Welcome!

Welcome to my web site! I have designed it to discuss topics of interest to me that I wish to share with others.¹ At the present time, more than two-thirds of its content is devoted to Cape Breton Island, a scenically gorgeous place populated by wonderful, friendly people who love to share their vibrant living heritage of Scottish traditional music and dance, maintained by its many world-class performers; this site is primarily my attempt to give something back to them for all of the richness and joy they have brought into my life. Much of the rest of the site is given over to concerts in the Northeast, mostly of traditional Scottish music. Eventually, I hope to get around to other subjects, including the North Country where I grew up, but my passion for Cape Breton and its music keeps getting in the way…

Even though this web site is now well over six years old and holds more than a gigabyte of photos and information, there is still much I wish to add. Nevertheless, I hope you will find the considerable amount of information that is already here as useful as others have said they have. I continue to work on the site as time and other projects allow, update it often, and frequently add new information and photos, so it is continually expanding. Enjoy your visit and come back often!

If this is your first time here, you should read this entire page before proceeding. If you have been here before but you notice a significant layout change from your last visit, never fear — you are in the right place; you should, however, read the next two topics below for details on how to navigate this updated version.

¹ This site is not a blog, which is defined here as “a biographical web log: a type of diary (=record of what someone does each day) on a website that is changed regularly, to give the latest news. The page usually contains someone’s personal opinions, comments, and experiences.” My site is not a diary; its text does not change regularly, i.e., periodically at regular intervals; nor does it attempt to provide or interact with the latest news. It does reflect my personal experiences and opinions and is updated often.↩

HTML5 is a forthcoming web standard that is sufficiently mature that most standards-based browsers already support that small subset I use here; the significant exceptions are all of the released versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer before Internet Explorer 9 (the just-released Internet Explorer 9 is said to include excellent HTML5 support).

With the notable exception of the photo essays (which I built for a different environment and only archived on my site), the previous version of this web site used XHTML 1.0 Strict in a two-column format with contrasting colours, with navigation and administrative information in the left column and the actual text in the right column. This format reduced by 25% the screen area in which to display photos in landscape orientation, many of which lost significant detail when they were compressed to fit in the available space. This format also somewhat complicated this web site’s use on smaller screens, such as those on mobile devices. Finally, in 2010, all further standards work on XHTML, long moribund, was officially terminated: once the “wave of the future”, but which Internet Explorer never properly supported and which was implemented with annoying quirks in other browsers, it is now a dead end. Its replacement, HTML5, is much more capable and significantly more precisely defined; all contemporary browsers are expected to soon support it, if they do not do so already. That should make it much easier to build web pages that are consistently rendered across browsers conforming to the forthcoming standard.

In late 2010, I therefore decided to convert this site to its present format to remove or reduce these problems, hopefully without introducing others, and, at the same time, to convert it (including the photo essays) to HTML5. Consequently, a browser that supports the subset of HTML5 used on this site is required for its pages to be readably displayed as I intend; other browsers will likely mangle the pages on this web site. I develop this site using BBEdit (10) and Safari (5) running on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard (10.6)), but I also test each of its pages using the latest versions of Camino (2), Firefox (8), Google Chrome (15), and Opera (11); I also test against my second generation iPod Touch running iOS 4.2. I do not have access to a Windows machine (real or virtual) on which to test, but since they all support the parts of HTML5 I use on this site, I expect these browsers (except Camino, which runs only on Mac OS X) will display there just as they do on my Mac. If your browser does not display this page as described in the next topic, I recommend that you install the free Firefox browser (which contains the requisite support on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows), the free Safari browser (which contains the requisite support on Mac OS X and Windows), or some other HTML5-savvy browser.

The Safari browser for iOS apparently has some kind of a fixed memory limit that precludes it from displaying more than a fixed amount of photo data on a given HTML page. This limit is rarely reached on most of the pages in this site, but pages with more than six 900-pixel photos will display only the first five photos and show question marks for the rest, although, for reasons unknown, a page with exactly six 900-pixel photos will display all six. I am in the process of trying to fix such pages so that iOS devices will be able to view all of the photos. For photos of other pixel sizes, the limit may be reached at other points, more generous for smaller pixel photos and less generous for larger pixel photos. Once the conversion of the entire site to the new format is complete, this problem will no longer exist.

If you are already using a standards-conforming browser and you notice an anomaly in the web page rendering, please use the feedback address at the bottom of this page (and every page in this web site) to report the problem to me; include:

• the browser you are using and its version number,
• the operating system on which you are running and its version number,
• the URL of the mis-rendered page from the address bar of your browser, and
• a clear description of the problem you see.

