Back in the spring I bought an issue of Iceland Review magazine on the newsstand in Halifax. At the back of the issue was a rosy advertising supplement about the Icelandic financial industry, including a spread about the health and promise of the country’s banks (click on the image to see exciting notes in Flickr):

The headlines say, in order, “Kaupthing is Solid,” “Landsbanki Sees Opportunities,” and “Glitnir Bank Well Equipped to Increase Efficiency.” What a difference a few months makes.

Surfing various financial and exchange websites this morning you get a variety of exchange rates for Icelandic króna against the Canadian dollar: Google says one króna is work 0.005 CAD, Yahoo says 0.01050 CAD, XE.com says 0.0102592 CAD, Oanda says 0.01034 CAD. That’s a pretty big range. I suppose the only real rate is what someone is willing to buy an actual króna for.

From Pownce comes a pointer to Geode, a new extension for Firefox that uses Loki to geolocation-enable the browser.

Iceland Review magazine’s Daily News page is a good source of the main headlines from Iceland.

Remember the $30 decrease in price of our rental apartment in Iceland due to the decreasing value of the Króna? Well, it’s getting even worse: the apartment we paid an equivalent of $375 CAD for would now cost us $204 CAD.

Icelandair flies from Halifax to Reykjavik until October 20 if you’re interested in helping the Icelandic economy and taking advantage of unprecedented value at the same time.

Say what you want about Northern Telecom, they made telephones built like tanks. I never, ever had one of their phones fail: from the old beige rotary wall-mount in our kitchen when I was a kid right up to the reconditioned Maestro I have on the desk beside me, they just work. Forever.

Which is sadly not true of any of the cordless phones we’ve had at home for the past decade: we’ve been through a Panasonic, a four-handset Siemens, and a three-handset Motorola setup. And they’ve all failed us in the same way: after 2 or 3 years of use, the keypads stop working. The Motorola is the worst: it’s just over a year old, and it has become almost impossible to answer the phone or make a call. Serves us right for buying telecommunications products at Wal-mart, I guess.

So I need recommendations: we’re looking for a simple two or three handset cordless system. Doesn’t need to have any special features: we don’t need an answering machine, or the ability to hook up to Skype or play Tetris. We just want something built as solidly as an old Nortel.

(By the way, did you know there is a Telephone Museum of Prince Edward Island?)

Hardy’s Organic Products in Alberton, PEI, makes organic tofu:

Currently, Old Dock Farm grows a large percentage of the soybeans used to make Maritime Soycraft Tofu. Other crops grown include clover, timothy, and hay for the 25+ calf/cattle. Soybeans and grains such as milling wheat and oats take up the rest of the 210 acres. Old Dock Farm is the first and the only Certified Organic Farm in West Prince PEI. There’s yet another generation of John Hardy’s to grow up and farm. Twins John ‘Landon’ and James ‘Liam’ will grow up on the farm as did their father, grand-father and great grandfather and it all started 55 years ago with a man and dream.

The Icelandic króna has been dropping relative to the Canadian dollar over the last week, so that today almost exactly 100 krónur are equal to one Canadian dollar, whereas two weeks ago they were worth about $1.10.

This means that our 34,000 krónur 3-day apartment rental in Reykjavik two weeks ago at that cost us $371 then would cost us $340 today. Not an earth-shattering drop for us, but extrapolated out over an entire economy I expect the drop is rather profound.

TSX down 5.3% at close:

By the close Monday, the S&P/TSX composite index was down 572.92 points, or 5.3 per cent, to 10,230.43. It had been down as much as 1,180 points or almost 11 per cent.

Eagles’ Westbrook fractures 2 ribs:

Westbrook has rushed 54 times for 194 yards and four touchdowns in four starts this season, and caught 14 passes for 97 yards and two touchdowns.

We took Olle and Luisa up west for the day on Friday, with MacAusland’s Woolen Mill as the primary destination. It’s a wonderful place, and somewhere everyone should visit.