We were talking at [[Gong Bao Thursday]] a few weeks ago about the announcement from Crime Stoppers that they now accept reports by SMS. What we found intriguing is that they claim that the text messages are “anonymous,” which is a curious claim because although it’s possible to make an “anonymous” call from, say, a pay telephone, when you send an SMS from your mobile, your number is sent too, as the “from” address.

If you read the TipSoft SMS Security and Anonymity Overview — they’re the company that runs this system — you’ll see that, in fact, your anonymity is simply a policy, not a technical fact. The most important sentence in the document is this one:

SMS messages from mobile phones are sent to a secure server located in Canada that is independently operated by Mr. Jacksch’s company, where the mobile phone number is encrypted and assigned an alias.

So, in other words, they’re using a third-party to make Crime Stoppers blind to the calling number, but the calling number is still being sent as part of the SMS, and from a technical perspective the calling number is available to the service, even if it is later encrypted. This seems like a pretty liberal interpretation of the concept of anonymity, especially because we’re being asked to trust an unnamed third party to protect our privacy. I’m not sure, if I was going to turn in my local mob boss, I’d be comfortable with this.

Later our discussion wandered from snitch-by-SMS to the mechanics of regular old low-tech snitching, and somebody made a joke about how they would have to pay you by doing something cloak and dagger like leaving an envelope under a tree. It turns out that this is pretty much how it does work.

According to this CBC story, there are 12 streets scheduled for resurfacing in 2008. Here’s what they look like on a map (larger map):

The list includes the portion of Prince Street that runs in front of our house. Interestingly, this portion was partially resurfaced in 2007 in advance of the Tour de PEI cycling race. Indeed the CBC reports that we’ll get first crack at resurfacing this year too:

For the most part, streets with the worst rating will be done first. The exception is Prince Street, which gets first crack because the Tour de P.E.I. will run down the street on June 12.

Here’s the stage of the Tour de PEI that runs through downtown Charlottetown by our house. As in 2007, nobody from the City of Charlottetown nor the Tour de PEI has bothered to contact us to tell us that they’ll be closing our street for this purpose.

This summer on Sundays at 10 p.m. beginning June 8, 2008, CTV will be airing Mad Men. I saw an episode over the weekend, and it’s very good.

Elmine’s Birthday Bash Conference and BBQ. What a great idea.

I moved to Peterborough, Ontario in 1985 to go to Trent University. While it didn’t really work out for me and Trent — I only lasted a year — I liked the city enough to stay until 1993. After we moved to the Island I went back a few times, but I hadn’t been back for 10 years until this weekend.

I was up in Ontario to attend the funeral of my friend Stephen Southall’s father George, who died last week. Air Canada’s schedule conspired to take me up a few days early, so after a day with my parents and a day with [[Catherine]]’s parents, on Friday afternoon I was in Kingston in the unusual church-in-a-basement that is Zion United.

I’ve known Stephen for more than 20 years, and in that time I’ve had many opportunities to spend time with his parents and his seemingly endless collection of brothers and sisters. The Southalls are nothing if not eccentric, and George Southall’s memorial was appropriately filled with wit and humour. Stephen gave an excellent eulogy that both managed to capture his father’s spirit and to make obvious to anyone who didn’t know that George’s spirit will live on, in part, through the verve of his children.

The memorial also gave me an opportunity to see my old friend Karen for the first time in a long, long time, and to meet her kids (two of which were born 7 days before Oliver). And of course all of the Southalls were 10 years older than the last time I’d seen them, so there were plenty of new children and new partners and new adventures to learn about. It was all very teleportational and surreal; it felt, in a way, like I’d fallen asleep and woken up a decade later and everything was both the same and completely different.

This trend continued over the weekend: late on Friday night Stephen and I escaped from the mayhem and made our way back up to Peterborough, and on Saturday morning I woke up early and took a walk around my old neighbourhoods.

