Once Saturday morning at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market – I think it was the spring of 2001 – I was seconded by Perry Williams and Doug Millington to sing the Vogue Optical jingle as part of an advertising campaign for the company that Perry’s Virtual Studios was filming. This is the result. Oliver, needless to say, was younger then. And, for the record, the glasses I’m wearing in the commercial were from Boyles Optical.

A few days ago my father sent me a note asking whether Prince Edward Islanders are friendly or not. He’d been talking to someone in Ontario, and they’d mentioned to him that while people in Nova Scotia are genuinely friendly, people in Prince Edward Island are only friendly when tourist money is involved.

On first reading I dismissed his comment; I’ve been here 17 years and I’ve always thought of Islanders, if not overtly gregarious, as having a underlying bedrock of friendliness.

Then I ran it by some colleagues, all raised here, and without exception they agreed: Islanders, they told me, are not friendly.

Apparently this is a well-known fact.

And then yesterday came Rude Patients, a blog post from Charlottetown doctor Robert Coull. In his post Dr. Coull starts by relating some of his experiences before he arrived on Prince Edward Island:

I’ve been threatened with a knife, threatened with a gun, had tables thrown at me, been chased round a hospital by a patient trying to flatten me with a chair, been shouted at regularly, been punched, had a cigarette stubbed out on my arm, had a patient try to strangle me in the back of an ambulance, and I’ve been kicked in the privates.  I’ve seen running battles in the street between knife wielding gangs.   I’ve had to wrestle violent people to the ground, I’ve had a patient I was treating in the street attacked by a gang intent on beating him up and had to use violence to help drag them off.

And since he moved his practice to Charlottetown?

So you would think that being a GP (Family Physician) on the Gentle Island of Anne of Green Gables would be a delight.

You’d be wrong.

It’s come as quite a shock to find out that lovely PEI appears to be infested with a significant minority of people who are bitter, rude, and - to be quite frank - horrible.

They make snide comments, are undermining, negative, and behave in a highly passive aggressive way.  Although less dramatic than the hostile aggressive behaviour of their Scottish ancestors, their behaviour is far, far more damaging.  Not least, it is far less honest.

Is this true? Are Islanders really a hostile, standoffish, unfriendly lot?

What do you think.

Corner of Kent and Queen.

Waiting for the “Don’t Walk” to turn to “Walk.”

An older woman comes up to me: “You wouldn’t have a loonie, would you?”

I reach into my pocket: I do. I hand her the loonie.

She says “Thanks” and walks on.

From an essay by Arjen Oosterman in issue #22 of Volume magazine:

Although tourism isn’t the subject of this issue, the impact it has on everyone’s image and understanding of the city is. This promotional and commercial image of the city, this image for an external world, tends to become a self-image – internalized, one could say. And it is the implied simplification that is most disadvantageous, not so say dangerous. Promotional image becomes ideal, ideal becomes program. A city cannot afford to reduce its complexity to a tagline.

See also Walk & Sea Charlottetown.

Proof not only that my parents read my blog, but that they are the greatest parents ever, here’s the belated birthday gift I received today:

In the years I’ve been playing with concepts for presenting Charlottetown public transit schedule information (map, mobile, printable, poster, phone), I’ve often wished for a way of presenting schedule information that breaks out of the columnar or tabular “here’s the times it leaves” format.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with a round bus schedule, with hopes that it ups the “at a glance” quotient. There are some significant challenges to such a design, the big one being that there are only 12 hours on a clock face and the transit system day runs for longer that 12 hours.

Here’s an early draft of what I’m thinking about. It captures on a portion of the University Avenue line, showing departure times from Confederation Centre from the first run at 6:45 a.m. and moving around until the 6:10 p.m. run, thus leaving off the last five runs of the day.

It’s by no means perfected – the tick marks on the clock face are too prominent, and I’m not sure I’ve effectively communicated the AM/PM combination (or maybe I’ve communicated it too much?). But I do like its “at a glanceness.”

I welcome suggestions for tweaks, or for completely different takes on the same design challenge.

My trip to the USA earlier this month was my first trip after switching from pre-paid “Pay As You Go” service from Rogers Wireless to a regular monthly account. And where on previous trips I’d avoided using my mobile altogether, on this trip I decided to experiment and see what additional roaming charges I’d incur if I went about something approximately regular usage.

And so while I didn’t spend hours on the phone calling home, I was fairly liberal with calling friends and colleagues in the US, sending text messages, and making occasional use of data (mostly for local search and maps in Brooklyn).

Over the course of 6 days traveling, I incurred $37.52 in extra charges on top of my regular $50/month bill, as follows:

• $2.13 for adding “Call Display” to my account (pro-rated portion of the $8/month fee for this service), added so that I could see who was calling me while traveling and decide whether or not to answer the call.
• $13.32 for 9 minutes of voice calling (a rate of about $1.50/minute).
• $9.17 for using 1523KB of data.
• $4.50 for sending 6 text messages within the US.
• $1.00 for sending 2 text messages from Canada to the US.
• $4.10 for sending 14 text messages within Canada.
• $3.30 for receiving 22 text messages while in the US.

I’m not complaining about the charges – I could have mitigated some of them by pre-paying some minutes in a “roaming pack” if I’d wanted – but what irks me is that there was no way for me to monitor my roaming charges while I was on the road.

Rogers only adds these up, customer service tells me, at the “end of the billing cycle,” so I had to have faith that I wasn’t accidentally racking up hundreds of dollars worth of roaming fees; it was only a call to Rogers’ customer service that produced information about the breakdown of the charges.