Kudos to The Guardian for embedding a Google Map in a breaking news story about a major accident:

[[Catherine]] told me last night that she would go to the beach every day of the summer if she could. Her desire is stymied by the fact that she doesn’t drive, and by my own beach aversion (all that sand — between my toes — uck).

So yesterday, when I announced that I was driving up to Park Corner for a L.M. Montgomery Land Trust meeting, she jumped at the chance for a free ride to the ocean. And so at 5:00 p.m. we three all headed north towards Cavendish; the plan was that I would meet and they would beach and then we would rendezvous.

Alas as we were pulling out of town it started to rain. At first a drizzle, then a torrent. With delusions that it was a temporary kind of rain, we pushed on.

It was with visions of a Lucky Duck burger that we pulled in to the Cavendish Boardwalk. Only to find that the Lucky Duck is gone, replaced by some crazy knick-knack store. So, unable to bring ourselves to eat at Subway or Pizza Delight, we headed to Captain Scott’s Fish and Chips.

Captain Scott’s, perhaps due to the demise of the Lucky Duck, has added “and Burgers” to the end of their name. Oliver had a tasty fish burger and Catherine went all traditional and had fish (which was piping hot but, she said, very good). I had a veggie burger, something made magnificent by the veritable wonderland of self-serve condiments: lettuce, hot peppers, two type of relish, sauerkraut, bacon bits. So it turned out to be a not-too-bad meal. But the loss of the Lucky Duck stings nonetheless.

By the time we were done eating, the downpour had reached a steady “I’m not going anywhere you foolish humans” pitch, so Catherine and Oliver drove up to Park Corner with me, hopeful that the storm would eventually pass and they could frolic on the beaches that entranced L.M. Montgomery.

The storm did not pass. And so Catherine and Oliver entertained themselves with fun iPod-based freeze-tag games on the covered porch of the Anne of Green Gables Tea Room while I discussed Serious Cornboil Issues inside.

By 8:05 p.m. we were headed back to town in an upgraded “super-torrential” downpour that covered the roads with a 1/2 inch thick layer of running water.

Needless to say, the first hint of sun this week, I will be leaving the office and driving my family to the beach, sand-in-toes aversion or no.

Although, in a way, it seems like posting naked pictures of myself, here’s what 515 grams of my own plasma looks like, freshly centrifuged out of my blood across the street at Canadian Blood Services:

Every time I donate it runs the same way: after about 30 minutes of paperwork (“Have you ever had sex with anyone who has received money or drugs for sex?” and so on), I get hooked up to to the Haemonetics PCS2 machine. The machine sucks out a bunch of my blood, whips it around and magically takes out the plasma, puts my blood back (that seems the most unlikely process of all), and then repeats. Here’s how Haemonetics explains it on their site.

Apparently some people can get their allotted due of 515 grams in two go-arounds; I always seem to take 3. In general I’m in and out in about 90 minutes; sometimes it takes two hours, especially if I linger for an additional chocolate chip cookie.

My friend Lowell’s son Mark is on the tail end of a charity bicycle ride from Carleton Place to Charlottetown. I have ancestors on my mother’s side with Carleton Place connections; in Our Caswell Relatives the town is described:

“Carleton Place, at the present time wears quite a lively appearance, and looks pretty much like a man who has been awakened from a sleep long enough to have suffered his clothes to get sadly out of fashion and repair, but was at length getting into a new suit.”

Right now the ride has taken them into New Brunswick; they should be on the Island later this week. It’s an amazing achievement.

David Byrne writes about the process of scoring the second season of Big Love.

So it’s been three days since I expanded the public wifi at 100 Prince Street using a mesh of three Meraki Minis.

In that time there have been 17 users of the network. Of those, 3 have been us — my iBook, Catherine’s iMac and our trusty rabbit. Of the remaining 14, the machine name identifies an Amanda, a Kritin, and an Ann; Amanda was the biggest user, transfering 176 MB. Bandwidth usage peaked on Friday morning at almost 450 kb/s, but has generally hovered in the 0-150 kb/s range.

Three users connected to the Meraki at the back of the house, 4 users connected to the one in the Coles Building, and the remaining 10 connected to the front of the use unit. A total of 1 GB has been downloaded and 62.9 MB has been uploaded.

I have MySQL table that has an email address field, and I want to sort the table by the domain of the email address. I went looking for some complex substringy way of doing this when I came across this elegant solution: just sort by the reverse of the email address.

While this doesn’t actually sort the addresses so that, say, AOL addresses come first followed by Bellsouth, Comcast, Dartmouth, etc., it does group all the email addresses for the same domain together in order, which is all I really needed. If this is all you really need, then it’s as simple as:

select * from table order by reverse(email)

The old AE 976 Anne of Green Gables license plate that saw us through a Ford F-100 pickup, a Nissan Sentra wagon, a Honda Civic, an Eagle Summit and a VW Jetta over 10 years got retired this morning, replaced with a new La province verte du Canada model (I opted for the French model simply for solidarity’s sake):

Ironically, once mounted on the Jetta under the plastic Sherwood Volkswagen holder the slogan and the website address are covered; I have to get some shorter bolts before I can rectify that.

This craiglist ad is one of the most compelling offers of accommodations I’ve read. It starts:

I need a granny for my granny flat, I have to rent a 30sqm apartment that is fully self contained with new kitchen and bathroom. The room has its own entrance, but there is also a door onto my studio for those late night Rendezvous (actually I’m taken sorry) You will have your own separate flat but with some cool neighbors, namely me and my house of 20 somethings not quite professional champagne socialists come artists etc etc we wont be the quietest neighbors but nor the loudest.