Upside: it’s nice that Charlottetown’s newest pedestrian signals talk to you; much better usability than the anonymous bleeps and bloops and other “accessible” signals have, it would seem. Downside: all the signalization in the world won’t keep you from getting run over by a quarter ton truck that chooses to ignore the signals.

About five years ago Catherine bought me an L.L. Bean winter jacket for Christmas, an olive green (officially “dill”) Gore-Tex shell with a warm removable lining and a pleasant array of zippered pockets. Warm enough for the coldest Prince Edward Island cold, I wore it faithfully from late fall to late spring every year. It was a good coat.

Except that the zipper never worked: some small defect at the bottom of the zipper prevented it from fully “meshing,” and so, unless I zipped the jacket up carefully and with some degree of magic finesse, I would often find myself with a jacket unzipping from the bottom on my way out the door.

I liked the jacket so much, though – and had nothing to replace it with – that I just put up with this problem and continued to wear the jacket year after year.

Until last Friday.

I found myself sitting on the on-ramp to Route 128 North in Burlington, MA faced with stop-and-go traffic all the way to Boston when I remembered that there’s an L.L. Bean store south of the highway in the Wayside Commons. I pulled off the highway to wait out the traffic and went jacket shopping.

I tried on a lot of jackets, including one, the Weather Challenger, that was very close to my old jacket, but I ultimately settled on the Bigelow model, a little less “outdoorsy” looking than my old jacket and with a better fit. And a much, much better zipper system.

Up at the cash register I noticed the “100% satisfaction” guarantee displayed prominently, and so I told the cashier the tale of my zipper. I was honest about my situation: I loved the jacket, had been wearing it for many years, and would have happily kept wearing the jacket should the zipper have worked. I showed her how the zipper unzipped itself. I told her that I wasn’t 100% satisfied, but I was certainly, say, 85% satisfied. I would have been happy if she’d knocked $25 off the cost of the new jacket.

But before I really knew what was happening, she’d accepted my old jacket as a “return,” looked up it’s original retail price, refunded me the entire amount, processed the sale of the new jacket, and handed me the new jacket along with a gift card for the difference owing me because the new jacket was less expensive and on sale.

So I walked out the door with a brand new jacket with a working zipper and an $86 gift card.

That is amazing customer service, a true implementation of “100% satisfaction,” and L.L. Bean deserves to be commended for standing behind its products and its guarantee.

I’m just back from a week on the road, one of my quarterly visits to my colleagues at Yankee. Here are some notes from the road, in reverse chronological order:

