The City of Charlottetown sent along a letter to our landlords here at the office about a proposed development that’s slated for the empty lot two doors up Fitzroy Street:

The City of Charlottetown has received an application in accordance with Section 4.29, Other Variances, for a variance to the property located at 96-100 Fitzroy Street (PTD #’s 344085, 344101 & 344093) which is zoned Downtown Mixed User (DMU), to allow an increase in height from 39.4 feet (12.0 metres) as required by the Zoning and Development Bylaw, to 98s feet (29.8 metres). The pupose of the variance is to permit the construction of a seven story office building. The proposed height of the building from grade to rooftop is eighty five (85) feet. The proposed height of the building from grade to the top of the mechanical penthouse is 98 feet. The proposed building will also be constructed to the property line or zero (0) setback. The attached map shows the location of the proposed structure on the property. In regards to parking the developer is proposing off lot parking or cash-in-lieu or a combination of these options as determined by Council.

As a property owner within 100 meters of this application, you are being notified of the requested variance. The City solicits your comments with respect to the proposed variance. If there are any objection(s) we would appreciate receiving the reasons for the objection(s) within fourteen (14) calendar days of the date of this letter. In accordance with Section 4.29 the City Planning Board will consider this application at its next regular meeting and may then recommend to Council to grant or deny this variance. Written comments on this application should be submitted no later than 12:00 noon on February 19, 2008.

If you have any questions in regards to this proposed variance, please contact the Planning Department at 629-4158.

The lot in question has been empty for the past few years; formerly it was occupied by a rather dilapidated building which was torn down. In recent years the lot was used as a parking lot for construction workers building the Jean Canfield Building across the street, and last fall the parking lot was closed and an 8 foot high plywood fence was built around 3/4 of the lot. This is what it looks like this morning:

Nominee for “Best Blog Post Title of the Year,” at least so far: Diana Barry turns her back on Charlottetown, chooses Evil Dead instead. Which contains the quote:

In my heart I want to return to the Island and have the magic again, but in my mind I know Evil Dead is the way to go.

A review of new devices that visually show energy usage. See also this WIRED article from 2001 about the “Viridian Electricity Meter.”

I’ve always called the spoons that accompany tiny cups of espresso “tiny spoons.” It seems they actually have a formal name: demitasse spoons. A demitasse, appropriately enough, being “a small cup of coffee” according to Oxford. A favourite part of our trip to Lisbon last year was finding a hardware store down near the train station that sold “tiny spoons” for 30 cents a piece. They were flimsy, and had burs on the edges, but I bought a half dozen and I treasure them.

Often when transiting through a larger airport like Heathrow I’ve spotted airplanes that have “Star Alliance” branding rather than the branding of an individual airline. And I’ve wondered what exactly these airplanes are. Thanks to the excellent Star Alliance Brand Book, I now have my answer:

Here you can download the specification sheets for the Star Alliance promotional livery that need to appear on 3% of each carrier’s international fleet.

The so-called “promotional livery” is explained in more detail in this 2002 press release:

Star Alliance is the only airline alliance that consistently displays a promotional aircraft livery. The flying billboards, featuring Star Alliance’s unique symbol, are highly visible at airports and in the air, and serve to build Star Alliance awareness and stature around the world.

First Scharffen Berger got purchased by Hershey and today comes the announcement that Coca-Cola has acquired a 40% stake in Honest Tea.

While I can understand the pure business rationale for the additional cash and resources that these kind of acquisitions allows smaller “boutique” manufacturers, they also seem to ignore that part of the attraction of the products they make derives from the fact the independent style and approach taken to produce them. For me it’s always been as much about the politics as it has been about the atoms.

“Honest Tea by Coca-Cola” will no doubt taste the same as little old independent Honest Tea. And it will probably be a lot easier to find (yes, I’ve complained about this very fact). But it will also now be tinged, at least for me, with the after-taste of Coca-Cola and the foul multinationalness that represents.

Fifteen years ago last weekend I found myself in the serials section of the Metro Reference Library in downtown Toronto looking to kill some time. So I picked up a copy of The Guardian in the newspaper section and sat down to read it. I’d only been to Prince Edward Island once, for two days, the fall before, on a drive back from Halifax and I knew almost nothing about the place. But Catherine and I were casting about for a new horizon, and so I was primed for possible adventures. Which is when I came across this:

It happened to be February 3 itself when I found the ad, and so I immediately got in my car, drove the 90 minutes back to my home in Peterborough, typed up my resume and faxed it to the PEI Crafts Council before the deadline.

