Lisa invited me to join her for Monday’s Choir! Choir! Choir! performance at Confederation Centre of the Arts.

Choir! Choir! Choir! is a roving “you’re not the audience, you’re the performers!” event run by Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman (Nobu is a de facto Islander, having summered in West Keppoch with his family for as long as forever; his  last appearance in this space was in 2007, when we spotted him at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market).

In recent years I’ve become way, way more comfortable than I ever was (“ever was” = “not at all”) singing in public, thanks to a combination of Lucy Farrell, performing improv, and Lisa’s influence. This was a chance to really take my new lack-of-inhibitions out for a ride, and I seized it, singing, relatively speaking, at the top of my lungs for the entire evening. I even threw in with the call to hand actions.

Nobu and Daveed have the form locked in: they are very good at it, and the whole night was a hoot.

I was especially impressed by their stage presence when the Confederation Centre’s projection infrastructure melted down before our very eyes: the entire operation relied on we gathered being able to read the words for what we were about to sing, and without the words, well…

This was eventually figured out, but it was frustrating for everyone; Nobu and Daveed handled it all with aplomb.

(The Centre itself offered an emailed apology for the schmazzle itself: “The ‘magic of live events’ was a little more mystery than magic last night and we really appreciate your patience and understanding.” Bravo!)

The heart of the night was singing a lovely arrangement of What a Wonderful World, and you can watch a video of what we came up with.

If Choir! Choir! Choir! comes to your city, I highly recommend joining in. They are on tour through 2026, and are hitting everywhere from Campbell River to Fairbanks to Berlin.

There’s no technical topic I’ve written about in this space more than DNS: 2001, 2003, 2007, 2009. My efforts to keep the Elections PEI servers online after a hurricane were valiant, but ultimately stymied by a DNS server in my basement that lacked power.

Needless to say, when I write about DNS, it’s generally an after-action review of some calamity.

Today is different!

I’ve been using Amazon Route 53 for DNS for some year now: it dovetailed well with my use of other Amazon services, both personally and for clients,  it was relatively simply to manage, and worked without fail.

When I migrated this blog, and other servers I manage, away from Amazon, though, it made less sense, especially as the absence of other services  made more evident that Route 53 not inexpensive. Here’s a chart that shows Route 53 charges relative to my monthly Amazon bill:

No, it’s not going to break me, but when I realized that Hetzner, where I’ve been hosting this blog post-Amazon, offers DNS for free, I was motivated to migrate.

What sealed the deal was realizing that I could use DNSControl to make the migration painless.

DNSControl supports managing DNS in both Route 53 and Hetzner via API, meaning I could import the existing zones from Route 53 and export them out to Hetzner. 

Here are the basics of what I did.

I installed DNSControl on my MacBook Air:

brew install dnscontrol

I created a skeleton dnsconfig.js file, with:

var DSP_R53_MAIN = NewDnsProvider("r53_main");
var DSP_HETZNER = NewDnsProvider("hetzner_v2");
var REG_CHANGEME = NewRegistrar("none");

I created a creds.json file with the credentials for Route 53 and Hetzner (after generating the API keys using the respective systems on each for doing so):

{
 "hetzner_v2": {
   "TYPE": "HETZNER_V2",
   "api_token": "REDACTED"
 },
 "r53_main": {
   "TYPE": "ROUTE53",
   "AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID": "REDACTED",
   "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY": "REDACTED",
   "AWS_REGION": "us-east-1"
 }
}

Then, zone by zone, I grabbed the existing Route 53 information, for example:

dnscontrol get-zones --format=js r53_main ROUTE53 whatsmylot.com >> dnsconfig.js

This populated my dnsconfig.js file with sections like:

D("whatsmylot.com", REG_CHANGEME,
    DnsProvider(DSP_R53_MAIN),
    A("@", "135.181.248.33"),
);

To switch these over to Hetzner required a simply search and replace of DSP_R53_MAIN with DSP_HETZNER, followed by a:

dnscontrol preview

to check for any errors (there were a few edits require for zones that used Route 53-only features), and then:

dnscontrol push

to push the zones to Hetzner. 

All of which just worked.

After some testing to ensure everything imported cleaning, the final step was logging into Webnames.ca, where all my domains are registered, and updating the DNS servers to point to Hetzner’s instead of Amazon’s.

A side-benefit of all of this is that, per DNSControl’s founding principle number one, DNS should be treated like code. This means I can store it in a repository, maintain it with a text editor, and migrate it just as easily the next time I want to move.

