Peter Rukavina's Podcast

Sunday morning in Serrazzano.

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 ce

The birds were alive and musical as I was pottering around with my bicycle in the back yard yesterday.

Sitting by the ocean on the western shore of Cape Breton. 

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 from The 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 m

I love Siri’s enthusiasm with this answer.

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

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

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 Handboo

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 mac