Icelandair cuts winter flights, reports Nova Scotia Business Journal. What was supposed to be year-round flights from Halifax to Keflavik will now be suspended for the winter, with the last flight for this year on October 20, 2008.

This is really too bad: Icelandair is a much better alternative to Air Canada for getting to Europe, if only because Keflavik is so much better a hub than Heathrow or Frankfurt.

Fortunately for any Europeans coming to Zap Your PRAM, the October shutdown date comes the day after Zap closes.

There has never been a Rukavina in the Olympics (pointer from Jason Kottke — to the site, not the Rukavina absence, that is).

With the redesign that launched yesterday, the City Cinema page in Plazes becomes much more functional.

In older versions of Google Earth there was a “horizontal slider” on the map that allowed you to vary the angle at which you were viewing the map — the “tilt” for lack of a better word. In recent versions this control has disappeared; after some digging in the help for the application, I found that to achieve the same thing you now simply hold Shift on your keyboard and drag the map with the mouse.

Piece a Cake, the Charlottetown restaurant that I wrote about here 5 years ago is, alas, no longer: there’s a sign on the door announcing their closure as of June 28, 2008, and there’s a “For Lease” sign in the window. I was not, by any stretch, a Piece a Cake regular — somehow it always seemed to fall outside of my culinary peripheral vision. But I had many good meals there, and there’s no doubting that when they opened they pushed the Charlottetown restaurant envelope forward. Will be missed.

Regular readers will recall frequent mention in this space of my friend Harold Stephens, author, adventurer, boatbuilder, and kind host for our trip to Thailand several years ago. Steve has just posted a video to YouTube about some old and some new experiences in China.

The redesigned Plazes.com went live today

(Link changed to point to the Internet Archive snapshot now that Plazes.com is offline).

So far these are the only things that work, all of the homebrew “saran wrap over a dish of sugar water” having failed. Catherine got them at True Value Hardware in the basement of the Confederation Court Mall. They haven’t eliminated the problem entirely, but they seem to be helping.

I’ve spent this morning refining some code that enables using Share on Ovi programatically from PHP. So far here’s what I have:

• class.ovi.php is a PHP class that supports upload of JPEG images to Share on Ovi.
• UploadToOvi.php is a command line uploading tool.
• Creating a Share on Ovi Droplet provides instructions for turning UploadToOvi.php into a Mac OS X “droplet” to allow for easy drag-and-drop Share on Ovi uploading.
• flickr2ovi.php is a PHP script that enables migrating a user’s public Flickr photos to Share on Ovi, complete with title, description, tags and the original image.

I’ve have been remiss in not pointing out the virtues of Ampersand, the new café cum t-shirt shack on Water Street in Charlottetown. There were some fumbles as they found their way — my first visit I asked for sugar and was handed a big bag and a spoon — but the young rockers behind the counter are all learning the ways of the big machine, and they’re starting to produce some very nice coffee. Like a cappuccino made for me this afternoon by Megan Stewart.

By far the nicest place to enjoy your coffee at Ampersand is in the back garden: you’ll have to be content with tree stumps to sit on, but it’s a very pleasant space. You could also hold a small theatrical event in the cavernous and as-yet ill-defined upper level if so-moved.

The Ampersand vibe is far too cool and young for me to completely grasp, but it’s a welcoming vibe nonetheless, and if you’re looking for a place to escape from the everyday, hiding out down on Water Street is a pretty good destination.