The Formosa Tea House will be open regular hours this week up to Friday, when they will close at 3:00 p.m. for the holiday. They re-open at the regular time on Monday morning.

Oliver woke Catherine up at 5:00 a.m. this morning, wondering when we were going to get the Christmas tree. He wouldn’t go back to bed. He could have tried with me, but he knew I would have ignored him; Catherine is the better, or at least the more waking-hours-flexible parent.

I expect he will be awake just as early next Saturday morning. I believe I’ve been nominated, in absentia, to get up with him.

Our house is now equipped with a freshly-cut tree.

Anyone who has ventured outside of the quiet confines of North America will have encountered “touts” — local residents who gather at bus and train stations, airports and other tourist-intensive locations to hawk their hotel, private room, taxi service, or other tourist service. Touts can be helpful or annoying, depending on the situation and how relentless they are.

On our first solo international travel of any great length, to Prague in the fall of 1998, Catherine and I made the mistake of trying to ignore a man who seemed like a tout but who was actually a bona fide transit “honour system inspector.” We survived.

In the Dominican Republic the next spring, we had a taxi tout spirit away our luggage to a waiting cab before we noticed; once Catherine had climbed inside, he moved between me and the door, looking for a tip. When I offered $5 Canadian — essentially worthless outside of Canada, but all I had — he wasn’t impressed, and quite a flurry of exasperation ensued.

But there have been situations where we’ve arrived in a strange city late at night, needing a place to stay, and having a “lodging tout” present themselves has been a very valuable service.

Until this week, I’d never seen a tout in North America. On Thursday, though, at the SMT bus station in Charlottetown picking up G., I saw my first: a man was approaching all “look like they’re not from around here” types getting off the bus asking if they were looking for a place to stay.

We’re slowly joining the international community…

Bergmark Guimond Hammarlund Jones appear to be webcasting video of their Christmas party. It looks like the webcam is pointed at the oyster bar. Catherine and I are going over in about 20 minutes. The staff and guests don’t appear to know that the webcam is turned on. Weird.

On the right of the screen shot above are B, G, and J themselves (annotation is mine), serving oysters.

You can open Windows Media Player directly to http://24.222.25.75:8080 for the live feed.

I’ve been on a mad hunt for BRIO-brand construction toys today. Along the way I found out here what BRIO stands for:

BRIO stands for the Brothers Ivarsson of Osby, the three sons of founder Ivar Bengtsson. Today Osby in southern Sweden remains BRIO’s headquarters, while a large proportion of the production takes place in Osby and Killeberg.

The BRIO website has the weirdest FAQ section I’ve ever seen: most of the questions seem to be missing answers.

Lindsay Lohan made an appearance on ellen earlier this week, and sang the song Over from her debut album Speak.

I am not nor do I plan to be a fan of Lindsay Lohan, but I post here just to alert you, should you have formed your opinion of her voice from that segment, that you look up her album and listen to clips: she’s much better in the studio than the out-of-tune, out-of-breath live singer she was on television.

Back in the olden days of the Internet, I approached the local CBC operation here on Prince Edward Island about doing a website for them. I was mostly concerned with them simply starting to do something — they had no web presence at the time — so I made them a deal they couldn’t refuse: I would take their materials and create a simple site for them for $150. They didn’t refuse.

Their first website, thus, was www.isn.net/cbc, hosted on the Island Service Network server. The Internet Archive cache of that page doesn’t go all the way back to the very beginning, but you can get a sense of the simplicity of the original design from the later 1998 version. I remember having to resize a lot of photos of Roger Younker and Wayne Collins. I handed things over to Mike Wile at the CBC almost immediately, and he maintained the site from there.

Of course it wasn’t much later that the CBC got organized, and a national, standardized web effort took the place of this simple local site, an effort now ably maintained locally by Mitch Cormier.

The first post-ISN version of the site was at charlottetown.cbc.ca, which later migrated to pei.cbc.ca.

