"From the Ridiculous to the Sublime"

Summer 2011 Planting Video

2012-01-09T02:09:00.002-04:00

Every summer, I take a video camera with me out tree planting. I don't have a lot of time for filming, but I do generally get to use it occasionally and get three or four hours of footage. And then, after the season is over, I boil that down into three or four minutes of some of the best clips, and turn that into a "Summer Memories" video for Replant.ca, my planting website. I got distracted with other projects for a while this winter, but I recently finished the 2011 video.

Here's a link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdcmb_n7ZC8

I want to thank Santosh Lalonde (Bad Uncle) for providing the backing audio, "Planter For Life After Four Years," which was used in this video. If you want to download this song, right-click on this link:

http://www.replant.ca/peppermill/set2-02-Bad_Uncle-Planter_For_Life_After_Four_Years.mp3

Thanks also to Peter Krahn of Peppermill Records for making the "Hi & Ho, We Plant Trees" project happen, which is where I originally found out about the song. Apparently, Santosh used to be Krahn's planting partner. Small world.

If you want to learn a bit more about tree planting, I'd suggest that you check out the Replant.ca website that I run, and go to the "photos" link at the top left. There are dozens of photo galleries there from the last ten years, each with between thirty and sixty photos. So there's lots of interesting stuff to look at.

You can also check out our YouTube video channel, which has all of the planting videos from 2001 onward, at this link:

http://www.youtube.com/replant

Thanks, I hope you enjoy the videos/photos ...

Eating Dirt - A Book by Charlotte Gill

2011-12-27T14:18:00.007-04:00

I just finally finished reading "Eating Dirt," which is a book that I've wanted to get my hands on for the past few months. The book is written by a tree planter, although it doesn't focus entirely on planting. There's also a lot of background on the logging industry in general, and some background on tree physiology and historical biology, with both local and global perspectives.

Charlotte Gill, the author, has planted for over twenty years. She started in Ontario, but moved out west and now works eight or nine months each year, predominantly planting coastal projects (the professional part of the industry), plus a bit of southern Interior work in the summer months.

Here's an excerpt from a review by Quill & Quire:

"A thoroughly Canadian story, Eating Dirt is not out of place alongside other classic memoirs of the bush by Susanna Moodie or Farley Mowat."

There were a few things in the book that really caught my attention. For instance, she was talking about the amount of ground that a million trees covers. When this is quantified in acres or hectares, it somehow seems less impressive than her way of illustrating: one million trees covers five hundred city blocks in Manhattan. My own camp usually plants around five million trees a year. I didn't really think about how much ground we cover until I thought of it as 2500 city blocks.

Another interesting fact is that when you're in a full forest canopy and you look up, it probably looks like the branches of adjoining trees are all intertwined above you. But they aren't. The trees are able to somehow sense their neighbours and the branch tips almost always stays a few centimetres away from each other. Of course there are occasional exceptions, but natural avoidance is generally the case. Charlotte mentions a lot of facts about trees and nature that seasoned planters take for granted, but non-planting readers would probably be surprised at.

Charlotte also talks about the number of calories a planter consumes in a day: around five thousand. If anything, I think this is an under-estimate. It's hard to count calories accurately in a bush camp, because most planters just load up without measuring portions, and shovel the food in as quickly as possible. But I've always been curious about caloric intake, so one day this past season (during a stretch when I was planting, not supervising), when we were working out of town, I actually measured what I ate. A normal person would be shocked. Here's the list:

Breakfast: 785 calories

3 yogurt cups = 240 calories
4 cinnamon buns with butter = estimated 500 calories
Bowl of strawberries = 45 calories

During Day, While Planting: 4,620 calories

5 pepperoni sticks = 400 calories
10 granola bars = 1600 calories
About 1/3rd block (150g) of marbled cheddar = 600 calories
Approximately 14 bottles (500ml) of water = 0 calories
Six bottles of Gatorade (591ml) = 780 calories
One large bottle of Clamato juice = 880 calories
Two Red Rain energy drinks = 360 calories

Dinner: 2,640 calories

Two Uncle Ben’s Bistro Express Rices at 250grams each = 800 calories
¾ bag of cheese perogies = 1260 calories
4 pepperoni sticks = 320 calories
2 gatorades = 260 calories
Couple glasses of water = 0 calories

Total for the day: 8,045 calories
(and about a dozen litres of fluids)

A lot of planters who work hard for 8-10 hours per day can eat this much food, day after day, and still lose a significant amount of weight as the season progresses. Back when I planted full-time, before I was a supervisor, I typically lost about 25 pounds in the first 6-7 weeks, and if you know me, you'll know that I don't have that much to lose in the first place. By the way, I tried to change my diet a bit from day to day when I was planting - on other days I had a lot less meat and more vegetables, and pastas were always a staple when I had a kitchenette.

Another thing that I really liked about this book is something pretty personal - I'm actually working on a planting book of my own (well, actually, two books). And there isn't a lot of overlap between what Charlotte has said and what I'm working on. That's a bit of a relief.

Tree planting is a job that most people would hate. For actual tree planters, it's more of a love/hate relationship. For people who've never done it, this book is a great insight into one of the strangest industries in Canada. Check it out if you can. Here's a link to order a copy from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.ca/Eating-Dirt-Charlotte-Gill/dp/1553659775

And while you're waiting for your copy of the book to arrive in the mail, here's a link to a lot of tree planting photo galleries that I've taken over the past ten years. Each of the photos on this page is actually a link: click on it, and you'll be taken to a page with dozens of other photos. In all, there are several thousand photos that I've put online:

http://www.replant.ca/photos.html

Better Canadian Mobile at Koodo

2011-11-13T12:31:00.005-04:00

Canada has long had a history of being one of the most expensive countries in the world for cellular communications users. So I'm going to suggest a solution (Koodo) in a few minutes, but first some background.

It's not really surprising that Canada has such high rates. First, Canada already had a significant wired (landline) network available for phones. When cell phones first came out, the demand for them was mitigated by the fact that in many cases, using a landline was an alternative. Contrast that with less technologically developed countries such as many in South America and Asia that hadn't reached the point yet of deploying massive lineline infrastructure. For those countries, cell technology was a way to leapfrog traditional technological development and save a lot of money.

The other big reason why cell phone technology is less expensive in most other countries is that geography is on their side. Compare a country like Vietnam as an example. They are almost exactly 1/30th the size of Canada, yet they have almost three times the population. That's an economy of scale of nearly 100 times, if you assume that they would have to build 1/30th as many cell towers to cover the country, and can spread the cost out over almost three times as many people.

Anyway, so Canada has a history of terribly high mobile rates, which of course was supported historically by government and the CRTC. Check this old post by Thomas Purves as an example (although things have improved substantially in the last four years).

I was one of the early adopters of cell phone technology. I actually detest using them for phone calls, but having one was very handy when I was tree planting (even though my first cell phone was the size of a case of beer and had to be directly wired into my truck to work). So I've seen a lot of changes & improvements over the years.

One of my biggest pet peeves (and that of nearly every other Canadian at some point) was having a cell and getting annoyed at some cost or feature, and talking to "customer service," and getting so angry that I wanted to switch carriers. But I was always locked into a plan.

A couple years ago, I was doing some research on the net and discovered a new carrier called Koodo. The more that I read about them, the more that I liked the idea. Their prices seemed competitive, and what was best, if you buy your phone in advance, you aren't locked into a plan.

So I tried them out, and for the past year and a half, I've been really pleased. And their prices seem to be dropping over time. Let me show you roughly what my monthly mobile bill is, keeping in mind that I have it loaded for being a really heavy user (because of work):

Unlimited Canadian Local and Long Distance, along with unlimited minutes. No time restrictions, I can call as much as I want to any Canadian area code, for as long as I want: $45 per month.

Unlimited Text Messaging: $10 per month. You can actually get it for $5, but I have it bundled with call display and voicemail, which is why it's $10. I think that voicemail alone was $12 at my old carrier, and text messages were astronomical.

Data Plan: I'm on a 2gig per month plan for $25. That's the only cap I have on the phone, but it seems to work.

I pay 53 cents on top of that per month for the NB 911 system, but basically, my phone is just barely over $80 per month plus tax for almost unlimited use.

By the way, when I was that you don't have to get locked into a plan (as long as you buy a phone outright, or already have a phone from another carrier), I wasn't kidding. The only exception to this is that if you don't already have a phone, and want to get it partly "on credit" from Koodo, you can get a discount of up to $150 off the price of your phone from Koodo. As future bills are paid, this "tab" of $150 is slowly reduced (10% of your monthly bill). If you stop using Koodo, you'd have to pay off the balance of that tab, but if it's paid off or you didn't have one in the first place, you are completely free to switch Koodo off.

Oh yeah, and if you want to learn about switching from your existing carrier when your contract comes up for renewal next time, you can probably keep your existing phone number.

Drawbacks? Hm. Mine has worked well all over Canada except a few parts of Saskatchewan. And I don't think that Koodo's selection of phones is great (although they do have several types of Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids).

I know this all sounds too good to be true, but check them out. Like I said, I've used them for a year and a half and I've been very happy, and I haven't had any problems. I'm not going to suggest that they are perfect - after all, they ARE a Canadian cell company. But I haven't had problems, and I haven't met any other Koodo users who have had problems. And by the way, I don't actually secretly work for Koodo, or have any friends that I know of who work for them! Here's their main website:

www.KoodoMobile.com

Sneak Peek at Facebook's New "Timeline" Change

2011-09-22T19:27:00.014-03:00

So the news is out about Facebook's changes.

The new "Timeline" format is a pretty big change. Considering how much everyone has complained about their last several major changes, I expect a FLOOD of complaints about this one. But as usual, everyone will get used to it eventually, and the uproar will die down.

However, although I've almost always embraced all of the past facebook changes immediately (with one exception), I have some reservations about the current change. The thing that worries me the most is that the photo at the top of the page takes up far too much valuable screen space. Yes, it certainly "sets the tone" for when someone first visits your facebook profile. But it would be nice to be able to set the tone in a more subdued manner with a half-height photo, so you'd have more immediately-visible screen space for the other stuff.

One other thing: for those of us operating on decent monitors with larger screen resolutions, it would be nice for Facebook to fill out sideways to take advantage of the blank space at the sides. [sarcasm]I guess that space is handy though if I need to put a post-it note on the display area of my monitor.[/sarcasm]

Although the changes were just announced a few hours ago, and aren't supposed to roll out for another six weeks, I used developer access to look at my own profile with the changes applied. The screen shot below is one-third real size, but if you click on it, you'll see the full-size version.

Anyway, that's about all that I have to say about it. I'm sure that hundreds of thousands of people will threaten to boycott Facebook and switch to Google+. However, I don't think Google+ will be able to achieve critical mass. I was one of their first users, and although it has some great features, it won't replace Facebook. You can't build a service based on the concept that it will attract people who dislike Facebook's dominance. It WILL become and remain popular among the techno-literate crowd (ie. the former Dodgeball and FourSquare types, and maybe even among the Twitter crowd). But my feeling is that Facebook will continue to dominate the masses.

However, only time will tell ...

EDIT, ten minutes later: Well, I just noticed the timeline on the right hand side. Very cool. But also very scary! I just went back to some of my first facebook posts from the winter of 2005/2006 (yeah, I've been using Facebook for a while). Amazing to see that I can still see everything. That'll be a huge help when I write an autobiography about my chaotic life. I'll be calling it, "It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time."

There is also a way of categorizing a lot of your status updates into "life events" such as "broke a bone, got a license," and all sorts of other categories. This could be interesting in terms of transforming Facebook from more of a social environment to augmenting that with socio-historical information.

I'm going to probably add a few more after-the-fact tidbits to this post over the next day or so, as I learn more. One interesting thing I just noticed - there used to be two ways of doing mouseovers over your friends' pics. Your left feed had usually ten friends' pics displayed, with names beside. And if you did a mouseover of your own name on your wall feed, you would see five photos pop up. If you did a mouseover of those pics, the person's name would pop up for each photo. On the Timeline update, there is no left-hand friends column. You simply have a single block of six friends. Mouseovers do not identify them. You might think, "So what?" But if someone has just changed their profile pic and you don't recognize them, doing a mouseover doesn't identify that person (this might be an early-release bug that will be fixed by the time the mainstream world sees timeline pages). So you'd think that you could just click on the photo and it would bring up that person's profile. Wrong. It brings up a new "friends" page, which might not even have the mystery photo in the first fifteen or so friends who are visible on your screen. So if you see a random strange photo in what I'll call your "friends block," you might have to go hunting to figure out who it is.

Definitely NOT happy with the fact that the latest comments are not visible on your main screen, because they are too far down. I hear a beep, I know that something came in, but I can't see it without scrolling. Very annoying. I presume this will make people spend much more time on their home page and much less on their wall page. I'm not sure that this was Facebook's intent.

Another later edit, October 1st: Facebook listened. Well, maybe not to me, but to someone. The new cover photos on the new Timeline profile just started showing up scrolled down slightly as of a few minutes ago, so there is more info and less graphics on your wall/timeline page when you log in. Much better.

Starry, Starry Night

2011-09-18T16:10:00.000-03:00

A friend of mine, known as Lars Zergun, just put together a YouTube video which I really liked. I'm posting it here on my regular blog and personal facebook page, instead of my music blog and DJ page, because I think the people here would enjoy it more (especially the tree planters).

Lars is a planter and musician. The video is a compilation of shots that he took himself, some of which are from planting, and some of which are not.

The background track that he set the clips to is called "Vincent" by Don MacLean of "American Pie" fame, which was actually on the American Pie album. It's a beautiful (and pretty famous) song which has been covered by dozens of other artists.

The song refers to Vincent Van Gogh, the famous post-impressionist painter who shot himself when he was 37 years old, long before his paintings became famous. Click here for a bit of background on the meaning of the song.

Here are the lyrics to "Vincent":

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and grey
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colours on the snowy linen land

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen
They did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds and violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue
Colours changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artists' loving hand

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen
They did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you Vincent
This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you

Like the strangers that you've met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen
They're not listening still
Perhaps they never will...

Avicii - Penguin (Sadoway & Bolivia's Dubstep Remix)

2011-06-28T09:33:00.001-03:00

When I travelled to Antarctica last November, I ended up taking a lot of photos, which have already been seen by tens of thousands of people at this point. But I also took a lot of video footage, which I hadn't had time to play with until recently. Earlier this spring, I was trying to figure out a way to make it interesting, and thought it would be good background footage for a remix or an original track. And with the recently popularity of a track called "Penguin" by Avicii (Tim Bergling, who has also produced tracks such as "Seek Bromance" under the name Tim Berg), I thought this would be a perfect fit for a remix and video.

James Sadoway is a really talented producer and friend of mine that I met a few years ago through a mutual friend in Vancouver, Shawn Cole. When I talked to him about some ideas a few weeks ago, he said that he'd be interested in working together. I started by laying out a bit of basic work on the track and video, and visited him in Edmonton, and we decided to make the effort to finish putting it together. He's the expert at dubstep (as you can see from his SoundCloud page at soundcloud.com/james-sadoway), and he took my initial layout in an entirely new direction that I liked.

Anyway, here's the result, which you can listen to here via SoundCloud, or view on YouTube:

Avicii - Penguin (Sadoway & Bolivia's Rockhopper Remix) by djbolivia

I'm temporarily going to make this track available as a download, so you can grab it by right-clicking on this link:

http://www.chma.fm/Avicii_-_Penguin_(Sadoway_&_Bolivia's_Rockhopper_Remix).mp3

The trip to Antarctica was pretty interesting, and I wrote about it at this link back in the winter. There is a bit of background on the trip, links to hundreds of good photos, and download links for a few DJ sets that I played during the trip. I've got shows booked in a few interesting place this winter (Australia, Beijing) but it will be hard to top that trip.

By the way, if any established dubstep producers are interested in working with James, his email is sadoway at gmail.com.

Upbeat Workout Music, Mix #05

2011-05-25T14:37:00.004-03:00

This one took a few weeks longer than I had hoped to put together. I started picking all the tracks a month ago, when I was driving across Canada for a summer of work in western Canada's silviculture industry, but I've been so busy that I just finally got a chance to finish it early this morning.

Here's a Direct Link to download this mix (right-click):
http://www.chma.fm/DJ_Bolivia_-_Workout_Mix_05.mp3

[Note: some people have had problems downloading mp3's publicized here, especially if you're viewing this post through Facebook. If that's the case, click here for help & suggestions].

The mix is an hour long, and anyone can download it. The mix that you can download here doesn't have any personal or radio station promos in it, so it will be great if it's being played in a gym. This mix is for demo purposes only, and not for resale or redistribution.

Here are Track Listings for Workout Mix #05:

01. Avril Lavigne, "What The Hell" (Mikael Wills Remix).
02. Diddy & Dirty Money, "Coming Home" (Dirty South Club Mix).
03. George Acosta feat Kate Walsh, "Nite Time" (Original Mix).
04. Alexandra Stan, "Mr Saxobeat" (Extended Mix).
05. Adrian Lux, "Teenage Crime" (Axwell and Henrik B Remode).
06. Adele, "Rolling In The Deep" (Melvin Reese Mix).
07. Emii feat Snoop Dogg, "Mr Romeo" (Ralphi Rosario Club Mix).
08. Antoine Clamaran feat Soraya, "Live Your Dreams" (Extended Mix).
09. Cybersutra feat Sarah Mattea, "Dirty Gurrl" (Cybersutra Mix).
10. Sarah McLeod, "White Horse" (Whelan & Di Scala Club Mix).
11. Swedish House Mafia feat John Martin, "Save The World" (Bastian Van Shield Remix).
12. Milk & Sugar vs. Vaya Con Dios, "Hey, Nah Neh Nah" (Milk & Sugar Club Mix).
13. Tiesto & Mark Knight, "Beautiful World" (Original Club Mix).
14. One Republic, "All The Right Moves" (Dave Aude Club Mix).

Note: If you're trying to track down remixes listed above and they sound different than what you're hearing in this mix, it's because I do a lot of specific editing of my own to each track before I put the mix together, and there is a lot of extra percussion added.

Here are links to the previous workout mixes:
Workout Mix #01
Workout Mix #02
Workout Mix #03
Workout Mix #04

I've got lots of other upbeat electronica mixes available on my DJ website, on the Mix Downloads page. Admittedly, there aren't too many mixes there [yet] that are exclusively club dance tracks, but there are a lot of house/trance mixes that I find to be pretty good to listen to when I'm going running. Or driving. Or doing any sort of mindless task where I just want some energetic beats to listen to. Most of them are about an hour long, to fit onto a standard CD. Check them out, maybe you'd enjoy some of them?

Finally, if you like this mix, please forward the link on to any of your friends who might also enjoy it!

http://djbolivia.blogspot.com/2011/05/upbeat-workout-music-mix-05.html

I'd love to see this shared around more. If you're a member of any sort of workout or fitness website or message board, feel free to post a link to this post there (or click on the tweet or like buttons below).

Summer 2010 Tree Planting Video

2011-04-10T13:44:00.002-03:00

Every summer, I take a video camera with me out tree planting. I don't have a lot of time for filming, but I do generally get to use it occasionally and get three or four hours of footage. And then, after the season is over, I boil that down into three or four minutes of some of the best clips, and turn that into a "Summer Memories" video for Replant.ca, my planting website. I got distracted with other projects for a while this winter, but I recently finished the 2010 video.

This year's video is especially exciting because it's the first time that I had a high-def video camera. My regular camera broke at the start of the season, so unfortunately, I didn't have an opportunity to get any footage from May or early June. But I got a good new camera near the end of June, and the quality of the video that it captures is far, far above the old camera.

Here's a link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoqhcT9ug8k

I want to thank Lars Zergun & King Kong Reforestation for providing the backing audio, "Pounder Mix," which was used in this video. You can learn more about KKRF's music at:

  http://www.youtube.com/user/mikcross?feature=mhum

Thanks also to PK of Peppermill Records for making the "Hi & Ho" project happen, which is where I found out about the song originally. Here's a link to where you can download the entire Hi & Ho album for free. Twenty-six songs in total, all planting-related, written and recorded by planters:

  http://www.peppermillrecords.com/pm007

If you want to learn a bit more about tree planting, I'd suggest that you check out the Replant.ca website that I run, and go to the "photos" link at the top left. There are dozens of photo galleries there from the last ten years, each with between thirty and sixty photos. So there's lots of interesting stuff to look at.

You can also check out our YouTube video channel, which has all of the planting videos from 2002 onward, at this link:

  http://www.youtube.com/replant

Thanks, I hope you enjoy the videos/photos ...

PS: Unfortunately, I don't have any job opportunities as the camp is fully hired for this season.

Upbeat Workout Music, Mix #04

2011-03-10T19:18:00.010-04:00

Happy Grad Banquet to all grads at MTA tonight! I've spent the past couple days putting together another workout music mix, and there has been a lot of anticipation of people waiting for this one ...

Here's a Direct Link to download this mix (right-click):
http://www.chma.fm/DJ_Bolivia_-_Workout_Mix_04.mp3

[Note: some people have had problems downloading mp3's publicized here, especially if you're viewing this post through Facebook. If that's the case, click here for help & suggestions].

The mix is an hour long, and anyone can download it. The mix that you can download here doesn't have any personal or radio station promos in it, so it will be great if it's being played in a gym.

Here are Track Listings for Workout Mix #04:

01. Ke$ha, "Blow" (Radio Edit).
02. Nervo & Ollie James, "Irresistable" (Chuckie & Gergori Klosman Remix).
03. Katy Perry, "ET" (Dave Aude Club Mix).
04. Zoe Badwi, "Freefallin" (Moto Blanco Club Mix).
05. J Pearl, "It's Getting Physical" (Wideboys Dub Mix).
06. Kim Sozzi, "Rated R" (Jump Smokers Clean Extended Mix).
07. Alyssa Rubino, "Keep On Dancing" (Wideboys Club Remix).
08. Usher, "More" (Gareth Wyn Remix).
09. Rihanna, "S&M" (Joe Bermudez & Chico Extended Mix).
10. Jennifer Lopez, "On The Floor" (Brian Cua Summer Club Mix).
11. Sander Van Doorn, "Love Is Darkness" (Original Mix).
12. Gareth Emery, "Sanctuary."
13. Laidback Luke, "Timebomb" (Original Mix).
14. Deadmau5, "Sofi Needs A Ladder" (Dj Chaos Cut & Paste Re-Edit Mix).

Note: If you're trying to track down remixes listed above and they sound different than what you're hearing in this mix, it's because I do a lot of specific editing of my own to each track before I put the mix together, and there is a lot of extra percussion added.

Here are links to the previous workout mixes:
   Workout Mix #01
   Workout Mix #02
   Workout Mix #03

I've got lots of other upbeat electronica mixes available on my DJ website, on the Mix Downloads page. Admittedly, there aren't too many mixes there [yet] that are exclusively club dance tracks, but there are a lot of house/trance mixes that I find to be pretty good to listen to when I'm going running. Or driving. Or doing any sort of mindless task where I just want some energetic beats to listen to. Most of them are about an hour long, to fit onto a standard CD. Check them out, maybe you'd enjoy some of them?

Finally, if you like this mix, please forward the link on to any of your friends who might also enjoy it!

http://djbolivia.blogspot.com/2011/03/upbeat-workout-music-mix-04.html

I'd love to see this shared around more. If you're a member of any sort of workout or fitness website or message board, feel free to post a link to this post there (or click on the tweet or like buttons below).

Music by Mike Allison

2011-02-28T12:30:00.004-04:00

A lot of people who have been at MTA at any point in the last ten years are quite familiar with the name Mike Allison, by virtue of his music on several Conduct Becoming CD's, and other involvements at the University. He's been involved in everything from Garnet & Gold, to Dinner Theatres, to music production, to live performances, and also attended MTA and worked there afterward.

If you aren't already familiar with his music, he's a Canadian singer/songwriter with a great collection of Indie Folk/Rock tunes.

Mike provided a number of his songs for use as the backing audio tracks for some of my tree planting videos over the past half decade or so. Because of this, an entire generation of tree planters across Canada has become acquainted with his music. We were just thinking that it would be good if they could actually download the mp3's, so Mike just set up a SoundCloud page, with free download privileges for everyone. Here's the link:

http://www.soundcloud.com/mike-allison

Hopefully some of you who are reading this note on Facebook will enjoy going directly to that link to listen to some of the music. By the way, one of the tracks on that page is called, "When I Grow Old." That's a special one to me since I wrote it, and played half of the instruments in the recording.

Mike Allison - At Least One Song (Things That Move Us) by Mike Allison

Mike Allison - When I Grow Old (Radio Edit) by Mike Allison

Mike Allison - Someplace I've Never Been (Independent) by Mike Allison

Mike Allison - Leavin' In The Morning (Preshow) by Mike Allison

Mike Allison - Holly Would (Things That Move Us) by Mike Allison

Mike Allison - Take A Solo (Things That Move Us) by Mike Allison

Mike Allison - Save My Soul (Preshow) by Mike Allison

Summer 2009 Tree Planting Video

2011-02-09T12:32:00.004-04:00

Every summer, I take a video camera with me out tree planting. I don't have a lot of time for filming, but I do generally get to use it occasionally and get three or four hours of footage. And then, after the season is over, I boil that down into three or four minutes of some of the best clips, and turn that into a "Summer Memories" video for Replant.ca, my planting website.

I'm a little behind-the-times right now, and I'm spending most of this year catching up on projects that I should have done ages ago. So anyway, I spent the last five days and finally put together the Summer 2009 video. I'm hoping that I can find time to do the Summer 2010 video in April.

Here's a link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOpJpocgaYY

I want to thank Baba Brinkman for providing the backing audio, "El Plantador," which was used in this video. You can learn more about Baba's music at:

  http://www.babasword.com

Thanks also to PK for making the "Hi & Ho" project happen, which is where I found out about the song originally. Here's a link to where you can download the entire Hi & Ho album for free. Twenty-six songs in total, all planting-related, written and recorded by planters:

  http://www.peppermillrecords.com/pm007

If you want to learn a bit more about tree planting, I'd suggest that you check out the Replant.ca website that I run, and go to the "photos" link at the top left. There are dozens of photo galleries there from the last ten years, each with between thirty and sixty photos. So there's lots of interesting stuff to look at.

You can also check out our YouTube video channel, which has all of the planting videos from 2002 onward, at this link:

  http://www.youtube.com/replant

Thanks, I hope you enjoy the videos/photos ...

PS: Unfortunately, I don't have any job opportunities as the camp is fully hired for this season.

Upbeat Workout Music, Mix #03

2011-01-27T15:03:00.015-04:00

The response to the last pair of workout mixes that I posted on my blog has been phenomenal. The mixes have had thousands of downloads in the past twelve weeks. I was going to devote every sixth episode of my weekly radio show to doing these mixes, as an alternative to the progressive house that I usually play on the show. However, to keep people from being confused, I will stick to progressive house for the radio show after this week. However, I'll definitely keep making these workout mixes every six weeks. So you can look forward to the next one coming out in the first week of March.

Here's a Direct Link to download this mix (right-click):
http://www.chma.fm/DJ_Bolivia_-_Workout_Mix_03.mp3

[Note: some people have had problems downloading mp3's publicized here, especially if you're viewing this post through Facebook. If that's the case, click here for help & suggestions].

The mix is an hour long, and anyone can download it. As implied above, I used the same mix for my "Subterranean Homesick Grooves" radio show this week, to give it a bit of a bigger audience. However, the mix that you can download here doesn't have the radio station promos in it, so it will be better if it's being played in a gym.

Here are Track Listings for Workout Mix #03:

01. Katy Perry, "Firework" (Radio Version).
02. BoB, "Airplanes" (DJQ's Extended Club Edit).
03. Swedish House Mafia, "Miami 2 Ibiza."
04. Santito, "Voices Inside My Head" (Club Mix).
05. Martin Solveig & Dragonette, "Hello" (Club Edit).
06. Kylie Minogue, "Get Outta My Way" (Tommy Love Dream Mix).
07. Tim Berg, "Seek Bromance" (Samnuele Sartini Extended Mix).
08. Kaskade & Adam K, "Raining" (Original Mix).
09. Kaskade, "Fire In Your New Shoes" (Joachim Garraud Vocal Mix).
10. Tiesto vs Diplo, "C'Mon" (Original Version).
11. Robyn, "Indestructible" (Laidback Luke Club Mix).
12. Taio Cruz, "Break Your Heart" (Wideboys Club Mix).
13. ATB, "Could You Believe" (Original).
14. Armin van Buuren, "Not Giving Up On Love" (Glenn Morrison Remix).
15. Mischa Daniels, "Where You Wanna Go" (Album Version).

Click here if you want to download the first workout mix from twelve weeks ago. Or click here if you want to download the second workout mix from six weeks ago.

I've got lots of other upbeat electronica mixes available on my DJ website, on the Mix Downloads page. Admittedly, there aren't too many mixes there [yet] that are exclusively club dance tracks, but there are a lot of house/trance mixes that I find to be pretty good to listen to when I'm going running. Or driving. Or doing any sort of mindless task where I just want some energetic beats to listen to. Most of them are about an hour long, to fit onto a standard CD. Check them out, maybe you'd enjoy some of them?

Finally, if you like this mix, please forward the link on to any of your friends who might also enjoy it!

http://jonathan-scooter-clark.blogspot.com/2011/01/upbeat-workout-music-mix-03.html

I'd love to see this shared around more. If you're a member of any sort of workout or fitness website or message board, feel free to post a link to this post there (or click on the tweet or like buttons below).

Great Grey Owl video

2011-01-23T16:56:00.005-04:00

I got some good video footage of a owl when I was planting a while ago, and I just discovered it when I was editing some tree planting footage this weekend. The owl was pretty unconcerned about me getting close to it, so the footage turned out pretty well.

The Great Grey Owl (also known as the Lapland Owl) is one of the largest owls in the world, with a wingspan that can exceed five feet. However, its body is a lot of fluff and feathers, so it isn't heavy like a turkey or plump chicken.

These owls have excellent hearing, and can allegedly locate and capture prey moving through tunnels beneath two feet of snow because of this keen sense of hearing. These owls can crash through snow that could support the weight of a fully grown person, so they are pretty tough. They're the provincial bird of Manitoba.

