Here are some interesting examples of how the Internet is like a big, useful, knowledge engine. Insert query in one end. Let simmer. Extract knowledge.

• For the past two years I’ve made a hobby of finding retired China Marines for my friend Steve in Thailand. He sends me a name and some sketchy details like “the last time I saw him was in Memphis in 1948” and I spend a couple of weeks hunting around the shockingly voluminous sources of public information about people on the Internet and, with luck, make contact. There are few greater feelings in the world than hunting for a 77 year old Marine, last seen in 1948, and finding him hunkered down in North Carolina (or the woods of Minnesota, or…), giving him a call and telling him that one of his long lost buddies wants to chat. Wow
• Yesterday I sent two friends, Buzz Bruggeman and Oliver Baker a wacky idea for making WiFi waves visible. I thought it might make a neat event for Pop!Tech. I received back carefully considered thoughts from Oliver on how this might or might not be possible. Buzz posted a note on his weblog (which, in turn, Doc Searls pointed to. I’ve already gotten one interesting response back from Buzz’ network of smart people.
• In response to my note about airline timetables XML, someone I’ve never met, a guy named Lars Marius Garshol from Oslo, wrote me asking for more data, and offered me help on improving the format of the XML file. I took his advice, sent him an updated file back, and now he’s building some neat thing around it.
• I ran into Matt Rainnie and his burgeoning family yesterday at the coffee shop; he mentioned that he was going to see Insomina. Inspired by this mention, I decided to go and see it myself. I reported this on my website. Matt read this, and wrote me back offering to lend me a DVD of the Norwegian version of the film.
• Having something of an obsession with the film Heaven Can Wait, I found that the papers of Harry Segall, who wrote the play the film is based on, are in the collection of the University of Texas at Austin. I sent an email off to a librarian there, and received a very helpful response inviting me down to Austin to examine the papers.

I don’t really think the Internet is anything new in this regard: it’s simply a “performance enhancing drug” for knowledge adventures, making things that would have been so inconvient or unlikely as to be impossible in the pre-Internet world suddenly quite easy, and compressing space and time in the process.

If you want to go to a mainstream first run movie in Charlottetown, and you don’t want to go to the drive-in, you’ve got to go to Empire Theatres.

I saw Insomnia there tonight; it was a good movie that I wouldn’t have gone to see if I knew anything about it, so I won’t say anything about it so as to not jeopardize gentle readers’ possibility of going to see it.

But the experience did leave me with the following questions about Empire Theatres:

1. There are now 4 or 5 electronic ticket machines available at the entrance. You can’t miss them. It takes about as long to buy your ticket from a machine as it does from a person, yet even when there are 30 or 40 people in line, the ticket machines remain largely unused. Why? (Companion question: similar situation exists at Terminal 2, Pearson Airport in Toronto: you can check in with a terminal in about 15 seconds or wait in line for 1/2 an hour to check in with a real person; the terminals are seldom used).
   
   
2. There is a new ritual of having an usher enter the theatre just before the show and say (and I’m paraphrasing from memory here): “Hello my name is Fabian and I’m an usher here at Empire Theatres. I’m just here to let you guys know about our Stash the Trash Program…” Fabian (or whoever) then goes on to tell us that we can “really help them out” by using garbage pails, and mentions at the tail end that if we have any temperature or volume problems we can come and talk to him. I’m wondering (a) why they put shy adolescents through such public speaking hell, especially when many in the audience are no doubt their classmates, (b) whether this scheme actually convinces people to stash their trash or not, and how much money they save from some number of the audience members doing so and (c) whether other audience members find this annoying rather than helpful. I always thought the opportunity to callously throw litter on the floor was part of going to the movies.
   
   
3. The ushers and their overlords are all wearing headset walkie talkies. What are they talking about? “We’ve got a callous trash non-stasher in aisle 3; all agents respond.”
   
   
4. The ushers that take tickets now refer to the theatres as “stadiums,” or rather “Stadiums” as in “Insomnia… that’s in Stadium 6, second door on your left.” Does this really impress anyone?
   
   
5. Has anyone else noticed that the toy plastic “stadium style seating” they apparently bought from Wal-mart is rather flimsy and has the annoying property of echoing every tick, kick and jossle of anyone in the row behind you directly into your spinal column?
   
   
6. Said Wal-mart style seating also incorporates cup holders, which while they make soda storage much easier, also render useless the arm resting feature of the arm rests. Did the designers not think of this?
   
   
7. Why do you young teens think it’s okay to talk at the movies? I never talked at the movies as a young teen. Talking at the movies is wrong. Such people should not be allowed to attend movies. I consider them one step below the “hey, let’s roll some M&M’s down the aisle for kicks” people.

Lars Marius Garshol from Oslo asked if I could add actual flight information to the XML airline timetable files I’d created.

So I did.

This file is an zipped version of an XML rendering of the latest Star Alliance timetable. You may wish to consult the original PDF file the information was scraped from for information about what the various bits of a flight’s information actually mean.

Ob Google: search for Star Alliance Timetable on Google; this site is the first search result. I’m not sure what this says about Google and/or Star Alliance.

Please note: the airline schedule information was scraped from the official original Star Alliance Timetable PDF and you should consult that document for “official” information. The XML rendering of the information may be incomplete or inaccurate; don’t show up at the airport expecting to fly based on the XML only. You have been warned.

