Can you help me identify this music, snapped in a clothing store in downtown Malmö?

Remember back in the 70s1 when I posted about how we should all have our own domain names and then held a workshop to walk the interested through the process?

Well Spark picked up the notion this week and we taped an interview over the ISDN from CBC Charlottetown to CBC Toronto this afternoon. Thanks to the quick work in the Spark boiler room, you can listen to the raw interview now, mere hours later. Spark will follow with a blog post on Thursday, and the real live radio show will swallow the edited audio later.

I arrived early at CBC for the taping and thus got to spend a pleasant 20 minutes chatting about broadcast audio with the inimitable Kenny Adams. If I ever decide to paddle across the Atlantic in a canoe, and need someone to arrange a live audio remote from the Sargasso Sea, Kenny is my man.

1. by “the 70s” I mean “last year at this time.”

Our colleagues at Yankee have suffered a bout of freezing rain today, and it’s made travel difficult and has created power problems; this is something one must suffer from time to time with a company located in weather-rich southern New Hampshire.

So, for today, everyone at Yankee is staying home. The main company telephone number has a message to this effect, delivered in true Yankee style; it starts:

Is it any wonder I have great affection for this company.

About a month ago Oliver and I had a few hours to kill on a Saturday afternoon. So I fired up the GarageBand, patched the audio gear in, brought in a bed track, and let Oliver have at it. I added some background vocals, did some light remixing, and this is the result. Perhaps only because I’m his father and love him dearly (and am very far away as I write), but listening to this brings a smile to my face every time.

Today was not so bleak, as it turned out: there was sun and some faint (faint) sense of warmth. But this is a brief respite from the alternating bouts of heavy snow and teeming rain we’ve been having since Christmas. Surprisingly, given this weather, we seem to be avoiding the prospect of the “meltdown season” so far. It’s early yet, though, so there’s still plenty of time for complete mental collapse before spring arrives in four months.

There is perhaps no better work that captures this part of the year than In the Bleak Midwinter:

No rendering of this lyrics captures its spirit better than the version on the now-alas-out-of-print CD A Celebration of the American Farm by David Schnaufer and Stephen Seifert.

If you can track down a used copy of that CD, which was created in partnership with our friend at The Old Farmer’s Almanac, you should; it’s got a bunch of great tracks from artists ranging from Maura O’Connell and Nanci Griffith to the Nashville Chamber Orchestra.

Of course if you’re looking for a somewhat more hopeful take on the season, there is always Raise the Dead of Wintertime from Allan Rankin (clip):

Customers of Charlottetown-based Internet provider ISN began to get word this week that the company is about to be acquired by Nova Scotia-based Eastlink. The sale represents the end of a 14 year project for ISN’s founder Kevin O’Brien.

Kevin and I first met in the spring of 1993. We were essentially doing the same job — taking resources to the Internet — for two different sectors; Kevin was working for the PEI Federation of Agriculture and I was working for the PEI Crafts Council. What began with innocuous conversations about technology that spring led eventually, 18 months later, to the creation of ISN: I, in essence, goaded Kevin into creating his own ISP and was his unofficial technical co-conspirator in the early days.

Over ISN’s colourful history there haven’t been many projects I’ve engaged in, from my work with the Crafts Council to the founding of Digital Island and my work with the PEI Government, to my Okeedokee partnership to Dave Moses to my current setup sharing ISN bandwidth with silverorange, where ISN hasn’t played a pivotal role. The consumption of the company by Eastlink thus represents not only the end of a project for Kevin, but also the disappearance of a human-scale bandwidth provider for the Island. Things will never be the same.

As many of the early conversations where the seeds of ISN were planted took place at The Noodle House here in Charlottetown, Kevin and I returned to the scene of the crime to record a series of conversations about ISN past, present and future. We began with a discussion of what has happened, what’s ahead for existing ISN customers, and you can listen to this in the first of what will eventually be three podcast episodes/

In future episodes we’ll talk about how ISN got started, and about some of the misadventures along the way.

Back in the day, when I was working at Canadian Tire selling Commodore VIC 20s and 64s, Commodore had an advertising campaign in Canada with the tag line “I Adore My 64” with an associated catchy jingle (another proof that eventually everything will be on the web). In French they had the same jingle, but the tag line was “Rien ne peut battre mon soixante quatre” — which translates as “nothing can beat my sixty-four.” All these years later, I’ve still got both versions running through my head.

You’ve watched the show, now download the ringtone! If you’ve got a mobile phone that allows you to set MP3 files as ringtones, grab this MP3 and be delighted with the blaring trumpets of Compass every time you get a call. Better yet, set up a personalized ringtone for calls from 902-629-6400 and know instantly when your favourite Compass reporter or producer is calling!

Although Jaiku provides several ways of updating your presence by mobile phone — you can send updates by SMS, and there’s a nice Series 60 application that runs on my Nokia N70 that does everything but make bread — there are times when I’m away from my mobile phone and want to update.

Enter Asterisk and PHPAGI which, together with class.jaiku.php make Jaiku By Telephone.

It’s not exactly a “ready for use by my grandmother” application because the text input system supported by PHPAGI (documented here) is a little bit like knitting with invisible yarn.

But it’s a cool proof-of-concept, and a good way to procrastinate a couple of hours on Christmas Eve morning.

I call into my Asterisk server, press a key to call up the AGI script I created, hear my current Jaiku presence message read to me, and then update my presence. I don’t quite get the keystrokes correct, but the result is:

The Plazes screencasts I’m recording the audio for demanded a better quality microphone than the $15 mic from Radio Shack I bought last summer. So I went out to Sobers Music this morning and invested in an APEX435 microphone, a tiny Behringer mixing board and assorted cables.

The result is much better audio. At least once I figured out which way to point the microphone.

I celebrated the occasion by recording the XLR episode of The 3LA Podcast, wherein I explore the origins of the “XLR connector” that’s at the end of my new mic.

The guys at Sobers, by the way, were super-helpful. They knew exactly what I needed, and I was in and out in 20 minutes.