If you can create one on your system, a screen shot of the misrendered page would also be extremely useful. I will attempt to correct the reported problem promptly.

While converting each page to HTML5, I also expect to recheck it and to revise and update its contents as necessary, looking for broken links and fixing any found, and incorporating knowledge I have acquired since the page was originally written. Because this is a fairly significant undertaking that will likely take me the rest of 2011 and into 2012, the site will appear somewhat schizophrenic until the conversion is complete, with both the old and new formats intermingling unhappily. Please bear with me as I work through this conversion.

The current single-column format I have adopted for this web site uses two different colour schemes to distinguish the page’s main content from its ancillary information:

• Dark green text on an off-white background (green and white are the primary colours on Cape Breton’s flag), such as that you are now reading, identifies the primary content of the page. (In the former layout, blue text on a pale yellow background was used for the right column, which also held the main content of the page.)
• Teal text on a pale green background, such as you now find at the top and bottom of each page, denotes navigation controls and administrative information. (In the former layout, teal text on a pale blue background was used for the left column, which held the same content.) The two areas so coloured are described in more detail in the following paragraphs.

The pale green background at the very top of each page holds the navigation block, which is intended to make it easy for you to move around this web site. Two horizontal rules subdivide it into three distinct lists of links:

• The page location list lies above the upper horizontal rule; it specifies the current page’s location within this web site’s organizational hierarchy; it is given by a sequence of one or more bold-faced links (to better distinguish them from links in the other two lists), with one link for each level of that hierarchy:
  • The first (leftmost) link is always to this home page, “Vic’s Web Site”, which is at the apex of the hierarchy. Clicking on this link will always take you to this home page (or cause your browser to reload it if you are already viewing it).
  • The last (rightmost) link is always to the current page, i.e., the page you are currently reading. Clicking on this link will have no effect on your position in the hierarchy of web pages, but it will cause your browser to reload the current page.
  • Links between the first and last, if any, show the page’s place in the hierarchy between the home page and the current page. Clicking on any of these links will take you “up” in that hierarchy, i.e., towards the apex and to a topic more general than that of the current page but less general than that of the home page.
  On very small screens, and on larger ones when when you are at a page well down in the hierarchy, it may be the case that the page location list is split across lines. In such a case, just read the links from left to right as if they were all on the same line: every link above the upper horizontal rule in the navigation block belongs to the page’s location list, even when the links are not all on the same line.
• The current page topics list lies between the two horizontal rules; its links, which appear in regular face, are to the topics discussed on the current page. Each of these links takes you directly to the specified topic without the need to scroll down to it. Because all of these links are to targets on the current page, they do not move you elsewhere in the web site’s organizational hierarchy — they just move you to the selected topic on the current page. As a consequence, none of the information in the navigation block changes when you click a current page topics link.
• The subordinate topics list lies below the lower horizontal rule; each of its links, which also appears in regular face, is to a web page immediately below the current page in this web site’s organizational hierarchy and presents a subject that is related to, but more specific and restricted than, the more general subject on the current page. For instance, “Cape Breton” is one of the subordinate topics on this home page; clicking that link takes you to a web page devoted to Cape Breton Island, a more specific topic than the subject of this home page, which deals with the web site as a whole. When you visit that page, you will be on an intermediate web page whose subordinate topics are all related to Cape Breton. If you click on one of those subordinate topics, the page you reach will be devoted to a yet more specific aspect of Cape Breton, e.g., Hiking Information. If you click on one of that page’s subordinate topics, you will reach a web page that provides yet more subordinate topics, all related to hiking in Cape Breton, but each more specialized than the page above it in the hierarchy. If you continue descending the web site’s organizational hierarchy in this fashion, you will eventually reach the bottomost page, where the subordinate topics area will contain no links, but only a “tack” symbol (⊥) to signal that you can not descend further in the hierarchy.

Since the page you are currently reading is the home page, the page location list has only a single link; however, as you descend the hierarchy, the page location list at the top of the page will expand to show additional links giving the route you used to reach each page you visit. You may ascend back up the hierarchy by clicking one of the page location links, which will return you to the corresponding level in the hierarchy.

Subordinate topic links in red, rather than teal, are place-holders for topics I currently propose to eventually discuss (and I may add others in the future); however, the web pages for those topics do not yet exist and clicking on such a place-holder link will just take you to a place-holder page. In other words, only the links in teal actually lead to useful information. The red place holder links will be changed to teal over time as I add pages for the corresponding information to the site.

