Category: tech

I have been a fan of good pasta since I was eating solid food. My mom made me spaghetti and meat balls when I was still in the high chair and I have photos of yours truly eating this dish with my bare hands! I have evolved a bit in the intervening years and, for…

Recently one of my colleagues at the University of Victoria loaned me one of his studio tools that he was thinking of parting with – The Zoom H24 24-channel digital portable recorder. Now for the record, way back when I first started recording multi-track style I was using a cassette tape based TASCAM 244 –…

If you are much under the age of 40, the concept of “radio, the medium that reaches the masses” is probably not a thing that resonates with you. But for many residents of British Columbia, over the last 70 years, if you lived in an out of the way place, CBC Shortwave on 6160 Khz…

When we first moved into our new house, one of the first neighbours to pop by was Alfons. He lives on the street parallel to our and shares part of a back fence. An enthusiastic gardener and outdoorsman, Alfons represents all the good things about good neighbours – engaged, good humoured and genuinely interested in…

We had a power outage from 7AM until around 11:30AM today. And it was patently obvious that outages were widespread — but because of my naturally curious nature, I went over to the BC Hydro website to look at the outage map — and the site stated: If your neighborhood is NOT on the map,…

Nothing like staying awake several hours in the night worried about the fact that two of your main websites are dysfunctional after a suggested system update. In this case, a software update was made to my main coffee website and my main telecom/radio website. The radio website has a huge technical library on board with…

If you have noticed an absence of activity around these parts for the last month, it is because I have been prepping numerous websites for an “experimental” move off of Islandnet.com (after almost 18 years with them…) after many technical hiccups, slow downs, the occasional Ddos attacks etc – it was simply time for a…

This is the first in a series of features focusing on the geek aspects of my life under the category of digital audio. I have a home based studio powered by a 3.2 Ghz PC running Windows XP. One of my main audio interfaces in the M-Audio Delta 44 4 channel audio interface tied into…

Signed on to Facebook for about 10 days. More out of curiosity than anything else. Twitter has been working out quite well – and not surprisingly. I mean, Twitter is a very simple thing. You post thoughts and hopefully link to some richer media somewhere. It works… like you would expect. But I digress. I…

I embrace technology. Heck, I have been doing this for too many years. When I first started monkeying around on the internet, there were no web servers. They were called gopher servers – and they served up text. My first attempts at webbing were launched from a Windows 3.11 for Work groups box (an IBM…