Catherine and Oliver saw the Google Street View car last year while walking down University Avenue.  And the Google Street View car saw them.

Oliver’s childhood has been blessed by the presence of the excellent local toy store Owl’s Hollow in his life. Owl’s Hollow is the sort of toy store you want to have in your life: broad and eclectic selection, friendly and helpful staff, and the kinds of toys and games you just won’t find stacked up at Walmart.

The store has always had a tiny books section at the back of the upper level; last year this expanded significantly and got a new place in the store just behind the cash. And over the last few months the selection of books has expanded even more.

So now in addition to Dr. Seuss and Goodnight Moon you will find everything ever written by David Sedaris, the Moosewood Cookbook, books about parenting, a chocolate exposé, a good selection of books on “children from other lands” and a nice cross-section of the sort of “middle school fiction” that Oliver’s just starting to get interested in.

I’ve slowly come to the realization that what I need in my life is not a bigger selection of books (or music, or movies, or …), but a smaller and better-curated selection.

That’s what the Owl’s Hollow book section is: packed into less than 100 square feet a rich, well-tended collection of books that means I emerge having purchased two or three every time I visit.

It’s all over the ‘net this morning here on Prince Edward Island that Google has finally turned on the Street View images on Google Maps that they shot last summer. There seems to be coverage of almost the entire Island, except for West Prince, which was left out for some reason (blue roads on the map are Street View-enabled):

What sets Prince Edward Island apart from, well, the rest of the world, is that there is some truly stunning imagery in their collection:

• Park Corner
• Stanhope
• Bay Fortune
• Confederation Bridge
• North Lake Windmills

The Google Car’s tour of downtown Charlottetown seems to have happened on a particular resplendent summer day, and our house at 100 Prince Street is captured in all its glory, complete with Catherine’s gardens in full bloom.

After our tour of the Prince Edward Island Preserve Company building on Wednesday afternoon, Bruce MacNaughton and I retired to his office in the top corner of the old New Glasgow butter factory to talk more about his business, his business online, and whether it’s possible to approximate online the experience of visiting the Preserve Company in person.

This week in my Conversations with Bruce series I drove out to the Prince Edward Island Preserve Company in New Glasgow for a tour around the place with Bruce MacNaughton.

The camera work is a little sketchy and points out the value of having a camera operator whose only job is to make sure that it’s not only half of people’s heads that are in the frame – it’s hard to talk, walk, and focus the camera all at the same time!

I got an email late last week of the sort that I’d like to receive every week but that, alas, are very rare.  Art Ortenburger, a home-schooled teenager from Bonshaw, lives in an area of Prince Edward Island where Bell Aliant isn’t currently providing broadband infrastructure  (despite promising end-to-end broadband for the Island by the end of 2009).

Art was curious to know exactly how many addresses on the Island were in the same boat, and, being a sharp guy, he set out to use Aliant’s own lookup tool to find out.

Art wrote a well-crafted set of automated tools that takes every civic address in the freely-available PEI Civic Address Database and submits each one to Aliant’s web page.  That page responds with either “Congratulations! You can choose from the following list of services currently available to you…” or “Your address … does not currently qualify for Bell Aliant High Speed Internet service.”

Art’s “bot” is well-tempered: it only submits one query a second, so it takes several days to run. And this left Art with a problem: he didn’t have a server on which to host the tool. And so he got in touch with me.

I was happy to provide a mechanism for the tool to do its work, and on Friday night I fired up an Amazon EC2 instance and set the script running. Three days later, the results were:

• Total Addresses: 68,040
• Addresses with no DSL: 10,439
• Addresses with Basic DSL: 19,559
• Addresses with Ultra DSL: 38,039

Here’s what a Google Earth map of the addressed with no DSL service looks like (click the image for a larger version):

If you’re interested and have Google Earth yourself, download the Google Earth file of the no-DSL addresses and zoom in to any area of the province to see the situation in detail.

Keep in mind, of course, that what Art’s tool looks up is civic addresses, not “households that might want to have broadband Internet installed,” and so among those 10,439 non-served addresses are everything from vacant lots to barns (although what farmer in their right mind doesn’t want DSL in the barn these days).

Art has released his complete toolset with a GNU open source license so you can see how the magic works, run the bot yourself, or just get some ideas on how to write automated tools in Python.

As a follow-up to last summer’s (warmer) Weekend in Halifax, here’s a few more notes about visiting the city, based on a quick (colder) trip we took over this weekend.

