From Springwise.com comes a pointer to POINTWC, a privately run public washroom in Paris. For 1 EUR, Springwise reports that:

Customers are welcomed by smartly dressed bathroom attendants, who also sell items in the boutique WC’s boutique shop. Impulse buys vary from diapers to designer toilet-paper holders. Needless to say, the bathrooms look (and smell) impeccable, and are cleaned after every single use. Women are provided with a powder room — a ’21st century boudoir’ — which offers hotel-sized toiletries, ample mirrors and good lighting.

Last Thursday afternoon I was sitting here in my office working away when a couple of email messages from PayPal arrived in rapid succession: both were receipts for purchases that I didn’t actually make (one for a “prank SMS” service, another for a year’s worth of web hosting in Germany), and both were genuine PayPal email messages (I didn’t click on the links in the emails themselves: I went to PayPal’s website to verify that the money had actually left my PayPal account. It had).

At first — before the second message arrived — I thought that Oliver might have been using the computer at home, that I’d mistakenly had his web browser remember my PayPal username and password, and the Oliver had mistakenly purchased something. Once the second email arrived with notice of the second purchase, I realized that this was unlikely (reinforced by the realization that making complete PayPal purchase would be beyond Oliver’s capabilities click-wise).

So panic temporarily set in once I realized that someone had guessed my PayPal password and was making purchases with it. Visions of my bank account quickly draining away danced in my head.

So here’s what I did.

First, I logged into PayPal again, confirming that I was actually connected to PayPal itself and not some phishing site by examining the URL (it did, indeed, start with https://www.paypal.com/).

Second, I immediately changed my PayPal password. Because doing this requires that having the original credit card that I used to register the account, I assumed the evil hacker wouldn’t have this information, and would be unable to change the password themselves. Nor to access my account once the password was changed.

Third, I went to PayPal’s “Resolution Center” and opened a new case to dispute the two purchases, providing all the details of the purchases and the original PayPal transaction numbers.

Finally, I visited the websites where the original fraudulent purchases had been made and sent email to their customer service contact addresses outlining what had happened and asking them to immediately cancel the purchases.

Now here’s the time for my mea culpa: I’m partly to blame for all this. Against all logic (and against everything I preach to others about password security) my PayPal password was both easy to guess — it was a combination of two English-language words both of which you’d find in a dictionary — and one that I’d used promiscuously on other consumer websites with the same username I’d used on PayPal.

Why was I so careless? Because I was lazy. I’d set up my PayPal account a long time ago when the world was a simpler place, and despite telling myself that I should update my password, I never got around to it.

So my next step, after dealing with the immediate PayPal crisis, was to ferret out all the other sites where I’d used the same password (at least I had good records!) and immediately changed my password to something unique to each website and in each case involving lots of upper and lower case letters, punctuation marks and numbers.

I’m happy to report that both of the fraudulent transactions were reversed, with the cooperation of the websites involved, within 3 days (I got personal replies from both after I sent my inquiries assuring me that they would reverse the charges).

And I’m happy to have been kicked in the security ass over an issue involving a couple of hundred dollars, not a couple of thousand.

I continue to think of PayPal as an excellent service, and I’m keeping my PayPal account in place (with its new much-more-secure password). But, as they used to say in high school, “with freedom comes responsibility.” What’s your PayPal password?

After much fiddling, I found out what the Portuguese translation of the title of Anne of Green Gables is: Anne e a sua aldeia.

Just goes to show that library catalogues can be a useful general research tool: I found this information by searching the Lisbon Municipal Library catalogue for books by L.M. Montgomery.

What I found was a reference to a 1972 translation by Olinda Gomes Fernandes published by Civilização in Porto.

Now, can any of you smart librarians in the readership help me track down a copy that I can purchase?

(With that information in hand, by the way, I also found this Czech page that shows the translation in several other languages).

I received the following error message after trying to a “flexible dates” search for travel between Charlottetown and London on Travelocity:

This is a new feature [sic] of the Travelocity website: up until recently you could do flexible dates searches for overseas travel too, and in fact I used the capability to find our excellent $300US return fares from Boston to Ireland in the spring.

The flexible dates search didn’t always work perfectly — about 25% of the time you would go through the entire process only to receive, 4 screens later, an error message of the “KLM does not fly from Halifax to London” kind, even though said fare clearly appeared in the list of available options. But I’d rather have a broken version of this feature than no version at all.

I called Travelocity’s Canadian call centre to ask for information about this change, and was told that “due to certain airline restrictions” the feature has been removed, but that it might come back at some later date.

Expedia has a weird version of a flexible dates search available for selected city pairs only, and says that the fares it displays are “the best prices recently found by Expedia customers” which seems like a number-crunching cop-out. And, what’s more, it doesn’t display a range of available fares, regardless of specific travel dates, as Travelocity used to do — you have to select a departure and arrival date before you get any pricing.

