If you are looking for a new direction in your musical tastes, you cannot go wrong with the the Be Good Tanyas, a self-described “group of ramblin’ gals” from Vancouver.

I heard them for the first time on KPIG’s Please Stand By live music show this past Sunday (listen here), and immediately ordered their album Blue Horse. It arrived today (such is instant gratification in the modern age).

Their music is bluegrassy folk. Simple instrumentation, elegant vocals. If you liked Michelle Shocked’s Texas Campfire Tapes (i.e. Michelle Shocked before she went all “big band”), then you’ll like this.

Way back in August, I wrote here about how Chapters censors the Internet at their in-store public access terminals. I sent a letter to Heather Reisman, their Chief Executive Officer.

Today I received her response, through her President, Retail, Michael Gagnier. You can read the letter (35KB PDF); the most interesting sentence is:

We feel that there is a difference between Internet access and access to books, in that a computer monitor is an open forum where children can easily see what is on-screen, as opposed to books, where items inappropriate for children are between the books covers.

My situation — not being able to read Doc Searls’ weblog because it had the word shit in it — is proof positive that these silly filtering schemes don’t work. They don’t protect children from anything (whatever that means).

I thought bookstores were supposed to support the idea that the free and unfettered flow of information in any form is a Good Thing.

I have a child. What lesson do I want him to learn from this? Certainly not that it’s okay for large corporations to decide what’s appropriate for him to read and what’s not. I’d far rather have him catch a view of a couple of errant penises — which I can explain to him — than to give up his — and everyone’s — fundamental right to freedom of information.

Of all the junk mail I’ve received recently, most interesting is the Connect, the newsletter of the European Space Agency’s Telecommunications Department. Whatever motivated them to add me to their subscription list, I can’t imagine. Their introductory letter starts:

Dear Madam/Sir

You may never have considered extending your range of products and services to include satellite communications. Alternatively you might have been discouraged by the complexity of the field and the potentially high barriers to entry…

There are some usability problems with PEIauto.com, but it appears to be the first automobile sales website on the Island to have attracted a critical mass of dealers.

The Bedeque Bay Environmental Management Association, BBEMA to its familiars, is an organization worthy of support from every Islander.

Today I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the Maple Plains Agro-Environmental Demonstration Project, a joint venture of BBEMA and farmer George Webster.

The Big Idea at Maple Plains is research and education surrounding sustainable agriculture: in other words, figuring out how we can adjust the way we grow our food so that we make less of an impact on the land.

Maple Plains is an actual working farm, where actual real potatoes and other crops are grown. And there’s actual real research going on there: research on run-off, filter strips, buffer zones, strip cropping and more. There’s a weather station and a significant educational effort involving tours, and outreach into the schools.

In short, BBEMA and their partners are doing the kind of stuff that a lot of people are saying we need to do before the agricultural bubble bursts; they’re laying the groundwork for the kind of sustainable farming that will inevitably become common practice if we’re going to continue growing food here and not completely screw the place up.

The BBEMA people impressed me with the degree to which they are firmly rooted in the practical: they understand how the world works, how to make projects happen, and how to preach the sustainable gospel without coming off as whacked out weirdo hippie freaks.

You can join or make a donation. Given that a donation is an investment in the long-term health of our province, I would encourage all readers to make a donation to the extent that they are able; feel free to drop a note in the Discuss This box when your cheque is in the mail.

Something happens to me about three times a week: I’m composing an email message to someone in Microsoft Outlook and, while happily typing away, I mistakenly hit some combination of keys and send the email out before I’m finished. I think the keys I hit are CONTROL and ENTER, but of course I’m not paying attention at the time, so I can’t say for sure.

I think this points out a deep failure in our current approach to using computers which is that, at any given point in time it’s far more possible to do the wrong (or at least unintended) thing than it is to do the right thing.

While I’m typing in this note, for example, there are innumerable things I could do with my keyboard or mouse that would cause problems: close the program, erase what I’m typing, turn off the computer. For example, one of the most common technical support calls I get from friends and family is the problem of people hitting CONTROL and A (which is the shortcut for Select All in Windows) instead of SHIFT and A. When they do this, and then blindly keep typing, their entire document gets erased. This can happen so easily, and so quickly, that it’s hard not to thing that your computer is broken.

And that’s only one example.

If you think of successful common everyday devices, the really useful ones are those that don’t have this problem. A push-button phone, for example: pick it up, press the buttons. You can mistakenly press the wrong button, but it’s usually pretty obvious that you’re doing that. It’s hard to accidentally call Hong Kong unless you want to, and there’s really not much you can do with a phone by accident that will make it disappear.

I wonder if it’s possible to create a different computing environment, one where it’s easier to do the right thing at any given time than it is to cause havoc.

I’m not sure if such a system would have to be really, really complex, or really, really simple.

Ten years ago I pulled a rental van up to my new rental house Peterborough, Ontario. I’d been told that a woman named Catherine, who lived in the house next door, had the key. And, sure enough, she did. I seem to remember that we flirted a little on that first meeting, but I might be making that up.

I moved in next door, and, over the course of the summer, Catherine and I got to know each other. I was working insane hours at the Peterborough Examiner, Catherine was working as a disability rights advocate, artisan, collector of hubcaps, and hostess for a motley collection of rabblerousers who would ramble in and around our two houses to play guitars, drink beer, and generally enjoy the summer. I’m not sure I knew quite what to make of her.

Over the course of that summer we gradually got to know one and other, spurred on partly by the subtle matchmaking of our friends.

That fall, on October 5, my little brothers turned 19 and I invited them, and our grandmother Nettie, up to Peterborough for the weekend and threw a birthday party in their honour. The party ranks as one of the more surreal experiences of my life: Johnny and Steve were presumably off somewhere enjoying the pleasures of legal alcohol, our extended network of friends and hangers on were everpresent, and Nettie, who’d brought her mandolin, started playing duets with our friend Irene, who’d brought her accordion.

At the tail end of the evening Irene needed a ride home and, on the spur of the moment, I invited Catherine to come along for the ride. In the heady surreal atmosphere of that night, after dropping Irene off at her house, we shared our first kiss (Catherine’s idea; I happily agreed). Ten years later, we are still together.

When you are living in sin over an extended period of time like we are, you need to come up with a somewhat arbitrary date for the start of your relationship, and we have choosen that night, October 5, 1991, as ours.

So, happy anniversary Catherine. Thank you for 10 wonderful years.

Oh, and happy birthday Johnny and Steve! And Nettie, up in heaven, I hope you’ll strum a chord or two on God’s mandolin for us all.

I spent yesterday morning getting a tour of the Atlantic Wind Test Site and the new North Cape Wind Power Plant at North Cape.

You cannot possibly imagine the size of the beautiful new wind turbines being installed at the site. By the end of the year there will be 8 of the turbines pictured here. To get some idea of the scale of the photo, the rectangular bit at the top of the tower is about the size of a Range Rover and the blades would not fit comfortably in your house (unless you have a very big house).

The entire assembly at the top comes overseas from Denmark in a standard shipping container (the blades come in a slightly longer container). Apparently there is about 2 inches of clearance on either side of the gear once the container is loaded.

No news yet on the ability to purchase green power from Maritime Electric, but apparently things are in the works.

So far the NYC horrors have claimed two large corporate victims: Swissair has stopped flying and Mademoiselle has stopped publishing.

The CBC spent millions, using an American company, to create a new visual identity for CBC Television, unveiled this week. Unfortunately they forgot to update their website to match, so their new “unified identity” leaves them more visually fractured than when they started.