product, I do have the original, unedited interview tapes. An interview with Kenny is among them. Setting aside my rambling interviewing technique (this was before I got the Ann Thurlow brevity religion), the interview is a great listen, due entirely to Kenny’s clear-minded ability to get at the stuff of what drives him. It’s also an excellent short course in how to be a good human being.
The interview was recorded on an inexpensive tape recorder, using one of the classic Radio Shack PZM microphones that, to my ear, make excellent mics for doing interviews like this because they produce bright sound and lots of atmospherics (some of this has been drummed out by the digitizing down to 32K; the silences appear too silent, but it makes for a smaller file).
Back in the early 1990s, I was Programme Director at Trent Radio, a campus-community radio station in Peterborough, Ontario. At the time, the station had a broadcast audio line running from Artspace, an artist-run centre downtown; this meant we could do live broadcasts of anything happening in Artspace’s performance hall.
On June 1, 1990, we organized an event called RadioMusic, and invited a wide variety of performers from the community to come and play for two audiences: people in the bleachers, and people listening in on their radios at home.
John Muir did the sound, and Ron Gaskin was up in the studio acting as a virtual host and technical man.
One of the highlights of the evening was a 25 minute set by Curtis Driedger.
Criticized once by my father as “having a total absence of musicality,” Curtis has always been one of my favourite performers. From the presciently-named 1980s band the CeeDees to the various and wonderful musical projects he’s done since, Curtis is (my father’s protests notwithstanding) a great musician, and an insightful songwriter. He’s also a really nice guy.
I was going through my archives the other day, and found a tape of Curtis’ set from that night, 13 years ago.
Some families pray to God. In our family, we prayed to Mongo Santamaria.
When you grow up in a religiously and politically agnostic household like we did, you take your icons where you can get them. And the biggest of ours was Santamaria. Every Christmas morning my father would wake up before any of us, go to the living room, and put the 1965 Columbia album El Pussy Cat on the turntable, crank up the volume to “full blast” and the house would rock with the latin rhythms of the title track, a song the AMG calls “delightfully absurd”. I can think of no better way to start Christmas Day, and this is a tradition we’ll keep alive for generations.
Mongo Santamaria died Saturday at age 85 of a stroke. Rolling Stone says he was considered”one of the most influential percussionists of his generation.” PopMatters calls him “Cuba’s conguero extraordinaire.” On Christmas mornings we didn’t know any of that, of course; we just knew that our eccentric father with broad musical tastes was up to his hijinks again. And we revelled in it.
Mongo Santamaria will be missed.
A CBC “Off the Beaten Track” episode in which I talk about what happens when you bring in cats to eradicate mice. Originally aired on September 22, 2000 on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet program in Prince Edward Island.
The Marion Island Cat Eradication Program Introduction: In 1949, five domestic house cats were introduced to Marion Island to help control a problem with house mice. By 1977, these five cats had multiplied to 3,400 cats and had eaten several bird species to extinction. This situation begat the “Feral Cat Eradication Program,” which, over the course of 19 years eliminated all of the cats from the Island. This is their story. WARNING TO AUDIENCE: This feature contains discussion of the killing of house cats. Sensitive viewers and cat lovers may wish to go away for 5 minutes.
The House Mouse Problem * The word mouse has no scientific meaning – it’s used generically to describe small rat-like rodents. * The house mouse is one of a greater family of rodents that includes mice, rats, voles, gerbils and hamsters. * Your average house mouse is brown or gray, can be up to 8 inches long, including their tail. * House mice mature quickly, and can mate 2 to 3 months after birth; gestation takes about 3 weeks, and litters can include up to 12 young. * The house mouse is native to Eurasia, but has been spread around the world. * If you do the math, you can see that two mice can produce many millions of ancestors in rather short order – two mice mating can result in 2000 mice six months later. * Sometime around 1818, sealers using Marion Island as a base inadvertently introduced house mice to the Island. * House mice feed on invertebrates, which are otherwise an important part of the Island’s food chain. * And house mice seek the food and shelter of human dwellings, so the mice became a problem for the people manning the South African weather station on Marion Island.
The House Cat “Solution” * The house cat is a member of a family of animals that includes leopards, cougars, and pumas. * Your average house cat weighs 6 to 10 pounds, and is 21 to 28 inches long. * Cats reach puberty at 9 or 10 months, can have up to 3 litters a year, and an average litter contains 4 kittens. * We humans, it is said, first domesticated cats about 3,500 years ago when Egyptians used them to protect their granaries from mice. * And in 1949, the South African residents of Marion Island decided to introduce house cats to the Island for the same reason – to rid the island of the house mice that had been there for almost 150 years. * And so five cats (a neutered orange male tabby cat, a black and white female, and 3 kittens) were brought to Marion Island in 1949. * How naïve they were… * Two unexpected things happened: * The cats liked eating birds more than they liked eating mice – and were eating some species of birds to extinction * The cats multiplied (maybe not so unexpected!) * A feral cat is simply a sort of cat that, once domesticated, has returned to the wild. * The result was that by 1977, there were 3,405 feral cats on Marion Island, and the cats were causing far more ecological damage than the mice they were brought to control.
A Note about Feral Cat Eradication * The problem of feral cats is one we see all over the world – a world where people don’t spay or neuter cats, and where they thoughtlessly abandon their domestic cats on the edge of town. * In many cities, their any colonies of feral cats, and these colonies are blamed – rightly or wrongly – for everything from spreading rabies, spreading disease, and eating birds. * There are two strong factions in the “feral cat problem” world: * The eradicators think that we should gather up feral cats and kill them. * The trap-neuter-vaccinate-release people advocate trapping cats, spaying or neutering them, vaccinating them against disease and then releasing them back to the wild. * In 1977, it was decided to take the eradication route, and thus began the “Marion Island Cat Eradication Program.”
Marion Island Cat Eradication Program * Step one was to introduce feline panleucopenia into the cat population. * Feline panleucopenia, commonly known as distemper, is an extremely contagious virus that is, roughly, “the flu for cats.” * The symptoms are similar to those of the flu in humans: coughing and sneezing, vomiting, and diarrhea. * It rarely lasts for more than a week, but it has a very high mortality rate. * Feline panleucopenia was introduced into the cat population on Marion Island, and it killed a lot of cats: by 1982, the population was estimated to have shrunk from 3,400 to 615. * Then the cats developed immunity to the virus, and with less competition for food, cats with immunity survived and multiplied. * In 1986, with the population on the rise again, it was decided to hunt the cats as a secondary measure: eight 2-man teams using spotlights and 12-bore shotguns killed approximately 803 cats this way. * Hunting proved not effective enough to eradicate all of the cats. * In 1989 and 1991, traps were used to try and capture the remaining cats. * In April 1991, only 8 cats were trapped. * It’s now believed that cats have been completely eradicated from Marion Island… * 19 years later!
The Situation Today * Now that the cat problem has been solved, researchers are turning again to the problem of house mice. * Biologist Charl Louw is on Marion Island this year doing research on the house mouse problem, looking at population size and growth, trapping, marking, and releasing mice. * And the Marion Island Cat Eradication Program is held up by the anti-eradication advocates as an example of why cat eradication won’t work in urban areas (if it took 19 years in a closed system like Marion… etc.)
A CBC “Off the Beaten Track” episode in which I talk about the other Prince Edward Island, in the southern Indian ocean. Originally aired on September 8, 2000 on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet program in Prince Edward Island.
Introduction: There is another Prince Edward Island, or rather “Prince Edward Islands,” located in the southern Indian Ocean and part of South Africa since 1949. Marion Island, one of the two Prince Edward Islands is current home to a meteorological station, and former home to some 3,400 feral cats. Prince Edward Island, the other of the two, is uninhabited and, indeed, people aren’t allowed on it without a special permit. This is their story.
Imagine a Prince Edward Island where… * …it’s cool and stormy most of the year, with an average temperature of 4 degrees. * …there are gale force winds 100 days of the year. * …the soil isn’t red and soft, but craggy and volcanic. * …the dominant vegetable isn’t the potato, but the cabbage. * …there’s so much concern for the environment, and a fear of mice, that you need a special permit from the government just to visit. * …chief impediments to tourism are danger from aggressive male seals and the possibility of having your boat smashed on the rocks while landing.
This is the “other” Prince Edward Island… * This is the “other” Prince Edward Island, and could very well be the “Bizarro” Prince Edward Island in for “Bizarro Superman” it is so opposite to ours. * In fact they are located at 46 degrees south while we’re located at 46 degrees north and are called “the jewel of the Southern Ocean” (rather than the “Garden of the Gulf”). * Located about 1900 km off the coast of South Africa in the southern Indian Ocean, the “other” Prince Edward Island is one of a pair of sister Islands – the other is Marion Island – collectively called, oddly enough, “the Prince Edward Islands.” * Prince Edward Island, South Africa, is 45 square kilometers in size, while it’s sister Marion Island is 290 square kilometers. * They’re both craggy volcanic islands, windswept, cold, rainy and quite unlike the Prince Edward Island we know and love.
Lost, then Found… * In 1663, Dutchman Barent Lam discovered the two islands on his way east; he named them Dina and Maerseveen (after his ship). * Some time after this, the Dutch tried to find the islands again, but couldn’t (Lam had recorded the wrong latitude) and they were given up for lost. * 100 years later in 1772 the islands were rediscovered by a French naval officer Marion du Fresne, who named them le de la Caverne and le de l’Esperance * In 1776, explorer Captain James Cook – only a decade after he spent five years based in Halifax, and three years before he died – visited the islands, and renamed them collectively the Prince Edward Islands. * Over the following 175 years the larger of the two islands came to be known as Marion Island by sealers who used the islands as a base. * In 1949 South Africa annexed the islands, and the weird Prince Edward Island / Prince Edward Islands / Marion Island naming scheme stuck.
Prince Edward Island Today * Since 1949, South Africa has had a presence on the Island when it established a permanent weather office. * I exchanged email with Chris de Wet, who is the team leader of “Marion 57,” which is the 57th expedition from South Africa. * They’re a motley group of 10 people, meteorologists, biologists, a radio technician, a diesel mechanic and a medic. * They’ve got a fully stocked hospital, complete with dentist’s chair and x-ray machine, telephone and Internet hookups, laboratories, and a gymnasium. * In addition to the weather station, which is staffed 24 hours a day, there’s research monitoring seal populations, sea bird populations, the effects on longline fishing on birds, and the impact of feral house mice on the Island. * I asked Chris what inspired him to take such a remote posting and he said he jumped at the opportunity – he says he’s an outdoor fanatic, and welcomed the opportunity to get away from the “rat race.”
Tourism on the Islands * During my research, I found an interesting paper called “Environmental impact assessment of possible tourism at Marion Island,” published by the South African Government, which looked at how tourism on the Islands would affect the environment. * I asked Chris about the possibility of tourism, and he suggested that because of the hard environment and lack of infrastructure, he didn’t think there’s was much chance of this happening, and if it did, it would be more of a “friendly outdoor laboratory” for scientists as opposed to something for “holiday makers.” * I also asked Chris is the members of his team had ever heard of “our” Prince Edward Island and I was surprised to find they hadn’t – but they found us on the globe! * He added that he doesn’t think that most people in South Africa have never heard of “his” Prince Edward Island, so we shouldn’t feel so bad if we haven’t.
