Excerpt from the Big Dig Construction Noise Control rules in Boston:

Work shall be performed in a manner to prevent nuisance conditions such as noise which exhibits a specific audible frequency or tone (e.g., backup alarms, unmaintained equipment, brake squeal) or impact noise (e.g., jackhammers, hoe rams). The Engineer will make any final interpretation concerning whether or not nuisance noise conditions exist. The Engineer has the authority to stop the Work until nuisance noise conditions are resolved, without additional time or compensation for the Contractor.

FAQ from the Noise Abatement Society in the U.K., an organization:

…instrumental in making noise a statutory nuisance in 1960. Its aims are to eliminate excessive noise in all its forms by campaigning to raise awareness, by lobbying parliament and through education to enhance the environment for all. It is an active and effective problem solving organisation with strong contacts in Government.

The jackhammers are back in the Queen Parkade this morning. They’ve been joined, from the sounds of it, by concrete saws. Email to Les Parsons at CADC that I sent yesterday, seeking steps to mitigate the problem, has so far gone unanswered.

Back last year I stumbled across the book Cork Boat, the tale of a crazy American who built a boat out of wine corks and sailed it down the Douro River in Portugal.

It only serves to reason that when I stumbled across an offer of a “renovated fisherman’s cottage” in Porto (where the Douro enters the ocean) on craigslist.com, we carved out part of our spring trip to take us to Portugal for two weeks.

So from May 13 to 26, before flying up to Copenhagen, we’ll be living just north of Porto in Leca da Palmeira.

When I later found out that airport code for Porto’s airport is OPO, my faith in our decision was only reinforced.

Perhaps you were thinking, after reading of my jackhammer plight, “I wonder what that actually sounds like.”

Attached hereto for your listening pleasure are 40 seconds of sound recorded with the internal microphone on my iMac after the jackhammers started up after lunch today. Suggestion for stress test: blast this through your headphones in an endless loop, and try to complete a complex technical task.

My office window here at 84 Fitzroy Street in Charlottetown faces right out onto the Queen Parkade, a multi-level parking garage. If you leave out the “large concrete monolith that blocks out the sun” part of the deal, they’ve been a good neighbour.

Until today.

Today CADC, the crown corporation that runs the parkade, started work on a renovating the first two levels of the Queen Parkade, work that is expected to continue until the end of May.

“Work” in this case means “jackhammers that sound and feel like they are operating inside my head.” In other words, my office space has been rendered uninhabitable.

The jackhammer operators are on a lunch break right now and peace has momentarily returned to the kingdom. If the sound and fury keeps up as it did this morning, however, I’m going to have to move out of the office.

Results of the Provincial By-election in District #2 are available at results.electionspei.ca. You’ll also find links to raw data files and an RSS feeds of the poll-by-poll results there.

Somehow in the week that I was away, Oliver became a completely accomplished user of Firefox. While he’s not installing his own extensions yet, he can start it up, find PBSkids, and independently browse around for hours. This is all due, I think, to his reaching a sweet spot of hand-eye coordination (so as to run the mouse effectively), a sudden surge in digital curiousity, and a desire to be in the driver’s seat.

As I type this, it’s Sunday afternoon and Oliver is sitting over in Johnny’s office with my laptop. I haven’t heard a peep out of him in 30 minutes, although I hear Barney singing and Teletubbies gurgling from time to time.

What’s most amazing about this is that only a couple of weeks ago Oliver simply couldn’t do this: three weeks ago I left him alone in front of Catherine’s iMac for 5 minutes and I came back only to find that he had mistakenly ended up at the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Of course there’s always a chance that his choice was deliberate and that I mistakenly redirected him to Barney when he was in the midst of an evaluation of the DRM situation in Latvia.

When I arrived here at Bradley International Airport north of Hartford, CT last Sunday I was out of the terminal and on to the Hertz bus in just a few minutes, so I only got the vaguest sense of the state of the terminal. Now that I have (characteristically) arrived 90 minutes early for my flight, I’ve had a chance to understand just how 1972 it is.

I hasten to add that I speak here only of the ye olde terminal that is now home to Air Canada and a gaggle of discount airlines like Southwest, and some others that you’ve either never heard of, or that have gone out of business. It is not, in other words, the focus of the Bradley’s future.

It is, however, a remarkable time capsule of the architecture of my youth, and a visit here helps one understand why airports created in reaction to this era are full of light and open space.

It reminds me of a near-empty mall on the suburban strip in Denver that Mike and visited a couple of years ago, a relic of the big mall construction build of the 1970s that had fallen victim to the new and modern mall across the road.

When I asked the gate agent at Air Canada where I should hang out, he sent me here to the Sheraton Hotel, which appears to serve as the de facto lounge for the terminal — the lobby has a “We Proudly Serve Starbucks” coffee shop, and wifi is available for $4.95/hour (there are about a dozen others here, sucking power from behind plant stands, with laptops open).

It’s a beautiful day, and it should be still be daylight when we take off at 5:40 so I should get a good view of New England from the air.

I’m stopped here in Keene, NH for lunch at the Panera Bread outlet. They have free wifi, and a very friendly start page:

At Panera Bread, our WiFi is free and we welcome you to stay as long as you like. All we ask is that you give consideration to other patrons, particularly at busy times of day.

At lunchtime, for example, please try to use the smallest table available so that we can accommodate larger parties. Or, come back when things have slowed down and you can spread out your work.

Thank you for your patronage and consideration. With your help, we can all enjoy our sandwiches, salads, freshly baked bread and hot coffee — and free WiFi, too.

The is not only considerably more friendly than a “please limit wifi use to 10 minutes” rule, but also, I suspect, engenders a fierce loyalty to the brand. It’s smart friendly, in other words.