From Edward Hasbrouck comes a reminder that The Amazing Race 5 starts tonight on CBS. Note that if you’re in Atlantic Canada, the show is being broadcast on ASN, not on ATV, although ATV is broadcasting it on Saturday nights in repeat. It looks like in the rest of Canada you can watch the show on your regular CTV station.
Catherine and I were driving up to Margate late in the afternoon yesterday to have dinner at the [fantastic] Shipwright’s Café before going to the big Bruce Cockburn concert in Summerside.
We decided to take the iPod with us, and listen to some audiobooks on the car stereo, using the little Griffin iTrip transmitter that broadcasts onto the FM band.
As we were driving along, I noticed that there was an uncommon amount of interference on the frequency we were using, so I asked Catherine to scan the dial looking for an clearer one.
So she tried.
And there wasn’t one.
All along the dial, there were radio stations coming in at every frequency. We stopped tuning at 88.5, and heard, clear as if it were broadcasting across the street, the unmistakable sound of National Public Radio. A few more minutes of listening and we’d figured out that, as if by magic, we were listening to WFDD, broadcasting from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which is 1362 miles away from PEI.
Intrigued by this amazing occurence (okay, I was amazed, and forced Catherine to feign amazement), we scanned down the dial and picked out WVTF in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a couple of rock stations from Fayetteville, North Carolina.
This weirdness continued all along the drive from Charlottetown to Margate, with the stations fading in and out as we went up and down hills and around corners.
I immediately got on the horn to my “they know about radio” gurus, Kenny Adams and Gordon Johnstone, and they both confirmed that this is something that just happens once in a while because of something Gordon call a “lift.” Apparently the technical term is tropospheric ducting.
We shut off the radio when we got to Margate, tuned in again on the way to Summerside, and then, on the way back to Charlottetown around 10:30 p.m., found that our friends in North Carolina were gone from the dial.
I tried to convince Catherine that this was the weirdest thing that had ever happened, but she wouldn’t buy it. It was pretty weird.
Our colleagues at silverorange are organizing a frisbee golf tournament in support of Habitat for Humanity this Saturday. I’m proud to be able to reveal the members of Team Reinvented:
Astute readers will recognize that we have almost all domains of human endeavour covered, from broadcasting to theatre to publishing to government to medicine to the visual arts. I’m confident that this broadly based team will combine to whoop some serious ass.
Daniel at silverorange assures me that there is still room for additional teams to enter at this late hour; full details on the tournament website.
Back in January, I predicted a Kerry + Edwards ticket. Now it’s happening.
The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust is holding a fundraising concert at Avonlea Village in Cavendish on Sunday, July 11, 2004 at 1:30 p.m..
Tickets are $15 per person, and this includes the concert, strawberries and ice cream, and admission to Avonlea Village for the day.
The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust works to preserve the scenic coastal lands on Prince Edward Island’s north shore in agricultural use. We work to acquire the “development rights” on land, leaving it otherwise owned and controlled by local farm families, who can continue to farm it in perpetuity, free from development pressure. It’s a worthwhile cause, and I’ve been a supporter, and member of the Board, for five years.
The fundraising concert is being generously sponsored by Avonlea Village: all funds raised will go to the Land Trust.
Avonlea Village is a great place for kids: I took Oliver out last year and we had a great time.
You can purchase tickets to the event directly from me (email avonleatickets@reinvented.net), or from any COWS on the Island.
Here’s an example, from Ben Hammersley, of using Perl to scrape an HTML page (in this case the FedEx tracking page) to grab data and spit it back out as RSS. Might be a good starting point for others, as he includes the source.
My father’s father, Dan Rukavina, was born in Croatia, in the village of Konjsko Brdo (he left for Canada in 1928). I just discovered that there were four people from Konjsko Brdo on the Titanic. Three died, one survived.
It’s Sunday, and I bought new socks yesterday, so it must be “renovate my own website day.”
I’ve fixed the RSS feed for the site: it has been broken since the beginning of time, with the date stamp for each item being set to the current date and time, not the actual date and time of the item. This probably didn’t break much, but it did make it look like I was writing everything all the time. Which would be exhausting. So I fixed it.
I modified search tool (in the sidebar on the right of the site) to use Google for searching; I’ve experimented with various mechanisms for self-hosting this, but in the end all were inferior to Google. Upside is that all of the Googleisms that you’re used to will work; downside (for users, not me) is that Google text ads will appear with the search results. I think it’s a reasonable compromise, but I’ll see what happens. Here’s a sample search, which will show you everything I’ve ever written about Aliant or Island Tel.
Other smaller things “under the hood” too, some of which might make things a little better, faster, stronger, others of which may or may not cause your computer to light on fire.
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, printer and developer.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, listen to audio I’ve produced, see the places I’ve been, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).
Mailing Address
100 Prince Street
Charlottetown, PE
Canada, C1A 4R4