Next Time on “Off the Beaten Track” * Remember I mentioned that there’s research going on about the “impact of feral house mice” on the Island? * That’s a longstanding problem: house mice aren’t native to the Islands — sealers introduced them sometime over the last century. * In 1949, in an attempt to rid the islands of house mice, five house cats were introduced. * By 1977 these five cats had multiplied to some 3,400 cats. * Next time we’ll hear their story, and the story of the “Marion Island Cat Eradication Program.”
A CBC “Off the Beaten Track” episode in which I talk about Showboat and the history of the song Old Man River. Originally aired on August 20, 2000 on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet program in Prince Edward Island.
Ol’ Man River Introduction: A brief history of the song “Ol’ Man River,” along with two very different interpretations by Canadian artists Curtis Driedger and Jane Siberry.
Show Boat * In 1926, a book called “Show Boat” by Edna Ferber was published – she was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for her book So Big. * Show Boat follows the life of Magnolia, daughter of the captain of the riverboat The Cotton Blossom. * Magnolia marries a gambler, Gaylord Ravenal. * As a result of his gambling, they separate * Magnolia moves to Chicago where she takes up life in musical comedy. * Their daughter follows her mother into show business, and eventually Magnolia and Gaylord are reunited years later at a performance of their now internationally famous daughter. * Woven throughout this plot is the sub-plot concerning the lives of the black workers on the riverboats, and marriage of Magnolia’s best friend Julie La Verne and her husband, which runs afoul of the law because it is discovered that Julie is of mixed black and white heritage, and this is against the law. * In 1927, collaborators Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II adapted the book into a Broadway show. * Show Boat the musical was groundbreaking when it premiered in 1927, as musicals up to that point hadn’t had a coherent plot or songs tied to the action. * Show Boat is said in many circles to mark the beginning of American musical theatre. * Show Boat originally played Broadway in 1927, was adapted into a movie in 1936 and again in 1951, and was revived on Broadway in 1946, and several times thereafter, most famously in recent years in 1994 by Garth Drabinsky.
Ol’ Man River * The song Ol’ Man River is sung by Joe, one of the riverboat workers, several times throughout the musical. * Edna Ferber said in her autobiography: “…Jerome Kern appeared at my apartment late one afternoon with a strange look of quiet exultation in his eyes. He sat down at the piano. He didn’t play the piano particularly well and his singing voice, though true, was negligible. He played and sang ‘Ol’ Man River.’ The music mounted, mounted, and I give you my word my hair stood on end, the tears came to my eyes, I breathed like a heroine in a melodrama. This was great music. This was music that would outlast Jerome Kern’s day and mine. I have never heard it since without that emotional surge. When SHOW BOAT was revived at the Casino Theater in New York just four years after its original production at the Ziegfeld I saw a New York first-night audience, after Paul Robeson’s singing of ‘Ol’ Man River,’ shout and cheer and behave generally as I’ve never seen an audience behave in any theater in all my years of playgoing…” * The song is most closely associated with Paul Robeson, who played Joe in the Broadway production of Show Boat and in the 1936 movie. * In the original 1927 lyrics, it’s written:
I gits weary and sick of tryin’;
I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’
And Ol’ man river, he just keeps rollin’ along.
- Robeson later revised the lyrics to:
I keeps laffin’ instead of cryin’
I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’
And Ol’ man river, he just keeps rollin’ along.
- Roberson, who had been a football star and then an actor, went on to a life as a political activist.
Canadian Singers on Ol’ Man River * Back on June 1, 1990, I was program director at Trent Radio, a community radio station in Peterborough, Ontario. * We organized an evening of performances by local musicians at the Market Hall in downtown Peterborough. * One of the performers was Curtis Driedger, formerly of the infamous Toronto band the CeeDees. * Here’s some of his performance from that night, recorded live and originally broadcast on Trent Radio…
[clip from “Curtis Dreidger live at Artspace”, recorded June 1, 1990; on cassette tape, queued]
- Toronto singer/songwriter Jane Siberry, who has, in recent years, been running her musical career largely through her own Sheeba Records website – www.sheeba.ca — is about to release an album of Celtic and American spirituals called “Hush.”
- From that album, here is her own rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” which you will immediately see is quite different from Curtis’
[clip from “Hush” by Jane Siberry, track 9]
A CBC “Off the Beaten Track” episode in which I talk traveling to Boston for Prince Edward Islanders. Originally aired on August 18, 2000 on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet program in Prince Edward Island.
As with all of these pieces, I prepared a script for host Matthew Rainnie and me; it went like this:
Peter’s Boston Survival Guide Introduction: It’s easy for Islanders to get to Boston. We should do it more often. This is the six-minute guide to getting to Boston in one piece and having fun while there.
Step One: Getting to Boston * The best flight to Boston is the 6:15 a.m. Air Nova flight direct from Charlottetown, which arrives in Boston 2 hours later at 9:13 a.m. * It costs a lot to stay in Boston – might as well maximize your time there by arriving early! * The earlier you reserve this flight the better – it can range anywhere from $250 to $1200. There are usually seat sales three or four times a year. * As usual, it’s cheaper to fly if you stay over a Saturday night. * You only need 15,000 Aeroplan or Canadian Plus points to get to Boston. * The flight takes about ½ an hour to get to Halifax, then you have a ½ hour wait, and then it’s about an hour to get to Boston.
Step Two: In from the Airport * Boston’s Logan Airport is located just across Boston Harbor from downtown Boston. * You can take a taxi, a bus, a limousine – even a water taxi – but the best way to get to downtown Boston is by subway – known in Boston as “the T.” * It costs only 85 cents, and it tales about ½ an hour to get downtown. * Go out of the terminal building to the ground transportation area and look for the signs to “Logan Shuttle” – this is a free bus that takes you to the Airport subway station. * Make sure you get on the right bus – not all of them stop at the subway station, but they’re all clearly marked. * Once you get to the “T station” you pay your 85 cents and get on the subway – make sure you’re getting on the one going downtown – just ask the person in the toll booth. * About 9 minutes later, you’re downtown!
Step Three: Where to Stay? * Boston is a really expensive place to stay! * If you’re willing to stay in the suburbs you can find a good room for less than $100/night. * In general, the closer you are to the heart of Boston, the more you’re going to pay and to stay downtown means paying $150 to $300 (or more!) a night. * My picks for places to stay are: + Susse Chalet Boston - One of a chain of New England budget hotels - Basic accommodations, but clean and well-located - Make sure you stay at the Boston one, not the Cambridge one (Cambridge location is right on the highway, and very noisy!) - Has a pool; is next door to a bowling center; has a restaurant; Burger King is around the corner. - Not right on the subway, but they have a free shuttle that will take you there. - About $100/night. + Newbury Guest House and the Harborside Inn - Sister properties – one located on Newbury Street (the chichi shopping district of Boston) and the other located just of Quincy Market right downtown. - Small and friendly. - Clean rooms, a step up from the Susse Chalet. - Very nice continental breakfast is included. - Can’t beat the location – both are located in the heart of very interesting neighbourhoods. - $110 to $160/night, depending on the time of year. + The College Club - My personal favourite place to stay. - Located in an historic building very near Boston Common, right in the heart of the city. - Started life as a private club for college women; now invites the public to stay in its guest rooms. - The rooms are small; sometimes you have to share a bath down the hall. - Rooms have a lot of character – books and magazines, antique furnishings, large windows. - But there’s a good breakfast included, you’re in the heart of the city and a block from the subway, and the building is beautiful. - And the rooms go for $55 to $85/night, which is a great deal for Boston.
Step Four: What to do? * It’s easy to get around on foot or on the subway – there’s very little need for a car. * You can get a free subway map from toll collectors. * You could spend weeks in Boston and never run out of things to do. * Here are some “must see” things: + Go to the top of the John Hancock Tower. It’s a little expensive at $6 a person, but you get a great view of the entire city, and there’s an interesting presentation about the history of the city. + The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, right around the corner from the Museum of Fine Arts, is a fantastic building which houses the personal collection of Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was a wealthy patron of the arts. The building is in the style of a 15th century Venetian palace, and is as interesting as the art. + The Nostalgia Factory in North Boston, which is the Italian district of the city, is a cramped little second-floor store, very hard to find. They have a collection of 30,000 historic movie posters, lobby cards, photographs, books, and magazines. + While in North Boston, eat at Ida’s Restaurant. Like the Nostalgia Factory, it’s cramped and hard to find, but they serve wonderful homemade Italian food. + Kendall Square Cinema over the Charles River in Cambridge is an “art house multiplex” and always has interesting movies playing. It’s kind of hard to get to: you go to the Kendall ‘T’ stop, and then take a free shuttle bus to the Galleria Mall. + While you’re on the Cambridge side of the Charles River, you can try Fire & Ice, which is a weird sort of “make your own meal” restaurant, where you assemble a collection of meat and vegetables and spices and then have them cooked for you on a huge 8-foot diameter grill. + Finally, my favourite place in Boston is Filene’s Basement, which sells a motley collection of seconds, overruns and liquidated clothing at prices that gradually go down to zero as time marches on. If you’re wily, you can buy an entire wardrobe for under $100. + When you’re at Filene’s, be sure to eat at Chacarero, a small Chilean takeout stand in the same building that sells a most amazing sandwich the core ingredient of which is steamed green beans.
Step Five: Coming back to PEI. * There’s a 6:00 p.m. flight from Boston to Charlottetown every day, which lets you still a full day in Boston after checking out of your hotel. * Many hotels, esp. smaller ones, have a luggage room where you can leave your things after you check out. * Remember that you have a $50 exemption from duty if you’re gone for 24 hours or more, a $200 exemption if you’re gone for 48 hours or more, and a $750 exemption if you’re gone for more than a week.
You can listen to a piece I taped with Jim Carroll on doing business with a New Hampshire company from Prince Edward Island.
(I recovered only a portion of the MP3 from Internet Archive).
A CBC “Off the Beaten Track” episode in which we go “down the road and under the ground.”
We start with the 25th anniversary of the book How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive and finish with The Septic System Owner’s Manual; both books were illustrated by Peter Aschwanden.
Originally aired on July 21, 2000 on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet program in Prince Edward Island.
A CBC “Off the Beaten Track” episode in which I talk about books about pregnancy (coincident with the pregnancy of my partner Catherine). Originally aired on May 5, 2000 on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet program in Prince Edward Island.
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This final, seventh, episode of Consumed by Technology focused on access to the Internet by students in public schools; it aired on August 20, 1996. Wayne Collins was the host.
With the growth of the Internet as an educational tool, the question of how to control what information students have access to has become a controversial issue. There have been several stories in the news recently about students gaining access to pornography, bomb making instructions and other “questionable” materials. The reaction from educators has ranged from the introduction of electronic monitoring to the insistence that students and their parents sign waivers before students are let loose on the ‘net.
Show Notes * Bombs + Atomic Bomb Engineering + The Anarchist Cookbook + The Worldwide Anarchy Page * Porn + Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler + HotBox + XXXporn + SexStudio * Censorship Tools + CyberSitter + NetCop + NetNanny [article about] + Surfwatch + TattleTale * Counter-Censorship Tools + Silicon Toad’s Hacking Resources
Transcript INTRO: With the growth of the Internet as an educational tool, the question of how to control what information students have access to has become a controversial issue. There have been several stories in the news recently about students gaining access to pornography, bomb making instructions and other “questionable” materials. The reaction from educators has ranged from the introduction of electronic monitoring to the insistence that students and their parents sign waivers before students are let loose on the ‘net.
