I’ve had cause to wonder recently how it is that many western languages — like French and Spanish, for example — have the concept of gender built into them (le chien / la voiture, etc.) whereas English does not. How and when did English evolve away from this? Or was it ever a part of English?

Part of my curiousity comes from a newfound fondness for the word Spanish word compañera which is high on my list as a replacement for partner, lover, spouse, wife, etc.

If there are any linguists (or just general smart people) in the audience, I’d appreciate having some light shed on this language/gender issue.

CafePress.com has an interesting idea: let anyone, anywhere, sell mugs, T-shirts and other brandable items with no up front investment, no inventory and no risk.

You select which images appears where on which products using a simple, well laid out web-based application. They handle both the on-demand manufacturing and the e-commerce part of things — billing, customer service, shipping, etc. — and host your online store for you.

When customers buy products, they ship and you get a cheque every month. While you can set your own margins, to be within a reasonable range it’s not exactly a way to make a killing. But then again there’s no risk and next to no effort required.

I found CafePress.com by clicking on a link at the bottom of the Blogger store and was intrigued enough by their setup that I took 10 minutes this afternoon to set up a Reinvented Online Store. It’s an interesting experiment.

It’s a holiday Monday again, and, as usual, there’s no update to CBC Charlottetown’s website. Presumably there simply aren’t staff assigned to come in on holidays.

I still cannot fathom why things that happen on Sundays and holidays are deemed any less important than things that happen on weekdays.

In dire need of procrastination activities today, I’ve made some renovations to this website.

First is the long-requested (at least by Steven) function to allow discussion of individual posts. The complements the guest book, which can remain a place to talk about issues of general interest.

Second is the link to the statistics about traffic to this site. I’ve been gathering these numbers all along, but have never linked to them. I couldn’t think of a reason not to.

I would appreciate comments on either new feature. Handily enough, there is now a mechanism in place to let you do this! Just click on the Discuss This link below.

Way back when, I lauded our plumber, and called him Cecil Taylor. When I went to pay his latest invoice today, I realized that I’d gotten his name wrong. Our laudable plumber is Cecil Thomas. You can phone him at 566-2973. You will not be disappointed.

I’ve rewritten the About Reinvented page on this website to try and better capture who we are and what we do. I’ve tried my best to strip out the marketing bullshit and actually create a document which encapsulates our approach to business.

Plumbing has always been a mystery to me. When I’ve tried my hand at it, inevitably something starts on fire. Or I end up driving a nail through a copper pipe and destroying the ceiling in the kitchen below me. I suppose I feel about the black art of plumbing pretty much the same as most civilians feel about the black are of website construction.

The episode which best illustrates this point is when we purchased a new pedestal sink for our old house in Kingston. Unable to figure out how to mount and plumb the sink ourselves, we left it sitting on the bathroom floor for 3 months and brushed our teeth in the kitchen sink.

It wasn’t that we couldn’t get a plumber to come and install it, it’s that 30 years of Dick Van Dyke Show reruns had us convinced that plumbers were very, very, very expensive. If you’d asked me at that point, I would have estimated, say, $600 to install a sink.

Finally we just had to up and call a plumber. “We’ll just pay the $600,” I said to myself. So we called up to Bobby Clow’s Store and asked them to recommend someone. As luck would have it, Don’s Plumbing was located just across the road from Bobby’s, and Don’s wife worked in the store. So Don came with a high recommendation.

And Don was great. He had spent a lot of time plumbing up our house over the years, and knew the system well. Over the 6 years we spent in Kingston, he performed innumerable miracles for us: installed a washer, moved a drain, fixed the pump, fixed the shower. And installed the sink. Don was friendly, highly skilled, and able to improvise when situations demanded it. Once Catherine went up to Bobby’s store looking for a shutoff cap for our outdoor tap; Bobby asked her to hold on for a second and ran across the road to Don’s, found what we needed, and brought it back. No charge.

Then we moved into town. Our plumbing needs are considerably greater here, as we not only have the usual sinks and toilets, but also hot water heating. When we rearranged our master bathroom last summer, we got to meet our second great plumber, Cecil Thomas.

We’ve met a lot of great tradespeople over the last couple of years (Herb and his guys from Meadowlaine, Herb’s drywall guy, Larry and his guys from ServiceMaster, Larry’s drywall guy), but Cecil stands out from the crowd. He is simply a great plumber and a terrific guy. He listens. He’s a master problem solver (especially useful in our ragtag old house). He’s a great technician. If we call he’s usally here within hours. And he’s just an all around nice guy.

So we’ve had good luck with plumbers, and while what they actually do still remains something of a black art, at least we’re not afraid to call them anymore.

And the sink? Don charged us $28 to install it.

Rob Schneider, American comedian and Saturday Night Live alumnus, starred in this spring’s regrettable film The Animal. The film also stars Colleen Haskell, Survivor alumnus and Blistex spokesmodel.

While I had originally no plans to see the film, I now have cause to reconsider, as I’ve discovered (thanks to my watchful friend Oliver) that the theme song was performed by German band Reinvented. You can watch the trailer (with Schneider and Haskell overdubbed in German no less).

By the way, it turns out that Blistex sells a line of Non-Lip Care Products, including Dairy Ease, a “full line of natural lactase enzyme supplements and treated milk.” Somehow the idea of milk that tastes like Blistex doesn’t seem very appealing.

Perhaps I’m missing the obvious here, but is there an easy way to automatically tell when a website was lasted updated? I now have 25 or 30 websites that I check regularly for updates, and it would be handy to have a quick visual way of know which have changed since my last surf ‘round.

I recall that in earlier version of Netscape or Internet Explorer there was a method for setting up your Bookmarks/Favourites to provide this visual indicator, but this seems no longer present.

I took a try at creating a system based on auto-grabbing the contents of my bookmarks list every 30 minutes, created a MD5 checksum, and then comparing this to the previous checksum, but ran into problems with sites that have rotating banner ads and/or a constantly updated date/time.

I invite your suggestions.

You’d be amazed at how difficult it is to find out what the weather in Germany is like in November using the Internet. I went looking for the German equivalent of this page in the online Visitors Guide for PEI.

While there are plenty of places to find out the current temperature in Germany, the German tourism sites don’t seem to be able to answer this simple question.

I finally found the answer from USA Today.