This week the address changed again, this time to cbc.ca/pei. I’m sure there are important technical reasons for the change, but it’s a shame that the change involves adding a slash to the name: given the confusion about slashes and backslashes you just know that people are going to mis-hear or mis-type as cbc.ca\pei, which doesn’t work.

In any case, the change in address brings an updated new design, with some new applications (like a live radio schedule widget on the right-hand side), and some nice clean-up of some inconsistencies of the old design.

Here’s a Yahoo Video Search for Rukavina. An interesting mixture of Minnesota content, CBC stories by Brother Steve, a couple of bold football moves, and a Zap of your PRAM. Thanks to Dave for the pointer to this video search feature: I didn’t know about it until today.

Sometimes you have video on VHS videotapes that you want to make digital, either so you can edit or otherwise manipulate it on a PC, or so you can burn it onto a DVD. I realized yesterday that I had all the pieces to be able to do this myself, so I tried it out, using the NFB series The Champions that I’d borrowed from the Provincial Library. What follows is an explanation of how I did it.

Here’s what I used:

• an iMac equipped with an Apple “SuperDrive” — which is their name for a “DVD burner.”
• an EyeTV box, which is a piece of hardware that converts analog video (from a VCR, antenna, or cable TV) to digital video (i.e. a QuickTime file on my Mac).
• Toast, a commercial software package that makes it easy to drag-and-drop create DVDs (and video CDs — VCDs) from digital video files. Toast is well integrated with the EyeTV software. It may be possible to use open source software for this process; I haven’t tried.
• an off-the-shelf VCR (we bought ours for less than $60 at Futureshop).
• a cable to connect the VCR to the EyeTV.

Here’s what the hardware setup looks like:

The connections on the back look like this:

The one Video Out and the two Audio Out on the VCR get connected to the one Video In and two Audio In on the EyeTV and the EyeTV gets connected to my Mac with a USB cable.

At this point it’s as easy as starting up the EyeTV software (it comes on CD with the hardware, but you can also download the most up-to-date version from the support website), pressing Play on the VCR and clicking on the Record button on the little EyeTV remote control:

EyeTV will digitize everything coming in from the VCR until you hit the Record button again to stop it. Repeat this process for each of the videotapes you want to digitize. When you’re done, you’ll see a list of the recordings in the “EyeTV Programs” window:

I took the extra step of selecting each of the recordings and clicking Info to add a title; you don’t really need to do this.

I also used the built-in EyeTV video editor to trim off the static at the beginning and end of the recordings; if you’re more accurate on the “hit play and record at the same time” action, you might not need to do this. The edit function is relatively easy to figure out:

You can mark sections of the recording by dragging the little triangles, and then click Compact to remove the marked bits. Note that EyeTV isn’t very quick at this: it can take up to five minutes to process this, so it’s more efficient to mark all of the bits you want to remove at the same time, then compact all at once.

Next you need to export each of the recordings in a Toast-compatible format. Fortunately, EyeTV makes this very easy. Select each recording in turn and select File and Export, enter a filename, and make sure you select for Toast as the format:

The result will be a file with an “mpg” extension for each recording (note that if you only have one recording, selecting File and Burn DVD is an even faster way of doing this and the next step together).

Start up Toast, and drag each of the files you exported from EyeTV into the main Toast window. For each recording, you can click the Edit button to set the title (up to three lines; the last line defaults to the length of the recording, but you can change this). You can also set the image to be used on the DVD menu for each recording by dragging a slider that will appear if you click on the thumbnail of the recording:

Select the DVD-Video radio button to burn a DVD, and if you have more than one recording, check the Create DVD Menu box so that Toast will automatically build a menu for the DVD allowing you to select which recording to play.

Pay attention to the “fuel gauge” in the bottom right corner: it’s a live update of the amount of space used and remaining on a DVD given the recordings you’ve included; if it’s not reading “full,” then you’ve still got room — if it is full then you’ll have to remove recordings (highlight and click the Remove icon).

