Peter Rukavina's Podcast

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.

Can you help me identify this music, snapped in a clothing store in downtown Malmö?

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. 1. 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 sh

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

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.

Rocket Propelled Grenades are the subject of The 3LA Podcast for today.

Episode 8 of The 3LA Podcast is about PEI.

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!