I’m selling my Nokia E61i on eBay. Although it’s a superior phone in almost every way to my old Nokia N70 — it’s got wifi, a bigger screen, a full QWERTY keyboard — in the end the N70’s smaller size won me over. Start your bidding.

We just booked an Alitalia flight to Milan for December, enabling [[Catherine]], [[Oliver]] and I to reprise my visit last year to [[Colletta]].

This means that it’s coming up to a full year since I began life as a highfalutin coffee drinker. Over the year I’ve documented 15 places in Charlottetown that serve cappuccino, and there have been a few more since; here’s a brief update on each:

1. Beanz - Since the L’affaire Voldemort in May I’ve only been back once; before then I’d settled into a routine of stopping in 2 to 3 mornings a week. I’d rate the cappuccino 6 out of 10; the service and the bagels elevated the experience into worthwhileness.
2. Timothy’s - Still in flux since their recent move from Kent to University, Timothy’s has won the bulk of my morning coffee business over the year. Their coffee isn’t to-die-for, but it’s adequate, and they make an awesome bagel with Swiss cheese and tomato, and Michelle is the best coffee server in town.
3. Mavor’s - Haven’t been there in months. Never got a taste for the coffee, and somehow its underground location never registers on my radar, even though it’s effectively next door to my house.
4. Bo’s To Go - Was the coffee place in the Atlantic Technology Centre, but it’s since be rebranded the “Hard Drive Café” and they ditched the espresso machine, so it’s out of contention.
5. Linda’s Coffee Shop - I always enjoyed the coffee at Linda’s, and the service was always tops, but its location — in the opposite direction from my office — and the lack of breakfast foods that meet my non-egg-eating tastes mean I’ve only been back a couple of times since winter.
6. Brett at the Market - With only a few exceptions I’ve had one of Brett’s coffees every Saturday morning this year, with two months of Wednesday visits in the summer to boot. Probably my favourite mix of quality coffee and atmosphere; staff are the most energetic in the city.
7. Cora’s - One coffee was all it took to drive me away forever.
8. Delta Prince Edward - Ditto.
9. The Charlottetown Hotel - They never had cappuccino, so I’ve not returned.
10. The Marketplace Café - RIP, alas. I miss it.
11. Great Canadian Bagel - No, no, a thousand times no. Although I do appreciate the fact they sponsor the School Breakfast program.
12. Catherine Miller - Catherine still makes the best coffee in town. I have yet to master the intricacies of her Gaggia, and when I try to make coffee for myself I’m inevitably disappointed.
13. Casa Mia - An unexpected gift to the city, and, hands-down, the best beans in Charlottetown. Casa Mia appeared from nowhere on Queen Street, and I’d move all my morning coffee business there if only they opened earlier than 9:00 a.m. Their service is still spotty — they get overwhelmed easily — but oh my is their coffee ever good.
14. The Island Grind - I went once, had a good coffee, went again and they were out of food, which pushed me over the edge and I haven’t been back.
15. Kickstart - The coffee part of the Urban Eatery. They serve Illy coffee, have an excellent fruit salad and some good pastries. There are two major strikes against them, however, as a morning coffee stop: the atmosphere of the Muzak-filled food court is dreadful, and they only serve coffee in “to go” cups, which I cannot bear.
16. Café Diem - Closed for the winter, alas. Staff problems of years gone by were eliminated this year, and the incremental renovations made each winter have turned the space into a very pleasant place to spend time, especially on cool summer mornings. Eating so many of their chocolatines probably took a few months off my life. And I always enjoyed the coffee.

These days if you’re looking for me between 8:30 a.m. at 9:00 a.m. you’re most likely to find me at Timothy’s; if a freak delay means I seek coffee after 9, then you’ll see me at Casa Mia.

From my [[Dad]] comes a link to the excellent World Clock page, a snapshot of statistics about the state of the world in real time.

Was ist das denn?: food humour from Germany.

Just as the Jean Canfield Building across Fitzroy Street is nearing completion and the neighbourhood here around Reinvented HQ was settling down to normal they’ve started construction on the new building between the Town and Country and the Island Tel building.

Sadly, the noise from said construction transits across Queen Street into the parking garage where it gets amplified 200% and then bounces down into my office window.

I fear I’ve another several months of truck backup alarms, banging dump-truck lids and steam shovel machinations ahead of me.

Air Canada has a new Daily Flight Schedule Operational Outlook page. Which is great in theory. Except today’s Operational Outlook is that the Operational Outlook isn’t working:

This is TV premiere week for the major U.S. networks. While some shows jumped the gun and started last week, Monday was the beginning of a sudden onrush of new content. And I’ve been paying attention (the sleep in my eyes is a testament to this). Here’s my take after days one and two:

Journeyman on NBC (pronounced Journey Man it seems) is excellent. The basic “average American guy gets afflicted by time travel virus” has been tried before, but never with production values, writing and a cast like this. I think it has staying power.

K-Ville on Fox seems promising too. It’s a fairly standard buddy-cop format, set in New Orleans. But one of the cops is an ex-con, the supporting cast is solid, and the pilot’s story-line was compelling. I’m not as convinced that this show will last; it depends a lot on where episode number two goes.

I get a lot of flack from [[Catherine]] for my devotion to The Unit, returning on CBS, mostly because it appears on the surface to be a celebration of the miltary-industrial complex and America’s prowess. Which it is. But it’s also a weekly dose of David Mamet on television, and that’s not be trifled with. Besides, I could watch Dennis Haysbert read the phone book and I think it would be interesting, and I’ve got a crush on Rebecca Pidgeon. Last night’s season opener revealed a snappy new opening credit sequence and a story that was somewhat less celebratory of military might (although things did get blown up).

