[[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] are visiting her parents in Kingston this week, and are due to take the train on Friday, June 29 up to Montreal to rendezvous with me. However Friday, June 29 is also the First Nations National Day of Action and, possibly, a related rail or road blockade between Belleville and Kingston.

We’re currently looking for alternative ways to get Catherine and Oliver up to Quebec. Unfortunately VIA Rail provides no information about the possible implications of the blockade nor proposed alternative travel arrangements.

I noticed last night that the sun in Keene, NH where I’m staying seemed to go down much earlier than I expected for early days of summer. It turns out that I was right: sunset last night was 8:32 p.m.

Back in Charlottetown it didn’t set until 9:09 p.m.. And even up at my parents’ place, which is in the same time zone as Keene and seems “close,” there was an extra 30 minutes of daylight as the sun set at 9:05 p.m..

Go even further east and they get even less of an evening: in Cape Cod the sun set at 8:20 p.m.

Go north and west to the western extremes of eastern time in Thunder Bay and the sun set at 10:03 p.m.

Amazing.

Upstart Porter Airlines is now flying out of Halifax to Ottawa and Montreal with connections to Toronto. Fares to Montreal appear to start at about $79, with Ottawa around $124 and Toronto starting around $114. Taxes and fees add about another $50.

Porter is flying the Bombardier Q400 turboprop: Halifax to Montreal takes 1:45, vs. 1:30 on an Air Canada jet. From the looks of it, Air Canada is matching fares at least some of the time — both Porter and Air Canada were charging the $79 one way fare for Halifax to Montreal in mid-July when I checked tonight.

Of course only Porter can boast a Tyler Brûlé-designed in-flight magazine (the first issue as a PDF).

After almost a week here with my parents, I’m off at the crack of noon tomorrow on American Eagle 4605 from Toronto to Boston. After a brief detour south for dinner with parts of the [[usual bunch]], I’ll drive north up to the E.F. Lane Hotel (the hotel with possibly the worst hotel website ever) in Keene to stay the week while working out of [[Yankee]]’s office up the road in Dublin.

I’ll have a brief diversion on Wednesday night: a quick trip down to Becket, MA to see Coleman Lemieux’s show at Jacob’s Pillow.

Friday afternoon I’m flying back up to Montreal to rendezvous with [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] where we’ll hook up with [[Steve]] for a weekend of maximum fun.

We’re flying back to Charlottetown on July 1, just as the embers from the looting and pillaging following the Nickelback concert have died down and just in time for what they now appear to be billing as the “Largest Fireworks Display in Canada,” which suggests that we’re either spending more, or someone else is spending less, as it used to be “in Eastern Canada.”

By the time this late-June family work/visit/vacation is over, we’ll have criss-crossed Ontario by train, taken three different airlines, rented two different cars, visited two sets of family, and will no doubt be thoroughly exhausted.

Sometime in the past twenty years I turned on Toronto. After growing up in its shadow and thinking that it was possibly the greatest place on earth, something snapped and I ended up with no desire to visit and a bad taste in my head every time I thought about the city.

Mind you it’s not that I’ve ever really had a bad experience of Toronto. I did live a rather antiseptic existence during the 6 months I spent as a resident in the mid-1980s, living out much of my time inside a thin corridor that ran from my home at Mount Pleasant and Eglinton to my school at Don Mills and Eglinton. This is, if you know Toronto at all, not exactly the most lively part of town, but I have fond memories regardless.

But I also followed this with a summer working at the ROM right downtown at Avenue Road and Bloor. Not exactly hip either, but certainly central. I ate a lot of ice cream at Greg’s and enjoyed summer in the city.

But somehow my malaise about Toronto sprung up and has continued, and during the regular “I wonder which cool urban location we should move to” conversations I have with myself Toronto never came close to making the shortlist.

Today, however, we had a great time in Toronto and I saw sides of it that I’d never seen before. I’m not quite ready to move, but the malaise is gone, and I’m eager to return soon.

