I’ve gone back and forth on the “one laptop per child” program, but it was Guy who convinced me of its ultimate virtues. Starting today people in Canada and the U.S. can participate in the Give One Get One program, ordering two of the “$100 laptops” for $399, with one going overseas and the other coming to them:

From the Stumbler to Plazes Web Service Test page you can upload the logfile from a wifi-scanning application like MacStumbler or netstumbler and get XML returned that contains suggested Plazes for every MAC address you encountered.

This is a quick hack, not an official Plazes product, and is bound to disappear without notice.

By way of testing this, I took a walk around the block here at the office, and found, to my surprise, 78 wireless networks in the immediate neighbourhood. Only 3 of them were associated with Plazes.

I have a well-known aversion to acronyms, so attending my first meeting of POPS — “Parents of Prince Street” — was challenge for me. Let’s just call it “Home and School” between us. But somehow, against our better judgment (or at least mine), Catherine and I are turning out to be that sort of “active and interested in school” parent. The kind you find behind the Mcdonald’s Orange Drink dispenser at field day. So this was just part of the drill.

There are about 230 kids at Prince Street School. There were 4 parents at the meeting. Obviously other parents see the Orange Drink dispensers on the horizon and run in the other direction. And who can blame them. That said, it was interesting, and worthwhile. Here’s what I learned:

• The “zone” for Prince Street School runs from Queen Street to the Hillsborough River, and from Water Street to Allen Street.
• That said, 70% of the students at Prince Street School are bused in from Hillsborough Park, four kilometers away in the suburbs.
• If the Hillsborough Park students weren’t there, Prince Street School would have about 70 students.
• In the good old days, Prince Street School had more than 400 students. Indeed, all the students from St. Jean and West Kent — the other downtown elementary schools — could move to Prince Street and there would be enough room to house everyone.
• One of the important functions of the Home and School Association is to raise funds for items that teachers and staff identify on “wish lists” — things that aren’t otherwise paid for by the school district or the government.
• A frequent request on the wish lists is window blinds: many of the classrooms in the school are missing proper blinds. In rooms that face south this can be a big problem, as the temperature can soar. Apparently it takes up to 5 years to get this sort of thing paid for in the capital budget for the school.
• Other items on the wish lists: books, butterfly kit, microwave oven, listening centres, white boards.
• Crossing guards are paid for by, and report to, City Police, not the school.

Song of the day: Out of Pawn from Anais Mitchell. Available on The Brightness from Amazon.com.

For the past two days I’ve walked by the Town and Country around lunch time and have been lured in by this sandwich board:

I’ve ended up with a very, very good bowl of homemade soup accompanied by (at my option) 1/2 of an excellent clubhouse sandwich (real chicken, cheddar cheese, on whole wheat bun). It’s not quite perfect but it’s very, very close.

Charlie Rose interviewed Jerry Seinfeld a few nights ago. It’s compelling television, and so much more than the usual “Letterman and Seinfeld goofing around” type of interview we’re used to. It went off the rails a few times, but both Seinfeld and Rose were at their best, and it’s a worthwhile hour of television.

Speaking of Charlie Rose, the CharlieRose.com website has just gone through a complete update, and it has gone all “social software” with comments, episode sharing, RSS feeds, etc. This is one situation where applying this kind of thing is useful because the so-called “social object” — in this case each night’s episode — is a good piece of bedrock upon which to build interactions.

Quick note for anyone using Mac OS X Leopard: the version of Safari that comes with Leopard has some issues with cookie-handling (either that, or I have some issues with cookie-handling that only show up in Safari under Leopard). You’ll notice that, as a result of this, the right-hand sidebar of the blog that shows “New Comments” and “New Posts” won’t operate properly for you. I’m on it.

With VNsea on my iPod Touch I can share the screen of my MacBook running Leopard (which is a built-in VNC server):

• Needed to turn on “Screen Sharing” on my Mac (System Preferences \| Sharing).
• Also needed to open the firewall for Screen Sharing (System Preferences \| Security \| Firewall).
• Only worked with “pixel depth” in VNsea set to 16.
• Wouldn’t work with my Cinema Display set to 1920x1200 — had to set it to 1600x1200.
• Wouldn’t work without a password set on both ends.
• Not zippy.