Live from the Formosa Tea House

What with the impending closure of the Formosa Tea House, Dan and Steven and I reasoned that we’d better record one final episode of our erstwhile Live from the Formosa Tea House podcast before it was too late (the last episode was six years ago, so it’s not like we were otherwise in a hurry).

Unfortunately the Formosa Tea House turned out to be closed for renovations today; so as to ensure that a weekend’s worth of careful planning didn’t go to waste, we redirected to the original location of the Formosa Tea House in Charlottetown, at 79 University Avenue, today the home of the Monsoon sushi restaurant.

Here, verbatim, as it was recorded on my iPod Touch placed in the middle of our table in the back room, is episode six.  We had a lot of ground to cover.

Live from the Formosa Tea House: Episode Six by ruk

As an experiment, I’ve created an iTunes enhanced AAC version of the plain old Live From the Formosa Tea House, Session Five, that contains chapter markers, images and links to websites we mention. Here’s what it looks like:

Because of the AAC encoding, and the embedded images and links, this is a much larger file than the regular MP3 version (32MB vs. 12MB). But it also sounds a lot better. Feedback welcome on whether this is worth it.

FormosaTeaHouse-Five.m4a

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.

FormosaTeaHouse-Five.mp3

Stay tuned for more Live From the Formosa Tea House; in the meantime I’m just claiming the podcast feed by sticking this link in: My Odeo Channel. Go on about your business.

Like all other things web, it’s deceptively hard to come up with realistic numbers for “readership” or “listenership.” Web requests can come from too many places, in too many guises, to each be dependably tied to a real person.

That said, we can get a vague idea of the “listenership” of Live From the Formosa Tea House by looking at the number of times the MP3 audio files have been downloaded. This doesn’t mean they’ve been listened to, of course, but it’s better than nothing.

So here are the episode statistics, covering downloads from September 27, 2004 to the present:

• Episode One - 3,705 downloads
• Episode Two - 3,456 downloads
• Episode Three - 2,153 downloads
• Episode Four - 392 downloads