I was making a deposit for the Prince Street Home and School at ScotiaBank in Charlottetown this morning. The deposit included some cash – the proceeds from our Christmas raffle than I’m woefully late to deposit – and as I watched Sally, my friendly and helpful teller, count out the paper money I noticed that she was splitting it into two piles.

I asked her what the piles meant and she told me that the one on the left was for money that was “all done” – off to be destroyed, I assume, in some federal government money furnace somewhere.

I asked her how she decided which bills went into this pile and she said it’s entirely subjective; she showed me a bill that was “on the edge” that got to live another day, but said that it was close the end of its run.

I’d assumed all of this was done robotically by some centralized money scanning bot; it’s nice to know that these decisions about which bills live and which bills die are still made by real human beings.

Following the template we laid down last year, Oliver and I are off to Europe for a father-and-son trip over the March school break (with a few days thrown in on either side to give us enough time to breath).

Regular readers will recall that last year’s trip started in Slovakia and took us across the breadth of Europe through Vienna, Nuremberg, Paris and London. Rather than a long-term passion for Slovakia, the trip was inspired by a cheap 128 EUR two-for-one flight deal from the now-defunct SkyEurope airline. It was a great trip: the most stressful part of it was in Bratislava when the candy-bar machine ate our coins. But we put in some more coins and ended up with two candy bars. Which is to say that things went pretty well.

This year’s destination inspiration started with a random Google search that ended me up at Phaeno, a science centre in Wolfsburg, Germany that looked interesting. From there the trip grew west toward Düsseldorf, the new home of my old friend Pedro and his wife Patricia (as well as new friend João Santos, who I met at reboot last year). It’s also dangerously near Enschede in the Netherlands where friends Ton and Elmine live, but logistics will prevent us from connecting with them. 

And east toward Malmö, where, what being in Europe and all, it seemed like a good opportunity to pop by and see [[Olle]] and [[Luisa]].

In the middle of that all is Berlin, a city close to my heart and a place I’m eager to see with Oliver.

Join up the dots and you get a night 12 day saunter across northern Germany with a flick up to Sweden at the end. The Canadian dollar is worth 10 more cents against the Euro this year too, so our travel budget is slightly less stressed.

So we’re off tomorrow to London via Halifax and Montreal, and then it’s Düsseldorf for a day, Wolfsburg for the weekend, Berlin for most of next week, Malmö for the last weekend, and then back to Halifax via London. Back on the Island on March 22.

Our bags – one smallish backpack each so we can travel free and easy and carry-on – are packed and I’m in the final throes of cleaning up last-minute work and life ends (tiny soaps, last-minute Trac tickets, etc.).  It’s a laptop-free vacation, so if you want to play the home game the best way will be to follow along on twitter.com/ruk and on flickr.com/photos/reinvented.

And if you need to track me down (job offer, lottery winnings, server crash, selective service), here’s our itinerary.

Sad news on Prince Street: our next-door neighbour Kelsie Todd died on Sunday.

Kelsie was our neighbour for 10 years, and he was everything you’d ever want in someone next door: ready with a wave and a hello, (especially for Oliver), endlessly talented in all the ways that we are not (over the years he built us a fence, painted our house, plowed out our driveway and leveled out our back yard), and always keeping an eye out for us (“you better lock your front door this weekend,” “I noticed the light’s been on in your basement for a few days”) without being overly so. Along the way we watched him raise his son Murray from a tow-headed youngster into a man unto himself.

We’ll miss Kelsie, and our hearts go out to Murray and his other kids, his partner Cynde, and his sister Vaunda. The wake is today from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at Belvedere Funeral Home.

You may have noticed a rather sudden dearth of reader comments in this space of late, presumably resulting from a decision I made about a week ago to restrict comments to “registered” readers only (registration is free and relatively painless, but still a barrier).

I put up this reg-wall simply to deal with a flood of comment spam that regular mechanisms in place to prevent it – the reCAPTCHA and the Akismet – were no longer sufficiently capable of holding back. It seems that dedicated “fleece blanket” and UGG boots sellers are willing to pay people to make somewhat-reasonable-looking comments – “Great post… I too am interested in Tim Horton Donuts nutritional information” – and jump through the reCAPTCHA. Matt Haughey has more on this phenomenon; it’s annoying and something that I imagine someone is hard at work building tools to try to help combat as I write.

