I’ve been using a cheap Nexxtech-brand USB headset with my MacBook for several years now. I bought it at The Source (née Radio Shack) for under $20.00 and I like it: it’s light, the microphone boom swoops out of the way for plain headphone-only use, and the Mac recognizes it without problems.

There’s one vexing problem with the headset, though: when I use it on VOIP calls (with the excellent Telephone application), after 52 minutes (exactly, every time), it starts distorting the microphone output (headphone input continues to work without issue) and the party on the other end of the line reports that I “sound like the Borg.”

While this “feature” is excellent for limiting conference calls to 52 minutes in length, and while the simple solution to it would be to replace the headset, I’m curious about the root cause.

I recall Leo Laporte mentioning something about a USB chipset in headsets that had this kind of issue, but I haven’t been able to find the reference.

Any thoughts? (And any recommendations for a lightweight under-$100 USB headset to replace this one with?)

One of the great gifts we’ve received at Prince Street School this year is a large community of Bhutanese and Chinese students whose parents are becoming very involved in Home and School activities. For our last two Home and School meetings this participation has been greatly aided by the presence of simultaneous translation into Nepali and Mandarin; our next step is to work on getting printed materials for our meetings – agenda, minutes, financial reports, etc. – translated into both Nepali and Chinese.

At last night’s meeting one of the items of the agenda was Teacher and Staff Appreciation Week in February, a week when the Home and School traditionally works to show our gratitude to teachers and staff by doing things like bringing in snacks and providing lunch. After this information was translated into Nepali last night there was a lot of discussion among the Bhutanese parents, at the end of which came an offer to provide a Bhutanese lunch on the Friday of that week.

This was an important breakthrough both because it wouldn’t have been possible without a translator present, and because it means that our Bhutanese parents are taking on a more active role in the work of the Home and School.

All the parents present agreed this would be an excellent idea, with many angling for an opportunity to “help out” on that day so as to be able to dip into the reportedly-spicy Bhutanese food.

My current project in this regard is working to make the Home and School’s website multilingual. I’m working with the nascent Drupal 7 to do this, along with the Translation Management and Internationalization modules to translate content and the Locale module and the related Nepali and Simplified Chinese projects to translate the Drupal interface. What with Drupal 7 being nascent and all, this solution isn’t quite ready for prime time yet – the various modules throw the occasional error messages, and make Drupal a little funky – but it’s working enough that it makes sense to work with Drupal 7 instead of Drupal 6.

If you happen to have English-Nepali or English-Chinese translation skills and want to help out with this effort (or if you happen to have money and want to help out with this effort), we could certainly use the support: the Nepali and Simplified Chinese localizations of Drupal 7 are only partially complete, and there’s a lot of work to be done translating the daily business of the Home and School.

There’s a great article in the New York Times today titled Where Do All the Cabs Go in the Late Afternoon? which cites the following as the reason that taxi cab shifts switchover between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m.:

The explanation for the 5 p.m. dip is steeped in the history and economics of the taxi industry. Many taxicabs are used by two drivers a day, each working a 12-hour shift. To ensure that each leg is equally attractive, taxi owners schedule the shift change in the middle of the afternoon, so each shift gets a rush hour.

But the switch can’t happen too early, either: a 2 p.m. changeover, for instance, would require a day driver to start his 12-hour shifts in the wee hours of the morning. And cabbies say the midafternoon offers brisk business not evident 12 hours later, when fares mainly consist of late-night revelers.

I love it when systems design bumps up against inviolable limits like “there are only 24 hours in a day” and “people gotta sleep.”

Exactly the same logic led Oliver and I to select Bathurst, New Brunswick as the destination for our 2007 late-summer vacation, the one where I vowed that we wouldn’t involve any automobiles in our transportation.

We were catching the VIA train north from Moncton, and we needed a destination where the arriving train didn’t arrive too late at night and where the departing train, 3 days later, didn’t leave at some unholy hour in the morning. Bathurst fit the bill perfectly.

I’m very late to the party with this, but man-oh-man was this an amazing project.

