I never met Urban Carmichael. We once sat at different tables in the same restaurant, but that’s as close as I ever came. I never even heard him perform, save for a couple of snippets on the CBC here and there.

But our lives intersected in innumerable ways.

Urban’s sister lives just over our back fence, and her kids say hello to us every time we walk by (one of them comes over to the house to work for Catherine every Sunday afternoon, another walks Johnny and Jodi’s dog for them).

I worked with another sister during my time with the Legislative Assembly.

Mix another way, and add another couple of sisters, and you get The Carmichael Sisters — I bought their first CD soon after arriving on the Island, and I listen to it often.

We spent our first Christmas on PEI with Urban’s nephew, hunkered down in Catherine Hennessey’s old place on Dorchester St., and he’s since become a friend.

And of course almost all of our friends, acquaintances and co-workers here on PEI have regaled us with stories about working and playing with Urban over the years.

So although I never met Urban, I feel as though I know him through reflection in the eyes and hearts of others.

When last summer I made a little post about a benefit for Urban, I suddenly became, according to Google, an authority. And so I started to receive email messages. Like this one:

I hope you wont think my request is intruding on you. My wife and I only learned today about Urban Carmichael’s health while listening to CBC radio. We, my wife Anne and I, met Urban in 1986 in Saint John NB during ‘Festival by the Sea’ when Urban was representing PEI and we were part of a contingent from the Yukon. Because of the small numbers of both contingents, PEI and Yukon shared a common dormitory at the performers village. Urban kept us entertained 24/7 for the whole two weeks.

A dozen others followed, from all over North America. With the help of Urban’s friends and family, I managed to steer people in the right direction, and many of the correspondents wrote back to thank me, letting me know they’d made contact with Urban.

Urban died last night, at the age of 53. CBC Radio is reporting that he died surrounded by members of his family — they called him a “legendary Island entertainer” — and said he was born into a family of 10 (which means there are still more Carmichaels for me to meet).

This morning, picking up a cup of tea at Timothy’s, I ran into my friend, Urban’s nephew. And again I saw Urban in reflection, this time in a deep sadness in his eyes.

Goodbye, Urban.

Early last week I finished off a chocolate bar that I’d been keeping for late-afternoon sugar emergencies at the office. To my surprise, immediately after consuming the last bite, one half of my lower lip puffed up to about twice its regular size. I was disconcerted, to say the least, especially as this was something I’d never experienced before, and I’d had no problems after the first half of the same chocolate bar. After a couple of hours my lip returned to its normal size, and I’ve suffered no ill effects since.

I decided to alert the manufacturer of the chocolate bar to my problems, and I followed the website address on the back of the wrapper to a feedback form. Today (appropriately enough, Valentine’s Day), I received the following reply:

We regret that you have noticed healthy disorders after consumption of a [brand name] chocolate bar [chocolate bar name]. However we are not able to inform you about the reasons for the mentioned occurance. As you have written, you ate the first part of the bar without any problems, we can not imagine why the problem appears when eating the second part.

Please understand that we cannot give any explanations without the product or without a diagnosis what could have happened.

We can assure you that we only use high quality raw materials for the production of our chocolate bars. Every raw material and production lot is checked by various parameters to guarantee the high quality and the consumer and food safety.

We ask for your understanding and hope you will be a sufficient consumer of our products in future. We will inform our distributor partner in Canada sending you a little chocolate package, regardless any legal duty, for compensation.

The note is delightful for its “native German speaker writing in English” style, and they actually took the time to write back, which most of the places I send customer service email don’t do. As a result — and because I don’t want to start a worldwide panic over something that may have been a coincidence — I’m leaving the manufacturer’s name out of this post. And awaiting my “little chocolate package” with much anticipation. Of course it might kill me, but I’ll die happy.

Given that the little Applescript I wrote to set the Adium status messages to the current Plazes location proved popular, I thought I’d have a go at setting the Skype status message in a similar fashion.

Except that the Skype status message doesn’t allow for custom values — it’s limited to a pre-defined list of settings like “ONLINE”.