Some topics, such as photo essays or performance descriptions, are sequential in nature, rather than hierarchical. Such topics are split across several web pages all logically at the base of the hierarchy. In such a case, instead of a tack, the subordinate topics list will contain small labelled icons to allow you to move sequentially forward and backward through the sequence, to move to the start or end of the sequence, or (when available) to move to an index page that allows you to reach any one of the pages in the sequence directly.

The pale green background at the very bottom of each page holds the footer, a collection of mostly administrative information relating to the web page. It consists of the following elements:

• for your convenience, the subordinate topics list of the navigation block is repeated here, but only when this page is part of a sequential sequence of web pages all logically at the base of the hierarchy
• a “Top of Page” link, which returns you to the navigation block at the top of the current page
• a photo and memorial dedication or a seasonal greeting, depending on the time of the year (this element is present only on this home page)
• a final line specifying:
  • the page’s copyright notice
  • the date the most recent update to the page was made
  • the page’s HTML5 validation status, and
  • a clickable link you can use to send me any feedback on the page you might care to share

The size of a window is, of course, constrained by the size of the screen on which it is drawn. I have attempted to design the pages on this site using a “liquid layout” that should adapt reasonably well to many different window sizes. These days, a 13" Apple laptop has a screen size of 1280×800 pixels; even smaller screens are still in use, but nearly all of those are capable of supporting windows 1024 pixels wide. I have therefore, in this rewrite, resized photos in landscape orientation to 900 pixels wide (up from the previous 630 pixels wide), which should considerably improve their sharpness and detail. However, if you decrease the width of your browser’s window much below 1024 pixels for pages containing such photos, you should expect to have to scroll horizontally to view the entire photo.

Larger photos with less compression inevitably mean slower download times. Given the widespread availability of broadband connections, I trust this will not be much of a problem for you.

For my personal viewing, both of this site and others, I set my browser window to roughly 1100 pixels wide and the full length of the screen (or most of it), yielding a browser window of about 1100×1300 pixels on my current display.¹ This is also the size at which I develop these web pages and judge their æsthetics.

However, I also ensure that I test each page against a minimum window size of 1024×550 pixels; while these pages will not look their best in such a reduced window, they should still appear reasonably well, though some vertically oriented photos will require scrolling in so short a window.

Moreover, I also test these pages on my second generation iPod Touch, which has a much smaller screen (480×320 pixels). In the past, I had checked some of the pages from time to time, but overlooked a significant problem: for reasons I do not yet understand, when a single page has more than about ten large photos, a small blue box with a question mark (the normal icon for a missing file) appears in place of one or more of them. The unrendered photos are definitely not missing on the web site as the non-mobile browsers show them without complaint — they’re just not being downloaded to the device. The problem does not appear to be caused by a memory limitation, as there is more than enough free space available on the device for the size of the photos to be fetched. My cousin confirms that the same problem occurs on his iPad, so the problem appears to be some kind of an iOS limitation. This has forced me to reörganize the presentation of performance photos, usually by placing one photo on a page. As it happens, this does not cause much of a problem on a normal screen (as I had feared it might) and may even be preferable to the previous presentation.

¹ For the past ten years, I have happily used a 22" Apple Cinema Display™, “a flat panel monitor that displays superb color and graphics on a screen impressive for its size and clarity.” [manual accompanying the monitor, p. 5] With a resolution of 1600×1024 pixels, it was the ne plus ultra of monitors when it was initially released: its large, clear, and brilliant screen was a welcome relief to my eyes from the days of cathode-ray tube monitors with their ambient radiation, a danger to one’s health if one sat too close. I am now using a 27" iMac with an even more impressive display and an astounding resolution of 2560×1440 pixels, an incredible gain in screen real estate!↩

This web site contains links to relevant external sites which are, of course, not under my control; such links are flagged by the black-diamond-with-white-x symbol ❖ (at least in standards-compliant browsers with the appropriate Unicode support — see the next section if your browser does not display this symbol properly) while links to locations within my web site are not so flagged. At the time of writing, the external sites contained the information described in the text containing the link; however, since the Internet is dynamic, the sites referenced by such links may disappear or be reörganized, thereby causing the links to stop working, or, worse, be “hijacked” to contain totally different content without my being aware that this has happened. Please notify me of any external links which have become invalid in such ways so that they may be replaced or removed.

I do not restrict the characters I use on this web site to a small set and instead draw as appropriate from numerous segments of the huge Unicode repertoire, which is well-supported on current operating systems. Because it provides a larger subset of Unicode characters than is available in most other fonts and because it is very highly readable on the screen, I have formatted this web site using the gorgeous Gentium font, which is available free of charge for all current platforms by following the “Download” link on this SIL web page.