I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the reboot7 conference back in 2005, rereading the posts I wrote back then. It was such an awakening, on so many levels.

In late February I’m heading back to Berlin for a week, in part to attend Cognitive Cities, a conference organized in part by reboot alumnus Igor Schwarzmann.

To be honest, I’ve no idea what Cognitive Cities is about – smart transportation? municipal politics? the coming of our robot overlords? – and I’m attending entirely on the strength of the Cognitive Cities blog (every post of which I find interesting), and because Igor’s an interesting guy, and I figure he wouldn’t be part of something uninteresting.

And, besides, the conference is turning into a sort of reboot7 reunion: Ton is speaking (met at reboot7, facilitated by Plazes) and Elmine is attending. Pedro will be there too (met at reboot). And Morgan. And Luisa. (Did I mention that some of the aforementioned and I own shares in a boat together?)

I’m also hoping revisit some of the letterpress shops that got me reinvigorated about printing this spring and to hook up with members of the old Plazes crew for a reunion of sorts.

From the interesting this town is small blog that Bruce turned me onto last week comes a pointer to this video from Millefiore Clarkes, who gets bonus points for naming her website onethousandflowers.tv. The video comes very close to capturing how I think of travel once it’s over: it’s not the duomos you remember, it’s the demitasse spoons, the hearty laughs and the strange pictures of cabbages painted on a wall.

Anyone who has flown to Charlottetown from Montreal is familiar with the remote bunker to which Charlottetown-bound passengers are consigned by Air Canada, forced to crowd into a cattle yard-like waiting room with uncomfortable seats, distant washrooms, and a single, moribund place to buy food.

While the Charlottetown bunker is a particularly gruesome example, waiting around in airports, especially of the “five hour layover in Philadelphia” variety, is one of the most stressful parts of travel. It’s boring, the food is generally horrible, and there’s a unique quality to the noise and air in airports that makes them feel frenetic.

There are exceptions to this: I could happily move right in to Keflavik airport in Iceland – the transit point for flight from North America to Europe on Icelandair – given its variety of seating, food, shops, and general air of calm. But it’s a rare exception, and even Charlottetown, which used to feature a delightful orbly-shaped couch in the waiting room, has recently invested in the same standard discomfortable chairs as larger airports.

There are ways to counter the frenetic insanity of airport layovers, though; here are some tips that I’ve arrived at through experience.

Sometimes it’s worth investing in airline lounges; they’re overpriced, have a disquieting aura of elitism, and seem extremely focused on the provision of free alcohol, but if you’re going to be in an airport for more than a couple of hours, even $50 begins to feel like a good deal for a day-pass to get away from the hubbub of the general waiting room. The best deal in this regard, if you can swing it, isn’t about departure, it’s about arrival: the Air Canada Arrivals Lounge at Heathrow isn’t lavish, but a shower, breakfast, and a coffee there, along with a chance to relax after an overnight flight, seems priceless when you’re there. Note that some Air Canada fare classes now present you with the option of purchasing a one-time pass to their lounges, so you don’t need to splash out on the full crazily-priced year-long membership or have enough points to fly around the world to get lounge access.

Don’t sit in the waiting room: if you sit on the uncomfortable sardine seats, you will inevitably inherit the stale, cramped, grumpiness that infects the waiting room. Fortunately there are often alternatives: Boston and Philadelphia, for example, have rocking chairs scattered around their terminals, and even the small act of sitting in a chair with a different profile can be enough to snap you out of the doldrums. In Munich last month we parked out for 2 hours around a table in the beer garden cum coffee shop at our gate and it was a much more relaxed way to spend the time. The key, whatever you do, is to find some way of tricking your mind into thinking it’s not at an airport. (Honourable mention goes to the Montreal Bagel Company near domestic security in Montreal: great, fresh food, real tables, and near enough to security that you can monitor the length of the line).