Here's a direct link to the video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj5dkks-EHA

Free Cracked Copy of MicroSoft Office

2011-01-07T16:18:00.003-04:00

As most people realize, I'm fairly handy with computers. Like a backyard mechanic who has a whole machine shop in his garage, I like to tinker with technology. Installing RAM and hard drives and tuning up operating systems is actually pretty easy if you've got any common sense, but it seems to scare people off the same way you might be scared to change an alternator in your truck (which incidentally, is also not very difficult). So I get a lot of requests for help with fixing laptops. And the biggest request that I get, about once a week, is whether or not I can give someone a copy of MicroSoft Office.

So to cut down on the number of requests, I thought I'd post a solution right here on my blog. No, I'm not giving out hacked copies of Office. It's a great program, and without a doubt, the combination of Word & Excel is the software suite that I've used more than any other software. By a factor of at least 10x. I think I first bought a copy in 1990 or 1991, running on a 286, when computer monitors were still monochrome and color printers were unheard of, and have upgraded constantly since then. I guess it helps that I'm a perpetual student, so I qualify for educational discounts on software.

Anyway, my solution for your quest for a versatile office suite is this: "Open Office."

Open Office is an open source software suite, promoted by Oracle, often referred to as "OOo." OOo stands for "Open Office dot Org," not "Oracle's Open Office." Anyway, open source means that it is free. Free does not always mean lower quality. This software has been developed by a team of thousands of developers from around the world, working on it for over a decade, in order to provide a free office suite package to internet users everywhere. It has a significant (and growing) market share, and is available in over a hundred languages. And it is very compatible with most aspects of MicroSoft Office; at the very least, with everything that students would use it for.

OOo consists of a number of modules/programs, similar to MS Office. "Writer" is equivalent to MS Word. "Calc" is equivalent to Excel. "Impress" is equivalent to PowerPoint. "Base" is equivalent to Access. Well, they're not quite the same, but very similar. OOo handles all major file types, including export to PDF's, and has versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Check it out: http://www.OpenOffice.org

Seriously, why perpetuate the distribution of pirated software when you can get the equivalent for free? If you like MicroSoft Office, buy a copy. If you want to save money, use Open Office.

By the way, the current version of OOo looks more like Office 2007 than 2010, which might be a disadvantage for some users, but might be an advantage to people who dislike the new layout of the current version of Office.

Using Google Chrome as a Browser

2011-01-06T21:02:00.004-04:00

I'm upgrading my studio computer to Win7 today, finally, and of course I've got to re-do a lot of the little tweaks that I've done over the past few years. I'm going to post of few of the handy ones here in my blog tonight as I get things up to speed.

One of the first programs that I installed was Google Chrome, a web browser. I really prefer using this browser, even more than FireFox. It's got a lot of good features, such as "stealth mode." For instance, let's say that I go to the doctor and he tells me that I have ovarian cysts. I want to look them up on the internet to learn more, but I'm embarrassed and don't want my roommates to use the browser later and see the search that I made. I can hit Ctrl-Shift-N and it opens up a new "stealth" browser (I think they call it "incognito" mode) and any searches in that new browswer aren't logged in cookies, browse history, or auto-complete. I would assume that for people in the workplace who use facebook when the boss isn't looking over their shoulder, but don't want a trace of their browsing on their workstation, this is an ideal solution. Mind you, a network manager can still see where traffic is going, so it's not the ultimate self-preservation tool if you're visiting websites like "iwanttohidesomebodythatimurdered.com"

By the way, I don't have ovarian cysts.

So here's the special "tweak" that I add to Chrome. That was the original point of the post, because everything else that I mention in this post is a built-in feature. One feature of Chrome is that if you open a new tab, it shows all sorts of recently-visited websites on the screen. This is problematic at Christmas time if you're trying to disguise shopping sites that you've visited, so your boyfriend or girlfriend can't see them. There is a simple solution: install the "blank new page" plug-in from Chrome, and the new page always ends up as a blank slate. It also loads slightly faster than a screen full of history. Here's a link to this very useful plug-in, which I don't think a lot of people know about:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dpjamkmjmigaoobjbekmfgabipmfilij

Chrome is also very useful when it comes to bookmarks. Instead of a bookmarks or favorites bar on the left side of the screen, taking up space, it has a one-line bookmarks bar across the top, under the URL line. Use Ctrl-Shift-B to hide or unhide. Right-click and "add page" if you want to add items. Most of us really only look at about a dozen or so websites for 99% of our browsing, so this bar is pretty handy as a quick-launch favorites bar.

My favorite feature about Chrome? It has Google search built right into it, without having to lose a line of screen space to a search toolbar. Just type anything into the URL line that you want to search on, and Chrome automatically assumes that it is a Google Search instead of a URL.

Oh yeah, Chrome has auto-translation of foreign languages almost completely implemented now, which is also handy. And instead of a "home page," you have as many home pages as you want. I usually have about three: Gmail, Facebook, and one of my own sites. So when I launch Chrome, three tabs all load simultaneously, with all of the "home" pages that I want.

If you haven't been using Chrome, you should check it out today ...

Predictions for 2011

2011-01-04T03:42:00.005-04:00

I’m sitting here right now waiting for a video to render on my studio computer, so while I’m waiting, I’d thought I’d take an hour on my laptop to type out some of my thoughts about the future. Call this a New Year’s predictions post, although it’s a few days late.

I pay a lot of attention to technology, history, and how technology might affect the future. Really, when you think about it, the study of history and predicting the future are almost the exact same thing, just in different temporal directions.

You’ll probably wonder why I’m qualified to make predictions about the future, and what my expected success rate will be. Well first, I’m no more qualified than anybody else with some common sense who studies historical trends and that sort of stuff. And as for my expected success rate, I’m sure I’ll be right on no more than 80% of the thoughts that I’m going to put down here. However, I’ve made a few good calls in the past. For instance, three years ago, I suggested that the price of gold would rise from $550 to more than $1200 per ounce within about two years. Right now it’s trading at over $1400. Check out this post, which I astutely made at the beginning of one of the worst months in US economic history. I also wrote publicly in March of 2005 that I figured the price of oil was on the verge of skyrocketing. At the time, it was trading around $40 and its all-time high was under $60. I predicted over $75 within 24 months. It took fourteen months to break through $80 per barrel. When it comes to guessing when aliens are going to reveal themselves to the public on Earth, I haven’t got a clue. But when it comes to other subjects, predicting events in the near future can be pretty easy, based upon past and current trends.

Here we go:
1. Oil (which has been trading in the $80-89 range for most of the past four months) will average over $100/barrel through 2011 as a whole.
2. Gold and silver, currently trading at record highs of $1415 and $31 per ounce respectively, will break through $2000 and $50.
3. Portugal and Spain will undergo further debt downgrades that will rock the Euro. These two countries, especially Spain, are much bigger problems than Greece or Ireland was. The future of the Euro is very shaky. The economic crisis of 2009 may seem minor compared to what is left to come, and this time it will originate in Europe.
4. Development for Mobile computing platforms will become more important than development for desktops.
5. Hundred of “traditional” media outlets will cease business operations because of digital information sharing. Specially, a large number of print newspapers will go out of business, and radio stations will be on the verge. See the next point.
6. This is more of a 2012/2013 prediction, but before long, hi-def video/audio will be able to be streamed effectively to all net-based devices, including mobile handsets. This will force traditional broadcast television and radio into a corner. Television producers are already changing their production focus, understanding that a lot of their content is being viewed on 3” screens and through headphones, so they are adjusting their video and audio work accordingly.
7. The concepts of “controlling content” versus “owning copyright” will turn intellectual property laws inside out.
8. Facebook needs to re-make itself to offer content. Maybe iTunes and Facebook should merge. iTunes needs social networking, and Facebook needs content.
9. Someone will crack and share The Insurance File from Wikileaks.
11. Within Canada, Bell and Telus will merge their cell-phone divisions.
10. The Toronto Maples Leafs will, once again, fail to win the Stanley Cup.

I read an interesting book a year or two ago that talked about how the acceleration of technology and development was happening at an exponential rate. The author talked about how eventually, development will reach a “critical mass” of sorts in which the entire human race will be transformed due to the technological developments. Looking ahead, I see that as happening in 2012 or maybe 2013. Think about all the things around you now that weren’t even conceivable five years ago. You can take a photo of a cheque with your cell phone and it is automatically deposited in your bank account. When I was in high school, cell phones (and email) didn’t even exist! And the possibility of having HD video cameras in cell phones was pretty unthinkable a few years ago, yet they are commonplace today. Very soon, wireless mobile networks will be fast enough to stream HD data in real-time.

Think about how far humans have come in the past century. Look back only one hundred years, and think about some of these facts:
- The average life expectancy was 47 years.
- There were only about 144 miles of paved roads in the world.
- Ninety percent of doctors had NO college education.
- Women usually only washed their hair once a month, often using egg yolks as shampoo.
- Indoor plumbing? Try out-houses, for a significant portion of the population.
- The population of Las Vegas was thirty people.
- Crossword puzzles and canned beer hadn’t been invented yet.
- Marijuana, heoin, and morphine were all available over-the-counter.
- More than 95% of all births took place at home.

That’s just a short list that shows you how far we’ve come in one hundred years. However, the developments that we see over the next two or three will be equally staggering.

Earth has already entered the beginning of a number of global crises. Fossil fuel depletion is going to cause an energy crisis in a few more years that will change our way of life. The possibility of global warming knocking out the western ice sheet in Antarctica is huge, and when (not if) it happens, it will raise global sea levels by almost twenty feet and displace billions of people (at least the banks won’t have to worry about the housing glut anymore). High energy prices will lead to global food shortages, and a complete reordering of how food reaches consumers (think regionalization of food supply chains). All of these topics are things that I’ve studied in depth for years, and they’re generally kind of terrifying. However, I like to think on the bright side, and hope that the human race can use technological advances to mitigate many of these problems.

Oh yeah, and as far as the aliens go, I don’t really expect them to land until between 2017 and 2020.

Upbeat Workout Music, Mix #02

2010-12-17T23:52:00.007-04:00

The response to the last workout mix that I posted on my blog was pretty amazing. The mix has had thousands of downloads in the past six weeks. As a result, I've decided that every six weeks, I'll devote an episode of my radio show to creating a new mainstream/top40 club dance mix.

Here's a Direct Link to download this mix (right-click):
http://www.chma.fm/DJ_Bolivia_-_Workout_Mix_02.mp3

[Note: some people have had problems downloading mp3's publicized here, especially if you're viewing this post through Facebook. If that's the case, click here for help & suggestions].

The mix is an hour long, and anyone can download it. As implied above, I used the same mix for my "Subterranean Homesick Grooves" radio show this week, to give it a bit of a bigger audience. However, the mix that you can download in the link above doesn't have the radio station promos in it, so it will be better if it's being played in a gym.

Here are Track Listings for Workout Mix #02:

01. Freemasons & Wynter Gordon, "Believer" (Club Mix).
02. David Deejay & Ela Rose, "I Can Feel" (Le Que Remix).
03. Ke$ha, "We R Who We R" (James Rendon Club Mix).
04. David Guetta & Rihanna, "Who's That Chick" (Martin Souza Extended Edit).
05. Rihanna, "Rockstar 101" (Dave Aude Club Mix).
06. Taio Cruz, "Higher" (Radio Edit).
07. Pink, "Raise Your Glass" (Jump Smokers Extension).
08. Avicii & Sebastien Drums, "My Feelings For You" (Original Mix).
09. Pussycat Dolls, "I Hate This Part" (Dave Aude Club Mix).
10. Swedish House Mafia, "One" (Original Mix).
11. Empire Of The Sun, "Walking On A Dream" (Johan Baath Remix).
12. Black Eyed Peas, "The Time / The Dirty Bit."
13. Rihanna, "Only Girl In The World" (Liam Keegan Remix).
14. Yolanda Be Cool, "We No Speak Americano" (Jarleen Bootleg).

Click here if you want to download the first workout mix from six weeks ago.

I've got many more upbeat electronica mixes available on my DJ website, on the Mix Downloads page. Admittedly, there aren't too many mixes there [yet] that are exclusively club dance tracks, but there are a lot of house/trance mixes that I find to be pretty good to listen to when I'm going running. Or driving. Or doing any sort of mindless task where I just want some energetic beats to listen to. Most of them are about an hour long, to fit onto a standard CD. Check them out, maybe you'd enjoy some of them?

Finally, if you like this mix, please forward the link on to any of your friends who might also enjoy it!

http://jonathan-scooter-clark.blogspot.com/2010/12/upbeat-workout-music-mix-02.html

I'd love to see this shared around more. If you're a member of any sort of workout or fitness website or message board, feel free to post a link to this post there (or click on the tweet or like buttons below).

Trip To Antarctica

2010-12-09T22:50:00.002-04:00

Earlier this week I spent a few days getting photos online from a recent trip to Antarctica. I also did a bit of DJ’ing while I was down there, and have recordings of three live shows online. I’m finally getting around to my last project associated with the trip, ie. a description of what we actually did. However, before I do that, if people are curious about seeing the photos that I took, the gallery is at this link:

http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_antarctica2010a.html

I’ve got a few of those photos here in this blog post too, but in much smaller size & resolution. Really, you need to go to that photo page to do them justice.

Anyway, our trip lasted from November 20th to 30th, aboard a Russian scientific expedition ship called the Akademik Ioffe. The trip was organized by a friend of mine, through Quark Expeditions. There were a total of 107 passengers on the ship, although a smaller group of 17 of us were friends who were travelling together.

November 20th – Day 1

We arrived on the ship at about 4pm, turned in our passports (which the ship’s crew had to hold onto during the voyage), and got settled into our cabins. I was in a triple, and the quarters were obviously tight, but still quite clean and comfortable. We had a quick introductory meeting in the dining room at 5pm, and our expedition leader suggested that we go explore the ship and hang out on the top deck for our departure at 6pm.

We had dinner at 8pm, and a lifeboat drill afterward. Then, after watching our progress from up top for a bit, I headed to bed. I already had a scopolamine patch on to prevent nausea, and I took a gravol too, just to be safe. I expected a pretty rough trip, since there was a Beaufort force 11 storm ahead of us. That basically means waves of up to fifty feet, just slightly under hurricane force winds. However, the seas weren't expected to be bad over night, since we were protected by land for a while yet.

November 21st – Day 2

The anti-nausea drugs really put me out. Not only had I slept through the first night with no problems, I also slept through most of our first day at sea, although I had really intended to do that so I could be caught up on my rest for the adventures ahead. The ship’s crew ran lectures and demonstrations all day, with sessions talking about whales, seabirds, and several other topics. I skipped most of them, in favor of resting.

The Captain made a decision to hide behind Cape Horn before venturing out into the Drake Passage, since the weather was so bad. We actually spent most of the day fairly stationary, without making any real progress. I think a lot of people were disappointed by this delay to our adventure, knowing that it would cut down on our time in Antarctica, but I knew that the crew knew what was best. I was nervous about getting sea-sick, so I didn’t mind avoiding the storm system. I’ve only ever gotten sea-sick once in my life, during a storm on a ferry to Newfoundland, but that was definitely one of the worst feelings of my life. I figured that lots of water, only moderate amounts of food, no alcohol, scopolamine patches, gravol, and lots of rest should keep me in good shape. So far, so good. A lot of people were having trouble at supper though. By that time, we were well underway into open seas, and the ship was dancing around quite a bit. Certainly not as bad as I had expected – average big waves of probably only around ten feet. But of the seven people at my table at dinner, five bailed before eating their main course.

November 22nd – Day 3

Gravol tends to make me pretty thirsty. I had a sink in my cabin, right beside my bed, and I am pretty sure that I drank a couple dozen glasses of water. But I didn’t ever feel sick. From the sound of things though, a lot of other people were. It seemed that everyone wearing scopolamine patches were mostly OK. The crew put on more presentations throughout the day.

Our private group was given access to the Lecture Lounge for the evening, to use as late as we wanted. We moved all the chairs aside and set things up for a night of entertainment. The group stated off by doing a “Century Club” of sorts, which they called “Power Hour.” A real Century Club is one ounce of beer per minute for one hundred minutes. This group changed the rules a bit and went with an ounce and a half per minute for one hour. So in the end, they were ten ounces short of a real century. Needless to say, I had nothing to do with these shenanigans, wanting to keep my supper down. Somehow though, everyone in the group made it through without any nausea problems.

Once the drinking games were out of the way, I set up a system and played a couple hours of Drum & Bass music for the crowd. Shipboard Rave number one. We also had a couple projectors, so we could project random video graphics on the walls, and they had a Wii set up in one corner. I recorded my set, and it can be downloaded from my website. This was a bit of a historical moment in my DJ career. Normally, I’ve always mixed on turntables or CD players, but it was obviously impossible to bring a full set of that equipment with me, halfway around the world. Instead, I used Ableton to play my set, and tapped into the ships entertainment system for a speaker system. This was not the first time that I used Ableton for a live gig – I did that once before at Defcon in las Vegas in 2008. However, this was the first time that I actually recorded the set. I think it turned out pretty good. Here’s a link to that:

http://djbolivia.blogspot.com/2010/12/mix-bolivia-live-in-drake-passage.html

November 23rd – Day 4

This was supposed to be our first day in Antarctica, but because of the storm delay the first day, this was our last day of travel through the Drake. People were starting to get used to the ship’s motion already, and I don’t think many people were sick. The ship’s doctor was also handing out extra anti-nauseants like candy.

I spent a lot of time on the deck of the boat during the day, watching several different types of albatross species, some other sea-birds, a whale, and our first signs of ice.

November 24th – Day 5

We were in Antarctica when we got up. And I might add, we got up early. There was a 5am wake-up call, because the expedition staff wanted to fit as much activity in as possible, to help make up for our lost day. We got into the Zodiacs (motorboats) and went for a cruise at 5:30am at Orne Harbour. We came back to the ship for breakfast, then went for another cruise at Cuverville Island. Some people went climbing, some people went kayaking, and in the afternoon we did a full beach landing at Neko Harbour. Penguins everywhere! We ended the day with a very tasty BBQ up on the deck of the ship.

November 25th – Day 6

The weather was pretty bad in the morning, so we didn’t get to go out in the Zodiacs. However, we went for a drive in the afternoon at Almirante Brown and saw a couple of bases. However, the ice was too bad to get the Zodiacs to show. We did see seals and a whale up close, and of course lots more penguins and blue ice. It was American Thanksgiving, so we had a turkey dinner on the ship. After supper, about thirty of us went camping and all of the non-campers also did a short landing at the camp site in Paradise (Danco Island). That was pretty cool, and possibly the highlight of my trip. I got to play a short DJ set while camping. That’s an interesting story in and of itself, which you can read here:

http://djbolivia.blogspot.com/2010/12/mix-bolivia-live-in-antarctica.html

November 26th – Day 7

We got up early and went back to the ship, and had a solid breakfast. I had a quick nap after breakfast, and then we went for beach landings at Jougla Point and Goudier Island. This is where we saw Lockroy Station, a British outpost. The outpost is manned for six months a year by four Commonwealth staff. Imagine spending six months living and working in a remote outpost at the bottom of the world, surrounded by penguins, with no cell phones or internet, and almost no electricity! I’d have internet withdrawal for a while, but it still sounds like heaven to me. I picked up a job application, just in case. I saw a couple seals and lots of penguins, and a few whale bones. I also bought lots of postcards at the station gift shop. After lunch, there was a quick zodiac cruise at Damoy Point, plus the kayakers and skiers went for special events. After dinner, we did a special “Titanic Night” and I DJ’ed in the ship’s lounge for quite a while, a bit of jazz and then a full DJ set. Here’s a link to that:

http://djbolivia.blogspot.com/2010/12/mix-bolivia-live-on-akademik-ioffe.html

November 27th – Day 8

We spent the day today in the South Shetlands, which were a bit less snowy and ice-covered than the places we visited the previous three days. We did a beach landing in the morning at Whaler’s Bay (Deception Island), and another in the afternoon at Half Moon Island. Whaler’s Bay gave everyone a chance to do a polar plunge. After supper, we knew that we had to start heading north for Ushuaia, and this would be our last view of Antarctica. I spent several hours on deck, watching the scenery, before we finally headed out to the Drake Passage.

The Rest of the Trip

On the 28th and 29th, we passed through the Drake Passage once again. We had waves of about twenty feet one night, but everyone was a lot more comfortable going through it this time. I skipped the gravol, and just used a scopolamine patch, and felt fine. We got back to Ushuaia on the morning of the 30th without any incidents, and everyone headed off for more travelling, or to return to their homes.

If you want to download a PDF summarizing the wildlife that we saw on this trip (probably of interest to the biologist types out there), click here.

One recommendation if you ever take this trip. We drank our ship completely out of mix by the last night of the trip (mind you, I think that can partly be blamed on our small group). If you're going on this trip, and take a bottle or two of alcohol with you for your cabin, make sure you don't forget to take mix too!

Before I go, here's a late addition (June 25th, 2011): some video footage from the trip, set to a dubstep remix of Avicii's "Penguin"

All in all, it was a pretty amazing trip. You’d think that it would be easy to get sick of snow and penguins, but I’m definitely hoping to head back in November of 2012. In fact, I’m going to organize a group tour that would be open to any of my friends and associates from Mount Allison University, and also for music industry friends. Let me know if you’re interested! And again, if you haven’t already checked out the photo galleries that I have online, go up and check out that link at the top of this page. The smaller photos that I included in this blog posting really don't do the trip justice!

Watch Out For Moose!

2010-11-07T12:46:00.013-04:00

In many parts of Canada, large animals on the roads are a significant danger at night. If I'm not on a full divided highway, I rarely drive much above 80 km/h at night, and often slower than that, much to the annoyance of my passengers. Although it is kind of slow and painful, it occasionally pays off, like the other night.

On Thursday evening, I was driving a few kilometers away from my property in Port Elgin, and saw a moose on the highway. I swerved to the left, and missed it by about a foot. It's a good thing I swerved left, because if I had gone to the right, I would have hit a second moose behind the first that I didn't see initially. Or maybe even worse, I wouldn't have made it past the first one and hit TWO moose at the same time. This is exactly why I drive a lot slower at night.

(Click on the photos to see them in higher resolution).

I find that moose are harder to see than deer. For one, their coats are darker, so they don't stand out as much. Also, deer are skittish and usually turn to face an oncoming vehicle, so motorists often see the reflections from their eyes. However, a moose is usually either stupid or indifferent, or too high off the road surface for drivers in low cars, so you never see their eyes.

Hitting a moose isn't anything like hitting a deer. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians have hit deer. It's the kind of thing that nearly every rural driver expects could happen at least once in their life. But all that a deer usually does is trash your car. I don't mean to downplay this type of accident, because hitting a deer is still very dangerous. Unfortunately, more than a dozen people die every year in Canada because of collisions with deer. I looked up the stats for deer accidents and the numbers in the United States are stunning: there are an average of a MILLION AND A HALF collisions per YEAR between deer and vehicles. That translates to about 150 deaths, which means that 0.1% of collisions result in fatalities. It seems like a low percentage, but that's still far too many. But your chances of getting killed when hitting a moose (or elk or caribou) are a LOT higher. A deer might weigh up to 200 pounds. A moose is usually north of a thousand pounds. Check out the photos at this link:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/accident/moose.asp

Recently, our part of the province saw a very high profile moose accident just outside of Moncton, where a young couple died, leaving behind a 2-year old child:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2010/10/07/nb-neguac-funeral-rousselles.html

Here are a few tips from a BC website:

- Moose eyes do reflect the light from headlights, but often the moose's eyes are too high above the beam to catch the light. A grown moose often stands taller than a car.

- Moose are a hazard in summer (as well as in winter). They crave salt and often get it from the side of the road.

- Long straight stretches of road are still hazardous. Drivers tend to speed and thus cannot react in time if a moose or other animal does appear.

- Deer are herding animals. Just because you miss one does not mean you are clear of them.

- There are no studies proving conclusively that deer whistles work. It is better to be wildlife aware when driving, and not to rely on the whistle.

Anyway, next time you're driving at night and see a "wildlife on highway" sign, remember that you're going to get to your destination a lot FASTER if you don't run into an animal. Driving slowly isn't a bad idea.

Upbeat Workout Music, Mix #01

2010-10-29T13:13:00.010-03:00

This week was my roommate Kati's birthday, so I decided to put together a dance music mix, for her to listen to when she goes running. A lot of people listen to other mixes from my website when they're running or working out, but I figured that this time, instead of using house & trance music, I'd use mainstream club dance tracks which are a lot more well known.

Here's a Direct Link to download this mix (right-click):
http://www.chma.fm/DJ_Bolivia_-_Workout_Mix_01.mp3

IF you are trying to download through the Facebook note feed, instead of being able to right-click to download (like you can through my original blog post), you will run into a problem. On Facebook, you must first click on the link regularly, to start the mp3 playing, and THEN right-click and choose the "save as" option.

The mix is an hour long, and anyone can download it. I actually used the same mix for my "Subterranean Homesick Grooves" radio show this week, to give it a bit of a bigger audience. However, the mix that you can download in the link above doesn't have the radio station promos in it, so it will be better if it's being played in a gym.

Here are Track Listings for Workout Mix #01:

01. Katy Perry, "Teenage Dream" (Liam Keegan Remix).
02. Dresden & Johnston, "Keep Faith" (Original Club Mix).
03. Afrojack, "Take Over Control" (Original Mix).
04. Kaci Battaglia & Ludacris, "Body Shots" (Dave Aude Club Mix).
05. Robyn, "Dancing On My Own" (Buzz Junkies Club Mix).
06. Hyper Crush, "Keep Up" (Tony Arzadon Remix).
07. Lady Gaga, "Alejandro" (DJ Nejtrino & DJ Baur Radio Mix).
08. Antoine Clamaran, "Gold" (Thomas Gold Remix).
09. La Roux, "Bulletproof" (Dave Aude Club Mix).
10. Stromae, "Alors On Danse" (DJ's From Mars Club Remix).
11. Taio Cruz, "Dynamite" (Mixin' Marc Club Remix).
12. Far East Movement, "Like A G6" (Disco Fries Remix).
13. Duck Sauce, "Barbara Streisand" (O God Remix).
14. Ke$ha, "Take It Off" (Jake Walmsley 2010 Electro Remix).
15. Flo Rida, "Club Can't Handle Me" (David Guetta Remix).

It was pretty fun putting this mix together, since it was a bit of a change from the usual style of my radio shows. This is the type of music that I use when I'm playing club nights around home. I've already decided that I'm going to put together a mix in this style about once every six to eight weeks as a change of pace on the radio show, and I'll post them in this blog as a "workout mix" series. If you like this one, you can look forward to the next one on December 17th.

I've got many more upbeat electronica mixes available on my DJ website, on the Mix Downloads page. Admittedly, there aren't too many mixes there [yet] that are exclusively club dance tracks, but there are a lot of house/trance mixes that I find to be pretty good to listen to when I'm going running. Or driving. Or doing any sort of mindless task where I just want some energetic beats to listen to. Most of them are about an hour long, to fit onto a standard CD. Check them out, maybe you'd enjoy some of them?

I'd love to see this shared around more. If you're a member of any sort of workout or fitness website or message board, feel free to post a link to this post there (or click on the tweet or like buttons below).

Outside The Box with John Mauldin - Oh Canada!

2010-10-21T22:11:00.012-03:00

For many, the thought of reading economic data and financial analysis is tantamount to torture; a subject to be avoided at all costs. Sites like The Onion have more humourous articles, and sites like Spankwire have more interesting "graphical yield curves" (albeit not work-safe). But for a smaller group of people, curiosity about what is happening in the world around us takes precedence. Especially when it eventually affects our pocketbooks.

I guess I'm not your typical male. I'd rather read the Globe & Mail's financial section than Gun Dog or Sports Illustrated (well, truth be told, I'd rather read them all if I had more time). I guess that the business degrees that I took at university impacted me a bit that way, and my entrepreneurial experiences setting up several businesses have made me quite conscious of the Canadian and global financial climate. British statesman Edmund Burke once said something along the lines of, "those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it." I think that knowing and trying to understand past economic events, coupled with an awareness of ongoing issues, can certainly benefit a person.

There are a lot of analysis newsletters out there. Some are humorous, some are dry. Some are expensive, some are free. Some are biased, while some are written by pretty open-minded authors. Some specialize, and some are wide-ranging. The best author that I've come across is John Mauldin, a registered investment advisor whom I believe lives in Texas, but who touches on issues from all over the world. He also shares articles and commentary from hundreds of his associates, and he is very well connected. He started his free newsletter online almost a decade ago, and it has grown to well over a million readers. That alone should tell you that he has some good things to say. His newsletter is read by everyone from history & business & poly-sci students, to bankers, to top lawmakers and congressmen.

Before I get into the "Oh Canada" part of this post, let me suggest that you take the time to check his website out quickly, and submit your email address for a free subscription. You won't get spam, just a single newsletter now and then, maybe once or at best twice per week. If you're a business or economics student, or someone who pays attention to financial issues at any level, you'll be glad you did. Here's the link: www.frontlinethoughts.com

Ok, now that we've got that out of the way, let me give you a few excerpts from a newsletter that he sent out a few days ago. Let me preface by saying that occasionally, I admit that his newsletters get to be a bit tedious even for myself. He infrequently gets into a lot of higher-level economics, with a lot of graphs, and I sometimes want to go grab a cold beer before I read any further. But that's only about 5% of the newsletters, and I wouldn't want him to change that. In fact, I usually get kind of excited when his newsletters arrive, because I find the other 95% to be really interesting. And occasionally, there is one like the recent "Oh Canada," that I find to be outstanding.

Here are a few (lengthy) excerpts from the "Oh Canada" newsletter. Incidentally, I have reprinted these here with his kind permission. Since my blog is read primarily by Canadians, there is a lot of recent history that might be very educational:

There are those who say the US is doomed, that there is no way out from our problems with deficits, future entitlement promises, and a dysfunctional political system. And in my darker moments I worry that they are right.

I get the problems, probably more than most. But there is a way out. Hopefully, it does not entail collapse first, as some suggest. But it will require a lot of hard decisions. Some will be very hard.

