things around New York:

• Bang On A Can - A multi-faceted new-music project from New York: ensemble, record label, summer institute, festival...

things around southern Ontario:

• the Guelph Jazz Festival - annual festival of forward-thinking improvised music in Guelph, Ontario - held every September
• the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society - one of the busiest presenters of chamber music in the country (and my family home)
• The Music Times - a new paper! KW's guide to classical music
• NUMUS - Presenters of new music in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario and environs
• the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound - biennial festival of new music and sound art in Kitchener, Ontario
  

Audio editors:

• Amadeus is not free or open source, but is cheap and lets you to batch processing of files, which can be oh-so-handy.
• Ardour is a free open-source DAW which is being pitched as a possible free competitor to the big commercial standards like ProTools, Cubase, etc.
• Audacity is the standard open-source quick audio editor - very good at what it does. If you want to learn Nyquist you can even program your own plug-ins.
• SPEAR - stands for Sinusoidal Partial Editing And Resynthesis, and lets you do spectral editing on audio.

programming languages:

• ChucK - ChucK is an open-source programming language for music and sound synthesis and processing. It's unique in the way it deals with time - the user can control time explicitly and with sample-accuracy. Not particularly optimized - fast computers preferred! There's a mailing list handy for answering questions.
• SuperCollider - is an open-source programming language for music and sound synthesis and processing. Very fast and optimized, with a ton of 3rd party extensions written by the wider community. Join the mailing list for a ready place to ask questions.
• Processing - kind of like SuperCollider for graphics - a Java-based, open-source programming language for dealing with graphics quickly and easily. It's still coding, but it's pretty friendly.

other stuff:

• Scala - designed for working with experimental tunings. These people have also been compiling a giant scale archive (linked under 'resources,' below).

• The Bohlen-Pierce site - info on a very interesting alternative scale
• Boomkat - these people are amazing: a net-based music store based in the UK, their weekly emails are packed with reviews of seriously interesting new music, and their web site is a great place to go and listen to stuff. I owe them for telling me about several new favourite artists.
• Conflations.com - new conversational idiom for the 21st century
• Scala scale archive - over 3000 alternate tunings in the concise and flexible .scl format.