It’s Sunday morning and I’m hear at Timothy’s. Front window is open. Temperature is perfect, with a nice breeze. I ordered a Wyman’s blueberry juice to drink (which earned me a “that’s an excellent choice for breakfast” from the server), along with one of Karin LaRonde’s “packed full of goodness” rice crispie bars. There is a German couple at the PC beside me; “that’s a small machine you have there,” the man says to me.

I watched bits of the first act of Saturday Night Live; the best skit was a commercial for a new TV series called Welcome Back Potter. It’s 20 years in the future, the area around Hogwarts has developed into a seedy slum, and Harry Potter, now scruffy looking, middle-aged, but still spectacled, comes back to the “old neighbourhood” as a teacher. It was very well done, and should receive some sort of award for “best play on words that I would have never thought of.”

Here’s a note I received from our old friend, and now famous filmmaker, Mikey Johnston:

It’s a funny thing when someone finally gets around to google searching their own name and finds articles like yours. Your readers may want to know that I could only put $2 down on the car and had to wait until my January student loan came in before paying off the $33 balance. I think car was crushed after performing its fence duties. By the way, my father is in the movie.

Here’s what the HotDocs film festival says about Mike’s film:

After graduating from Trent University, Mike Johnston found himself unemployed, crushed by his student loan and plagued by collection agencies. He decided to make a film about his student loan to pay it off. Begging and borrowing cameras, Johnston launched on a hilarious and horrifying ride through debt-ridden student life. Students working at the local pizzeria tally up their combined debt on the cash register – a total of $90,000 in one stop. In fact, Trent students have run up a combined debt of $54 million in the last four years, at interest rates of 12 per cent and up! But the absurdity doesn’t stop there. The university itself is wallowing deeper in debt as a strategy to get out of debt. With dogged determination and acidic deadpan irony, Johnston follows the money and takes politicians to task to expose the dangerous lunacy of the ‘new economics of education.’ Funny, insightful, essential viewing.

I’ve emailed Mike back to ask about the possibility of screening his film here in Charlottetown.

Hey, maybe I’m not a good for nothing music pirate after all: today I went out to Back Alley Discs to buy a copy of Fred Eaglesmith’s new bluegrass album, balin, (see here and here for inexplicable love of bluegrass).

If you like Fred Eaglesmith, and even just like bluegrass music a little, you will, I think, love this album.

City Cinema has one of the oldest commercial websites on Prince Edward Island. It originally went online in the very, very early days of ISN, back in 1995. The site has had many incarnations over the years, but it’s always been almost exclusively about telling people “what’s playing.” It amazes me still how many cinema sites obscure this information several clicks down into their sites, for that’s the only reason why people are visiting, on balance.

In any case, this is just a note to alert you all to the presence of the following experimental services, each delivering the City Cinema scheuled in a different format :

• RSS Feed
• iCal Calendar
• Email Alerts

I’d be happy to make the schedule available in other formats; just let me know.

Today in history: Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, touching off World War I, 1914. (from The Old Farmer’s Almanac). Who knew he had a first name?

Here’s how a story gets to be on ATV’s Live at Five program.

At 10:45 a.m. I was in the basement of the Shaw Building at the Queen’s Printer and a call came in on my cell phone from Dan Viau, ATV’s only videographer on the Island. He had been assigned to do one third of a story about “music piracy” and his task was to get the question “how do we stop this?” answered by experts. He’d started with Kevin O’Brien, and Kevin suggested he call me.

I told Dan I wasn’t an expert, but that I could certainly comment on the folly of trying to copy protect — to “keep the genie in the bottle,” as it were. We made arrangements to meet at my house at Noon.

About five minutes after twelve, I spied Dan smoking a cigarette out on the sidewalk in my front yard, and went out to talk to him. I know Dan a little bit because when he’s not a shooter/reporter for ATV, he runs The Toy Factory in New Glasgow, and is a member of the PEI Crafts Council, which is where I started working when we moved to the Island a decade ago.

Dan came into my office, we opened up the blinds to get some light on me (I’d earlier cleaned up my desk to give an “efficient professional” look to the place), and he set up his camera tripod, clipped a wireless microphone to my shirt, and got his camera in place. The camera itself is interesting: it’s a digital video camera that’s got a super long battery life, an integrated light, and power for the wireless mic, all of which make Dan’s work — he has no cameraman and has to shoot everything himself — a little bit easier.

With a copy of Acquisition running in the background on my iMac, Dan sat opposite me and started shooting.

Our interview, which went on for about 15 minutes, covered mostly the issue of whether keeping music from being pirated is possible, but also extended into questions of morality, and who’s being hurt by piracy. He moved the camera around a couple of times to get shots of me using the mouse, searching for music, and so on. And then we were done.

Dan loaded up his gear into his Jeep Liberty, and went off to edit.

Here’s the finished club:

Please note that in my “for educational purposes only” demonstration, at least I am ripping off Canadian music. Also please note that if I truly have “25 years of computer experience,” we’re working from a starting point of age 12; I’m not sure if all of those years count as valid “industry experience.”