For example, many point to the unfunded Medicare liabilities of some $70 trillion. I don’t worry about them so much, as they will never be paid, at least not under the current system. LONG before we get to that point, there will be a crisis that will force us to deal with the issues. Rule: if something can’t happen, then it won’t. We can’t pay the Medicare bill, so it won’t happen. Something else will happen in the meantime. It may not be good or pleasant, but something will come along to change the rules. More taxes? Fewer benefits? That is up in the air. But the system as it currently stands will not be allowed to prevail. Ask Greece how that is working out for them.

In today’s Outside the Box we look at a country where they had an even worse problem than we are faced with here in the US. They were on the ropes and their bond market was balking. Yet, their left-wing government made some very hard choices and turned things around. And now they are on top.

... it was somewhat ironic that one of the two books I read while over there [Italy] was about Canada and, specifically, the extraordinary financial turnaround that country has made over the last 15 years. Remarkably, if you were to roll the clock back to 1995, Canada was actually deeper in debt than Italy. In those days, the Canadian dollar was derisively known as either the Loonie (after the bird on Canada’s $1 coins) or the Northern Peso. The situation was so dire that the Wall Street Journal ran what turned out to be a pivotal article in which the authors asserted that Canada had become “an honorary member of the Third World in the unmanageability of its debt problem.”

This editorial set off shock waves around the world and, of course, within Canada itself. To its credit, Canada’s political establishment got fiscal responsibility religion in a hurry; it was almost like they went from being atheists to Southern Baptists overnight. And, get this: for the most part, it was Canada’s equivalent of our Democratic Party that assumed the yoke of pulling the country back toward the high ground of financial solvency. Do you think that perchance we could learn a thing or two from Canada’s experience?

...
A far more rational way to approach the problem (I realize that rationality and politicians rarely converge) would be to make the book I just finished — The Canadian Century, Moving Out of America’s Shadow — required reading for all incoming members of Congress. It would be nice to demand this from incumbents as well, but let’s face it: most of them don’t even bother to read the legislation they put into law.

...
At its scariest zenith, Canadian federal and provincial government debt amounted to 120% of GDP, with roughly 70% at the national level and an outrageously bloated 50% owed by the provinces. Again, to put that in perspective, despite our debt binge over the last decade, US government debt is around 60% of GDP, while state debt is nearly 17% of GDP, or 77% overall (this is based on net, not gross, debt and excludes the Social Security trust fund holdings as well as intergovernmental liabilities).

As I’ve given various speeches over the last year, it has become clear to me that very few Americans are aware of the extraordinary recovery Canada has achieved since the mid-1990s. When I bring it up, most people seem surprised that Canada could have gone from a laughing stock to the envy of the developed world in just a decade. But, actually, 10 years wasn’t the true recovery period. And that was my big surprise from reading The Canadian Century. The reality is that Canada achieved stunning progress in a mere three years.

Mauldin then goes on to talk about some of the reforms that resulted in Canada's comeback. The full article can be read here:

http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/john_mauldins_outside_the_box/archive/2010/10/18/o-canada.aspx

Anyway, like I said, check out John's newsletter if you enjoy reading this kind of stuff. It ranges from insightful to brilliant, and it is rare that I finish one of his letters without taking away some good new knowledge.

And now, on a humorous note before I leave, I'll give you one last insight into Canada. If you don't follow Canadian hip hop (and many people who've made it this far through my blog post probably don't), then check out this video by Halifax group Classified. The lyrics are very insightful about Canadian culture:

YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znejGNjOtmY

Sorry that I had to use this smaller version with lyrics. The original on YouTube, which had a lot more views, just got blocked in Canada by Sony, for reasons which I haven't figured out yet. Probably because of the entire Heritage Council commercial that was also included. Viewers from other countries might be able to watch it though.

Anyway, big ups to John Mauldin for his newsletters, and to Classified & IV for this little bit of Canadiana.

Glen Ballard Scholarship at Berklee

2010-09-01T18:42:00.000-03:00

I’m currently in the middle of working through two separate Masters’ programs through the Berklee College of Music, one in Music Theory and one in Production. I just found out that I am the recipient of a "celebrity scholarship," thanks to support donated by Glen Ballard.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name Glen Ballard, you should be. He is an R&B, rock, and pop songwriter and record producer who has had a hand in releases by an incredible number of artists. I’m going to list just a few of the artists that he has either performed with or done production work for, and you’ll see what a huge impact he has had on contemporary popular music: Michael Jackson, the Pointer Sisters, Wilson Phillips, Paula Abdul, Evelyn King, Van Halen, Aerosmith, Alanis Morissette, No Doubt, Shakira, Dave Matthews Band, Christina Aquilera, the Goo Goo Dolls, Annie Lennox, and dozens of others. Wow.

It’s quite an honor to be recognized for this scholarship. Now the only problem is that my cumulative GPA is only 3.82. I’m happy with that, but it could be higher. But now that I’ve finally returned home and to my personal studio today, after four months on the road, I’m excited to really dig into the course work more heavily and see if I can get that GPA closer to 4.0.

Many, many thanks to Glen, both for his support with this scholarship, and also for his diverse contributions to contemporary mainstream music.

Save BC's Forests

2010-06-20T14:32:00.002-03:00

The reforestation industry on Canada's west coast is in a huge mess right now. As a result of the recent economic downturn, dozens and dozens of mills have gone out of business. Unfortunately, in an attempt to save money, reforestation of logged areas is being thrown by the wayside.

In addition to that problem, the Mountain Pine Beetle infestation in BC has impacted approximately fifteen million hectares of forest. It is estimated that around a third of that land will NOT regenerate naturally, and will require human intervention in the form of tree planting. The government has no intention to address reforestation in most of this area.

Twenty years ago, the province planted far, far more trees than today. In terms of reforestation, 2010 is the worst year in a couple decades. The low number of seedlings being planted is going to drop even further in 2011. While the province can invest a billion dollars into the Olympics, it cannot muster the political will to invest a few hundred million more into reforestation, which will provide the backbone of a sustainable forestry industry (and tens of thousands of jobs) for decades to come.

Take a look at this graphic, and you can see how much pine has been killed in the province as of 2009:

Original map at: http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfp/mountain_pine_beetle/maps/BCMPBv72009Kill.jpg

Check out this story from the CBC in 2007 that suggested that reforesting the Pine Beetle forests might take about thirteen centuries:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/09/19/bc-1000yearplan.html

In this photo that I took near Kamloops in 2008, you can see the extent of the mortality among mature trees. The very youngest trees (about ten years and less) are generally not being affected, but almost everything else is:

Please, if you care about the environment (even if you don't live in British Columbia), take a moment to visit the forestfacts.ca website, and sign their petition urging greater government support for reforestation. It will only take a minute for you to read it and sign. Click on this link so you can read and sign the petition:

Link to the Petition

Please forward this link to any of your friends or family who might be concerned about this issue. Thanks ...

The Meaning of 420

2010-04-24T04:59:00.004-03:00

For anyone who smokes pot, the meaning of the phrase "420" is very symbolic. Urban legend says that 420 is the police code to refer subtly to someone who is smoking marijuana.

It turns out that this urban legend is incorrect. I just read one of the most interesting articles I've read in some time, which discusses the origins of the phrase, so I thought I'd share it. Check it out:

Click here to read the article from the Huffington Post.

I don't actually smoke pot myself. That probably surprises more than a few people. I'd much rather sit down with a couple of cold beer, and perhaps a shot or two of tequila or bourbon. However, the Canadian culture is so heavily intertwined with the cannabis culture that the subject is fascinating to almost all Canadians. And I am a believer in the concept that people should be able to decide for themselves whether or not to partake, as long as it doesn't hurt themselves or others around them.

Legalization? I don't see any need for pot to be legalized in Canada.

Decriminalization? Makes sense to me.

Health-wise? Smoking isn't good for your lungs. I do like my lungs.

But considering the amount of butter and other fats that I shovel into my stomach and indirectly into my circulatory system, I guess I shouldn't criticize others for abusing their lungs.

Revenue Canada Strikes Again!

2010-04-14T18:19:00.003-03:00

This situation would be rather funny if I hadn't just spent four hours trying to document and resolve it.

I was speaking to the Canada Revenue Agency earlier today, and they told me that they owed me $362.91 because I had paid them too much a few months ago. I was quite pleased to hear that, of course. However, the guy on the phone then went on to say, "but we aren't able to give it back to you unless you're able to explain why you gave it to us in the first place."

WTF?? I thought he was joking at first. He wasn't. Actually, once I talked to him some more, it made sense - it was the "current source deductions" department, which handles money that employers have to contribute into the EI and CPP programs, and since the funds are held in trust they can't just arbitrarily issue a refund cheque without detailed corroborating evidence.

So anyway, the long and short of the story is that I've spent the past four hours trying to properly document my answer, which essentially COULD have been reduced to this short paragraph:

"You sent me a notice on October 26th saying that I owed you $362.91 (with no accompanying explanation), and I was stupid enough to think that you might have been correct, so I paid it. That's why you've been overpaid by $362.91."

The only hard part was trying to say that diplomatically. Luckily, I managed to write a fourteen hundred word letter to explain the situation in excruciating detail, along with five pages of spreadsheets and printouts, so hopefully it will take them just as long to sort out as it took me to put everything together.

Facebook Friends Limit Removed?

2010-03-19T05:54:00.005-03:00

For a long time, Facebook has capped the number of "friends" that someone may have at 5,000 people. It appears that the company may have just quietly lifted that limit, from what I can tell so far. I can't find any official information yet in a Google search, but I think the genie is out of the bottle.

First of all, you might ask, "Why would someone want to be able to have more than 5,000 friends?" Major studies undertaken a year or so ago found that the average facebook user only had a couple hundred friends, and more to the point, some sociology studies have identified that most people only have about half a dozen to a dozen true "friends." The problem lies in the definition: Facebook "friends" include "acquaintances," which can justifiably number in the hundreds or thousands.

So rather than focusing on the definition of friends here, and the moral issues of calling casual acquaintances "friends" (not a bad thing?), let me focus on the facebook-specific implications: social & professional marketing.

In terms of social marketing, some people like adding lots of acquaintances. Others rarely add acquaintances, and let acquaintances find them. I'm not going to comment on this process here, mostly because I don't think it's that relevant to this post. In any two-way relationship, someone has to make the first step.

Incidentally, when thinking purely in terms of numbers, is five thousand friends "too many?" I don't believe so, for some people. I've been thinking about this for a little while this evening (er, morning). I have about 1300 people in my friends list on Facebook. Many people say that's a lot. I disagree. I'd guess that when you consider all the people that I know well enough to have a reasonable conversation with on the street or on the telephone, less than one tenth are in my friends list. Work that backwards, and I probably know well over ten thousand people well enough to know who they are and talk to them comfortably. Seems like a lot? Maybe I'm over-estimating? No. Think about it this way: Over the past decade or more, between my work as a tree planting supervisor, as a bar manager, and as a restaurant owner, I've had over a thousand direct employees. Add to that the people I know through the music industry, either as professionals or as fans or as friends. Add to that all the regular customers (students and alumni) that I've come to know well in my job running the bar at the University - I usually know close to half of each year's grad class, so there's another ten thousand people right there. Five thousand acquaintances is not unreasonable for some "public figures." And think about writers, politicians, activists, actors, etc. They'd meet many more people than I might.

In terms of professional marketing, this limit is important. Facebook has traditionally had three main approaches for marketing (I won't lie - I use FB as much for the marketing as I do for the social aspects, although I consider both to be equally important). These three are:

(1). Personal Friends: I've tried to block people that I don't know. In fact, last year, I put up a post saying:

I have decided to stop accepting friend requests on my personal page from random internet crack-heads & stalkers. Random unknown DJ fans will heretofore be denied and will remain banished to my "DJ Fan Page," except for the few hundred of you that I already know well or know vaguely (if you're still here, you passed the test). MTA friends/alum are great, as are the tree planters, family & friends, and also the professional musicians & producers. Oh, and the random peeps that I meet in the bars in Halifax, Moncton, and Saint John are generally pretty cool and encouraged to remain.

Going forward, if you're offended by any of my personal posts, remember the following: I spend six months of each year being far too sober for my own good. I spend the other six months being occasionally the opposite. Your goal is to figure out which is which. Life is short: enjoy it.

I think I have now narrowed my friends list down to the 1245 people whom I currently would be quite comfortable sharing a drink or a few hours of conversation with. You are one of them.

The drawback with personal friends is that the number has always been capped at five thousand. Facebook's reason for this was originally a logistical scaling issue, and a couple years ago, a study found that there were only a thousand users on Facebook with this problem. So it wasn't really "a problem" in their eyes.

(2). Groups: The advantage to "groups" on Facebook (over fan pages) is more direct control of members, plus better messaging capabilities, albeit only IF the group was, historically, under five thousand members. The big problem with groups, however, was that once they reached five thousand members, the ability to message members was removed entirely, to minimize message traffic and spam. Speaking as a DJ and musician, or any type of figure that wants to communicate with fans, this is a death sentence. You have to assume that your popularity will grow over time, and thus, eventually your group will become useless in terms of communicating with fans.

(3). Fan Pages: This is where "fan pages" came in. Fan pages on FB allow for administrators to continue to send out updates to fans, no matter how large the group gets. The only problem with this (and admittedly, it's not a deal-breaker, but it is quite annoying) is that "updates" are collected in a separate folder in your inbox from personal or group messages, therefore, a lot of updates are not read by fans unless they specifically choose to go through their update folder. And although I'm not positive about this, I don't believe that fan updates result in a message notifier being sent to your email account, which further reinforces the fact that if you don't specifically check your update folder, you never see the updates.

Fan Pages are obviously the best option at the moment for public figures who will attract a large fan base, and groups are the best for figures who will maintain a small base of under five thousand. But trying to plan this in advance leads to difficulties. Facebook will not let you arbitrarily switch back and forth. Ouch.

In May of 2008, news reports surfaced to state that Facebook WAS planning to lift the five-thousand friend limit eventually, although no specific date was announced. Info that I've seen recently indicates is that this change is still being considered for this year. Earlier tonight, I finally saw a couple people with friends lists that cracked five thousand. To be honest, it jumped out at me pretty quickly, because a lot of friends of mine who are DJ's or producers have been capped at 4999 friends, so seeing 5000+ was a bit of a shock. However, there is no official news to date.

If this change has finally happened, officially, it raises a few questions:

1. Has the limit really been lifted entirely, or has it been just raised to a slightly higher amount (which is no long-term solution), or was this a programming problem? (For example, if you have 4999 fans, and then ten of them are university students who temporarily suspend their accounts during exams to avoid distractions, and you add ten more fans to replace those, then those students reactivate their accounts, that might circumvent the cap temporarily).

2. Has the limit only been increased for personal friends, or does it also apply to groups? And remember that groups have always been able to have 5000+ members, unlike personal friends' lists, however, messaging has been blocked. So this is really two separate issues, although the fact that the caps are the same leads me to wonder if they happen to be linked and whether or not both aspects have been changed.

3. How will this affect promotions for public figures? As noted, I've always kept my friends' list fairly exclusive. Some DJ's that I know have tried to circumvent the problem by having multiple accounts. However, if the limit has been lifted, I think I would try to set up two personal accounts, and limit one to the categories of real acquaintances that I know, and use the other one for the more random fans of my DJ'ing and productions. This is risky too, because FB could theoretically crack down on my extra account and pull it.

The issue of spam concerns me. As the administrator of a fan page, I am the one who creates the "spam." I dislike receiving garbage emails, so I therefore try to avoiding being the person who sends them. With my fan page, in nine months, I've only sent out five fan updates. But the whole point of marketing centers on the ability to communicate with fans effectively. If I could send actual messages to the in-boxes of all fans, it would be more effective than sending updates. But I would be very cautious about sending out any messages unless they were what I considered to be the very most important ones, ie. if I was releasing a new self-produced track, or any other news significant to my music career. Unfortunately, my interpretation of what is important is not always interpreted the same way by fans, and even worse, some fan page administrators don't seem to mind clogging up peoples' in-boxes. But there is a feedback mechanism there - if you get annoyed at the quantity or content of messages that you're getting from a page/group/person, you can always "remove friend" or "leave group/page."

It will be interesting to learn, eventually, what's happening here. I just hope that Facebook eventually releases some official information. At the present, there is still just rumour and speculation. You would think that in a theoretical sense, since a network's strength is reinforced by the size and strength of its nodes, FB would be willing to expand the numbers if scaling is presumably no longer as big an issue as it was several years ago.

ETA, March 20th, 2010:

Now the accounts that I saw with over 5,000 are below that number again, so maybe the limit has not been lifted yet. A few more thoughts:

- If Facebook is worried about lifting the cap but is also thinking about their revenue model, they could maybe give users the ability to become a "professional" member by paying something like $99 per year and those members would be allowed to exceed the limit. I'm not saying that I would necessarily be interested in paying the premium myself, but it would also give an option to those people who are quite adamant about scaling to a larger group.

- Maybe "friends" on FB could eventually be divided into two categories: friends and acquaintances, or friends and connections. Mind you, I haven't thought this option through carefully yet, and my initial gut reaction would be that this would be unbelievably complex for FB to implement. And I don't yet see how this could solve the problems that I've touched on.

- For my personal example, of being happy with keeping my friends private and having a widely used fan page, I could solve the "communications" issue by creating a group or groups specifically for the purpose of sharing promotional items. For example, my friends' list stays exactly the same. My fan page stays exactly the same. On my fan page, I put up a notice that says, "incidentally, if you wish to receive messages from me whenever I release new music or want to share videos & other important news, join my 'DJ Bolivia Music Releases 1' group." Then I'd have the ability to direct message members of that group, without messaging other fans who wouldn't read the messages any. And if that promotional sub-group got close to 5,000 members, I start "group 2." The only problem I can see with this solution is that I'm not sure how to easily cap membership once I get close to 5,000, without booting people out of the group. I guess that there are ways to make the group a closed group once you move onto the second or successive groups, so ultimately, this last idea might prove to be the best solution.

I'm going to have to think about this for a few more days.

ETA, November 7th, 2010:

The limit is still in place. However, "groups" as they were known six months ago have been eliminated. The old groups that were previously in place have not been erased, but it is not possible to great new groups. Instead, fan pages seem to be the trend of the future. There is also a new sub-group category which I'm just exploring, whereby a person can create and automatically add people to their own sub-group. Very strange.

Olive Branch Restaurant

2010-03-15T12:33:00.004-03:00

The Olive Branch restaurant, which I used to own, has just recently reopened in Sackville.

Please note that I am no longer affiliated with that business. I sold the assets to the new owners, and I am not working there, nor do I own any interest in the name or venue. A lot of people have contacted me over the past week, assuming that I opened it back up because the Pub is closing, but I am 100% uninvolved with it.

I wish the new owners the best of luck in their new venture.

How to Save Yourself $7,500

2010-01-30T17:28:00.006-04:00

A few months ago, I sold my house. I spent about a day of effort putting the information online myself, and saved myself $7,500. Well, almost half of that amount, anyway. Let me explain ...

In Canada, when you buy or sell a house, the seller usually loses about a 6% commission to the real estate agent. My house sold for about $130,000, but I didn't have to pay any commission to an agent. It's not that hard to save yourself the same money if you're selling. Here's how:

I started off by making a web page about the house. Granted, I find it pretty easy to throw together a quick web page, and I have my own server account, so that's not exactly the easiest thing for everybody. But if you're trying to sell, you don't have to create your own personal website to benefit from this post. There are ways around that, as I'll explain in a minute.

Once I had the web page together, I put an ad on Kijiji. Anybody can figure out how to do this. You don't even need your own web page - you can let Kijiji "be" the web page. The only reason I made my own was so I could add a bunch of additional information (several pages worth, plus a ton of photos) so interested buyers could figure out more about the house themselves, without having to pester me with questions. Basically, I wanted a filter to save myself some time.

Once the Kijiji ad was posted, I decided to invest a bit of money. I spent a little under $100 and got some major extra publicity for the ad with things like highlighting and home page rotation. You don't actually need to do this, because you can post an ad for free, but I figured that if I was [hopefully] going to save myself several thousand dollars in commissions, it would be worth trying to make sure that more eyes saw the ad.

After that I sat back and waited. I got my first call from someone wanting to look at the house about seventeen MINUTES after it was posted. I definitely did not expect those kind of results. That person didn't turn out to be solid lead, but over the next month I had about a dozen calls. And one of those calls led to the sale.

I wasn't in a huge rush, otherwise I probably would have throw a few extra weapons at the fight. For instance, I had considered buying a professional listing on PropertyGuys.com - a full-package there is definitely more pricey than just putting an ad on Kijiji, but at $1,400 they agree to market your house basically "forever," until it sells (and they also have much cheaper packages). After a bit of investigation, that seemed like a smart idea, although as it turned out I sold the house before getting to that point. I was also considering using Google AdWords to bring more traffic to the Kijiji ad, but again, I wasn't in a big rush.

Of course, most people don't have their own real estate agent training, and selling a house is a complicated issue. I went down to one of the local lawyers, explained what I was doing, and he took care of everything for me for a total of under $700.

The reason that I am mentioning this is because I just read an interesting article in Report On Business that talks about the major changes that are about to happen within the Real Estate industry due to the influence of the internet. If you think you might either buy a sell a home in the next five or ten years, it's definitely worth a read:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-battle-to-unlock-the-housing-market/article1450088/

And by the way, remember something else. You may think that you're not going to benefit if you're a buyer, because only the seller saves the commission. However, when I was picking a price to sell, I had originally wanted to list it for $134,000. But then, when I realized I was going to lose almost $8,000 in commissions, I thought that I'd "split the difference" and list the house for four thousand less, to help sell it faster, and still come out $4,000 ahead. So if you're thinking about buying a home, it's definitely worth your while to go through Kijiji and the other non-MLS websites out there.

Good luck ...

Why I Like Living in Sackville

2010-01-06T22:10:00.004-04:00

There's a certain charm to living in a small town, instead of in a big city.

Take this conversation, which I had about 20 minutes ago:

Phone: "Atlantic Towing."
Scooter: "Hey, is this Bubba? It's Scooter."
Phone: "Yup."
Scooter: "My car just died, can you take it to Amherst Toyota?"
Phone: "Yup, I saw it there on the highway a few minutes ago. Keys in it?"
Scooter: "Yup. Do you want a credit card?"
Phone: "Nope, stop by the shop sometime. All taken care of."

Try getting that kind of service in the Big Smoke ...

Every Bird Needs To Fly

2009-11-22T17:20:00.002-04:00

I love birds. This is a great commercial:

If you can't see it on my Facebook feed, click on this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og5saE-D5QE

Thanks Monica!

Remembrance Day

2009-11-09T17:43:00.001-04:00

Remembrance Day is coming on Wednesday of this week. In light of this important day, I thought that I'd post an article here that I really liked. It was written by Kevin Myers in 2002, and was published in the London Telegraph. Some of you might remember the friendly-fire incident that prompted this article:

"UNTIL the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers accidentally killed by a US warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.

It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.

That is the price which Canada pays for sharing the North American Continent with the US, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: it seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10 per cent of Canada's entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.
Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the "British". The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third largest navy and the fourth largest air force in the world.

The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign which the US had clearly not participated - a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and film-makers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality - unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer British. It is as if in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakeably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves - and are unheard by anyone else - that 1 per cent of the world's population has provided 10 per cent of the world's peace-keeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peace-keepers on earth - in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peace-keeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.

Yet the only foreign engagement which has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace - a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the US knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan? Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost.

This weekend four shrouds, red with blood and maple leaf, head homewards; and four more grieving Canadian families know that cost all too tragically well."

Here's the link to the original:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3575633/The-country-the-world-forgot---again.html

A Day In The Life

2009-10-03T02:47:00.006-03:00

I'm sitting in the Vancouver airport, trying to quickly inhale a draught and a couple shots before a flight to Montreal, which boards in fourteen minutes. I was going to do a quick Facebook status update, something generic like "today was hectic" and then I figured that something that generic didn't tell a story. And since I'm a fast typist, and bored, let me tell you about a random day in the life of Scooter, in excruciating detail ...

Background: I just finished a tree planting contract in Alberta yesterday. So today was my "in transit" day on my way back to the East Coast. The past week was interesting - 80 km/hr winds, crazy ranchers, pre-daylight safety meetings every morning, eating gas station salads for a week, and I may have even run into KD Lang in town.

4am: Up early to hit the road from Consort, Alberta (beside the Saskatchewan border). Side note about Consort - you know how some towns have creative and uplifting slogans like "our people are our best asset"? Consort's is "really rural." No kidding, it's on the sign coming into town, which also says that the town's population is 679. I didn't see that many people though.

6am: Quick stop at a Tim Hortons. Tried their soup with bun. The bun was amazing. I went up to ask how much it would cost to buy another. Fifty cents. I was tempted to buy twelve, to see if I'd get a baker's dozen, but I only had $5.00 in change left. Besides, the last thing that I needed for today was a distended belly. The steering wheel on my truck wasn't adjustable.

7am: Had to pull over to put pants on. I was driving the 5-ton, and the heater was broken, and a couple hours of seeing my own breath in the cab was too much to take. Mental note: always wear pants in October before the sun comes up.

9am: Just past Calgary, heading to a nursery to drop off the truckload of flat garbage tree boxes for recycling. That took about 45 minutes. The nursery probably didn't recycle them, probably just burned them for heat, but who am I to be hypocritical?

2pm: Saw a coyote, and shortly afterwards, two wolves.

3pm: Saw what I think might have been a blue heron, but not positive.

4pm: Lots of domestic llamas and alpacas on the farms that I've been driving by.

4:15pm: Saw three brilliant white mountain goats. Those things are pretty odd-looking (although not as odd as an alpaca, come to think of it). Weather getting nasty - I hope they don't blow off the cliff.

4:30pm: Blizzard in the Rockies. Snow sucks in early October.

5pm: Just before Jasper, saw about eighteen elk. I also saw a retarded tourist, decked out in full camo gear, taking photos of the elk with a tripod and a telephoto lens that was also camo'd, who was taking his pictures from BEHIND a big white suburban. Idiot! Does he not realize that the camo gear does not help if there is already a two ton white gas-guzzler hiding him? I was tempted to pull over and go stampede the elk off into the bushes, or some other tom-foolery, but I was on a tight schedule.

8pm: Arrived in Prince George, had a few minutes to drop off my truck at the office and empty the quad and all of my other gear out of it, then bolted for the airport.

8:44pm: Arrived at check-in, one minute before my flight started to board. And by the way, there was a time change in there, so this was actually about sixteen hours on the road so far. Cutting it close, but really, they even let me check my back-pack, so I guess I still had several minutes to spare before I would have missed the flight.

By the way, I wasn't alone in this whirlwind tour. There were seven of us in a convoy of five trucks making the voyage - myself, Jackie, Nate, Kyla, Al, Matt, and Dana.

Anyway, I'd like to embellish this post with a lot more of the fun details along the way, but I have one minute to finish my drinks and run to gate C38 for boarding.

PS: God bless YVR - best airport in the world for free internet, lots of sushi shops, and one of the cleanest airports that I've ever been in.

PPS: Next stop, Montreal, then Moncton. Trying to make it to Sackville by Saturday afternoon so I don't miss my cooking shift at the Olive Branch at supper, and then my bartending shift at the Pub on Saturday night. Can't miss the Pub on a Saturday night! Kati, if you read this, please have a "voldka-bomb" (or four?) ready at 11pm ...

Cheque This Out

2009-09-14T13:36:00.003-03:00

My frustration with the global banking system reached a new peak today.

It all began two weeks ago, when I had to order new cheques for the Pub. We had a change of mailing address, because of our move last year, and I was finally getting around to ordering new cheques with the correct address. I went to the Scotiabank and dropped off a sample cheque with the new address information, and they said that they’d take care of it. A week later, my new set of cheques arrived in the mail. Easy.

A few days later, I noticed that my cheques at the Olive Branch were also out-of-date from the move to a new address there eighteen months ago (ok, so I’m a little behind in my work right now). I decided to get new cheques there too, and while I was at it, I figured I should also order payroll cheques, which come on a different type of paper.

I took the cheques to the bank and dropped them off with an explanation of the required address change. A few days later, I got a phone call – the bank couldn’t order them for some reason, because the Davis & Henderson (cheque printing company) website was down, and I’d have to call in the order myself on their toll-free number. I went to the bank the next morning to pick up the blanks that I had dropped off, so I had all the correct account info to work with when I placed the order. No luck – the bank had accidentally shipped my void sample cheques off to Halifax, but I could get them back next week.

So this morning, I picked up the cheques after their vacation in Nova Scotia. I called the David & Henderson customer care number. I started off with the payroll cheques, and got them re-ordered with a relatively low number of questions. They actually had our old order on file, so they knew which number to start off with, and the color of the cheques and everything. They said that they’d have to FAX me a form to confirm the change of address, which I would need to take to the bank to get signed. I don’t have a FAX - that's outdated technology, and everyone should be scanning and PDF'ing these days. So they agreed to email it. I went to check email, and the internet was down. I called back to ask if they could re-send the email to a different address, so I could go down to the University to print it out and deal with the problem. They said that they had no idea what I was talking about. I tried to explain the problem to the lady on the phone, and she said that what I was trying to do was impossible, because those cheques have to be ordered directly by the bank and customers can't order over the phone. At this point, I tried to refrain from screaming. I was only moderately successful.

Eventually, after another visit to the bank, the girls down there were able to help me out, and assured me that my cheques would arrive soon. I’m not holding my breath. Oh, and by the way, the cost for all these new cheques? A bit over $600. SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS.

For any of you would-be entrepreneurs out there, I would strongly recommend that you change your mind and look for a less frustrating career, like teaching cats how to do synchronized swimming.

ETA, September 15th: I just got a call from Davis and Henderson. They said that they just got a call from ScotiaBank, trying to order more cheques for me. The bank wasn't allowed to do it without authorization from me. Unbelievable.

Splitting the DJ Bolivia Blog into Two Blogs

2009-07-30T01:40:00.002-03:00

Starting effective immediately, DJ Bolivia will be splitting his blog into two separate blogs - one for music and one for personal thoughts.

Because of the popularity of DJ Bolivia's fan page, it makes sense to have one blog, Soporific Airs, feed to the Facebook page. That blog will deal exclusively with music-related posts.

Any personal posts will remain confined to the previous blog, From The Ridiculous To The Sublime, which will continue to be viewable to the general public and which will also feed specifically to Jonathan Clark's personal Facebook profile page.