A week later I got a call offering me an interview (although I’d have to pay my own way to Charlottetown). So I borrowed some money from my parents for an airplane ticket, flew to Halifax, hooked up with my friends Richard and Victoria, and we drove over to Charlottetown for the interview. We had lunch at the Old Dublin Pub, dinner at Shaddy’s Shawarma Palace (which had just opened two weeks earlier), and stayed overnight at the CP Prince Edward hotel (with a Richard and Victoria’s giant black lab welcomed at the front desk).

That night I had my interview in the back room at the old Crafts Council shop on Richmond Street. Morley Pinsent was there, along with Pat MacDonald, and Darren Matheson and the rest of the Board, along with Irene Arsenault, who managed the Council. I’d taken a risk when I wrote my cover letter, trying to mask my relative immaturity (I was hardly a “MATURE, experienced computer skilled individual”) with humour (I suggested that hitchhiking across the country, for example, was part of my relevant experience); this h turned out to be a plus, as I think it intrigued the committee as much as anything else. I remember being asked about my relevant “crafts industry experience” and trying to spin a yarn about how my relationship with Catherine had given me an “appreciation for craftwork.”

It must have worked, as the next morning I got a call offering me the job, and, somewhat foolishly, said I could start in two weeks. So I rocketed back to Peterborough and asked Catherine how she felt about moving to the Island. In two weeks. While she was up for the former, the later was a little bit of a stretch — she did have a life of her own to wind down, after all — so while I arrived with a pick-up truck and U-Haul trailer full of our life’s possessions on March 16, Catherine didn’t arrive until a month later.

My friend Simon drove down with me, and we spent the first three nights at the Queens Arms Motel in West Royalty until I found an apartment at 50 Great George Street and Simon headed back to Ontario. I moved into the apartment in the middle of a blizzard, managing somehow to back my truck into the house next door and cut off their phone service.

The next morning I reported for work.

Let me briefly sing the praises of the combination of NetNewsWire, my longtime RSS newsreader for the Mac, and NewsGator Mobile for the iPhone, a web-based application to which NetNewsWire automagically syncs.

When “syncing” got added to NetNewsWire (after its acquisition by NewsGator) I was perplexed by why such a feature would be useful. I tried it out for a while to sync up the RSS feeds on my laptop and my desktop, but at the time it seemed slow and prone to problems, and when I integrated my life onto a single MacBook even that utility went out the door.

Things have improved. A lot.

The syncing from the NetNewsWire end is seamless and very fast — your feed list, and what you’ve read and not read is auto-synced to the NewsGator servers every time you refresh your feeds and when you exit the application. And so the next time you visit NewsGator Mobile for the iPhone, you can essentially pick up where you last left off. And the syncing works both ways, so if you read a few things on the iPhone, the next time you load NetNewsWire they appear as “read” there automatically too.

By far and away the killer feature of this combination, however, is the ability to “clip” feed items in the mobile client (you just click “Clip” when scanning the feed). Anything clipped this way automatically shows up in the “Clipping” folder in NetNewsWire:

This means that I can open NewsGator on my iPod Touch every morning over coffee, scan my new items — something the iPod UI is very tuned for — and “clip” anything that demands a closer read. Then, once I get to the office I simply fire up NetNewsWire and read the items that I’ve clipped, something my big screen and full-sized browser is much better suited for.

And one final cool feature of all of this: anything that I clip, on either NewsGator Mobile or NetNewsWire, ends up automatically on my clipping RSS feed, which you can subscribe to yourself and share in the joys of my peculiar interests.

For some reason I thought that it would be better to take the bus to the [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] this morning than to drive — what with the ice all over the roads and the driving rain. I’m not sure why this seemed like a good idea, especially given that taking the bus means walking along Belvedere Avenue to the Market with a sketchy sidewalk:

Amazingly enough we didn’t get completely drenched, as most drivers were watchful enough to slow down and avoid the puddles. There were some clods that came awfully close to dousing us, though; frightening to realize that some people really aren’t paying any attention at all to their driving environment.

By 12:00 noon the sun was out and the day was very pleasant.

As we know, Maritime Electric has been in the centre of the news this week here in Prince Edward Island. Something that caused me, when walking by on my way up to drop Oliver off at school, to take another look at their headquarters building at the corner of Kent and Prince in downtown Charlottetown:

If you look carefully at that photo you’ll notice that although there are electrical wires running through this intersection none of them actually run into Maritime Electric itself, suggesting that, despite their widespread advocacy for “electricity,”, they don’t actually use it themselves.

To say that this is hypocritical is an understatement, and places the credibility of the company in some dispute. In any case, the situation certainly demands further investigation, especially as, without electricity, it’s unclear how they power their lights, computers and other devices (I personally suspect they have some sort of secret technology that uses converts air into light, but that’s just me).