[[Dad]], [[Mom]], [[Catherine]], [[Oliver]] and I started the day with a race down the escarpment to catch the 10:14 a.m. GO Train into Union Station. We made it with 10 minutes to spare, and by 11:20 a.m. we were on the subway going north to the ROM.

We decided to overlook the fact that the dinosaurs are in storage and let ourselves be drawn into all the hype about the Crystal that now envelopes and re-centres the museum.

While I’m as much of an architecture tourist as the next guy, I can’t say that I was blown away, at least not Bilbao-style blown away, by my first view of the structure. You hear “crystal” and you think it’s going to shimmer or something. But it’s primary characteristic seems to be jutting.

But as we experienced the interiors of the crystal, it turned out to be a far more interesting structure on the inside than on the outside. All that juttiness creates some intriguing indoor spaces, especially where the old ROM meets the new ROM. It turns out that perhaps the crystal’s most useful role is as a exhibition container, and as a grand entrance hall. An expensive role. But it plays it well.

Inside, crystal aside, this ain’t your father’s ROM. There’s a new brightness to the place. The exhibits are more lively, more focused, and ultimately much more interesting. Even a docent-guided tour of the Peru temporary exhibition didn’t put me to sleep (and I can’t stand docents in the normal course of affairs). Even the cafeteria has a new life: what used to be chaotic and run, if memory serves, by Druxy’s Deli, is now Danish-inspired minimal with wood-fired pizza and organic juices.

By far and away my favourite of the exhibitions currently on display was The Evolution of Style, a quick survey from the Renaissance through Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classical, and Victorian ending up at Art Deco. It was compact, well-illustrated, and I left knowing more than when I started.

After a few hours at the ROM, we went across the street to the Roof Lounge at the Park Hyatt (nee Park Plaza) for a drink. They make a mean cappuccino up there, and put on a nice olive plate. They also have world-class washrooms and a great view over the new ROM.

Sated, we headed down for a brief detour through Dad’s old residence at Victoria College, and then walked south on University Ave. to College where we took the streetcar over to Bathurst to spend some time in Kensington Market.

It’s odd, but I’d gone through 41 years without setting foot in Kensington Market. I had no real idea what it was — I suppose I assumed it was something along the lines of the St. Lawrence Market to the south (i.e. a souped up farmer’s market). It turns out that it’s actually a rather interesting neighbourhood and, by all appearances, the capital of a certain kind of Bohemia in Toronto.

We had a really good time wandering around for 2 or 3 hours. Mom bought an apron for 99 cents. I had an excellent espresso at Luis Coffee Stop (and I do mean excellent).

Dad bought some ginger tea, and then had a demonstration of a folding bicycle from a guy riding by. We had dinner at Freshwood Grill (they make a mean iced tea there) and then walked over to Spadina, across Dundas past the new AGO (likely the subject of a future architecture-whore visit) and down past the crazy new Sharp Centre for Design, a building that strikes me as among the most interesting buildings I’ve ever seen (I love it, I think).

By 7:43 p.m. we were back at Union Station and on the GO Train home.

So really just a brief slice of Toronto. Or really two slices of two very different approaches to Torontoness, both of them compelling.

I might not exactly love Toronto yet, but I may be developing a crush.

There are more photos in the Flickr archive if you’re keen.

A friend of mine asked me what I though of the new CBC.ca website. I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days, and here’s my answer.

I think the CBC has been trying very hard for many years to turn itself into a “brand” in the way that Palmolive and Kleenex and Xerox are brands. For listeners to CBC Radio this branding’s first cries were when the “coming up tonight on This Hour Has 22 Minutes” promos started to appear on [[Island Morning]] — we’d entered the era of the “cross-platform” CBC. And it’s only intensified since then, reaching its nadir, perhaps, with the awkward “Big Picture” days when one topic gets addressed on radio, TV and the web (something that always feels as awkward as getting the Grade 6 kids to do a school play with the Grade 2 kids).

