Last night saw the debut of Big Break: Prince Edward Island, a taxpayer-supported reality show airing on The Golf Channel. A channel that, by some demographic incident, is included in my cable package. So I watched.

From the initial hoopla you might think that the show actually had something to do with Prince Edward Island. After watching the first hour I can confirm that, short of some quick establishing shots of lobster boats and a lighthouse, it does not.

Big Break is a show about golf and the narcissistic young people who play it. While it was shot at the Mill River course in western PEI, you never actually get to meet any real Prince Edward Islanders, nor, indeed, see much of PEI off the golf course. You might as well be in Dearborn for the paucity of “Islandness” in the show.

I’ve got nothing against golf and the people who play it — although I’m not certain we should be trying to attract the “soulless people with time on their hands” demographic that the contestants seem to represent — but surely there must be more to a golf vacation on the Island that what we’re showing on the screen. If there isn’t, we could save ourselves a lot of annoyance and degradation if we just re-sold Dearborn tee-times and offered a shuttle service.

The Holman Building on Grafton Street in downtown Charlottetown, once a department store and soon to be transmogrified from office space into the Hotel Homburg, is having its regrettable modern skin peeled off to reveal the facade the building once presented. Our man on the street G. captured the first stabs:

Nora Young interviews Nicholas Felton. Interesting listen if you are a fan of his work, or just interested in personal data publishing.

From the official rules for the Tim Hortons Roll Up the Rim to Win Contest (PDF):

NOTE: The cup size names are the same in Canada and the U.S. but the ounces differ. In Canada the cup sizes are 10oz (medium), 14oz (large) and 20oz (extra large). The cup sizes in the U.S. are 14oz (medium), 20oz (large) and 24oz (extra large).

Here’s a handy chart to help you better interpret this:

Today’s “random iPod shuffle track that started playing during my workout” (see also The Mandy Patinkin Workout) was The Grid, a Philip Glass composition from the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi.

It nearly killed me.

It’s 21 minutes long. It has all sorts of dramatic tempo changes. It generally chugs along at about 90 to 100 beats per minute, a pace that, on a stationary bicycle, is challenging to keep up with for 21 minutes solid, when you’re already 15 minutes into your pretend journey. Especially given the little bits of “no, wait, 80 bpm, okay, now 100.”

But, truth be told, it didn’t kill me. It made me stronger. I think.

And as if preordained, after speeding along to a track from a film subtitled “Life out of Balance,” during the “cool down” phase of my workout Shore Fields by Allan Rankin randomized itself into the mix:

Before we star talkin’
Would you do me a favor?
Have a look at these old pictures
There cracked and faded
Torn at the edges
But that’s the way I’m feelin’ tonight

Casa Mia debuts its new menu today. You already know about the pizza — now you can experience the new “dark chocolate pancakes,” “casa mia hash” and “double smoked bacon & pear sandwich.”

Nokia released a research prototype called Easy Meet today that looks like it might solve an issue that I noticed in my Philosophy 105 lectures this winter.

A weekly feature of the lectures was a PowerPoint projected on the big screen in the lecture theatre. Several times I found myself wanting to share things from the “audience” — web pages, images, PDF files — but there wasn’t an easy mechanism for doing this in real time.

While Easy Meet if obviously targeted at business meetings, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be used in an academic setting; in theory this would allow the sort of two way sharing that I was looking for: anyone with a laptop or mobile phone could share media with the class, and then others could annotate that media, and so on. It would be neat to try it out in this context.

With inspiration from Oliver and Don and Olle, I’ve dumped my personal library into LibraryThing, a web-based library, um, thing from our sister state of Maine.

To save hours of typing ISBNs, I used Oliver’s copy of Delicious Library along with the iSight camera on his Mac to quickly scan the bar codes of the books scattered around our house. I then exported from Delicious Library into a plain ASCII text file, edited the text file to remove everything by the ISBN, and then imported this into LibraryThing using its “Universal Importer.” Five minutes later and there were my 106 books in LibraryThing.

One of the things I learned by going through this process is that my library is almost completely made up of books about travel, medicine or design. I wasn’t completely aware that my tastes were so limited (you will note, as well, that there are no works of fiction in my library, reflecting my longstanding suspicion of the genre).

LibraryThing is free for up to 200 books, and cheap to join after that. I welcome you to sign up and befriend me: just visit librarything.com/profile/ruk can click “Add to Friends” in the top-right.

If you start with this Flickr photo you can explore an annotated front door of a standard 20 foot shipping container — just follow the links in the notes embedded in the photo.

Here’s the container itself, being used as a construction storage shed at the Confederation Centre of the Arts renovations:

It’s amazing how much you can learn about containers, standards, maritime law and Korean manufacturing by studying the plates and stickers on a container:

• The container was manufactured in 1982 by Hyundai Precision and Industry Company in Ulsan, South Korea.
• The paint, both on the interior (grey) and exterior (rust) came from the multinational paint comglomerate Hempel.
• The container was operated by Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics, a Norwegian shipping company, but owned by a company called Scalco in the Cayman Islands.
• It was branded ScanDutch, “a pool for container shipping between Europe and the Far East… formally dissolved in 1992, after more than two decades of operations.” (source)
• Safety approval for the container was by the French company Bureau Veritas.

Some days it’s just extra-especially good to be a parent: