October is a busy month for us. October 14th is my birthday, and October 16th is our wedding anniversary. On our honeymoon in 2004, we took a trip to Charlevoix at the mouth of the Saguenay fjord in Quebec.
Then, in October 2005, Amita June had just been born, so we took a short trip to Ottawa for the weekend. At this point, I think we've established an anniversary tradition of short weekend trips to cities in Eastern Canada.
This year, Maj started arranging a trip to St. John's in Newfoundland. I'm pretty fascinated by Newfoundland -- it's one of the oldest settlements in North America, yet very isolated. Its culture is a unique blend of Celtic, English, and a smattering of French Canadian with an idiosyncratic accent and great music.
But St. John's is just too remote for a relaxing, romantic anniversary weekend. We kept trying to find easier ways to get there, and nothing was working out. So we decided to save Newfoundland for a spring trip. My crazy-cuckoo dream is to drive from Montreal to Labrador City and then out to Goose Bay in Labrador on the mainland, take the ferry to Newfoundland, drive around a bit there, then back to Montreal on a car ferry. Good trip, eh?
So, we decided to take things a little easier and go to another part of Canada. We've wanted to visit Halifax for a long time, and now it looks like it's going to work out. It's only 1-1/2 hours by plane from Montreal, and it's supposed to be a very charming, fun city. I got good deals on Air Canada for the two of us, plus baby, and we're staying at the posh Lord Nelson hotel in the middle of town. Even though it's the "Splurge" hotel on the Wikitravel Sleep section, I was able to get a discount with my CAA card that makes the price just about acceptable for a special occasion weekend.
Now we have to plan what to do when we get there. We've only been to Nova Scotia once, and that was just a jaunt across the border from New Brunswick for kcks. I'm going to pore over the Wikitravel and World66 articles to see what I can come up with, and hopefully do some research while we're on the road. Really, that's the best part for me.
I probably shouldn't look so far ahead -- we've got Hudson (New York) still to do this weekend. Like I said, a busy month!
tags: anniversary october st. johns halifax newfoundland travel nova scotia
Free Books
I've been planning to go to the local Wiki Wednesday here in [wt:Montreal], so I was reviewing the Montreal Wiki Wednesday page for previous events. Although we've made it to a few of the previous ones, we definitely haven't made it to all the ones we said we would... so be it.
One of the previous speakers was Hugh McGuire, a Montrealer who started an excellent project called Librivox. Librivox is a project to create free audiobooks, with chapters contributed over the Internet by readers around the world. They take books from Project Gutenberg (which is apparently a MediaWiki wiki site now... who knew?) and volunteers read them and then the whole thing gets munged into a nice little package. Everything stays in the public domain (bless their generous souls) and they even have a Librivox podcast just in case you swing that way.
I'm super-hot for audio books. I love listening to them while driving, especially for long road trips. Maj is lukewarm on the idea, but she occasionally gets into them when we've got a good book going. The big downside is that they're ridiculously expensive -- $50+ for some books.
The only thing that bothers me a bit about Librivox is that there arent CD Audio ISOs available. We have an MP3 CD player in our car, and I think it should work fine, but for sharing it's awful nice to have real CDs.
UPDATE (from Hugh): There are mp3 ISOs available here: LibriVarc, but no aiff files. mega storage space, bandwidth and transfer problems to do that, but if anyone is interested in providing such CDs, or helping manage such a project, we'd love to know about it.
tags: librivox audio books books on tape roadtrip project gutenberg
BarCampMontreal
And while drifting through Hugh McGuire's blog, what do I see but a link to the newly-announced BarCampMontreal -- the first BarCamp to happen here in The City Without a Nickname. I had thought that the loose plan was to do a BarCamp to coincide with RecentChangesCamp in May 2007, but this plan seems more impetuous and uninhibited -- just like a BarCamp.
There are just too many people to invite here in Montreal, though... we have something like 20 Debian developers, a whole passel of bloggers and wikitistas, lots of games developers and folks like that. Lots of work before the big weekend. Did I mention that October is a busy month?
tags: barcamp montreal barcampmontreal
Day against DRM
And look at that... October 3 is the Day against DRM per Defective by Design. A new DRM info clearinghouse, cleverly named drm.info, launched today, too.
I've been in the weird situation lately of fighting against over-protectiveness w/r/t DRM in the Creative Commons licenses, when in fact I think DRM is twisted and dumb. It's a bill of goods being sold to entertainment companies by shady technology groups, it's rarely effective, and its only value is to punish law-abiding citizens. It's gotta go.
A passionate and profanity-laced article I wrote about DRM coders for Pigdog Journal was linked from ars technica and BoingBoing last year. Although my writing style is a bit different (cough cough) than it once was, I still feel the same about DRM: a shameful and hostile way for technologists to treat each other.
tags: dayagainstdrm drm pigdog journal
Are you experienced?
So, I like the TV show Lost a lot, but I had no idea about this immersive alternate reality game The Lost Experience. Seems like just the kind of intense investigation game to keep losties busy for the entire summer. (You know, while they weren't trying to figure out the truth about lonelygirl15.)
I'm not really that into figuring this stuff out, but I do enjoy reading the details once people have worked them through.