However recent versions of Skype have something called a “mood message” and this can be set with AppleScript quite easily. The result, thus, is PlazesSkype, a little AppleScript that grabs your current Plazes location and uses it to set your Skype mood message.

Olle blogs about Sean Treadway’s Danish plight. Short version of the story: Sean, an American, has been a freelance worker in Copenhagen for the last seven years, but has recently been told he must leave the country because his small (one person) company “doesn’t contribute a type of company to the Danish labor market that doesn’t already exist in Denmark.”

Olle and I discussed the issue this morning and agreed that this is a more general and more serious problem than it might first appear, a problem not specific to Sean nor to Denmark: the tendency of the state to discount the economic importance of “micro” businesses (like Sean’s, like Olle’s, like mine).

Unlike larger companies, micro-companies inevitably develop a sort of “digital ecosystem” with each other, and rely upon partnerships (ephemeral, short-lived or otherwise) to thrive. While this isn’t unique to the digital economy (plumbers and electricians have always installed furnaces together), advances in travel (and thus mobility), communications and work now make it more possible for the ecosystem to cross regional and national lines: if I’m living temporarily in France, working with Olle in Denmark on a German open source project that sits on a server in Canada, where “am” I? Where is my economic activity being generated? Who do I pay taxes to? And whose economy is benefiting from my activity?

From what Olle tells me, Sean has grown to become an important and vital part of the Danish digital ecosystem, and his economic impact is out of proportion to what a strict traditional economy analysis might suggest — his presence in the ecosystem, in other words, enables others to be more effective, which has a cascading effect, and so on.

We face related challenges here in Prince Edward Island, where our provincial government seems to exhibit a single-minded obsession with catching Big Important Technology Fish, and largely ignores the important (but largely invisible, at least to them) economic activity generated by small one- or two-person companies.

In the case of both Denmark and Prince Edward Island, you would think that the “small is beautiful” ethos upon which both depend for their cultural survival, would inspire economists and bureaucrats to realize the beauty of the small that lurks within.

The GeoTraceAgri project has set out to “define a methodology for the sampling, acquisition, utilization and processing of georeferenced data that will be used to generate agro-environmental indicators at various geographical scales.”

What I think that means is that, at least in part, they’re working on systems that would allow me to learn more about the geographical route my food took to get from the farm to my plate. Which is not only a cool idea, but one that many consumers, I think, would clamor for.

It also represents one of the Great Hopes for small agricultural economies on the edge — like Prince Edward Island. We’re never going to win on price; we can hope to win the information race.

I know, from work on a project with Rob several years ago in Kinkora, that there’s interest and willingness into the agriculture community to enable this sort of thing. Some of it is happening already in some sectors — FoodTrust is an early adopter program that’s driving some of this.

Thanks to Ogle Earth for the pointer.

Henriette introduces an excellent new word into my vocabularly: Københavnerprotokollen, or “the Copenhagen Protocol.” Perhaps one of you in the Danish-speaking readership could shoot me an MP3 to let us in on how it’s pronounced?

By the way, the HTML entity for ø is ø.

It’s a “snow day” here in Charlottetown today — schools and offices are closed, and the streets are all but empty. Catherine found me a mysterious pair of felt-lined rubber boots in the mud room; they barely fit, but they were enough to insulate my feet to work (although my left foot did spasm several times on the way here, as they’re about two sizes too small). When I arrived at the office there was a giant German Shepherd named Gail on her way out; this turned out to be Nathan’s parents’ dog Kayla (the blazzardic winds had caused my hearing to temporarily fail). Personally, I think she’s a better dog as Gail, and will continue to call her that.

The past three days have seemed like an continuous eating party: Mom and Dad arrived by air on Thursday afternoon, and we haven’t stopped eating since. Thursday was dinner at our house, Friday was dinner at Johnny and Jodi’s house, Saturday we all went out (minus Oliver) to the Harbour House restaurant, and Sunday was a repeat performance at our place. In addition to the wardriving fun, we’ve been out to see the Curious George movie, did a Saturday Morning Market Run with Dad, and have had many Serious Discussions About World Issues around the dinner table.

