Here is my 10th installment for #octaver25 where I answer the age old question, what one dessert would you bring to your disc island? Wait…that’s not it, ahem, what deserted disc would you bring to your dessert table, no, no that doesn’t sound right…oh heck, just listen to the audio…
Author: slandi
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Octaver25 Day 4 My Nth favourite genre of music
For this 4th installment, yes on the fifth day 🙂 for #Octaver25, I answer the question what is my second favourite type of music, as you’ll see, the answer is shrouded in ambiguity and mystery.
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#Octaver25 – Day 2 The Music I first liked
This entry is one day late and rather noisy as you’ll hear. I also realized how rusty my delivery is 🙂 Enjoy this second installment of #octaver25 as I look back to the early music that I remember first liking as a kid.
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#Octaver25 Day 3 My favourite genre of music
I had no trouble at all answering Paul O’Mahony’s question as to what is my favourite genre of music. In this episode I’m still in the same, rather noisy, recording environment and explaining my love for a certain type of music and plugging a few websites, WHICH I GOT WRONG! Ha Ha!
The radio station I was eluding to is Jazz 91FM, don’t ask me where the decimal number came from :), and can be found at https://jazz.fm/
SOMA FM can be found at https://somafm.com/
Finally Jazz24.org is found at…oh will you look at that! https://www.jazz24.org/
Check them out and give them some love if you like what you hear.
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#Octaver25 – Day 1The first music I remember hearing
Hello and welcome to my first entry for #Octaver25, OK, so what the heck is an Octaver you might ask. Well it’s a portmanteau of the words Octave and October and was originally coined back in 2012 by yours truly for a musical festival that took place on an audio-based social network called Audioboo. During Octaver people were given a set of prompts about music, and they would create audio messages of themselves talking about music, and in some instances even playing small excerpts, those among us who were more talented, I don’t include myself in that group 🙂 would also play musical instruments and/or sing.
In any case, Audioboo was purchased many many years ago and re-baptized Audioboom and they changed their approach to social audio and started charging more. Unfortunately the social network slowly caved in and we all went our separate ways and Octaver faded into the distance, like the end of a great song. During my years on Audioboo I met a wonderful group of people, many with whom I still keep in touch with today. In fact, two of those great folks ask me to participate in a revival of the hashtag some 13 years later, has it really been that long?
Back then in the 2010’s I would put quite a bit of production time in these Octaver episodes, I’m not so sure I’ll be able to give it that much devotion this time around, but I did want to at least contribute and participate in some way. So here it goes, below is my first entry for this new month and the launch of my #Octaver25
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Four day week
I finally took the plunge and have decided to reduce my full-time work hours at my job. I’m dropping down to a four-day week, which I hope will give me a bit of time to get back to some of my projects and past-times that have long since been swept aside. I’ll have more details coming soon as it’s been several months since I’ve posted anything on this site. In fact my last post was ‘supposed’ to be on my trip to Calgary and Banff and I realized I never finished that post.
So just an update, I signed the necessary documents and so starting Sept 15th I will now be working four days a week, which, as I mentioned, will afford me some time to pursue some of my other interests. Now what will be a little strange is that I have an accompanying website, which will be my actual virtual workshop and lab, you can find it over at http://www.slandi.net, there I hope to post more in-depth articles about some of my projects and creative endeavours. Exactly what those are remains to be seen, as I have so many interests, hobbies, past-times and I’m constant finding new things due to my insatiable curiosity. So many, in fact, that more often than not I never finish I start. One of the reasons I’ve started this blog and also my slandi.net site is that I want to force myself to see some of these projects through to some kind of end, or at least give them some substance.