There is a sense of deja vu to all this: back in the days when I ran my own DNS servers, I took a similar approach, with a homebrew system that took zone information from text files and created the files that BIND needed.

It’s nice to finally have been able to write a good news DNS post!

This comment from Miguel on my post The Best Place There Is deserves more attention:

I was born, raised, and live in both Mexico and the US, and it always amazes me how much Americans love places like this. They are ALL OVER MEXICO… do you know why? Because they can afford to be. No frivolous lawsuits, no over-code enforcement and building regulations lol. These are the places you expect to see in places like California… yet they cannot exist because of unionized labor, workers rights, and building regulations. That’s what is great about Mexico. Liberals from the USA always come to Mexico and fall in love with… essentially what they’ve made impossible!

Lord knows that, more often than not, I throw my lot in with the heritage preservationists, city planners, rule-makers, but there’s great truth in what Miguel writes: we get the world we plan for, and the dearth of interesting spaces in Charlottetown belies the extent to which we’ve planned away Stewart Brand’s “low road”:

“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”

Naomi Alderman writes about Paul McCartney, John Lennon, The Beatles, creativity, and grief.

Wherever creativity comes from, it’s rarely “everything in my life was totally fine, yeah”.

Harry Holman’s STRAITPOST: The Early Postcards of Prince Edward Island is a heretofore undiscovered cavalcade of visual delights.

The post Fifteen Edwardian Views of Queen’s Square is of particular interest, given that I look out my front window at Queens Square, and have lived and worked within earshot of it for almost 35 years.

Our house appears in none of the 15 views, not unusual as historic photos of our house—despite being one of the oldest to face Queens Square, here since 1827—are rare. There are simply too many  interesting buildings in the neighbourhood for our simple Georgian cottage to warrant attention.

Pugh postcard #898-15. Our house does not appear, though you can imagine it behind the building on the far right.

Henrik Karlsson reflects on his first year of writing full time:

The main thing I remember, looking back, is how tired I was for the first three months after I quit my job. All through December, January, and February, I felt wrung out, empty, and sad. This came as a bit of a surprise to me. I had expected to be filled with energy now that I had reached my goal and finally had plenty of time to work on my projects.

My own experience of setting down my keyboard was similar.

Jonathan Godfrey answers the question “I love what Radical Aliveness  does for me, but how do I apply what I’m learning here to my life?”; in part:

As guests finished sharing their comments with the chefs and began wrapping up the evening, I felt an impulse. I was nervous but I’ve learned to listen to those moments. So even though I worried about whether it was “appropriate,” I stood up and asked if we could also take a moment to give the dishwashers a round of applause for their hard work, care, and support—for their part in making the evening possible.

One of the chefs went back and invited them to come out.

When they did, they were greeted with a full round of applause from everyone.

They looked stunned.

One of them said, “Wow. No one’s ever done this before. Thank you.”

I worked weekly with Jonathan for about 9 months, two years ago; that work had a lot of impact on me. Radical Aliveness might not be for everyone, but for me it was the right modality at the right time.

Mike Monteiro answers the question “How do you lovingly care for an aging parent who treated you like shit?” by writing about his own father; in part:

Speaking of which; the last thing my father told me was to go fuck myself. This happened on the phone a few years ago, during a call with my mother. I heard her turn away from the phone and ask him if he wanted to say hello. I heard him reply in the background. Tell him to go fuck himself. And that was that.

Death does not make saints, and I have neither the desire nor the power for beatification tonight.

Read the whole thing. It’s not a Hollywood script, but there is hope in it.

Monteiro closes his piece with:

Please donate to Trans Lifeline, and for fuck sake, if there is a trans kid in your life please love them. They are so so so so ready to love you back.

Please heed those words; it’s true.

This is the 2026 levee schedule for New Year’s Day, January 1, 2026 for Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island.

Include ages 19+  Include businesses  Show only Charlottetown

The levee schedule is covered under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike License.

Four years ago , I wrote about Get Me Through December, with vocals by Alison Kraus, fiddle by Natalie MacMaster.

What I didn’t know at the time, but know now, thanks to MacMaster’s book I Have a Love Story (available at Bookmark), is:

• The tune is Neil Gow’s Lament for His Second Wife, a tune I first heard when Tim Chaisson played it on the piano in 2008, then later arranged by Steven Garrity, and then, most notably, when Roy Johnstone played it at Catherine’s Celebration of Life in 2020.
• The song was cowritten by Gordie Sampson (see Day Without Power from 2007, and Jesus Take The Wheel, which he also cowrote).

MacMaster’s book has contains both the sheet music to Neil Gow’s Lament, and the words to Get Me Through December.