Feel free to register to post comments until I come up with either the energy to spent 10 minutes every day doing battle with the fleece blanketeers or to implement another defensive system (What about peiCAPTCHA? Commenters have to ask a question the answer to which only Prince Edward Islanders would know – What did Boomer wear on last night’s Compass? or If you drove up east to go to the beach would you be more likely to run into Leo Cheverie or Leo Broderick?).

In the meantime, thanks for your patience.

Early in February during our trip to Halifax for the weekend, I stopped in at Chairs Limited in Dartmouth, a local independent maker of office chairs.  I liked their products and approach so much that when we got back home I immediately placed an order for a “Dolphin Series Tilter Chair.”  It arrived today.

I’ve got 30 days to try it out to ensure it’s the right chair; as soon as I’ve had some solid working time in it, I’ll report back as to how it’s working out.

Regular readers will recall my distaste for investing in the stock market, something that has left me, for as long as I’ve been an RRSP contributor, earning around 1% interest in deposit receipts at our local credit union.

This has meant, in part, that our yearly trek to the credit union – usually on the last possible day to make contributions for the year – has involved some apologetic sidestepping when the friendly credit union staff bring out the “investment vehicle” brochures and start talking about index-linked mutual funds and the like. “Oh, we’ll just keep it in a deposit receipt for now and think about it later.” 

It seems that this combination of amateur ideology and procrastination has finally come around to being in vogue: at last night’s annual credit union visit our friendly staff-person as much as suggested that credit union deposit receipts were as good as any alternative, at least for the time-being. It wasn’t a ringing endorsement of my philosophy – the S&P-linked index fund brochure was still on offer – but it’s close as perhaps we’ll ever come to being “normal.”

As such I was happy to read the following in a recent New Yorker profile of economist Paul Krugman:

The crisis should have been a lesson to people not to rush into investments that they didn’t understand, but Krugman suspects that it wasn’t. “It hasn’t been the searing experience,” he says. “A lot of people got burned, but I’m not sure that they’ll remember. You really have to have a Depression mentality to say, ‘I’d rather have cash or Treasury bills that yield almost nothing, rather than this product that my banker assures me is perfectly safe and yields two per cent.’ So, unless there’s a lot more regulation, we could do this again.”

Which, I think, means that I have a “Depression mentality.” Which is not such a bad mentality to have, all things considered.

There is no more brave an act, in the world of e-commerce and design, than agreeing to try to use your own website. With the camera rolling.

And that’s just what Bruce MacNaughton agreed to do on Tuesday morning: to, as they say, eat his own dogfood, and walk me through the process of placing an order on the Prince Edward Island Preserve Company website (spoiler alert: it didn’t all exactly work as planned).

While usability testing by regular everyday people is a useful part of every web project, trying to use your own website is also a useful exercise, and something that we all forget about much too often.

We went through this exercise not to rip the website apart, but rather to see how it looked like from “the other side” and to try to develop a set of eyes that would allow future developments to incorporate that view.

Bruce deserves a lot of credit for agreeing to go through this, and for not blanching at the prospect of publishing the experience for the world to see.

Note to future video producers: make sure your subject doesn’t leave his credit card on camera (hence the “redacted” smudge over the video for a few minutes midway through).

Here’s a nice historical photo of the Port of Charlottetown my friend G. found in a pictorial book from 1984. The photo was taken after Harbourside was constructed, but before the Delta Prince Edward hotel, and well before the oil tanks were replaced by Confederation Landing Park.  When we arrived in Charlottetown in the winter of 1993, the port looked more like this than how it looks today; there’s no arguing that there’s been a dramatic improvement in this area over the last 17 years.

Here’s a contemporary photo for comparison (thanks to Dale for sending this along, and to the City of Charlottetown for permission to use it here):

Charlottetown Vision Centre has a nifty new gizmo that takes high-resolution photos of patients’ eyes.  It costs $18 to have done, but that’s a small price to pay for a photo that, in essence, “looks the other way” at the eye.  Indeed, trying to think about the fact that the eyes in the photos are the eyes that are looking at the photos is hurting my brain.

My Left Eye

My Right Eye

If you’re at all interested in customer service, new media, body image, or just simple humanity, you owe it to yourself to listen to SModcast #106. Especially if you’ve only followed the “Southwest Airlines affair” from stories like this. If you have delicate sensibilities you will likely be horrified by the experience, but bear with it, as the underlying ideas are profound. Although far less entertaining, Southwest Airlines’ part of the conversation is also a worthy read.