Find a mission. Oliver and I have spent a lot of time in Luton, Gatwick and Stansted airports in London in transit to other places in Europe, something that often means a wait of many hours. If we find ourselves a mission – “we need to buy hand cream,” or “let’s see if we can find that new book we read about” or “let’s find red licorice” – we can keep ourselves busy, get a good walk around, and, again, it feels less airport-like than just sitting around would feel.  At our last time through Gatwick I decided we would try to print out our easyJet boarding passes ourselves rather than waiting in the long, long lineup at the counter; although it cost about $15 by the time we’d rented the Internet time and paid the high per-sheet printing charge at the Internet café, it was a learning experience, and killed 90 minutes that would have been spent dawdling around.

Get outside. It’s often impossible to do if you’re in transit, but if you’re shunted outside security anyway, nothing refreshes the mind and body better than going for a walk outside during a layover. I wish more airports (any airports) would invest in green space or trails to make this easier; as it is the best you can usually do is loop find a corner with less automobile exhaust and make the best of it.

Go downtown. Depending on the length of your layover, and the airport you’re at, it’s often possible to get right out of the airport and take a visit into the city. Having a lot of carry-on luggage makes the harder to pull off, especially now that most airports no longer have lockers or left-luggage areas. But there are ways around this too: if you take the water taxi from Logan Airport into Boston, for example, they’ll often let you leave your luggage on-board for the return journey, leaving you free to wander around unfettered.

Drink lots of water. I’m not a water-drinking zealot, but keeping hydrated has the benefits of being a mission unto itself, of making it easier to survive the dry air of most airports, and of preparing you for the long and horribly dry experience of flying itself that’s about to come.

Nintendo DS. If your a parent, the Nintendo DS is your friend. You run the danger, of course, of the better parts of the trip – the mountain vistas, etc. – being ignored in favour of the DS, but if you ration things our, and use the DS as a boredom averting tool only, there’s nothing that can make the grumpy airport hours fly by faster for families traveling. The DS comes with the additional benefit of turning itself into a mission of its own at opportune times: not a trip has gone by since we became a DS family that we’ve not had to go in search of replacement case, charger and/or stylus that’s somehow gone missing along the way.

I was prompted to think about all this after seeing this interesting video from KLM:

Their project – to identify KLM passengers through social networking sites and give them impromptu gifts – is either delightful or creepy depending on how you feel about such things. It strikes me as equal parts of both. But what is heartening is that an airline is turning its attention to the pre-flight life of its passengers at all. Look at the copy in the introduction to the video:

Travelling…
Is it all that exciting?
Waiting for take-off. Passing time.
We see our passengers fighting boredom while they wait.

In an environment where most airlines treat you as a hostile force on the other side of a threshold while you’re in the waiting room, the mere fact that KLM acknowledges that the waiting room isn’t fun is revolutionary.

The only airline I’ve flown that seems to pay regular, everyday, practical attention to pre-flight is Porter, at least in Toronto, where their lounge cum general waiting room has snacks, passable coffee, newspapers and slightly-less-uncomfortable seating.

Flying otherwise, alas, you’re best bet is to try and fool yourself into thinking you just popped out for a bit.

When [[Oliver]] and I spent the afternoon along together last month in Munich, we found ourselves in the gift shop of the BMW Museum. While most of what we found there was product for the BMW aficionado, there was one product that caught Oliver’s eye: spy glasses.

While we didn’t buy them, we spent much of the next several hours talking about spy glasses: how they worked, what you could do with them, and so on.

And then, so I thought, the spy glasses meme was over.

Until this weekend: unbeknownst to me, the spy glasses had stuck in Oliver’s mind, and he’d been combing the Internet looking for them since we returned. On Sunday morning he presented me with a photo of the selfsame glasses we’d seen in Munich, taken from TinToyArcade.com, along with the website address handwritten below. And he asked me if I had a PayPal account.

Surely, I reasoned, this is the sort of pluck that must be rewarded with action, so last night, with Catherine safely away in her studio, we sat down in front of the computer and ordered a pair. They should be here in a few days. We’re both very excited.

