We have been providing web support to the Electoral Boundaries Commission of Prince Edward Island. One of the interesting facets of the Commission’s website is that the audio of all of the public meetings is available online.

Here’s a brief outline of how this worked.

The audio technicians at Multimedia Services plug a Sony digital sound recorder into their PA system, and record the entire proceedings. They convert the proprietary Sony-format file into a standard Windows WAV file, burn it on CD-ROM, and pass it along to me.

I load the WAV file into QuickTime Pro and split it up into individual files for each speaker.

Using the AT&T Natural Voices Demo, I prepare a spoken introduction to each speaker’s presentation (this lets the audio file stand on its own, separate from the website, if needed). I save this as a WAV file from the QuickTime browser plug-in, then add it to the speaker’s audio file in QuickTime Pro.

I export each speaker’s audio file as an AIFF file (22 kHz, 16 bit, mono), then load all of the AIFF files into iTunes where I add textual information (which will become ID3 tags), convert the files to 24 kbps mono MP3 file, and export.

The files then get uploaded to the Commission’s website, entries are added to the database of audio submissions, and the page for each individual meeting, as well as the index of all submissions gets automatically updated.

Peter Kormos is the NDP member for Niagara Centre in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. He’s also former Minister of Consumer Affairs in the ill-fated Ontario NDP government.

Earlier today, my cerebral friend Gary called into question my use of the phrase “tinker’s damn” in this morning’s post about bootleggers. I pointed here to justify my use and spelling. Gary’s research suggested I was on the wrong track.

Surely there could be no greater authority on this matter than the selfsame Peter Kormos, who, on June 12, 2001, make the following statement in the Legislature (recorded in full in this Hansard):

I used the phrase yesterday in my discourse from my position here in the House. I explained the etymology of “tinker’s dam,” which is spelled d-a-m. I’ll repeat the etymology of the phrase “tinker’s dam” — I know you’ll be interested — because I might, as a matter of fact I’m confident, I’ll use that phrase this evening.

In days gone by, tinkers went around from village to village repairing pots. They were tin pots. The pots were worn through. You got holes in the pots. There’s a hole in the bucket. The tinker literally built a dam of wet bread around the hole. When he poured the molten tin to fill the hole, the wet bread acted as a dam around the hole so that the tin wouldn’t spread across the whole base of the pot. The phrases “tinker’s dam” and “not worth a tinker’s dam” speak to the rather less than best quality of those tinkers who would use but bread for that dam when the molten tin was poured in to fill the hole. So “not worth a tinker’s dam” and “to not give a tinker’s dam,” as the tinker didn’t when he was soldering or retinning that pot, means to care little — t-i-n-k-e-r-‘-s d-a-m, as in Hoover Dam.

I’m convinced: it’s dam, not damn. Gary and Peter are right.

When you create websites like this, you are, in effect, saying “screw you, web.” Flash websites don’t get indexed, so their content is neither world, nor wide, nor web.

This isn’t television.

If you’re used to:

/etc/init.d/named restart

service named restart

I went along to the big CBC “bootlegger forum” this evening at the Basilica Rec Centre. Taking a page from the Wesley Clark for President playbook, the forum was held in the smallest room possible, and therefor bristled with packed excitment.

To be honest, I have no opinion on the issue: I don’t live next to a bootlegger, and so I’m not in the “bothered” constituency; I don’t give a tinker’s damn about articles in the National Post making fun of Charlottetown, so I’m not in the “ashamed” camp; I’m not a customer, so I wasn’t one of the vocal majority at the meeting; and I’m not a big “the law is the law” believer, so I’m not in the Bruce Garrity-led “enforcement” camp.

But here’s what I do know, mostly as a result of tonight’s meeting: this is a class issue, and until it’s framed as such, the various protagonists will neither understand the positions of the other, nor be able to come to a solution that works for all.

I’ve just finished reading The Other Half of Half-Safe, the sequel to Half-Safe: Across the Atlantic by Jeep. While I’ll review the second book soon, this passage from author Ben Carlin, in the book’s epilogue, bears immediate posting:

Travel is a trap that most men insist on entering if they can. As a boy I had felt that Hungarian soil must differ significantly from Australian. Instead of satisfying curiousity, reading merely stimulates it. One goes abroad to peek around the corner; mainly he sees more corners. He looks round another — to see another — and another to realize evemtually that he has done little but chase his own tail.

A paragraph later, he continues:

Always people have interested me more than places. From a photograph one can grasp the size and beauty of the Grand Canyon but he cannot savour a Spaniard. Even in the search for people there is tail-chasing. It was in a Persian teahouse that I realized that men are basically the same the world over: the funny man, the serious man, the weak man, the strong man…

A question for Robert: when you were working for large multinational corporations, did you have any inkling, deep within your heart of hearts, that the corporate model you were a part of might be broken, or at the very least harmful to you and the planet?

My reaction to seeing The Corporation was “tell me something I don’t know” while yours appears to have been rather more profound. I’m trying to figure out why this is.

I was struck by an odd thought while putting on my shoes to come home this afternoon: it may very well be that watching television is actually not very satisfying.

I can count on one hand the number of television shows I’ve watched where, at the end, I’ve felt a better person, or that I’ve learned something. Or, indeed, that anything has actually happened at all inside my head.

And yet, as ever, I will absolutely, positively watch any episode of Seinfeld or The Simpsons that presents itself to me as though if to not watch would be to turn down some special, unique, never-to-be-repeated opportunity.

It has been over a year since I was a regular, serious consumer of fast food. It no longer has any appeal to me, and I’m amazed that it ever did. Forced aversion by gallbladder meltdown is what let me break free.

I’m wondering if some calamity befell me that made watching televsion intensely painful, perhaps after two or three months I would have the same reaction to it as to fast food?

I stuck my card in the ATM machine today at the National Bank. “Enter your PIN number, and press ENTER,” it said on the screen.

There is no ENTER key, however.

Not only is there no ENTER key on the keypad (its label is “OK”), but the graphic on the screen that illustrates the process has a depiction of the keypad. And that graphic is also missing an ENTER key.

The Advice of the Day at Almanac.com is:

“Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” —Mark Twain

Which reminded me of this: when I was working in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner, I was assigned the weekly task of pasting up the ad for the Farm Boy produce market. The Farm Boy ad consisted of a 4-inch wide column the entire length of a newspaper page that listed off the prices of whatever fruits or vegetables were on special that week, along with a tiny photo of each.

On the shelf above one of my coworker’s stations was a collection of various pictures of various fruits and vegetables, and from that collection I drew whatever I needed to compose the ad.

Except I could never find a picture of brussels sprouts.

So every time that brussels sprouts were on special, I needed to find a picture of a cabbage, mount it on the large-format camera, set the camera to reduce to about 15% of the original size, and then shoot four or five copies. I then arranged the little cabbages together to form a rather realistic looking set of brussels sprouts.