Air Canada is getting better at highly targeted marketing. On the way in to the office this morning I was thinking “it would be great if there was a way to fly to Europe on a whim.” I picked up my National Post this morning and found the following ad on the bottom of the front page:

Just as I was starting to get over my Eurofetish, there she goes pulling me back in…

Today marks the first in an experimental series of podcasts here on the blog. I’m trying out the medium: taking the gear out for a ride and exploring different ways of talking about things that I’m interested in. Putting this piece together brought back a lot of memories about Nouspeak, a weekly spoken word programme on Trent Radio that I was one of the production team for; I enjoyed that experience, and I had a good time editing this piece together.

Today’s podcast: Cindy Burton, owner of the recently-closed Cool Dog Deli in Charlottetown, talks about the ideas behind the deli, the challenges she ran into running it, and how it came to close.

I have long been a fan of the CITY-TV programme The Originals, especially its “interviewless” format. I’d experimented with the format in radio projects before, and decided to return to it for this piece.

Here’s the tech used to assemble today’s podcast:

• My “in studio” voiceovers were recorded into Sound Studio using the Omnidirectional Tie Clip Microphone from Radio Shack connected to my iMac using a Griffin iMic (see this technical note).
• I recorded the telephone interview with Cindy Burton using the Monitor command in our Asterisk telephone system. The result is two WAV-format files, one for each side of the telephone conversation.
• I broke Cindy’s part of the interview up into individual clips using Audacity; I exported each of the eleven clips as a 16-bit, 44 Khz AIFF file.
• I used Apple’s GarageBand to edit everything together: I imported my intros and Cindy’s clips, added a soundtrack, and exported into iTunes.
• I then exported as a 24kbps mono MP3 file from iTunes (which compressed the file from 108MB down to a more reasonable 2MB!).

Thanks to Cindy for agreeing to talk about her experiences; you can email her at cindy@cooldogs.ca or visit her website at bigdogsolutions.ca.

I’m trying to craft up a little podcasting rig here in the office, something better than using the built-in microphone on my iMac. I’ve had a Griffin iMic hanging around, and I bought a Omnidirectional Tie Clip Microphone from Radio Shack this afternoon.

Doing some testing with the iMic and the new microphone, using both Audacity and Sound Studio, there was a noticeable background hum with everything I recorded.

I tried a different Mac, and a different microphone, but the hum remained. Then I stumbled across the helpful Fixing white noise and 60Hz hum when using an iMic and Final Vinyl, which advises, in part:

• Flip the switch towards speaker. This will amplify the signal coming in.
• Go to Applications—>Utilites and run Audio MIDI Setup. Set the “Properties For:” to iMic USB Audio System and make sure that both input and output are set to 16bit 44100Hz 2 channels. Most likely it is set to 8bit.

I have no idea what this actually does, but it worked, as you can hear clearly if you listen to the attached MP3 file.

Post number one on this blog was six years ago today, May 31, 1999.

A couple in BC buy a smart car and detail their experiences.

As much as I’d love to, money and schedule won’t allow me attend the I’ve cleared the time and found the money to attend the reboot conference, from June 10 to 11 in Copenhagen, Denmark. It looks like a great roster of participants, though. When we were planning Zap Your PRAM, reboot was one of our models.

Okay, I’ve decided that today will be the day I stop pining for pain au chocolate and the gentle winds of France and return my head back to Prince Edward Island. Apologies to friends and family for three weeks of plaintive moaning.

To go with the return to home I’ve got a new morning routine worked out that involves a sesame bagel with cream cheese and tomato and a pot of English Breakfast tea at Timothy’s. For $3.38 I figure I can’t go wrong.

Just to confuse my newfound sense of familiarity, my friend in the aubergine jacket has mixed up his morning routine, diverting to the under-new-management café in the Polyclinic. This means that our paths now cross at the corner of Prince and Grafton. Very confusing, but not unwelcome.

I picked up the National Post after my encounter with DJM (they sell it at the Guardian office), and noticed the following example of “corporate synergy” (red arrow is mine):

(I got the front page snap from this helpful page at the Newseum). The complete story is here (behind a fee gateway), but you can rest easy that it’s a corporate sister puff piece that extolls the totally excellent shows on Global this fall.

And finally, I noticed yesterday that Fido’s network has expanded and seems, at least from their tiny map of Atlantic Canada, to now include most of Prince Edward Island. Johnny and Jodi had abysmal service from Fido, so I’m not eager to jump ship to them, but then again they do have the cool Danger Hiptop.

Apparently there’s an Amazing Race DVD on the way. No release date yet, and you can’t place an order, but word is it’s in development.

Through the magic of BitTorrent and UKNova we’ve been able to watch a lot of BBC and ITV television recently. Here’s what I liked:

• A Short History of Tall Buildings, a series on the Imagine programme hosted by Alan Yentob, is a series of vingettes on skyscrapers and other tall buildings all around the world.
• Horizon is the BBC’s science programme, a British Nature of Things. We enjoyed a couple of episodes: An Experiment to Save the World about the search for workable nuclear fusion, and The Day the Earth Almost Died about the mass extinction of 95% of all life on the planet 250 million years ago.
• Martin Bashir, famous over here for his Michael Jackson programmes, hosted a programme in 2003 called Major Fraud: Charles Ingram’s Millionaire ‘win’ that examines how Charles Ingram cheated on the British version of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire show. The show is somewhat over-produced, but it’s an interesting tale nonetheless.
• A series called The Tube does for the London subway system what the ITV show Airline does for easyJet: it’s a “day in the life” sort of show, going behind the scenes into various aspects of the Tube’s operations.

If you use the BitTorrent search engine, searching for “BBC” or “ITV” to find British TV works well; UKNova has only British TV (although it does require registration).

Remember that School Trustee Elections are this Monday, May 30, 2005. You can find you school district, a list of candidates, and the your local polling location on the Elections PEI website.