Peter Rukavina's Podcast

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 Ra

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

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 betwe

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 m

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

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 notwithstandin

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 r

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

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 m

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 plo