Peter Rukavina's Podcast

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 lo

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.

Oliver recites the poem We are here, turning the mundane into the delightful.

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, w

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 M*A*S*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

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. He

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

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

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

In development: an Amazon Alexa skill that delivers information about electricity load, generation and peak on Prince Edward Island.