Question for those from away: in your city do riders traditionally thank their city bus drivers when leaving the bus? Here in Charlottetown it seems the rule rather than the exception — most people seem to say “Thanks” or “Thank a lot” when getting off the bus. I find this both endearing and somewhat puzzling as a social custom.

Remember that 24 hour technology-less experiment we lived over the weekend? Well the “case study diary” is due tomorrow and even though, as a non-student, I can’t be graded on the written part of the project, I decided to assembly a diary anyway.

One of the freedoms of not being a student is that I didn’t need to heed any formal academic guidelines about 1½ inch margins and only writing in proper Edwardian English.

So my project is more of a graphic novel than an formal essay. Here’s a PDF file of it if you’re interested, and here’s what it looks like:

The first page of my fitness assessment. The red splotches are a result of cutting open my thumb on the broken zipper of my old Peterborough Canvas Company gym bag, an unfortunate end to an otherwise positive evening in the gym.

What with the mental workout I’m getting this winter, it seemed only appropriate to turn to the issue of the body and given that I’m on the UPEI campus three mornings a week, mere steps from the Sports Centre, it was hard to claim inconvenience as a way out.

So last night after supper I made my way up to the Fitness Centre for a rendezvous with Stan Chaisson the fitness man and an assessment of my current state of fitness (or lack thereof).

To start I had to fill out a form listing my fitness goals (the best I could come up with was “to decrease possibility of death”) and my fitness preferences (I have none, being completely ignorant of the items on the fitness menu).

Stan then took some basic baseline measurements — height, weight, BMI, bodyfat percentage. And then the gruelling tests began: a 12-minute stint on the treadmill for the Cooper Test, a push-up test (how many), a half-situp test (how many in a minute) and a flexibility test.

The result was a score out of 100: I scored 29, “below average.” The good news is, I have lots of room for improvement.

To my surprise and delight, running for 12 minutes (okay, it was more like “speed-tinged walking”) didn’t kill me, and I woke up this morning feeling just fine. This bodes well.

I meet with Stan in a week to go over my personalized training program; last night we set some modest goals for the next five weeks: getting my weight down 4 pounds (which will improve my BMI), increasing my minutes-per-kilometre on the treadmill from 17.5 to 18.4, increasing my push-ups ability from 10 to 15 and so on.

The plan is that I’ll visit the fitness centre every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning before my philosophy class, and Stan will take some new measurements in a month or so to see how I’ve gotten along.

As a point of privilege I will note that, as with UPEI’s general challenges welcoming the community, the Sports Centre could work to create a gentler landing strip for new recruits: it’s a daunting thing for an middle aged unfit guy to plunge into the midst of the land of spandex and free weights, and other than “the locker room’s down and to the right” when I first signed up, I was on my own. I still haven’t been able to find the locker room. Fortunately this will be mitigated somewhat by an “introduction to the fitness centre” session that I’ve signed up for tomorrow night; but including an basic overview and tour of the facility for all new members would go a long way to making people like me feel more welcome (and likely to come back).

If you’re interested in getting assessed yourself, grab yourself the 2009 brochure (cleverly concealed as “Personal Trainor Information” on the Fitness Centre’s website) — what’s you’re looking for is the “Basic Fitness Assessment” and it costs $30 for members and $40 for non-members. And, at least from my experience, Stan will not make you feel like an idiot or a layabout (even if you are one).

For anyone who’s doubted my pronouncements about the sky-scraping nature of the building that’s quickly being assembled next door, witness the following photo that clearly demonstrates that it is now as high as the Sun itself!

Every Wednesday in my email in-box is Air Canada’s announcement of their weekly mini-seat-sale, a customized list of on-sale fares from Charlottetown. Because you can customize this email for any of Air Canada’s departure cities, I have to assume that the selection of the destinations is done by a computer not a person, and so often I end up with unexpected cities as suggestions. This week it as Düsseldorf:

My only experience of Düsseldorf to this point in my life is through the mid-1960s American television show Hogan’s Heros. Not American television’s finest hour, but we watched it eagerly nonetheless (and gained not only a warped perception of World War II, but also a warped perception of Germans).

And now Air Canada thinks I should go there. I’m tempted to do so, just to call their bluff.

(see also On Sale Now: St. John’s to Bogota — similar thoughts from 2005)

It’s very cold here this morning — current temperature is -22°C with a wind chill of -32°C:

It’s days like this that you can start to wonder why we choose to live in such an inhospitable place; if this was an episode of Star Trek, we’d be marvelling at the strange alien tribe of cold-dwellers and wondering what insanity led them to abandon their balmy cradle of humanity and head north.

One of the things I realized during the 24 hours of darkness this weekend was that microblogging (the emission of pithy 140 characters-or-less “status updates” through sites like Twitter, Jaiku and Faceboook), while addictive, is, for me, the digital equivalent of empty calories. It took 24 hours out of the loop to realize that while microblogging has the appearance of substance, it shares more in common with a nervous tick than with writing a novel.

So, at least until I have another epiphany, I’ll be blogging only in the macro format (here), and my Twitter, Jaiku and Plazes streams will end abruptly.

With Facebook I’ve taken the additional step of deleting my account completely (you can do it right here if you want to join me); if following the lifestream of my familiars was distracting, following the lifestream of that guy who sat across from me in grade 12 biology was simply pointless.

Having streamed the minutiae for almost 5 years in one form or another, this will take some getting used to, as the reflex to ping won’t just disappear overnight. So if you see my hands trembling with frustrated glee over the next while, you’ll know why.

The first formal assignment for the Philosophy 105: Technology, Values & Science course I’m participating in this winter is a “case study” that requires abstaining from digital technology for 24 hours. While I’m not technically, as an unofficial interloper, required to carry this out, it wouldn’t feel right to sup from the digital table while everyone else was voluntarily starving, so I’m in.

Thus, as of of 4:00 p.m. Atlantic Time today, January 24, 2009, I’ll be offline.

What offline means is, of course, an arbitrary thing, and the case study guidelines make it clear that figuring out where to draw the line is part of the activity. Do I need to shut off the furnace at home, for example, because it uses digital thermostats? If I was a purist, yes. But I won’t (it’s going down to -20 degrees C tonight!). However I’ll unplug the TV, the clock radio, the computer and the phone. I’ll shut off my mobile phone, leave the car parked, and try to convince Oliver to leave his Nintendo DS turned off (after an initial bout of enthusiasm that involved running around shutting off all the lights, Oliver has turned negative on the whole idea; I’ve got 4 hours to bring him back around).

My jury is still out on the espresso maker — it seems pretty manual, but I’ve a suspicion there’s a chip in their somewhere. And while our oven is clearly out — it has digital-only controls — I’m considering ignoring the fact that the range, which has seemingly analog controls, may also have digital wizardry buried inside.

My original thought was to sequester us away for 24 hours in a primitive cabin but that seemed to ignore the spirit of the case study — it’s easy to shut off when you’re outside of your home environment, a lot harder to confront your dependence on the digital when you’re faced with its stark absence. So we’ll try to maintain some semblance of a normal life and see what it is we miss.

See you on the other side.

I’ve Loved You So Long is playing this weekend at City Cinema. It’s near the top of my “best movies of 2008” list, and I highly recommend it. It is not a comedy.

What with all the brouhaha of late, it seemed like a good idea to become more aware of who controls the “Dizzy Block” — the block at the heart of downtown Charlottetown bordered by Queen, Grafton, University and Kent. So I gathered the disparate sources of corporate and property ownership together to create Who owns the Dizzy Block?, a visual guide:

(this is just a thumbnail image, get the full-size PDF file for maximum utility)