Every once in a while the show Songwriters’ Circle shows on on CBC Television as part of the early evening Atlantic Focus program.

Hosted by Cape Breton singer-songwriter Bruce Guthro, each episode features Guthro and two singer-songwriter guests singing their own songs and telling the stories behind them.

While the guests and their songs and stories are great — Randy Bachman was amazing — the standout feature of the show is the quality of the sound.

I don’t know why or how, but through some combination of acoustics, technology and mixing finesse Songwriters’ Circle has purer more vibrant audio than any show I’ve ever seen on television. If anyone knows those behind the show, please pass along my regards for their sonic excellence.

The Guardian is reporting that Nickelback to rock city this summer This is something, alas, confirmed by the tourismocrats responsible themselves.

My ears are still ringing from the last appearance of Nickelback on Charlottetown’s waterfront — sitting in my living room, 5 blocks away, it literally sounded like I was sitting right at the waterfront.

The return of Nickelback is a testament to my awesome powers of prediction.

While I’ve obviously retained my old “where do these people get off renting out my neighbourhood for 3 days to become a rock concert venue without consulting with me or compensating me” feelings about this issue, the return of Nickelback unleashes an entirely new “do these people really have no imagination” level of vitriol.

Oh for the days of Lennie Gallant in a tent playing solo-acoustic.

I was riding my bicycle downtown from the Metro Credit Union back to the office along University Avenue when, near the intersection with Euston Street I was passed by a Brinks armoured truck with about 4 inches to spare between me and them. If they’d been any closer to me, I would have been knocked off my bike.

As the truck drove away I noticed at the the toll-free telephone number 1-800-827-SAFE was printed on the back, along with a vehicle ID number of UL524.

When I got back to the office I called the number to report the incident. The call was answered on the first ring, and the operator took me through a questionnaire: what kind of truck was it, what colour, where to the incident occur, and so on. And the end of the call they indicated that the file would be passed on to “the safety director.”

It turns out that 1-800-827-SAFE is operated by Driver’s Alert:

Driver’s Alert helps companies manage their fleet safety and vehicle monitoring whether they have one vehicle or tens of thousands, all at one location or with multiple locations in the US, US territories and Canada. There are over 10,000 companies on our vehicle monitoring program and that number is increasing. Our clients include insurance companies, trucking companies, law enforcement agencies, school districts, delivery services, utilities,waste management companies and many more.

While I’m normally not a big fan of 1-800-SNITCH-ON-SOMEONE services, in this case I was happy to have the opportunity to at least record my frustration and know that, even if some infinitesimally small way, I might be making the roads safer for the next bike.

The Globe and Mail unveiled a new design on Monday, and today was my first experience of it:

The dominant feature of the new design? It’s all about bold 8-point lines: they’re everywhere.

Back in the day when we wanted to put lines under or around things in the newspaper we used self-adhesive line tape. Because you always wanted to have line tape when you needed it, in a complete range of 1pt, 2pt, 4pt, 6pt, 8pt thicknesses, in the composing room we all used to keep personal caches of the stuff hidden within easy reach. I’ve still got a couple of rolls at home, just in case there’s a sudden need.

The biggest mistake of my professional newspaper career involved 8-point line tape.

Late one Friday afternoon I was charged with pasting up a full-age ad for Sears. The ad was mostly black-and-white, but there were a couple of red 8-point lines in the design, which meant that I had to paste up one sheet with the ad itself, and then overlay a clear sheet of acetate and lay the spot-colour for the red lines on that with 8-point line tape. I would then shoot two negatives for the ad, one for the black ink and one for the red ink.

All was well and good until, at the very last minute, some changes came in from Sears that required moving some parts of the ad around. After I made the changes I shot a new black negative, but I forgot to re-shoot the red one. The result was that the next morning in Saturday’s paper there was a full-page Sears ad with red lines running right through the middle of the text and photos.

Fortunately the newspaper world is nothing if not ephemeral, and by the time Monday rolled around all was forgotten — if, indeed, anyone but me actually noticed.

Reading the new Globe sort of feels like being under assault by 8-point line tape (now applied, of course, by computer). I’m sure the effect will wear off, but because of my tortured relationship with the 8-point line, I don’t think it will ever wear off completely.

Coda is the name of a new web development application for Mac OS X created by Panic, the same folks who created the file transfer application Transmit.

While there’s not really anything revolutionary about the individual components of Coda — remote SFTP browsing, text editor, browser preview, visual CSS editing, SSH terminal, programmer documentation — these functions are rather elegantly stitched together in a way that makes my existing toolset — YummyFTP, BBEdit, Firefox, and CSSEdit — look cumbersome.

The nice thing about Coda for me is that its basic assumptions about work flow mimic closely the way I actually work — editing “live” files from a remote volume via SFTP, previewing in a browser from the remote server, tweaking, repeat. While it’s possible to recreate this flow with things like YummyFTP’s ability to call BBEdit and re-save to the remote volume when the edited file is saved in BBEdit, having a closely-coupled remote volume browser and text editor takes one level of cumbersomeness out of the picture and makes for a much more natural rhythm.

The text editor in Coda, built around the Subetha Engine, isn’t quite as capable as BBEdit — there’s no function-browser (Wade points out there is one), and the search-and-replace functions are nowhere near as strong (seems like I missed the fact that Coda actually has very capable search-and-replace, with regex and everything!), for example — but it’s a pretty solid text editor nonetheless, and presumably will only get better in future releases.

Indeed one of the pleasant surprises of Coda is that it doesn’t suffer from the “Lotus Symphony” problem, where functionality is compromised for integration.

While there are some interface inconsistencies and other challenges in Coda — the integration of the Terminal application, for example, is visually confusing, and the documentation in Coda’s “Books” is too slow to be practically useful — Coda is remarkably mature for a 1.0 release, and I’ve been using the application for 3 days very productively and with surprisingly few “oh, I can’t do that in Coda” moments.

Spotted in the washroom of a Charlottetown business. Message on the side of the box says “not to be sold individually.” Do you think there’s much call for this?

Exove Oy has released a Jaiku Widget for Mac OS X. It’s very nice. It’s only a posting engine, however, not a “give me a snapshot of what my people are up to” widget, which would be extra especially useful.

When the office got cleaned a couple of weeks ago, an old copy of The Independent on Sunday ended up on the back of the toilet. As a result every time I pee at the office I look down to see a photo of Elton John and David Furnish cheering me on:

Only four years after I originally suggested to the City of Charlottetown that they install them, and two months after they were first installed, we now have working pedestrian signals at the corner of Prince and Grafton Streets in downtown Charlottetown (see my February note about their original installation).

Although there are 7.6 million different ways for me to walk to work (or was that 32 different ways — I can never remember), almost all of them take me through this intersection, and so I imagine I’ve waited at the horrible old vehicles-only signal lights as a pedestrian about 2,000 times.

And they were horrible. And dangerous. From two of the four corners you could hardly see the lights, and because the yellow light came on about 5 seconds before traffic started moving in the other direction, there was the ever-present risk of interfering with traffic.

The new pedestrian signals are wonderful — super-modern with a 20-second countdown timer and everything. They’ll be a big boon to pedestrian safety and will provide a great ease to my nervous morning constitution.