Looks like this might be an industry-wide purge: looking at the top websites in Google for “flight reservations,” I see that while some airlines offer this on their own sites, no general purpose airline site has a flexible dates search feature. Interesting.

Update: Here’s a blog post on the change — the feature was disabled on July 16th, and is related (as everything eventually seems to be…) to fuel surcharges. And here’s another blog post that offers some possible alternatives to Travelocity that have variations on this feature.

After almost a decade of full dental health, I had to go along to the dentist this afternoon to get a cavity filled. And next week I go back for another one. Needless to say our house is aflutter with all sorts of “don’t you know how to brush your teeth” sarcasm at my expense.

Cavity filling has come a long way in the 30-odd years since I had my first one filled. First, cavities get filled with some sort of magic epoxy that cures in 40 seconds under ultraviolet light. Second, there’s cable TV in the ceiling (and thus I’ve been fully briefed by CNN on the Mel Gibson situation). Third, my dentist is a friend, not a strange man with funny glasses. There also appear to have been several positive developments on the “freezing with a needle” front, such that all “this is going to pinch” warnings I received actually did pinch, and there were no episodes at all of jarring discomfort.

Well, besides the occasional mild episode of “I believe that I will be unable to breath or swallow sometime in the next minute and will make a fool of myself by flopping around and passing out right here in the dental chair.” Fortunately, this didn’t actually happen.

I arrived in Cornwall at 3:00 p.m.; I was out the door with cavity filled and paid for ($171) at 4:09.

My friend Don the Dentists’s parting words were “don’t bite your cheek.” Apparently my cheek is still frozen, and there’s some chance that were I to eat the wrong way, I might actually eat my cheek off without knowing it. Or something like that.

To avoid total paranoid meltdown, I’m going to avoid eating altogether for the next 12 hours. I need my cheek for other purposes.

If you have a Mac running OS X you may have noticed that considerably more spam is getting through Mail.app’s junk filtering, mostly a particular type of spam. Hawk Wings has a possible fix for this problem. I haven’t tried it yet. There’s good additional information in the comments for that post.

Remember the yurt? Peter Lux has great photos.

There’s a new brand of iced tea in down — UrbanZen-brand iced tea has replaced Honest Tea in the “health food” section of Shoppers Drug Mart on University Avenue. Their ginger flavoured tea is excellent, the lemon is an acquired taste, but is very refreshing, and the honey jasmine in almost undrinkable (it may also be an acquired taste, but one that I cannot acquire).

As with their handling of Honest Tea, Shoppers Drug Mart can’t seem to stock a regular supply of UrbanZen, so you’re just as likely to find them without stock as with; if you’ve a taste for ginger and iced tea, however, I suggest you invest $2.99 in a bottle of the ginger brand (yes, it’s $2.99 a bottle, which is expensive; worth it for the ginger, however).

I stopped by the PEI Preserve Company Café on Queen St. for lunch this afternoon (wasn’t there supposed to be a contest to name their restaurant?) and found, to my surprise, that they’re carrying Orangina, a carbonated citrus drink from France. I had something of an addiction to Orangina back in the late 1980s in Peterborough that culminated in ordering a case of 1 litre bottles and a subsequent overdose that kept me Orangina free for the longest time. I ordered one for lunch today, however, and it was quite refreshing.

It won’t be long before the carbonated beverage cops crack down, I imagine, so if you’ve a hankering for one get it now. Remember what happened with the Jones Soda fiasco.

I spotted this sign this afternoon; it’s newly up on the site of the old Central Farmer’s Cooperative on Richmond Street:

My only exposure to developer Phillip O’Halloran was at a public meeting held several years ago to discuss the disposition of the old Charlottetown Forum lot after the building was demolished. Phillip presented what, by all appearances, was a very well-designed and appropriate plan for housing on that site; unfortunately the awesome power of Holland College to consume every square foot of that neighbourhood for parking meant that the plan was never brought to life.

Phillip has a good reputation as a savvy developer who understands neighbourhoods and design; certainly the look of the Richmond Street Condominiums on the sign suggests that he’s planning on putting up a well-proportioned building that’s somewhat more than the usual design-free box that typifies other recent housing developments in the city. I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges.

I’ve been making slow and steady progress fleshing out the Charlottetown portion of OpenStreetMap:

Today I discovered a stretch of Sydney Street, behind the Notre Dame Convent, that I’d never ridden down before. And I’m pretty certain I’d never been on Orlebar Street either.

So far I’ve got almost everything south of Euston Street online, and I’m chipping away at the area east of University Avenue between Euston Street and Allen Street. To date all of Brighton, save for Brighton Road, remains dark — volunteers?

I finally discovered the reason for the different colouring on the public map rendering of streets: yellow streets are ones I created using the web-based edit applet on OpenStreetMap.org and green streets are ones I created using the standalone JOSM editor (thanks to the folks on the IRC channel for helping me figure that out).

By the time this is finished I’ll have a lot of miles on the bike to my credit, albeit slow and steady ones.