As proof positive that air fares bear no relationship to the cost of flying, Air Canada is having a two-day sale this week with one-way fare from Charlottetown to London as low as $159, and to Paris as low as $180 each way. By way of comparison, the fare from Charlottetown to Montreal is $194, to Hamilton is $164.

Using the direct great circle distance, that puts the fare to London at 5.6 cents a mile and the fare to Montreal at 37.6 cents a mile. So somehow flying to Montreal is 7 times more expensive than flying to London. Weird.

Should you wish to take them up on this crazy folly of a fare, the rules are as follows for London:

Tickets must be purchased by March 13, 2008. Fares are valid for departures from March 27 to April 14, 2008. Minimum stay: Saturday night Maximum stay: 12 months. All travel must be completed by April 30, 2008. Seats are limited. Day-of-week restrictions may apply: advertised fares are valid Monday through Wednesday departures. Higher seat sale levels are also available for weekend departures.

A brief note for you fans of Monsoon, Charlottetown’s sushi destination: I had lunch there this afternoon and confirmed their latest opening hours policy is “Noon to around 2:30 p.m., except if school is cancelled.”

Interesting fact of the day: P.E.I. is about 100 times the size of Bermuda. Turns out that Bermuda is very, very tiny.

Remember the clock that couldn’t be adjusted for daylight time back in November? Well it looks like it got the upgrade it needed, because this morning, the day we “spring ahead,” it’s telling the correct time:

We who are Rogers Wireless customers do a lot of complaining about their crazy data rates. But maybe I’ve found a loophole?

I was doing some experimenting this afternoon with my Nokia N70, my RoyalTek RBT-1000 GPS and some of the excellent Python scripts for Series 60 phones from Nick Burch. This included setting up the S60 Python Lat/Long URL Loader to take my current GPS location and send it to a URL.

The URL I set up to receive the data doesn’t actually return anything, it just sends back a “202 Accepted” HTTP header. So the total data used, including the original HTTP request and the resulting response, is probably less the 1KB.

Rogers’ standard charge for pre-paid wireless data is advertised “5 cents a page” (which seems like a lot like selling gasoline in units of “number of drives to work”). If you thrash through their thicket of a website for a while you find this translates to “$0.05 per kb”. So the charge to transfer, 300 bytes should be about 1.4 cents. And yet, somehow, it is not, as the following screen snip from my online bill shows a charge of $0 for my two tests, spaced 13 minutes apart:

Have I found some sort of “less than some threshold” level that causes Rogers not to bill for data?

Update: Oh how naive I was to think that Rogers would let anything slip through. After a delay of 10 minutes a 5 cent charge finally showed up on my bill:

This explains why their data billing system uses the weird “debit $2 then credit $2” method: it can’t keep track of data usage in real time. It also suggests, alas, that the minimum charge is 5 cents, even if you use less than 1KB of data.

I knew it was too good to be true.

Maybe Dan McTeague, Liberal MP for Pickering-Scarborough East, should be leading the Liberal Party? Mr. McTeague managed to get a Private Members Bill through the House and on to the Senate yesterday — a rare feat — that would, in effect, turn RESPs into RRSPs. This is a brilliant political move, perhaps more brilliant than the C-10 dodge by the Government. Bravo.

Has anyone with Eastlink broadband service ever figured out how to get them to turn off the filter they have in place on outbound Port 25 (SMTP) traffic? There was no filter in place on our ISN-branded Eastlink-provided broadband, so it must be possible.

G. sent a link to a collection of historical air photos of Charlottetown that includes this beautiful shot from 1935:

Unfortunately their Air Photo Search feature doesn’t work with Safari or Firefox, so seeing what else they have available is behind a Windows wall.

Canada’s Radio Sweetheart, Dan Misener pointed to an episode of The Sound of Young America a couple of weeks ago, and in so doing inspired me to explore the amazingly rich episode archives of the show.

One of the most interesting interviews is with Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, the public radio show he hosts (another listening habit of mine inspired by Dan).

You can listen to the interview here.

The interview is interesting in part because it affords an opportunity to hear the unscripted Ira Glass, which is quite different from, although no less enjoyable to listen to, the well-worded and deliberate Ira Glass we hear on This American Life. It becomes immediately obvious what an incredibly deliberate and well-crafted show it is when you note this difference; you realize the show isn’t just Ira Glass hanging out in the studio and ad-libbing.

The other item of note is Glass’ description of the importance of a narrative thread to This American Life stories, and how this differentiates them from run-of-the-mill radio “feature reporting.” When host Jesse Thorn asks Glass about an episode of the show that focused on Improv Everywhere and their Best Gig Ever. Thorn wanted to know why the episode focused on this particular project — one that, in a certain sense at least, backfired — rather than any of the more “successful” projects from the group. To which Glass responded:

I know what you’re saying: you’re saying that basically 90% of what Improve Everywhere does is actually quite dear and really wonderful and we happened to choose two cases where they had dramatic failures…

…but I have no interest in a story about Improv Everywhere. Like I think that Improv Everywhere is totally interesting and if I were a feature reporter working for a daily news show or working for a newspaper, maybe I would do the story that you’re talking about, which is the story that goes “There’s this cool group, they do these funny little happenings,” and we’d go along on one of their happenings, and we’d quote some people at one of the happenings.

That’s not what I’m interested in doing. Because I don’t think it’s that compelling.

I’m more interested in a story with a plot and a conflict and characters and something that’s more engaging. And truthfully the story that I’m describing as the theoretical straight news version of this story isn’t as interesting as the story of “they accidentally screwed up.”

I feel like, in a way, it gets to something really interesting about Improv Everywhere, which is they mean well, they totally mean well, but even with the best of intentions, and even being very imaginative, creative people, occasionally they screw up… that to me is more interesting than “hipsters putting on happenings around New York.”

Those few sentences are as good an explanation of the difference between boring radio and compelling radio that I’ve ever heard.

And indeed they also cut to the heart of the difference between boring blogging and compelling blogging. So many times I’ll sit down and carefully craft a blog post, a blog post that I think will be the greatest blog post ever written, only to find that, in the end, to plot sort of, well, trails off. There’s no punch line, no resolution. No story. And so I close the browser and try and walk away with some notion that I’ve learned something, and vow to write another day.

Bill C-10, with the obscure-sounding title “An Act to amend the Income Tax Act, including amendments in relation to foreign investment entities and non-resident trusts, and to provide for the bijural expression of the provisions of that Act” has my television-making friends all atwitter. The offending matter is found in a proposed amendment to Section 125.4(1) and concerns the definition of what a “Canadian film or video production certificate” is.

The current version of the Income Tax Act says simply:

“Canadian film or video production certificate” means a certificate issued in respect of a production by the Minister of Canadian Heritage

(a) certifying that the production is a Canadian film or video production, and

(b) estimating amounts relevant for the purpose of determining the amount deemed under subsection 125.4(3) to have been paid in respect of the production.

The amended version, which has already passed the House and is to be considered by the Senate, contains several additional provisions, including this caveat:

(ii) public financial support of the production would not be contrary to public policy

The film and television making community suggests that this amounts to “essentially government censorship of the arts” and has mounted a campaign to have the bill overturned.

The Minister of Canadian Heritage disagrees, saying the intent of the amendment is to:

…make sure that we will take fiscal measure to make sure that the Canadian taxpayers’ money won’t fund extreme violence, child pornography or something like that.

Meanwhile, the Canada Family Action Coalition, a group “with a vision to see Judeo-Christian moral principles restored in Canada,” says in a recent release, in part:

[T]he argument that filmmakers and some media industry have a Charter Right to be funded and given tax breaks exposes years of liberal entitlement mentality…. Let them argue this one before the public, ask the taxpayer in the next election, if they want to spend 1.5 million dollars for a film called ‘Young People F***..ing’ - a pornographic film that even some Toronto Film Festival people thought questionable. Cronenberg and his friends will lose that argument and the one about their Charter right to be funded.”

Setting aside any debate about whether this is good public policy or not, it strikes me as a brilliant tactical move by the Government.

By burying the provision deep within a long bill, the Government is able to suggest in public both that it’s simply a well-intentioned administrative change, and also that, as it passed through the House without notice, it’s the fault of the opposition for not reading the bill before voting for it.

At the same time, they can also claim credit for the provision with their socially conservative base. And they can do this with the conservative code-word “contrary to public policy,” which their brethren will understand to clearly mean “no bestiality movies starring Rick Mercer.”

There’s almost no political downside, as the artistic constituency that’s up in arms is never going to vote Conservative, and even any hard-right Libertarian faction in the party that might otherwise oppose “Government control of the arts” is going to be against taxpayer-supported arts anyway.

On the opposition side, in addition to the “wait, we passed this without reading it?” problem, there’s also the challenge of appearing to be against something that is designed, says the Government, only to protect against “excessive violence or any heinous attacks against targeted groups in society.” For every artistic freedom argument the opposition raises, the Government can simply counter with any manner of fictional constructs — “so, the Honourable Member would support public financing of a pro-Nazi movie about ducks having sex with cows?”

Those of us who consider ourselves on the opposite side of the fence from the socially conservative aspects of the current Government treat these elements as though they are thick-skulled dullards at our peril: these people obviously know a thing or two about how to forward a their agenda without appearing to.

We may think that they’re going to win their revolution by introducing bills like “An Act to Curtail Swearing” or “A Bill to Limit Genital Contact between the Unmarried,” when, in fact, they’re smart enough to achieve their aims with considerably more finesse.