To talk about this issue, Peter Rukavina joins me now for another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
QUESTION: What is it about the Internet that makes controlling access to certain types of information so difficult?
ANSWER: We’ve talked a lot in this series about digital information — information that’s not that different in substance from any other sort of information, but for the fact that it is very easy to move from place to place using computers.
It’s very easy and very cheap to take any sort of information — pictures, maps, magazines, TV programs, whatever — convert it into digital information and then use computers to make as many copies as you like and to send these copies wherever in the world you like.
Compared with the old ways of moving information around — using printing presses and trucks or radio studios and transmitter towers — spreading digital information from place to place is almost effortless.
It’s precisely because moving digital information is so easy and so cheap that we’ve seen the explosive growth of the Internet over the past several years: the Internet provides, quite literally, an “information highway” which can provide people around the world with access to vast amounts of digital information.
One of the other interesting things about digital information is that it’s invisible when it’s moving around. In its most primitive state, digital information is just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s — electrical impulses really — moving up and down wires at the speed of light.
If you were able to somehow magically zoom in on a little piece of the Internet, what you would see would simply be a stream of digital information bits zipping along. These information bits, once assembled at the receiving end by a computer, could just as well be the complete works of William Shakespeare as they could be an episode of Compass or information about crop rotation. While they’re out there on the Internet, though, they’re just bits of a vast digital information soup.
When you hook up to the Internet, you immediately gain access to all of the public information that’s available on Internet computers around the world: it’s like you’re connecting a big pipe to the entire information soup.
And when you do this, you’re not only gaining access to things like the complete works of William Shakespeare, and information on when to plant begonias, you’re also gaining access to the latest issue of Playboy magazine, to discussion groups about bomb making, to a myriad of radical political views… whatever information is out there on the Internet — and that probably includes any sort of information you can imagine and much you cannot — whatever information is out there is accessible to anyone who’s connected to the Internet.
QUESTION: And this is true whether we’re talking about my computer at home or the computers at my child’s school?
ANSWER: When you’re plugged into the Internet, you’re plugged into the Internet. It’s the same information soup no matter where and who you are.
And that’s precisely why we’ve seen some controversy in the past year as schools have become connected to the Internet and students have started to be able to browse around and see what’s available.
As you might imagine, they’re not always browsing around the lofty educational stuff.
QUESTION: Here on the Island and elsewhere, there’s been talk of installing special computer programs which will filter out objectionable material… does this sort of thing actually work?
ANSWER: It works… sort of.
There are three problems which arise when you try and filter digital information: first, the problem of deciding what to filter, second, the problem of how to filter it, and finally the problem of the students simply finding ways to work around the filters.
On the surface, the problem of deciding what to filter out appears pretty simple. If you were to put 5 or 10 average parents in a room and ask them to come up with a list of what they consider “objectionable” information, information that they don’t want their kids coming across, you’d probably have a pretty easy time of it… at least to begin.
I don’t thing there are many parents around who would want their kids having access to violent pictures, pornography, or information about how to make bombs, and you’d probably get pretty quick agreement on those.
But then what about pictures of the aftermath of Hiroshima: that’s a pretty gruesome — a pretty violent — sight, but it’s also a very powerful tool in teaching about war and peace… so maybe no violent pictures, except pictures of Hiroshima.
And then there’s information about sex. Pornography is out, but what’s pornography? Two people kissing? “How to” information about sex? What about information about birth control? Some people think that information about birth control is pornography.
What about this “bomb making information?” If you screen out everything with the word “bomb” in it, you’re going to leave out most of the history of World War II and a lot of the items in the news recently.
The issue of figuring out what’s “good information” and what’s “bad information” isn’t cut and dried; information isn’t black and white and while it might be possible to get people to agree in a very general way about what’s “good” and what’s “bad,” doing anything more is like trying to get agreement on anything controversial… next to impossible.
This sort of problem is no different than the classic problem of trying to figure out whether “Catcher in the Rye” should be in school libraries or not, except that the challenge is not about one book which you can pick up and read and argue about, it’s about trying to sort through an entire world of information, sometimes before it even exists, and coming up with very specific rules for what’s “in” and what’s “out”… for what’s “good” and what’s “bad” Information.
QUESTION: Assuming we could all, somehow, come to agreement over what information should be filtered out, how does the actual filtering process work?
ANSWER: Well remember that digital information is, essentially, invisible: when it’s moving around it’s just a generic soup of bits and bytes. The filtering programs that schools are looking at work by intercepting information in this raw state as it enters the computer.
A sort of “information robot” sits and watches for patterns in the incoming information. If it detects one of the patterns, it can take actions that range from shutting the computer down immediately, to denying access to that particular page or Internet site.
The patterns this robot is looking for are a pre-defined set of keywords that are associated with the kind of information that students are denied access to. In most cases, this set of keywords is something that can be added to or changed to suit the particular needs of the school or the age group in question.
So a student walks up to a computer, clicks on “Open” and types in an Internet address like “www.playboy.com” and, because the word “playboy” is one of the keywords in the “watch list,” a warning pops up on the screen telling them that they’ve tried to access a banned Internet site.
The problem here is that it’s next to impossible to come up with a set of keywords that will both screen out anything objectionable and let good, useful information through. There are simply too many possible combinations of words and phrases and content to cover off everything, and inevitably in the process of trying to screen out “bad” information you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and screening some out “good” information too.
Perhaps the best example of this sort of thing happened last year when America Online, a large U.S. computer network added the word “breast” to a list of banned words for their electronic discussion groups. They view themselves as a “family” network and, in their well intentioned way, were just trying to “clean things up.” Unfortunately in the process, they ended up censoring an electronic discussion group for breast cancer survivors.
Just like trying to define what information is “good” and what information is “bad,” trying to come up with a comprehensive set of watch-words that will cover off all situations without making the Internet all but useless just isn’t possible.
Another problem that crops up when you try to filter digital information is that it’s next to impossible to filter out pictures based on their contents. You can filter out pictures based on what computer filename they’ve got — “porn.gif” or “dirtypicture.bmp” — but that’s about it. It’s almost impossible for a computer, at least with the technology we have today, to figure out what a picture is actually of. And so, again, even if you could figure out what sort of pictures you wanted to screen out, there’s no effective way of actually doing it.
QUESTION: You mentioned the problem of students finding ways to work around the filters… is that really a problem?
ANSWER: The natural inclination of any teenager when prevented from doing something — and I speak from considerable personal experience here — is to immediately find a way around whatever roadblocks have been placed in their way. Consider the fact that it is illegal for teens to buy beer and cigarettes and yet, somehow, many teens are able to get beer and cigarettes whenever they like.
The situation with Internet filters is no different: there’s always a way to work around the system and the very fact that the system is there at all is extra incentive to work harder at getting around it.
To test this out, I downloaded a program from the Internet called “Net Nanny” and installed it on my computer. It’s a pretty standard Internet content filtering program.
I set the program up on my computer, gave it a list of watch words and then took it out for a spin. Sure enough, whenever I did something “bad” by trying to go to an Internet site that contained any of the words I’d set up as watch words, I was prevented from doing so.
When I set out to work around Net Nanny, it took me about 45 seconds to erase all traces of the program from my computer and to again get unlimited access to the Internet. If I wanted to cover my tracks, I could have just set the Net Nanny program aside for a while and then, when I was done browsing, I could have put it back and no one would have been the wiser.
It didn’t take any great knowledge of computers for me to do this, and it would be well within the capabilities of any high school student with a bit of computer savvy to do exactly the same thing.
The reason this is so easy to do isn’t really because the filtering programs themselves aren’t bullet-proof enough, it’s just that computers are, by their very nature, malleable, flexible things that are designed to be easily modified. These filter programs are like deadbolt locks installed in a door with a balsa wood frame: they do what they’re supposed to do until you decide to just bust through the door and ignore them.
So again, to answer your original question — “do these filter programs actually work?” — my answer is that even if we can somehow agree on what we’re going to censor and figure out list of words that will do the task — and both of those tasks are next to impossible — we’re still left with an imperfect solution that can be easily worked around.
QUESTION: If we can’t use computers to filter out information, what other options do we have if we want to continue to give students access to the Internet, but only to certain parts?
ANSWER: To be honest, there really aren’t any technology solutions to this problem and I doubt that there ever will be.
The problem we’re really facing here is that we’ve relied for generations on our ability to simply physically prevent our children from coming across information we don’t want them seeing. Dirty magazines are on the top shelf in the local cigar store, public libraries simply don’t buy really controversial books, we don’t let our kids watch TV programs we don’t like, and so on. It’s been relatively easy to hold back the tide of “bad” information by placing that information out of reach.
And now we can’t do that anymore.
Short of unplugging the Internet and calling it a day, there isn’t going to be a technology solution that’s going to keep our kids from coming across all sorts of information we don’t want them seeing. Kids are going to see violence. They are going to see graphic sex. They are going to see things that, probably, you and I have never seen.
The solution to this problem isn’t going to be a technical one, it’s going to be an educational one. And it’s not going to be a universal, complete, blanket solution, it’s going to be a fuzzy, inexact, incomplete, evolving solution.
Because we’ve dealt with objectionable material for so long simply by physically preventing access to it, we’ve gotten lazy… we’ve not had to think that hard about why some material is objectionable to us and other material isn’t. And we haven’t, by and large, had to talk to our kids about this, at least not in a pressing, practical way.
We’re going to have to start.
If we admit to ourselves that our kids are inevitably going to come across materials which will shock them, make them afraid, turn them on, confuse them, and confound them, then rather than trying to pretend that some technological magic bullet is going to come along and screen our the bad bits for us, we can get on with the job of giving our kids the skills they need to deal with all of this information.
I don’t think we even know what those skills are. But we’re going to have to figure them out.
There are, unfortunately, no easy answers to this problem and I imagine we’ve only begun to see the beginning of the controversy.
We’re facing yet another one of those situations where technology, in solving problems for us — in giving us more access to more information — also introduces a host of new challenges we never imagined and never prepared for.
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This sixth episode of Consumed by Technology focused on computer bugs; it aired on August 13, 1996. Karen Mair was the host.
Late one August night in 1945, U.S. Navy Captain Grace Hopper and her co-workers were hard at work in their computer lab at Harvard University. They were frustrated. Their project, a pioneering computer called the “Mark One” wasn’t working. And after trying everything they could think of, they still couldn’t figure out why. Finally, someone located the trouble spot: using ordinary tweezers, they extracted a two-inch moth from the computer’s insides, a moth that was causing the computer to short-circuit. And so was born the world’s first “computer bug”.
Transcript INTRO: Late one August night in 1945, U.S. Navy Captain Grace Hopper and her co-workers were hard at work in their computer lab at Harvard University. They were frustrated. Their project, a pioneering computer called the “Mark One” wasn’t working. And after trying everything they could think of, they still couldn’t figure out why.
Finally, someone located the trouble spot: using ordinary tweezers, they extracted a two-inch moth from the computer’s insides, a moth that was causing the computer to short-circuit.
And so was born the world’s first “computer bug”.
In another in the series “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about bugs, glitches and why you don’t always get what you pay for when you buy computer software.
