Circumstances conspired to leave you eleven days to read my update from Boston. In the interim:

• Johnny and I returned from our trip to Yankee after a brief stopover in Boston that facilitated the purchase of 4 pounds of Catherine’s favourite coffee in the North End.
• We hosted Ton and Elmine for dinner at the tail end of their month-long trip to Canada.
• Oliver and my Mom and Dad and I took a short vacation to Louisbourg at the far end of Cape Breton. It rained the entire time, but we had a good trip nonetheless, touring the Fortress of Louisbourg (in driving hard rain that soaked us all to the skin; still impressive and fascinating, though), catching a musical revue at the Louisbourg Playhouse (which has an odd history) and eating well every night at Grubstake. We rented a two-bedroom cottage at Peck’s Cottages: inexpensive, clean, and well set up.
• We made our first visit to Harmony House in Hunter River to take in a Bruce Guthro show. A great night in a wonderful new theatre (check out their calendar of upcoming shows; it’s a wonderful new venue).
• I somehow missed a few months in there somewhere and forgot to pay for the fire insurance for our house, to register my car, and to pay off my Mastercard bill. Just now catching up.

At the end of August I’m back to Yankee for two days, then up to Thunder Bay for a family wedding, then back on the Island for the start of school. At the end of September we’re taking a 7-day family vacation in Iceland, at the end of which we’ll hook up with Olle and Luisa in Reykjavik (en route from Copenhagen) for the start of their Prince Edward Island adventure. In mid-October there’s Zap Your PRAM, which is shaping up nicely. And then Christmas.

To avoid the usual pattern of “arrive at Logan, drive north, get hungry, end up at Applebees eating deep fried gunk,” I availed myself of the restaurant suggestions a smart friend and booked a table for me and Johnny at Hungry Mother in Cambridge. The vagaries of our Delta arrival in Boston — long delay while wheelchairless person sought wheelchair while we all waited on the bus to take us from Terminal A to Terminal E to clear customs — plus punishing Boston traffic meant that my 6:00 p.m. reservation was timed perfectly for our arrival, as long as we skipped my planned outing to The Dutch Bicycle Company.

Hungry Mother was great — a beet salad that knocked my socks off, honey-drenched cornbread and a gnochhi that rivaled the gnocchi-from-heaven that I had last year north of Milan. They also served a very pleasant sweet iced tea, and an excellent cappuccino. They have a great deal that we weren’t in a position to take advantage of: arrive before 6:00 p.m. and get $6.00 tickets at the Kendall Square Cinema next door, and they pick up the tickets for you. In any case, I’m sure to be back for a meal again.

After dinner we headed north and were diverted by the prospect of short-sleeved-shirt shopping at the mall in Burlington, Mass. A mall that now has a Nordstrom. A Nordstrom that had a 30% off sale on house-brand 100% cotton short-sleeved shirts, button-down collar, solid colours. $32. I bought two.

Back in the car around 9:00 p.m. we steamed north-west to Peterborough, NH where we’re now hunkered down at the Jack Daniels Motor Inn, ready to launch into three days of intensive envisioning at Yankee.

Cavendish Beach East, Friday evening, 7:19 p.m., looking east:

We bought a tiny solar racer from Owls Hollow this afternoon — too cool a toy to pass up. Take the car and put it in bright sun and it moves. Until it gets to a shadow. Magic. Or so it seems.

Ever since my experiments with Nokia Chat and XMPP I’ve had the picture in my mind of an XMPP-driven robot that would accept geographic locations from Nokia Chat and respond with a list of nearby Plazes. This, after all, is the promise of the “location-based future,” is it not?

Tonight I managed to hack something together in PHP, running on my MacBook. You can try it out if you like: you’ll need Nokia Chat running on a GPS-enabled device. Here’s what you need to do.

First, start up Nokia Chat and select Options \| Add Friend:

Add user reinvented@ovi.com as your new friend:

If everything goes according to plan — my robot hasn’t imploded and is still running — you should automatically receive back a welcome message:

Next, select Options \| Send \| My location (this will only appear if your GPS receiver is running, and your device knows its location already):

You’ll receive back an acknowledgement with instructions to send a keyword to look up Plazes:

Enter a keyword — in this example I entered bar, but you can enter a Plazes category, or, indeed, anything that you can normally enter in a Plazes.com search. After a brief delay you should receive back a list of the three Plazes nearest your current location that match your search:

If you move up and click on the Open link under any of the Plazes, and you have Nokia Maps installed, the location will appear on a map:

At this point you can add it as a new Landmark, or you can click Exit to go back to Nokia Chat and continue your exploring.

This is a two-hours-old alpha robot, so it’s likely prone to breakage or other weirdness; please bear with me.

