As if their legal assault on our friends the Tweels wasn’t enough, this week multinational developer Homburg has added a mysterious new feature to its Fitzroy Street Skyscraper:

While the specific role of the new feature is unclear, the ruk.ca art department has come up with one possibility, an Employee Arrival Optimization Tunnel:

With the developer’s stated desire to squeeze every last square foot out of the property, it seems only logical to conclude that they would also seek methods to optimize the time of the employees who will one day work there.

I have been infected by both Steven and Deb in the 7 Things viral epidemic. I think this makes me the most popular blogger in the Charlottetown-Moncton corridor. I’m not sure if I should list 7 things or 14 things, or maybe 10.5 things. But here goes:

1. In the late 1980s I spent New Years Eve on the Dragonfly Commune outside of Bancroft. We slept in a bed that, if memory serves, was made out of saplings. It was not comfortable. Raccoon may have been consumed. I can’t recall if there was dancing under the moon, but it’s within the realm of possibility.
2. An article of mine on media was once published in a Christian Anarchist ‘zine; the pullout quote was: “What I can do is say, in a wholly metaphorical sense, ‘fuck you’ to the mainstream media and seize control of the culture I consume.” Plus c’est la même chose.
3. Amidst an impromptu dalliance slash vacation in the Caribbean I was dumped in favour of the Cuban saxophone player from the band at our resort. In reaction to this I started to smoke. But only for a week.
4. While necking with Catherine on the side of a highway near Kitchener in the early 1990s we were interrupted by the police. We tried to explain that we were “just checking the map.” I believe the phase “move along” may have been uttered.
5. During a long run of hitchhiking that lasted from the time I was 18 to the time I was 24, several times I promised to myself (and maybe to God) that if someone picked me up I would be the guy that, once he had a car, would always stop. I have not honoured this promise. I will go to hell.
6. I think Mandy Patinkin is a musical genius.
7. I stole a black magic marker from my grade 3 classroom.

I thence tag: Shawn Murphy, Dale Sorensen, Billy Amon, Rob Lantz, Mark Leggott, Joel Ives and Dave Cormier.

Once again I have been passed over for a Cabinet post. Just what is it that I’m doing wrong?

One of my favourite applications for my Nokia N95 mobile phone is Step Counter: it uses the accelerometer in the phone to detect every step I take and then displays information about when and how many steps I take each day.

When Step Counter is running on the phone, it looks like this:

Step Counter also keeps a diary of each day’s step activity, and provides several different ways for seeing this. For example, this graph shows the level of activity over the entire day:

I started the day walking Oliver to school (it was cold yesterday, hence our “intense” walking), then walked to Casa Mia where I stayed motionless until 9:30 a.m. I then walked back to the office, worked a tiny bit, walked to the bus for 10:00 a.m. and then walked to my class at UPEI. Class was over at 11:20 and I walked to the cafeteria, had a walking lunch, then took the bus down to the Royal Bank stop where I got off and did some more outdoor intense-style walking down to the Credit Union, and then back to the office. I was sedentary until about 1:30 when I walked home, drove Catherine to the airport, did some errands, then picked up Oliver. We got home about 3:00 p.m. and, as you can see, I didn’t do a lot of walking around after that.

Oprah says we should be walking 10,000 steps a day, and Step Counter lets you set a daily goal, and then see your progress toward meeting it. Yesterday I did 6,717 steps, and so got about two thirds of the way there:

Even though I took the car to pick up Oliver, it was a fairly typical day for me. Even after just a day of tracking things, it’s obvious (and of course should have been obvious to me even without gizmotic assistance) that I’ve got some nighttime motionlessness issues, mostly television-watching related. A nice after-supper walk and I wouldn’t have much trouble getting into Oprah territory.

I woke up this morning thinking that the news-feeds would be crackling with reports about how Christian Colson said fuck on the Golden Globes broadcast last night — his film Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture, the last award of the night, and when “Wrap Up” came onto the teleprompter he uttered one of the seven words you can’t say on television.

Given that there’s almost no coverage of this, I’m wondering if, perhaps, nobody other than Canadians watching on the anything-goes CTV, actually heard him.

Any of you Americans in the readership watching last night?

There are two schools of thought on the cultural ancestry question: one view holds that it’s important to maintain a strong cultural connection to our ancestry and that the deep spirit of our ancestors lives within is, the other view sees this all simply as mythology that we perpetuate for our own comfort, and that simple genetic relationship to those from the old country has no practical connection to our modern lives.

I have a foot in each camp. On one hand it seems absurd for a Scots-Irish-Ukrainian-Croat like me to feel any connection to the cultures that were home to my grandparents (or their parents, or their parents). On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel connected to each of those home cultures in some way, especially the Croatian and Ukrainian one that are so unlike my day-to-day existence.

Which is how we ended up at the Ukrianian Christmas Dinner here in Charlottetown with Catherine and Oliver.

