My brother Johnny is in Guatemala on business, visiting the coffee fields with The Bread Garden, for which he manages a restaurant in British Columbia. Today a major earthquake hit the country and, of course, our first thoughts were to Johnny. Brother Mike in Ontario immediately fired up MSN Messenger when he heard about the quake and brought us up to date on what he knew so far, mostly from TV. We didn’t know where Johnny was, but then we remembered that he’d left a message on Brother Steve’s website, so we found out he was in Panajchel. Scant information on the web or about this place. Kept up to date using CNN, which was basically running the same AP wire story as everyone else. Mike got in touch with Johnny’s office, and talked to a guy who was acting general manager; no help. I tracked down the SEDAR filings for the Bread Garden, Johnny’s company, and talked to the [very helpful and nice] wife of one of the vice-presidents (found the phone number using Canada411); she promised to dig up the itinerary and get back to me. In the meantime, Mike heard from Johnny’s fianceé Jodi, who had been on the phone with Johnny: he’s okay, was in a bar when the earthquake struck, and is flying back Sunday.

Charlottetown has been blessed/cursed this week with an inordinate amount of snow, which has, in turn, resulted in an inordinate amount of ice. Yesterday I decided I had to do something about this ice, as much of it is in the form of 4 foot long icicles hanging off the back of our roof. Needing a suitable implement of destruction to knock these icicles off the roof, I went to the basement. There, as if a gift from Brigadier Reid, former longtime owner of house, was an appropriately sized axe, perfect for the job. Once the icicles were gone, I needed to shovel some snow off the mud room roof at the back of the house. Again to the basement. And there was a shovel of the perfect shape and weight for the job. I am sure that there will come a day when I can find a similarly timely use for the whistles which seem to hang in every corner of our house; perhaps there will be some sort of coaching or air raid emergency?

Back in the late 1980s, while I was a programmer at Trent Radio, our station manager, Joanna Rogers, published a ‘zine called Ear Meat in which she published reviews of independent music releases. I was drafted at one point to review a Ron Sexsmith cassette called Grand Opera Lane and the result was a smarmy sophomoric review that panned the cassette, and insulted the artist. A couple of months after that issue was released, Joanna received a very nice note from Mr. Sexsmith, thanking her for the review, but requesting that I not be employed to review his future efforts. Grand Opera Lane has been reissued by MapleMusic.com.

As ill as I feel towards Microsoft, I must say that their NetMeeting product is pretty slick. When brother Mike and I were setting up his Mike Radio station, I needed to configure some things on his end: NetMeeting lets you simultaneously audio and video share, as well as remote screen share. Snazzy (and free!).

Tonight I set up an IceCast Internet radio station, just to see how it worked. Wow! Within 15 minutes of starting, I was “on the air,” broadcasting to my brother Mike in Ontario. An hour later, we had Mike up and running and broadcasting back to me. Having spent 4 years working with Real Networks netcasting products, I can’t tell you how much easier this was. Highly recommended.

So I want to start an Internet “radio station.” Regular old broadcast stations have to pay music royalties to SOCAN (in Canada) or BMI or ASCAP (in the US).
There’s a good overview of the U.S. situation on the DNA Lounge website, but I wondered what the situation was in Canada. So I sent email to SOCAN.
SOCAN’s response was basically “we’re still figuring this out,” but they added:

To avoid future copyright infringement and any resulting legal proceedings, SOCAN advises that you send a letter to my attention stating that you (the company, if incorporated) agree to pay any fees and taxes applicable to your use, once they are set. Also, since the fees approved will be retroactive, you should consider making provisions for a reserve fund of 3.2% of your gross revenues or, if the site is noncommercial, 3.2% of operating expenses to pay fees and taxes once they become due.

From my friend Oliver:

I thought this site’s use of seat perspectives was a staggeringly obvious and yet brilliantly original idea.

From my wise and religiously-inclined friend Stephen, father of my God Daughter:

i am not one to proselytize and i don’t think everyone has to have kids, but i do think that there is so much you learn about yourself and others and so many changes for the better that happen to you with kids that it would be hard to have those changes happen any other way. i’ve been working with a guy who is 54 and unmarried and childless and his whole life revolves around what happened to him when he was under 25. i like the sufi expression - “shatter my heart to make it ready for a greater love than i have ever known”.

A couple of years ago, I wanted to set up the Pagoo system to act as my answering machine. To do this required a service from the phone company called Call Forward Busy. At the time, the phone company told me that no such service was available; I pressed them with CRTC rulings, and then, as if by magic, the service became available. It’s interesting, in this light, to find the following notice on the phone company’s website:

(*Call Forward Busy is needed to make this service work. If you were to purchase this or a similar service from another provider, Island Tel would charge residential-line customers $2.25 per month and business-line customers $3.25 per month on your phone bill for Call Forward Busy. That’s in addition to what you pay your other provider. Island Tel bundles the two together so you can save money!)

Transmission work is something each of us will probably have done only once or twice in a lifetime. And for most of us, transmissions remain a deep dark automotive mystery, one of those things usually prefaced by a statement like “we’ll have to drop it out and take a look, and that will cost $600 up front.” And then there’s Precision Transmission in Charlottetown. Two years ago, the transmission in my 1993 Eagle Summit got all chewed to hell, and I needed a new one. My local dealer quoted me a starting price of $4500 for a new one (I only paid $6000 for the car); the guys at Precision rebuilt the transmission for $1500. They’re friendly, don’t talk in mechanic-speak, and I would highly recommend them when and if you experience the dread that comes from shifting into drive and having nothing happen.