DJ Bolivia Career Changes

2009-06-28T23:30:00.013-03:00

[Voy a tratar a incluir traducciones en espanol después del inglés, abajo de esta página].

Hey everybody,

This is a very exciting time for me I’ve decided to pursue my music career (as a DJ & producer) more seriously in the near future. Right now, as many of you know, I have several jobs - bartending, restaurant, and silviculture. I’m going to try to separate myself from a couple of them over the next eight to twelve months, to give myself a lot more time to work on song-writing, DJ’ing, producing, and video projects. So here's a brief look at what's happening or about to happen:

First, I just set up a fan page on Facebook a few days ago. The initial response has been absolutely overwhelming, and I’d really like to thank my many friends who have signed up as fans. My challenge now will be to keep adding fresh content to that page.

For the next four weeks, I’m still working at my job on Canada’s West Coast, supervising a camp of tree planters. I love the job – it’s healthy, it’s good for the environment, and it gives me a good tan. I always feel like I’m incredibly good health at the end of every summer, thanks to this job. And as you can see from the photo below, which I took earlier this afternoon on a cut block that we were replanting, the scenery is absolutely beautiful. You'd never want to work in an office again. You can see another of our blocks at the base of the mountain across the valley:

During the next month, while I’m still planting, I can’t do a lot of music-related work. However, I plan to be doing some filming of DJ Dan and Dave Dresden on July 3rd in Calgary, for video projects that I’m working on for each of them. I'll have those videos available for the public in mid-August. I’ll also have photo galleries of that night’s show available in early July.

In August, I return to the studio, both to work on DJ mixes and self-produced tracks that I’ve written. To give you a sneak preview, I think that I might put up a blog post in a week or two about some of the tracks that I’m working on, with either lyrics or vocal samples as a teaser. I’m also planning to start a regular progressive house/trance radio show, which I’m going to call the "Five O’Clock Cock Block" show (I kid you not). I’ve also been asked to do guest mixes for a couple of other well-known radio shows, which I’ll tackle as soon as I get back home.

For upcoming shows this summer and fall, I’ve got confirmed dates in Las Vegas, Seattle, Toronto and most Atlantic Canadian cities, and I am tentatively planning shows in Buenos Aires, Australia, and Japan this fall or winter, if time permits.

So that’s what you can expect from DJ Bolivia in the near future. In the meantime, enjoy your summer and keep checking my fan page and website, especially after August 1st.

Hola a todos,

Primero, permítanme a disculparme por mi español malo, tengo mucho que aprender.

Este es un momento que es muy importante para mi, porque he decidido dedicarme a mi carrera musical (como DJ y productor) mas seriamente en un futuro muy cercano. En este momento, como muchos de ustedes saben, tengo muchos trabajos – a el bar, el restaurante y la silvicultura. Voy a tratar de separarme de algunos de ellos durante los próximos ocho a doce meses, para poder tener mas tiempo para la composición de canciones, mezclando música, produciendo y proyectos de video. Entonces aquí esta una breve mirada a lo que esta pasando y lo que esta por pasar.

Primero, hace algunos días lance una fan page en facebook. Los resultados iníciales estan muy excelente, y yo quiero dar las gracias a todos mis amigos que se han registrado como fans. Mi meta ahora es seguir actualizando la página con nuevos contenidos.

Por las próximas cuatro semanas, seguiré en mi trabajo en la costa oeste de Canadá, supervisando el campamento y los sembradores de arboles. Me encanta mi trabajo – es sano, es bueno para el medioambiente, y me deja con un buen broceado. Gracias a esta trabajo, yo siempre siento que mi salud esta muy bien al final de cada verano. Y como pueden ver en la foto de abajo, que tome hace un rato en uno de las zonas de corte que estamos reforestando, la vista es absolutamente hermosa. Ustedes nunca querrían trabajar en una oficina nunca más. Se puede apreciar otra de las áreas de trabajo en la base de la montaña al otro lado del valle:

Durante el próximo mes, mientras sigo sembrando, no tengo mucho tiempo para hacer trabajo relacionado con la música. Sin embargo, tengo planeado filmar a DJ Dan y Dave Dresden el 3 de Julio en Calgary, para algunos video proyectos en los que estoy trabajando para cada uno de ellos. Los videos van a estar disponibles a mediados de Agosto. También voy a tener galerías de fotos de esa noche disponibles a principios de Julio.

En Agosto, vuelvo al estudio, para trabajar en mezclas y canciones producida que yo mismo escribí. Para darle un pequeño adelanto, creo que voy a publicar en el blog en una semana o dos algunas de las canciones en las que estoy trabajando, con sus respectivas palabras o ejemplos vocales. También estoy planeando empezar un programa de radio de house progresivo y trance, el cual voy a llamar el "Five O’Clock Cock Block" show (no se como se dice en espanol). También me han ofrecido hacer mezclas para algunas de programas de muy conocidos como invitado, de los cuales me encargare apenas vuelva a mi casa.

Para próximos eventos en el verano y el otoño, tengo fechas confirmadas en Las Vegas, Seattle, Toronto y la mayoría de las ciudades de la costa Atlántica de Canadá, y estoy planeado algunos proyectos tentativos con una amiga en Buenos Aires, Australia y Japón para el otoño y el invierno, mientras el tiempo lo permita.

Entonces esto es lo que pueden esperar de DJ Bolivia en un futuro muy cercano. Mientras tanto disfruten de su verano y sigan visitando mi fan page y mi pagina web, especialmente después del primero de agosto.

Me disculpo por mi malo español, y le agradezco por escuchar mí. Hasta pronto ...

www.djbolivia.ca

Armin van Buuren Photos

2009-03-28T22:15:00.008-03:00

This past Sunday night, I got a chance to see Armin van Buuren in Halifax, Nova Scotia, courtesy of Underdog Productions. I wasn’t actually playing on the bill that night, I just went to relax and take some photos. It was my first night using a new camera (a basic Canon XSi digital SLR), but I managed to get a few decent shots. Here's the link:

http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_armin2009a.html

I owe a big thanks to Armin for being so accommodating with the photography.

Armin has been ranked by DJ Mag as the #1 DJ in the world for the past couple of years. To lend credence to this assessment, consider this: his signature A State Of Trance radio show is listened to by thirty million fans - every single week. Wow. I’ve had my website online for about seven years and I’ve only had around fifteen thousand mixes directly distributed during that time (although I’m sure with pass-alongs, the number is probably a lot higher).

Armin is Dutch. He’s got a law degree, but wanted to give up that career to pursue his love of music. He’s a producer, who has a number of huge hits, both as singles and from the several albums that he has self-produced. He doesn’t use an engineer – he does all of his own production work. He loves his fans, and is always happy to sign autographs and shake hands at the end of his shows.

Some of Armin's well-known hits include Love You More, Blue Fear, Exhale, This World Is Watching Me, Communication, In And Out Of Love, Burned With Desire, Serenity, and Yet Another Day (and a few of the older tracks in this list have only been officially released on YouTube very recently, so they haven't had a lot of views yet). But that's only a very short list of tracks that I could quickly find videos for. For a full look at his portfolio, check out Discogs. The list of work that he has produced is simply staggering.

Check out his website at www.arminvanbuuren.com

Subterranean Homesick Grooves

2009-02-11T17:50:00.012-04:00

I just put together a new DJ mix earlier this week, which is now available on my website and MySpace page. Sadly, it's the first mix that I've done in, oh, about a year and a half.

Actually, that's a bit of a misrepresentation. I put this mix together at the end of last summer, around August 24th. I was almost finished and about to put it online, but then I suddenly got distracted with my bar moving into a new building, and the constant headaches and 18-hour days for the next couple of months kept me from getting around to spending the last hour that I needed or so to put it online. Anyway, I just remembered it recently, so I re-recorded it on Tuesday morning to tidy it up, and now it's done. I also kind of regret using the "Looking At The Stars" title for my last mix. Considering the "stars" and "angels" themes of some of the songs on this mix, the titles should have been reversed for my last two mixes. Oh well, too late now - I didn't realize when recording "Looking At The Stars" that there would be several great star-themed songs coming through the pipeline so quickly.

The mix is not the type of music that I'd play in a club, yet it is a great mix of electronica tracks to listen to in your car or warming up for a party. None of these tracks are particularly new (obviously, they're all from the summer of 2008 or slightly earlier) but I found a really good group to mix together. There are several tracks on this mix with female vocals that just blow me away.

Here's a track listing:

01. Solarstone, "Rain Stars Eternal" [Original Mix].
02. High Torque, "Sparks" [Original Mix].
03. Morgan Page feat Norah Jones, "Angels" [Morgan Page Remix].
04. Boza, "Twisted Mind" [Alex Celler Tech Dub].
05. Cream Sound, "Always" [Stereotip Edit].
06. Python, "Expectation" [4Mal Premonition Remix].
07. R-Tem, "Cloud Of Sound" [Natlife Nu School Remix].
08. Kenshin, "Afraid."
09. Bolivia feat Mike Allison, "When I Grow Old" [Prince Avitar Electro Aftershow Vocal Mix].
10. Section 75 feat Penny, "Locked Heart" [Lynx Remix].

If I had to pick a favorite track from this mix, I couldn't. Maybe "Twisted Mind" or "Angels," but it's so hard to choose because there are so many good ones. Also, this is the notably the first time that I've ever put one of the songs that I've written myself onto one of my mixes - that needs to start happening a lot more later this year.

Anyway, thanks to the headaches at my bar, I've been pretty delinquent when it comes to music lately, however, I'm going to try to fix that in the next few weeks. I've got shows in Moncton & Saint John coming up in a week and a half, then two or three shows in Seattle the following week, then I'm on a bill with DJ Dan in early March. I also hope to get a few more mixes together this spring, before the summer hits. And of course, now that I have more time to catch up on my life, I have a backlog of other projects that I want to tackle in the coming weeks, including some long overdue video promos for DJ's such as Dave Dresden, Josh Gabriel, & Heavygrinder.

Anyway, my apologizes to Bob Dylan, and I hope you enjoy some Subterranean Homesick Grooves ...

Basic Wine Appreciation

2009-01-20T22:33:00.003-04:00

I was going through some old videotapes this past weekend, looking for something for a video project that I was working on, when I found some of my old "wine appreciation" series video masters. These were originally filmed in 2003, but I realized that with the advent of YouTube, it would be quite easy to publish these videos for the world to see, so I got them all prepped and online earlier today. I know a few people who watch these are going to get quite a laugh when they see me in a suit and tie in one of the videos, but I guess I'll have to live with that.

The original intent for this project was to be able to present inexperienced wine drinkers with the basic information about wine that would make them comfortable in selecting and assessing different brands of wine. Learning about wine is actually fairly easy, and tasting different brands can obviously be pretty fun, so it was a worthwhile project to put together. And filming the project was pretty fun too, with Koren's help.

The videos have basically been broken down into a series of beginners, intermediate, and advanced wine education topics. The basic videos are all available online right now, with nine separate segments totalling just over an hour in length. We haven't quite finished filming the intermediate and advanced videos, but we did all the prep work for them, so hopefully I'll find some time to make those videos available soon too. Please click here for more detailed information about what is being presented. Or if you don't need the written reference material, just grab a bottle of wine and watch any of the videos listed below!

Basic Wine Information, Part 1
YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLVnLf5ee_4

Basic Wine Information, Part 2
YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kzdB_Lo434

Basic Wine Information, Part 3
YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRS5J7Q4YMg

Basic Wine Information, Part 4
YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCEZdo5Tqio

Basic Wine Information, Part 5
YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p67Q7YifGVw

Basic Wine Information, Part 6
YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji66hK5uZQY

Basic Wine Information, Part 7
YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieHlLS0u-E4

Basic Wine Information, Part 8
YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi5X5Ob7aNM

Basic Wine Information, Part 9
YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSqA0DM-T_Q

James Sadoway Artist Album Released

2008-12-20T19:07:00.009-04:00

A friend of mine, James Sadoway, has just released his first full-length album of self-produced electronica tracks. And for a limited time, he's offering free downloads of the entire album here on my website:

http://www.djbolivia.ca/jamessadoway.html

The album itself has quite a bit of diversity, from deeper house to faster breaks-influenced tracks. For those who like remixes, he's got four tracks remixed from Holden & Thompson (Nothing), Ace Of Base (Cruel Summer), Gabriel & Dresden (Tracking Treasure Down), and Plummet (Damaged). Of those, I'm especially fond of the energy that James put into Tracking Treasure Down.

Of course, James also has a number of his original tracks on the album, many of which feature the vocals of Vancouver pop vocalist Armstrong Jr. Two that I enjoy in particular are "Shut Up" and "Float Like A Butterfly."

Anyway, if you enjoy electronic dance music, I suggest you download the full album and check it out. To listen to "Float Like A Butterfly," click on the player here (visible in the original blog only, not in the Facebook notes feed).

Stupid To The Last Drop

2008-11-18T19:08:00.002-04:00

When I first learned about Stupid to The Last Drop, by William Marsden, I knew that I had to read it. Not only did it relate to the oil and gas industry, it specifically focused on part of Canada. And even better, it was about Alberta, a province where I work every summer. In fact, I work in the oil fields (although I work for forestry companies, not for the energy industry). And saying that I work in “the oil fields” is probably misleading or non-instructive, since just about the entire province qualifies for this descriptor.

The product description for this book gives you a good idea of what it’s all about: “In its desperate search for oil and gas riches, Alberta is destroying itself. As the world teeters on the edge of catastrophic climate change, Alberta plunges ahead with uncontrolled development of its fossil fuels, levelling its northern Boreal forest to get at the oil sands, and carpet-bombing its southern half with tens of thousands of gas wells. In so doing, it is running out of water, destroying its range land, wiping out its forests and wildlife and spewing huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, adding to global warming at a rate that is unrivalled in Canada or almost anywhere else in the world. It’s digging, drilling and blasting its way to oblivion, becoming the ultimate symbol of Canada’s – and the world’s – pathological will to self-destruct.” Well, at least there is no misunderstanding of the author’s opinion about what’s happening in Alberta.

This book is not really focused on peak oil issues, although it touches on them. Rather, it is more written as a hard look at the current state of the industry, and mismanagement of the existing resources. The book has several separate sections which didn’t necessarily flow into one another, but which rather should be looked at as separate aspects of Alberta’s past and current history:

Thermonuclear Oil Extraction – believe it or not, in the late 1950’s, geologist Manley Natland proposed a plan to extract oil from the sands by detonating nuclear bombs under the sands, allowing them to collapse and collect into a spherical reservoirs, for easier extraction. Ironically, the science behind the plan was quite sound, although Natland was fairly dismissive of the consequences of radiation. The proposal was almost carried through, with the US government selling a test nuclear device to a Canadian company, and the federal and provincial government appeare to endorse the experiment until Diefenbaker’s Conservative government turned the tables by banning nuclear testing on Canadian soil.

The Importance Of The Oil Sands – the Canadian/US energy relationship is discussed, and a number of external international implications are brought into light, in an effort to explain the importance of Canada’s supplies of oil and natural gas. The book makes clear the value of oil to the United States, and talks about NAFTA and GATT implications.

Provincial Politics In Oil – a few chapters are devoted to Jeff Tonkin and a slew of Alberta O&G industry scandals including Stampeder Energy, Westar Petroleum, and Big Bear Exploration. I generally found these chapters to be pretty irrelevant and boring.

Reserve Depletion – everyone knows that fossil fuels will run out someday. Former Geological Survey of Canada geologist has speculated that Canada’s natural gas reserves could run out by 2014, if not earlier. “We have to drill an increasing number of gas wells just to keep up with demand. In 1996 we drilled four thousand productive wells to get 15.7 billion cubic feet per day of gas. By 2001 we were drilling 10,757 wells to get 17.4 billion cubic feet per day. These drilling figures have continued to rise. In 2005 we drilled fifteen thousand wells to get 17 billion cubic feet per day. Coal Bed Methane, which is another form of natural gas, was supposed to be the savior … [Hughes] came out with figures that showed recoverable gas was … enough to replenish our reserves for maybe another eight years at most.” This section made me want to re-read “High Noon For Natural Gas.”

Fort McMurray – there is all sorts of discussion about “Fort Mac” and the municipality of Wood Buffalo. Fort McMurray has suffered immensely with the problems that face any boom town with a rapidly expanding population and an inability to develop supporting infrastructure in a timely manner. What surprised me was the relatively low financial support levels that O&G companies in the area provide to the municipality. I would have thought that they would want to contribute a lot more funding to improving the city, because of the dividends that it would pay off in managing their work forces more effectively.

Contamination Of The Environment – there are several chapters devoted to groundwater contamination, the deleterious effects of drilling and “frac’ing” wells, and the general environmental destruction that the O&G industry is causing. Specific references have been made to the Rosebud River Valley’s water well contamination problems (water so saturated in combustible chemicals and gases that it will support combustion, right out of household taps), and Wiebo Ludwig, the “oil patch terrorist” who bombed sour gas wells in 1998 due to his belief that they were harming his family.

All in all, the subjects are fairly disjointed, but appropriately, the book has been segmented somewhat into different sections. Being able to identify with a large number of the locations discussed, and the “grass roots” implications of the problems identified, I found this book to be a pretty interesting personal read. However, the book doesn’t seem to have any real editorial “conclusion” to it. At the end of the day, I got less of a sense of “so much for a sustainable future” and more of a sense that “you can’t mess with oil & gas.” I think the book would have benefited from a final chapter that discussed how readers or Albertans could take specific steps to improve the future of the province. Nonetheless, I was glad that I took the time to read it, and I did learn quite a bit in doing so.

2008 Tree Planting Video

2008-11-13T11:30:00.003-04:00

I just finished editing the 2008 version of the Tree Planting video from my summer job.

Here's a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOBps6I1iaQ

The tree planting and silviculture industry in general is being devastated right now by poor economic conditions. The sub-prime crisis and the low American dollar are contributing to the bankruptcies of a huge number of mills and logging companies in Western Canada, and of course, anyone who plants trees is trying desperately to trim costs if they are still in business. I'm a little bit worried that I might not have any work with my regular company for this coming season, so this might be the last of my annual planting videos. I hope not, but the situation is a bit worrisome right now.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video ...

Airline & Airport Closures

2008-10-29T18:24:00.005-03:00

It's time for another random energy-crisis related posting. I know, the price of oil has dropped to less than half of what it was back in the spring. But trust me, this decrease is very temporary. You all know that for years, I've been warning about the impending oil crisis. And it's only in the past year that it's become mainstream enough that people finally are starting to believe the doomsayers such as myself. But rather than talk about the gradual decline in fossil fuel supplies and rising fuel prices, let's get into something a little more specific. Today, I'll dig out the crystal ball and talk about the effects of the energy crisis on the airline industry.

A couple years ago, I suggested that in the long term (ie. a three to five year horizon), a person could make a lot of money shorting airline stocks. Now for this posting to make sense, I need to explain what "shorting" a stock means. In the stock market, the traditional way to make money is to buy shares in a company, then to hope that the company either increases or is perceived to increase in value over time, so the shares are perceived to be worth more. You then turn around and sell those shares to someone for more than you originally bought them for, because that person thinks the shares are going to appreciate further in value. Simple. But in such a limited market, people can only make money when their stock is increasing in value. That's no fun. What if there was a way to make money when shares go down in value too? Well, there is. It's called "selling a stock short" or "shorting." Shorting a stock is intended to benefit you when you believe (correctly) that the shares of a company are going to decline in value. Essentially, what you do is "borrow" shares from a third party who owns shares. You've borrowed the shares, so they can't turn around and sell them, because they've loaned them to you. So anyway, you have these borrowed shares. You think the stock is worth more now than it will be in a few months. So you sell the shares on the open market for the current price. Then, assuming that you're correct, let's assume that the shares go down in price. A few months later, you buy them back on the open market for the lower price. You then give those shares back to the person that you originally borrowed them from. In effect, you've sold shares at a higher price, which you bought at a lower price, even though the chronological order of the two transactions is backward. I know, this is a moderately confusing concept, but hopefully I've boiled it down to the very basics that will make sense if you think about it. Not every investor in the stock market is savvy enough to be able to do this, but institutional and wealthy investors generally are qualified for this kind of trading. Incidentally, although I understand the concept, I've never dabbled in this kind of trading. My knowledge of trading is somewhat more extensive than my personal wealth.

So anyway, back to shorting airlines. Fuel prices have started to increase significantly over the past year (ignore this month's temporary decline). The airlines are all admitting that they are getting hammered on their financials. About a third to a half of the total operating costs of any airline right now is the cost of the aviation fuel. This is up from between ten and fifteen percent a few years ago. Needless to say, if your operating costs increase by twenty to thirty percent, and your profit margin was only a few percent in the first place, you're suddenly losing a lot of money. No other global industry is so heavily affected by fuel prices, and thus, no other global industry is likely to suffer financial catastrophe as quickly as the airlines when fuel prices rise. Therefore, as oil goes up in price over the next few years, the increased fuel costs are unquestionably going to drive a large number of airlines into bankruptcy.

The interesting thing about the US airline industry is that they historically have embraced "bankruptcy protection." This is a legal status whereby an airline asks for temporary court protection from their creditors because they are on the verge of financial ruin. In theory, this situation can give the airline a few months or years to make significant changes to their operational procedures, to allow them time to restructure or become more profitable. This practice has become especially common since the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act. Anyway, a number of the major US carriers have successfully used this "Chapter 11" protection in the past as a last-ditch effort to keep from true bankruptcy. But this avoidance measure is going to become increasingly ineffective. The financial pressures that the airlines are starting to face are simply too overwhelming. There are too many airlines competing for passengers' money, at the same time that the economy is stalling and people are flying less.

So who is going to go out of business first? Simply picking random airlines to "short" might prove effective, but you would be better off specifically picking the worst companies. In a general sense, it will be the leisure and travel specialists, and the commuters. Economy fares (especially for travel and leisure) are generally the cheapest and therefore least profitable. Smaller airlines and tour operators are in a bad position. The commuters are also handicapped because they run some of the least efficient fleets, out of the most marginal airports. The rising fuel prices are already causing airlines to drop their least profitable routes, reducing capacity, and parking planes (it is estimated that about five hundred planes are going to be permanently grounded this year, which is about ten percent of total US capacity). That's good, because the least fuel-efficient and oldest planes can be retired. But it's bad too, because that's not nearly enough of a reduction in supply. The industry needs to contract more than that, and ground more low-volume and low-profit routes.

In terms of the major airlines, I think that US Airways is in the worst position. Almost every North American airline is projected to sustain staggering losses for the next couple of years. US Air has a hub in Phoenix, which I've used many times. Some of their more popular airports are LaGuardia in New York, and McCarron in Las Vegas, which again are airports I've frequented numerous times. I will go out on a limb here and suggest that US Air is famous for being the most disliked airline in America. Although it is probably one of the five largest US airlines, it consistently ranks the lowest in consumer satisfaction surveys. It has eliminated free services with a vengeance since 9/11 and a subsequently temporary Chapter 11 protection period. However, US Air generally has an older and less fuel-efficient fleet, has less advantageous gates and routes than most of its competitors, is disliked by consumers, and doesn't have a large cash position to get it through the next several years. So I will put my reputation on the line and say that I predict that US Airways will be the first major US airline to fail. My guess would be in the fall of 2009, approximately twelve months from now. Of course, US Air does have a habit of hanging on by their fingernails. Regardless, my prediction is that the only thing that could possibly save them would be government subsidies or consolidation, both of which are politically difficult. Perhaps a merger with United (a good fit) would delay the end, or maybe US Air could sell their international routes to United to buy more time, but ultimately, for the long-term health of the airline industry, some major competitors need to fail so overall capacity is reduced. Of course, nobody really wants to merge with United, because they think they are worth a lot more than they really are. Continental thought about it, but pulled back.

So that's my medium-term assessment of where the airlines stand. In the long-term (five years plus) there will be fewer players in the field. The majors may not be the first to go, but they will still be susceptible. Fuel prices will be much higher, and ticket prices will be much higher. Fewer people will fly, and since the airlines benefit from larger volumes, it will be a catch-22 situation. Many existing routes will eventually be cancelled, so that less than a decade from now, only the very most popular routes will be remaining. It would not surprise me if fully one-quarter of US airports were to completely close within five years. Mind you, some of the smaller commuter airports and seasonals could close without a significant impact on the American way of life.

The "global marketplace" is going to become a thing of the past in another three to five years. Expect global trends towards regionalization of services and production. We're watching the sunset of global jet-setting, except for the wealthy. If you've ever dreamed of traveling to foreign countries or to see the world, and you're on a tight budget, I would strongly recommend you do it in the next year or two, before it's too late. And if you've got lots of frequent flyer points, use them while you can, before the airlines start making it impossible to get the best benefits from your points.

Thanksgiving in Toronto

2008-10-19T16:16:00.004-03:00

Thanksgiving Weekend in Canada (last weekend) was pretty interesting for me. I’ve been completely swamped for the past six weeks with my bar moving, so this was my first chance to get out of town in quite a while.

On Friday morning, I flew up to Toronto. I flew on Sunwing this trip, instead of the usual Air Canada. I was curious to compare the two airlines. Ignoring all the unimportant things, like the plane and the ticketing process and customer service, I focused on the really important differences: the drinks on SunWing were only $5, instead of $6 on AC. I was quite happy with this, especially after having several mini-bottles of rye. It’s not that I care about the cost of the drinks – I just feel bad for all those AC flight attendants who have to make change all the time for a $6 drink. There aren’t a lot of places to go to find some extra change when you’re at 37,000 feet.

We got to Toronto and spent a couple hours in the airport, working on the laptops and having more beverages. After that, my host (Drew Dudley) took us to Hemingway’s. We met a few MTA alumni there, and the night was mildly entertaining. Actually, that’s the understatement of the year.

On Saturday, we went back to Hemingway’s for the afternoon, to continue the festivities. I didn’t want to get too exuberant, since I had to “work” that evening. After supper, we went to Filthy McNastie’s for some beverages and to watch the hockey game, then finally we headed off to Circa for the rest of the evening. Dave Dresden was playing at Circa that night, and the whole point of the weekend was to get some more video footage of him for a short promotional project that I’m putting together for him. Click here if you'd like to check out one of Dave's promo DJ mixes.

Circa is a pretty decent club, although I wasn’t that impressed with the clientele. It was too much of a “club crowd” for my taste, and not enough of the “party” crowd of people who pay more attention to the music than to their own appearances. Regardless, the staff at Circa were pretty cool, and the club itself was set up nicely. The layout was certainly confusing, but the number of unique rooms and themes was good. The only thing that I really disliked was the DJ booth itself. The booth was very, very dark – it was really difficult to get good footage. They did bring a portable light into the booth eventually, which helped, so the night wasn’t a complete loss. However, as usual, all sorts of things were happening around us. One of the girls that we went to the club with managed to slip in some vomit and break her arm. She wasn’t too impressed with this development, needless to say, but I think she’ll look back on the incident quite favourably. It will be a great cocktail story for her a year or so from now.

On Sunday, we drove off somewhere to the middle of nowhere in Ontario for Thanksgiving Dinner. On the way, Drew stopped by a random church for photos. Now this might sound ridiculous, but I was a bit curious about this particular church. I used to be a church organist. Don’t judge me – I don’t consider myself to be particularly religious, but it was an interesting job. And someday, I’d like to buy an old unused church and convert it into a massive recording studio. Anyway, this church was a six-seater. Yes, you read that correctly. Maybe twelve if you squeezed two thin people into each pew.

On Sunday night, we had to head back to the airport, but I was really tempted to go back to Circa before we left. The lineup was good, and since I didn’t have to think about filming, I thought it would be pretty fun. Victor Calderone, Roger Sanchez, and John Acquivava all played. Thank goodness that I decided to stop into the club before heading to the airport. I have literally wanted to see John Acquivava play for about fifteen years, but have never been in the right city at the right time. As far as electronica goes, Acquivava is probably Canada’s top historical DJ, thanks to both his solo work and his work with Richie Hawtin. Well, let me say that it was well worth the time. Unquestionably, Acquaviva played one of the most enjoyable sets that I’ve heard in a long time. Here's a photo of him, looking very relaxed behind the decks:

The trip home was fairly uneventful. I was looking out the window as we were about to land and was a bit surprised to see trees about twenty feet below us as we were still descending through the fog, but the pilots quickly jerked the plane up in an emergency manoeuvre and announced on the loudspeakers a few minutes later that they had a missed approach, and would try again. Lucikly, I don’t think that many people were looking out the window at the time, because I think that some of them might have had heart attacks. Anyway, the second attempt was perfect, so I made it home in one piece, and just in time for a second Thanksgiving Dinner with my own family in Nova Scotia.

Using A Seatbelt

2008-09-27T12:30:00.002-03:00

I drive around quite a bit. Between my various jobs, I probably rack up about fifty thousand kilometers a year. Not nearly as much as a full-time truck driver, but it adds up. In my lifetime, I’ve definitely driven more than a million kilometers. And I’m quite proud to say that until yesterday, my driver’s abstract was completely clean and free of tickets or violations or accidents.

I’m a pretty big supporter of the use of seatbelts. The simple fact is that they frequently save peoples’ lives in major accidents, and they also prevent a lot of injuries in minor fender-benders. In my job supervising the camp of tree planters, I have about ten to twelve trucks on the road any given summer, driven predominantly by young males in their early twenties, driving large pickups on dangerous dirt logging roads. It’s a recipe for disaster. I try to force all of my employees to wear belts all the time, because the odds are that some of these vehicles will get into accidents. Over the years, my camp has completely written off about nine trucks. Several of my employees have been killed, although our track record has improved greatly in the past ten years or so. But even this summer, we had a roll-over for the first time in over a decade. Luckily, all five occupants of the truck were wearing their seatbelts, and all five got out without a scratch.

Anyway, last March, I got a ticket in Sackville for not wearing a seatbelt. It was a strange set of circumstances (I’ll explain in a minute). Since I was working out west all summer, my court date wasn’t until yesterday. I wanted to fight the ticket. When I got to court, the crown prosecutor suggested that I plead guilty. He said that if I did that, I could probably get out of the fine completely although the ticket would still go on my driving record. He also said that if I did contest the charge, the judge would have to impose a minimum fine but could alternatively charge a higher fine at her discretion (seems reasonable, as it probably would cover court costs). But I’m stubborn, so I decided that the principles were more important than the money.

I got up on the stand and told the judge what happened. I had been driving at the time (past the RCMP station, ironically) and stopped at the stop sign at the end of that street. My cell phone started to ring, while it was in my jeans pocket. I had my belt on. I looked in the rear-view mirror and there was nobody behind me, and since the car was stopped, I figured that I could answer it. I took my seatbelt off (partly) so I could dig my phone out of my pocket. As I was about to answer it, an RCMP cruiser drove past me around the corner. I had heard something in the news about it being illegal to use a cell in a vehicle, or that such a law was on the verge of going into effect, so I got worried and put the phone back down so the officer wouldn’t see me and give me a ticket. She drove by, then I put my belt back on, then started driving again.

A minute later, I got pulled over. The officer had turned around and chased me down (well, it was only about a block and a half away). I figured that I was either in trouble for the cell phone or maybe my registration stickers were expired. I was a bit startled when she said that she was pulling me over for the seatbelt, but of course, it immediately made sense. So off to court I went.

The judge found me guilty, despite the circumstances. I wasn’t really surprised, but as I said, I had to fight it on the principle of the matter. The judge reminded me that she could have fined me a higher amount, but graciously kept it at the minimum. She appeared to be a bit sorry about the matter. The RCMP officer also appeared to be a bit embarrassed, and had been extremely polite when she was on the stand. I didn’t really care about the fine ($172.50) but I was frustrated that I still got the points assigned against my license.

So much for the clean driving record. I now feel like a criminal. I guess that the moral of the story is that you should always wear your selt belt. And of course, don’t answer your cell phones while you’re in a vehicle.

PS: If any of the employees from the Town of Sackville happen to read this, please register my disapproval of the large tree at the west end of Union Street, which makes it almost impossible for drivers to see traffic coming from the north end of Salem. Somebody should cut that tree down. If I had been able to see the traffic coming more than twenty feet away, I probably would not have gotten this ticket. Half of the people in town hate that tree because it blocks the view of the road.

Lehman Brothers in Bankruptcy Protection

2008-09-15T03:20:00.009-03:00

A year ago, there was an unobtrusive item in the news about the Bear Sterns mortgage hedge fund crisis. I wrote about that when it first happened, because although it didn't make the major news at the time, it was something that conspiracy theorists quickly jumped upon as the "straw that would break the camel's back" and finally expose the underlying weaknesses of the US financial system. Little did I know just how right they were.

Last week, the US government intervened to prop up Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two mortgage giants who hold almost half of the mortgages in the United States. Quite simply, the government could not allow them to fail.

A few hours ago, Lehman Brothers filed for Bankruptcy Protection in New York. The global financial implications of this are staggering. Lehman is a giant - a firm that is more than 150 years old, and an integral part of Wall Street. The company recently listed its assets as being worth almost $700 billion dollars. Yes, that's billion with a Big B, not million. Compare that to the assets of something like MicroSoft - about $72 billion. Yes, they are different types of companies and assets, but you get the picture. Lehman is/was Big League.

Then, shortly after that bombshell, another press release just notified the world that the Bank of America, after failing to come to a deal to rescue Lehman (as many had hoped), is going to buy Merrill Lynch (another Goliath) in a deal valued at $50 billion. There is little doubt that today, September 15th, is going to be one of the most gut-wrenching days in history for global financiers.

On a positive note, the Federal Reserve is taking extraordinary measures to try to calm markets. They have been wary of intervening too directly, after they got involved in the Bear Sterns mess and were highly criticized. But they are taking behind-the-scenes steps to steady the markets, through changes in debt collateralization rules. But even so, I doubt that they can have as much of an impact as they would like. Today is a holiday in Asia, so the Asian markets are closed, but Europe opens shortly, and when Wall Street opens, some financial analysts are predicting a bloodbath. A lot of people might shrug and say, "Who cares?" but the bottom line is that the fallout from this weekend's events will send ripples through the global economy for months and possibly years to come.

And don't think that this is the end of it. More American banks are going to fail in the next year. The economy will get worse. With the run-up to the American presidential election in November, chances are that the economy will enjoy a temporary two-month "grace period" where the shocks aren't as bad as they could have been, but 2009 looks like it could be a very ugly year. We'll see large jumps in businesses scaling back operations or folding, large jumps in unemployment, and rapidly rising food and gas prices at the same time to deal a double-blow to everyone. The worsening American debt crisis is reaching a global tipping point. It's not just mortgages and energy, it's the entire financial system that is not-so-slowly collapsing. As I've said before, America is an empire in steep decline. As Ernest Hemingway said in 1932, ""The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but brace yourselves ...

ETA, 15 hours later: The Dow Jones dropped over 500 points today (biggest point drop since 9/11), the TSX dropped over 500 points today, and other markets around the world are also reeling. In the US, my bet is that Washington Mutual will be the next giant to fall.

Google Turns Ten

2008-09-07T19:23:00.006-03:00

Ten years ago today, Google was incorporated as a company. At the time, it didn't appear to have much for assets: a $100,000 bank account, four computers, and the ingenuity of its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. However, since then, Google has gone into the history books as being the fastest growing company in history (taking in $20 billion in revenue this year).

Google's search engine has always been the core product for the company, but as any computer geeks know, Google has expanded into many other niches – Adwords/Adsense advertising, GIS offerings with Google Earth and Google Maps, the purchase of YouTube, free Gmail email accounts for the world, and hundreds of other examples. In fact, Google has become so ubiquitous that it has become the de facto standard for people trying to check if their internet connections are working. If Google doesn't come up, the internet must not be working.

However, it isn't what Google has accomplished in the past that is important, it's what it will accomplish in the future. Management at Google have some pretty lofty goals:
- Digitizing copies of all of the world's books.
- Further improvements to its search engine, so it can fully understand questions in "plain human language."
- Providing software to businesses over the internet.
- Fully extending their data platforms and applications to cell and other mobile devices.
- Leading the change from fossil fuel reliance to alternative energy sources (this one seems to be a bit of a tangent, but do some research, and you'll be surprised at some of the investments that Google has made).

The company is not without a sense of humour. For its IPO several years ago, it picked a seemingly random number to value as its initial float - $2,718,281,828. Wall Street scratched their heads. Geeks everywhere instantly recognized this number as "e" – the complex number that represents the natural logarithm. And if you go to the Google Pranks page on Wikipedia, you can read about a lot of their other practical jokes and April Fool's Day pranks. One of my favourites was the fake "Google Romance" application in 2006. Their splash screen introduction was a classic: "Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance." And of course, another classic joke happened on April Fool's day this year, when Google rickrolled the world.

Happy Birthday, Google! And happy birthday to my nephew, Evan, who also turned ten on Friday.

The OhMiBod Vibrator

2008-09-05T11:07:00.006-03:00

Watching the growth of the iPod over the past several years, it’s been amazing to see just how pervasively it has entered and affected many peoples’ lives. And speaking of “pervasive entry,” I’m going to introduce a neat little iPod accessory today that some girls have already heard of: the OhMiBod.

The OhMiBod is a vibrator that hooks up to your iPod. Turn on the music, and the unit pulses to the beat. What could be more simple? For the girls who enjoy music, and who also enjoy sex, this is definitely a winning combination.

I meant to write about this several months ago, but I got distracted at the time. However, the well-known vocalist Marcie emailed me last night about something else, and it reminded me of a certain OhMiBod commercial, since she did the vocals for the music in the commercial:

YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6oYmSG-ccs

If you want to buy the track that accompanies the commercial above, here’s what to search for:

Tyler Michaud feat Marcie – Dirty Girl (System Recordings, 2007).

Beatport has a package of five different remixes available – search for Tyler Michaud and then go through his library.

I’ve gotten some feedback from female friends of mine who use the OhMiBod. It’s been suggested that albums like Madonna and Nine Inch Nails are good. Music that has some variation is more interesting, so house or trance music with a straight four-four beat wouldn’t be that great. But some heavy drum ‘n’ bass music might be very stimulating. The volume of the iPod controls the strength of the vibrations. Music that has been heavily compressed with a hard limiter would have an almost constant output, so tracks that have been compressed that way wouldn’t be that great. Of course, if you aren’t intimately familiar with music production, you’d have no idea what that means, and it would be tricky to sum it up here so I won’t bother. I’ll just say that sticking to classic rock would provide much more variation than heavily over-produced dance music. As far as the product itself, one of my friends said, "It’s obviously very much a novelty vibrator, and does not really compare to the more 'complex' ones such as the Jack Rabbit, but in comparison to other vibrators, the power is great. The different pulses are very interesting - teasing perhaps."

And if this isn’t enough to intrigue you, check out the company’s new vibrator that attaches to your cell phone. It’s designed to add a whole new dimension to phone sex …

The "Chrome" Browser

2008-09-02T22:01:00.001-03:00

Today, Google made another bold move in the global computing scene. Google now has a free internet browser available to the public, called “Chrome.”

Want to download it? http://www.google.com/chrome

I was kind of curious to see how they set up the browser, although I didn’t really expect that I’d want to use it in the long term. Most of the time, I use MicroSoft’s Internet Explorer. After all, I work on several different computers in various locations, and IE is pretty common for any Windows-based machine. And it gets the job done in most cases. I also use FireFox occasionally, but that’s more for when I’m downloading larger files (because of Mozilla’s download manager). I don’t really like the bookmarks layout of FireFox, compared to IE’s favorites table, otherwise I would probably use it more often than IE.

But so far, my initial impressions of Chrome have been pretty positive. First of all, downloading and installing Chrome is fast – the whole process took well under two minutes on my first machine.

Chrome also has a very simple and clean interface. There are far less visible options than in Internet Explorer or FireFox. I think that quite a few options are fairly irrelevant anyway, so keeping the screen lean and clean is probably a positive move. And of course, think of Google’s search page – a simple search box on almost empty white space. Nobody has had better success with that approach. Keep it simple.

Under the hood, Chrome’s big advantage (especially for intense users) is that it loads pages many times faster than IE or FireFox. And for someone who surfs the web constantly, that is going to make a big difference. In fact, it will make a big difference for a lot of people from business users to casual surfers, not just for the internet junkies. Google (and other companies) have done a lot of studies and it has become very clear that when pages load faster, even if it is only by milliseconds, even casual users who can’t even really notice the difference will browse more frequently. And, lest you think that Google has become completely altruistic, remember that increased browsing often leads to increased placement of Google Adwords, since they have practically taken over the internet. Google is, after all, a $150 billion company – they do make money with some of their activities. The importance of fast page-loading also applies to searching, not just browsing, so it’s no surprise that Google would put such an emphasis on making sure that its browser is blindingly fast. Oh, and by the way, for the tech-savvy readers out there, Chrome is very JavaScript friendly, just like FireFox.

Perhaps Chrome’s biggest attraction is how Google has seamlessly integrated both the URL (address) bar and the search bar into a single search box called the “omni box.” I won’t lie – I really disliked the Google Toolbar, but mostly because it took away a line of screen space when I was browsing. So I’ve always avoided that add-on like the plague. However, the whole idea of being able to do your web searches without having to go to a bookmarked page (or having to type Google into the address bar) is quite appealing. And after playing around with the functionality of the omni bar for a few minutes, it certainly seems to work.

Of course, no matter how good or bad the browser turns out in the end, there will be mixed feelings about it. Some people will use it even if it isn’t that good, because they appreciate what Google is doing to make end-users’ computing experiences better. Some people will not use Chrome no matter how good it is, because “Google is evil and taking over the world.” Chrome will probably never take over the dominant market position from MicroSoft’s Internet Explorer, but I have no doubt that it will gain a devoted following pretty quickly.

So in short, I haven’t fully road-tested Chrome out yet, but my first impressions were pretty positive. Lean, clean, fast, and robust. Give it a shot …

Hurricanes and Gas Price Pains

2008-08-30T12:46:00.006-03:00

The National Hurricane Center has a website which has some pretty interesting tracking tools, if you are curious about the status of tropical depressions, storms, hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones around the world. In the next few days, they are probably going to get an incredible surge of traffic as people around the world watch the progress of two significant storms, Gustav and Hanna.

A tropical depression is a “baby storm.” It doesn’t have the “eye” that a hurricane does, nor does it usually have a photogenic spiral shape. A depression usually has sustained winds of under 63 km/h. Once a depression gets stronger, it becomes a tropical storm. It probably still won’t have an eye, but the spiral shape usually has formed by now. Maximum sustained winds for tropical storms are in the 63 km/h to 117 km/h. Once the storm becomes even stronger than that, an eye usually forms, and there is another name change. In most of the world, the storm becomes a hurricane. If the storm is in the northwest Pacific Ocean, it is usually called a typhoon instead of a hurricane, even though they are really the same thing. And if the disturbance is in the southern hemisphere or Indian Ocean, it gets called a cyclone.

There have been a number of famous hurricanes in the past century. One in India in 1970 was estimated to have killed up to a million people. Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, and was estimated to be the third costliest hurricane in history (based on current dollars). Hurricane Andrew in 1992 destroyed a large part of Florida, so much so that as a tree planter on Canada’s west coast, our amount of work surged two years later to reforest the blocks logged the previous year to rebuild after the storm.

For the last seven days, I’ve been watching the track of a storm called Gustav, which is going to be a household name by the end of this weekend. This is due in part to two reasons. First, it is heading almost straight toward New Orleans. Second, the largest and most concentrated part of the US energy infrastructure is in the Gulf of Mexico, just west of New Orleans.

New Orleans is a city that should not exist. The average elevation of the city is a couple of feet BELOW sea level. This was only made possible by a massive system of dykes, levees, and pumps, which began to be put into place in the early 1900’s. Up to that time, settlers stayed on higher ground, above sea level. So it appears that people were perhaps a little more intelligent a century ago than they are today. Katrina certainly reinforced that theory, when a major portion of the city was pretty much destroyed. However, it appears that some people learned their lessons, because the population of New Orleans today is probably only two-thirds of what it was before Katrina.

Why would people choose to live there, knowing that chances are high that another hurricane could come along and do same thing? Well, I can’t really criticize all of them. If you’ve lived there all of your life, it’s your home, regardless of the dangers or challenges of living there. And if you’re too poor to move, there isn’t much that you can do. It’s really only the people that are moving there nowadays of their own initiative that really need to give their collective heads a shake. I hope that this weekend doesn’t prove to be a lesson for them. Hopefully Gustav will lose strength or miss New Orleans, although I wouldn’t put any bets on that.

There is a possibility right now that Gustav might swing sufficiently to the west to avoid hitting New Orleans head-on. If that’s the case, then it’s just the rest of the United States that really has to worry. You see, just west of New Orleans, all the way over to Galveston, Texas and beyond, lies the richest energy production zone in America. The oil and gas production from the Gulf of Mexico is unbelievably critical to the proper functioning of the American industrial empire and financial infrastructure. You see, the Gulf is responsible for fifteen percent of American natural gas production, twenty-five percent of American oil production, and one-third of American refining capacity. The following graphic shows just how concentrated the production fields are. All those little blue and red things in the water are oil or gas rigs, and the line shows the current predicted path of the storm. You can also click on the graphic for a link to the original, larger-size version:

After Katrina and then Rita came through the Gulf in 2005, oil prices jumped overnight. More importantly, gasoline and diesel prices also skyrocketed. If a storm shuts down the region, imagine what will happen across the United States when one-third of America’s gasoline production is suddenly unavailable for a period of time. It’s a classic supply/demand problem – less supply for the same demand means that prices rise. And when prices of oil or gasoline rise, America’s economy goes into the toilet.

There are a few positive factors that could help. For one, maybe the storm will weaken, or veer off and miss the critical energy infrastructure. Even if only Gustav’s edge passed through the area, the industry would recover almost overnight. Also, the industry learned a lot from Katrina. For instance, at the time, most oil platforms were anchored to the floor of the Gulf with only eight mooring lines. Nowadays, twelve to sixteen lines are the norm. A storm would still damage a lot of the surface infrastructure, but at least there might not be so many loose oil rigs floating around the Gulf this time around. Needless to say, it is a bit of a challenge to tow an oil rig back into the exact proper location and tie the production pipeline back into the wells on the floor of the Gulf.

On a less positive note, there is a lot less "spare production capacity" in the world right now than there was in 2005. This is evidenced by the price increases in oil since then. Oil was less than $50 per barrel before Katrina hit, and immediately jumped to new records. Oil is down to around $115 per barrel today, but was almost at $150 per barrel earlier this year. Because of the lack of spare production capacity, the impact of a major industry shutdown this month would be far more serious than it was after Katrina. It's a good thing that the industry has taken major steps to protect its physical infrastructure from the possibility of further hurricane damages.

The amount of news coverage of the Democratic Convention this week, then of McCain’s VP pick, has certainly been astounding. It’s too bad that it has almost completely overshadowed the potential economic disaster that may hit at the start of next week.

Remixes of -When I Grow Old-

2008-08-28T15:33:00.014-03:00

I sponsored a contest on my DJ website during the summer to encourage people to submit dance remixes of Mike Allison’s “When I Grow Old” track. We provided the raw clean vocals track for producers to download, to make things easier. We got a lot strange entries, ranging from drum & bass, to breaks, to atmospheric lounge music, to trance and dance. We also got some really high quality, creative remixes.

I’ve picked three of the top entries here. Not all of them are available yet from my website, but I figured I’d let my blog readers have a “sneak peek” at the tracks. The first track listed below (Bit Funk’s) is a great club track, and starting to get a fair amount of play in venues around North America. The other two mixes are trance-oriented - Prince Avitar did an incredible job creating the backing track, and the judges for the contest liked the Zodiacal Light remix for the winning entry:

      Bit Funk's Club Remix

      Prince Avitar Electro Aftershow Vocal Mix

      Zodiacal Light Vocal Remix

If you want to learn more about the guys who produced these tracks, and links to their MySpace pages or websites, check here.

The tracks are a good example showing how different a song can sound when you give it a different drum track and tempo. I hope you enjoy them ...

Mount Allison Pub Moving

2008-08-13T10:02:00.004-03:00

The MTA Pub, where I work, is moving into a new location this month. Although there are going to be some shortcomings with the new location, there are also going to be a lot of improvements to our infrastructure. I'm putting together a blog for the next few weeks to track progress for all of the students who are curious to see what the Pub is going to look like when they come back to university in September. Here's the link:

http://mountallisonpub.blogspot.com

For the time being, I have allowed the comments to be turned on and unmoderated. If we start getting much spam, I'll switch to comment moderation, but it shouldn't be too bad at the start since it's a brand new blog and most of the attention on it will only be in the next two to three weeks.

Short-Term Individual Changes To Reduce Energy Consumption

2008-08-03T00:28:00.001-03:00

As a society, we have to make a lot of changes to mitigate the effects of energy depletion. However, a lot of people feel helpless when it comes to effecting change, because they feel that their actions won’t make a difference. However, it would be a mistake to think that. Above and beyond the role that societal changes play, people making individual changes in their consumption patterns can actually make a major difference. Just as conservation became a popular buzzword after the oil shocks in the early 1970’s, a large mass of people making changes in personal habits will possibly put off major declines in our standards of living by a few or several years. One should not underestimate the power of grassroots societal shifts.

Several people have emailed to ask me what they can do to try to help solve the problem on an individual level, or what I’m doing personally to help. So before I write a post talking about ways that our collective society should change, I’ve come up with a short list of five simple things that I’ve already done to change my personal habits, which each play a small part in reducing my overall energy footprint. These changes go beyond common-sense items like allowing your house to be cooler in the fall and winter (in northern climates), not standing in front of the fridge with the door open, and pledging not to buy a new car. And just so you know, I don’t have to do any of the things on this list: I just want to. It makes me feel like I’m contributing to the solution (partly) rather than being solely a part of the problem:

01. Compact fluorescent light bulbs: If you haven’t seen compact fluorescent bulbs yet, you will soon. They are becoming immensely popular. Yes, they may cost about four to six times as much as a regular incandescent light bulb, but they usually have a rated life that is five to ten times as long as an incandescent, so the cost equals out. Where you gain, however, lies in the fact that it only takes about one third or less electricity to power these bulbs compared to regular bulbs. Aside from a very small number of applications (ie. if you ‘need’ or prefer yellowish/incandescent light in a particular area, or if the bulb needs to support certain shapes of wire shades of a lamp cover), these bulbs are a sure-fire way to reduce your electrical bill.

02. Wash with cold water: I’m no fashion king, but when it comes to washing my clothing, I’m pretty sure that cold water does almost as good a job as hot water. And it uses far less electricity, because you don’t have to heat the water. Even whites can be washed in cold water – try it yourself.

03. Turn down your water heater: The way that a water heater works is that it keeps a large amount of water on hand at a certain temperature, let say around 150 degrees Fahrenheit. That water may sometimes come directly out your taps as original “hot water,” or it may be mixed slightly with cold water, depending on how you run your taps. If you find that the water coming out of the taps in your home is too hot to run your hands under, so you mix it with cold, or if you need to have a lot of cold mixed in with the hot to make your shower bearable, then your hot water heater is probably set higher than it needs to be. Turning it down by ten degrees or so probably won’t make your life uncomfortable, but over the course of the year, if you only have to keep the water ten degrees cooler than before, you’re saving a lot of electricity again. The only disclaimer I have about this task is that you shouldn’t play with the settings on your hot water heater if you aren’t comfortable working around electricity. Turning the temperature down is quite easy for an experienced handyman, but if you’re not that type of person, ask a friend who is comfortable to turn down the thermostat.

04. Walking to work more often: As a tree planter, I walk about fifteen to thirty kilometres per day, on average. I don`t know why I tend to get so lazy in the winter. Western civilization has made me decadent, but I can change. During the fall and winter, I can certainly take a ten-minute walk to work, rather than driving there. The less that I travel in the car, the better, and since most of my driving is in a very small radius around town, walking is quite often feasible. And for the days when I’m busy and running late, walking will just mean that I have to plan my time better. Besides, spending more time walking to work and from work will be healthy. Well, except maybe for my liver – if I`m walking home from work all the time, I`ll be able to have a couple drinks before I leave.

05. Refrain from using Christmas lighting: A lot of Canadians take great pride in decorating their houses with extensive Christmas lights in December. This will be a hard tradition for many to let go of, but the fact is that it burns a lot of unnecessary energy. If you hold off from putting the lights up this coming Christmas season, you’re effectively saying to your neighbours, “I’m doing my part to help conserve energy.” I`m not saying that you should refrain from having a decorated tree inside just yet (although that may also change in the future), but at least the outside lights can be sacrificed. If you’re not sure about this decision, look at your electric bill before you go digging out the Christmas lights this December.

You may find it interesting that only one of these specific five items, #4, deals with saving fuel or oil directly. The other four items deal with reducing electricity usage. But remember, a high proportion of the electricity generated in North America comes directly from power plants that consume oil or natural gas, so if you can minimize your electrical bill, you’re actually reducing the amount of oil and/or natural gas that you are consuming. And the best thing about all of these items (except for #4) is that it really takes NO effort or willpower to do these. All you have to do is make a decision one time, and you’ll continue to get the benefits again and again after that. Take the plunge – go out right now and make a list of five things that you`re going to do to save energy, and follow it. You can borrow from my list if you want.

Paperback Writer

2008-07-06T22:49:00.006-03:00

When you meet someone new, and you've gotten to talk to them for a while, the conversation often turns to the subject of (for young adults) the rest of the family, including your parents and what they do. So to set the record straight for the curious, my parents are fairly normal. Mom had an arts-related career since she was an elementary school teacher, and she was also interested in writing. Dad, on the other hand, was more of the scientific type. His careers intertwined with several individual disciplines. He started out as a land surveyor with some engineering background, then went on to work for Lafarge Canada as a quarry manager and also a shipping terminal manager.

One day, a year or so ago, my mother called me on the phone. Luckily, my parents have both wholely embraced the use of email (after I initially accused at least one of them as being a Luddite). So phone calls are fairly irregular now, and I wasn't sure what merited this one. Anyway, mom got right to the point: "So, guess what? Your dad has a new career. Can you guess what it is?"

I couldn't.

Her reply, "He's writing romance novels."

I suspect that there was a long pause at this point, before I finally replied, "Pardon me, but can you repeat that?"

I had heard her clearly. He had decided to become a writer. And no, I could have guessed for months about his alleged new career, but I would never have guessed that.

His first novel, Tatamagouche Inheritance, is already out in print. Dad grew up in Tatamagouche (and I spent many summers playing on the farm there while I was growing up), so it seems like a fitting setting for his first novel. I have a backlog of about 200 books at my house, sitting by the bed, which I really wish I had time to read, so I haven't actually read his yet. However, some of my female friends have read excerpts from his book to me aloud, much to their own amusement. Maybe I'll have to keep several copies on hand just to give out. However, I somehow inwardly cringe at the thought of bringing someone home to "meet the parents" someday, and have her get all excited to meet this wonderful romance writer in person, and it's my own father.

Anyway, this book is now available from the Wild Rose Press, for anyone looking to pick up some summer reading material. It promises to be full of conflict and sexual tension, and he has more books on the way. You can also check out www.davidclark.ca for more background about him.

Peak Oil

2008-05-26T11:29:00.003-03:00

This post could be the most important thing that you have ever read, if you take it seriously.

How many of you have heard of the term “peak oil”? Three or four years ago, probably less than 0.01% of North Americans knew what this phrase referred to. Nowadays, with the price of gasoline and diesel and other fuels skyrocketing, the phrase is entering the mainstream, and probably almost 5% of the population has at least heard some reference to the emerging problems of fossil fuel depletion. If you haven’t, you’d better learn quickly. And as a forewarning, you’re going to be shocked by what you learn.

Basically, the problem is simple to understand if you know anything about basic economics. Fossil fuels, particularly crude oil, have been plentiful in the past hundred years. However, even though humans have known about the existence of crude oil for thousands of years, it has only been since the early 1900's that crude became a mainstream commodity. Many people mark the effective beginning of the petroleum industry as taking place when the Spindletop gusher was discovered in Texas in 1901. After that, it wasn’t too long before oil became a key part of industrial civilization.

Over the years, geologists have been able to find many large deposits of oil. However, the rate of new discoveries has plummeted in recent decades. Basically, geologists found almost all of the notable fields several decades ago, and now, the best we can hope for is rechecking old areas for small pockets that were overlooked. On a global basis, discoveries peaked in the 1960’s. However, the exploration budgets of the big global oil companies have all been slashed in the past decade, because these companies know that there is very little left out there to find. Of course there are some exceptions – some geologists hope that there are still large deposits under the Caspian Sea, under Arctic regions, and in certain deep sea offshore areas. However, most of those areas are extremely tough to drill in (both politically and financially) and are unlikely to add more than a small percentage to remaining global reserves.

At the moment, the world consumes about 85 million barrels of oil per day. This number has been growing for decades (by a few percentage points per year), with the exception of a few blips, such as immediately after the 1974 oil shocks. It’s not surprising that consumption has been growing, because the earth’s population has been growing. True, we have made enormous strides in terms of conservation and efficiency, especially since the early 1970’s, but these “savings” have been offset by increased population growth, and also by the desire of certain second-world economies to “catch up to the west” (especially in countries like China and India, who, not surprisingly, want to emulate the same standards of living as North Americans).

Just as demand grew, the supply of crude was historically able to grow for decades and always exceed supply. However, many of the large “elephant” fields that were discovered in the mid-20th century (Cantarell in Mexico, Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, etc.) have finally started to run out. In fact, four of the five largest oil fields in the world right now are in terminal decline, and their daily output is dropping fast (some on the order of 10% per year or more). Since about 2000, we have only discovered about one new barrel of oil for every four or five barrels that we consume. So basically, although global supplies were increasing for quite a while, we’ve used up quite a fair chunk of available oil over the past century. Since oil is a non-renewable resource, at least in terms of the human time frame, we’re running out.

Now I don’t want to mislead people here. It isn’t exactly accurate to say that we’re “almost out of oil” on planet Earth. In fact, the truth is that we’ve probably used less than a third of the known oil. However, problems do exist in extracting oil. Based on current technology, which has been pretty refined in the past few decades, we can usually only recover about 35% to 55% of oil from any given underground deposit. We’ve managed to increase this recovery rate by a small amount, and in some cases geologists are going back to old “exhausted” fields and are able to extract a bit more oil. However, due to geologic and physical reasons, it is impossible to improve recovery rates by much more than current levels. One method of improving recovery rates used to date is that sometimes petroleum engineers will inject large quantities of water into a well in order to increase the pressure and force more oil out. However, this is a bit of a desperate approach – estimates are that in Saudi Arabia, engineers are injecting over 13 million barrels of seawater per day to force out about 9 million barrels of oil. It won’t be long before some of those fields become useless because they will have such a high water content.

Also, you have to consider the cost of extracting oil. There are two measures of the cost of extraction. If you’re looking at the monetary cost, let’s take an example: let’s say that it costs $150 to extract each barrel of oil from a certain oilfield. At the moment, with crude oil selling for $135 per barrel, it doesn’t make any sense for a company to extract that oil, so it is currently an uneconomical field. However, if oil suddenly jumps to $200 per barrel, that field will become economical again, and engineers will drain it. But ignoring the dollar costs, the key indicator is the “energy cost,” known in the industry as the ROEI, or Return On Energy Invested. It is increasingly taking more and more energy to get at the “harder to extract” oil basins. If you can only recover 0.9 barrels of oil from a particular reservoir for every barrel of oil you use in energy consumption, that basin will never, ever become useful for humans.

So based on these two main considerations, we are running out of “useful” oil. You can describe the situation in many different ways: we’ve “skimmed off the cream of the crop” or we’ve “picked the low-hanging fruit.” But no matter how you put it, we’ve exhausted a sizeable percentage of the easiest oil, and we can never get it back. Due to this, due to the extreme depletion of our existing largest fields, and due to the practical absence of new discoveries, the cumulative effect has been that our global supply of oil appears to have finally peaked in the past year or so. Although petroleum geologists around the world are desperately trying to increase output in every known oil-producing region, it is extremely unlikely that global output will ever rise again above 85 million barrels per day. In fact, because so many oil fields are already going into terminal decline (estimated at 3% or more globally per year), that supply figure is going to drop quickly.

