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.

Something weird just happened: the speed of my high-speed Internet connection just increased by a factor of about 4. I’m watching full-screen QuickTime video that looks much, much better than it usually does. I’m zipping files down over the Internet at 260KB per second. Am I hallucinating? Perhaps I should go to bed. But I’m afraid that things will go back to “normal” when I wake up. Help!

Here’s are the cliques I’ve of been a member of so far in this life.

In very early elementary school, I was the “new kid” because our family moved out to the country after I was in grade one, and so I started a new school for grade two. All of my schoolmates had known each other for two or three years already, and I was late to the party. It’s amazing what a dramatic effect this has had on my life, both positive and negative.

Later in elementary school, partly as a result of this, I was a member of the “loner guys.” We loners generally remained un-derided and un-teased by staying under the radar. This was a loose affiliation with an flexible group of other “loner guys” on the playground; sort of the playground equivalent of running as an independent candidate for U.S. President.

I stayed a “loner guy” all the way through elementary school, and through junior high. At its best this meant being a “lone wolf,” and at its worst it meant I was lonely.

In the last year of junior high — grade 8 — I was branded a “browner” because I was pulled out of regular classes a day every week for “gifted and talented group” activities. Can you imagine the stupidity of the bureaucracy that came up with that name?

In high school I was one of the “early bus euchre groupies.” High school started at 9:00 a.m., but buses arrived at our high school from abour 8:00 a.m. onwards. My bus was an early bus, and so I became a B-list member of a group of guys who gathered in the cafeteria every morning to play euchre. I was never allowed to actually play euchre, which was probably good, because it allowed me to maintain the veneer of being unaffiliated.

Later in high school I graduated to the “very slightly cool geeky guys.” I was President of the Computer Club for two years in the middle of my time at high school. Although this carried with it the same inevitable taint that being in “projector club’ would have carried, my Vice-President Simon and I managed to make the best of a bad thing by producing ever-more-outrageous announcements that we convinced our Vice-Principal Mr. Japp to play over the Public Address system every morning. Our tag line was “The Computer Club: Where the Future is Today.” I think we got cut off when our announcements, which often involved sound effects, music, and location recording, extended over the 5 minute mark.

On the first night of my one-year stay at Trent University, I went to a social event held in the riverside quadrangle. I was socially ill at ease, but tried to do my best. I guy from a neighbouring residence and I made small talk; he was going to the bar, and asked me if I wanted anything. I said “no, I don’t drink; I’m into Coke.” I never saw him again, and didn’t realize until much later that he probably thought me a n’er do well druggie. I generally remained completely aloof at Trent. I was housed in “staircase K/L” at Champlain College, on a floor the other residents of which were all third-year women. I was terrified of them, although they were very nice to me.

When I left university, I joined up with the a rag-tag group of anarchists, socialists and libertarians organized under the banner of “Projects for Change.” They were mostly older and wiser than me, but were a great and passionate group of people. I hung with and around them for almost 5 years. Under this banner I was a member of, a variety of splinter and side groups, including the Community Information Agency (CIA), Oxfam-Peterborough, the NDP (although only on the distant fringes; I was never a member), the “Fuck School” project (a long story), Powerless Books, the Peterborough Food Bank, and the Kawartha World Issues Centre. I headed up a campaign to bring full CBC Television service to Charlottetown, commited one act of civil disobedience, and was questioned once by the police. The common thread running through all of this activity was a general feeling about the need for “social change” of some description; the nature and degree of change required varied greatly depending on the players. In any case, there was a very clear distinction, socially, between us and the “regular straight people.”

I had a very brief time as a member of the “cool musicians” group in Peterborough, although mostly in my own mind, and really only then for about a week.

Moving to the Island, and having a wonky ethnic last name, automatically gained me free membership in the “vaguely suspected of being a terrorist” group, although never as severely as Island detractors made it out to be. After about five years of being here, I sensed a subtle “well, maybe he’s not a terrorist” change, although after we painted our house in Kingston bright yellow, Catherine did stop getting invited to the WI Christmas party, and there was a rumour that we might be “Catholic or French, or both.”

But seriously: when we were considering moving to the Island, we were warned, mostly by people who had never been here before, that this was a closed, insular place, where we would have no friends and always be on the outside. This has proved both completely true and completely false.

The last ten years here we have benefitted greatly from the kindness of our friends and neighbours in ways we never could have imagined when living in Ontario. Islanders have employed us, invited us to dinner, plowed out our driveway, lent us their table saws, cared for our son.

However it’s only this year that I came to realize that although we are accepted here, and can dwell here happily until our end, we will never be of here. I used to think, when people told me this, they were talking about some sort of secret conspiracy, a basic distrust, or a mystical quality; I’ve come to realize that mostly what this is about is time. The born-and-bred Islanders that I know and observe simply benefit from having know each other not only since Kindergarten, but also, family-to-family, for several generations. It’s simply not possible, being late to the party, to build the kind of relationships that are this deep; I’ll just never know all the stories, and the stories are what’s important. In a sense, it’s the same phenomenon I experienced in grade two as the “new kid,” and it’s got the same upsides and downsides associated with it.

Aside from all that, I guess the strongest affiliation I have here is with a rag-tag group that would probably best be called “mildly rebellious non-joiner designers.” By our very nature, we have no formal affiliation, don’t hold meetings (well, sometimes we hold meetings), and resist any rituals.

I also have associate membership in the “independent entrepreneurs” group, although I’m less entrepreneurial than the charter members, only employ one other person (and he’s my brother), and don’t drink coffee. It’s amazing the degree to which this group holds common beliefs with the hippies and anarchists from back in the day.

So the common thread, reading backwards as I write, is an affiliation with the unaffiliated, an appreciation for the rebels, and a position just on the cusp of the inside/outisde fence.

Not a bad place to be.

I was sitting in the Formosa Tea House just a minute ago, and a group of young people came and sat at the table behind me. Unable to keep from eavesdropping, I heard one say to the other “what’s your trad?” The answer appeared to suggest that all three were practioners of and/or adherents to some sort of wican system, and the “trad” was a reference to which branch, or “tradition” thereof. After this small learning opportunity, their conversation descended into small talk about who should get fixed up with who. Apparently everyone has a code name in this group. Fascinating.