Preparing the Saturday and Sunday editions of a newspaper or news website, or working the weekend shift at a radio station is something often left to the junior editorial staff. One way you can tell this is that the headlines are often somewhat more daring than on the weekdays. Witness:

• Shiploads of extra visitors expected (from pei.cbc.ca)
• Courtney Love’s Hole calls it quits (from Canoe.ca)

While I’ve made great use of the Air Canada website in recent years, it does suffer from one thing common to most airline sites: it’s great if you know where you want to fly and when, but not very useful if you just want to explore the possibilites of flying, well, wherever.

To this end, I present these XML files for Air Canada and Star Alliance, which I derived from their latest timetables. They contain information about all of the cities that Air Canada and Star Alliance fly between, along with the distance between the cities.

I’d welcome the inventive and talented among the readership to take this file and make something fun, artistic, creative and/or useful from it.

These little applications, for Air Canada and Star Alliance are my contribution. Let the games begin.

As you can see from the following snippet from Air Canada’s current timetable, the daily flight from Charlottetown to Toronto mysteriously starts taking 4 minutes longer as of July 2, 2002:

Kameradschaft. Kameraadschap. Cameratismo. Kamratskap. Or my favourite: compañerismo. The American Heritage Dictionary says:

Goodwill and lighthearted rapport between or among friends.

I had an interesting email conversation tonight with an old friend of mine from my Ontario days. He’s in Texas now, and I’m here on the Island. The heart of our conversation was the camaraderie that so infused our earlier lives which, to one extent or another, we’re missing in our current situations.

It’s not that we’re socially bereft now: we both have a good collection of close friends. It’s just that somehow the camaraderie of our twenties — the “goodwill and lighthearted rapport” between roommates and friends and fellow travellers had a quality all its own.

Part of what we were talking about the closing scenes of the movie Notting Hill where a group of friends — perhaps the ideal groups of friends — are careening around London together, crammed into a car that’s too small to hold them all; my Texan friend summed it up like this:

It’s funny, it just occurred to me that the Peterborough gang you are describing is sort of like the people in [that] car. That’s what it was like - we were all in this car, sometimes literally like when I had my Dodge Ram van that could seat eleven people… and we would go swimming or to the market - but it’s almost like the gang was like that in other ways - a casual kitchen conversation could turn into a play or a film festival or a political rally or an outing or who knows what… but always that problem of categorizing, always something in the back of your mind going “I’m in a car with a bunch of crazy people and I don’t even know where we are going” so what? Enjoy the ride.

I was never a big fan of the WB series Felicity. I will admit that I watched it several times — maybe more — during the first season, mostly because it spoke to some latent post-high school angst stuff buried deep inside me. But after that season things started getting weird and I could no longer muster the energy required to sort out Noel and Ben and who was the flavour of the week and so on.

Tonight, though, I stayed up ‘til 2 a.m. and watched the series finale of Felicity in KTLA Los Angeles (hence the late hour). And it wasn’t bad. They did use the familiar Wizard of Oz crutch of a feverish dream leading to some lucid time travel fantasy.

But they also did a much better job at “review of the 5 years of the series through flashbacks” than most any other series that has attempted the same. And this, in turn, provided me with a useful catch-up: I skipped four seasons of the show and caught up on all the various threads in one handy 2 hour package.

I have spent an exhausting six months watching Seinfeld. Exhausting because it’s on most prominently at 12:05 a.m. (i.e. the 12:05 that comes just after midnight). Watching because somehow I largely missed Seinfeld in its original run (there was a dark period of 3 or 4 years in the somewhere where I had a small black and white TV that only picked up CHEX, a sort of toy CBC station in Peterborough). As a result of this, Seinfeld has always seemed like some deep dark secret pool of cultural references that I didn’t quite get.

I’m happy to say that after this tiring marathon (in recent weeks it’s been 5:30 and 8:30 p.m. on Fox Rochester, and 12:05 a.m. on ASN), I believe I’ve now seen every episode. And so while I’m not yet at the stage where I’ll turn away from an episode of Seinfeld if it throws itself at me, I no longer feel the need to pursue the affair. Thank goodness.

That said, I have cause to wonder why in the panoply of digital channels there isn’t The Seinfeld Channel. There’s a channel that plays only westerns, one that plays only action movies, one that plays only Dave Chalks Computer Talk and other annoying tech weirdnesses. There even appears to be a channel based almost entirely around reruns of Three’s Company and Hogan’s Heros.

So why not The Seinfeld Channel? I suspect that it’s the kind of channel that people actually would pay $2.95 a month to subscribe to… just think: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you turn to, say, channel 345 and you can watch an episode of Seinfeld. No more waiting until after Spin City or ATV Nightside. All Seinfeld, all the time.

If there are any impressarios reading, I’m ready and waiting to sign up.

In a move that has shocked some village residents and that echos its recent acquisition of Callbeck’s Home Hardware, the APM Group today announced that it had completed negotiations to acquire the Village of Hunter River, Prince Edward Island.

APM president Tim Banks said he is excited about the acquisition. “I’ve driven through Hunter River many times, and have always realized that it is underdeveloped; with our retail and construction expertise, we’ll have Hunter River turned around by the end of the year.”

APM plans to introduce better lighting, friendlier customer service and a better selection of exotic fruits and vegetables to the village. It is expected that the present site of the Irving gasoline station will be converted to a manufacturing plant for reproduction antique wheelbarrows.

While tightlipped about details for the project, APM officials did hint that some of the residents of the village may have to be relocated. “Hartsville is barely full, and New Glasgow has some spare room,” said a company source, “we don’t anticipate much resistance.”

Part of a planned expansion by the APM Group in 2002, the acquisition of Hunter River has renewed rumours that the company is planning to purchase the communities of Crapaud, Eldon and Dundas. APM representatives had no comment on these rumours.