If you’re looking for a hearty lunch in Charlottetown today to take the edge off the return of winter, I highly recommend the Chicken-Tomato Soup at Leonhard’s. It’s served with a slice of olive baguette, and it’s fantastic.

For those of you living in places where “spring” means “balmy breezes wafting over the cherry blossoms,” here is what it means on Prince Edward Island:

At Heathrow Airport last weekend I picked up the April 2009 issue of Emigrate magazine, a magazine targeted at British residents interested in emigration to Australia, New Zealand, the USA or Canada. Prince Edward Island is mentioned a few times in this issue; for example, in the Destination Doctor feature:

As I type I am sitting at a table deep in the bowels of the Robertson Library at the University of PEI. It is snowing outside. I have just finished a toasted bagel with vegetable cream cheese, and beside me sits a piping hot cup of green tea with lemon. In another era this would induce paroxysms of protest from any librarians in the vicinity. But today’s library is different: the library’s Food and Drink/Noise Policy has been updated to allow food and drink — at least food and drink that’s not “smelly or messy” — in most places in the library. Including at this very table.

This is all an outgrowth of the replacement of the Reference Desk with a coffee shop this month. And while said coffee shop serves only much the same generic goo that the other campus food outlets serve, somehow the opportunity to purchase Glosette Raisins to be consumed while reading The Book of Kells seems, if not quite revolutionary, at least a step in the right direction.

As far as I know the Robertson Library’s ban on “prolonged conversations” remains in place, and I skirted up against this rule when my friend John Cousins stopped by my table a minute ago and our conversation came very close to being prolonged. Fortunately I was able to nip things in the bud and John went on his way right on the extended-prolonged conversational border.

At the Fitness Centre this morning the television in front of my exercise bike was running The Today Show with closed captioning turned on and I spotted the followed mistyped transcription:

Administration forces GM CEO Rick Wagoner to design.

Oh it were true.

Well that was fun: this morning was my time to switch sides of the lectern and deliver my Privacy and The Obligation to Explain lecture to my Philosophy 105 class. You can grab a PDF of the slides I used if you’re interested.

Thanks to Alan and Chris for helpful comments on my original blog post: I ended up using a snippet of Alan’s comment in my talk.

By far the most interesting part of the proceedings was the 20 minutes of discussion that followed: my fellow students had a lot of good insights. The general consensus: this is all very well and good, but we’re going to have to get rid of capitalism and nationalism first, and everyone is going to have to be pure of heart; in other words there are aspects of my proposition that have a slightly Utopian quality.

I come away with a newfound respect for the life of the academic lecturer: it’s a lot of work, not only in preparation, but also in keeping all the freaky balls in the air.

Wednesday I’ll go back to my seat at the back of the room.

Regular readers may recall our last meal at the venerable Town and Country Restaurant back in 2006. In the intervening years the building housed an “asian fusion” restaurant for a time but more often than not has been standing vacant, waiting for someone new to breath life into it.

Unfortunately this never happened, and whoever owned the building decided it was better as an empty lot than a building waiting to be filled, so it fell to the wrecker’s ball over the last several weeks:

I’ve been experimenting with IIPImage and its companion IIPMooViewer as a way of serving higher resolution images in a web browser — think “Google Maps slippy map, but for images.” (the cool Java kids would use djatoka for this, but Java makes my head hurt).

I grabbed this 1958 aerial photo from the government collection of photos of Charlottetown and turned it into a Tiled Pyramidal TIFF with ImageMagick:

convert 16113-44.jpg \
  -define tiff:tile-geometry=256x256 \
  -compress jpeg 'ptif:charlottetown.tif'

And then set it up to be served from IIPMooViewer here. The result is imperfect: the image viewer appears to “stall” after loading an initial collection of tiles (it completes eventually). It would have been nice to have access to higher-resolution scans of the aerial photos to be able to dig deeper, but it’s still an interesting window into Charlottetown in the late 1950s.