In addition to its regular Saturday, December 20, 2008 opening (where you will again have an exciting opportunity to purchase Prince Street School raffle tickets from me and Oliver from 10:30 a.m. to Noon beside the pierogi booth!), the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market will be open on Tuesday, December 23 from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. for all your Christmas shopping needs.

Something in the Air is a “2001 documentary about the dangers of pesticides used by potato farmers in PEI” from the National Film Board:

Thanks to Suzanne Long for the pointer (to the NFB’s new snazziness).

Just in case you are a Nabaztag rabbit owner and haven’t twigged to this fact yet, the my.violet.net application allows you to manage your rabbit, and all your other Violet things.

Our colleagues at Yankee have suffered a bout of freezing rain today, and it’s made travel difficult and has created power problems; this is something one must suffer from time to time with a company located in weather-rich southern New Hampshire.

So, for today, everyone at Yankee is staying home. The main company telephone number has a message to this effect, delivered in true Yankee style; it starts:

Thank you for calling Yankee Publishing, home of Yankee Magazine and The Old Farmer’s Almanac. The weather has gotten to us and our offices will be closed today…

Is it any wonder I have great affection for this company.

Pamela Courtenay-Hall, a professor of philosophy at the University of PEI, has a well-worded op-ed piece in today’s Guardian about Sunday shopping. She writes, in part:

Further, to construe ‘individual liberty’ as being primarily about ‘consumer choice’ is to misconceive the fundamental role of individuals in a society. It is not to consume or to own stores. It is to build a good life in community with others.

It’s nice to see this issue discussed outside of the usual narrow commercial slash religious context.

Here’s a snippet from Google Analytics showing the source of traffic to OpenCorporations.org from November 24, 2008 to December 11, 2008. Over that period there were 7,863 individual visits to the site. Here’s how they got there:

It’s interesting that the traffic from the CBC and from The Guardian was effectively equal; traffic from Dan James’ blog was about half of each of those, but still worthy of note as Dan runs a tiny little blog, not a vast media empire.

Of the 7,863 total visits to the site, 5,232, or 70%, were from Internet addresses identified by Google as being in Charlottetown, making “intensely local” a pretty good way of characterizing the audience (by comparison, only 17% of the traffic to ruk.ca comes from Charlottetown).

Something I didn’t notice yesterday: there’s a “Data Download” link on the “Detail” tab of the Jean Canfield Building energy monitor applet. This means that, for example, at this link you can grab a comma-separated data file of the raw data presented under “Energy.” This is very cool.

Air Canada is selling Halifax to Beijing for $565 each way for travel until April 30, 2009. March break in Prince Edward Island is March 16 to 20, 2009.

Holy.Shit.Shopping. What a wonderful place to do holiday shopping; shame it’s so far away. Surf here for depth and understanding.