Song of the day: Out of Pawn from Anais Mitchell. Available on The Brightness from Amazon.com.

For the past two days I’ve walked by the [[Town and Country]] around lunch time and have been lured in by this sandwich board:

I’ve ended up with a very, very good bowl of homemade soup accompanied by (at my option) 1/2 of an excellent clubhouse sandwich (real chicken, cheddar cheese, on whole wheat bun). It’s not quite perfect but it’s very, very close.

Charlie Rose interviewed Jerry Seinfeld a few nights ago. It’s compelling television, and so much more than the usual “Letterman and Seinfeld goofing around” type of interview we’re used to. It went off the rails a few times, but both Seinfeld and Rose were at their best, and it’s a worthwhile hour of television.

Speaking of Charlie Rose, the CharlieRose.com website has just gone through a complete update, and it has gone all “social software” with comments, episode sharing, RSS feeds, etc. This is one situation where applying this kind of thing is useful because the so-called “social object” — in this case each night’s episode — is a good piece of bedrock upon which to build interactions.

Quick note for anyone using Mac OS X Leopard: the version of Safari that comes with Leopard has some issues with cookie-handling (either that, or I have some issues with cookie-handling that only show up in Safari under Leopard). You’ll notice that, as a result of this, the right-hand sidebar of the blog that shows “New Comments” and “New Posts” won’t operate properly for you. I’m on it.

With VNsea on my iPod Touch I can share the screen of my MacBook running Leopard (which is a built-in VNC server):

• Needed to turn on “Screen Sharing” on my Mac (System Preferences \| Sharing).
• Also needed to open the firewall for Screen Sharing (System Preferences \| Security \| Firewall).
• Only worked with “pixel depth” in VNsea set to 16.
• Wouldn’t work with my Cinema Display set to 1920x1200 — had to set it to 1600x1200.
• Wouldn’t work without a password set on both ends.
• Not zippy.

If you want driving directions in Europe, and you’re finding that Google Maps doesn’t cut it, try ViaMichelin, which has much better coverage, and much richer directions. My favourite feature:

From the recently-prolific Nokia Beta Labs: Nokia Audiobooks. Cool, but alas only for 3rd edition phones, so not available for my trusty [[Nokia N70]].

The Holy Grail for me back in the days when I was working with the Province of PEI on mapping was coming up with a driving directions application from scratch (those were the days well before Google Maps and MapQuest made such things commonplace).

While we went through several iterations of kludgy MapGuide-based solutions, none of them were ever quick or well-executed enough to be actually useful (I did, however, learn a lot about Dijkstra’s algorithm).

If only I was doing this sort of thing today, when open source mapping has hit prime time, and amazing stuff like this is coming to the fore.

Die Idee, die aus der Kälte kam (“The idea to come in from the cold” says Google). One of my favourite websites. I don’t read German, but my oh my is the photography amazing.