Catherine also refuses to watch Kid Nation on CBS; she’s offended by its blatant exploitation of children. So am I. But that doesn’t keep me from watching. The show is basically “Survivor for Kids in the Old West” — take 40 kids, dump them in a faux wild west town in the desert, and see what happens. Unfortunately, given that there are kids involved, the show can’t really hope to be a realistic Lord of the Flies remake, and so in lieu of children going insane and eating rats we are given cheesy reality show hi-jinx cut with soulful interviews with mournful 8 year olds. Ultimately it’s not all that interesting, mostly because you know that nothing real is going to happen.

I’ve watch two of the crop of nerd-based shows so far. The Big Bang Theory on CBS stars Johnny Galecki, who I really like in the final seasons of Roseanne back in the 1990s. Alas the show is a tumult of nerd jokes and pop-culture references that seem demographically peppered over the plot rather than central to it. Such as there is a plot. Perhaps it will find an audience. But I won’t be in it. Similarly the drama Chuck on NBC is packed full of pop-culture references, but is a drama in the school of The Greatest American Hero, and indeed shares many of the sensibilities of that ABC show from the 1980s. There’s not much to like about Chuck, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t last more than 3 or 4 episodes before cancellation.

On the DVR and waiting for watching tonight are the season premiere’s of the returning House from Fox and NCIS from CBS. There’s also the U.S. edition of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (I love the U.K. version), the premiere of ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money (which John Doyle glowed about in the Globe this morning), and a big night for NBC with the opening of the Bionic Woman remake and the new drama Life. It’ll be a busy night.

[[Oliver]] is into his third week of grade one, and after a week away at [[Yankee]], I’m back on track as his “walk to school in the morning” parent.

If you know me at all you know that waking up at the same time every day to do the same thing in the same way is tantamount to poking myself with a sharp stick. I am a creature of habit, yes, but my creaturedom requires improvisation, or at least the possibility of improvisation, to work properly.

In other words, I’ll probably be home for dinner tonight, but I could also be in Berlin.

And yet somehow I have successfully managed to leave the house every morning at 8:10 and get Oliver to [[Prince Street School]] for the 8:25 a.m. bell without fail. I have had to rewire significant parts of my brain to make this work, but so far the rewiring seems to be working.

Other than the sheer regularity of it all, the most startling revelation that’s come from doing the same thing at the same time every day is the realization that there are a lot of other people doing this too.

Apparently most people are creatures of habit, perhaps more by circumstance than desire. And so every day on our walk to school we see the same woman walking her dog on the same route, and the same mother dropping her daughter off at the Zion kindergarten, and the same Dan Misener-look-alike walking to work. This morning I noticed that the same small bird is perched on top of the traffic light at the corner of Prince and Kent every morning too.

Yesterday I lollygagged in bed 10 minutes later than usual. I was in no danger of falling out of line, but from [[Catherine]]’s reaction — “are you taking Oliver to school today?” — it was obvious that she still harbours some doubts about my long-term abilities in this regard. Indeed I think that part of my steely resolve on this issue is to simply to demonstrate to Catherine that I am not a total lay-about and that it is possible for me to make some contribution to the efficient running of the household, no matter how small it might ultimately be.

In the meantime I have to remember that salving my stressed psyche by introducing random improvisations into other parts of my day — I might each lunch today, or I might not — is perhaps not the most effective way of completing the rewiring. Although it’s still nice to delude myself into thinking that I could wake up tomorrow morning in Bangkok.

One of the long-standing features of The Old Farmer’s Almanac are the so-called “left-hand calendar pages.” These pages, one for every month, contain astronomical timetable information — sunrise, sunset, length of day, moonrise, moonset, moon’s place in the heavens, and so on.

And when I say “long-standing,” I mean long-standing, as these tables have been there since the first edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac was published in 1792, two hundred and fifteen years ago. Here’s the September 1793 left-hand calendar page:

While the columns have changed a little, and the typeface is different these days, that 1793 page is substantially the same in format as the ones you’ll find in the 2008 The Old Farmer’s Almanac that went on sale last week:

One of the limitations of ye olde print world is that these pages have been pegged to a specific location; for the national edition of the Almanac in the U.S. it’s Boston; for Canada it’s Ottawa. This means that if you live elsewhere, as most people do, you need to use conversion tables printed in the back of the book to correct for your location.

For the past couple of months I’ve been working on a web-based application that does away with this limitation, allowing the left-hand calendar pages to be generated for any location in the U.S. or Canada. This application — dubbed My Local Almanac — went live an hour ago, and I’m quite proud of it.

Take a look at this sample page for Dublin, NH and you’ll see that it bears an awful lot in common with that page above from 215 years ago.

Needless to say the process of creating this application has taken me deep into the heart of astronomy, creating algorithms to quickly compute the various columns of information. I’ve learned about the great zodiac debate (sidereal vs. tropical; or “do we use the heavens as they were a long time ago, or as they are tonight?”), about places with 5 high tides a day, and about how the moon sometimes neither rises nor sets in the north. I’ve learned about the Equation of Time and about how it’s noon when the sun is directly overhead, but only if your longitude is along the Standard Time Meridian for your time zone.

I’ve also learned a lot about handcrafting PDF files (EZPDF I bow before your excellentness) and how to effectively deliver products that take 2 or 3 minutes to construct behind the scenes.

All that’s left to do now is sit beside the terminal waiting for the first customer to come along and make the first purchase. Perhaps it could be you: My Local Almanac.

Cover of the September 18, 2007 Monadnock Ledger-Transcript: headline reads “Fructose levels cloud ongoing slushee debate” and the story concerns whether or not slushees should be allowed in the cafeterias of local schools.