Using the terms “red state” and “blue state” to refer to states with a Republican or Democratic bent respectively is a thoroughly modern construction, credited to the late Tim Russert, who coined the current usage during the 2000 election.

The November 3, 2008 edition of Dispatches (MP3, the interview is in the second part of the program) features an interview with Rose George, the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, a book that has captivated me for the last week (thanks to Ray for the link).

I took a tour of suburban Charlottetown yesterday and visited some of the water and sewer locations I mapped yesterday, taking photos as I went. You can see the results in Flickr and also on the updated Charlottetown Sewer and Water Map, where I’ve added photos to the sites I visited and fixed up their locations in situations where I’d got it wrong.

The new JetBlue Terminal 5 at JFK in New York features furniture from the Italian company Moroso.

Google Transit for Montreal is now available. At m.google.ca/montreal there’s a mobile version too.

Using this snow removal tender call, I’ve created a map of Charlottetown Sewer and Water — water and sewage stations. Some of the locations are approximate because it’s hard to tell the actual location from Google Maps.

With Ohio as an important battleground state in tomorrow’s US election, it’s interesting to note that at almost 250 years ago this area of the country was to become a colony called Charlotina, named for the same Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz after which Charlottetown is named. The colony was never actually established, but it does appear on a map showing British colonies of the day:

Other places named after Queen Charlotte:

• Charlotte, North Carolina
• Charlotte County, Virginia
• Charlotte Hall, Maryland
• Charlotte Place, Sydney, New South Wales
• Charlottesville, Virginia
• Port Charlotte, Florida
• Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand
• Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia

Use m.citycinema.net in your mobile browser to get a shrunken version of the City Cinema website. Just testing for now.

I took a Flickr vacation for six months while I experimented with Nokia’s Share on Ovi service. I’ve moved my photo-sharing focus back to Flickr now, and I created ovi2flickr.php to bring my photos back with me.

Share on Ovi proved itself a capable peer to Flickr and technically it matches Flickr in almost every respect but a well-documented API. What’s missing from Ovi, however, is a community. Or at least my community. In the months I used Ovi as the home for my photos only two comments were left, and I became “contacts” only with Jonas.

Meanwhile, back on Flickr, I’ve got almost 100 contacts, and I receive a couple of comments a week.

The idea of centralized photo sharing has never really worked for me spiritually — I wish there was a way to decentralize the Flickr experience and let photos be stored locally and comments, favourites, contacts and other aspects of Flickr work under more of a “federation” system. But, for the moment, there is not. And so my photos go where the community goes.

Most of the time what you get at a “bakery” in Charlottetown is more “different forms of doughy glop” than it is something you’d actually look forward to eating. This is may be about to change: Leonhard’s Café and Bakery is set to open later this month at 42 University Avenue, in the space next to to Blue Note that was formerly occupied by the Perfect Cup Café, a pizza place and, most recently, by a lamp store.

Leonhard’s has been selling bread and cakes at the [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] this season. Their bread is almost always sold out by the time [[Oliver]]; a testament, I hope, to its wonders. Stay tuned.