Peter Rukavina's Podcast

What with the impending closure of the Formosa Tea House, Dan and Steven and I reasoned that we’d better record one final episode of our erstwhile Live from the Formosa Tea House podcast before it was too late (the last episode was six years ago, so it’s not like we were otherwise in a hurry).Unfortunately the Formosa Tea House turned out to be closed for renovations today; so as to ensure that a weekend’s worth of careful planning didn’t go to waste, we redirected to the original location of the Formosa Tea House in Charlottetown, at 79 University Avenue, today the home of the Monsoon sushi restaurant.Here, verbatim, as it was recorded on my iPod Touch placed in the middle of our table in the back room, is episode six.  We had a lot of ground to cover.

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Session Five this afternoon over lunch.The focus of this episode was on Zap Your PRAM 3, the next incarnation of the Zap Your PRAM conference we organized in the fall of 2003. Zap3 is running February 16 to 19, 2006 in Cavendish, PEI; details forthcoming shortly on the new Zap3site.There is, alas, an annoying bit of electrical interference that runs throughout the episode — it’s most noticeable at the beginning. I tried various methods for filtering it out, but they all made Dan, Steven and I sound like drunken fish. Here’s a rundown of what you’ll hear:00:00 - The intro and extro stingers are from Royalty Free Music.00:15 - We start off with a somewhat dorky and stilted introduction to Zap Your PRAM (early-episode dorkitude seems to stike us every time). We get better as we go along.  Video and Audio of Zap Your PRAM One19:45 - The “people standing in from of webcams” phenomenon. The Island Cam (Dan stood here).The YankeeCam.21:15 - Peop

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Episode 4 this afternoon over lunch. At the Formosa Tea House. Live.We recorded in the coveted back room of the Formosa, with a very simple technical setup. We all sat around Dan James’ APEX435 microphone, which ran into Steven Garrity’s Behringer Eurotrack UB802 mixer. We took the output of the mixer and plugged it into my iMic, which was plugged into a USB port on my laptop. I did the recording in Sound Studio, saved as an AIFF file, then imported the file into iTunes and converted to an MP3 (24 kbps mono, VBR medium quality).This episode runs one and a half hours. It didn’t feel “too long” when we were recording it, so we’ve decided to release it completely unedited to maintain the “three guys having lunch” feel. It may feel too long to listen to. Things we discuss:Our technical setup.Recent travels by Dan to Peru and Peter to France and upcoming travel by Steven to London and Paris (for his honeymoon). [starts 2:42]London bombings, “ter

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Episode 3 this afternoon. And because the Formosa Tea House is closed until February 24th, we switched locations and recorded here in the lounge at 84 Fitzroy St. in Charlottetown.This episode features the best audio yet, with three microphones running into a mixing board running into my iBook. We missed the delivery of the iced tea and dumplings, though.In this episode you’ll hear:Talk about travel. My trip to Croatia last fall, Dan’s trip to Peru coming up this spring, and Steven’s trips to San Francisco and upcoming honeymoon trip to Europe. We also talk a lot about travel in general, using the Internet to make reservations, and the differences between being a tourist and being a visitor.News of the new Queen Street Commons project that silverorange and others are working on at 224 Queen St. in Charlottetown.Random musings about the nature of web design work vs. “creating real things.” Special bonus “I always thought I’d be an architect”

We recorded another episode of Live From the Formosa Tea House this afternoon (the first episode is here).You can download today’s episode (it’s an 11MBMP3 file) or, if you’re using iPodder or its brethren, you can set up an auto-grab via RSS 2.0 enclosures from our RSS 2.0 feed.Self-flagellation about this episode:We squeezed 30 minutes of content into 60 minutes of talking. We could probably lose a lot of the witty side-banter, and tighten up our conversation 50% and not lose anything.The sound is better. We were in the back room of the Formosa Tea House, where it’s quieter and more isolated from the fray. Things got worse the more we went along because we forgot to lean into the microphone as our audio guru John advised. We need a big “LEANIN” sign.We were more focused: we had three set topics (Firefox, silverorange stuff and my phone adventures), and something of a structured “okay, now you’re the host” system worked out in advance. We can get better at this.We flipped back and forth b

Ever since it became possible — because of high-speed Internet and good audio tools — to “do radio on the web,” I've been itching to dust off my interest in radio and start recording. Today the dream was realized, with the recording of the first episode of Live From the Formosa Tea House.Using Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes and The Gillmor Gang as inspirations, Dan, Steven and I gathered, as we do two or three times a week anyway, at the Formosa Tea House here in Charlottetown. Except this time we brought audio gear.The AAC version will be especially useful if you have an iPod or use iTunes, as, at least in theory, these should “remember where you left off” if you take a break.This isn't a polished radio program — it's sort of a combination of sticking a microphone on our lunch table, with the extra self-conciousness of the microphone making us each a little stiff. I don't think we knew who we were talking to really — each other, “the Internet,” or the invisible fo