If you use Gizmo5 or another VOIP client, you can now get Charlottetown Public Transit schedule information simply by dialing sip:info@thebus.ca. You’ll get the same interactive system you get if you dial (902) 367-3694 on a regular telephone.

How To Read Your Bill on the Maritime Electric website is a partially useful tool for helping decrypt your electric bill. While it would be nice if there was more detailed information provided, it’s still an excellent starting point for figuring out what you’re paying and for how much.

My favourite part of the page is the address of the customer on the sample bill: only on PEI is it conceivable that there would be a community called Anywheres:

It’s been raining babies in Charlottetown this year — everywhere you look they’re breaking out. Oliver is no longer wee by comparison, but sometimes it’s good to remember that he once was:

The photo is by my friend Steve Muskie and was taken at Steve’s house in Harrisville, NH in the spring of 2001 when Oliver was eight months old.

And as proof of what utterly irresponsible parents we were, here’s me hanging on to Oliver in the back up a pickup truck cum taxi in Chiang Mai, Thailand 8 months later in the water of 2002:

And finally here’s a photo from that summer, when Oliver was walking (he’d taken his first real steps the month before during a visit from my parents):

Our house at 100 Prince Street has two rooms, the upstairs bath and the downstairs kitchen, that are lit with halogen light bulbs on tracks. Each track holds four 50 watt bulbs. The bulbs are hot, burn out a lot, and are expensive to replace ($17 for a package of three).

I’d always been under the impression that there was something special about the whole halogen-lighting setup, and that these were bulbs we couldn’t replace unless we replaced the fixtures; a helpful clerk at Canadian Tire disabused me of this notion this afternoon, telling me and another guy with the same issue that although a compact fluorescent replacement might stick out a little more, there’s no problem with swapping out halogen and replacing them.

And so I bought two packages of two 9 watt ECObulbPLUS compact fluorescent bulbs to retrofit the bulbs in the upstairs bath — three of them burnt out over the last week anyway, so it was high time.

The new bulbs were just a little longer than the ones they replace, but because the fixtures aren’t the kind where the bulbs are flush, this didn’t matter at all.

The light is only slightly less “warm feeling” than the halogens, and not at all like the “fluorescent-lit 1975 high school history classroom in the middle of winter”-light I assumed I might be ending up with:

I replaced 200 watts of bulbs with 36 watts of bulbs. Assuming we have the bathroom lights on for 2 hours a day, or 730 hours a year, that would mean that, before the change, we were using 146 kilowatt hours to light the bathroom every year, for a cost, at the Maritime Electric rate of 15.15 cents/kwh, of $22.11 per year.

After swapping in the new bulbs we’ll use 26.28 kwh/year for a cost of $3.98/year. The bulbs were on sale for $10 per package, so the $20 total cost will be paid for in the first year of the bulbs 9-year rated lifespan.

Next stop: the kitchen. There are six of the 50 watt halogen bulbs there that need replacing, and the Canadian Tire sale is still on.

I’m running an experimental telephone-based bus schedule for the University Avenue line Charlottetown at (902) 367-3694. Phone that number and you’ll hear when the next buses are leaving from the Confederation Centre and from the Charlottetown Mall, and you’ll then have the option of selecting a stop and hearing the next four buses outbound and inbound from that stop. You’re welcome to try it out and get back to me with feedback in the comments.

The same information is available, of course, on the web at thebus.ca and on your mobile browser at m.thebus.ca.

My colleagues upstairs have released a new photo-brokering website, and as a result you can now license my photographs for the cover of your next book about Porto, party invitation, or Wal-Mart “insert your photo here” placeholder. Royalty-free licenses are $2.22 an image.

A helpful piece of guidance from G. this afternoon: Queens Square in downtown Charlottetown, bounded by Queen, Prince, Grafton and Richmond Streets, is 4 acres. The other squares downtown — Rochford, Connaught, Hillsborough and Kings — are 2 acres.

You may recall my shameful commentary on the presentation regarding bottled water made to the Eastern School District back in September. Well, something must have stuck with me.

At a catered meeting yesterday at the University of PEI we were offered chilled bottles of Aquafina bottled water. I reached for one, and then realized that someone else at the meeting had just complained about how the china mugs we’d been provided with for coffee were freezing cold. Then I spotted the tiny kitchen, with a sink, about 6 steps from the meeting room.

I put back the Aquafina, took a pre-chilled mug into the kitchen, and filled it up with good old Charlottetown tap water.

One of my favourite events is the somewhat-annual CBC Prince Edward Island Open House, where the local CBC facility here in Charlottetown throws its door open and lets we in the listenership meet the bodies behind the voices, try on Boomer’s Hawaiian shirts, make our own radio documentaries, run the robotic cameras and eat baklava. Or something like that.

This year’s edition is happening on November 29, 2008 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.. Which hardly seems enough time to get the thousands of people through the doors (really: there were super-long lines last time). But, regardless, it’s well worth a visit if you haven’t before.