Just in case everyone in the world doesn’t know this already: if you are a member of a coop or credit union, and you buy your home heating oil from Coop Fuels, you qualify for their Member Rebate Program:

As a member of a co-op or credit union on PEI you will receive a rebate of 3.0 cents per litre. You will also receive a GST refund (on the amount of the rebate) on all your heating fuel purchased from Co-op Fuels Ltd.

We’ve been benefiting from this program for 15 heating seasons, and it’s not an insubstantial windfall: our last bill of the winter season, in May, is usually half of what it would have been otherwise.

Remember the crazy wheelchair symbol from the Fitzroy Parkade from a few weeks ago? Well an eagle-eyed reader pointed out that it’s been painted out of existence:

If I can make bad design go away simply by blogging about it, what should I set my sights on next?

At the Robertson Library at UPEI you can borrow an iPod and take a guided tour of the library. Unfortunately it’s not a service offered to civilians — you gotta be “faculty, staff, [or] students.”

Inspired by Ton and Robert, I’ve been playing with Qik, an application that runs on my [[Nokia N95]] mobile phone that can stream live video from phone to the Internet. Here’s a video of Qik in operation:

Here’s the video I streamed live on Qik and here’s an RSS feed of all my Qik videos.

While it’s been possible to shoot video on mobile phones for a while, and it’s been possible to upload that video to places like YouTube and Google Video, using Qik takes the process to a whole other level: there’s literally nothing you need to do to make it work: you just turn it on and stream. So no transferring from phone to computer, worrying about format conversion, waiting for the video to upload: you just hit “Stream” on the phone, and you’re broadcasting.

Which means that the 4 ounce device in my pocket can now reflect my immediate surroundings to the world at large more quickly than almost any other technology.

While my [[Nokia N95]] has a capable web browser, it’s screen is small enough that using the regular Plazes website to update my geopresence is cumbersome. And so I’ve created TinyPlazer.com:

The first time you visit the site, you enter you Plazes username and password; these are then saved in a cookie, and you don’t have to enter them again. From then on you simply type the name of a Plaze (or part of the name) and your status message. If the Plaze name you enter matches only one location then your presence is updated automatically; if it matches more than one, then you’re shown a list of matching Plazes and can select one.

I’ve created a Plazes Group for TinyPlazer adherents.

Photo by pterjan - some rights reserved.

In preparation for next month’s Wearable OPAC workshop, I’ve begun to lay some of the technical groundwork.

Last week I ordered up a Nokia N95-4 8GB, the latest incarnation of Nokia’s flagship device. It’s good for my purposes because it has wifi, has enough memory to run PAMP (PHP, Apache and MySQL), and it’s tiny and “wearable.” Oh, and you can also use it to call anyone, anywhere in the world, stream live video to the Internet, and locate yourself when lost in the Arctic with its built-in GPS (these features will be less vital for OPAC-creation purposes).

Today I got PAMP up and running: it’s actually rather easy to do, as there’s a canned install that’s pre-signed. You just have to click “OK” about a thousand times while it installs the various packages.

Lacking a good library-specific dataset for experimenting, I decided to use PEI Civic Address Data to take things for a ride. I initially ran into a problem with creating indexes, but found a workaround, and after waiting for about 30 minutes for the ASCII file to import, via Navicat, into the MySQL server running on my phone, I had a table containing 67,261 civic addresses ready to go.

Performance isn’t all that bad: with indexes on the street number, street name and community name I can find any civic address on PEI in less than a second. How much harder can cataloging data be?

I ran into a few hiccups along the way:

• The Bluetooth File Exchange on my MacBook, which is what I was using to move files back and forth to the N95, would time out from time to time, and then would refuse to re-establish a new connection until I rebooted the phone. That’s somewhat inconvenient.
• To work around that problem, I set up WebDAV in the Apache on the phone so that I could mount it as a remote drive from my MacBook. This mostly worked. And then it stopped working entirely. I have yet to figure out why.
• I have yet to completely figure out Devicescape, the third-party wifi manager I’m running to, in theory, make wifi management seamless. Sometimes it connects me to a wifi network on a separate LAN segment here in the office, which makes things really difficult. I can’t figure out how to make it stop doing this, other than disconnecting and hoping it connects to my local LAN the next time.
• A couple of times I got a “Got error 124 from storage engine” error message from the MySQL server on the phone. Not sure why.

That all said, I was able to whip up a small PHP application to run on the phone that accepts a civic address number, street name and/or community name and returns matching addresses. This is Good Sign for things to come.

I’d like to smooth out the bumps in the development toolchain before the workshop so that we don’t have to keep rebooting the phone (nothing like waiting for a phone to reboot to dampen a scintillating workshop).

If you’ve ever had anything go wrong with an Air Canada journey — cancelled flight, weather delay, missed connection, lost luggage — then you know well the torture of endless lines at the counter, often followed by a “oh, we can’t help you here — you have to call the 1-800 number” or a “you need to go downstairs.”

The airline always appears to be operating on the edge, keeping just enough staff around for normal operations and getting completely flummoxed when things go off the rails.

So what’s their answer to a winter season’s worth of customer frustration?

Pay them $25 — in advance, on the chance that something will go wrong — and their new On My Way service will give you access to a “travel assistance service that will help get you on your way quickly, no matter what setback you encounter.”

This is almost comical enough to be joke.

I can only imagine that their next up-sell is going to be something like “Crash No More” …

Air Canada understands how terrifying it can be to hurtle through the air and 500 miles: the fear of unpleasant death is ever-present. That’s why we’re introducing Crash No More, a new flight crew upgrade service that will have you flying in peace.

Crash No More is now available at a low price when you book your next flight on Air Canada: for only $25 per flight segment, we’ll replace your regular pilot and first officer with seasoned veterans, many with actual combat flying experience. These are pilots who know the skies well, and are trained for any circumstance, thus helping you avoid the inconvenience of unplanned crashes or midair events.

I’ve got no problem with splitting off checked baggage, lounge access, meals and advance seat selection into optional services, but charging for what is an essential part of just being an airline is unconscionable.