Here’s one of the vehicles that K-ROCK and The Ocean, two Charlottetown radio stations, have choosen to use to promote themselves:

For the uninitiated, it’s a Hummer H2, a truck made by General Motors that, according to dealers, gets 8 to 10 mpg.

I know that rock and roll is supposed to be about being all crazy and rebellious, but does it really take a huge gas-guzzling truck to telegraph that attitude? For the same price — probably less — you could pimp out a Toyota Prius and get 5x better mileage.

Your license application to the CRTC talked about NewCap’s policy of providing “intensely local service to the communities it serves.” How about showing some community leadership and getting a promotional vehicle that equates “cool” and “rebellious” with something more progressive and useful than a 6,400-pound monster truck.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to grit my teeth and invest in some panniers for my bicycle: I suddenly realized that my bike could become a much more useful tool if I could carry things with it in a fashion other than the tricky and dangerous “balance plastic shopping bags on the handlebars” method.

I remember once being in Quebec City when I was about 19 years old and needing to comb my hair. But I didn’t have a comb. And I didn’t know the French word for comb, and I was too embarassed to walk into a pharmacy and ask for “a little thing for which to make my hairs come together.” So I had unkempt hair all the way out to the coast and back.

The same fear had kept me pannier-free all these years: I’d a vague sense that those bags you slung over the back of a bike were called something weird that started with “P,” but darned if I was going to walk into a bike shop and ask for them by name; what if I pronounced it wrong in front of the cool bike guys… oh, the shame!

It was [[Cynthia Dunsford]] who helped me over the hump: she got me in line on the prounciation front (thing “pahn-yeh” rather than “pan-ear”), and once said panniers had been acquired (from the actually-not-too-intimidating [[Smooth Cycle]]), she came over and helped me affix them to my bike (if you ever find yourself needing to rebuild the transmission on a 1970 Chevy Nova I’m pretty certain that Cynthia has the tools to help you in her kit bag).

So I’ve been riding around a veritable cargo-bike for two weeks now. So far I have managed to squeeze the following into them (although not all at the same time): my 12” iBook laptop, several copies of The New Yorker and a paperback book, a complete take-out meal from [[The Noodle House]], a 5-pound bag of flour and a litre of orange juice, and several library books.

It’s remarkable how much more has become possible since I’ve strapped on a couple of pretentious-sounding bags to the bike; I’ve had the car out once in two weeks, and might make it a couple more completely car free.

Need an extra incentive to (a) work close to where you live and (b) drive you car as little as possible? I’ve filled my car up twice since Christmas. At least on the car side, I’m almost completely isolated from “peak oil.” It’s a great feeling.

It’s only taken me a year set we set out on the Open Bread odyssey, but I got it together last night to actually set out to bake a few loaves (this odyssey has a long, gentle curve to full throttle — like bread).

I should mention that this was made possible in no small part due to the existence of the new grocery store downtown: they have flour and yeast both, and I was able to swing by on the way home to pick these up.

Most of our recipe books buried in a giant pile of books upstairs, I used the whole wheat recipe from the Cooks’ Illustrated The Best Recipe cookbook. Their recipe calls for a mixture of whole wheat and all purpose flours, with a small amount of wheat germ and rye flour mixed in; we didn’t have either add-on, so I used a little buckwheat flour for variety.

All was proceeding wonderfully, and I was well on the way to a couple of excellent loaves when, for some bizarre reason, the oven shut off midway through the baking. This way well have been due to some errant key-press on my part (we have a futuristic Star Trek-like oven); in any case, the loaves foundered at 240 degrees for 15 minutes before I noticed what had happened, and there was no recovering.

In the end I tried a quick blast back up to 375 degrees for 10 minutes, but the damage was done. The end product was surprisingly edible for such a disaster; it was just a couple of inches thick rather than a full loaf (although a pleasantly elastic 2 inches; at least I didn’t produce bricks).

Once the sting has passed, I’ll give it another try.

We’ve got two “new” radio stations in [[Charlottetown]] this month.

The first, branded The Ocean, is a new wrapping on the old CHTN-AM; they’ve moved to the FM dial and updated their sound a little. They told the CRTC that the “new” station would:

…offer a Classic Hits/Oldies musical format, offering music from the 1960s to the present, targeting primarily female listeners aged 35 to 54.

In Newcap’s application to the CRTC (a ZIP file of PDFs), they further define the “Classic Hits” format as “20% of our music from the 70s, 40% from the 80s, 20% from the 90s” with an additional 20% from the 2000s.

Their application also indicates that the new CHTN will have year-one revenue of $1.1 million vs. expenses of $658,000, growing to $1.4 million in revenue for year 7 vs. $716,000 in expenses.

Because the station is simulcasting their signal on both their old AM frequency (720 AM) and their new FM one (100.3 FM), you can get a good idea of the quality difference between AM and FM by switching your radio back and forth between the two (hint: FM is way, way, better).

Also from CHTN’s parent company Newfoundland Capital Corporation is a new FM station, branded K-Rock like many of Newcap’s other rock stations across the country; it’s actual call letters are CKQK. The CRTC approval for their license indicates they’ll play:

…a blend of music consisting of new and Classic Rock from the late 1960s to the hits of today, targeting primarily male listeners aged 25 to 44.

