The latest Hurricane Information Statement about Tropical Storm Noel says, in part:

We have nudged our forecast track west of the previous track and the latest cmc and gfs guidance suggests that it may not be far enough To the west. Because we are dealing with a large sprawling storm system by the time it reaches us we are cautious to make significant changes to the track in that the impacted areas will still be mostly The same… It is only the details that remain to be ironed out.

While it is refreshing to see such non-technical writing from an Official Government Source, the casual language hides the reality of the “nudge.” This morning’s storm path, grabbed and posted by Dan, shows Noel floating comfortably (for me) far away over Cape Breton:

Post “nudge,” the track appears to place the eye of the hurricane-in-wait directly over where I am sitting right now:

Of course my lack of hurricane knowledge means that I may be mis-interpreting the relative merits of being in the path vs. being aside the path.

Nokia has released an updated version of Nokia Multimedia Transfer for the Mac that’s Leopard-compatible. I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to depend on this app for easy transfer of files to and from my [[Nokia N70]], so this makes me happy.

We’re in the middle of that week in November when our friends in Berlin have switched off Daylight Time (October 28) and before we switch off Daylight Time ourselves here in Atlantic Canada (November 4). Which is causing scheduling discord to break out all over the place. You’d think that there would be some body at the United Nations that could work this all out so that we jump at the same time.

I have suddenly turned positive on David Duchovny. Californication started it all and Trust the Man sealed the deal. Go figure.

Today’s favourite Mac OS X Leopard feature: “web clip.” Lets me take any chunk of any web page and turn it into a dashboard widget. In about 4 seconds. It’s very easy to use, and while it bears something in common with the old “Active Desktop” system from the Windows world, its elegance transports it high above the Microsoft implementation.

Click on the image to see it in Flickr and mouse-over the image there for more details about each widget.

The sign says it all: [[Interlude]] will be open, in its new location on University Avenue north of Euston Street, in one more week. I can taste the Gong Bao even now…

We ended up watching the Gemini Awards on Sunday night, despite our best intentions. And it was like watching a car accident in slow motion.

For my money the Geminis have never reached the heights they did in 1996 when Albert Schultz hosted and performed a heartbreaking tribute to Casey and Finnegan. That was, I think, the introduction of ironic detachment to the proceedings; every awards show since they’ve tried to top 1996, and they’ve not succeeded yet.

Host George Stroumboulopoulos, who is cooler-than-hip in his day job as host of The Hour, performed his hosting duties completely absent of ironic detachment (perhaps he thought the very fact of hosting itself was ironic enough?). As a result he came off looking like a lame Jon Stewart impersonator, and a clumsy one at that.

Any of the “innovations” introduced to the show this year — most noticeably and embarrassingly the “let’s interview winners on the podium so that they don’t go long,” an idea that melted down before our very eyes — seemed forced. Trying to squeeze the live TV event down into an hour, which meant that we only got to see the “important” awards sandwiched in between endless comedy bits, sucked the life of the whole thing — it’s important to see the gawky composers, self-involved writers and awestruck lighting designers receive awards on national television and, what’s more, it makes it clear that there’s craft in that thar medium.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about this year’s Geminis is that they laid bare the desert that is Canadian television: when the best we have to offer is Corner Gas and Slings and Arrows (a show that, no matter how good it’s purported to be, has been seen by perhaps 2 dozen people), you realize that, for all intents and purposes, there is no Canadian television being produced any longer.

Next in the line of “my favourite features of OS X Leopard” is the new “Alex” voice for text-to-speech. To hear Alex, open System Preferences, and then click Speech and select the Text to Speech tab:

I have my Mac set up to announce the time every hour on the hour, and now it’s Alex that’s doing the saying. He’s very nice.

I’ve only been using the new version of Mac OS X for a few hours, but I already like what I see. As others have commented, many of the most satisfying changes are simple clean-ups that should have been done years ago. Like this one:

Notice that the icon for iCal has the actual date, not “Jul 17,” which is what it had since iCal was introduced 5 years ago (on July 17, 2002).

Although my email archive from the late fall of 1996 isn’t complete, I’ve been able to string together the story of the events surrounding PEINet’s request that we leave their shared webserver for our own host. My chain of email starts with this paragraph in a note to a friend:

Sorry to have not replied earlier — engaged in a little crisis management on this end today. Yesterday at 3:30 p.m., 10 minutes before we were to demonstrate the Government site to the new Minister of Economic Development and Tourism, I got a call from our ISP saying that they had decided that we had to move to our own server ASAP as our Christmas Card feature was giving them load averages of 36.

So I’ve spent the day sourcing an a Intel Linux box, finding memory and setting it up with Linux. Hard to do with no money and 24 hours notice!

The “Christmas Card feature” in question, which was a Perl-based e-card system based on a similar service we found at MIT, became suddenly popular in early December, to the point where it was causing problems for the shared host we were using at PEINet. And so we got a call telling us, in essence, “you guys gotta find another solution, quick.”

The solution? We “borrowed” the Intel Pentium 100 desktop of an admin assistant who was on vacation; later the same day, I sent an email to the system administrator at PEINet about this new machine I’d put together:

The machine is an Intel Pentium 100 with a 500 meg hard drive and 48 megs of memory. It has an Intel EtherExpress card in it. I’ve installed Slackware v3.0, with the Linux 2.0.0 kernel on the machine and verified that the NIC card is probed for and recognized.

I’ve installed the ‘A’ and ‘N’ disk sets, which is enough to get the machine up and running and on the network. I’ve gone through the netconfig routine during setup, but, of course, didn’t have the proper information so I entered bogus data. You’ll need to boot it up and run netconfig to put it on your network.

This machine will be in place for the next 10 to 15 days until a more capable replacement (probably a Pentium Pro 200 with 128MB of RAM) arrives, so if it is possible to keep it housed in your offices until then, that would be preferable.

Then, finally a three days later, confirmation that everything working more smoothly after we took the machine down for a processor upgrade:

The new server is up and running. Because of the faster processor, I’ve been able to up the simultaneous connections to 45 from 30, which seems to be having a positive effect on response time. I’ve also copied all of the web data to the new SCSI disk, which is much faster than the old IDE drive, and this is improving response as well. Our load average seems to be in the 3 to 4 range as opposed to 10 to 15 which it was before.

While the desktop got replaced with more robust hardware early in 1997, it’s amazing to recall that 10 years ago the entire web infrastructure of the Province of PEI operated on an Intel Pentium 100 MHz with 48MB of RAM and half a gigabyte of storage. More amazing still when you consider that my tiny [[Nokia N70]] mobile phone has a 220 MHz processor and 1 GB of storage.

That same week I was preoccupied with server issues, two other big events were happening in my life. First, my paternal grandmother, Nettie, got a computer:

Dear Peter and Catherine: Surprise! I am learning to send messages on the Internet. I’m having quite a time. It’s really hard for me to catch on. Your Dad has been here a few weekends to help me but I’m as dumb as I was to start with. I’m not feeling too badly but am stuck in the house all the time. Am not looking forward to the snow or cold weather. Wishing you the best. Love, Nana

And Dave Moses and I were plotting the company that would, in 1997, emerge as [[Okeedokee]]. Here’s a rather precious “mission statement” I wrote that same week:

Okeedokee combines technology new and old with irreverant systems thinking to create simple, delighful solutions to information, logisitics and entertainment challenges.

Our core values are: Modesty, Honesty, Beauty, Utility, Fun.

We think technology is best when it’s non-intrusive, useful, sensible, compelling and beautiful. Sometimes its neat when technology takes your breath away, too.

I do like the “takes your breath away” part.