So what I’m saying is that last year (probably) or maybe this year is the last time in human history that global supply of crude oil will be able to fulfill demand. In the next few decades, demand will grow by probably 2% per year, and supply is expected to fall by 3% per year. In other words, the difference between supply and demand is going to result in a shortfall that gets probably four or five percent worse every single year.

A shortfall of 5% doesn’t sound like a big problem. However, consider than during the oil shocks of 1974, a 5% shortfall resulted in gasoline prices going up by 400%, and some industries coming to a standstill. I can think of two analogies: the first is musical chairs. When the music stops, if there are exactly enough chairs, everyone calmly seats themselves. But as soon as there is a shortfall of just one chair, fighting breaks out. Another even better analogy would be the human body. An average person probably contains about 160 pounds of water, since we are mostly made of water. However, a shortfall (dehydration) of just 10 to 15 pounds of water can be life-threatening, and in some cases will kill a person.

Your next thought might be, “So what if gas becomes really expensive? That’s a problem, but not the end of the world.” However, you would be incorrect. In addition to transportation fuels, crude oil is a basic component of just about every part of industrial society. We make medicines, plastics, and thousands of other materials out of crude oil. Crude oil is a key component of global food production, and is a core input for just about every significant industrial activity that exists today.

Our entire culture is screwed. Human civilization is screwed. I know that this sounds extremist, but that is the very opinion of the best paid and most highly respected scientists, geologists, and physicists in the world. The problem is that very few people WANT to believe this warning, because it means a total re-evaluation of the near-term future of humanity. Nobody wants to think that ten years from now, our world will probably be embroiled in untold economical and physical resource wars between nations and regions for access to energy and food supplies. Our best option is to hope that these are mostly fought with economic means rather than conventional and nuclear forces, but regardless, the end result will be the same.

You may think that I’m crazy, and that this can’t happen. However, look up the history of dozens of major historical empires and civilizations that have gone through similar collapses in the past few thousand years. The American Empire is one that is currently in steep decline. It’s hard to see that at the present, “from the inside,” but it will become painfully obvious in a few more decades. A complete collapse of the American dollar and financial system, which could make the Great Depression seem like a frat party, is probably only a few years away. The only difference between Fortress America and past empires is that our collapse will be based upon a sudden shortage of fossil fuels, rather than other causes. It is a sad but unfortunate fact that future historians will look back on the “industrial age” as being a relatively brief blip in the history of humanity, of maybe two centuries in duration. Our global population is going to collapse massively in the next century. Humans must evolve into a much less energy-dependent society in order to survive in the long term.

When I first started learning about all of this, several years ago, I was a bit apprehensive about our future. However, I’ve become quite reconciled to the possible ramifications of energy shortages in the next decade. I’ve studied the implications of Peak Oil in a lot of detail over the past several years, and it no longer worries me. I have a kind of detached indifference when I look at signs everywhere that Peak Oil has finally hit us, such as rapidly rising fuel prices, rising food prices, the beginnings of “mainstream consciousness” when it comes to energy issues, and so on. I know that my lifestyle even ten years from now will be radically different than it is at the present, but I’m not worried. Electricity will be available only sporadically, unless we make enormous progress with renewables such as wind power (and it may be too late). The internet will no longer be maintainable, because of the electrical and infrastructure costs. Conventional food sources will have to become extremely localized, and our monetary system may be replaced in large part by trade or barter. However, that would be a type of lifestyle that I could easily adapt to, unlike most city folk. I’ve learned a few useful skills in my career as a tree planter, and I wouldn’t be too upset to live a rural subsistence existence with no money or fancy possessions. Unlike a lot of modern society, I could almost enjoy becoming a farmer, scratching out a subsistence lifestyle without luxuries or many conventional amenities. Well, maybe I wouldn't enjoy it, but I could do it if I had to to. Could you?

Anyway, that is enough for now. I’d like to keep my blog more light-hearted, but I can’t help but let some people know more about Peak Oil, and I know that I’ll have follow-up posts in future months. I’ll probably also do some book reviews of some of the better books that I’ve read on the subject.

I highly recommend that you take the time to educate yourself on this topic – it could be the most important thing that you have ever studied. A very large number of university students read my posts because of my Facebook feed – if you know me, you may think that I’ve totally lost what little was left of my sanity, but please trust me - it is definitely worth your time to learn more about Peak Oil. It will be more useful to you than any university course that you ever take, and it will probably change your life. You can start by reading through a couple of websites about Peak Oil, such as www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net, which is maintained by Matt Savinar, or www.dieoff.org, by Jay Hanson. Those sites should work wonders in completely depressing you about the possible near-term future of mankind. Then, to snap you out of depression, you can try going to your local library or to Amazon and reading some of the mainstream analyses of our global energy problem, such as “The Party’s Over,” “Hubbert’s Peak”, “High Noon For Natural Gas”, and a slew of other best-sellers.

Here’s one final staggering statistic to think about before I wrap up this post, which surprisingly, I haven't seen used before to make people realize how severe the situation is. According to the Oil & Gas Journal, the world had about 1293 billion barrels of oil in total in reserve in 2006. This number is disputed, and some other authorities think the true number is actually a bit lower than that. But let’s assume that 1293 billion barrels is the correct number. Seems like quite a bit, doesn’t it? We shouldn’t really have to worry for a while yet, should we? Well, with 7.5 billion people on Earth, that works out to about 172 barrels per person left on our planet, period. And a sizeable portion of that amount may never be able to be recovered due to the physical and geological challenges.

Right now in my summer job, my truck is consuming over a barrel of oil PER DAY based on the amount of diesel I use. I run a silviculture camp of tree planters, so the job is about as “green” or eco-friendly as it gets (my camp will replant about five million trees in Western Canada in the next three month). However, despite how “good for the environment” this job is, the fact remains that I am going to use “my share” of the Earth’s remaining oil in less than six months based on my driving use alone, and this doesn’t even take into account the hundreds of other barrels of oil that my personal ecological footprint will consume in other ways. If every other person on the planet consumed fossil fuels at the rate that I do (and I’m drastically trying to reduce my consumption), then the world would be out of oil in a couple months, not decades or years.

I have wanted to put up this post for about three years, but until now, I figured that everyone would think I was crazy, and only one or two people would read it and take it seriously. Now that gas prices are going up quickly, I think quite a few more people will actually study this information and start trying to learn more. I hope this is the case - sticking your head in the sand is not going to make the problem go away.

Three years ago, hardly anyone but a tiny minority of financial experts (and myself) ever believed that oil could cost more than $60 per barrel. Less than a week ago, it set a record at $135 per barrel, but believe me, that’s just the beginning. Global oil supplies will become increasingly scarce in the very near future. A famous Saudi proverb goes, “My grandfather rode a camel. My father rode in a car. I ride in jet planes. And my sons will ride camels.”

GlobalStar Satellite Phones

2008-05-18T02:31:00.000-03:00

While I’m supervising a bush camp of tree planters, I occasionally make use of a satellite phone for remote communications. These phones are invaluable for people working in extremely remote locations, where there is no cell or radio-phone coverage. Although they are a relatively new technology (I first saw them in widespread use in planting camps beginning about five years ago), their use has exploded in situations where the basic ability to communicate with the outside world is what matters, and where the cost is fairly irrelevant. For instance, as of last summer, GlobalStar (the provider that I’m familiar with) had over a quarter of a million phones in operation in over 120 countries around the world.

The way that the satellite phones work is quite simple. They are very similar to a cell phone in look and operation, but instead of getting a signal from a tower on a nearby mountaintop, the signal is transferred between the user and a satellite in low-earth orbit or geosynchronous orbit. GlobaStar has a network of 52 low Earth orbit satellites to provide coverage. The satellites fly about 1400 km above the earth, which in aeronautic terms is “fairly low.”

GlobalStar has a few problems, however. First of all, their satellites have to be close enough to an earth-based station (known as a gateway) to operate properly, so there are areas around the world where coverage does not exist. For instance, there are no gateways in remote areas of the ocean, because traffic in those areas is almost non-existent (except from passing ships). Therefore, even though the satellites fly over these areas, their phones don’t work there. Also, because the Globalstar satellites have an inclination of 52 degrees, they don’t provide coverage over the polar areas, which are “out of sight” of the satellites.

GlobalStar’s satellites were launched between 1998 and 2000, and were mostly expected to have a lifetime of seven to eight years. Accordingly, in 2005, some of the satellites started to be taken out of service. They are currently designing new satellites with much longer life expectancies, but I have no idea when they are being launched. I think they expected availability is around 2010, but I may stand to be corrected.

The big problem is that in early 2007, GlobalStar filed documents with the SEC in which they admitted to a problem with their S-band amplifiers (a critical part of the communications equipment) which would lead to a significant loss of operational capability by this year. In fact, I started having extreme difficulty in using my own satellite phone last summer. The company went so far as to issue the following statement last year: “Based on its most recent analysis, the Company now believes that, if the degradation of the S-band antenna amplifiers continues at the current rate or further accelerates, and if the Company is unsuccessful in developing additional technical solutions, the quality of two-way communications services will decline, and by some time in 2008 substantially all of the Company’s currently in-orbit satellites will cease to be able to support two-way communications services.” So in other words, the reliability of the GlobalStar network is highly questionable right now.

One of the other planting camps in my own company had a medical emergency today. An employee was found unconscious on a remote block by another member of her crew. She is quite fine this evening – the crew had the proper first aid personnel and gear on site to provide proper care, and a helicopter was called immediately to take her to the nearest hospital. However, the helicopter was summoned by satellite phone, using a GlobalStar phone. It worked well today, but we can’t count on the phones being reliable in all situations.

As a supervisor, I have to plan for safety every day, and have reliable methods of dealing with emergencies. My plans no longer rely on the assumption that my satellite phone will work. It’s funny – I spent fifteen years working in remote camps without a satellite phone, and never worried in the slightest. But now that I’ve become used to having it, I feel very uneasy knowing that the technology is no longer reliable.

Food Price Increases

2008-04-28T00:52:00.003-03:00

By now, most of the world has realized that food prices are increasing very quickly. This was a major potential issue which was first brought to my attention about three years ago (after reading books such as “Powerdown,” “The Party’s Over,” and “High Noon For Natural Gas”), so I touched on it briefly back then in my Blog and on my message boards. Usually, I focus on energy crisis issues, but the increase in food prices is of course directly related to the energy crisis in many ways. Prices weren’t rising a few years ago, when I started to learn about the issues, but the writing was very obviously on the wall.

First of all, it’s important to understand specifically why food prices are increasing so much today. The main three reasons are:
1. High demand for food grains which can be used to produce ethanol.
2. Five consecutive years of relatively poor crops on a global scale, which has reduced storage stocks.
3. We have reached a “tipping point” several years ago where supply of food grains is no longer able to increase at the same rate that demand is increasing, and technological improvements can no longer compensate.

Combined, these forces have led to a global supply/demand imbalance, which has reduced global stocks to the point where prices are rapidly rising as the marketplace tries to balance out supply and demand. This kind of “economic balancing act” is fine in an abstract sense when you’re talking about the price of mink coats or auto parts, but it has some pretty major implications when you’re talking about hundreds of millions of people eventually starving to death.

When talking about the high demand for food grains which can be used to produce ethanol, the root cause is the high price of fossil fuels. High crude oil prices lead to high transportation fuel prices. Many American states are imposing increasingly drastic regulations about the amount of ethanol that needs to be blended with transportation fuels, in order to lessen demand/reliance on oil, and reduce the cost. However, the consequential increased demand for ethanol means that the price of ethanol goes up. It’s still cost-effective to use ethanol in terms of reducing transportation costs, because gasoline & diesel are going up faster than ethanol, but the higher price for the ethanol component makes farmers want to produce grains for ethanol rather than for food. This is one major contributor to the global shortage of grains for foods. It’s too bad that the climate and ecosystem in North America wasn’t similar to that of Brazil, or else we’d be able to grow sugar cane effectively as the main ingredient for ethanol.

The poor global food crops for the last five years are basically related to weather. However, this just exaggerates the problem with the supply available. The population of Earth, and thus the demand for food, is increasing by a couple percentage points each year. Until about the middle of last year, there was a fair amount of surplus grain and rice in storage around the world. However, that was because five years ago, there was “a lot” of surplus. Every year since then, as demand grew, stocks have been depleted. This was all quite easy to forecast about three years ago, although the continued poor crops since then has made the problem explode even faster than many people (including myself) had expected. I originally figured that it would be at least the end of 2009 before stocks diminished enough that we reached the global “tipping point” and that prices would start to rise quickly. I was wrong. This past fall, I could buy a bag of flour for my restaurant for about $12.35. On my last food order, I had to pay over $28.00 for the same bag of flour. I’m glad we don’t sell a lot of pizzas. Rice is also rising in price extremely quickly – prices have gone up about 75% globally in the last three or four months (although this is related to conventional supply/demand issues and poor crops, not due to demand for ethanol).

Look at China as a specific (and significant) example. In the mid-1990’s, that country was blatantly warned (see Lester Brown’s book, “Who Will Feed China?”) not to become dependant on foreign grain imports. However, their harvests and storage levels continued to the peak year of 1998, but have then been falling every year since. Unfortunately though, their population has continued to increase, and so has soil erosion, water depletion, and urbanization. In 2003, alarms were raised as China’s national grain storage system became depleted to the point of having only two year’s supply of grain on hand. Since then, there have been annual shortfalls in production of more than twenty to thirty million tons per year. This is not good for the global picture.

Ultimately, food costs will continue to rise, and not just due to supply/demand issues. The larger (long-term) problem is that food production is tied closely to fossil fuels. We could get lucky and discover a major source of alternative energy, but I’m not putting any bets on it. It often takes fifty calories or more of fossil fuels to produce one calorie of table food that is consumed by humans. Essentially then, humans indirectly "eat oil" to feed ourselves. But now, think about the fact that the price of oil has tripled in the past three years. And the price of natural gas has more than doubled in less than a year. Gasoline and diesel are at all-time records. And then consider the following:

- The average piece of food consumed in North America travels 1500 miles before it is eaten. And you need fuel for the cars and trucks that move the food around, yet gas and diesel are climbing in price.
- The main reason why crop yields climbed so much during the 20th century was the introduction of fertilizers. A major component of fertilizer is the nitrogen that is produced through the consumption of natural gas. Natural gas has doubled in price and is becoming increasingly scarce. So not only has fertilizer become more expensive, it is continuing to become more expensive.
- Farms no longer rely predominantly on human labour inputs. Farming is done predominantly by machines, which consume yet more fuel (and additional oil for lubrication).
- Irrigation is becoming increasingly critical to maintain crop yield in many areas. It takes energy to perform irrigation, and even worse, long term water levels & aquifiers are becoming depleted, which is soon going to cause crop levels to decline rather than increase to meet the higher demand of the larger population.

The Earth’s population remained fairly stable for thousands of years, with only slow growth, and it was only when we discovered oil that the world population suddenly blossomed exponentially. Fossil fuels helped to make food production become incredibly easy. Eventually, oil and natural gas are going to cost ten times what they do now (even in inflation-adjusted dollars). When that time comes, and when fossil fuel reserves are a fraction of today’s level (probably less than forty years from now), the global population is probably going to have to shrink back to pre-industrial levels, ie. about a quarter of what it is today. To get there, we either need an immediate effective world-wide birth control program (impossible), a global pandemic that kills a significant fraction of the Earth’s population (possible), or we will see literally billions of people dying a slow death due to starvation. It may seem callous to say that so blatantly, but essentially, the Earth is like a giant petri dish. When a culture in a petri dish gets a major new source of food to consume, the population of the bacteria suddely skyrockets. And then, once the food source is used up, there is an equally sudden decrease in population as a significant portion of the bacteria die off to pre-food-source levels.

Some of the only answers to all of the problems that I’ve touched on above include:
- Massive birth control programs in almost every country around the globe.
- A complete change in the way that our food supply systems are organized, including a huge increase in “locally” grown food, and reduced fertilizer use.
- A major change in global diets: a major shift away from meats to vegetables would make an enormous difference, because animals consume such a large amount of plant matter and only provide a returned fraction of the calories in the form of meat.
- Major reductions in overall food intake levels for most levels of the social hierarchy.

Do any of these seem like easy or likely solutions? No. But over the next couple of decades, changes like these might be the only ways to prevent even greater suffering through global famine and wars for food, as unpalatable as they seem.

Think about that the next time you have a slice of pizza …

Conduct Becoming 2008

2008-04-03T22:42:00.004-03:00

The Conduct Becoming project, originally started in 2001 by Marc Carnes and Drew Dudley (with a tiny bit of assistance from myself), was created to honor the memory of Jason Abraham. Last week, this project released its eighth annual CD. A feature about that project and about the Pub was shown on CTV’s “Live At Five” program on the album launch night last week, and you can see that news clip here on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywksUzmD9Xo

This year’s Conduct Becoming CD will soon be available for online purchase, and you can check out the Conduct Becoming website for more information. One of the tracks on this year’s album (Mike Allison’s “When I Grow Old”) can be downloaded for free as an MP3 from this link, if you want a sample of some of the music available on the CD. I've listened to the entire CD several times, and I highly recommend picking up a copy and supporting a very worthwhile cause.

For people in the southeastern New Brunswick area, there will be a special "Conduct Becoming Evening" hosted at Cranewood, the University President's house, next Friday evening (April 11th). Several of the artists and musicians from this year's album will be performing that evening. Tickets are $25 each and somewhat limited in availability. I went to this event last year and had a great time, so I highly recommend it.

TorrentSpy Website Closed

2008-03-27T23:03:00.003-03:00

The well-known TorrentSpy website closed down this week. The message on their website now says:

"Friends of TorrentSpy,

We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.

The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.

Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown.

It was a wild ride,

The TorrentSpy Team"

It's too bad that piracy and copyright-infringement issues are making torrent files seem like a "bad" thing. They can be pretty useful at times, and for quite legitimate purposes. For instance, I had some training videos (full DVD image) available that I created for my tree planting website a year ago, but of course the files were huge - over two gigabytes each. I could host them on my server, and the bandwidth wasn't an issue, but when downloading a file that large, it takes a while and having a connection hiccup aborts the download if you aren't using a browser with some sort of connection manager. Torrent files solved that problem, and also distributed the bandwidth drain so that the server wasn't suddenly overwhelmed with the need to feed out hundreds of gigabytes of data per day during the peak part of the run-up to the planting season.

The closure of TorrentSpy certainly doesn't make torrent files less practical for legitimate hosting, but if torrents are punished enough, their common use will eventually become minimal enough that using them for legitimate means will be constrained.

Sackville Fire in 2006

2008-02-24T18:45:00.005-04:00

Two years ago, on the night that I returned to Sackville from my summer on the West Coast, there was a large fire in downtown Sackville, my hometown. The date was August 11th, 2006.

It started out fairly innocently. I had just arrived at the Pub minutes before, when someone came into the bar and said that they had just been kicked out of Ducky's because the fire alarm went off. This was (and still is) a fairly frequent occurrance. Everyone assumed that it was a false alarm. This was still fairly early in the evening, shortly after 9pm.

An hour later someone else come up to the Pub and reported that the building really was on fire. Fifteen minutes later, another call came in to tell us that it was a major fire. A couple of us decided to walk down to see what was happening, and I grabbed the video camera.

When I arrived, we immediately realized that this was definitely a major fire, it didn't take long to realize that the building would be destroyed. I stayed at the scene for about an hour, and the police officers, recognizing who I was, allowed me close enough to get some pretty good footage. A lot of my video footage was used on a couple of the regional news networks the following day.

Anyway, I also took some of the more interesting shots and put together a short video, about seven minutes long, and we put a copy of it online on the Pub website, so alumni and students from out-of-town could see what happened. The Pub website had over three thousand visitors in the following 24 hours as word got around. I was also happy that we were able to use the video later that same year in putting together a fundraising/awareness video for the Sackville Fire Department.

Anyway, I found a copy of the video yesterday, so I put it up on YouTube. A lot of students at MTA right now (everyone in first or second year) won't have ever seen what the downtown used to look like before half the block burned down. Here's a copy of the video:

Here's a direct link to the YouTube page, for Facebook readers who can't see the video as an embedded object:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9ZoR4N7hlM

When I Grow Old

2008-02-22T00:03:00.011-04:00

People who visit my website because of my DJ’ing activities probably assume that I focus almost entirely on “dance music,” or progressive/tribal house EDM, for those who pay close attention to the particular genre that I specialize in. However, I have a fairly broad background in music (as my regular blog readers must realize).

Last year, I wrote a track which I thought was pretty catchy. I'd categorize it as "indie soft rock." I recorded a rough copy of the song one Saturday evening before work at the Pub, and sent the recording to Mike Allison to listen to. A day later, Mike emailed me back to say that he really liked the song, and recorded a rough version himself. As soon as I heard it, I decided that I would try to release the song professionally.

What with all my other jobs and projects, it took a while for everything to come together, but over the next eight or ten months, I finally got the project moving forward quickly. We recorded the song partly in New Brunswick, in my own studio, and partly in Vancouver at FaderMaster Studios, with Shawn Cole acting as a recording and mastering engineer. Mike did the lead and backup vocals, and the acoustic guitar and bass. I played the drums, keyboards, electric guitar, and shaker in the new version.

I also enlisted the assistance of Deanna Musgrave to help me put a video together. We did some filming last spring, and more filming this past fall. Deanna has a lot of practice at putting videos together, and has a really interesting abstract style for some of her work which contrasts interestingly with the usual style that I’ve used in the past to put a lot of videos together. Deanna put together the first version of the video for me, and then added some additional footage with the help of Julien Strasfield as a technical guru in Final Cut (since I’m used to PC-based software). Having Deanna and myself working together as co-filmmakers and co-editors was a really educational experience for me.

It’s interesting that this project has turned into a “Mount Allison University Community” project. Mike is an alumnus at MTA. Shawn used to be my roommate while we were at university, and he worked at the campus Pub with me as the Student Manager (his mom, Filis, still works at the university too). Deanna is an alumnus. Julien is still a student, although he graduates this year. Ian Allen, another employee at both the University and the campus Pub, did the graphic design work for the CD, and helped with marketing. When we needed extra actors for the video, we recruited Dinao (a friend of mine who worked with me as a bartender last year) to act as Mike's supposed girlfriend. For the older version of Mike & Dinao in the future, we were lucky to have the assistance of Robert Campbell (MTA’s President) and his wife Christl (a professor at MTA) as characters. In fact, the only two people involved in the entire project who are not members of the MTA university community are the two kids in the video – Evan (my nephew) and Mira (Evan’s friend), which provided the "flashback" footage of Mike and Dinao when they were young. Maybe someday one or both of them will decide that they want to come to Mount Allison.

Here’s a link to the video, for those who want to watch it (which only works in my original blog, but not in the Facebook feed). I’m going to try to submit it to MuchMusic and other networks shortly, although I want to do a few more edits first.

We also put together a full CD with this song as the first track on the CD, and I included eight of my favourite other Mike Allison tracks. Some of the other songs have been released on his various albums before, and some were not. The CD is called “Tilting At Windmills” and is available for sale for $10 at the Olive Branch restaurant in Sackville, NB. I’m also working on getting a listing for the CD on Amazon.

You may be curious about the name for the CD. “Tilting At Windmills” is a phrase from Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. Basically, "tilting" was another word for jousting (by knights) in Medieval times, and in the book, our hero thought that a windmill was actually a giant, and so he wanted to attack it by jousting. Essentially then, “tilting at windmills” has come to mean “fighting a futile fight” or “fighting against imaginary enemies,” or variations on the same theme. I suppose that you could infer that since this song (and CD) are being marketed purely through guerrilla or viral marketing approaches, rather than conventional musical channels, we are “fighting the musical establishment.” However, we’re just doing this for fun, so the “musical establishment” is really an enemy in imagination only. Don Quixote is the best-selling work of fiction of all time (for non-political, non-religious works), so hopefully some of that charm rubs off and makes the CD popular too.

Anyway, if you like the song, please send the website link and/or the YouTube link to your friends. We’re not trying to make money off CD sales, so we definitely encourage you to share the mp3 freely. And if you want to hear the song on the radio, click here to see a full list of Canadian radio stations, so you can give your favourite local station a call or an email request to hear the song. Here are the links to the video on YouTube, and also to the page on my site where you can download the mp3 for free:

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJjauOyEt40

"When I Grow Old" (and the rest of Mike Allison's "Tilting At Windmills" album) is now available for mp3 download from iTunes, AmazonMP3, Rhapsody, Napster, and Shockhound. We especially recommend that you check out the Shockhound link, because you can sign up for a free account now and as an introductory offer, you can download thirteen mp3's for free. In other words, you can get the entire "Tilting At Windmills" album for free that way!

One Hundred Dollar Oil

2008-02-20T22:10:00.001-04:00

Oil “officially” traded above $100/barrel today for the first time ever (well, sort of). And by officially, I mean that the closing price of West Texas Intermediate in Cushing was $100.74/barrel. Oil has touched $100 a couple times recently though in intraday trading, but I’m fairly certain that this is the first time that it has closed at that level.

There are several different benchmark trading prices for oil, depending on the type of oil and the date of the transaction. For example, WTI is a common benchmark – it stands for West Texas Intermediate, which it is a “light, sweet” crude, with an API gravity of 39.6 and sulphur content of 0.24%. Its specific gravity is around 0.87 (hence the reason that it floats on water, like other oils). When someone talks about the “WTI price” they mean the price of WTI when it is in storage (or assumed to be in future storage) at the major U.S. distribution terminal in Cushing, Oklahoma. WTI is also the oil used for pricing when someone talks about the Nymex price, although under that pricing description, it is assumed that the oil is priced for storage or delivery through the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Other commonly used reference points for oil are Brent Crude (sourced from the North Sea, 0.37% sulphur, 38.1 API), Dubai Crude (sourced from the Middle East, 2.0% sulphur, 31.0 API), and the OPEC Reference Basket (a mix of eight or ten standard crudes from various Middle Eastern states).

The price of oil also depends whether it is a “spot” or “futures” price. A spot price means that a buyer and a seller are willing to trade the oil at a certain price at the time of the trade (ie. on-the-spot). A futures price means that the buyer and seller agree to transfer possession of the oil on a future date, usually measured as the first day of the month of the contract. Finally, a single “contract” means an amount equivalent to one thousand barrels of oil.

Getting confusing yet? It shouldn’t be. Let me give an example. Let’s say that a trader offers to buy 10 futures contracts of Nymex oil at $101.40 for June delivery, from another trader who is willing to sell under those conditions. Under those exact specifications, the buyer has just committed himself to buying 10,000 barrels of oil (on paper anyway, even though he may never physically take possession of the oil) on June 1st, for $101.40 per barrel. In other words, he just spent $1,014,000 – not a small amount. Now what happens if oil goes up in price/value over the next few months, so that on June 1st, the spot price on the Nymex is $103.50? Well, the buyer has already locked in the price with the previous transaction, so even though people are buying and selling for $103.50/barrel on the open (spot) market, the buyer still gets his oil for $101.40/barrel. The interesting thing is that the seller may never have even owned the oil in the first place. He might have been betting the prices would go down between now and June. However, in this example, he made a wrong guess. So the seller, if he didn’t actually have possession of 10,000 barrels of oil, would have to buy those on the open market (for $103.50/barrel) and then sell them right back to the buyer (for $101.40/barrel) at a loss, to meet his obligation, giving him an instant $21,000 loss.

Anyway, now that you know a bit about trading, let’s get back to the point: oil prices are continuing to rise. Oil has actually traded (briefly) above $100 a couple other times in the past year, but this is the first time that it closed trading for the day above the magic $100 mark. I think the first time that it traded for $100 was maybe back in late December? I can’t remember for sure, but I believe that it was a single contract traded, and the price immediately dropped back to $99.40 after that single $100.00 contract. So in other words, a trader probably did the trade for bragging rates. He bought a thousand barrels for $100.00 per barrel, and a minute later sold them for $99.40 per barrel, which would be a total loss of $600. Why would he do that? Either he was an idiot, or more likely, he did it for bragging rights: he probably figured it was worth $600 to him (pocket change for most big-time traders) to be able to brag to his grandkids someday and say, “Yes, I was the first person in the world to trade oil for $100.00/barrel.”

That’s a big psychological barrier. It was only a few years ago that people thought we would never, ever see oil priced that high. Before Katrina, the record high price for oil was around $60/barrel. However, I think $100.00 is still a drop in the bucket. Based on volume, that’s still cheaper than milk, and even cheaper than bottled water in a lot of places. There’s plenty of oil left in the world, although the cheap and easy-to-extract stuff is running out. Get ready for gas prices to continue to rise in the near future. The depressing thing however, which I’ve said before, is that “we haven’t seen anything yet.” I don’t think the real pressure on oil prices (due to worldwide demand exceeding available production capacity) will start causing major price spikes until 2010. Enjoy the party while you can.

Marketing Brilliance

2008-02-11T19:34:00.000-04:00

As a marketing major in my undergrad, and also having taken several marketing courses when completing my MBA, I tend to analyze various marketing campaigns that I come across in the world around me. And I tend to appreciate unusual, intelligent, or subtle marketing ideas, because there aren't enough of them in the world today. I also tend to really shake my head at other marketing approaches. For instance, what about WalMart's plan to market products for the Chinese New Year, by proclaiming that the products were "authentic products for the Chinese New Year, made in China!" Um, someone can correct me here if I'm wrong, but isn't the majority of stuff sold by WalMart made in China already?

Anyway, I'm in Vancouver this afternoon, and I came across a billboard that was so creative and yet stunning in its simplicity that I didn't know whether to clap or shake my head in disbelief. The ad is for NEW Diamond Shreddies. I was always a big fan of Shreddies as a breakfast cereal, so I was intrigued by the "new" Shreddies. Well, as the photo below will attest, the difference with the new cereal is that they turned a Shreddie around when they took the photo, so it looks like a diamond rather than a square.

Just don't be disappointed if you find that they taste similar to the square ones.

And by the way, what is the proper spelling of Shreddies in the singular? Is it a Shreddie or a Shreddy?