Their (application to the CRTC (a ZIP file of PDFs) indicates:

• They expect to have 16% of the audience in their first year, reaching 15,360 people over 12 per week over their entire coverage area.
• They expect to grab their share from Magic 93 (down 5%), CFCY (down 2%), CHTN (down 1%), CKTO in Truro (down 2%), CBC (down 2%) and CJMO Moncton (down 2%).
• They expect to make their money from new radio advertisers (40%), existing radio advertisers (30%) and expanded radio ad budgets (30%).
• They estimate the size of the Charlottetown radio ad market to be $5 million to $6 million, and their total year-one revenue to be $680,000.
• They estimate their total year-one expenses to be $745,000.
• Capital cost for the start-up estimated at half a million dollars — $150K for studio, $270K for transmitter and $80K for “start-up costs”.
• Newcap considered nine possible formats for the new station — 80s/90s, Active Rock, CHR, Classic Hits, Classic Rock, Country, Hot A/C, Oldies and Soft A/C — before settling on “Rock” as their format, which they define as “a format that focused on Classic Rock… and Classic Hits.”
• Their “projected era balance” (and I can’t believe I just typed that) is:
  • 1960s - 5%
  • 1970s - 15%
  • 1980s - 25%
  • 1990s - 25%
  • 2000s - 30%

Meanwhile, CFCY-AM has also been approved for a move to the FM dial. They’ll be broadcasting on 95.1 FM and their format will remain the same:

…the Country music format currently provided by CFCY, targeting listeners aged 25 to 54.

In Maritime Broadcasting’s application for the move (a ZIP file of PDFs), they indicate:

• Their year-one revenue will be $1.3 million vs. expenses of $1.2 million, rising to revenue of $1.5 million in year 7 vs. expenses of $1.2 million.
• They expect to reach 76,750 people over 12 per week during their first year, or 3.5% of the morning market, 2.25% of the lunch market, 1.5% of the drivetime market and 0.5% of the nightime market.

Perhaps the weirdest item in CFCY’s application is a 2004 letter from CBC Television news anchor Ian Hanomansing in support of the Martitime Broadcasting (although not in reference to the specific application). There are also letters from the Mayors of Charlottetown and Cornwall, from the President of the PEI Rural Beautification Society, and the Canadian Cancer Society, among others.

CFCY’s application also sheds light on a dramatic Summerside-Charlottetown rivalry:

Summerside and Charlottetown residents passionately support their respective cities. Residents of Summerside consistently support Summerside businesses first, and Charlottetown businesses only as a last resort. Our local staff often hear anecdotal stories of retailers in Charlottetown, unable to attract Summerside customers, setting up storefronts in Summerside. The previous owners of CJRW-FM in Summerside fell victim to this phenomenon. Specifically, the Schurman family converted CJRW to the FM frequency band in hopes of realizing additional revenues from Charlottetown. They were unsuccessful at overcoming the cultural differences between the two cities. The incremental revenue from Charlottetown did not materialize and never will.

CFCY will also be simulcast on both their old and new frequencies for three months after they make the switch.

When all this moving is finished, Prince Edward Island will be without AM broadcasters.

I don’t know how current their information is (or even what their information is), but here are coverage area maps for Charlottetown radio stations: CFCY, Magic 93, CHTN-AM, CBC Radio One, and CBC Radio Two.

Back in 2003, during a visit to [[Charlottetown]] on his honeymoon, [[Ian Williams]] remarked that the poster of Anne of Green Gables hanging on the side of the Confederation Centre of the Arts was “so hauntingly awful that I stared at it for hours.” Here’s the next the series, this one plastered on the side of a cube van:

The last time I went looking for a desktop GIS application for my Mac all I found was the beast of a system that is GRASS (it looked so powerful, but yet so far beyond my reach to properly grasp).

Suddenly it seems that GIS apps for the Mac are all over the place: Quantum GIS and uDIG are two I tried tonight with good success (both are cross-platform PC-Mac-Linux).

The task at hand was updating an old MapInfo layer of The Old Farmer’s Almanac long-range weather forecast regions and getting it ready to live as a MapServer-friendly SHP file.

I began by exporting the MapInfo file as an ESRI shapefile using the trial version of MapInfo running on my Mac using Virtual PC. Both Quantum GIS and uDig then opened this file with no problems:

Now the fun begins: I’ve got some “ZIP code in polygon” magic to perform and my next step is to see which tool supports this sort of thing best. Stay tuned.

Update: There’s also Thuban.

New England singer/songwriter Jennifer Kimball has a new album Oh Hear Us. It’s very, very good.

Although it’s rather dreary tonight, last night’s sunset in [[Charlottetown]] was spectacular:

The CBC is reporting that “organizers of September’s Black Eyed Peas concert on P.E.I. will keep the provincial sales tax on ticket sales under a special arrangement with the province.”

While this is being cast as some sort of enlightened “we’re not really giving them money” scheme, what is boils down to is more like “concert organizer can charge 10% more for tickets and get away with it.” That just smells wrong.

While I’ve no particularly strong feelings on the notion of the concert itself, other than a sense that it will suffer from all the “orgasmic tourism” problems that afflict other mega-super-concert of the century events, I am glad that they decided to hold it out in the wilds of Alexandra rather than in my front yard. Of course I also have some sympathy for the non-hip-hop-lovers in Alexandra.