QUESTION: That first “computer bug” wasn’t the last one, was it?
ANSWER: Not at all. Computer bugs or glitches or foul-ups or whatever you want to call them — Microsoft calls them “known issues” — they’ve been with us since we started using computers, and they’ll be with us for as long as we continue to use them.
QUESTION: Now it’s not actually two-inch moths that are causing these “bugs” anymore…
ANSWER: Well, you’d be surprised at what happens… there are probably still moths causing havoc out there somewhere. But “bug” has become a general term used to refer to anything that causes a computer program to break down and not do what it’s supposed to be doing.
On Sunday night, for example, I got a frantic call from my brother in Toronto. He had turned on his computer to look up a name in his electronic address book, only to find that all but the first four entries in it had somehow disappeared. He had no idea how this had happened, no idea how to get them back, and was afraid that he’d never be able to track down all of the 100 or so people he had on file.
He was but the most recent victim of the same thing that happened to Grace Hopper in 1945: a bug — in this case probably an error in the computer programming itself, not a moth or any other insect — had caused 96 of his addresses to be deleted, to just vanish into thin air.
This kind of thing probably sounds very familiar to a lot people listening.
It’s very rare that people who use computers at home or in their office haven’t had an essay disappear at the last minute, or their database get garbled beyond recognition, or had a strange message pop up while they’re working complaining of “General Protection Faults” or “Seek errors writing to Drive C”.
We almost take it for granted that, at some point, our computer is going to screw something up and we’re going to suffer for it. And we’re probably right.
QUESTION: Why do these bugs exist at all? Isn’t it possible for software companies to “stamp them all out?”
ANSWER: Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for that to happen.
Think of something simple: a shovel, for example. If you run a shovel making plant, you can make shovels and send them out to stores with a relatively high degree of certainty that you’ve produced a high quality product that’s going to dig dirt well for many years to come. The “quality control” checklist for shovels is pretty short: steel tempered correctly, handle on right, wood sanded well. Shovels are a pretty simple product to get right.
Software on the other hand is some of the most complex stuff around.
At its most basic, software is a long, long list of very, very simple instructions to a computer. Draw a line on the screen from here to there; put a letter “A” at the top of the red box; if the user presses the spacebar, print a space on screen. Absolutely everything that a computer program does has to be spelled out in intimate detail. And everything that we users could possibly do when using the program has to be taken into account — every key we could possibly press has to be recognised and acted on, things like saving files and erasing files and creating new files and changing old files, all has to be spelled out, simple instruction by simple instruction.
To have computer programs which do anything but the most simple of tasks requires literally thousands, and sometimes millions of lines of computer programming. And it’s very easy for a programmer to make a mistake in one of those lines… to put a comma in where a period was supposed to go, or to misspell “goto” as “growto”.
It’s also very difficult for a programmer to imagine every possibility that might crop up out there in the real world when people are using the program to do real things. It’s one thing to have a program work fine in the lab for computer programmers, quite another thing for it to work outside the lab with real everyday people.
QUESTION: It sounds like you’re speaking from personal experience here…?
ANSWER: You’re right. I’ve written a lot computer programs, and I’ve certainly been responsible for my share of bugs. It’s been my fault that books have been shipped to Timbuktu rather that Toronto, and that 20 kids showed up for canoe lessons when they were supposed to be learning macramé. Not nuclear meltdown stuff, but bugs nonetheless.
But I don’t want to make it sound as though having computer programs which break down is an inevitable fact of life, as though there’s nothing that can be done to make the situation better.
Imagine if you bought a new car and were driving along the highway and the engine fell out. You phone the dealer and they say, very off the cuff, “oh, that’s a known issue in the ‘96 models… if you return your car to the factory, we’ll install an upgrade for $2000.”
Most people I know wouldn’t stand for this sort of thing. And the car maker in question probably wouldn’t be around for very long.
But this is kind of thing that happens every day in the computer software industry. And anybody who’s ever tried to get their computer problems solves knows this very well.
Short of phoning me — which didn’t end up helping anyway — my brother’s only recourse in trying to figure out where all his addresses went would be to phone the place where he bought his computer; they would probably tell him to phone the software company; if he could find the software company, he’d probably end up waiting on hold for an hour before talking to someone who wouldn’t have the answer to his problem anyway. And so in the end, he’d be out half a day’s work and 96 addresses.
QUESTION: Have you got any advice for people who fall victim to computer bugs?
ANSWER: My best answer to that question is “don’t use computers.” And I’m only half joking.
But my first suggestion is not to blame yourself. It’s surprising how many people, when something goes wrong with their computer, think that it’s they who have done something wrong — pressed the wrong key or typed the wrong command or just did something wrong that caused the problems they’re having.
Nine times out of ten, this just isn’t true.
Quality control in the software industry is generally horrible. In many cases, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that consumers are the quality control people: version 1.0 of a product gets released, the bug reports roll in, version 2.0 gets released with those bugs fixed, more bug reports roll in, version 3.0 gets released. And so on.
It’s no coincidence that Microsoft Windows didn’t become widely used until version 3.1; versions 1 through 3 were simply unusable. Part of Microsoft’s rationale for changing the name of Windows 4.0 to Windows 95 was to avoid creating a situation where people would hold off for Windows 4.1 to get a reliable product.
In the same way that we don’t stand for cars with engines that fall out or lawnmowers with blades that going flinging off, we’re going to have to, as consumers, start demanding that quality control in the software industry simply gets better.
Now, unfortunately, this may be impossible. Software is getting so complex that adequate quality control — stamping out all of the bugs before the packages hit the shelves — is such a huge task, a task that would cost so much and take so long, that it wouldn’t be feasible; any company that tried it would fall behind in the marketplace.
Part of the solution to this problem is for consumers to demand simpler software. Look at program like WordPerfect, for example, a commonly used word processor. You can use WordPerfect to type essays and letters and reports, save them on a disk, print them out, make some changes, and so on. When you’re doing this, you’re using a very small proportion of WordPerfect’s capabilities. WordPerfect will also create an automatic table of contents, an automatic index, it will check your spelling and your grammar, let you merge addresses and form letters together. You can use it to mix pictures and graphics and tables and charts. The problem is that all of these “extras” require thousands of extra lines of computer programming, which increase the possibility that something is going to go wrong. This isn’t something unique to WordPerfect; it’s a problem that afflicts most computer software on the market today. The fact of the matter is, the more complex that software is, the more it’s going to break down.
If all you need is a simple computer program to type simple letters, then that’s all you need. And that’s all you should need to buy and use. It might not work perfectly, but the closer your program is to being a “shovel” of a computer program and the further it is from being, say, a “nuclear reactor,” of a computer program the better off you’ll be.
QUESTION: So consumers need to demand simpler software as well as more bug-free software.
ANSWER: Exactly.
Now that all said, the other thing you can do is to come to terms with the fact that things are probably never going to get any better. You will always lose important information to bugs. Your computer will always crash, eventually. You will always be frustrated by computer programs that don’t do what they’re supposed to do. Computer people will never learn to speak without the techno-babble.
You can do things to lessen the damage: save your work every 5 minutes, make backups of your disks every night and again every week, hire someone to translate what the computer people are saying. But that’s only making a bad situation slightly better. You’ll still be frustrated and bad things will still happen.
Once you’ve admitted this, though, you can look at the real costs of using computers to solve information problems and simply figure out whether it’s worth it or not.
There are a lot of everyday information tasks that have been “technologised” that worked quite well — much better, perhaps — in their “pre-technologised” state. In a mad rush to stay “modern” and to “keep up”, a lot of us have forgotten what a simple HB pencil and stack of index cards can do for an information problem. Index cards and other “low tech” solutions are not sexy, not wired, but they are often the cheapest, most effective, and most elegant solutions to many information problems.
It’s very rare that addresses disappear off the pages of a regular old address book.
Now I’m not suggesting that computers don’t have their place, that we should just throw them all out the window, no matter how much we might want to. Even with all of their foibles, computer actually do make a lot of tasks easier. In fact they make a lot of tasks possible for the first time.
But bugs and glitches and “known issues” will always be with us.
Perhaps the best that we can do is to steadily press software companies for programs with fewer bugs and at least a friendlier voice at the end of a phone to explain them to us. We can stop blaming ourselves for problems we didn’t cause. We can try and make computer people speak our language.
And, in the end, we can take steps to at least rescue ourselves when disaster does strike.
QUESTION: And watch our for those moths…
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This first fifth of Consumed by Technology focused on information privacy and the use of unique ID numbers by companies to track consumers; it aired on August 6, 1996. Karen Mair was the host.
Have you ever had a day where you’ve felt more like a number than a real person? Telephone numbers, calling card numbers, bank account numbers, bank machine numbers, credit card numbers… sometimes it seems impossible to do anything these days without one number or another.
Transcript INTRO: Have you ever had a day where you’ve felt more like a number than a real person? Telephone numbers, calling card numbers, bank account numbers, bank machine numbers, credit card numbers… sometimes it seems impossible to do anything these days without one number or another.
In another in the series “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about all of these numbers, what they’re used for, and why you might just want to think twice the next time you’re asked for one of them.
QUESTION: So what about all these numbers…?
ANSWER: Last week we talked about the kind of information that governments record about us and what they do with it. This week I’d like to concentrate on how businesses keep track of us… and that’s where all these numbers come into play.
As you suggested, these days it seems like you need a number to do most anything: to get money from a bank machine you need your bank card, to rent a video you need a video rental card, to go to the hospital you need your hospital card.
All of these cards have numbers on them, and often its these numbers that seem most important to businesses.
In a very real sense, to whatever business or organization is looking for whatever number they need, you are your number.
Try calling up the bank and saying “Hi, it’s Peter here… can you tell me my balance please?” What’s the first question they’ll ask…?
QUESTION: “What’s your account number?”
ANSWER: Exactly. Now of course the real reason for all of these numbers has nothing to do with people at all and an awful lot to do with computers.
If you’re writing a computer program to keep track of customers, you want to make sure that all the information that gets entered into the program gets “lined up” with the right person’s record. If I make a payment on my credit card, for example, it’s important that that payment gets subtracted from my balance, not from the balance of some other Peter Rukavina.
Using numbers as the “key” for a customer database — as the way to call up any person’s record — is an easy way for computers to make this happen.
Now if this doesn’t seem like a particularly new concept, you’re right… businesses and organizations have been using numbers to keep track of us since before there were computers to make the job easier.
But what is new and different in the 1990s is what businesses are doing with these numbers — and more importantly what they’re doing with the personal information about us that these numbers are tied to.
QUESTION: What are they doing with our information?
ANSWER: Businesses call what they’re doing by odd-sounding names like “establishing client intimacy,” “relationship marketing,” or “demographic profiling,” but what it all comes down to is that businesses are using the same ability of computers to record personal information about us that they’ve been using for years, but they’re starting to gather more and more information and to look at the patterns contained in that information to try and “figure us out” and, in the end, to sell us more stuff.
QUESTION: What do you mean by “figure us out?”
ANSWER: Let’s take an example: over the past couple of years, a lot of retail stores have launched some variation of the “customer loyalty card” — the Club Z Card, the Petro Points Card, whatever. Usually you sign up for a card and then every time you purchase something you get points which, after a while, you can redeem for “free stuff.”
