Despite my difficulties learning how to spell it, I’m experimenting with using the third-party commenting platform Disqus to manage comments here. 

Although commenting might appear to be a technically simple aspect of maintaining a blog — name, email, text, blamo — it’s the defense against the ever-widening torrent of blog spam that’s the complicated part. I’ve experimented with everything here — reCAPTCHA, Mollom, Akismet, Defensio — and although they do variously capable jobs at filtering out the spam, they also make the user experience of commenting suffer because of the delays involved in the spam-catching-and-filtering.

So I’m going to experiment with letting someone else have a go for a while.

Please let me know (in the comments, of course) whether this works better for you in the readership; if it looks like Disqus is a good replacement for Drupal’s built-in commenting, I’ll work at migrating the 20,000+ comments that have flowed in over the years into the Disqus archive.

I’ve had a MyFax.com account for as long as I can remember: I hardly every need to send faxes, but once or twice a year the need has arisen. But not for a long while now, and hardly at a volume that would warrant the monthly cost. So I’ve closed my account, and you can no longer send me faxes nor expect to receive them from me. The end of an era that started many years ago with WinFax Pro (note how the email address on that old Usenet post is caprukav@atlas.cs.upei.ca).

Oliver and I spent the afternoon inside the projection room at Brackley Drive-in yesterday with Bob Boyle and his son Ben helping them prepare files for their new digital projection system.

Bob has made a huge investment in projection technology this year, shifting entirely from film to digital, and one of the content gaps that needed filling in were the various interstitial bits of film like “The Show Starts in 10 Minutes.” Bob put together animations, using Animoto for all of these; I simply helped him get them from the M4V format that Animoto allows you to save animation in through to the DCP format required by his digital projection system (I have some notes here if you’re doing this yourself). We finally got it all mostly working after about 3 hours of experimenting, most of which was spent waiting for video files to convert from one format to another. If you’re at the drive-in this season, watch for the result.

Here’s what the new projection system looks like (on the left) beside the old system (on the right; as a backup for now):

From the other side it looks more like a data centre rack:

The top unit in that rack is the driver for the new closed captioning system that Bob will roll out shortly, an innovation that would have been impossible in a pre-digital era. Those requiring captions are loaned an in-car caption display that looks like this:

The captions are displayed on that unit exactly as they would be if you turned on closed captioning on your television. 

The captioning system isn’t the only drive toward accessibility that Bob’s taken this year: he’s finishing off construction of accessible washrooms along with a paved area of the lot close to the canteen that will allow easier navigation for wheelchairs. 

The Brackley Drive-in is open weekends now; 7 days a week come summer. Check out what’s coming soon.

The Richmond Street transformation crew has been hard at work all day, and the street is beginning to take on a different character. While my jury is still out on the shape of the bicycle lane — I’m not sure a wavy-gravy bicycle lane is “sustainable” — it’s nice to see a gaggle of passionate people outside the office window painting and sweeping and drawing and plotting. Stay tuned for more.

I leaned out of the window of the Reinventorium and snapped this photo of a “living wall” set up beside The Guild on Richmond Street, not anticipating the nice reflection the building would offer in return:

Richmond Street between Queen and Pownal is getting transformed today into a “sustainable street.” From the Reinventorium we have a bird’s eye view. Here’s the pre-transformation scene at 9:00 a.m.:

Ate lunch at the Town & Country Restaurant, since torn down:

Vestigial oil tank discovered on the playground of Prince Street School:

Olle sent me to the useful How to setup Google Chrome a few days ago. Which, in turn, sent me to Google Reader Readable extension. The extension transforms the visual cacophony that is:

Into the calm simplicity that is:

Nothing to set up. No changes to Google Reader required. It’s the most useful of the myriad Google Chrome extensions I’ve come across.

As a pleasant and unexpected coup de grace, Nokia has transitioned Plazes.com into an infographic-rich summary of each user’s Plazes journey. It’s very nicely done. To get yours (and to download your Plazes history and/or transfer your history to Nokia Maps), just login to Plazes.com.

A nice additional touch is that the download package you receive if you choose to grab your Plazes history includes all the infographics for your own account.

Oliver and I have been making the rounds in downtown Charlottetown after supper this week stapling Richmond Street posters on electric poles.

On Monday night we ran out of staples and so popped in to Shoppers Drug Mart on Queen Street to buy some more. When we couldn’t find them on the shelf, I asked a clerk, who looked at the shelf with me and confirmed they didn’t have any. The pharmacist across the hall overheard our search, however, and volunteered some staples from his own stapler; no charge.

On Tuesday night we were walking up Queen Street toward Grafton. Oliver was expressing some interest in an after-supper snack when three young people stopped us on the sidewalk and asked us if we’d like hot chocolate and granola bars.

“Ah… why?”, I said.

“We’re just giving back to the community,” one of them replied.

And so we took a break and enjoyed hot chocolate and granola bars on a bench in the waning spring sunshine.

Both episodes were a technical violation of the age-old dictum to not talk to (let alone accept gifts from) strangers, and demanded an elaboration of the dictum to Oliver.

“It’s okay to accept gifts from strangers if you’re an adult. But you have to go with what your gut tells you.”

“What’s your gut?”, asked Oliver.

“Your feeling about whether the strangers are good people with an honest offer.”

“Okay,” said Oliver.

This is tricky parenting. I want Oliver to be “streetproofed” (and, to a large and possibly extreme extent, he already is), but I also want him to be open to the delightful happenstances that the world has to offer. 

With staples and hot chocolate under our belt, and an extra 25 posters still-unposted, I’m eager to see what gifts the streets of Charlottetown will provide us with this evening.