I’ve been doing some twiddling this week for some possible travel in Europe for reboot. Part of my twiddle involves a stop in Berlin, both because I’ve never been there, and also to let me see my friend as [[Plazes]] face-to-face.

To help assuage my carbon guilt, I’m looking at taking the train for all of the intra-Europe travel rather than following my usual habit of flying cheap on easyjet and the like.

Here’s the economics of the difference:

For “Journey Time” I added in the time it would take to get to the airport from downtown, the need to arrive at the airport in advance, and the time to get downtown from the airport. Cost is converted to Canadian dollars, and reflects the cheapest fare I could find (it’s easier to find airfares than it is railfares, so there might be less expensive ways to take the train).

Kaboost is a “portable chair booster” that fits most 4-legged chairs and lets you use regular chairs for young children instead of booster seats:

Link from cribcandy.

As I mentioned here, Rob and I once had a project, called “This Bag of Potatoes Has a Website,” that would have seen farmers in the Kinkora area provide a code of every bag of potatoes leaving their warehouse and bound for consumers. Customers could enter the code into a web application and find the “provenance” of the potatoes — why grew them, what fertilizers they used (and when), how many miles they’d traveled to market and so on.

The Kinkora project never happened, but now Dole is doing much the same thing for bananas. Soon, I think, consumers are going to demand this sort of information in the same way we now expect nutritional labeling on packaged food.

Although we’ve been busy moving around piles of data and piles of paper for a while, today marks our first burst serious provincial general election activity.

The big data management challenge at the front end of the electoral process is that data gathered door to door by 291 teams of “confirmation officers” during the first week of the election period has to be used to update the Registry of Electors that’s used to generate the Preliminary List of Electors later this week.

What this means in practice is that information about almost 100,000 electors has to be confirmed, added or deleted in the space of 48 hours. This is all made possible by data entry team of about 100 who start work on Tuesday night once the confirmation period is over.

The data gets entered into a web-based application that we first created for the 2003 election and that’s evolved in the interim as it’s been used for municipal elections and provincial by-elections.

Today is “data entry training day.” Starting at 11:30 a.m. we’ll run through four 30 minute training sessions with different groups of the data entry team, reviewing the basics and covering any changes since the last big “data entry event.” The sessions are held in the same windowless basement audio-visual theatre that’s otherwise used for press conferences and the like; it’s a place with little air and no light, and so keeping sharp — especially after three sessions — is always a challenge. When we did this back in 2003 I recall looking up from my notes after the third session and completely forgetting how far along I was, and convinced I was repeating myself (turns out that I wasn’t).

Tomorrow night the Big Fun begins: the 291 binders of confirmation forms will all get delivered to our “data entry HQ,” and then they’ll be distributed out to the data entry team and inputting will continue well into the night. We’ll repeat on Wednesday night, and the Preliminary List of Electors will get generated Thursday morning.

I covered some of the technical details of the data entry application in my talk in 2003 at Zap Your PRAM if you want to know more about the particulars.

As proof that I can waste time measuring (and then blogging about) pretty well anything, I present the following video of the new traffic lights at the corner of Prince and Grafton Streets. My reasons are just, however: I wanted to get a good idea of just how much time I have to get across the street.

From the beginning of the cycle (which starts 19 seconds in):

• 00:00 - vehicle and pedestrian lights turn green
• 00:06 - flashing pedestrian “red hand” begins
• 00:26 - vehicle lights turn yellow, pedestrian solid red
• 00:30 - vehicle lights turn red

As Ann pointed out after I suggested it was still under wraps, Sim’s Corner is now open at the corner of Sydney and Queen in downtown [[Charlottetown]]:

Danny, Kevin, Michael, Shawn. Confused? Use my handy Which Murphy is Which? guide.

Spring is here and there’s lots happening on the [[Charlottetown]] restaurant scene.