The weirdest thing for me is seeing that, somehow, my widow’s peak is on the other side of my head when I’m on television. I think it has something to do with the mirror in the bathroom reversing things. Spatial geometry is not my strong suit. The point that I tried to make that Dan left out is that I believe artists deserve to be fairly compensated for their work, and that the existing economic setup of the industry doesn’t allow this.

This was the tail story of a set of three. As a group, they tilted a little bit more towards the “renegade savvy computer geeks swashbuckling against authority” than I would have skewed it. And there wasn’t a lot of richness in their examination of the subtleties of the issues involved. But then again, it was all produced in a day, so what can you expect.

Also in Dan’s piece are clips with Alet Pieterse who I worked with several years ago on a potato project with Rob Paterson. She’s a sharp thinker.

For those of you intrigued with the view into the secret Reinvented Bunker, here is a key should you wish to purchase these items for home use:

I’m off to listen to Gordon Lightfoot, and to wait for the call from ATV’s lawyers telling me I ripped off their Live at 5 story and put it on the web.

There was one day, back when I was 21, where I managed to drink vodka, smoke pot, and drop acid, all for the first time. All on the same day. In one fell swoop, I made up for 21 years of reticent moderation.

I can recall another day, about 7 years ago, where I gave a speech to a group of librarians, made an appearance on Morningside, and ran the laptop for a presentation to the Catherine Callbeck cabinet. Not quite like dropping acid, but close.

Activity levels in my life work in a quantum leapy kind of way (side note: I had to phone my wise friend Oliver, who has a PhD in biophysics to verify that my use of “quantum leap” in this manner was proper; Oliver did not, however, authorize the use of the phrase “quantum leapy”). I’ll be going along, ambly pambly, idling my time. And then, blamo, a jump to another energy level hits and I wake up in another busyspace.

Last night I worked on a perplexing PDF-wrangling puzzle until 2:00 a.m. At 8:30 a.m. I was awoken by the plaintive cries of wee Oliver, sad that Catherine had left the house, leaving him with our world class babysitter. By 10:00 a.m. I was at the computer eating peach yoghurt, checking my email. At 11:00 a.m. I was at the Queen’s Printer helping to test a big print job. At Noon I was on Prince St. crawling through the basement of a hundred year old house looking at the quality of the foundation. At 12:30 p.m. I was back in my office taping an interview with Dan Viau for ATV “Live at 5” on music piracy. At 1:15 I was out at Ravenwood for a short L.M. Montgomery Land Trust meeting. At 2:00 p.m. I was back downtown for the meeting of the Weblog and Related Technologies Association of Prince Edward Island, I’m back in front of the machine doing some actual work now; in 45 minutes, one of my colleagues from Yankee Publishing, vacationing on the Island, is coming for dinner. Then, of course, there’s the Amazing Race.

I’m not sure my mind can sustain this level of activity: too many synapses firing.

Postscript: No, I’m not an acid head. I was young and wild and free. I’m living a natural high now. Also, crazy business has continued for another hour and a half. Several IM chats happening at the same time; cell phone ringing; email flowing. Dams have burst somewhere.

I’m not exactly sure who I get my high-speed Internet service from, to be honest. I get bills from Island Tel Advanced Solutions (if you click on that link, you get a quick vestigal flash of their old identity, and then get redirected to an Aliant page). But as far as I know, Island Tel, nor its Advanced Solution, don’t exist any longer.

Being the curious lad that I am, I had to get to the bottom of the crazy speed increase on my connection that I first noticed last night. So I called the local number for the Help Desk, and, alas, got a recording: “this number isn’t the technical support number any longer,” or something to that effect. I was given a new number to call, a toll-free one.

So I called that new number, and after navigating through a telephone tree, got to speak to a very friendly chap. I explained the situation, and much to my surprise, he said “there’s no cap on the speed” of my connection. When I told him I was getting download throughput of 4Mbps on what is purportedly a 1Mbps connection, he seemed to suggest that there’s no such thing as a “1Mbps connection,” and that I have access to seemingly infinite bandwidth. When I pressed him on this, he said it depends on where in the Maritimes you are, and that they usually see highest speeds of 150Kpbs.

Needless to say, I remain confused.

More disturbing is that this fellow was talking to me from a call centre out of Moncton. He told me that there were only three technicians working out of the Charlottetown help desk, and two of them have moved on, and one is the head technician. Help desk calls aren’t answered in Charlottetown any longer as a result.

So, in other words, Island Tel or Aliant or whatever they are has moved my local support “off-shore” without telling me. Thus evaporates one of the few remaining benefits of dealing with a “local” company; talking to a tech in Moncton, I might as well be talking to a tech in Katmandu for all the local knowledge and local relationships he doesn’t have.

Remember Dave Moses’ beautiful television commercials with pictures of our friends and neighbours climbing up the telephone poles and installing our phones? Well, I guess that’s over. Too bad; I believed it.

Here’s a great tool that lets you view pictures of the TED2003 conference by attendee. Thanks to Dan for the pointer.