A week into my new work blogging at Plazes, the blog.plazes.com server is suffering technical issues, and availability is spotty. This will be fixed soon.

Oliver and I are speeding down the track from Dorval to Kingston where we’ll rendezvous, after a week apart, with Catherine. Remember when I said that wifi is everywhere. Well it’s here on the train. Bandwidth sucks (latency to the mothership back in PEI is 619ms), and my Plazer keeps freezing (probably not its fault), and my iChat keeps kicking in and out (probably not its fault). But it’s still pretty cool. Indeed somehow cooler than wifi on airplanes because the technical insanity of it all is more obvious.

Sadly, even though there is wifi there are no power plugs, which makes the service of somewhat limited use after a few hours.

Thanks to the excellent efforts of Christian Dannemann, it took me 30 seconds to configure my Nokia E61i to make calls using our Asterisk server instead of my wireless provider.

I’ve now got the phone set up as, appropriately enough, “extension 61” on the local Asterisk PBX. This means, in practice, that it is now simply another handset here at the office. Except that “the office” stretches anywhere there is wifi. In other words, Johnny can pick up the phone in his office, dial “61” and my mobile will ring. Whether I am in the office next door or drinking absinthe with Olle in Copenhagen.

While this is technically elegant, it would also seem to signal a rather cataclysmic shift in the mobile marketplace: wifi is everywhere; once wifi-enabled phones are everywhere, is there any reason to have a SIM and be tied to expensive rates, dreadful service and poor features?

Starting this week I’ve taken on a new role as User Advocate with Plazes. It’s not a full-time gig — I’ll still be lovingly crafting almanacs and magazines most of the time. And we’re not uprooting ourselves to Berlin (at least not yet!). In a sense it’s doing what I’ve been doing all along — being a passionate Plazes user — except now it’s official.

I’ve explained more about exactly what this is all about in my first post of the Plazes weblog (a post that, unfortunately, has some people thinking my name is Julie; more fool me for making broad North America-centric pop culture references the centre of my posts).

After planning to all but ignore the Tour de PEI cycle race as it whizzed past our front door, I somehow conjured up a cycle-watching wine-drinking happening. At the height of it all we had a dozen people cheering the cyclists on from our tiny front yard. It was all quite thrilling. I took some photos. I took the photos on my new Nokia E61i, and these are the first photos on the camera since it arrived early this morning by UPS, so I’m still getting my sea legs with it. Here’s a short video taken early in the race:

I’ve got our Apple iSight camera sticking out the front window, pointed at the corner of Prince and Richmond Streets in downtown Charlottetown where, in a few hours from now, preparations — road blocks and who knows what else — should spring into life for the Tour de PEI cycle race that’s taking over the neighbourhood for the day. I’ll just leave the camera running:

Note that: time displayed in the video window is Pacific Time, which is 4 hours earlier than the local time here; audio is on, but you won’t hear much through the window; if you visit the stream’s page at Ustream you can chat with other viewers.

Two photos taken by Oliver, one week apart. Amazing what shave, haircut and tie will do for a guy:

Perhaps you, like I, have been wondering what Casa Mia, the new place on Queen Street next to Woolworths, will turn out to be once the wrapping comes off. There are some hints in their public trade name registration: “Coffee shop, etc., ice cream.” Anyone else have more intel?

So Oliver graduated from kindergarten this morning. Being the jaded curmudgeon that I pretend to be, I was all ready to concoct some biting “when I was a boy we graduated from high school and that was it” commentary. I mean kindergarten graduation? Come off it.

How naive I was.

It turns out the kindergarten graduation made me cry.

Right from the Pomp and Circumstance through the singing of various tribute songs and on to the handing out of the diplomas and the playing of a stirring tears-inducing PowerPoint montage of photos of the class taken over the year.

Don’t ask me why, school- and ceremony-averse as I am (I refused on principle to pay a $25 fee for a cap and gown rental for my own high school graduation), I was so affected by it all. But I was. I suppose it’s a combination of “our little boy is growing up” with some deep-seated human need to get all emotional when kids catapult up to the next level.

The staff at the Child Development Centre are amazing and put on a great event. I’m proud to say that my assigned potluck lunch task of “fruit plate for 10” was delivered on time, and was hand-cut from actual fruit, not just picked up at the Sobeys deli counter as Catherine insisted.

The resourceful staff went as far as burning a DVD of the teary PowerPoint for every graduate, so now we can watch it over and over again and relive it all over again.

Delivery Status, a Mac OS X Dashboard widget from Mike Piontek is a beautiful and functional both. I’ve been using it to watch my Nokia E61i wing its way from Indiana to Charlottetown:

The widget has an impressive array of tracking savvy: in addition to the expected FedEx, UPS, etc. you can also track orders from Amazon.com, Canada Post, Apple, Purolator and more.