Now on the surface, these cards are simply a way for these businesses to keep you coming back again and again to their store. And that’s a large part of what they’re good for: they do, indeed, help to build “customer loyalty.”
But remember that every time you use one of these cards, a record of it goes into the store’s computer. Buy ten rolls of toilet paper on July 13… it’s in there. Go back on July 17 and buy 20 feet of garden hose… it’s in there too. It’s no longer just a “what” that get recorded in the store’s computer, but a “who” as well.
Purchase by purchase, this information isn’t remarkable. But taken as a whole, over time, it can be very valuable to businesses.
QUESTION: What use do businesses make of this sort of information?
ANSWER: They can use it two ways.
Firstly, they can look at broad patterns of who’s buying what. Remember that before this sort of card came along, stores could tell what was selling well, but not who was buying it.
It used to be that if I came in on Monday and bought a some toilet paper and then came in Tuesday and bought some cat food, the store would never know that it was actually me making both of those purchases.
Now that they can tell that it’s me, they can answer all sorts of new questions.
It’s one thing to know that you’ve sold 20,000 rolls of toilet paper in July, another thing altogether to know that three quarters of the people who buy toilet paper at your store also buy their shampoo from you every week. And that half of those people prefer a certain brand of shampoo.
This kind of information, used properly, can be like gold to a retailer because it helps them know more about who their customers are and what they’re buying… it helps them “figure their customers out” as a broad group. And, in the end, to market more effectively… and to sell more stuff.
The second way that businesses can use the personal information they have about us is a little more ominous, and it surrounds using information about our buying habits to try and “figure us out” as individuals.
If you’ve ever subscribed to a magazine and then, a couple of months later, started to get flooded with junk mail, then you’ve seen a primitive version of this in action. Magazines sell their mailing lists to companies who think that there’s a good chance that people who subscribe to that magazine will buy their products. Subscribe to Harrowsmith, you might start to get L.L. Bean catalogues in the mail. Subscribe to the Financial Post and you start to get mutual find mail.
QUESTION: So we’re not as much a number to them as a “the type of person that reads Harrowsmith?”
ANSWER: Right. Now what’s starting to happen now is that this practise is becoming something of a science.
Businesses are realizing that it’s a lot more efficient to send out, say, 100 catalogues to people who they know are going to buy something from them, than to send out 100,000 catalogues to people who they have a hunch might buy something from them.
And it’s in this process of moving from a list of “hunch”-people to a list of “sure thing”-people that businesses can make use all of this information they have about us.
Let’s say you go grocery shopping every week at the same store and that store has some method for keeping track of who you are and what you’re buying.
Over the course of a year — in fact probably over the course of a couple of months — that store is going to have a pretty good idea of what sort of products you buy from them. They’ll know that you buy 3 pounds of apples ever second trip, that you don’t ever buy canned juice, that you only buy flour when you buy sugar, that you just started to buy diapers in July. And so on. In that small space of life that has to do with grocery buying, they’ll probably end up knowing more about you than you know yourself.
Now think about all of the other things you buy and imagine a similar situation is in place. Your video rental store keeps track of the movies you’re renting, your clothing store knows when you buy clothes, the gas station knows what grade of gas you buy and when, your car dealer keeps track of how often you get your car serviced… almost everything we do in the marketplace has the potential to leave an electronic trail behind.
Now again, any of this information taken alone — the fact that I bought a bag of apples on Monday, for example — isn’t very useful to anyone. But, just like the “One Big Government Database” that we talked about last week, the real potential power of this information for business lies in combining this information about us with other information about us from other businesses and then using powerful computer programs to help to slot us all into a very narrow “demographic profile” — a sort of map of our lives based on what we buy.
Businesses can then turn around and use this demographic profile to hit us with very, very targeted and specific marketing messages.
QUESTION: So it’s no longer just getting L.L. Bean catalogues in the mail because I subscribe to Harrowsmith…
ANSWER: …it’s getting personalised coupons for cloth diapers in the mail because of three visits to a maternity clothing store in the past month combined with the fact that we just purchased a new washing machine.
It’s having my cable company give me a free month of TSN because I rent sports videos a couple of times a month and subscribe to the Hockey News.
It’s getting email from a drywall contractor because I bought five home renovation books at the local bookstore over the last two weeks.
There are not a lot of businesses taking things to this extent yet, but to get some idea of what a seasoned professional in the direct marketing game looks like, you only need to look as far as Readers Digest. Most people probably think that Readers Digest is just a magazine. And it is. But more than that its a huge database of marketing opportunities. With 15 million subscribers, Readers Digest has one of the largest and finely developed databases in the world. As they use the list, they learn more and more about the people on it and they use that information to market to those people even more. What Readers Digest — and the Columbia Record and Tape Club and the Book-of-the-Month Club and other veterans in this game — having been doing for years now is something which will become more and more common in many, many other, smaller businesses in years to come.
Standards for recording and sharing personal commercial information are being developed. Computers are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, and networked together. More and more of commerce is moving to mail order and the Internet and other electronic systems where gathering information is so much easier and more invisible. After using bank machines for a decade, we’re all starting to use debit cards more and more; “smart cards” that actually carry money around are on the way soon.
Taken together, the signs all suggest that whatever you want to call this “customer intimacy building” is only going to become more and popular and common.
QUESTION: Should we as consumers be wary of this?
ANSWER: It all depends on how you feel about your personal information. If you like receiving things in the mail, if you don’t care who knows what about you, if you don’t mind being slotted into a very narrow demographic group for marketing purposes, then the world is going your way.
If, however, you value your privacy, if you’re the kind of person who blanches at junk mail and values the kind of personal service that comes from being known as an actual real live human being and not a number with a demographic, then you’ve got something to be worried about.
And I say that in all seriousness; although I’d tend to put myself in the later group, there are a lot of people who see this trend as being a positive thing, as a giant leap forward for the science of marketing. And many of these people are consumers themselves.
QUESTION: What about the issue of privacy? Do we actually have any control for how all this personal information about is used?
ANSWER: The short answer is no.
A lot of privacy issues we take for granted: I can’t call up a department store, for example, and ask them how much you charged to your account last year because in most if not all cases, they consider that information confidential.
But by and large our privacy is not protected by legislation, but by tradition.
Industries that have been around for a while often have a “privacy code of conduct.” Most credit agencies, for example, will only reveal information about you to people who have your consent and will always let you look at your own file and will let you request that changes be made if they are warranted.
But other businesses, which haven’t really seen themselves as being in the information business until recently may very well think that whatever information they have on you is their property to do with as they see fit. And a business that would never consider giving out your name and address to a third party might not think twice about selling information about what you buy from them and when.
The best advice I can given anyone who is concerned about the privacy of their commercial personal information is to simply be extremely vigilant. Whenever a business asks you for information which would identify you, ask them what they want it for, how they’re going to store it, whether they consider it confidential and whether or not they’ll sell information about you to anyone else.
If their answer doesn’t satisfy you, don’t give them any information.
Of course it’s hard to be vigilant when everyone is looking for one number or another, especially when you live in a small place like PEI where you might not have any choice as to where to shop.
But short of legislation which places limits on the use of commercial personal information it’s really the only option we have.
What bothers me about this trend is really not as much a privacy issue as the notion that we’re quickly moving from a world where personal relationships are the core of the marketplace to a world where demographics and buying patterns and databases are the core. I’m no longer a thinking breathing person with a set of shopkeepers who know me and my needs, I’m a number attached to a file attached to a profile which sits in a computer in some far off place owned by people who think that this tells them who I am.
And that… makes me sad.
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This fourth episode of Consumed by Technology focused access to information; it aired on July 30, 1996. Karen Mair was the host.
It used to be that in rural communities on Prince Edward Island, the local telephone operator was the “central clearinghouse” for all types of information. If you wanted to know what the hymns were for church on Sunday, or whether Mrs. MacIsaac had given birth yet or what the price of apples at the general store was, you’d just pick up the phone and ask. The last rural telephone operator left service almost 20 years ago, but the idea of a “central clearinghouse” for information is still alive and well.
Show Notes These are the original links that I released with the episode; each is a link to the Internet Archive’s cache of the site at the time.
- The Numbers
- Canadian Social Insurance Number Disclosure Regulations
- Special Joint Subcommittee Studying State and Commercial Use of Social Security Numbers for Transactional Identification
- How to get a Second Social Security Number
- Government and Privacy
- Federal Information Commissioner
- Federal Privacy Commissioner
- Privacy Protection across Canada
- Information For Sale
- ServiceOntario Kiosks
- Internet Department of Motor Vehicles
- Sherlock
- International Research Bureau
Transcript INTRO: It used to be that in rural communities on Prince Edward Island, the local telephone operator was the “central clearinghouse” for all types of information. If you wanted to know what the hymns were for church on Sunday, or whether Mrs. MacIsaac had given birth yet or what the price of apples at the general store was, you’d just pick up the phone and ask.
The last rural telephone operator left service almost 20 years ago, but the idea of a “central clearinghouse” for information is still alive and well.
For another in the series “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about this, and to tell us what he found out when he asked the question “What have they got on me?”
QUESTION: So the operators are all gone, but their spirit lives on?
ANSWER: Well, perhaps a vague shadow of their spirit, a distant cousin, you might say…
As you suggested, in days gone by, rural telephone operators played a central role in community life as the chief “keepers of information. “
After telephones came along, pretty well anything important that had to be communicated had to pass through the local telephone exchange. This meant that the operators had a pretty good handle on everyone’s life and goings on, and so if you wanted to know something, there was a good chance the local operator would either know themselves, or could tell you who did. In their own way, they were pretty powerful people in their communities.
Today, telephone operators are gone, but what has lived on is the notion that having a central clearinghouse for information makes you a pretty powerful person.
In this “wired world,” the place that information gets stored — the clearinghouse — is not in the minds of telephone operators, but in databases in computers. And so today, it’s really the person with the fastest computers and the best databases that holds the most power.
Now with all of that in mind, I decided to set out to answer the question “What have they got on me?” I was curious to know how much information about me and my everyday life is sitting out there in the computers of the world, what it’s used for, and who can get access to it.
QUESTION: Well… what did you find out?
ANSWER: I started by sitting down with a piece of paper and listing out all of the businesses and organizations and governments that I knew had a file on me. I started with things like my driver’s license, my bank accounts, my Social Insurance Number, the credit bureau and continued on to things like the local video store, my Internet provider, and all of the magazines that I subscribe to. And on and on.
Now I don’t tend to get surprised about much when it comes to information and technology, but I must say that I was overwhelmed by the size of this list when I was done… in 10 or 15 minutes I came up with almost 50 places that had some sort of information about me in their files. And those were just the places I knew about.
Once I had this long list in hand, I decided to zero in on a couple of the items, make some phone calls, and see what more I could find out about exactly how and what was being recorded about me.
I started with my driver’s license, which I figured was a good place to start because it has a reputation as being a sort of “universal card” — people ask for it when you want to rent cars or videos or sign up for a cheque cashing card at the grocery store.
I assumed that if someone had my driver’s license number they could just phone the driver’s license people in the government and find out where I lived and what kind of car I owned and whether I’d run over anybody lately.
QUESTION: And were you right?
Well, actually, no.
Much to my surprise, when I talked to the Highway Safety people in the Department of Transportation and Public Works I was told that driver’s license information is absolutely, positively confidential.