For most of my site, Gentium is not strictly necessary, but pronunciations and those areas which are language-oriented will most likely not display properly without it or some equally capable Unicode font that supports the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) character repertoire. If you see question marks or black boxes or outlined boxes in places they do not belong (and particularly if external links, such as the one at the end of the preceding paragraph, are preceded by a question mark), you do not have the minumum Unicode support to view this site correctly. The most likely solution to this problem is to install the Gentium font for your operating system.

At the moment, Gentium itself does not support bold face nor bold italic face. An e-mail newsletter dated 2008 April 4 announced the availability from this SIL web page of the release versions of the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts, which do provide bold face and bold italic face for the Latin characters of Gentium; these variants will eventually be merged back into Gentium itself. To properly see headings and other bold face text on this web site, you should therefore download and install these additional fonts (you should do this even if you installed the beta version of these fonts, as the release versions correct deficiencies in the beta version); otherwise, the default for bold face text will be Times, which sets up a bit of a visual clash. I have installed Gentium, Gentium Basic, and Gentium Book Basic without problems on my system and strongly recommend that you do the same.

For as long as I have been writing, I have preferred spelling behaviour to behavior, travelled to traveled, judgement to judgment, catalogue to catalog, and the like; these spellings were usual in the North Country where I grew up and are still regularly seen throughout New England. I do, when writing in US English, generally use center (and -er rather than -re, except in theatre, where I exceptionally use -re), plow, color, license, jail, and the like, so there are nevertheless considerable traces of Noah Webster’s reforms in my US English spelling.

When writing of Cape Breton or for a Canadian audience (the Cape Breton music list is hosted in Canada), however, I adopt the variants used in Maritime Canada; thus, you will see centre, plough, colour, licence, learnt, and the like in those areas of my web site, where I am generally guided by the Canadian English spell checker (which tends to be a bit more British than actual Maritime usage).

The suffix -ise/-ize is particularly vexing; for some words, even in US English, -ise is mandatory (e.g., televise, compromise, etc.), reflecting the strong influence its French heritage retains in English spelling; in other cases, -ize is required (e.g., capsize, prize). In British English usage, when there is a choice, the Oxford spelling, used by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the publications of the Oxford University Press, systematically spells -ize, as the US spelling does, but the Cambridge spelling in -ise seems to have won the day in Britain and the former British empire and has even been adopted by the European Union for its English publications. Both variants are found in Canada, with the -ize variant considerably more common, so that is what I have used here. For more on this subject (and on English spelling variants generally), see the excellent Wikipedia article American and British English Spelling Differences; for more on Canadian spelling, see the Wikipedia article Canadian English.

Like the fine magazine, The New Yorker, I use diacritics and ligatures freely in my spelling, so you will see façade, naïve, coöperate, rôle, reöpen, reäction, lacunæ, and the like here. I strenuously dislike seeing the vowel collisions in reaction and cooperate, where (unlike ready and [chicken] coop, say) the vowels are in two distinct syllables, and I much prefer the diacritic to the hyphen as a way of separating them.

I write French place names as they appear in standard French; thus I write Grand-Étang, rather than the anglicised Grand Etang that appears on local road signs. Newpapers in France tend to drop the accents from capital letters, but the standard usage¹ is to retain them, as Canadian newspapers written in French usually do.

I, along with a few other hardy idiosyncratic American individualists, sin against the punctuation rule that dictates that punctuation marks appear inside quotes at the end of a sentence or clause (this rule is much less vehemently enforced in Britain); I instead place a punctuation mark inside quotes only when it is actually part of the quoted material—that’s what the quotes mean, right? In most other respects, my punctuation follows current norms, though I insist on a comma before and and or in lists and use the comma, as I was taught, far more liberally than seems to be the contemporary practice — given my syntactically complicated sentences, commas are a requirement if the reader is to follow along!

Most of the spelling and punctuation “errors” you see, I do not therefore consider to be errors. However, occasionally, an inadvertent mistake does slip into one of the web pages due to a moment of inattention. If you should see such an error (i.e., one not covered by the points above), please use the feedback address at the bottom of this page (and every page in this web site) to report the problem to me and I will promptly correct it.