I went by 241 Dublin Street, where I lived with Linda and Simon and Brenda above a screen-printing shop:

And 451 Water Street, first George and Leslie’s home, then mine for a small slice of time before I left town for the first time, and then Stephen’s home for 14 years:

Later in the day, on a walkabout with Stephen, we went by 621 George Street, where I first met Catherine (she was my next-door neighbour) and where I lived with Tim and Dianne and Richard. My room was in the attic, reached by climbing up a ladder at the end of the hall; you can see it in the photo — the three tiny windows at the top of the house:

And by 139-1/2 Hunter Street West, where Catherine and I first lived together (in an apartment on the third floor), and the last place we lived in Peterborough before moving east:

Saturday afternoon Stephen and I walked across the London Street Foot Bridge to East City to see the hole in the ground where 107 Hazlitt Street used to be:

I lived in the house that used to occupy that spot twice, both times renting from Roy Wright, once with Simon for a summer that ended with us getting kicked out, replaced with new tenants, and then again the next year with Stephen and Mary Clare. That tenancy ended up with the police at the door and Roy insisting we weren’t actually his tenants at all.

Down on Hunter Street in East City we passed the old house with the turret:

I had tea and popcorn in that turret with Jennifer Janz, Jake Berkowtiz and Betsy Trumpener in the fall of 1985; we were conspiring to create a show for Trent Radio. It’s the first memory of have of Peterborough; I thought I was in the apex of hipdom. These days the house is home to a real estate office and a bridal boutique.

Which is not unlike what has happened to the rest of Peterborough. The old home of Projects for Change, 219-1/2 Hunter Street, our storefront activism business, is now a leather goods store, and its second home, a few doors up at 231 Hunter, is a trendy bar called the Rusty Snail. Peterborough now has espresso shops and Himalayan restaurants and high-end video rental shops. There are also a lot of pawn shops and cheque cashing outfits, and more than a few empty storefronts on the main streets.

The city seems to lead a dual life: half upscale gentrified hipster and half decaying post-industrial milltown. While this dual identity was evident when I lived there in the late 1980s, the differences between the two now seem starker: from the look of the downtown on a Saturday morning, the two most evident demographics were beardy panhandlers and MEC-clothed women with golden retrievers.

Of course I was there but for a few hours, and my visit was tinged with the putrified glasses of a middle aged expat looking back at his college years, so it’s quite possible I got it all wrong.

Late Saturday night, after a visit with my old friend Nancy and her daughter — a year old when I last saw her, and now a smart, witty and confident 15 year old — I headed out the Parkway onto Highway 115 and home to my parents. After Mother’s Day brunch in Burlington with Mike and Karen and Mom and Dad I was back on PEI on Monday after an all-day flight back from Toronto.

It’s good to be home.

Just to ensure there’s no misunderstanding, you may have read this Guardian story about Catherine’s generosity and been left with the impression, after reading “[b]oth Miller and her partner have been involved fighting poverty,” that I have somehow secretly been involved fighting poverty.

You can rest easy: this was simply a misunderstanding, and your impression of me as someone who mostly just hangs around drinking cappuccino, obsessing about geopresence, and writing snarky self-aggrandizing blog posts can stand. Catherine is the generous heart of our family; for that I deserve no credit at all.

I’ve never owned a microwave oven. It’s really the only thing, other than smoking, that I absolutely forbid in our house.

Why? I don’t understand how they work, and however it is that they do work seems to defy all logic. I suppose “electricity” is no less mysterious, and thus my suspicions should extend to regular ovens too. But they don’t. At least regular ovens got hot. Which in my book is a necessary requirement of anything that’s going to be doing the cooking in my house.

Of course this has caused others in my house some degree of hardship — no baby bottles were microwaved, no chicken breasts get quickly defrosted, no quick popcorn-in-a-bag for us.

It’s been mostly a lonely, irrational obstinacy that’s kept the microwaves out all these years.

Until today, when I spotted this sign on the wall of The Courtyard, a coffee shop on Locke Street in Hamilton:

The sign makes reference to Dangers of Microwaving, which is a much more complete list of anti-microwave reasoning. I don’t know enough about the science of microwaves to be able to judge the truth of what’s written there, and it may be all drivel. But as it bolsters my until-now-knee-jerk anti-microwave stance, I welcome the help.

Snapped from the window of seat 4A on Air Canada 8875 from Halifax to Charlottetown on Tuesday, May 6, 2008:

95% of my life is conducted within the confines of the area this photo captures.

Announced.

There are a many reasons why, sitting in the Halifax Airport on a three-hour layover, you may wish to use a thesaurus to find synonyms for ‘anal’, not the least of which are the myriad things that can go wrong in this area when traveling.

You may also be looking for a synonyms to allude to something like this (as I was here). Or, perhaps, you are looking for sexual imagery.

Unfortunately, you will be out of luck not matter your reasons: