Right about this time I expected to be having to take my shoes off in the security line at Logan Airport, en route to Charlottetown on Air Canada.

Alas Air Canada’s flight from Boston to Halifax is delayed 50 minutes, which means I cannot make a connection to Charlottetown. Air Canada’s option was to put me up in a hotel in Halifax, which is tantamount to condemning me to hell, so I’ve opted to stay in Boston another night.

As such I find myself again sitting on the floor of the bathroom of room #213 of the Club Quarters Hotel in downtown Boston.

Club Quarters isn’t really a hotel, per se. It’s a private member-owned hotel cooperative, owned by large corporations and universities that have banded together to create cheaper lodging for their employees. They sell off weekend rooms to discount hotel brokers, and it’s through such a mechanism that I find myself staying here.

The “hotel” is wonderful. As I mentioned earlier, checkin is completely automated. The rooms are small but well laid out and spotlessly clean. There’s a nice club room downstairs, saturated with wireless Internet access. There’s a restaurant next door. It’s central — two blocks from the State St. T station. It’s quiet. It’s perhaps the nicest hotel I’ve stayed in for business.

This in contrast to Air Canada which I hesitate to even call an airline given their propensity to not fly has affected my life more often than not. This is the second time in less than a year that a Boston to Halifax flight has been delayed, and one of a half dozen or so times that Air Canada’s inabilities have affected me or my immediate family this year. They are, in a word, inept. Sheesh.

That said, there are worse places in the world to be stuck than in Boston. Off to have a tiny bit of fun.

I’m sitting here at my table at The Wrap, a burrito bar on Newbury Street in Boston. It’s the final stop on my tour of wireless Internet access points in Boston.

I started this morning at my hotel, Club Quarters on Devonshire. They have free WiFi access in the downstairs lounge and, also, given that I was staying above said lounge, WiFi in my room. Actually make that “WiFi in my room as long as I was sitting on the bathroom floor.” Hey, you take what you can.

Next stop: the Apple Store in the CambridgeSide Galleria, a large urban shopping mall near the Lechmere T stop. The Apple Store is as dreamy as the one I visited in Peabody last October: it’s a paragon of retail design, with about the best staff of any store I’ve ever come across. I was having trouble with my iTunes starting up slowly: I pulled up a stool at the Genius Bar (yes, that’s actually what it’s called) and Steve the friendly Genius spent 15 minutes with me diagnosing and fixing the problem (it was an old iTunes plug-in that I’d installed many months ago and forgotten about). The store is flooded with WiFi, and thet staff appear to take no offense at customers with Airport-equipped iBooks sitting on a bench and surfing away.

And finally here at The Wrap — a nice little burrito and smoothie place with patio where free wireless Internet is provided by the Newbury Open Network. So, in other words, I can sit enjoying my Pineapple Orange Gauva juice and my Bangkok (burrito with jasmine rice and peanut sauce) and surf the net at the same time.

The burrito is excellent and, for someone who started surfing the Internet at the end of a leased 14.4 copper wire on Victoria Row, the Internet access is, well, revolutionary.

The downsides? Well, ironically the credit card machine at The Wrap is broken today, so while I can sit here an book airline tickets to Rome and purchase the complete works of Shakespeare, I cannot pay for my burrito with my MasterCard.

Oh, and I just spilled jasmine rice on my trackpad.

Home tonight on MCA and back in action on Prince St. tonight.

Postscript: Here’s how you get wireless Internet access on your Airport equipped iBook: open the lid. That’s it.

The radio silence over the past week was largely due to an intense bout of work on YankeeMagazine.com, a new website we launched today.

Since 1996 I’ve been working with Yankee Publishing in Dublin, NH on their web efforts. We started with NewEngland.com and later came Almanac.com, the website of The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Today’s launch is the culmination of almost a year of work by a team inside Yankee along with our Reinvented operatives. We’ve been working 18 hours days for the past week to get it ready for today’s launch, and everyone’s happy (if exhausted) to see it launch.

You’re welcome to drop by for a visit.

It seems everything in Boston is automated now. I went to Fandango.com and ordered a ticket for The Bourne Identity. Then I walked over to the theatre and tuck my credit card in a kiosk in the lobby and out popped my ticket. 49.2 seconds.

Check-in procedure at my Boston hotel: insert credit card. Wait. Receive receipt and key card. Time from walking in the door to walking in the room: 37 seconds. Impressive.

I had avoided seeing the movie Frequency for a long time. Although I came close several times, both in theatres and standing in front of the DVD rack, there was always something in the back of my mind that associated the film with duds like The Rocketeer and Fearless.

Well, last night, with the free digital period on our Eastlink about to run out, I took the plunge.

I like smart movies with a tricky plot. I loved The Spanish Prisoner, for example. Frequency doesn’t quite rise to this level, but the premise — basically “son talks to dead father, 30 years in the past, used ham radio tricked out by northern lights” — was clever, and for something this far-fetched it was carried off well. I meant to watch for 10 minutes, then half an hour, and finally stayed up until 3:00 a.m. watching the entire thing.

Recommended.

My copy of Just In Tokyo arrived this week, and I’ve read it from cover to cover.

The book is a new travel guidelette from prolific web impresario Justin Hall. Written in much the same style as his web writings about Japan, Hall covers the basics of travel to Tokyo in a quick and entertaining fashion.

It’s a new sort of travel book this: it’s not as ponderous as the travel essays of people like Paul Theroux, not as granola comprehensive as the Lonely Planet books. And it certainly ain’t no Fodors.

The book is more a incomplete practical précis of Tokyo from the perspective of what Hall calls an urban nomad. Which means that you learn about everything from where to find the good “capsule hotels” to how to deal with food that has the consistency “of snot” (one of Hall’s favourite food words).

If you have a passing interest in visiting Tokyo, or even just in understanding more about it through the eyes of someone younger, braver and more sexed than the usual travel writer, this would be a good place to start.

You’ve got to hand it to David Mackenzie. Not only has he taken on the thankless job of Executive Director of the Confederation Centre of the Arts, but he’s done so even though the Centre’s adjunct theatre building is called the David Mackenzie Building.

I first worked with David when I was on the Victoria Row board and David was at CADC, and found him to be an intelligent and effective organizer. He is in no small way responsible for getting Confederation Landing Park built, and Victoria Row renovated. And it looks like he’s managed the speedy and difficult task of getting the Centre renovated with the same efficiency.

Oliver and I attended the Centre’s Renovation Celebration yesterday, and the place looks fantastic.

So kudos to David (and his staff) for pulling this off.

I upgraded my iBook to Mac OS 10.1.5 this week and somehow lost the ability to put it to sleep by simply closing the lid. It would appear to nod off, but would then spring back to life, and then turn on and off over and over and over again. I found the solution was to reset the power management unit. Everything’s back to normal now.

In other Apple news: I have about 4,000 photos in iPhoto now and find that if I try to delete a lot of photos at the same time, iPhoto hands with a “spinning rainbow” cursor. Forever. I found that if I leave it in the catatonic state for about 20 minutes, and then Force Quit, I can restart iPhoto and the photos are gone as I intended. Certainly not graceful, but it works.

These are beautiful photos and this is very funny. The former reloads a new image every time you reload while the latter requires some very recent version of Microsoft’s Windows Media Player to view, also requires that you don’t mind free and open discussion of blow jobs (albeit in an endearing and witty contact), and comes courtest of Scoble.