The only people who could get at it were them, me, and the police. I asked them why, if this was the case, people still asked for my driver’s license number when I signed up for things that had nothing to do with driving.
They had no idea. If it was useful to others, they said, it certainly wasn’t because of anything they were doing.
Now, as I said, this all came as something of a surprise to me; I’d always thought driver’s license information was public.
And then I found out why I’d always thought this.
Being an Ontario boy, I got on the phone to the Ontario Ministry of Transportation. I never actually did get to talk to a real live person, but I was told by the talking computer that answered the phone that if I sent them $12.00 and an Ontario driver’s license number, they would send me what they call a “Driver Record Search,” which lists the name and address and three years worth of accident and speeding ticket information for the person with that license.
And if I lived in Ontario, I could do the same thing simply by walking up to something called a “Service Ontario” machine where I could slip in my credit card, and get the goods on as many people as I could afford.
QUESTION: They’re obviously a little more liberal with their information in Ontario… what about closer to home in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia?
ANSWER: Again, it seems to depend on where you are.
The person I talked to at the Nova Scotia Department of Consumer Services gave me pretty much the same answer as I got from Prince Edward Island: driver’s license information is not public. They seemed shocked that I would even ask.
In New Brunswick, however, the Motor Vehicles Branch told me that if I sent $8.00 to their office in Fredericton, I could get the driver record of any New Brunswick driver and I wouldn’t even need their driver’s license number, just their name.
I was curious to see what the American take on driver’s license information was, so I headed out on the Internet so see what I could find out.
I did a search for the phrase “obtain driver’s license information” and, wouldn’t you know, that first thing that popped up was an business calling itself the “Internet Department of Motor Vehicles.”
Just by filling out a form right there online, giving them a state and a name, for some states a driver’s license number, and my credit card number, for $20.00 they would email or fax me back any driver record, for any driver, anywhere in the United States.
QUESTION: So it seems that we might be ahead of the pack here on the Island when it comes to protecting people’s privacy…
ANSWER: Well of course some people would suggest that we’re actually behind the pack… again, it depends on who you talk to.
In fact that brings up one of the Big Issues that surround keeping information about people on file, and that’s the question of who owns the information. Is, for example, my driver’s license file my property or the government’s?
Now you might think that someone having access to your driver’s license file isn’t such a big deal.
But what if that someone is an insurance company that turns you down because you got into an accident 5 years ago that wasn’t really your fault.
Or a local car dealer who just happens to have a deal on the latest model of the car you’re driving now — in your colour!
The point is that it’s hard to foresee what others might do with information about you.
The situation becomes somewhat more complicated if you start looking at the issue not just of one government database or another being public, but the potential power of several of those databases combined.
This is really where the telephone operators got their power: not from just knowing that Mr. Jones wasn’t at home on Sunday night because he wasn’t there to accept a long distance call, but also knowing that he used to be married to a mysterious woman from Toronto, a woman reported to be seen in Charlottetown on Sunday morning.
Computer people call this “the power of systems integration.”
QUESTION: So it’s not knowing all the little bits of information as much as having them all collected together…
ANSWER: Exactly.
Now if I continue down my list and just look at the branches of government who have files on me, I see Revenue Canada with a complete record of what I earn and what I spend in my business, the Passport Office with a record of my comings and goings in and out of the country, the Customs Office with information on what packages I’ve received from outside the country.
The Department of the Environment knows what size my septic tank is, the Land Office knows what my house is worth. If I owned a dog, I’d need a license and that a record of that license would be in somebody’s computer.
Now although I don’t really consider it anyone’s business but my own whether I own a dog or not, or what the size of my septic tank is, I’m not too concerned that information like that “gets out.”
Imagine, however, if all of these databases were, effectively, “One Big Database.” What if it was possible to go up to a machine in the mall, slip in a credit card, and for 10 or 15 bucks find out everything that government knows about any person: where they live, how long they’ve been there, what they earn, who they’re married to… whatever.
Now I should hasten to add that this is, in fact, not the case at least right now.
There isn’t, at least yet, “One Big Database” of government information and, in fact, government’s have been quite strict about how they share their information with other governments. But the potential is certainly there for this sharing to happen.
Take the example in Ontario where the provincial government is trying to get access to federal government files to help them track down people not making child support payments.
This is another one of those instances where the basic issues themselves aren’t really that new — governments have been keeping track of us for years — but the power that computers bring to the task of collating and sorting and distributing this information changes the dynamic of the issue so much that we all have be a little more vigilant about keeping an eye on what governments are doing with information about us because they can do so much more now than ever before.
QUESTION: Now that’s government information, what about information that businesses keep on file about us?
ANSWER: I’m reminded of a call that my friend Leslie Niblett got when she was living in El Paso, Texas for a time. A woman from Houston whose name was also Leslie Niblett phoned her up, out of the blue, one day in the midst of a hunt for the Leslie Niblett that was making her life hell.
It seems that some other n’er-do-well Leslie Niblett in Texas had skipped out on making their JC Penny Department Store card payments and that this fact had been incorrectly noted on the Houston Leslie Niblett’s credit file. She was now trying to buy a house, and was being turned down for a mortgage because of this. Her only solution was to call every Leslie Niblett in Texas until she found the one who was making her life so difficult. Lord knows if she ever did find her, and even if she did, what she could have said…
I’ll be back next week to talk about how this could have happened, how it could happen to you, and generally about how businesses can use the information they have about us to sell more stuff.
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This third episode of Consumed by Technology focused on the rhythms of digital working; it aired on July 23, 1996. Karen Mair was the host.
Farmers live from season to season. Car makers live by the model year. Monks live a lifetime of coming to understand God. Politicians live by their terms. Every sort of work has its own rhythm, and these rhythms can profoundly affect people’s everyday lives.
Show Notes These are the original links that I released with the episode; each is a link to the Internet Archive’s cache of the site at the time.
- Jazzed up
- Hotwired
- Microserfs
- Working at McDonald’s
- Mad as Hell
- The Unabomber Manifesto
- Network
- Center for Repetitive Motion Disorders
Transcript INTRO: Farmers live from season to season. Car makers live by the model year. Monks live a lifetime of coming to understand God. Politicians live by their terms. Every sort of work has its own rhythm, and these rhythms can profoundly affect people’s everyday lives.
In another in the series “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about the rhythms of the “digital worker” and what he calls “the death of time.”
QUESTION: What exactly is a “digital worker?”
ANSWER: Well, the easiest answer to that question is that I’m pretty sure that I’m a “digital worker.” Being a digital worker means that the “stuff” of my job is digital information; what I do all day is move it around.
I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life — I’ve sold car parts at Canadian Tire; I’ve sorted turtle bones in a museum; I’ve taught 7 year olds how to canoe; I’ve pasted up the sports section a daily newspaper every day.
All of these jobs, in one way or another, have dealt with “real stuff” — car parts, turtles, kids and canoes, newspapers — and they’ve all been the sort of work that gets “finished” at some point — the part gets sold, the bones get sorted, the kids know how to canoe, the newspaper gets printed.
But now that I have a job as a “digital worker,” the days of having “real stuff” to deal with and jobs that have a beginning, a middle and an end seem to be gone.
What I do all day is sit in front of a computer screen moving around bits of digital space: words, graphics, pictures. The different thing about moving around bits of digital information as opposed to, say, moving around bits of turtles, is that digital information is a very “elastic” thing — it’s extremely easy to change — and that elasticity makes for a very different work life than what I’ve been used to.
Think about the difference between typing something on a manual typewriter versus typing it on a word processor. If you get 7 pages into it on a typewriter and decide that you want to add a new paragraph somewhere on page 3, it’s out with the exacto knife and the rubber cement and 15 or 20 minutes of fiddling around. On a word processor, all you need to do is to pop up to page 3, hit insert and start typing.
The simplest way to understand what being a digital worker is like is to take that example — typewriters versus word processors — and extend it to almost all aspects of a work life.
For me, going to work means logging on to the ‘net. The tools I use are text editors and electronic paint programs and modems. And the work I do is like being a construction worker in cyberspace: I arrange bits of information so that people can find them and make sense of them. I don’t move around bales of hay or pizzas, I move around ferry schedules, soil test results and electronic pictures of horses. My job is to maintain a constantly evolving pool of information in good order
QUESTION: That sort of work sounds very familiar… how is being a “digital worker” different from what we do here on the radio every day? We’re both in the “information moving business,” aren’t we?
ANSWER: Well yes, we’re both in the information moving business. The important difference, though, is that come 9 o’clock this morning, today’s “Island Morning” is done; you can’t go back and change something that happened at 7:15, because it’s already out there in people’s radios… it’s done. Making radio — and, for that matter, making television or newspapers, or magazines — is a lot like using a manual typewriter. The rhythm of these media is hourly or daily or weekly or monthly. They start. They end. They’re done.
Working with digital information, though, is a different story. If I take a piece of information, let’s say it’s a map of Charlottetown, and put it on the Internet. In the “old print world,” my job would now be done.
But remember, digital information is very easy to change. Let’s say that in two weeks, a new road gets constructed in East Royalty, or a street downtown gets changed to one-way, or new park gets created. Because the map is on the Internet, because it’s a digital map, I can simply go and make these changes. As soon as I make them, the original map is gone and is replaced by a new, more up-to-date map.
To do the same thing in the “old print world,” would mean printing and distributing a whole new map, something you wouldn’t tend to do very often because of the cost of paper and ink and distribution.
Now this might seem like a pretty simple concept: digital information is easier to change.
But the important thing here is not one example or another, but an entire work day, or work week, or work year, spent working in a world where everything can be changed, updated, redesigned — easily — all the time.
That’s what being a digital worker is like.
QUESTION: Now you call this the “death of time?”
Well, I’ll admit that “the death of time” might be blowing things a little out of proportion, but let me explain why it feels like that’s exactly what it is…
I don’t think anyone would disagree that the job you have, and how time factors into it, can really affect the rest of your life. If you work the night shift, for example, you’re awake when everyone else is asleep. If you’re a teacher, you get a two month vacation in the middle of the summer. If you farm potatoes, there’s not a lot to do in the fields in January. If you host Island Morning, you’ve got to get up before almost everyone else.
Now, as you suggested earlier, time also factors into jobs in another way: every occupation has its own rhythm, or “life cycle” associated with it. This isn’t necessarily a day to day thing that has to do with when you have to get up in the morning, it’s more about the natural cycle of whatever it is you work at.
If you’re a farmer, you plant a crop every season. Spring comes, you plow, fertilize, sow, roll, till, spray… harvest. Winter comes. And then you do it all again. When farmers talk about how things are going in their lives, usually it has something to do with how the crop is going. You’ve had a good year if you’ve had a good crop. You’ve had a bad year if you’ve had a bad crop. The rhythm of the farm is the season.
If you work in a hospital emergency room, each “project” you take on is one case coming in the door. They’re hurt, you treat them, they go away. Total time, anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours. Then it’s on to the next patient. The rhythm of the emergency room is the coming and going of the patients.
Again, these rhythms can have a profound affect on how people live their lives, not just in a practical way, but in a way which affects how they feel and think and relate to the rest of the world.
Imagine then what it’s like to work in a job where the work is, quite literally, never done, where the “stuff” that you’re working on is constantly evolving, where everything is in a constant state of flux, where projects start, but never really finish, because they can always be changed, updated, made better, clearer, easier to understand.