¹ §86, a; §101, N.B.: in Le bon usage, 13^th revised edition, by Maurice Grevisse and recast (refondue) by André Goosse, Éditions Duculot, Paris, 4th printing, 1997 [ISBN 2-8011-1045-0].↩

I’m not a professional photographer¹ and I’m frankly amazed that my photos have turned out as well as they have, given my inexperience and lack of extensive photographic knowledge—it’s indeed a tribute to those who built the cameras:

• an Olympus Stylus Epic Zoom 80 (film point-and-shoot) [all photos prior to 2004 December 12]; the photos with this camera have an aspect ratio (length to width) of 4:3
• an Olympus D-540 Zoom (digital point-and-shoot) [all photos after 2004 December 12 and up to the summer of 2008]; photos with this camera also have an aspect ratio of 4:3
• a Nikon D40 (digital SLR) [nearly all photos since the fall of 2008]; photos with this camera have an aspect ratio of 3:2

The Nikon D40 works much better at night than either Olympus did, but I am sometimes unable to convince it to do as good a job with scenery and landscape photos as the digital Olympus; it often, for example, fails miserably in rendering greens properly, making them far more faded than they appear to my eye. Nevertheless, over the three years I have been using the Nikon (nearly exclusively), I have gotten happier with it, having learned how to better compensate for many of its failings, both on the camera before shooting and in the post-shoot photo editing software (originally iPhoto and now Aperture) that is frequently necessary to clean up a digital SLR’s photos. Those taken since I acquired the Nikkor 18-105mm lens in the spring of 2009 also have much better detail than those before and are now competitive with those taken with the second Olympus.

As discussed above in Window Size, JPEG compression (which preserves an amazing amount of detail considering the amount of data it removes) has been applied to nearly all of the photos on this site so that neither dimension exceeds 900 pixels; the originals are much larger (2256 × 1496 pixels for those shot with the Nikon D40, 1600 × 1200 pixels for those shot with either Olympus, and nearly all of them taken with the “medium” image size and “fine” quality settings on all three cameras).

Unless otherwise noted directly below the photo, I took each photograph on this web site and I hold the copyright to it. Photography is a hobby for me, not a business, and I do not offer my photographs for sale. I do, however, make them freely available to others for non-commerical use (e.g., adding Cape Breton scenes to a web site) or for commercial use in a cultural context (e.g., for use in the packaging or liner notes of a CD or illustrating a magazine article). For such purposes, you probably want to start with the originals and not the reduced versions. If you contact me with your usage scenario, I will be delighted to make the originals available to you at no cost; all I ask in return is that you acknowledge me as the source of the photograph(s) used. As for photos credited to other photographers, which have been used here with their express permission and to which they retain the copyright and distribution rights, you will need to address your requests for their use directly to them; if you lack such a photographer’s e-mail address, contact me and I will forward your e-mail to that photographer.

¹ I would be remiss if I did not thank my family for resuscitating my interest in photography: until they gave me the first Olympus camera as a Christmas gift, I hadn’t taken a photo since the 1970’s—I found the fiddling necessary with a light meter and 35mm film camera far too distracting to allow me to enjoy what I was looking at. After I discovered how much cameras had improved, my family also gave me the second Olympus to cut down on the expense and problems introduced by film processing, which were disastrous for the photos I took in 2004. After I destroyed the D-540 Zoom they gave me by an unexpected dip in the water off the Little Narrows dock, I purchased a second one, identical to the first, which served me well until I bought the Nikon in 2008.↩

My contact information is as follows:

If you have not previously corresponded with me, please include the words “Cape Breton” in the subject line to ensure that my spam filters do not mistakenly route your e-mail to my Junk folder. My phone is not connected to an answering machine, so you should use e-mail if you do not reach me by phone.

When I am away for an extended period of time, I do not have access to e-mail and the phone will be unanswered. In such cases, I place a notice to that effect at the bottom of this section. When no such notice is showing, you should receive an answer to your e-mail within a day or, on those week-ends when I’m away for a concert, two days; most times, however, it’s much quicker than that, as I take feedback on this web site or questions relating to it very seriously.

My long-time e-mail address

ceased being valid as of 2009 June 18, so please change your address books to use the gmail address. Likewise, my former Optimum Online address (which I did not give out widely)

ceased being valid as of 2011 February 4.

If, for some reason, you should fail to reach me at the gmail address, you can try:

• my Verizon e-mail address, which is the same as the gmail address above except that “verizon.net” replaces “gmail.com”
• my Mobile Me e-mail address, which is the same as the now invalid concentric address above except that “mac.com” replaces “concentric.net”

(I’m avoiding writing these addresses out here to prevent a spambot from “harvesting” them).

I am on Facebook (search for “Victor Maurice Faubert”) and I do respond to e-mails sent to me there when I have e-mail access. I will normally reply to your usual e-mail address as I do not care for Facebook’s e-mail facilities.