1. On a whim I bid $50 for two rooms in Halifax on Priceline and it was, to my surprise, accepted by The Westin Nova Scotian. The hotel is perfectly acceptable, if (very) slightly off the beaten track. They charge $18/night for parking, but somehow we were exempted from that. There’s nice little swimming pool, a very well-equipped fitness room (the treadmills have built-in televisions), and the rooms are comfortable. The only downsides were that it was hard to control the temperature in the rooms, and that the entire hotel bristled with static electricity, making for a shocking weekend. But for $50, who’s complaining.
2. We had another great dinner at Chabaa Thai Restaurant on Saturday night. We arrived about 15 minutes before the supper rush and by the time we left the place was packed to the gills. Our friend (and world traveler) C. was with us and this broadened us out of our usual Thai menu habits, so we got to taste more of what they offer. The spicy halibut was especially good.
3. Dartmouth Crossing, which had been positioned in my mind as a sort of mainland shopping nirvana, turned out to be a depressing industrial shopping wasteland full of the same-old same-old big-box stores. Best avoided.
4. We made our first visit to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia based on a recommendation of the Machines at Play show helpfully tweeted by Iain. It had a very high neato quotient, and the rest of the gallery was interesting too. Best $20 (per family) you can spend in downtown Halifax, I think.
5. Conversely, the Discovery Centre’s much-hyped LEGO exhibit turned out to be little more than a bunch of LEGO models of iconic American scenes with some LEGO brick-filled tables sprinkled around. I love LEGO, and the our visit to LegoLand was one of the highlights of my life, but this had nothing at all to do with “discovery” and was more of a promotional opportunity for LEGO. The rest of the Discovery Centre is much more straight-ahead science centre-like, albeit with exhibits that look like they haven’t been refreshed in 10 years. While not completely without value, the overall impression one is left with is of a poorly-funded and unloved facility that pales when compared to any other children’s museum we’ve visited.
6. On Sunday night we used 2-for-1 coupons from The Coast to go out to dinner at The Wooden Monkey in its large new location on Grafton Street around the corner from where it started out. The service and the food were both excellent and this remains our favourite place to eat out in Halifax.
7. On Monday morning we drove over to Dartmouth to visit Chairs Limited, a bespoke chair maker. Met a very helpful salesperson who guided me through the options available (which turned out to be “almost anything you can imagine”). When I joked that I’d like a chair upholstered in the Prince Edward Island tartan he excused himself for a moment and emerge shortly with both PEI- and New Brunswick-tartan covered chairs. I’m preparing my chair order now.
8. I put out a call on Twitter for a new coffee place to try out and the consensus from all corners was Two if By Sea in Dartmouth. So on our way out of town we stopped in. Wow. They have a pain au chocolate on the menu that is indescribably good (albeit also indescribably rich) and also serve a very solid espresso. Not the kind of place you could go every day, but certainly worth a visit to see how croissants are supposed to be made.

We packed a lot into 48 hours, and then made quick work of the trip back to Charlottetown, darting between snow squalls all the way.

Several people have asked me what I think about Apple’s newly-announced iPad.

While there’s no doubting it’s a significant technical and design achievement, and is filled with the usual Apple lusciousness, the iPad scares me, and why it scares me is well-expressed in the blog post Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?, the heart of which is this:

The fundamental difference between a Mac and an iPhone is that I can run any software I want on my Mac. I can buy it on a DVD, I can download it from the Internet, or I can compile it myself. I can get rid of OS X and install another operating system. The Mac is a general purpose computer in the classic sense. The iPhone is not.

Apple decides which software I can run on my iPhone. Apple provides the only means by which I can get it. The platform is for all intents and purposes, closed, and the hardware is closed as well. Sure, the iPhone is great to use, but the price of using it is that you’re rewarding Apple’s choice to bet on closed platforms.

What bothers me is that in terms of openness, the iPad is the same as the iPhone, but in terms of form factor, the iPad is essentially a general purpose computer. So it strikes me as a sort of Trojan horse that acculturates users to closed platforms as a viable alternative to open platforms, and not just when it comes to phones (which are closed pretty much across the board). The question we must ask ourselves as computer users is whether the tradeoff in freedom we make to enjoy Apple’s superior user experience is worth it.

I agree completely.

I don’t want the spirit of the digital devices in my life to become more iPhone-like, especially the devices at the heart of my digital nervous system; the prospect of owning an iPad seems awfully like buying a pair of exquisitely-design shoes that can only be shined, re-laced or repaired by sending them off to the manufacturer.

The iPad, like the iPhone and the iPod touch, represent another step down the road toward Internet devices being kneecapped into a conduit for us to passively pay for and consume tightly controlled and regulated content.

The power of the net for me has always rested in its utility as a vehicle for freely producing, sharing, mashing-up and distributing stuff, not in its utility for allowing me to watch re-runs of LOST more easily. While there’s no doubt that the iPad is a sleek device to enable the later, it fails abjectly as a device for the former, and if anything it has me thinking it might be time to sell the MacBook and invest in a more open solution for my desktop before it too falls prey to this emerging ethos.

I watched this Ricky Gervais movie over lunch today (it’s on Eastlink’s Video on Demand service in you’re a customer). With the proviso that I’m a big sucker for contemporary reality-turned-upside-down movies (it’s not for nothing that I loved Heaven Can Wait), I heartily recommend it: Gervais puts in a nice performance, as does Jennifer Garner. The only weak point was Jonah Hill, who seems like he had a much bigger part in the film at some point, most of which ended up on the cutting-room floor.