If you’re not too consumed with crucifixion-veneration activities on Good Friday, the CARI Pool in Charlottetown has an open swim from 10:00 a.m. right through to 8:00 p.m., with a lower-cost “Toonie Swim” from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. The water slide is open from 4:00 p.m. to close.

Easter weekend is when we Canadians get our payback for all those midwinter holidays our American colleagues have that we don’t: both Good Friday and Easter Monday (which my American friends think we just make up) are regular workdays to the south.

Give its new prominence, I’ve updated the web page that logs incoming calls to the Charlottetown Transit Schedule telephone information line, adding some information up top about total calls processed. This page updates in real time, so if you happen to be in front of a web browser when you call the line (902-367-3694), you can watch your key presses being logged (just reload the page as you interact).

I did some experimenting with sending an SMS follow up with the schedule information requested to the caller’s mobile phone this morning. The send-the-SMS (using ipipi.com) was very easy to implement as they have an SMTP interface you can send to; I got stymied, however, with trying to find a way to figure out if the calling number was a mobile: there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing this. As an alternative I may modify the UI of the telephone tree and add a “press * to receive a text message with this schedule” option. Stay tuned.

And remember, on Saturday mornings the regular University Avenue line runs twice as often as it used to, leaving downtown every half hour, and between 9:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. it reroutes to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market.

For my money, Mandy Patinkin is this generation’s preeminent interpreter of the Great American Songbook. I say this as someone who would rather scratch his eyes out than sit through a Broadway musical. But man, that guy’s got it. He also happens to be a rather good actor, having, in his Dr. Jeffrey Geiger character on Chicago Hope, perfected the “brilliant brooding curmudgeon doctor” a generation before Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House; and he was also Inigo Montoya. But I digress.

I mention Mandy Patinkin because yesterday was my first music-equipped session in the gym: my new smaller-than-a-thimble iPod shuffle arrived on Monday and I loaded it up my iTunes tracks, one of which happened to be a rousing medley of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and The Hokey Pokey. In Yiddish. (A track hanging around from my role as arranger of Oliver and Sophie’s wedding music).

And so as I stood there doing my gyrations on the treadmill on Wednesday morning there came Mandy Patinkin into my ears. Needless to say that my pace picked up and I ended up running an extra mile as a result.

The next song on the shuffle was Untouchable Face by Ani DiFranco, a song from a whole other chapter of the Great American Songbook, but also a rousing song in its own laconic way.

My iTunes music library has 643 songs or 1.7 days worth of music in it. One of the things that I discovered very early on is that I’m absolutely sick of much of it. When exactly did I go through a Lisa Loeb phase?

A lot of the rest of it isn’t particularly well-suited to the workout setting (see Nearer, My God to Thee by Mahalia Jackson and Somewhere Over the Rainbow from Rosemary Clooney). So I think my next step is going to have to be an infusion of fresh music and a special workout playlist.

The new iPod shuffle is Saturday Night Live sketch come to life: small enough that you can clip it to any part of you and not know it’s there. The controls-on-earphones, while leaving one vulnerable to a non-workable device if the earphones go missing or wonky, provides enough of a usability leap to make that vulnerability worth it — I just have to get my clicks and double clicks and triple clicks and clicks-and-holds straight. Even VoiceOver, the feature that, with a click-and-hold, reads out the name of the song and the artist, is something I find myself using a lot, even if only to see how the iPod reads out “Mandy Patinkin.”

Speaking of the Charlottetown Transit applications, I’ve updated the route, stop and schedule data should you wish to roll your own applications.

I’ve also released the PHP source for the Asterisk AGI script that drives the automated telephone system; even if you don’t want to create your own Charlottetown Transit Information Line, it might prove a useful (if kludgey) model for creating Asterisk AGI scripts to do other interesting things.

Remember the Charlottetown Bus Schedule by Telephone I hacked together back in November? Well this morning as I stood at the University of PEI waiting for the bus back to the office I spotted a new blue and yellow Charlottetown Transit bus pulling into the parking lot with “The Talking Bus” emblazoned on it. “That’s weird,” I thought to myself, “I wonder how it talks.”

It turns out that it’s me making it talk, as further emblazoned on the side of the bus is the telephone number I set up, 367-3694:

What’s especially weird about this, other than it being a surprise, is that the telephone schedule remains a hack to this day — wired together with the masking tape and baling wire of a $2.50/month Eastlink virtual telephone number gatewayed through silverorange’s T1 into my own Asterisk server where a custom PHP application talks to the same MySQL database of stops and schedules that thebus.ca does.

Needless to say, it gives me no end of pleasure to see my Working for Free side-projects carved into public infrastructure.

If you’re interested in following along from home, the Charlottetown Transit Telephone Schedule Call Log has an anonymous record of the last 20 calls received.

I’m as cynical as the next guy when it comes to the notion that digital person-to-person marketing will become the dominant force in the economy, but I’m starting to wonder. In the last 24 hours I:

• Bought a a book because Jason Kottke recommended it on his blog.
• Bought another book because of a tweet.
• Bought a share of a boat in Denmark because of a YouTube video.
• Purchased a license for a piece of software because the developer answered a question I tweeted him.

While there’s a lot of infrastructure underlying those “purchase-influencers,” they are all, at their heart, “user generated” by people I trust.

My friend Mehrnoosh who, with his wife Gina, owns Casa Mia, is someone always willing to entertain my crazy ideas, and today’s crazy idea was to shoot a daily video introducing the café’s daily specials. So this morning I showed up at Casa Mia with my trusty Nokia N95 phone-cum-video-camera and we shot the pilot, an actual video for today’s actual daily special, which is Grilled California Chicken Pizza:

The pizza actually is very good, and if you happen to be reading this on April 7, 2009 I encourage you to stop by and have it for lunch: it’s $9.95, and enough to feed two people. Tell them you saw the video.

It took about 20 minutes to shoot the video, with little or no advance planning or discussion. It took me another hour to edit it all together in iMovie back here in the office. I’d welcome any comments you might have about the video and the general idea.

The background music is Millie’s Waltz from the Roy Johnstone-Steve Sharratt album Longshore Drift. You can purchase an MP3 of the track for only 99 cents if it strikes your fancy (or buy the entire album — it’s very good).

My friend Henriette Weber, whose imagination is a true force of nature, has hatched a new plan: PAN 2.0. She’s turning her great-grandparents’ boat into a coworking space:

So those of you who has been following this blog knows that I have had a dream during the last couple of years to turn my great grandparents old LM23 into a danish coworking space placed whereever the boat may be. It looks like a mess - but I am so sure it’s gonna be great. Anyway we are retronizing the boat - which means that we are going to turn it back into the original state

Henriette is making some great videos of the project as she goes along, like this one:

You can buy a share in the endeavour for 500 DKK (about $100 Canadian), which is really something you should do if you ever anticipate the need for a floating coworking space in Denmark (and who among us hasn’t).

Here’s a photo of the Scales Pond Dam I took two years ago. The dam burst over the weekend, sending Scales Pond into the oblivion of the Dunk River (CBC, Guardian, YouTube):

Photo by Dean Godden, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works licensed.