1. Flying out of Boston’s Logan Airport on Air Canada Jazz through Terminal B means that you’ll be passing through a security line that serves only 3 gates; as such it is never busy, and so, unlike other flights you might take out of Logan, you can show up for Air Canada flights a lot later. I left my hotel downtown at 9:00 a.m. for an 11:00 a.m. flight and had 60 minutes to kill at the airport once I got through security.
2. If you’re looking for “facial tissues” in a U.S. drug store, don’t look in the “paper products” section, look in the “medical things” section. Apparently Americans consider Kleenex to be a medical device, not a paper towel offshoot.
3. If you’re in North Boston shopping for coffee beans at Polcari’s – and, let’s face it, you really should be if you’re in Boston – don’t be off put if you show up at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday and they’re not open, even though the sign in the window says they should be. Just walk up Salem Street a few doors to Boston Common Coffee Company and have a snack and coffee and come back around 9:00 a.m. and Polcari’s will be open.
4. The AMC Loews Boston Common is a great place to watch movies when you’re staying in central Boston – indeed it’s really the only movie theatre downtown. With 19 screens, there’s always something on, and it runs shows from late morning until after 10:00 p.m. I saw Blue Valentine (stunning tour de force) and Black Swan (over-rated shlock). The theatre is a 15 minute walk from almost anywhere in central Boston, so if you’re staying in a hotel in the Back Bay, Quincy Market or Fort Point Channel area, you can be there on the spur of the moment.
5. As a rule I do not eat hamburgers, but UBURGER, just up the street from the Loews, makes very good burgers, and it’s open until 11:00 p.m. I became particularly fond of the Boom Burger: chipotle sauce, cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and fried jalepenos.
6. I stayed at the Parker House hotel – $95 on Priceline – and, to my surprise, really really enjoyed it. It’s a grand hotel, but not too grand to feel comfortable in. My queen-size bed was very comfortable, and the room was well-appointed and clean. Close to everything, including transit (Government Center and Park Street T stops are both only a couple of blocks away).
7. I spent an hour in the Bob Slate store at Porter Square. It’s a stationery store without peer, and I found paper and pens there that I’ve not seen anywhere else, along with very helpful staff. If you’re a stationery junkie like me Bob Slate is a must-visit in Boston; two stores at Harvard Square along with the one I visited at Porter Square.
8. Down Massachusetts Avenue from Bob Slate at Porter Square is Abodeon, one of my favourite stores anywhere. They sell a combination of new and “vintage” well-designed items, everything from 1950 rosewood bottle openers from Denmark to business card holders from Italy made from reconstituted leather mixed with rubber (yes, I bought one of each). It’s easy to spend an hour browsing there, and very hard to walk away without buying something.
9. Also at Porter Square and interesting: Ward Maps, which sells antique and contemporary maps, specializing in public transit maps; Greenward, selling “eco” things, from bamboo forks to reusable mesh fruit and vegetable bags; Paper Source, which sells paper, rubber stamps and novelties (it’s not quite as much a wonderland as you think it will be, but it’s still worth a visit); and, especially, an interesting collection of small Asian food stalls inside the old Sears store that’s now home to Lesley University.
10. If you’re traveling down Route 3 from New Hampshire to get on 128 North up to Rte. 93 south to get into Boston around supper time and find yourself stuck in traffic, or facing the prospect of getting stuck in traffic, there’s lots to see and do in Burlington, MA: the Burlington Mall has an interesting collection of higher-ends shops (Apple Store, Nordstrom, etc.) and, across the highway and one exit closer (Cambridge Street) to Boston there’s an L.L. Bean and a Border’s on Wayside. Wait out the traffic for 60 minutes and you’ll be rewarded with smooth sailing all the way into the city.
11. The Courtyard by Marriott hotel in downtown Keene, just a year old, is almost perfect in every way: modern, clean, well-appointed, free parking, free wifi, a 5 minute walk to good coffee. I didn’t relish the daily 30 minute drive from Keene to Dublin, and I did miss the personality of the Jack Daniels Motor Inn in Peterborough, but I’m almost certain to stay there again.
12. I’ve been eating at ChiangMai Restaurant, on 101 just west of Nashua, NH, for a long time, and it just gets better and better; I recommend it for great Thai food if you’re in the area.

Oliver and I came up with the following “Guidelines for Chatting” together, after encountering some challenges; they’ve worked well.

1. Do not type “hello hello hello hello.” Once is enough.
2. Be patient.
3. Type interesting things, not nonsense.
4. Read carefully what the other person types.
5. Don’t chat to people during inconvenient times (too early, too late, during work, etc.) Remember the time zones.
6. Be respectful of other people: if they are too busy to chat, don’t get angry or frustrated. This might be hard, but it’s important.
7. Don’t chat to people just because you are bored. Make sure you have something to communicate about. Or, find something else to do.
8. Don’t chat to one person too much: remember that people’s time is valuable.
9. Sometimes email is better than chat: if you email, people can answer when they have the time, even if they are busy right now.
10. You could try scheduling a chat with someone by email first: suggest a good time and ask them if they are available then.
11. No strangers.

Oliver has dedicated, international collection of iChat/Skype friends, and it’s an important part of his life. Becoming one of the group, as any will attest, requires patience and commitment, and for that generosity we are truly grateful.

Sometimes you come across a book shop that seems, somehow, to exist in a parallel universe, with an entirely different set of books, organized in some novel way, and with a variety that makes book megashops like Indigo and Borders seem like Walmart.

The Globe Corner Bookstore in Boston has a selection of travel books and maps the likes of which I’ve never encountered elsewhere (well, except for the The Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, which has the added advantage of star power). The Highway Book Shop in Cobalt, Ontario is, at least in my childhood memories, like a book-lover’s paradisal airplane hanger. New England Mobile Book Fair near Boston has a section where the books are organized by publisher, which, at least for certain publishers, is very, very useful.

My favourite book store, though, is Toadstool Books. They have an outlet in Peterborough, NH and another larger one in Keene, NH up the highway, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the years browsing through both. I find books there that I don’t see elsewhere: they have depth in travel literature, art and design, transportation and a children’s section, especially in Keene, that boggles the mind (they have a section of “books about horses” for kids).

I dropped by Toadstool on Tuesday night – I’m here in southern New Hampshire visiting my colleagues at Yankee for a week – and spent ninety minutes, yet again amazed at what I found. Fifty dollars later I emerged with everything from the Moon Handbook to Croatia and Slovenia to Ed Emberley’s Make a World Drawing Book. I could have easily spent twice has much had I the space in my luggage for a book about hand-drawn maps or a book about a Paris café or a book about how to make pop-up books.

Alas the store was deserted: I was the only customer inside its rambling expanse for most of my visit, and I heard the staff lamenting the arrival, in recent years, of Borders out on the edge of town and the continual chipping away of the book trade by Amazon.com.

Which is a shame: Toadstool doesn’t have every book ever printed, and it doesn’t have a Starbucks, but what it does have is a carefully curated collection of books that, together, are unique.  I hope it survives.

Skype chatting to Oliver later this afternoon about problems he’s having with the “three times table.”

Me: What do you think could make it easier to figure out the times tables?

Oliver: A pencil that has a memory.

I have a brilliant son.

Before he assumed the Larry King spot on CNN earlier this week my only exposure to Piers Morgan was through his appearance on the celebrity version of The Apprentice. While that show was a showcase for essentially all that is wrong with humanity, and so perhaps not a fair environment in which to make judgments about its participants, Morgan came off a prat even amongst company like Gene Simmons and Stephen Baldwin, which is an accomplishment.

So, suffice to say, I didn’t have high hopes for Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN: I assumed it would be a cross between TMZ, Access Hollywood and Larry King Live.

It is not.

The new show is simple: an one-hour interview with a single guest. It has more in common with The Dick Cavett Show than with Larry King Live.

Morgan asks interesting questions, sometimes unpredictable ones. He is kind to his guests, but not fawning (well, he was fawning with Oprah, his first guest, but he can be forgiven that). He does not try to be hip or “with it”  (see George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight) and he does not appear to have any designs on reinventing the chat show format.

The result is oddly-compelling television: last night’s hour with Ricky Gervais (ignore the first couple of minutes of mindless prattle) was entirely unlike the standard 7 or 8 minute “so, apparently you’re into ice cream sundaes!” late night show. It wasn’t quite Charlie Rose, but if you watch the 2004 interview Rose did with Gervais, I’d argue that Piers Morgan’s interview was better television.

The key to enjoying Piers Morgan Tonight is to completely ignore the CNN hype machine that surrounds it: if only CNN showed the same minimalist approach to promoting the show that they have in designing the show and its set it would feel a lot less like getting hit over the head repeatedly with a Piers Morgan hammer in the hours leading up to the show, and likely more viewers would tune in.

Soupy Saturday
Back Alley Music
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Noon to 3:00 p.m.

I support school breakfast programs – where any student who wants to can get a free breakfast, every school day, before school starts – for entirely selfish reasons: I want the all the kids sitting in Oliver’s classroom to be well-fed to start off the day. I’m enough of a “if I don’t eat I turn catatonic” to know that having breakfast is an inviolate qualification for being able to learn.

Prince Street School, where Oliver is in grade four, is lucky to have a well-run breakfast program spearheaded by the school’s resource teachers, supported by the Principal and volunteers and stocked with a small amount of core funding, milk donated by Purity Dairy and bagels donated by the Great Canadian Bagel, and from financial donations from near and far.

It’s not an ideal setup: there’s a lot of volunteer time spent by teachers and staff trying to keep the program afloat that could be better spent on, well, learning. In a perfect world breakfast programs would be publicly funded, with paid coordinators and a wider array of healthy food choices. But until that happens, we all rely on the kindness of others to support breakfast programs.

To this end, you’re invited to Back Alley Music (69 University Ave. in Charlottetown) this Saturday, January 22, 2011 from Noon to 3:00 p.m. for Soupy Saturday: there will be soup from Ted Grant (Culinary Institute) on offer, in return for a donation, and entertainment from musicians Tanya Davis, Kelley Mooney, and Peter Winn.

Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Ann Thurlow for shepherding this effort.

You might think that “debossing” is some sort of revolutionary employment tactic. And perhaps it is. But it’s also “the reverse of embossing, or the use of heated dies to stamp or press a depressed image into a substrate.” It turns out that if you take an engraving, like the Reinvented logo I had made for letterpress printing and don’t apply any ink to it, you can press it into dampened paper with the force of a letterpress and get something that looks like this:

Iceland’s musicians (see also sigur rós) continue to be some of the countries most powerful ambassadors. Witness this video from Rökkurró: makes me want to go and hang out in a barn in the Icelandic countryside. The excellent SONIC ICELAND is a great starting point for diving into the Icelandic music scene as is the compilation album Soundtrip Iceland.