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A Great Trip to Calgary, Banff and Lake Louise
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Four years and counting
According to the date calculator on timeanddate.com I’m due to retire in 3 years, 11months and 5 days, but hey who’s counting, I’m looking very much forward to retirement, there are so many things I want to do, projects I want to work on, things I want to learn. During the next few years I will be slowly preparing for retirement by purchasing those tools and items for many of my past-times and interests, this might include specialized measurement tools for my electronics hobby, woodworking tools, mechanics tools, etc… Perhaps a nice new synthesizer is in the mix as well, we’ll see. I both anticipate my retirement but I’m also a little leery of it as I worry that I’ll have enough to do, enough things to fill my time. Then again, there are many things I haven’t thought of, like perhaps some meetups I could go to, some social events or perhaps other outside activities. I’ve always loved the theater, so perhaps something like that is in order. Who knows really, I just hope that I’ll be healthy enough to enjoy my retirement years. This brings me to another point, physical fitness, which unfortunately I’m sorely lacking at the moment. You see I have a life partner that is an avid fitness guru. She loves to exercise and has the discipline to do it, alas it’s not my case at all. I’m not so much a couch potato, as a desk potato and spend untold hours on the computer doing a myriad of things. I really need to find a hobby/interest that gets me moving, gets me out of the house at least and doing something physical. I was thinking of getting back into photography and maybe doing urban photography or hiking in the forest to do some forest bathing, etc… That is a possibility, I just wish I had more discipline. In any case, I’ve got a little less than four years and in that time I have to get my ducks in a row as they say…
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Canada first initiative
Now with the US administration having put into place the 25% tariffs as they had threatened and Canada doing a tit for tat and imposing tariffs on incoming US goods I felt it was time for me on a personal note to reduce the number of US-based online services and products I am using. I started with my domain name and email provider. I initiated a transfer to a Canadian-based domain and DNS host as well as email provider. This should all go down by the end of this coming week.
I was also subscribed to the US-based Tidal music streaming service and severed my account with them and opened up one with a French-based company Qobuz, OK, not Canadian-based, but at least it’s not in the US. I also stopped donating, at least for the immediate future, to SOMA FM, one of my favourite online Internet radio stations out of San Francisco. Again, it’s nothing personal against the fine people working there or elsewhere, it’s just that I feel compelled to support my fellow Canadians in this very difficult moment.
Only time will tell what will happen next… -
Good-bye Spaced-Ex and Blue Orifice and a confession…
UPDATE: 2026-05-31
On this, the last day of May, I’m confessing that my boycott of SpaceX and Blue Origin didn’t really last that long. I suppose it’s because Musk, perhaps having understood his errors with the DOE (doubtful) and his supporting of Donald Trump after the whole Jeffrey Epstein scandal broke out, has simply vanished from the political spectrum and he’s seemingly back to talking about colonizing Mars. I certainly don’t condone any of his or Bezo’s other behaviour, but such is the pull of my interest in space exploration and rocket science and technology in general. Am I being hypocritical, perhaps a little bit. I certainly don’t talk too much about either company and praise them, I simply and quietly read and/or watch their on-going activities. I have also since started watching Scott Manley and Marcus House as I felt boycotting them wasn’t fair, they are simply space journalists in their own right. So yes, do I completely retract everything I’ve written below? No, not all of it, I still am sickened by these billionaire little boys, but I mustn’t forget the thousands of people who work at SpaceX and Blue Origin who put in hours and hours of hard work and scientific experimentation in pursuit of space exploration and so I feel I’m honouring them when watching and cheering on Starship and so forth.
I’m so done with rich billionaire little boys and their big toys. Elon Musk’s rather disturbing gestures at President Trump’s inauguration really upset me as it did many people and I’ve decided to now do a personal boycott of SpaceX flights. I’m a big space nerd at heart, so not partaking in the excitement of launches and the advancements of amazing technology like Starship is going to be very very difficult. However, I just can’t bring myself to ignore Musk’s seemingly white supremacy behaviour and Jeff Bezos isn’t any better, Amazon recently closed all of their distribution centres here in Quebec because one of them was successful in forming a union. The employees were only trying to get fair wages and better working conditions and Amazon punished them for it, closed down everything and laid them off.
For this reason I’ve decided I’m going to boycott SpaceX and Blue Origin launches. In fact I’m even going to Boycott Scott Manley and Marcus House as they mostly talks about SpaceX. It’s going to be tough as I’m such a space nerd, but I’ll continue to watch and listen to NASA but if they mention or talk about SpaceX, then I’ll switch off, perhaps in time I’ll just ween myself off NASA altogether, who knows. I’m not sure what I’ll use to fill the gap, perhaps Ham radio, my music, both listening and playing it, and then there is reading, as I have so many books waiting for me. In any case, I don’t know how successful I’ll be we’ll see. I’ll take it one day at a time and see what happens.