Starting this week I’ve taken on a new role as User Advocate with Plazes. It’s not a full-time gig — I’ll still be lovingly crafting almanacs and magazines most of the time. And we’re not uprooting ourselves to Berlin (at least not yet!). In a sense it’s doing what I’ve been doing all along — being a passionate Plazes user — except now it’s official.

I’ve explained more about exactly what this is all about in my first post of the Plazes weblog (a post that, unfortunately, has some people thinking my name is Julie; more fool me for making broad North America-centric pop culture references the centre of my posts).

After planning to all but ignore the Tour de PEI cycle race as it whizzed past our front door, I somehow conjured up a cycle-watching wine-drinking happening. At the height of it all we had a dozen people cheering the cyclists on from our tiny front yard. It was all quite thrilling. I took some photos. I took the photos on my new [[Nokia E61i]], and these are the first photos on the camera since it arrived early this morning by UPS, so I’m still getting my sea legs with it. Here’s a short video taken early in the race:

I’ve got our Apple iSight camera sticking out the front window, pointed at the corner of Prince and Richmond Streets in downtown [[Charlottetown]] where, in a few hours from now, preparations — road blocks and who knows what else — should spring into life for the Tour de PEI cycle race that’s taking over the neighbourhood for the day. I’ll just leave the camera running:

Note that: time displayed in the video window is Pacific Time, which is 4 hours earlier than the local time here; audio is on, but you won’t hear much through the window; if you visit the stream’s page at Ustream you can chat with other viewers.

Two photos taken by [[Oliver]], one week apart. Amazing what shave, haircut and tie will do for a guy:

Perhaps you, like I, have been wondering what Casa Mia, the new place on Queen Street next to Woolworths, will turn out to be once the wrapping comes off. There are some hints in their public trade name registration: “Coffee shop, etc., ice cream.” Anyone else have more intel?

So [[Oliver]] graduated from kindergarten this morning. Being the jaded curmudgeon that I pretend to be, I was all ready to concoct some biting “when I was a boy we graduated from high school and that was it” commentary. I mean kindergarten graduation? Come off it.

How naive I was.

It turns out the kindergarten graduation made me cry.

Right from the Pomp and Circumstance through the singing of various tribute songs and on to the handing out of the diplomas and the playing of a stirring tears-inducing PowerPoint montage of photos of the class taken over the year.

Don’t ask me why, school- and ceremony-averse as I am (I refused on principle to pay a $25 fee for a cap and gown rental for my own high school graduation), I was so affected by it all. But I was. I suppose it’s a combination of “our little boy is growing up” with some deep-seated human need to get all emotional when kids catapult up to the next level.

The staff at the Child Development Centre are amazing and put on a great event. I’m proud to say that my assigned potluck lunch task of “fruit plate for 10” was delivered on time, and was hand-cut from actual fruit, not just picked up at the Sobeys deli counter as [[Catherine]] insisted.

The resourceful staff went as far as burning a DVD of the teary PowerPoint for every graduate, so now we can watch it over and over again and relive it all over again.

Delivery Status, a Mac OS X Dashboard widget from Mike Piontek is a beautiful and functional both. I’ve been using it to watch my [[Nokia E61i]] wing its way from Indiana to Charlottetown:

The widget has an impressive array of tracking savvy: in addition to the expected FedEx, UPS, etc. you can also track orders from Amazon.com, Canada Post, Apple, Purolator and more.

My friend Leah Tremain — you’ll remember her from here and here and here — is hitting her stride. Today she’s featured on the front page of the University of Victoria website with a story about being named the “BC Chamber of Commerce Young Entrepreneur of the Year” for her “creative ingenuity.”

Leah has always been creatively ingenious, so this seems only fitting.

I put this here only because on the myriad school and board web pages the information is not (update: easily) to be found: the first day of school on PEI in the fall is Thursday, September 6, 2007.

Update: I found the information in this PDF file on the Eastern School District website and I’ve created School Calendar Google Calendar that contains this and all the other exciting school-related dates for next year including intriguing-sounding dates like “Area Association Professional Development Day/CUPE 3260 Annual Convention” on May 2, 2008.

I noticed last night that the photo lab at Atlantic Superstore in [[Charlottetown]] has machines that will let you send photos to them via Bluetooth. So you can bring in your Bluetooth-equipped camera-phone, slurp over the photos to the machine and make prints while you wait. I tried it — at least the “get the photos from phone to machine” part, and it worked like a charm.