Top Ten Classical Music Works

2008-01-27T05:50:00.001-04:00

On Friday night, I went to a performance by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (in Edmonton, at Winspear). My former roommate, Marc Carnes, is the Director of Development at the Winspear Centre. The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra is pretty small as far as orchestras go, with about 56 full-time members, and when they perform bigger pieces, they hire in extra talent where needed. The Winspear Centre has amazing acoustics, and I believe that it is known as being one of Canada’s premiere performance venues for exactly this reason. The evening included a Messiaen piece, “Oiseaux Exotiques,” which featured guest pianist Louise Bessette, whom I met after the show. The 2nd half of the evening featured Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” performed by the ESO under the direction of William Eddins. All in all, a great evening of entertainment for anyone who enjoys this kind of music.

People who only know me casually might think that it’s strange that I would go to an event like this. If you know me because I’m a DJ, focusing on electronica and dance music, you’d probably think that listening to classical music would be the furthest thing from my mind. But I actually like several types of music, with dance, rock, indie/alternative, and classical being among the top genres (and I don’t mind country). I actually studied classical piano for a long time, and an understanding of classical piano theory gives everyone a great building point for understanding other genres of music.

For those of you who have always wanted to learn more about classical music, but didn’t know where to begin, I’m going to give you a quick “top ten” list to think about, since I am wide-awake right now after bartending this evening, and I can’t fall asleep at the moment. All of the pieces that I'm going to list here are easily recognizable, and quite memorable. I don’t watch a lot of movies or TV, but I can think of several movies that have soundtracks which included various of these pieces, so I’ve tried to list those tie-ins where I could. Anyway, here is my late-night off-the-cuff “top ten classical music” list.

1. George Gershwin, “Rhapsody In Blue” – one of America’s most well-known and loved classical works. This piece was written by Gershwin in 1924, and many people remember it from its appearance in Disney’s “Fantasia 2000” movie. When Gershwin was asked about his inspiration for the piece, he said that he wrote it on a train trip from New York to Boston, to describe the musical kaleidoscope of America. To honor this piece, it was played at the opening of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles by eighty-four pianists, playing simultaneously. The piece is instantly recognizable for its opening glissando on the clarinet. This is a very whimsical and upbeat piece.

2. Samuel Osborne Barber, “Adagio For Strings” – another unforgettable composition for me, because it was the backing music for the “Barnes Shoots Elias” scene in the movie Platoon. This piece was written in 1936, and was voted as the “saddest” classical musical composition of all time by a recent BBC survey. That’s not surprising, when you hear it, considering its mournful tempo and melodies. Versions of this composition have been remixed or sampled for tracks by such well-known DJ’s and producers as Sean Combs, Ferry Corsten, the Skip Raiders, Paul Oakenfold, and Tiesto. In fact, it was the strength of Tiesto’s remix of this piece, from his “Parade of Athletes” album, that led to him being asked to perform at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

3. Maurice Ravel, “Bolero” – this 1928 composition by Maurice Ravel actually embarrassed him because of its popularity. It was featured in the popular late 1970’s film “10” (Bo Derek & Dudley Moore), and is most recognizable for its ostinato rhythm on the snare drum throughout. The piece itself is very simple, and is one of the best examples in classical music of a piece that constantly builds throughout the performance. It is basically just two separate melodies, which continue to overlap each other, and more and more instruments get added as the piece progresses, until finally the entire orchestra is playing together at the end. Some people might also recognize this from its inclusion in the theatre production Copacabana.

4. Carl Orff, “Carmina Burana (O Fortuna)” – the Carmina Burana is a manuscript from the 12th or 13th century which is really just a collection of hundreds and hundreds of medieval songs and poems. Carmina Burana means “songs of Burana” in whatever language it was written in (Latin?). In the 1920’s or 1930’s, Carl Orff set 24 of these songs/poems to music, and the most famous of this group was “O Fortuna.” If you’ve seen “The Doors” (the movie), then you’ll easily recognize the “O Fortuna” selection from that soundtrack, when Jim and Patricia (the reporter) were in the library, entering the blood pact.

5. Mozart, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” – this work, meaning “a little night music,” was written in the late eighteenth century. There are four known movements to this (with the suggestion by Mozart himself that there was also originally a fifth movement), and the first movement is the one that everyone would recognize instantly. The best way that I’d describe this work would be that it is a pretty whimsical or frivilous piece of music. This composition has been featured in a couple movies that I can think of: Alien, and one of the Ace Ventura movies.

6. Johann Pachelbel, “Canon in D” – this 17th century work, often [mistakenly] assumed to be composed by J. S. Bach, is a simple three-part canon based on a repeating two-bar (eight note) bass line. And what’s strange is that I can’t think of any movies that this was in, off the top of my head. I used to love to play it when I was studying classical piano. However, a rock arrangement was made extremely popular by YouTube, in this video by an Asian guitarist.

7. Tchaikovsky, “Nutcracker Suite: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” – the Nutcracker Suite is a ballet. Within the musical score to the ballet, Tchaikovsky wrote a series of waltzes and other works. The “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” is probably the most famous of these. The song in the original Nutcracker which introduces the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” is called “La Marche,” and that piece was used as the basis for a pop rock single that became a #1 hit in Britain in the 1960’s, although I can’t remember who wrote it. Anyway, that song, “Nut Rocker,” is one of the theme songs for Boston Bruins. Parts of the Nutcracker Suite (including “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” as an opener) were used in the original soundtrack to Disney’s “Fantasia” (1940 version).

8. Rachmaninoff, “Piano Concerto no. 2, opus 18” – Rachmaninoff, a Russian composer of the early 20th century, is famous for four concertos he wrote, and also for the “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” I really like his 2nd Concerto, although his third Concerto is notable for being one of the most difficult works to play on piano. I can’t remember ever hearing any of Rachmaninoff’s pieces in any movies.

9. Ludwig van Beethoven, “Mondscheinsonate” – most people would probably know this better by its common English name, the “Moonlight Sonata.” Beethoven’s list of produced works is enormous, such as his nine symphonies, and he is well known for the compositions that he continued to write over the years as he slowly became completely tone deaf. In fact, it is said that when his Ninth Symphony premiered, he did not hear the audience clapping so he started to cry because he thought they didn’t like it, and he did not realize until someone turned him around to face the audience that everybody had loved it. Anyway, the Moonlight Sonata is probably in a ton of films, but I can’t think of any right now.

10. Johann Strauss Jr., “An Der Schonen Blau” – this is something that you might recognize if I told you that the common English name for the piece is the “Blue Danube Waltz.” And if you’ve seen “2001: A Space Odyssey,” you’ll recognize this song. It was also used in a Monty Python skit, where there was an orchestra playing this piece in a football field, and someone kept blowing up members of the orchestra.

ETA April 5/08: I just saw "Hannibal," and the Blue Danube is also in this movie.

Alright, that’s enough about classical music for this evening, but if you have ever had any urge to start learning a bit about classical music, find copies of these ten tracks to get you started, and you won’t go wrong.

Distortion in Windows Media Player

2008-01-24T16:29:00.000-04:00

Have you ever listened to songs in Windows Media Player and found them to be distorted in places, so the sound quality is terrible? The same files may play perfectly in all other programs - I've had files that worked in WinAmp, RealPlayer, Quicktime, Nero, and a host of other programs with no problems, yet Windows Media Player would not handle them properly.

As it turns out, MicroSoft has a Creative PlayCenter MP3 decoder resident in the operating system which is what causes the problem. Certain versions of Windows Media Player use this decoder, but there are compatibility problems. If you're not using that decoder file for whatever reason, you probably won't run into the distortion problems.

The simplest way to fix the problem, assuming that you're running on a Windows operating system, is to go down to your start menu on the bottom left side of the screen, click on it, then go into "search." You need to search your C: drive (or whatever drive your O/S resides on) and look for a file called "Ctmp3.acm" - if you can find that file, don't delete it, just rename it to "Ctmp3.bak" instead.

If you can't see the file extensions when you're doing searches (the default option on Windows, but one which I detest and disable immediately whenever I set up a new computer), I'll show you how to make your file extensions visible. Go to Windows Explorer, either through your Start menu or by holding down the "flying window" key (left of your left side alt key) and then pressing the letter "E" at the same time. Next, go into the Tools menu, and chose Folder Options in the drop-down Tools menu. In Folder options, click on the "View" tab. The seventh or eight option in that list usually says "hide extensions for known file types" and has a check beside it. Uncheck this, then click OK. Now you'll always be able to see file extensions in Windows Explorer and associated panels. If you're quite computer savvy, you might also want to set the other three options above and below that let you show hidden files, show O/S files, and display the full path name in the Title Bar (although this is only applicable if you're trying to conserve system resources by switching to Classic View, such as for intensive audio or video processing).

Anyway, now you know how to show file extensions, and how to fix the distortion problem on Windows Media Player. This may not be a problem on newer versions of Vista, but it certainly was on certain versions of WMP running on XP.

If you want a different approach to disabling the problem codec, here's another set of instructions:

The Creative Playcenter software rudely blocks the Windows MP3 codec. The following instructions show how to unblock it on Windows XP system. The instructions for other Windows versions are the same except the steps to get to the audio codec area from the control panel varies. Note that this will disable the MP3 capability of the Playcenter software. You can re-enable using the same steps or replace the Playcenter software.

1. Go to the Control Panel
2. Double click on "Sounds & Audio Devices"
3. Select the "Hardware" tab
4. Double-click on "Audio Codecs"
5. Select the "Properties" tab
6. Double-click on ctmp3.acm
7. Select "Do Not Use this Audio Codec"
8. Then click on the "Apply" button

Hitchhiking Safety

2008-01-13T16:19:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted on my regular blog for a while. Since the middle of November, I've been pretty involved with moving my restaurant, (see here for more details) which takes up almost every hour that I'm not at work at my job at the university. It's been pretty time-consuming, so my email-answering and other communication has been minimal during these past two months. However, right now I'm sitting in Seattle and waiting to fly home (I played a show here last night), so before I get back to work on some paperwork for the Pub, I thought I'd take a few minutes to write something here.

I get a lot of random ideas. When it comes to "problem solving," I've been told that I excel at lateral thinking. Sometimes these ideas are pretty crazy, sometimes they are fairly intelligent or creative (this is my own assessment). My blog has been a bit boring lately, so over the next few months, when I have time, I'm going to share a few of these ideas and let people reading here make their own opinions.

Today's idea came to me because I was thinking about the "Highway Of Tears." This is the name that some people use to refer to a section of highway in British Columbia, in particular, the section of the Yellowhead (Route 16) which runs from Prince Rupert to Prince George and eastward. Over the past decade, a number of women have disappeared from this highway - so far there are about ten documented cases which are assumed to relate to the highway, and of course, there may be more unreported cases. The theory is that someone is preying on hitch-hikers along that highway, targeting mostly women with Native backgrounds. However, one victim in particular (Nicole Hoar) raised the awareness surrounding this subject, at least for myself. Nicole was a tree-planter, and her disappearance brought national attention to the area. If you do a search on Google, you'll find more information about this situation.

Hitch-hiking is a fairly common practice for some people. It's an inexpensive way to get from place to place for people on a low budget, and you can meet some interesting people when doing it. I used to hitch-hike regularly between university and home before I got a car, and I also did it fairly often the first several years that I was tree-planting, when I had to deliver vehicles to a different town or city and then return to Prince George. However, in the past few decades, I think it has become less common, as people become aware of the danger of getting picked up by a psychopath. Who knows, it's probably safer than some other things that people do regularly, but "safer" doesn't mean "safe."

My idea is something that would make hitch-hiking "safer" than it is currently. I think someone (a not-for-profit institution of some sort, or maybe one of the big auto-makers) should set up a toll-free hotline for hitch-hikers, something like 1-800-HITCHHIKE, although of course the exact number would have to be picked carefully (that one has too many digits). The concept would be that if someone is hitch-hiking, as they are walking to the vehicle that picks them up, they call the toll-free number and leave a message on the hotline saying, "My name is XXX, I'm calling from about 10 miles east of Prince George on route 16, and I'm getting picked up by a red truck with BC license plate KC 7839. I'm heading East to Jasper."

That's it, that's all there is to my idea. There wouldn't have to be a detailed conversation. The hitch-hiker wouldn't have to call once they arrived at their destination to say, "I've made it safely" - that way, there is far less work for the operator, and many hitch-hikers would be too lazy to call once they had arrived at their destination. However, if the hitch-hiker goes missing, at least there would be a record somewhere of what might have happened. Now of course, this still doesn't prevent all problems. For instance, hitch-hikers are often low on money, which means that they probably are less likely to have a cell phone than many other people. However, so many people have cell phones these days that this is becoming less of an issue.

Anyway, if you happen to get into a car and the person turns to you and says, "Hi, I'm an axe murderer, and you're in deep trouble now," then you could turn to them and say, "So are you - I've just left a message with the Hitch-Hiker Hotline to tell them your license plate number, and if I don't make it to Jasper safely, they'll know where to start looking." Now of course, this still may not deter the axe murderer from cutting you up into tiny pieces and feeding you into a woodchipper, but if it DOES happen, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that he or she is more likely to be caught.

That's my idea for the day. In the meantime, be safe and take the bus.

YouTube Honours

2007-12-09T23:04:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I released a video that I put together recently. The video shows a number of clips that were filmed this past summer in my tree planting camp. I do this every year, and my planters look forward to it with a lot of anticipation.

In the past five or six years, I've always used songs by Mike Allison as the backing music for the planting videos. This year, for the first time, I used a song that I wrote myself, although Mike helped me record it. He did the lead vocals, backup vocals, acoustic guitar, and bass, while I played the keyboards, electric guitar, drums, and shaker. Shawn Cole of FaderMaster Studios helped with the recording and mastering (incidentally, Shawn once worked in my camp as a tree planter). The song, called, "When I Grow Old," is going to be officially released on January 5th, 2008, and will be available as a free download at that time. However, since it is pretty hard to rip an MP3 out of a YouTube video, I was able to post the planting video yesterday, before the song is officially released.

Anyway, you can view the video directly from within my blog or by clicking here to go directly to the YouTube page. The neat thing about it is that it received an honours from YouTube today as being the top watched video in the "People and Blogs" category on YouTube Canada. That's a pretty good start!

Edit on January 13th: I re-encoded the video the other day and reposted it on YouTube with better quality settings, but unfortunately, it wiped out the old video and reset the view counter. The content of the video was not changed, I only edited the video encoding settings.

Restaurant Makeover

2007-11-23T06:54:00.000-04:00

My DJ'ing activities have mostly been put on hold for the next five weeks, while I deal with another major project. As many people know, I own a small restaurant called The Olive Branch, which is located in Sackville, New Brunswick. I just made the decision last week to move the restaurant to a much larger facility within town, and my goal is to be out of our former location by Christmas, and up-and-running in the new location sometime in the first half of January.

Because there is so much happening with that move that our customers, staff members, and friends are curious about, I've created a separate blog to deal specifically with the "Restaurant Makeover" that we'll be doing in the next month and a half.

If you're curious to pay attention to progress between now and mid-January, bookmark this blog: http://olivebranchrestaurant.blogspot.com

Under The Bridge

2007-11-16T13:48:00.001-04:00

I spent this past weekend in Seattle and Vancouver. Originally, I was going for no good reason, just because I wanted to go to a party at the Pacific Science Center on Saturday night and to visit a friend (TProphet) in Seattle. I know, that’s a unique name – but it's a long story.

A couple weeks ago, he emailed me and said that as long as I was coming out for Saturday night, I might as well DJ somewhere on Friday night. Since he is a Seattle promoter and has a full sound system of his own, he said he was going to set up an event for me. I said that I’d definitely be willing to play if he got anything together, and I asked where I might be playing. He said, “oh, maybe under an abandoned bridge.” Hm.

I got to Seattle on Thursday evening and we spent most of the night getting things organized, and doing a little bit of touristy stuff. Then, on Friday, we started getting ready for the bridge party. I won’t lie, I expected something pretty low key - maybe a pair of speakers, a dozen people, and the chance to annoy or entertain some homeless people, or to get into a fight with bikers. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The party that he and his friends pulled off was one of the most entertaining evenings I’ve ever had. After we convinced the K-9 unit at 10:30pm that the entire cube van full of sound gear we were loading up wasn’t stolen, and said that we were preparing for a nice responsible folk music concert, we hit the road. Upon arriving at the bridge, there was a flurry of action, and within about half an hour we had two full sound stages set up with power generators, propane heaters for the crowd, a small kitchen selling drinks and snacks, and an art display/sale. The equipment and sound system was better than what I’ve played on in a lot of clubs in Atlantic Canada (five bass bins for my stage alone). A couple hundred people showed up, even though it was a totally unadvertised renegade party. It was pouring all night, but we were completely dry under the bridge. With two stages, and a total of ten DJ’s playing throughout the evening, Friday night alone was worth the trip.

On Saturday, TProphet’s sound system was being used at the main stage of the party of the Pacific Science Center, so he went off to set that up while I went exploring the Seattle social scene for several hours with a couple of his friends. One of his friends in particular was quite entertaining. TProphet introduced him by saying, “this is possibly the sketchiest guy you’ll ever meet, but I mean that in a good way. Try not to end up in jail before the show.” This person, who I will leave unnamed, was quite entertaining. He was discussing his plan to take out a life insurance policy on himself, fly to Zambia to buy a death certificate in the black market, then buy a Zambian identity and passport in the black market, then come back to the States as a different person and cash in on his own life insurance policy, and then use the proceeds to tour the world as a Zambian. Or something like that. Anyway, it was an entertaining start to the evening.

When we got to the Pacific Science Center, I was extremely impressed, once again. They had a full blown party IN the Science Center. There were four stages with DJ’s from 10pm-4am, three or four full bars, and best of all, all of the exhibits were open. I had a few drinks and went straight to the planetarium, where I spent the next hour and a half looking at the stars. The butterfly exhibits were open, and there was a bar in the dinosaur room, and basically the whole place was interesting. The best thing was that the tickets were moderately expensive, which meant that there weren’t a lot of street kids, so it was a very clean and respectful crowd. This, of course, is good when you have several thousand people partying in a museum.

Seattle now ranks near the very top of my list of fun cities to visit. Click here to see more photos from the trip.

911 System in Action

2007-11-02T17:31:00.001-03:00

We have a custodian at the MTA Pub named Joann. She's worked for us for about a decade, and does an amazing job of keeping the floors and washrooms clean.

This morning, she was hard at work, and was wiping down one of the phones in the building. Six minutes later, the RCMP stormed the University Centre, to make sure she was OK. Apparently, while wiping off the phone, she unknowingly dialed 911.

She was pretty embarrassed, but it's good to know that the system can function effectively for emergencies!

Marc Carnes in Edmonton

2007-10-20T18:02:00.001-03:00

Last Thursday night, I was in Edmonton for the evening. I was supposed to be DJ'ing at a house party with Marc Carnes, but since I didn’t want to lug my vinyl records across the country, I suggested that he should rent a pair of CD players. I recorded part of the evening on my laptop, and I finally got around to compressing it this afternoon and figuring out all of the tracks that he played.

Marc has DJ’d for about a decade but has always used vinyl himself, so this was his first chance to try mixing with CD’s. To make things a bit more challenging for him, he had to use my music (which he was unfamiliar with), since all of his music was on vinyl. Luckily, mixing on Pioneer CDJ’s is very similar to mixing on Technics decks, because the pitch control mechanisms are designed to be almost the same. In fact, I think that CDJ’s are even easier to mix on than turntables, because you never have to worry about the needle skipping, and they hold their speed more consistently (although I can’t manipulate my placement within the track nearly as fast on the CD players).

Anyway, right-click here and choose the “save target as” option to download an mp3 recording from the evening. It’s a little over an hour long, upbeat dance music. You’d never know that it was the first time Marc had ever used CD players to play a set. Here’s a track listing:

01. Emjae feat Marcie, “Loaded Gun.”
02. Javith, Salazar, & Gil, “Kukenan.”
03. Deepologists, “History Of Electronica” (Original).
04. Marzetti, “I’m Just A DJ” (Shawn Jacobson & Jeremie Voillot Clubstompers Remix).
05. Levan, “Miau.”
06. Hedkandi, “Boogie 2Nite” (Haji Big Love Remix).
07. Tom Leeland feat Vivian Tate, “Feel My Love” (Sven Waschinsk).
08. Thee-O, “Tribal Dreams” (Original Mix).
09. Dan Sampson & Jhreal, “Solid Gold” (Thomas Penton & Jerome Remix).
10. Alibi vs Rockefeller, “Sexual Healing” (Freemason’s Vocal Mix).
11. Piece Process, “The Preacher” (Partial Vox).
12. Mike Kings, “You Want It” (Original Wanted Mix).
13. Victor Gonzales, “Better Step Up” (Bitwise Remix).
14. Dial Freaks, “28157” (Iceland Spar).

Ninety Dollar Oil

2007-10-19T11:31:00.000-03:00

Oil continues its inexorable march upwards. It was only five weeks ago that oil hit $80 per barrel, an all time high. This morning, oil briefly traded (on the Nymex exchange) above the next benchmark, $90/barrel. And many of the most respected experts in the world (such as Texas oilman Boone Pickens, former Saudi oil minister Sheik Yamani, Matt Simmons) are all saying that $100 oil is inevitable, and just around the corner.

Oil’s recent run-up can be attributed to a couple things. Mostly, it is tied to the decline of the US dollar, which is commonly priced in US dollars. So in other words, as the value of the US dollar declines, oil producing countries need to trade their oil at a higher price to get the same value. In that sense, Canada is a bit lucky, because the relative strength of our dollar is cushioning the impact of the price increases to some extent. Another broader factor leading to oil’s rise is the global supply/demand equation – 2007/2008 is effectively the first time in the last century that globally, not enough oil can be produced to meet demand. Or so many people think – it’s hard to tell when you’re on the inside as this is happening, and the global marketplace for fossil fuels is incredibly complex, but there are a lot of indications saying we’re hitting a peak in global production right about now. In the near future, it will be harder or impossible to maintain current production levels in the future, even though demand will continue to grow.

On a positive note, oil is NOT that expensive. Think about it – it’s cheaper at the moment than bottled water. It’s cheaper than milk. In fact, it’s one of the least expensive commodities in the western world, which is part of the problem. I’d like to see the price go up somewhat, just to slow global consumption. We need to stop wasting it for frivilous use, because twenty years from now it’s going to be incredibly valuable solely for the production of plastics, metals, medicines, and all sorts of stuff that westerners seem to think they can’t live without. So yes, its value for transportation and for food production is high, but it’s more important for other uses in the long run.

Anyway, if you want to learn more, or like to read, I have a couple books here that I’m going to recommend. If you’re in university, you’re probably thinking “I don’t have time to read, I’ve got too much to read for school already.” Well, let me tell you that these books will shock you, and you’ll learn far more from even one of them than you’ll learn from any of your academic courses. These books will teach you things that are going to directly affect you and your lifestyle for the rest of your life. And I will put it as bluntly as possible: our civilization is in big trouble, and your lives are going to be far different five to ten years from now than what you currently imagine. You may think I’m crazy now, but if you read even one of these books, you’ll realize that the world is starting to wake up to a serious problem. Enjoy the party while you can, and if you like to read, get to work ...

The Party’s Over, by Richard Heinberg
This is my top pick, not because it is the best book listed here (it’s not), but because it is such a good overall introduction to the energy problems we are about to face, if you are just learning about the subject. To be honest, I found the first sixty-five pages to be a bit boring, talking about how humans got to this point in our history. However, after that, the book went on to cover a large number of useful topics from oil depletion, to alternative sources of energy, to specific thoughts and recommendations about how to potentially cope if some of the outlined events take place. It also talks about the economy, transportation, agriculture, the environment, and international politics. If you’re going to start somewhere, or even if you only want to read just one of the books here, this should be it. It will give you a good background on fossil fuel depletion, and then you can decide if you want to learn more by checking out any other books.

A Thousand Barrels a Second, by Peter Tertzakian
This is another good general book, which backs up a lot of the information in the book I mentioned above. This one is easy reading, pretty clear, with a lot of nice facts that are pretty easy to understand.

Sleeping With The Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul For Saudi Crude, by Robert Baer
Let’s assume that you’ve now gotten to the point where you finally realize the importance of fossil fuel depletion. You can skip books like Twilight In The Desert and Hubbert’s Peak, and just accept the fact that cheap oil is running out. You don’t need to go through these slightly technical books to understand what’s happening. However, the relationship between Saudi oil and the rest of the world is particularly worth understanding. Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest reserves of crude, and the world’s largest daily production. They are literally the only nation right now which can significantly regulate the price of oil because of the claims to be able to increase or decrease production at will, to influence market prices. The problem is that they won’t let outside experts examine their geological data to verify whether or not their stated reserves (much more important than their daily production) are actually true. Many scientists believe that the Saudis (and several other Middle Eastern countries) are misleading the world and overstating their reserves. This is in the best interests of the American government, because if the world thinks that energy supplies are still plentiful, oil will remain less expensive, and the American economy and industrial empire depends entirely on inexpensive energy. Equally important, the American financial system is built upon the fact that oil is traded globally in US dollars. “Sleeping With The Devil” explains many facets of the complex relationship between the American government and the Saudi monarchy. Essentially, the Saudis sell their oil to the US to help the American empire from crumbling. In return, the American government has maintained the ruling Saud family in power for decades through military and other means. Understanding this relationship is perhaps not as important as understanding what will happen once Saudi Arabia starts to truly run out of oil, or if the ruling Saud family is removed from power, either of which possibility is becoming increasingly dangerous every year. This book will make you wonder whether it’s all a house of cards.

High Noon For Natural Gas, by Julian Darley
Many people, realizing the problems with the global supply of oil, point to natural gas as a clean and viable solution to wean us off our oil dependence. The problem is that this is a false solution. Much of the remaining natural gas around the world is not in locations conducive to supplying the gas to markets, because it has to travel through pipelines. LNG, or liquid natural gas, is not a wise approach, because by the time our society invests several years and untold billions of dollars in developing sufficient LNG infrastructure, the gas will start to run out. North America in particular is in deep trouble. Canada and the US will have depleted a very significant percentage of remaining natural gas on the continent within ten years. Even the large discoveries on Alaska’s North Slope will only give us a few more years of breathing room, and elsewhere on the continent, very little area remains unexplored. Even today, there are occasional rotating power outages in US cities, because power utilities that rely on natural gas for generation of electricity are having problems sourcing supply, and many natural gas generating stations in various stages of development are being shuttered because policy makers are starting to realize the gas is already running out. There IS a lot of natural gas left in the world. Unfortunately, a lot of it is in the wrong places, and hard to get to useful markets. Hopefully, industries like gas-to-liquids (for transportation fuels) will mature over the next decade. Companies are desperately trying to perfect such technology at the present time.

The Prize, by Daniel Yergin
This is the ultimate book about the history of oil, even though it does not cover the last fifteen years (it won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction in 1992). This covers everything you will ever want to know about oil. This is NOT a book for a casual reader – this is for someone who has read other books about fossil fuel depletion, and who wants an extremely intimate background on the oil industry, from start to finish. Essentially, this is an incredibly detailed history book of some 900+ pages. You’d have to be a serious bookworm to enjoy this, and it takes a long time to get through it. But like I said, it is the ultimate book to read if you want to thoroughly understand the dynamics of the industry. Anyone who works in industries that are directly associated with energy, or anyone who invests significant amounts in the stock markets, should take a few months and work your way through this, a little bit at a time.

Naming Songs

2007-10-18T00:02:00.001-03:00

I'm just going through the latest Richmond Record Pool DVD, and I'm getting a bit annoyed at the way some record companies promote themselves. Let me cut right to the chase. If you're going to name a song, use the following format:

Artist - Song Name (Specific Remix).mp3

It is not that hard. Now I can understand someone coming up with a somewhat unconventional naming protocol if you're maybe playing around with something, or naming stuff in a hurry, or drunk. But if you're a Record Company, you need to pay attention to a simple concept. It's called MARKETING.

Let me give you an example of a "bad" job of naming a track. This is an actual example from the DVD that I'm reviewing this evening:

drop_54_b1be_bop_DOWNLOAD.mp3

WTF? This is just ridiculous. Who is the artist? What is the track called? Why is "download" in capital letters, and what does it mean, since it's from a physical DVD? Now to assauge your curiousity, I spent a few minutes trying to puzzle it out, and the only thing I can figure out so far is that it is probably the 54th release on the Drop Records label, side B1, and the song is probably called "Be-Bop." But to be honest, after I got that far, and couldn't assign any degree of certainty to that guess, I dragged that puppy right over to the Recycle Bin (where it will not be recycled).

I'm sure there are DJ's out there who like to spend their time checking out mysterious, nebulous tracks. There is certainly a subtle appeal to a "white label" track for some DJ's. However, if I'm personally trying to quickly sort through and review 250 songs in an evening, you've just lost all hope of getting any air time from me if you don't name the song properly.

On a positive note, I'm glad to see more people starting to trade and distribute WAV files instead of 320 kbps mp3's. With the way hard drives are growing these days, it's worth the extra storage space to improve the audio quality.

Cambridge Punk Rock Show

2007-10-06T20:14:00.001-03:00

I flew out to Vancouver last night. I’m here to do some work on “When I Grow Old,” a track I’m recording with Mike Allison, at FaderMaster Studios. One of the sound engineers and owners at FaderMaster is Shawn Cole, an old friend and roommate, who is now teaching at the Pacific Audio Visual Institute in Vancouver, helping to run FaderMaster, and doing work at a number of other studios in his spare time.

When I got into town, Shawn immediately thrust a couple beers into my hands, and said that we were going to a punk show that evening. That kind of took me by surprise, but he said he wanted to go to the “Pub 340” to see an album release show by Cambridge. It sounded good to me, so we had a few more drinks and went to the bar.

Upon getting to the bar, we had a few more rounds of drinks, and Shawn gave me some background on Vancouver’s punk rock scene. Shawn actually produced the Cambridge album, so he knew a lot of the people in the bar. Shots of Jagermeister were only $3 each (ridiculously cheap for Vancouver), so before long, I knew a lot of people too.

There were actually four bands playing, although I only saw two of them. I think Loose Tooth was on stage when we got there, and they were singing a song that went something like, “America can suck my dick, Canada’s gonna make you her bitch.” I’m not entirely sure about the lyrics – things were already getting a bit hazy by that point. And for any Americans reading this, you shouldn’t worry that this was a sign of anti-American sentiment in your northern neighbours – I think this was actually a song of affection (after all, it was a punk rock show).