The rhythm of this sort of job — the rhythm of “digital work” — is very, very different than the rhythm of any other sort of work. It’s either so long that it’s endless, or so short that it’s invisible.
For all practical purposes, though, it’s as if there’s no rhythm at all.
And in a way, that means that there’s no time at all. Or at the very least it means that how people and work and time all relate is very different from what we’re used to.
So that’s why it call it “the death of time.”
QUESTION: What are the practical implications of this? What have you noticed about your life as a “digital worker?”
ANSWER: One significant thing is that getting satisfaction from my job is difficult, or at least different. It’s not like there’s a pile of something getting smaller as I work, or a last nail to drive in to finish, or a published book to put up on the shelf. I have to get my satisfaction from the process of working rather than from the finished product because, really, the product is never finished.
My day to day work life is different too.
Because there’s no beginning, middle or end to the projects I work on, and because the tasks involved in digital work tend to be shorter rather than longer, I tend to be working on 25 or 30 little things all at the same time. And which 25 or 30 things I’m working on changes from day to day, from hour to hour. I might spend five minutes adding a bit to an Internet page I’m working on here on the Island, 10 minutes fixing up a database on a computer in Boston, another five minutes answering some email and so on, hour after hour. It makes it difficult to go home at 5 o’clock because there’s really no logical place to end the work day… there’s always something else to evolve a little bit before I call it a day, and sometimes I end up evolving until 9 or 10 at night.
QUESTION: So computers have changed our whole idea of what is work time and what is home time?
ANSWER: Well, certainly for me they have, and that too can be something of a challenge. Because digital work can be done from anywhere — including from home — it just makes the dividing line between work and home all that fuzzier.
Perhaps most importantly, though, is the challenge of doing digital work in what is still largely an analog world.
It tends to be the places where “old analog” meets “new digital” that are the most challenging. This is true in work — how do you set up electronic hotel reservations at hotels with no computers — but I tend to notice it more in just regular day-to-day life.
I’ve started to notice, for example, that in my personal life, I don’t tend to think ahead very much; it’s hard to shift from a minute-by-minute digital way of thinking to a “where should we go on vacation this fall?” or a “when do you think the broccoli will be up?” way of thinking. It’s hard to move from a digital world where everything is malleable and elastic and easily changed to a concrete “real” world where pipes burst and ceilings fall in and cars run out of gas.
Now I don’t want to make it sound as though I’ve morphed into some sort of digital cyberguy or even as though my life is any different, worse or better than anyone else’s. My mortgage still comes due at the end of every month and I still brush my teeth twice a day.
But I do notice a difference in my life as a digital worker as opposed to my life as, say, a canoe instructor.
And I do think it’s important to look carefully at the long-term social consequences of this transition to an “information economy” — with all the digital workers it will require — that we seem to be in the middle of. In the end, I think the real effects of digital work on society won’t be felt, or at least understood, for 5 or 10 years and it may be too late by then to have any control over them.
QUESTION: In some ways, it sounds like it may be too late now…
ANSWER: It’s very hard to say: the changes we’re talking about are so small and so subtle, and the nature digital work itself changes so much, that actually putting your finger on something and saying “no, this is something we don’t want to happen” or “hey, isn’t that a nice new thing to have happened” seems almost impossible.
In any case, I certainly know that there are some days that I’d relish another go at the turtle bone pile or the chance to sell someone a muffler for a ‘75 Dodge Dart…
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This second episode of Consumed by Technology focused on the economics of moving around information on the Internet; it aired on July 16, 1996. Karen Mair was the host.
In 1837, a retired school teacher named Rowland Hill wrote an essay which shook the world of “moving information from place to place,” an essay which is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when he wrote it.
Show Notes These are the original links that I released with the episode; each is a link to the Internet Archive’s cache of the site at the time.
- About Rowland Hill and the Mail
- Royal Mail History
- Mass Postal Service after 150 Years: A Review Essay
- The Post Office
- Canada Post
- United States Postal Service
- The Royal Mail
- The Phone Company
- Island Tel
- Bell Canada
- AT&T
- International Telecommunications Union
- Telecom Digest and Archives
- Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission
- Paying for the Internet
- Basic accounts fees at PEINet, Sympatico, Atlantic Connect (all here on Prince Edward Island) and AT&T WorldNet, Mindspring, The Well (all bigger U.S. Internet providers)
- How big is this?
- Anne of Green Gables
- The Canadian Constitution
Transcript INTRO: In 1837, a retired school teacher named Rowland Hill wrote an essay which shook the world of “moving information from place to place,” an essay which is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when he wrote it.
To talk about this retired school teacher and about “moving information around from place to place,” Peter Rukavina joins me now in another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
QUESTION: What exactly was in this essay that shook up the world?
ANSWER: Well, in 1837, Rowland Hill was living in England after retiring from a career as a teacher and administrator. He was quite an eclectic man; he was know for his somewhat innovative teaching methods and his interests in printing, astronomy, mathematics, and transportation.
And in that year, 1837, he produced a pamphlet called “Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability”. And, quite simply, the theories he forwarded in this pamphlet revolutionised the postal system, not only in England, but around the world. And not only in 1837, but in ways which live on today.
You see up until that time, the cost of sending a letter was based on a rather complex set of factors like the distance the letter was to travel and the number sheets of paper you sent and so on. And in fact the cost was usually charged to the person receiving a letter, not the person sending it.
This all resulted in the need for something of an overwhelming postal bureaucracy: not only did the people delivering the mail have to charge for every letter they delivered, but they had to charge a different amount for each one. And that amount had to be figured out.
The system required large number of people, cost so much that is was hard for the common person to use it, and was just generally inefficient.
And then Rowland Hill can along with three relatively simple suggestions:
- Postal rates should be lower.
- The cost of sending a letter should be the same, regardless of distance.
- Costs should be paid by the sender, not the recipient
Although Hill faced some political challenges getting his ideas across, in the end, nothing could stop common sense and by 1840 uniform postal rates, and postage stamps purchased by the sender, were in place across England. Within 25 years his ideas had spread around the world.
What we end up with, 159 years later, is a system here in Canada where you can send a standard letter to any of 12 million addresses in the country, for just 45 cents.
QUESTION: So Rowland Hill gave us a world with cheap, universal postal rates?
ANSWER: Exactly. And not only that, but his ideas changed the model for the way that information was moved from to place to place.
Now that we live in an “information economy” where we’re moving around more and more information and less and less tractors and sheet metal and rolls of carpet, how we pay to send and receive information becomes only more important.
Imagine, for example, a world where it cost $73 to send a letter to Toronto. Or what if international telephone calls were free? Or we had to pay for Island Morning by the minute? What if it cost five dollars to run a TV commercial during Compass?
In a world where money is so important to us, how we pay to move information dramatically affects how we deal with that information. Generally, the cheaper it is, the more we use it.
Now, in addition to the sort of “all you can eat” way we pay for postal service — one fee, as much information as you can stuff in an envelope — there are generally three factors used to charge for moving information from place to place: how much, how far, and how long. Which of these is in place for a particular “information moving device” tends to determine how we use that device in our daily lives.
QUESTION: Well what about telephone service as an example?
Telephone service is an interesting case because the way we pay for it changes depending on where we’re calling. Local calls are “all you can eat” and long distance calls are charged using a combination of time and distance — not unlike postal service before 1837.
Now think of the difference in the way we make local phone calls versus the way we make long distance calls. In any given day, I might make 20 or 30 local phone calls. Because I don’t have to pay for each one, I don’t even think about picking up the phone at the drop of a hat to make a local call.
Long distance calls, however, are a different matter. Because I have to pay for each one, even thinking about making a long distance call is a different kind of thing altogether from making a local call, to say nothing of the experience of actually making a long distance call with the clock silently ticking all the time in the background.
Not it sort of seems a little silly to be describing all of this is such intimate detail; it seems like such a natural part of our lives that we just take it for granted that to call across the street is free and to call Halifax costs. But sometimes it’s useful to step back for a minute and realize that all of these distinctions are ones we’ve allowed to be put in place; take these arbitrary distinctions as to where is “near” and where is “far” and multiply their effect over millions of phone calls over the years, and you’re talking about a pretty major issue. And an issue which not only affects the size of our phone bills at the end of the month but which can determine how communities relate to each other.
Take North and South Granville, for example, close to Hunter River in the middle of the Island.
South Granville is in the Hunter River “964” telephone exchange and North Granville, just over the hill, really, is in the New London “886” exchange. Now I’ve been told that the natural inclination of people in South Granville is towards Hunter River and Charlottetown, both local calls, whereas the natural inclination of people in North Granville is towards Kensington and Summerside, again, both local calls. As a result, the natural inclination of North and South Granville is not towards each other. It seems like such a simple and insignificant thing on one level, but when you start to think about all of the friendships and marriages and business arrangements that have been subtly affected by this over the years, it looms pretty large in the grander scheme of things.
And again, it’s really all about how we charge for moving information from place to place.
QUESTION: You mentioned the “information economy”… how do things like the Internet fit into all of this?
ANSWER: Well, although the Internet has been around, in one form or another, for over 20 years, it’s only in the last couple that people like you and me have started to use it. And so how we pay for using it — what “information moving” model will apply is only in the process of being figured out.
By far the dominant model right now is something which shares something in common with long distance phone service and something in common with the revolutionary postal system of Rowland Hill. In most cases when you sign up for an Internet account you pay a certain fixed monthly fee which allows you to spend a certain number of hours connected to the Internet… $30 for 30 hours, for example. Any time that you spend online over that fixed monthly amount is billed by the hour.
QUESTION: So the clock is always ticking?
ANSWER: Yes indeed, and, as you might imagine, that affects the way that people use their time online.
The Internet is often compared to the public library; they’re both places where lots of information is stored and organized.
Think of the feeling you get from wandering around a public library: you might wander over to the magazine section and read the latest issue of the New Yorker, browse though the Irish travel book section for a while, maybe try and find the latest John Grisham novel. Because using public libraries is free, and because you can take as much time as you want to find what you need, there’s a certain kind of freedom that libraries bring to gathering information.
On the “billed by the hour” Internet, however, that freedom is gone. Although you can wander around the Internet in much the same way you can wander around a library, and although you’re not paying for the actual information you’re browsing, there’s always that feeling that the clock is ticking. It’s not unlike the feeling that you get making a long distance telephone call.
One of the reasons I know this is true is because I’ve experienced another way of using the Internet, a model which is gradually becoming more common, and that is paying a fixed monthly fee for unlimited Internet use. This is a model very similar to the way we pay for cable television; in essence, “all you can eat.” Without that invisible clock ticking in the background, “surfing the net” is an entirely different experience.
QUESTION: Do you expect that this “all you can eat” approach is going to be the way of the future?
Well, it’s certainly preferable from a consumer’s point of view, but it also makes it hard for someone in the Internet business to make any money.
The third possible model for paying for the Internet, and the one which perhaps makes the most amount of sense for someone in the Internet business and the least amount of sense for consumers, is the “pay by the byte” model. This is similar to the way we pay for telegrams: by the word.
In essence, we would pay for the actual amount of information we browsed on the Internet, no matter how long it took. If we look up two books in the Library of Congress online catalogue, it might cost us 5 cents. I we look up ten books, it might cost us 25 cents.
