New songs from Laura Peek

My friend Laura Peek is a very talented singer-songwriter. For a good long while now, she’s been talking me about a record she’s working on. And I’ve been waiting patiently since she first mentioned it.

Luckily, it seems that the wait will soon be over. According to her blog, the new CD will likely come out in April. What’s more, she’s posted three new songs from it on her MySpace page. And, she’s playing in Toronto on March 11th.

Go listen to Laura’s songs. They’re good.

Scheduled syncing with iSync

I like my cell phone (a Motorola L7) just fine. It’s small-ish, the speaker volume is sufficient, and through iSync, it can keep in touch with my address book and calendar using Bluetooth.

Problem is, I never remember to actually sync the darned thing, so the information on my phone is always hopelessly out of date. So I’ve come up with a solution — scheduled syncing:

1. I copied Fraser Speirs’s Synchronize with iSync, then Quit script into Script Editor, then saved it as an application.
2. Then I set up a cron job to periodically run the script. I used CronniX to do this, because I’m no Unix geek.

The result? When my computer is on, and my phone is within range, it’s periodically synchronized with iCal and Address Book. If my phone is out of range, it fails and quits iSync.

Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids went really well

Last Monday, upstairs at the Victory Cafe, I hosted the very first Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids — an evening of childhood poems, schoolwork, and diary readings. I was really worried that nobody would show up, and that I’d have to read from my Grade 1 journal all alone, for an hour.

But that didn’t happen. The night was amazingly well-attended (standing room only on a Monday night), and everyone who read did a great job. readings were funny, and sad, and embarrassing, and wonderful.

And, the night caught the attention of some media-types. On Monday morning, Tori Allen talked about it on her What’s Goin’ On column. Then Gadzooks featured GRTTWAK in its latest episode. And today, Leah McLaren wrote about it in her Globe column.

Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids was so much fun the first time, I’ve decided to do it again. I’ve booked the sequel for Monday, April 30, 2007 at 8:00 PM, upstairs at The Victory Cafe.

That means if you couldn’t make it to the first one, you have some time to track down that old diary or get your mom to send you that shoebox full of schoolwork.

I’ll post everything related to the reading series at http://www.danmisener.com/read/

I’ll be on Go this Saturday

I’m on the radio this weekend, joining Go for their Canada Reads spoof called “Canada Skims Magazines.”

I’ll be on a panel with Scott Thompson, Jean Yoon, and Olivia Chow, pitching Lou Lou as the magazine every Canadian should be skimming.

Should be fun.

Saturday morning at 10 on CBC Radio One or listen online.

The Hour Podcast

Scanning through the iTunes podcast directory today, I came across something called The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos Video Podcast.

Now, iTunes doesn’t easily let you see the feed information for podcasts listed in its directory, but if you ping a feed (using its ID from the Music Store URL) like this:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?id=215119383

You get:

Podcast Ping Received

Podcast Feed URL: http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/rss/itunes_video.xml

Podcast ID: 215119383

Thanks, iTunes.

I haven’t seen this published anywhere (not even on The Hour’s site), but it’s listed in iTunes, and discoverable by mere mortals.

Update: Seems like all that sleuthing may have been in vain. CBCer Paul points to a post on The Hour’s blog that announces this podcast dated February 15th. Also, there’s an audio podcast feed too.