I was outside while the third band played, so I missed them entirely, but we got back inside when Cambridge was about to start. Shawn got right up into the mosh pit, while I tried to stay a bit more restrained, and took photos. The band was tight, and the crowd was into the music (and seemed to know the songs very well). It was pretty amusing seeing people getting thrown onto the stage, then back off the stage into the crowd, and dancing and smashing into each other. One of the highlights was when it looked like the head of the bass player’s instrument swung around and smashed into a bottle of beer that someone was taking a drink from. I wonder if it was a member of Loose Tooth? As Monty Python once said, “Now you see the violence inherent in the system.”

The rest of the night was fairly chaotic. We ran into two guys who were getting into a fist-fight on Hastings Street, and one of them had dropped a box of pizza on the ground just before they started fighting, so I went up and asked them if I could have the pizza. I also seem to remember Shawn trying to climb onto the roof of the Price Waterhouse building, so I could get a photo of him up there, although that memory is kind of vague. Anyway, it was an interesting start to the weekend.

Looking At The Stars

2007-10-04T22:47:00.000-03:00

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
- Oscar Wilde

It’s time for another demo mix for my website. I had meant to do this a couple weeks ago, but some other Cubase & Ableton projects got in the way. As with my last project, I mixed this one entirely on CD players - I used a Pioneer CDJ-200 and a CDJ-1000MK3 for CD players, a Pioneer DJM-600 mixer, and I recorded the audio into Adobe Audition 2.0, with mastering & compression done in Cubase Sx.

The title is very appropriate, considering what today’s date is. Today is the 50th anniversary of the launching of the Sputnik I spacecraft, which started man’s exploration of space. Ironically, there were several tie-ins to this album title. Not only did I record this mix on the Sputnik Anniversary, but the graphic that I had chosen for the mix (earlier this week) was actually titled, “Looking At Stars,” from the Exploding Dog website. As usual, I owe thanks to Sam Brown for his artistic design – his website has a ton of funny drawings on it.

All music was sourced from the Richmond Records Pool, but in contrast to the last mix, I tried to use a few more selections with story-line vocals (as opposed to short, random vocal samples). Not all of the tracks are vocal-based, but there are certainly enough to make many of the individual tracks stand out, even to people who don’t normally listen to electronica. I also tried to mix this one at a slower tempo than I usually do (127 bpm) so it seems more restrained, and less aggressive than usual. It's almost got a deep-house feeling in a few spots.

Track 01: Medway, "Trauma." [Benz & MD Mix].
This is actually an older track, which I think might have been first released in 2002 (or before?) Medway became well-known with a series of EP albums on the Hooj Choons label in the late 1990’s, and then really hit it big with their track “Release” (which I actually included on the very first demo mix that I ever published on my website). This particular mix was done by two awesome Canadian DJ/producers, Greg Benz and Marco Di Carlo, from London (Ontario). I really liked the introduction for their version of this song, so it was a perfect track to use at the beginning of “Looking At The Stars”.

Track 02: Girl Nobody, "Hello, It’s Me." [Marc Mitchell].
Girl Nobody is a Vancouver band featuring singer Marta Jaciubek-McKeever, whose works range from pop to trip-hop to dub and beyond. This particular remix was done by Mark Mitchell, a well-known UK producer. I’ve featured Girl Nobody in the past, including their “Why Am I Alone?” track on my “Dancing Baloney” mix. This is another female vocalist whose voice I love. I’m flying out to Vancouver tomorrow morning to do some mixing and mastering work on an audio project that Mike Allison & I are collaborating on, so I’m going to see if I can track down Girl Nobody while I’m there.

Track 03: Noel Sanger feat. Dauby, "My Prayer." [Original].
I think this is probably the first time that I have ever mixed two tracks on a demo without bothering to beat-mix them properly. The ending of the previous track and the intro of this track just merged so well due to the ambient noises that I did a “radio-style” mix. Noel Sanger is certainly not a new name in electronic music, having toured with BT for years, and his tracks are getting regular play from DJ’s such as Tiesto, Armin van Buuren, Paul van Dyk, Judge Jules, and Marcus Schultz. This is the second time that I’ve used a Noel Sanger track on a mix, after using “One Drop” on “Partisan Scream Fest.”

Track 04: Neil Quigley & Nick Muir, “Feedback From The City." [Spin Science Remix].
Neil Quigley has been repeatedly tagged by John Digweed as one of UK’s top emerging talents. Nick Muir is the “other half” of Bedrock, along with Digweed himself. In this track, they’ve put together a track that I really like, which seems to be very organically deep-house influenced, in my opinion.

Track 05: Gustavo Bravetti, “Sail With Me." [Ariel Perazzoli].
Gustavo Bravetti is a Uruguayan performer/producer who is very well known in Montevideo and around South America for his live performances, not just as a conventional DJ. I’m not sure who is doing the singing for him on this track. Ariel Perazzoli, also of Montevideo, did this particular remix for Bravetti.

Track 06: BS As Deep, "The Finder."
BS As Deep is Diego Sebastian Colquhoun from Argentina. “The Finder” became a pretty big hit after it was played by Hernan Cattaneo at the Creamfields festival.

Track 07: Mike Mucci, "On & On." [Evolved Mix].
Mike Mucci is of course still well known in his hometown of Miami as a DJ, but he is increasingly spending more and more time in the studio dealing with production work for Amplitude and other projects.

Track 08: 4Mal, "Red Dust." [Dust & Ashes Dub].
4Mal is a pair of Russian producers, Anton Guzev and Evgeny Svalov. A couple of their other well-known tracks are “Where I Belong” and “Twilight.”

Track 09: Pagano, "Marvellous." [Pagano In Heaven Mix].
Pagano is an Italian DJ/producer now based out of London. The list of clubs that he has played at this year (see his MySpace page) is rather impressive.

Track 10: Deepsky feat. Jes, "Ghost." [Joe Bermudez & Klubjumpers].
Deepsky is Jason Blum, based out of Los Angeles. Ghost was a popular track earlier this year, and is certainly not Blum’s only major hit. However, I first became aware of his talents due to several remixes that he did for other artists (including Madonna, Oakenfold, The Crystal Method, and others). Jes is none other than Jes Brieden (of the group Motorcycle - with Gabriel & Dresden), and anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that I love her voice.

Anyway, go here to see the web page where you can download the mix. This is an MP3 mix, 123 megabytes in size, 67 minutes of audio, encoded at 256 kbps.

The Tragically Hip

2007-09-14T11:50:00.001-03:00

I saw the Tragically Hip playing in Halifax last night at the Metro Centre. It was packed, not surprisingly. And since my blog is read by a lot of music fans who live outside of Canada, I need to do a bit of promotion here. If you’re Canadian, you can pretty much stop reading now, because you’ll already know a lot about this band. But if you want to learn more, carry on.

First, you need to know that “The Hip” are Canada’s greatest rock band. The drummer, Johnny Fay, was once interviewed by Billboard, and when the subject of being in Canada’s best band came up, he said it was, “kind of like being the world’s tallest midget.” In 1989, the band apparently did a show where they opened for Nirvana, and less than a hundred people showed up.

The group has ten studio albums to their credit at the moment (disregarding their first self-titled album, which was only an EP). If I had to pick my favorites, I would recommend their first five albums, starting with “Up To Here,” and with “Fully Completely” probably being my top choice. Unfortunately, I haven’t spent a lot of time listening to any of the albums that came after “Trouble At The Henhouse.” I need to go out and buy the others though, because I know a few of the songs on them, and I know that I'm missing out on other gems.

I’ve seen the Hip perform dozens of times. The first times were in Banff in 1990. I had a few weeks off from my summer job planting trees, so I decided to hitchhike to Banff to wash dishes in a restaurant (The Magie & Stump) to pass the time for a week. During that week, I went with a couple friends to the Silver City nightclub every single evening. There was a band playing, and I thought that they were pretty good. Nobody else seemed to agree, because except for Friday and Saturday night, there were only about ten people in the bar each night. Anyway, after seeing them the first night, I was hooked. I kept coming back, and I watched them from about ten feet away, five or six nights that week. It wasn’t until about four or five years later, when they were starting to get famous and I saw them play at Mount Allison University, that I recognized them and realized that it was the same band. Since then, I’ve seen them in quite a few full concerts, and I also saw them in a small venue in Edmonton when they did their album release for “In Between Evolution,” with just a couple hundred people invited. I have photos from that night online here:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_hip.html

An interesting thing about the Hip is that if I had to pick my favorite five songs, I couldn’t. Not a chance. I might be able to get away with my favorite thirty, but even that would be hard to narrow down. Their music and sound are solid, and even though I’m not usually one to pay a lot of attention to lyrics, Gord Downie is brilliant. The funny thing is that I don’t even know if he writes all the lyrics. I’ve always assumed so, because he is their lead singer, but that’s not necessarily true. His improvisational abilities in live shows though, are legendary.

“New Orleans Is Sinking” was one of their earliest songs, written a decade and a half ago, and it’s one of their best-known songs. However, after Katrina, many radio stations stopped playing it in deference to the residents of New Orleans. The Hip are actually playing a show in New Orleans on October 20th of this year.

Anyway, so if you like rock music, and haven’t listened to this band before, take a Canadian’s advice and check them out. If this is the first you’ve heard about them, you’re missing out on one of Canada’s best-kept secrets.

Eighty Dollar Oil

2007-09-12T23:02:00.000-03:00

Oil finally traded above $80 per barrel today for the first time in history. This is something that I’ve been waiting for since about three years ago, although it took a year longer than I expected for it to get this high. And by "waited," don't assume that I'm happy it's that high.

Most people who hear about high oil prices think that the biggest problem is that gas prices will go up. They certainly do increase when the price of crude goes up, although it’s not a perfectly parallel relationship. There are a lot of minor issues, especially related to refinery capacity and location and quality of the crude, which can make fuel prices increase more or less quickly than oil goes up and down.

Anyway, the cost of gas is certainly something that affects a lot of people, but only in a very superficial way. The bigger problem is that crude oil and related fossil fuels are the most important building blocks for our civilization. We literally “eat” crude oil. Oil is the most important component of fertilizer. As oil goes up, and fertilizers become prohibitively expensive in the next several years, global crop yields are going to plummet. Add on top of that the fact that most food consumed in North America must travel, on average, well over a thousand kilometers from where it is grown to where it is consumed. In the next five to ten years, as food production declines significantly, and population pressures go up, agriculture will have to become a lot more localized because the costs of shipping the food to other regional markets will be prohibitive.

On top of that, most manufactured goods (especially plastics and rubbers) are based on oil as an input. And we use enormous inputs of crude for energy to mine and process most metals. In short, as oil (and natural gas) become more scarce and expensive, our society is in a lot of trouble. This will be especially hard-hitting in the heavily industrialized countries of Europe and North America – the bigger they are, the harder they fall. In third world countries, the daily struggles of life are something that the populations are already used to. For North American suburbanites, some people are going to be in for a rude awakening in the next five to ten years.

Where are oil prices heading from here? Well, to put it bluntly, the world isn’t running out of oil yet. We’ve been extracting and consuming it for well over a hundred years, and we have probably used less than half of the global reserves during that time. The problem is that we’ve used all the stuff that’s easy to get. Right now, the world is probably producing about 86 million barrels per day, but many countries are already experiencing heavy declines in production as all the big and easy fields have been depleted. Oil companies are fighting to maintain production by using smaller and smaller fields, and by getting into regions which are extremely inhospitable, either because they are deep under the oceans, in the far northern Arctic, or in regions of the world which are extremely instable. And to top it off, demand is surging in large countries like India and China, so that global demand is finally starting to exceed available production. That’s going to make the price of oil skyrocket in the next few years. I predict that it will be less than two years before oil hits $100 per barrel, and when that happens, we’re in a big heap of trouble. Hundreds of thousands of businesses will no longer be viable because of rising energy prices, unemployment will skyrocket, the global financial markets will be rocked, and life will generally be a lot less fun. And we’ll be fighting to feed ourselves. Do you want a recommendation for a good book? Let’s start with “The Idiots’ Guide To Backyard Farming.”

I’m an optimist of sorts, and I hope that we can come up with a lot of changes to mitigate some of these problems. However, I’ve studied the global energy situation for years, and it’s hard to be optimistic. On a positive note, we can still enjoy the global energy party for a couple more years. Over the next couple of months, I’ll see if I can touch on some more energy-related issues, and also give some recommendations on some good books to learn more about these problems. Like it or not, this is going to be the most important problem facing our society in another ten years. Or maybe a lot sooner.

Danny Is My Friend

2007-09-04T18:27:00.001-03:00

I just got a new music demo mix put together for the website this weekend. This is the first one that I’ve had time to do in over half a year, so it’s long overdue. This one is also pretty unique. Every other studio mix that I’ve done in the past was recorded using a pair of turntables, with vinyl records, but this is the first mix that I’ve ever done using music on CD’s. For equipment, I used a Pioneer CDJ-200 and a CDJ-1000MK3 for CD players, a Pioneer DJM-600 mixer, and I recorded the audio into Adobe Audition 2.0, with mastering & compression done in Cubase Sx.

The title is kind of random. I went onto the Exploding Dog website to find a graphic to use for the front cover of the CD case, and the very first one that I looked at was called “Danny Is My Friend.” Usually I go through hundreds of files before I find one that I like, but this one had an interesting graphic, and since two of the tracks on the CD are by producers whose first names are Danny, I thought I’d use it. Thanks to Sam Brown for his artistic design – his website has a ton of funny drawings on it.

All music was sourced from the Richmond Records Pool, so it's a mix of tribal and progressive house music, not top-40. In the past, if I made a studio mix, you could count on hearing most of those same tracks if I played at a live show. However, I’m trying to get away from that trend, so my live shows will be a little more interesting for people who have already heard my mixes from the website. Accordingly, this mix is a bit more abstract and less danceable in some places, but great for listening to when you’re going for a drive, working out, cleaning up around the house, or anything like that. I’m going to try to focus on saving the more danceable tracks for sets that I play at clubs and parties. The track listings are below, with a little bit of info about each producer, where I could find it:

Track 01: Matt Cerf, "Clearwater."
Matt originally went to McGill for agricultural engineering, but decided to move into music production instead. Now based in Los Angelos, Matt has had tracks in play on Quebec’s Music Plus network, and has released productions on labels such as Baroque, Armada, Somatic Sense, DeepBlue, and Sirup. More info about Matt can be seen at www.myspace.com/mattcerf. I like this track because of the slow and quiet introduction, which builds pretty slowly with a sporadic breakbeat until a steady 4/4 beat finally comes in with just a couple minutes left in the song. A good track to use as an opener.

Track 02: Chiba Unit vs David Phillips, "Unforgettable Time." [Desert Dwellers Remix].
Chiba Unit is a collaboration between producers David Phillips (www.thedjlist.com/djs/david_phillips) of Germany and Marcel Best (www.thedjlist.com/djs/marcelbest) of Switzerland. This track is very unique due to the vocals and the strange timing syncopations.

Track 03: Alejandro Rado, "The Dream."
Alejandro is a DJ and producer from Argentina with a regular radio show on www.tribalmixes.org. You can check out his MySpace page at www.myspace.com/alerado. This track has some trance influences, and it reminds me of an older tracks from the late 1990's, which I think might have been called "Arms Of Orion" by the Tea Freaks.

Track 04: Christian Duran, "Madreselva" [Roman Lieske 2007 Remix].
Christian is a Spanish producer who has DJ residencies at a number of clubs in Madrid & Valencia. Madreselva was originally released in 2004, and enjoyed quite a bit of chart success at the time, but I enjoyed this 2007 remix by Roman Lieske. MySpace: www.myspace.com/christianduran. Another memorable track due to the vocals. Incidentally, there are a lot of Spanish vocals on this mix, although that was more by accident than design.

Track 05: Javith, Salazar, & Gil, "Kukenan" [Tribal Remix].
Venezuelan producer Eduardo Javith (www.eduardojavith.com) has worked on productions with well-known names such as Chus, Marcello Castelli, and Bob Sinclair. I really don’t know much at all about Salazar & Gil.

Track 06: Zur-Face, "Manhattan Grooves" [Original].
Zur-Face is a pair of guys living in Bogota, Columbia, with a residency at that city’s well-known Theatron club. They’ve worked alongside other producers such as Jose Acosta, Eduardo Perez, and DC Project, and recently had a track, “Cosmopolitan Drink,” appearing on Global Underground’s Paris mix by Nick Warren (GU30). MySpace: www.myspace.com/zurface. I really like the work that Zur-Face has done, both on their own tracks and on remixes of other people tracks. I’ll probably be using their remixes in my sets fairly often.

Track 07: Danny Tuval & Vic, "La Caress" [Zur-Face Enchantement Spagnol Mix].
Danny Tuval is one of Israel’s most well-known DJ’s, having residencies at clubs in Eilat & Tel Aviv, and has shared the decks with notable DJ’s such as Junior Vasquez, Paul Okenfold, Nick Waren, Satoshi Tomiie, and Tarrantella. More info here: www.dannytuval.com/index6.htm.

Track 08: Mentalman, "Sick" [Original].
I can’t find any information about this producer. I like the track though.

Track 09: Danny Teneglia, "Dibiza" [Chus & Ceballos Midnite X-Press Mix].
I don’t even know where to begin. Danny Teneglia is unquestionably the biggest name on this demo. Originally from New York, Danny has held residencies at some of the world best-known nightclubs, and has two Global Underground mixes to his name. If there was one DJ that I could ever see performing live, it would be this man. Go to his website and look at his personal discography, and you’ll be blown away by the work that he’s done over the past two decades. Website: http://www.dannytenaglia.com.

Track 10: Tarot feat Kasey Ryan, "Conscious."
Tarot (Taro Fujita) grew up in Tokyo, but studied audio engineering in New York, before he moved back to Japan. He has collaborated with Kasey Ryan on other works too, such as “Simple Things,” a track he produced with Bob Marbach. MySpace: www.myspace.com/tarotrecords. This is the only track on the mix with any significant amount of vocals in English.

Go here to see the web page where you can download the covers or the mix itself. This is an MP3 mix, 116 megabytes in size, 64 minutes of audio, encoded at 256 kbps. I hope you enjoy it ...

Talking To A Crow

2007-09-02T14:43:00.000-03:00

An hour ago, I thought I was losing my mind. I’m sure that hundreds of other people have already come to that conclusion, but today I was even questioning it myself.

You see, I was sitting out on the back lawn, doing some research. Well, to be more exact, I was laying in the sun, but also trying to finish some reading. Anyway, as I was reading, I thought I heard the neighbour saying hello. But it sounded like her voice was in that funny sort of tone and cadence you hear when an adult is talking to a pet or a small child. Then I heard a crow cawing back. There are a lot of crows living around my house, so I didn’t really think much of it – my neighbour must be sitting on her back porch, talking to a crow.

Anyway, after I heard this conversation back and forth five or six times between the neighbour and the crow, I started to think, “This is a little odd.” So I sat up and turned around to get a better point of view. I was quite surprised to see a crow sitting in the tree about thirty feet away, staring at me. No neighbour. I was even more surprised when it opened its mouth and said “hello” to me. And this wasn’t any random squack that could possibly be interpreted as a similar sound. No, this was a perfectly clearly enunciated greeting. And then the same crow screeched at me with a loud caw a few seconds afterwards, when I didn’t answer back. It then waited for a moment then said hello to me again, so I spoke back to it (feeling kind of foolish). After that, it was quiet and just stared at me for a while.

Now I was pretty wide awake, so this wasn’t a daydream. And although this is Frosh Week at the university, which means that the alcohol is flowing pretty freely, I myself haven’t had a drop since April (although that’s going to change tonight because I’m DJ’ing at a house party down in Halifax). So in other words, I wasn’t under the influence, and this crow really did seem to be talking to me.

Crows are extremely intelligent birds. I’ve observed them (and lots of other wildlife) for years as a tree planter. I’ve seen crows go from cache to cache on a block, dragging tree planters’ backpacks from out under the corner of tarps, unzipping them to get inside, and dragging out their plastic lunch bags. The Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds says that some crows in Japan, when trying to crack walnuts, will allegedly wait by intersections until traffic lights turn red, then fly down and place walnuts on the road in front of waiting cars’ tires, then get out of the way, then fly back down to recover the meat of the walnut after the lights change and the cars have driven over the walnuts. Crows have frequently been observed mastering the art of making and using simple tools, such as bending materials into hooks to retrieve food that they cannot reach themselves.

Researchers have said that American crows have a rudimentary language of about twenty or so “words” that are used to communicate with each other, and that the crows understand the concept of numbers and basic counting. Apparently, it is fairly easy to teach them to mimic simple human speech, and they also sometimes learn to mimic the noise of other animals. If parrots can be taught to talk, it’s not surprising that crows can too. The only thing that puzzles me right now is trying to figure out whether this particular crow learned this trick from watching humans, or if someone in the area has actually tried to teach it to talk.

Alright, to finish this post off, here's a pretty funny pun:

Q: Why was the detective so interested in a small group of crows?
A: He thought it was an attempted murder.

My apologies to the non-ornithologists - that one will go over the heads of SO many people reading this.

Richmond Record Pool

2007-08-30T18:22:00.000-03:00

Being a DJ, one of the things that I am constantly doing is looking for new music to play in my sets and mixes. One of my best sources for new music these days is the Richmond Record Pool. For those of you who aren’t familiar with how record pools work, what essentially happens is that a director for the pool works full-time to collect new tracks from various record labels all over the world. Each pool is targeted to a specific target audience or genre, so for example, the director for a pool specializing in house music wouldn’t be looking for new tracks from rock bands. And this is a two-way operation – the record companies work with the pool directors to distribute the right music to the right people. Anyway, each pool has a group of members (DJ’s) and every month, the director of the pool sends copies of all the new music out to all of the DJ’s in the pool. These DJ’s pay a small monthly service fee for belonging to the pool, to cover pool expenses and a small remuneration for the director. The DJ’s then review all the new music and provide feedback to the record labels about each track. The labels benefit from getting useful feedback about the production on each track, from people who are experts in the field. They also get the benefit of having the DJ’s promote their favorite new tracks in the clubs, which eventually means better sales for some of these tracks once the general public starts hearing the music. The DJ’s benefit too, because it gives them a big advantage in getting new music (at a very low cost), usually long before it is available to the general public. Not everybody is allowed to become a part of these pools. The whole point isn’t to distribute the music to the average Joe-on-the-street; a pool’s goal is to get the music to the most influential people in the industry.

The Richmond Record Pool has about thirty DJ’s as members. All are Canadian, and this particular pool targets “progressive house” and “club house” music (my description), and they're also quickly expanding the amount of "tech house" and "electro" that they service to members. The DJ’s live in various urban centers across Canada (except for myself). Nick Nonsense and I are the only Atlantic Canadians that belong to the pool, and there is at least one DJ from Montreal, but most of the rest are from Ontario and the West Coast. The pool is administered by director Josh Bowman, who usually sends out between 150 and 250 tracks to the DJ’s in each monthly shipment. Here’s a link to the pool website:
http://www.richmondrecords.com

Incidentally, I’m actually a member of the Pool East organization too, which is a Halifax-based pool that distributes music to thirty bars & DJ’s around Atlantic Canada. The music that I get from that pool is more geared to a Top-40 crowd, which is good for the university Pub. There is some overlap between the pools, and I sometimes use music that I’ve learned about from Pool East in my own sets at other venues.

Anyway, since I’m reviewing the RRP music every month, and since my main blog (disregarding the Facebook feed) originates from my DJ website, I’m going to try to put a posting up every month with a listing of my favorite new pool tracks from the month. After all, I should talk about music occasionally. Most of the Facebook readers may not be interested in this info, but a lot of my normal blog readers will be. In these posts, I’m basically planning to separate the tracks that I like into three categories:
1. Live Sets – Tracks that I would play in a live set in a club or at a party, to a busy dancefloor. A fair number of them will have vocals, and I’ll usually be playing them at speeds of between 130-134 beats per minute.
2. Warmup Sets – Tracks that I would play earlier in the evening, before the dancefloor gets too crowded. There will be less energy to these songs, and I’ll usually play them around 126-129 bpm. Not many vocals, but interesting music nonetheless, with a consistent back-beat.
3. Studio Mixes – Tracks that I would put into studio recordings that I make to hand out as demos, or to put on my website. Some of these songs might be tracks that could be included in a live show or a warmup set, but I tend to pick more unique songs for my studio mixes nowadays, with more frequent breakdowns in the middle of the tracks, etc. If I’m listening to a studio mix, I’ll usually do it when I’m working out or driving someplace by myself, so I don’t mind the breakdowns. In contrast, I try to avoid playing too many tracks with long breakdowns when I have a crowd on the dancefloor, so they don’t lose their energy.

Since I normally play progressive house tracks in my sets, with a little bit of house if it isn’t too frivilous and bouncy, my monthly favorites will fall into that style of music. There are often songs in the monthly listings that I think would be great house hits in a top-40 oriented club, but I might not pick those for my own sets. Also, sometimes there will be more than one mix for a particular song. For the non-DJ’s, a different “mix” just means a different version of a song. Sometimes, mixes can be very similar to each other, and other times, they can sound like almost entirely different songs. You’ll eventually notice that sometimes, I’ll pick one mix of a particular song for use in a live set (maybe a vocal mix or “vox” mix), whereas I’ll use a different mix of that same song in a warmup set (maybe an instrumental or “dub” mix, which doesn’t have nearly as much for vocals).

Anyway, here are my picks from the August 2007 Richmond Record Pool collection:

Warmup Tracks:
- Avalon Superstar, “So Alive” (Boston Thunder Instrumental)
- Cadatta, “Waiting For T” (Original Mix)
- DJ Chus meets Pete Tha Zouk, “There Is A God” (Original Stereo Productions Mix)
- Jay Cox, “Panda Ear Muffs” (Original Mix)
- Masque, “Cafe Amargo” (Original Mix)
- Masque, “Moon Bathing” (Original Mix)
- Mindskap, “Twist ‘n’ Shout” (Original Tribal Mix)
- Medway, “Trauma” (Chris Micali Mix)
- Mikel Curcio, “Pain” (Nino Anthony Remix)
- Paul Bowen, “Dirty Weekend” (Disclosure Project Mix)
- Squash 84, “Neon” (Original Mix)
- Neil Quigley & Nick Muir, “Feedback From The City” (Pacemaker Dub)

Studio Mixes:
- Medway, “Trauma” (Benz & MD Mix)
- Neil Quigley & Nick Muir, “Feedback From The City” (Spin Science Remix)
- Ogi Gee Cash & Synchronized, “The Hype” (Original Mix)

Live Sets:
- Avalon Superstar, “So Alive” (Playmaker Dub Mix)
- Karl G, “Crossfire 2007” (Original Mix)
- Levon Yves Eaux & Luke Star, “Fashionized” (Original Mix)
- Nick Fiorucci feat Kelly Malbasa, “Every Time You Move” (Jerome’s Mix)
- Neil Quigley & Nick Muir, “Feedback From The City” (DJ Meri Remix)
- Ogi Gee Cash & Synchronized, “The Hype” (Nicholas Van Orten Remix)

The Tequila Wave of 2001

2007-08-27T23:31:00.000-03:00

I was just going through some old data files, and I found an amusing video. It's from the Mount Allison University Pub, where in 2001, Drew Dudley decided that he would try to set a world record for the most consecutive people taking shots of tequila. The whole point of the exercise was to be a fun & unique way to raise money for Shinerama. Everyone who participated paid $10 to join, and all that money went as a donation to the Shinerama campaign. The folks who distribute Jose Cuervo tequila made arrangements so that someone could cover the costs of the tequila consumed. Here is the video, filmed in the Pub one afternoon just before supper:

YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v8g02iREBo

There's also a page on the Pub website that has more details:
http://www.mta.ca/pub/tequila.html

Looking back, it's neat seeing a ton of my old friends and staff members on the video. And strangely enough, even though it was about six years ago now that this event took place, several of those people are still working at or near Mount Allison. Also notable: as much as Drew was able to set a lot of records during his years as a Shinerama Director, both at Mount Allison and in other parts of Canada, I think this is probably the fastest time (four minutes) that he was ever able to raise $2000.

I'm going to try to tag a bunch of the people I recognize when this feeds out to my Facebook Notes - so far, I can see about fifty people that participated and who are in my Facebook friends list. It's pretty entertaining, at least for any of us that were there when it happened, and it's making me look forward to Homecoming Weekend at the university in just another three weeks or so. I'm going to have to keep digging around and see what other old videos I can find to share around.

Back To The Music

2007-08-22T17:56:00.000-03:00

I’m back in New Brunswick (for now) and after a summer on Canada’s West Coast, it’s good to be home for a bit. I’m going to spend the next couple weeks getting caught up on music. Being stuck in the bush for several months definitely puts a damper on my other music projects, especially since I had to turn down opportunities to play a couple of pretty high-profile shows over the summer.

As far as conventional music goes, right now I’m finishing up a video for “When I Grow Old” with Mike Allison (video produced by Deanna Musgrave) that we want to be able to release early this fall. Mike and I are also working on a few other projects, including a cross-Canada album release which will feature some of his previous favorites, a few of his new songs, and a few of my own songs that he’s performing. This album will be released to a large number of radio stations across the country, maybe as soon as six to eight weeks from now.

For electronica/dance music, I’m trying to get caught up on what’s been released over the summer months, and I’m also getting used to working with the Ableton Live software. I’ve got a lot of music (mostly progressive & tribal house) from the Richmond Record Pool which I’m trying to get caught up on, first and foremost, and of course I also need to get more familiar with the club music that I get through Pool East.

For upcoming shows in the next four months, I’ve finalized a few fall dates so far. I’m organizing shows right now in Tokyo, Osaka, Seattle, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Boston, the Dominican Republic, Saint John, Fredericton, Moncton, and Halifax, so hopefully I’ll get most of those dates pinned down soon (about two thirds of these shows are confirmed now). I’d also like to start playing in American cities more frequently, so I’m looking forward to meeting more US promoters in the coming months, either at other shows or through online connections. If anyone would like to contact me to talk about potential bookings, just email me at djbolivia@gmail.com. I’d also like to play in a few more European cities, but unfortunately, I don’t have too many connections over there just yet.