The old home of Action Press at the corner of Sydney and Queen — they were always my favourite printer and paid me several kindnesses over the years; alas they’re now out in the Shops of St. Avards — has been shrouded in mystery (literally — scaffolding and a blue tarp have covered the building for many months). A while back a sign went up on the side of the building confirming rumours that it will soon open as a steak house called Sims Corner (update: it’s now open):

I got a peak inside the back bar while walking by last Saturday night and it’s obvious that they’ve put a lot of money into this building; I expect we’ll by impressed by the facade when the scaffolding comes down (update: it’s now down). The restaurant is a project of Murphy Investments, the same folks who run The Gahan House, Off Broadway and 42nd Street just next door.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away on University Avenue the space formerly occupied by the Checkers, Downtown Diner and Barristas is set to reopen as a fish and chips place called Brits; the signage went up on the door late this week:

Since the furniture store gave way to restaurants this space has never seemed to take off; it has echoes, in this regard, of the space where Little Mac Shoppe is now on Victoria Row that was a seemingly endless series of restaurants in the 1990s, none of which ever came into their own. I hope they do better with fish.

Up University a block we now find ourselves temporarily sushi-less, as Monsoon is closed until July:

It’s hard to run a one-woman sushi counter when you’re due to give birth any month; we all look forward to the reopening mid-summer!

Around the corner at the Confederation Court Mall the food court has been under its own plywood shroud for a few months now:

Earlier this week the promotion for the re-branded “Urban Eatery” began. The signage on the hoarding has long portrayed this renovation as a move to an “upscale” space (the burger place and the Oriental Wok were many things, but they could never be accused of being “upscale”). The revelation that Chef Gordon Bailey is involved in the recasting would seem to confirm this pretense. The opening seems to be scheduled for May 14th: I stuck my head in the door yesterday, though, and they seem to have a lot of work still to do; they’ll be working hard for the next week to hit that deadline.

Meanwhile over at the recast Town and Country on Queen Street things are purring along very well. Alex the manager is some sort of “call people by their first name savant” — I don’t know how he does it, but I’ve seen him call people he’s never even met before by their first names. I’m not easily one to be wowed by 10 foot rule-like customer service, but the way Alex pulls it off I feel more like Norm pulling up a bar stool at Cheers than anything else. Oh, and the food’s pretty good too; here’s the special from a few weeks back:

Spicy rice, shrimp, chicken saté, salad. Very, very tasty. I think the brilliance of the Town and Country, first name-basis aside, is that they’ve kept the balance of the old “Lebanese and Canadian food” menu while adding the Indonesian and Japanese-influenced items. In other words, they haven’t alienated the old crowd and they’re attracting whole new legions.

And speaking of the Town and Country, a few block away at the Sea Treat (at the corner of University and Euston), Joe, son of former Town and Country owners Louis and Faida, has been sprucing up the place and has added a Lebanese section to the menu. He’s also serving Louis’ famous chicken soup, which is about the best soup that there is. We’ve gotten into the habit of going there for lunch every Sunday afternoon and every time we’ve been there we’ve found Louis and Faida there too. By the way, is it “Sea Treat” or “Seatreat”:

And finally, some small food items of note.

Shoppers Drug Mart has a new house brand of “brewed iced tea” in several flavours. It’s too sweet, with 36g of sugar per bottle, but if that doesn’t put you off, it’s not too bad (meanwhile Karin’s iced tea at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market, which she’s been faithfully brewing up every week all winter long, continues to be excellent and every week there’s an inventive new flavour). If you’re in at Shoppers, look for the Laura Secord chocolate bars, back from oblivion in new wrapping:

Sometimes there is absolutely nothing like their French Mint bar to hit the spot. Obviously I’m not alone in feeling this way, as they were all sold out of French Mint downtown today (while the box of 70% went unsold — Islanders, or at least those who don’t play the trombone don’t like chocolate dark).

See you out and about.

Zapped!…

…takes a close look at—and a new approach to—the mass deployment of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID is not yet a household name or a pervasive technology, but Preemptive Media predicts that everyday encounters with this technology (whether known or not) will soon be commonplace. Zapped! is an effort to learn about and respond to the tags that industry is embracing for product tracking, the government for border control, schools for attendance-taking and public libraries for automatic checkout.