The new CBC.ca takes this branding to a whole new level, flashing alternating images of the Dragons’ Den players from CBC Television with a photo Bernie McNamee from CBC Radio News with an image of what appears to be someone being killed by listening to CBC Radio 2.

When you’re selling diapers and you want people to buy your bum wipes, this sort of approach makes perfect sense.

But here’s the thing: I think the CBC defies all regular brand logic, and I think listeners and viewers and readers are unused to, and uncomfortable with the multi-hued beast being boiled down to a set of “platforms.”

My own experience suggests that a relationship with the CBC is really more a relationship with a collection of programs and their producers. When I listen to Island Morning, I’m listening to Karen and Mitch talk Prince Edward Island. Their “CBCness” is important to this — it represents a way of doing things, an editorial rigour, and access to national resources — but it doesn’t start there.

Similarly, when I listen to As It Happens, or Maritime Noon or Q, my “brand identification” is with the shows and their hosts, not with the CBC. Same thing with Compass or The Road to Avonlea or Venture.

This is not to suggest that the institution itself is unimportant, simply that it exists for me more like a rather interesting set of kitchen cupboards in which I find intriguing, unique things to nourish me and less like 7-11 where I find “trusted information content” that I demographically connect with.

The underlying assumption of the new CBC.ca appears to be that if I’m into one CBC thing, I’ll be into another. Which is sort of like assuming that if I use Tide I can be convinced to use Bounty paper towels and Duracell batteries and Old Spice cologne because, well, they’re all made by Proctor & Gamble.

But in the real world, the world that exists on the consuming side of the CBC, I don’t think we could care less that Hockey Night in Canada and The Current and Nana’s Helper all happen to share a funding pool and a set of standards and practices.

So I would suggest that the proper role for a new CBC.ca would be to allow we readers to navigate as quickly as possible to our little cubbyholes within the rabbit warren — show me how to find out what song just played on Sounds Like Canada or what’s coming up on this week’s episode of C’est La Vie. And then get out of the way.

Alas what we’ve been given instead is a super-charged version of “coming up tonight on This Hour Has 22 Minutes” and while it’s visually well put-together, and no doubt sells well to those leading the “cross-platform” drive, it’s ultimately quite useless to we who might actually use it.

A week into my new work blogging at [[Plazes]], the blog.plazes.com server is suffering technical issues, and availability is spotty. This will be fixed soon.

[[Oliver]] and I are speeding down the track from Dorval to Kingston where we’ll rendezvous, after a week apart, with [[Catherine]]. Remember when I said that wifi is everywhere. Well it’s here on the train. Bandwidth sucks (latency to the mothership back in PEI is 619ms), and my Plazer keeps freezing (probably not its fault), and my iChat keeps kicking in and out (probably not its fault). But it’s still pretty cool. Indeed somehow cooler than wifi on airplanes because the technical insanity of it all is more obvious.

Sadly, even though there is wifi there are no power plugs, which makes the service of somewhat limited use after a few hours.

Thanks to the excellent efforts of Christian Dannemann, it took me 30 seconds to configure my [[Nokia E61i]] to make calls using our Asterisk server instead of my wireless provider.

I’ve now got the phone set up as, appropriately enough, “extension 61” on the local Asterisk PBX. This means, in practice, that it is now simply another handset here at the office. Except that “the office” stretches anywhere there is wifi. In other words, Johnny can pick up the phone in his office, dial “61” and my mobile will ring. Whether I am in the office next door or drinking absinthe with [[Olle]] in Copenhagen.

While this is technically elegant, it would also seem to signal a rather cataclysmic shift in the mobile marketplace: wifi is everywhere; once wifi-enabled phones are everywhere, is there any reason to have a SIM and be tied to expensive rates, dreadful service and poor features?