The April 21, 2008 issue of The New Yorker has an article by Nick Paumgarten about elevators, contained within which is this shocking revelation about the “door close” button (emphasis mine):

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

It is not (too much of) an exaggeration to say that learning this has undermined my faith in, well, any number of things.

Johnny and I were talking just last week about strategies for phasing Oliver into more independence. We’re not talking “here’s $5, see you in Vancouver” yet, more like “can you go over and borrow a cup of sugar from Johnny” (with appropriate roof-top spotters and GPS monitoring).

Today Catherine and Oliver and I were at the Friendly Pharmacy checking out the nascent Uberloo and its many and varied hand dryers. While looking around for an appropriate shampoo to purchase, we realized we’d lost track of Oliver. Before we had a chance to panic, Oliver came walking in the front entrance with a hot dog in hand: seems he’d decided that it would be a good idea to go out and get himself one (they were free) from the food bank fund-raising table.

And so we were left with the task of a treading a middle ground between lauding him for his independence and self-reliance and reinforcing the standard street-proofing mantras (don’t get into cars with strangers, even if they offer you hot dogs, etc.).

In any case, I think we can do away with the “journey to Johnny and Jodi” war-games, as Oliver has obviously already cut the apron strings on his own.

We fully expect to get up tomorrow morning to find that Oliver has gotten up, got dressed, and gone over to Casa Mia for a hot chocolate and smoked salmon bagel.

Apparently the section of the Trans Canada Highway between the Charlottetown Mall and North River Road has been renamed “Capital Way.” Perhaps “We Are A Boring City With No Imagination Way” would have been a better name? Has the list of notable Islanders that should have things named after them been exhausted? Councillor Rob Lantz noted the renaming back in October, so I suppose we’ve only ourselves to blame.

At this writing, Aeroplan.com, the website of Air Canada’s frequent flyer program, has been down for more than 24 hours, with the message:

Sorry — Due to a technical issue, our web site is currently unavailable. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause you. Be sure to come back later and try again. Thank you for your patience.

Ellen Roseman from the Toronto Star has some of the details on the outage.

If you call Aeroplan at 800-361-5373 you get a recorded message telling you that the website and the cell centre are both down, so at this point you can’t make Aeroplan bookings at all.

I’ve prepared a PresenceRouter Screencast that provides a brief overview about what it actually does:

There may, or may not, have been a bug affecting Safari v3 that caused the sidebar list of new posts and new comments to not properly update. This may or may not now be fixed. Please let me know if you notice anything weird.

PresenceRouter, my Mac OS X presence-flinging application, has supported Twitter since the very beginning. Now Twitter tells you so:

I added this feature in PresenceRouter v2.73, which I just released. Thanks to Alex at Twitter for quick turnaround on setting up the “source” parameter for me.

Oliver and I were listening to the CBeebies Best Bits podcast this morning and they mentioned a six-legged spotted beetle called a “ladybird.” It seems that in Britain, as well as South Africa and Australia, this is what they call what we call a “ladybug.” Who knew.

During the day you can’t see inside the new Ceridian Building on Queen Street because of its Las Vegas-style reflective windows. Last night, however, they left the lights on, and the effect was somewhat “magic X-ray specs” like:

The Old Farmer’s Almanac has, for many years, been a support of the American Farmland Trust. The organization is one I’ve also had a personal interest in because of my work with the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust — we’re essentially in the same business, albeit at a vastly different scale.

Today I got an email from a staffer at the Farmland Trust in reaction to a post about an interactive foliage map I made last August; in the post I described how we’d taken the best of DIY MapServer maps and the Google Maps API to make a cool slippy map with some custom data layers.

At the Farmland Trust they have oodles of data about farmland loss in the USA. Data that, while useful, is locked up inside tiny JPEG images and PDF files. In other words, they’ve got data that would make a lot of sense to apply some MapServer/Google Maps mojo to. So my man at the Farmland Trust asked around. And someone sent him to my blog and the post.

Ironically, he knew neither that Yankee was the sister publication to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, nor of my involvement with the Land Trust. But in that funny way that sometimes connects exactly the right problems to the right solutions, we got connected.