Having been a victim of untold multicultural days in my youth, wherein we would traipse from church to church sample the food, music, dance and gaily painted crafts of the the immigrant cultures, I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from the Ukrainian diaspora in Charlottetown.

It turned out to be a fairly sedate affair, run like clockwork: we sat, we ate, we watched slides, we went home. The diners at our table — there was assigned seating — were a mixture of the curious (two sisters from Parkdale at their first Ukrainian event ever) and the Ukrainian (a man from out west with Ukrainian parents who’d married an Islander). Looking around the room it seemed this was as typical mix. And there was also Leo Cheverie, of course.

The eating was central to the event, and there was a full buffet of Ukrainian delights:

It was generally agreed that low point of the menu was the kutia, a mixture of wheat, honey, poppy seeds and raisins that tasted like sweet cardboard. It was the only bowl that didn’t get polished off at the buffet:

There were two types of pyrohy (perogies) on offer, sauerkraut and cheese; both were serviceable although, of course, nowhere near like my Nana and Baba used to make:

In addition there was pickled herring (quite tasty, although I prefer the bold Swedish I had last summer), pickles, beet soup, cabbage rolls, jellied fish, sauerkraut and peas, and mushroom sauce. The Ukrainians obviously don’t go for the bold flavours: it was an off-white coloured meal, well-prepared, but unlikely to blow your socks off. You can’t choose the food of your ancestors, alas.

The dessert table was overflowing with tasty delights: strudel, several different cakes, a fruit compote and khrustyky (which was much smaller than my Nana’s — the size of a stubby pencil where Nana’s were the size of a pinwheel):

After the plates were cleared away Sharon Labchuk presented a slide show on her travels Ukraine this summer, which was very interesting. Her family (and, she said, most Ukrainian Canadians) is from the same region as my great-grandparents, in Western Ukraine, so it was nice to get a photographic feel for the area.

I was up at UPEI this morning waiting for the bus when someone beside me asked for the time. I told him, and then watched as he pulled out a bus schedule that he’s printed for himself on thebus.ca — it was cool to see the product in the field.

In celebration, I’ve extended the concept further: at Print a Charlottetown Transit Stop Schedule you can select any stop along the main University Avenue line and print an 8½ x 11 inch poster with all the scheduled times for that stop, suitable for pasting up at the stop itself:

You’ll notice that the poster includes a QR Code: with a suitably-equipped mobile phone you can point your camera at the code and have your mobile web browser load up the mobile schedule for the stop.

If you’ve got access to a laminator and some way of affixing things to poles or bus shelters, I’d encourage you to stick posters up at each of the stops along the line.

Speaking of the bus, apparently the telephone number (902-367-3694) for the Bus Schedule by Telephone service that I hacked together back in November has now been printed in some of the transit literature, which means its graduated from hack to infrastructure in less than 60 days. You can see a log of the last 20 calls to this number on the new Charlottetown Transit Telephone Schedule Call Log page.

From Pedro comes a link to TiltShiftMaker, which I don’t completely understand, but which seems to be able to make photos look like models. Like this:

A few observations about the technology I’ve come across at the University of PEI so far:

• Before class on Wednesday I needed to get something from my server back at the office. I was able to use a public PC in the library to download and install the PuTTY SSH client, and then connect to the office server. It was nice to find machines that weren’t locked down to within an inch of their lives.
• The computer hooked up to the screen projector in our classroom (Main Building 120) is running some version of Windows, and Windows has been set to automatically download and install updates and then prompt the user to reboot. As a result every 5 minutes over yesterday’s lecture the PowerPoint presentation on the screen was interrupted by a pop-up dialog box that had to be dismissed.
• Suggested readings have, so far, been distributed as proprietary Word and PowerPoint files, which open with varying degrees of success on my Mac. It would be nice to see some movement toward widespread use of open file formats to avoid this problem.
• The university uses Moodle as its “virtual learning environment.” My experiments with Moodle to date suggest that it’s a 1998-style web application that’s constricted around the traditional academic hierarchy and course delivery system. While it’s nice that Moodle is open source, in the age of Facebook its user interface seems antique. And it’s unfortunate that the infinite flexibilities of technology haven’t been exploited to experiment with different ways of teaching and learning: as it stands, Moodle seems little more than an electronic recapitulation of the same-old same-old.
• There is a kiosk in the hallway of student centre that can tell you the history of the University and let you watch a video message from the University President. It cannot, however, tell you when the next bus leaves campus, nor how to find Main Building (i.e. things you may actually want to know).

The most exciting development I’ve come across so far on campus is that the reference desk in the Robertson Library is in the process of being removed and replaced with an in-library coffee shop. There’s no word on whether this shop will improve on the abysmal cappuccino situation, but I’ve promised to endow an espresso machine if the opportunity arises (Don and Marion McDougall can’t hog all the naming-rights fund for themselves).