There are lots of very cool sounding intern jobs working with artists at eyebeam. For example:

Carmen Trudell and Jennifer Broutin — These NY based architects would like someone with experience in basic mechanics and electronics to assist in prototyping a DIY device that can be attached to any swinging door as a closure assembly to locally capture and redistribute energy. Applicants should be able to program a microcontroller, wire a simple LED assembly, and work with gears. They should be available to work on Saturdays and occasional weekdays. A good estimate is about 4-6 hours per week minimum.

I am in awe of Stellarium, a “free open source planetarium for your computer.” It’s available for Linux, Mac and Windows, and it’s a great “hands on” tool for learning more about astronomy. The long and the short of it: configure if for your location, and it will show you what you’re looking at when you look up into the night sky. Here’s the view out my front window tonight:

This week I’ve had my efforts split over two projects.

The first is a minor renovation of The Old Farmer’s Almanac website (we’ll be releasing it shortly). Part of my work on this project has involved delving headlong into the world of astrology — yesterday I coded up a feature that displays the current “moon’s position in the tropical zodiac” and today it was some code to display the “best days to…” (fish, camp, wean, etc.) based on astrological influences.

The second, introduced here, is our work on the Provincial General Election. I’ve been working on two fronts here: we’ll begin the process of data entry for the Official List of Electors next Tuesday, and I’ve been gearing up the systems to support that. And for the other end of the election event there are preparations for the presentation of results online and to the media.

I can’t imagine any two projects as different from each other as these two (although you could, I suppose, make a case that the partisan side of the electoral process includes aspects that overlap with astrology!) It’s an interesting week.

Hank, a Well-Traveled Dog is a story from the May/June 2007 issue of Yankee Magazine. If you’ve any love for dogs, you will be unable to read it with dry eyes.

We’ve just updated the Find your Electoral District tool with polling locations for the upcoming Provincial General Election. As in 2003 there’s a much wider range of voting options available, with a week of advance voting (two full-day Advance Polls followed by four half-day Returning Office polls). Just enter your civic address and you can find out what your location locations are.

Eleven years ago the team developing the www.gov.pe.ca website had a meeting with Merrill Wigginton, then Chief Electoral Office of PEI. There was an election coming up on November 18, 1996 and we were interested in putting the election results online on our nascent website.

Merrill, to put it mildly, was skeptical. The Internet was still called the “information superhighway” back then (proof) , and nobody was completely sure that it was going to “take.” Why should Merrill risk the integrity of the electoral process by loosing the result out into the ether?

To Merrill’s credit, he had faith in us, and he let us have our shot. And it worked. And we went back and did it all over again in 2000 and then again, after a hurricane, no less in 2003.

With the dropping of the writ tonight, we’re back in “election mode” once again. And this time, as in 2003, in addition to processing the results on polling day, we’re maintaining ElectionsPEI.ca and are overseeing the technology side of the province-wide door to door confirmation process.

Between now and Election Day on May 28th, I’ll be immersed in districts and polls and lists and audit trails and the like. As I spoke about at Zap Your PRAM in 2003, we use a lot of open source technology at Elections PEI and while I’ll be stepping away from commenting on any issues related to the candidates, the issues and the parties, I’ll be blogging here about some of technology story of the election.

Here’s a little experiment: if you call +1 (902) 367-3694 (that’s DOPE-MY-I if you need a handy mnemonic) you’ll here a short recording instructing you to “press 1” if you want to record an audio advertisement (project offline for a while). If you do press 1, you can record a message of up to 30 seconds, and shortly thereafter your “audio ad” will appear in the sidebar here, along with your name (from your Caller ID) and your telephone number.

You’re welcome to call in messages about anything — your business, your organization, your passion, your event. I reserve the right to remove anything insane, but I’ve got a pretty decent insanity tolerance. Up to six ads will appear at any given time — the six most recent ones phoned in.

This is free (unless, of course, you’re phoning long distance), may disappear at any time, and isn’t guaranteed to work.

The Guardian is reporting Charlottetown mayor orders halt to bottled water:

In a letter to the local branch of the Council of Canadians, Charlottetown Mayor Clifford Lee said city council recently met to discuss a letter from the group requesting the city switch from using bottled water to tap water.

“It was the decision of (city) council that the City of Charlottetown would cease purchasing bottled water,” Lee said in the letter.

Bottled water will no longer be permitted in all city premises and workplaces and all city council and committee meetings.

Now while in the grander scheme of things this might seem a trivial move, I still think it’s an important statement. The commodification of drinking water has been something that’s happened in my lifetime; we’ve moved from:

to this:

While this obviously has ramifications for how we think of water locally, and for our relationship with our ground water, more significantly it contributes to the erosion of access to clean drinking water being treated as a basic human right around the world.

Kudos to Mayor Lee and council for showing leadership in this regard, especially given their earlier dismissal of this as an important issue.