There must be something in the water over there in Brighton that causes musicians to become politicians. Or politicians to become musicians. Or something like that. First we had Wes Macaleer, renowned for bringing his guitar along to staff celebrations when he was Minister of Economic Development. And now Councillor Rob Lantz unleashes his guitar on us.

Wes was more “up in the air, the Junior Birdsmen” than Rob who, as he describes it, is channelling the Allman Brothers.

A demonstration of what a talented musician, Imogen Heap, enhanced by digital prosthetics, is capable of: thanks to Fabrica (which has been a treasure-trove of goodness this week after lying dormant recently).

I’m not sure whether Aliant’s Stories on the Phone is a very, very good thing or a very, very bad thing. I tend to lean in the “very, very bad” direction, as I think getting a bedtime story over the phone seems like it would be missing a lot of what makes bedtime stories important (i.e. the opportunity to communicate with your child). That said, I suppose if there’s nothing else available, it’s better to have a story over the phone than not at all. Call 1-888-280-7070 to find out for yourself.

Canadian Blood Services has a website, onematch.ca where you can register online to become a donor of stem cells, either from your blood or from your bone marrow.

I’ve hacked together a proof of concept connection between Jott and Plazes. If you have accounts on each, you can call Jott from your mobile and “voice plaze” yourself. Here’s how:

First, go to Jott.com and login. Then visit your My Links page and click on Add it here under “Developers - Got a custom link to add?”. Enter the following information:

• Link Name: Plazes
• Setup Url: http://ruk.ca/plazes/jott/configure.php
• Link Url: http://ruk.ca/plazes/jott/post.php
• Send SMS Response: your choice; all you receive back right now is “Your message was received.”

When you save the new link, you’ll be automatically redirected to a page on my website where you’ll be prompted to enter your Plazes username and password:

Please note that this information is not transmitted or stored securely. So use at your own risk.

Now it’s as simple as calling Jott (or, if you want to test, just sending a Jott message from the website) and saying “Plazes” when asked “Who do you want to Jott?”. Then, after the sound of the beep, say:

status message at plaze

For example, you could say “hanging out at pony bar” or “working hard at casa mia”. Jott will transcribe what you’ve said, send it to my link, where I’ll split the message into “status message” and “plaze” parts and use the Plazes API to create a new Plazes activity.

It’s important to note that the word at is used to separate your “status message” from your “plaze”. You can leave out the status message by just saying “at plaze.” And, of course, you can’t say something like “At home talking to Jim at work at Reinvented Office,” as this will drive the (very primitive) parsing algorithm insane.

Obviously this works only for existing Plazes, and will locate you at the first match for a keyword search of Plazes for the location you speak. Remember that Jott supports spelling out words, so it’s probably better to say “p l a z e s” than “plazes” if you’re trying to create an activity at “Plazes HQ”.

This is all only an hour old, so it’s prone to bugs, will not report failures properly (or at all) and may not work. I welcome any comments you have about any experiments you do, or suggestions for improvement.

Note that Jott transcription doesn’t happen immediately — I’ve had it take as much as 5 minutes — so your Plazement will not happen instantly. Check your Jott inbox to see how things are getting along.

Bendito Machine.

Air Canada has been running a curious seat sale for the past several weeks one of the unexpected deals of which was a fare from Charlottetown to Osaka, Japan for $1000 return, taxes included. Japan has been high on my list of places to visit, and with [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] away in Ontario for 10 days over March Break the stars seemed to be aligning. Then I started looking around for an apartment to rent and it turned out that Kyoto was possibly a better alternative. Then, suddenly, the prospect of flying for 20 hours to spend 7 days in Kyoto — yes, that Kyoto — seemed, if not absurd, in poor environmental taste. So you’ll find me in my usual chair at Casa Mia over March break.

Training chopsticks for kids. I don’t read Japanese, but there’s a lot of useful-looking information on that page, including an absurdly helpful number of real life action shots.