Insert a blank DVD into the SuperDrive, and click the big red “burn” button in the lower right corner to start the DVD creation process, then click Record on the dialog box that pop’s up. Toast will go through a somewhat lengthy process of encoding and then burning the DVD. When it’s done, the DVD will automatically eject, and you’ll have something that will play in almost any DVD player.

Oliver and I spent an hour and a half listening to Cross Country Checkup, the CBC’s national open line show, on our way back from Sackville on Sunday (you can listen to an archive of the show here).

The topic was “Is the same-sex marriage battle over?” in reaction to the Supreme Court of Canada Reference that was released last week.

The program was mostly infuriating, as a cavalcade of “marriage is a sacred procreative union of man and woman and has been for thousands of years” callers squirmed to justify their “uniqueness” without appearing “bigoted.” Here is a typical example of this, from a caller from Saskatoon:

The redefinition of marriage as it’s being proposed really does trump the notion of equality; I think that if this passes it will inflict irreparable damage on this institution and I think that, you know, to give a homosexual couple civil union status with according benefits is fine, we could all accept that, but I do wish these people would not explode the last vestiges of this universally sacred institution. Could they not leave us that. We allow their culture, and ask only that they allow ours.

Thankfully there were more rational callers, like this guy from Nova Scotia:

I just hope I don’t lose too many friends after tonight… I’m just an ordinary hetrosexual person, but to me it is a matter of principle, and it’s a principle of equality, in rights, and in dignity. I find it quite hypocritical to hear people say “give them their rights,” like the last caller said, but what I hear behind is “as long as their rights are not our rights.”

I’ve looked deep, deep within myself to try and find a scintilla of reasoning why men shouldn’t be allowed to marry men and women shouldn’t be allowed to marry women. I come up dry.

Even if, for some odd religious reason, you think gays and lesbians are “evil” I can’t understand why “allowing them” to marry is so threatening to some. And I can’t understand why “they” are “them” and “we” are “us.”

And even if it is threatening, it disturbs me that people can’t look beyond their own discomfort and look at the broader issues of equality involved.

And even if people can’t muster enough strength to think about equality when it runs contrary to their base instincts, I can’t understand how in any way it makes sense to turn away from two people, regardless of gender, who voluntarily say “we love each other, and we’d like to make a public commitment to that love.” In what way can that be construed as a negative or harmful endeavour?

When I was a kid in elementary school, one of the worst insults you could hurl at someone — and we did it all the time — was “you’re so gay.” There was also lots of “suck me off” talk. I’m sure most of us didn’t know what we were talking about (I didn’t learn what “gay” meant until I was ten years old: I watched this episode of The Bob Newhart Show and asked my father; I can’t remember what he told me, but I know it was a more open-minded answer than the fathers of most of my friends would have given).

Through my youth, though, it was pretty clear, both in the popular culture and on the playground, that “being gay” wasn’t something to aspire to. And I didn’t even get the condemnations from the pulpit that kids in religious families would have.

As much as I’d like to think otherwise, I can’t help but thinking that the reaction against same-sex marriage is rooted in deep-seated fear, ignorance and discomfort about homosexuality, gay sex and gay culture. Although it has become de rigueur to pay a constricted sort of respect to gays and lesbians — this is what “give them their rights” means, I think — if you scratch beneath the surface, I think there’s a huge popular well of anti-gay sentiment in Canada.

If all of the “God’s sacred relationship between man and woman” rhetoric is simply cover for “we’re queasy about gay sex” — and I suspect that a large part of it is — what can we do about that? And, perhaps even worse, if large numbers of Canadians are members of anti-gay religious sects, how do others who aren’t live in community with them?

I want to live in a world where people are free to express different opinions, live different lives, eat different foods, practice different faiths, follow different paths; a world where as much as we hold our own personal beliefs dear, we’re smart enough, and guided by a sense of justice strong enough, and courageous enough to know that even when things made us afraid or uncomfortable or seem to involve a lot of change, a higher power of mutual respect and understanding guides us towards following the path of equality, plurality, and understanding.

How do we get there?