Just to give you some idea of the relative size of pieces of information: the book Anne of Green Gables weighs in at just under half a million bytes — one byte equals one letter or space in the book. The entire Canadian Constitution is about 100,000 bytes long while the American Declaration of Independence is about 7,000 bytes long. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article on dandelions is 508 bytes long.
Now remember, in this “pay by the byte” model, the clock isn’t ticking, but the “information meter” is. It’s more the bookstore way of doing things than the public library way of doing things.
The “pay by the byte” way of charging for Internet use isn’t really common for consumers yet, but it’s becoming an increasingly common model for charging businesses for Internet access.
QUESTION: So the Internet will be “pay by the minute,” “all you can eat,” or “pay by the byte?”
ANSWER: In the end it will probably be some combination of the three. No matter what the final model is, however, its going to have a dramatic affect on the role that the Internet plays in our life.
Just to introduce one final wrench in the works: there’s a lot of talk now about “convergence” — about telephone and television and radio and the Internet all merging into one sort of “digital appliance.” When you hear people talking about a “set top box” this is what they’re talking about.
Things start to get really weird when you start thinking about telephone service — the new “digital appliance” telephone service — being billed not by the minute or by distance like we’re used to, but by the amount of information that is communicated.
“Hello mother, I’m doing well” might cost you a tenth of a cent, “Hi Mom, all okay!” might cost you half as much. We could end up with a whole generation of people talking in a weird abbreviated code.
QUESTION: We’d have old Rowland Hill rolling over in his grave…
ANSWER: Indeed. Just remember, the next time that you pick up the phone or send a letter or pick up the newspaper, or watch TV, you’re helping to move information from place to place. And how you’re paying for it probably has a lot more to do with how you’re doing it than you realize.
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston. He’ll be back next week for another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Wayback Machine and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This first episode of Consumed by Technology focused on the coming of the commercial realm to the Internet; it aired on July 9, 1996. Wayne Collins was the host.
It’s hard to believe that only two years ago we were talking about the Internet as a lofty academic sort of place where you could do things like search the Library of Congress catalogue and read research papers on fruit fly migration patterns. The business world has now discovered the Internet and it’s as if a giant shopping mall has suddenly moved in next door to the old “Internet public library.”
Show Notes These are the original links that I released with the episode; each is a link to the Internet Archive’s cache of the site at the time.
- Carville, Matalin and Speechless
- Information about the movie “Speechless”
- James Carville’s website at Random House
- James Carville’s column in Salon Magazine
- The Mary Matalin Show’s website on CBS Radio
- Buying Stuff Online
- Amazon.com (where I bought the books)
- Books Stacks Unlimited (another place to buy books)
- CD-Now (where I buy my CDs and tapes)
- Paying Online: The Big Boys
- VISA
- Mastercard
- American Express
- Digicash
- Paying Online: The Hackers
- 2600 Magazine: The Hacker Quarterly
- Phrack Magazine
- Cyber/Phreaker/Cypher/Cracker Shit
- Metal Strapping
- Metal strapping and plastic wrap keep lumber secure, employees safe and customers happy from The Lumber Cooperator
Transcript INTRO: It’s hard to believe that only two years ago we were talking about the Internet as a lofty academic sort of place where you could do things like search the Library of Congress catalogue and read research papers on fruit fly migration patterns.
The business world has now discovered the Internet and it’s as if a giant shopping mall has suddenly moved in next door to the old “Internet public library.”
In the first of a new series we call “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about “going shopping in cyberspace.”
QUESTION: So business has jumped online…?
ANSWER: Yes, in a very, very big way. As you suggested, it’s hard to believe that just a couple of years ago there was still raging debate about whether even mentioning something vaguely commercial-sounding on the Internet was acceptable. Many long-time Internet users — people in universities and colleges and governments — were convinced that if the Internet “sold out” to business, it would loose the sort of fuzzy, anarchic “information sharing” feeling that had developed over 20 years of being something of a “secret nerds-only club.”
Now, all that’s changed and you’d be hard pressed to find a business, small or large, that isn’t on the Internet right now or in the processing of getting there.
QUESTION: Now when you say that a business is “on the Internet,” what does that mean?
ANSWER: That can mean many things. What it usually boils down to is something called a “home page” which is really just a starting place, a “page one” for a business’ electronic presence.
Some businesses just have a very simple home page: they list their address and telephone number, have a paragraph about what it is they do, maybe a picture or two of their building or their products and that’s it.
Other businesses dive in with both feet and have thousands of pages of product information, online order forms, lifestyle magazines, contests and whatever else they can dream up to get people to come to their Internet site and hang around for a while.
No matter how extensive their Internet presence is, most businesses are trying to do two things online: first, to generally build their “brand identity” and second to “sell stuff.”
QUESTION: By “selling stuff” do you mean something along the lines of “electronic catalogue shopping?”
ANSWER: I can answer that best with a couple of examples. I must admit to being something of an “home shopping” cynic. I’ve never been one to order things from the “Home Shopping Channel” and I’m not really a catalogue shopper. But recently I’ve become something of an bona fide “online shopper” so I can tell you some real life “stories from the field” to give you some idea what it’s actually like.
For me, online shopping really works for three things: buying CDs and tapes, buying books, and buying computer software. Lately I’ve found myself doing each of these at least a couple of times a month.
QUESTION: When you talk, for example, about buying a book online, explain to me how the process actually works.
ANSWER: Well, typically I’ll have a specific book in mind. I’ve not really found the Internet a very good place to browse around for books — it lacks the “feel” of a genuine good bookstore.
So with my specific book in mind, I’ll dial up the Internet, go to a online bookstore’s “home page” and select the option to search their catalogue of books. I can enter a title, or an author, or a subject and get a list on my screen of all the books in their store that fit the bill.
One example: a couple of months ago I rented the movie “Speechless”, which is about a man and woman set inside the centre of a U.S. federal election. She manages the Republican campaign, he manages the Democrat campaign… somehow they meet and fall in love and get married.
Now I knew this was all based on a true story and I’d read somewhere that the two “real people” had written a book about it. But I had no idea who they were. To find the answer to that question, I relied on a low-tech solution and phoned my brother Steve. When he heard what I was looking for, he immediately said “oh, you mean the book by James Carville and Mary Matalin…”.
So I had my answer.
Now, being the home shopping cynic that I am, the first thing I did was phone my local bookstore. No sense in buying something online if I can just go down the block. I told them I was looking for a book by James Carville and Mary Matalin that has something to do with the U.S. election.
They searched in their computer and nothing came up.
They looked on their microfiche and there was nothing there.
They suggested, perhaps, that no such book existed.
They sort of sounded like maybe I was bothering them and I should leave.
So I did. And I went home and sat down at my computer and decided it was time to give online shopping a whirl.
I ended up at a bookstore called “amazon.com” (which, I later found out, is somewhere in Seattle).
From their “home page”, I clicked on “search our catalogue, ” entered “Carville, James” in the blank, clicked on “Search Now,” and, a couple of seconds later, the titles of seven books were listed on my screen, including three different versions of why I came to know was called “All’s Fair: Love, War and Running for President” — paperback, hardcover, and audio cassette.
I clicked on “Audio Cassette” and then “Buy Items Now”, entered my name, mailing address, and credit card number, told them how I wanted the book shipped and that was it. A week later the book was waiting for me at the post office.
Sub’ in CDs and tapes for books, and the process works much the same way.
QUESTION: When I hear you talk about giving your credit card number out over the Internet, alarm bells go off in my head… is that something that’s safe and secure?
ANSWER: It depends on who you talk to. And it all depends on who you give it out to. Nothing that passes through the Internet is ever 100% secure. There will always be someone, somewhere, trying to get at that information and use it for evil purposes. Just as there will always be people breaking into houses and people stealing cars.
But just as you can put a deadbolt on your front door, you can be careful about how you give out “secret” information — like your credit card number — online. Most Internet stores operate something called a “secure server.” This means, in essence, that when any information you send form your computer to their computer over the Internet, it’s encrypted so that, even it is intercepted somewhere along the line, it will be useless gibberish.
Now encryption has been around for a long, long time. But encrypting credit card numbers and the like on the Internet has only been around for a little more than a year, so it’s not exactly what you would call a “mature” technology. That said, there are thousands of people now buying thousands of things every day online and it’s rare if ever that you hear of a major security problem. Pretty soon places like Mastercard and Visa and the major banks will be getting into the game themselves and, presumably, things will only get more secure.
But there will always be a risk. I feel about as comfortable in typing my credit card number over the Internet as I do in giving it to some anonymous order clerk at a toll-free catalogue order desk; I know there’s some risk, but I’m willing to take the small risk for the convenience it offers.
QUESTION: You mentioned buying computer software over the Internet — is that any different that buying books or CDs?
ANSWER: The real difference is not in the actual ordering — that works pretty much the same — the real difference comes in the delivery. Whereas a book or a CD is sitting in some large warehouse somewhere in Seattle and has to be physically shipped from there to here, computer software is, quite literally, invisible. Software is digital information, and the Internet moves digital information, so the neat thing about buying software online is that you can get it delivered right over the Internet.
Enter your name and credit card number and the software you order gets automatically transferred to your computer where you can set it up and use it right away. This is true whether it’s a word processor or a spreadsheet or the latest video game.
QUESTION: Instant delivery, in other words…?
ANSWER: Not exactly instant. If you’ve ever bought a piece of software from a store, you know that often it comes on upwards of 10 or 20 floppy disks, each which holds quite a lot of information. To squeeze that amount of information over the Internet takes a bit of time. I recently ordered a scheduling program over the Internet, for example, and it took about 45 minutes to transfer from the store’s computer to mine. So it’s not quite instant, but it’s a lot easier than getting in my car and driving to Seattle.
QUESTION: Should Island retailers fear this losing business to these new “cyberstores?”
Yes and no. I think retailers in general, no matter where they are located, are going to have to start looking at their competition not as the guy down the street but the guy — or the thousands of guys — all around the world.
As much as I’d like to be able to buy locally, why should I order a book or a CD or a piece of software from someone down the street with a poor selection, grumpy staff and high prices when I can get great selection, responsive staff and decent prices online?
There are obviously some businesses that have to worry more than others. I don’t think buying furniture or tractors or heads of lettuce online is going to take off anytime soon — there are certain things that people are, I think, always going to want to pick up or kick the tires of. But if you’re selling something which is pretty generic — books and CDs and software yes, but also everything from jeans to modems to tea towels — being quick and lean and very customer friendly is going to become more and more important or you’re going to find your customers “going to Seattle.”
Or to a new upstart just around the corner with a low-rent warehouse, a big computer and zero overhead.
What the Internet cannot offer, and what I don’t think it will ever be able to offer, is the feeling that comes from truly amazing customer service be real friendly local people.
Perhaps the best example of the this for me came up last summer. It was Saturday night at 7:30 and we were in the middle of renovating our bathroom and we needed 4 inches of metal strapping before we could continue. I got in my car a drove up to Bobby Clow’s store in Hampshire before he closed at 8 o’clock and, sure enough, he had metal strapping. Now a whole roll was about 100 feet or 1000 feet and cost about 12 or 15 dollars. I only needed 4 inches. No matter. Bobby snipped off 4 inches and charged me 37 cents and I was on my way.
I don’t think I’m in any hurry to look for 4 inches of metal strapping for 37 cents on the Internet.
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston. He’ll be back next week for another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”