You’re all on notice: don’t be making fun of us behind our backs, because may, due to the awesome secret power of our new spy glasses, we can see what you’re doing.

CBC Compass broke the story last night that the Charlottetown Area Development Corporation has been secretly developing a plan to extend the Queen Parkade across through to University Avenue, tearing down the buildings that house the The Maple Grill, Back Alley Music, Monsoon, the Alibi Lounge and Cedar’s in the process.

Turning this…	Into more of this…

This is being done, CBC reports, to provide 200 parking spaces for the new Homburg developments downtown.

Fortunately the owners whose properties were to fall to the wrecking ball, or at least some of them, decided not to sell to CADC and so the plan has been scrapped, at least for the time-being, in favour of expanding either the Fitzroy or Pownal parkades.

While the immediate threat has been stanched, the larger issue – just how far is the City of Charlottetown willing to prostrate itself at the alter of Homburg’s Trump-like plans to remake the city’s core in his own image – remains.

Indeed this plan, conceived out of the public’s scrutiny under cover of CADC’s “arm’s length” relationship to both the city and the province, represents a new, more foreboding variety of Homburgism: it was possible to argue, however implausibly, the Homburg’s developments to date, the office skyscraper and the hotel, benignly replaced underused buildings.

In this case, however, CADC, doing Homburg’s bidding, was proposing to tear down an entire stretch of viable businesses so that Homburg’s tenants would have a more convenient place to park.  

This is no longer development, it’s cannibalism, and it must be stopped.

There’s an larger issue at play here too, and that’s the rapid disappearance of what Stewart Brand calls “low road buildings” – the cheap, flexible, unremarkable buildings in any city that play a vital role as incubators of small businesses that would be impossible to house anywhere else.

We lost a strip of low road storefronts when the Jean Canfield Building went up between Fitzroy and Euston on University Ave., another when the Johnny’s Mayfair building burned at the corner of Prince and Kent, and as Water Street gradually gentrifies we’re losing even more down there.

Without low road buildings in the core you don’t get record stores and sushi places and bicycle shops and book stores and interesting bars, you get franchises and banks and office towers and high-end shoe stores.

If the trend continues, there won’t be any area downtown for small businesses to bootstrap, and it’s precisely this kind of small business that breathes new life and diversity into the retail and restaurant life of the city, and that distinguishes downtown Charlottetown from downtown anywhere else.

I grew up in Ontario during the decades when “urban core renewal” was in vogue, a style of “renewal” that saw the downtown of many small cities – Brantford, Hamilton, and Peterborough come to mind, but there are countless others – gutted and replaced with behemothic shopping malls. The result? Much fanfare, followed by a gradual decline into urban wasteland.

While Charlottetown was not completely immune to this trend, the city was fortunate that the shopping mall we got downtown preserved much of the existing infrastructure, and so was less behemothic and more sympathetic infill.

But even this less severe approach to “renewal” has essentially been a failure: you have only to walk through what remains of the Confederation Court Mall and its empty unit after empty unit to see this.

And yet those charged with charting a course for the Charlottetown have fallen in thrall to Homburgism, a model of the city that, if it prevails, will ultimately see much of what’s interesting and unique about the city replaced with generic developments that flow from one man’s outlandish vision, not from the kind of collaborative, organic, community-based planning process that makes the kind of city that people might actually want to live in.

While the thwarting of CADC plan to expand the Queen Parkade holds back one flank of this battle, it continues on other fronts unabated, gradually creeping over the entire urban core.

It’s time for people who care about the distinctive character of downtown Charlottetown – the architects, the designers, the historians, the everyday regular people – to speak out against this movement, to work to snap the city father’s out of their Homburg-induced delirium, and to propose viable alternatives to this inane approach to urban development.

If we don’t, then soon it will be too late: office tower will beget parking garage will beget office tower will beget parking garage and soon we’ll be living in downtown anywhere, wondering what happened to the city we once held dear.

Not sure what stage this re-imagining of the Peter Pan Corner in Charlottetown is at, and whether it’s a Peter Pan in name only, without the hamburgers, or not.