This isn’t an official Plazes or Nokia project; it’s just me doing some weekend hacking.

Here’s how the process of booking a hotel at NovaScotia.com goes:

1. Use the Accommodations Search page to identify a property you like.
2. Click “Online Reservation.”
3. Enter check-in and check-out dates and number of guests.
4. Select an available room and rate.
5. End up at a page titled “Members” that invites you to “logon” or “register.”
6. Click “Need to register?” and name, address, telephone, email, username and password.
7. End up at confirmation page telling you that you need to confirm your email by clicking on a link that’s been emailed to you before you can logon.
8. Receive said email, click on link.
9. Start the entire process over again from scratch now that you have an account — the entire search has been forgotten now, and it’s a whole new day.

The heat yesterday afternoon was punishing, and so once my weekly call with Yankee was over, I rushed home, Catherine and Oliver and I piled into the car, cranked up the AC, and headed out into the countryside with hopes of finding food and cool ocean breezes.

Our first choice, The Pearl, had no room for us, so we continued to head west through Cavendish. We flirted with the idea of Pizza Delight, but decided we had to aim higher. Through Stanley Bridge and New London, we almost stopped at the seafood place on New London Bay, which is where we usually end up when we’re at the end of the line. But we continued onwards ever still to Long River, with hopes that The Kitchen Witch would be open.

Fortunately, it was.

My introduction to The Kitchen Witch came almost a decade ago. A colleague of mine was fond of holding breakfast meetings by driving towards Long River, parking his truck about a mile away, and then “meeting” during a mile-long brisk morning walk that ended with breakfast there.

We’ve been back many times, mostly on family rambles along the north shore. The restaurant was always a reliable place for a good family meal, with the food tending towards the “Island home cooking” style, with chowders, lobster rolls and the like.

And so this was what we were expecting when we pulled the car up last night.

Somebody forgot to tell us, however, that The Kitchen Witch is under new management. And the new management hails from Houston, Texas.

From the outside, much looks the same, save for the sign advertising Strawberry Rhubarb Gelato, which seemed a little out of character for the Witch.

Inside, however, it’s a completely different story: take a look at the menu and you’ll see enchiladas, Texas tamales, taquitos and spicy tortilla soup alongside the more familiar reuben sandwich, French onion soup and spaghetti. The new Texan owners have brought a good amount of their southern U.S. cuisine with them, and it shares the menu with some of the old favourites.

And that’s not all: in a fashion unusual for Island restaurants, the menu points out options for vegetarians, items that are gluten free, and dishes that use local Prince Edward Island ingredients. And the beverage menu is one dear to my heart as it includes house-made iced tea, “teamonade” (highly recommended mixture of iced tea and lemonade) and Dandelion & Burdock soda and an exhaustive menu of hot tea.

Oh, and they make their own gelato, with a constantly changing collection of flavours; last night, for example, they had gingerbread flavour, the result of a fallen gingerbread cake put to good use.

The food is good too. No boil-in-bag enchiladas here: they make their own tortillas. And their own Texas BBQ. And their own bread. And their own potato salad. The service is friendly and completely without pretense. The room is as pleasant as it ever was: old wooden chairs around old wooden tables inside the old Long River school.

Did I mention that the (clean) washrooms have kid-attachments for the toilets, and a complete changing table with supplies?

The Kitchen Witch was always a reliable place to get a solid meal. Now it’s a must-see that I encourage everyone to make a pilgrimage to: you will not be disappointed.

The Kitchen Witch is located about 45 minutes from Charlottetown in the village of Long River. Be sure to drive along the scenic coastal lands from French River to Sea View while you’re in the area, and then make a generous donation to the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust to help preserve them in perpetuity.

Here’s a graph that shows traffic, over the last day, on our Internet connection here at the office (time runs backwards from the left-hand side of the graph):

See the two “mountains” of traffic, one yesterday afternoon and the other starting at 9:00 a.m. this morning? That’s all spam. Loads of it. Floods of it. Enough incoming network traffic that our SMTP server is having trouble keeping up.

In this case it’s not the spam itself that’s a problem — most of it is so obviously spam that we can easily throw it into /dev/null — but rather the impact on our bandwidth, and the server resources needed to identify and throw the spam away.

Looking at our mail server logs, this spam is coming from all over the place — there’s no discernable pattern of IP addresses or domain names that we could simply firewall out. And so I’m sort of as a loss as to how to react, other than to hope that, like the flood yesterday, this too shall pass.

Anyone have any advice to offer?

Update, the next morning: the spam flood seems to have passed, at least for now…

Directions to a man from Alabama, looking for a mocha latte on lower Queen Street: “See that sign up the street on the other side with the sunshine on it that says Cora’s? Don’t go there. But walk there, and then go two doors up.”