In other news, Catherine says that her taxi driver told her that the much vaunted “downtown grocery store” slated for the old Carter’s space on Queen Street has imploded; something about the intractable dividing wall between the two halves of the building.

Speaking of implosion, part of our Market Run on Saturday included a stop at the Indigo store on University Ave., where the day before an out of control SUV had driven into the children’s section (nobody was seriously hurt). The hole in the wall was still there, and we were able to get a good look at it; apparently the building that houses Indigo is essentially “disposable,” as the walls appear to be made of steel studs and tissue paper (a fact that probably prevented a lot of cement black carnage, but doesn’t bode will for Historic Charlottetown moving north of Euston St.). Inside they were doing a brisk business, although not in children’s books, as the entire section was roped off to allow for emergency construction work. And to think that I’d recently started to let Oliver alone to browse while I shopped for magazines: no more.

Otherwise, today was Mitch Cormier’s first day in his new role as newsreader on Island Morning, a role formerly ably filled by Kerry Campbell, Barbara Nymark, current host Karen Mair and, back at the beginning, Whit Carter (among many, many other over the years, of course). I’ve always enjoyed Mitch on the radio, and he’s a welcome addition to the morning; at the same time, I’ll miss Kerry Campbell, who did a bang-up job, especially on the “patter with Karen” front. I hope he has another local role to jump into, as it would be a shame to lose him.

Gail and Nathan are back now, and the silverorange boys are starting to muster for their Monday session of power-working in the front room, so I best sign off and hunker down for some serious snow day working.

Honest Tea-brand iced tea has returned to the Shopper’s Drug Mart in Charlottetown with a vengeance: they now have what looks to be about 200 bottles ready for purchase in the cooler in the health food section at the back. If you’re an aficionado, now’s the time to stock up.

I have an arcane technical request for any of the readership within spitting distance of where I type this in Charlottetown: my Dad wants to test the ability of his IBM ThinkPad’s DVD reader to read DVD RW disks burned in the “InCD” format. He’s here until Monday evening. If you have a DVD RW burned in this fashion that we can borrow for a bit, I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

A perfect storm of technology became available this morning that allowed Dad and I to go on a wardriving expedition around Charlottetown — an upgrade from my earlier warwalking experiments.

We ended up finding just over 200 wireless access points; put on a map they look like this (red markers are secured wifi access points, green markers are open ones):

In terms of gear, our setup looked like this:

• IBM ThinkPad T-20 laptop.
• NetStumbler software running under Windows 2000 on the laptop.
• An ancient Entrega 4-port USB hub.
• An ancient Holux GPS receiver, borrowed from Dan, plugged into the USB hub, and using some sort of weird “make my USB port into a serial port” driver.
• TRENDnet 54Mbps 802.11g Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter plugged into the USB hub.
• 400 W Eliminator Power Inverter from Canadian Tire.
• 2000 Volkswagen Jetta.

NetStumbler worked very well with Dad’s cheap USB wifi card and Dan’s GPS receiver; we needed the inverter in the car because the ThinkPad battery only lasts 15 minutes, and it only has one USB port where we needed two, thus the powered hub and the need to plug it in someplace.

I would be horrible if every asked to run a “grid pattern search” in a search and rescue situation, so our wardriving pattern wasn’t exactly comprehensive; we tried to get a representative sample from several neighbourhoods, but my sense is that there are 10-20x more access points out there that we missed.

Not sure how that one marker ended up out in Charlottetown Harbour — we didn’t actually drive the car out there.

If you want to fool with the raw data we gathered yourself, here are a couple of files:

• NetStumbler Binary Logfile
• Google Earth KML

I created the Google Maps map and the Google Earth datafile using the excellent GPSVisualizer site: it simply slurps in the NetStumbler files and spits out maps. Neato.

Some kids go hunting with their Dad, some kids play ball; I run wires all around my Volkswagen and go hunting for radio signals with my Dad.