When we were at the Museu das Comunicações last month in Lisbon (see Ten Things To Do with Kids in Lisbon), my favourite exhibit was a demonstration of rotary dial telephones and an old telephone switch. I shot a video of [[Oliver]] and I taking it out for a ride:

The exhibit is set up with about a dozen rotary telephones, each with its own “phone number.” You dial dial any phone from another. And you can see (and hear) the call being placed on the switch right beside you.

Notice that I have some difficulty actually hanging up the phone — I’m so out of practice. See also Feeling out of time and place, wherein my old friend Sam relates his son’s first experience with a rotary dial phone. He writes, in part:

When I returned a half hour later he was extremely aggravated and upset at me and I couldn’t figure out why until later. As it happens the only phone in the club house area where he was, was rotary dial phone. Max had previously seen one in a museum, but had never had occasion to actually use one. As a result, he had absolutely no clue about how to operate this seemingly straightforward device.

As far as I know, the only restaurant in Charlottetown to provide a stool that allows kids easy access to the sink to wash their hands is [[Angels]] on Belvedere Avenue. If you’ve got a young child, you know that it can often be a struggle to hold them up to the tap while simultaneously turning on the water, managing the soap, and so on.

Which is why the Step ‘N Wash should be in every public washroom. It’s a hand folding “on demand step,” with no pinch-points, that’s bolted to the floor. USA Today reports today that Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta is installing them; the company website has a list of other customers.

Each unit costs $189US, and they suggest you need only one per washroom.

Ten years ago, back in 1997, when [[Reinvented]] was still called Digital Island and most of my work was with the Province of PEI, I went down to the Coles Building here in [[Charlottetown]] in the late afternoon and was locked inside, along with a bunch of reporters and camera operators, until 8:00 p.m. when then-Provincial Treasurer Pat Mella delivered the Provincial Budget address in the Legislative Assembly.

The result was this page on www.gov.pe.ca (back when web design was so much simpler…), the first appearance of the PEI budget on the Internet at the same time as it was delivered by the Treasurer.

Back in 1997 this meant dialing up to the Internet from an old Toshiba laptop from the desk of the Coles Building Commissionaire to upload HTML that had been finagled out of the original WordPerfect. The budget documents came to me on a floppy disk in an encrypted ZIP file. The whole thing took about 5 minutes to upload.

Other than the heady excitement of being locked up in the heart of the excitement, my strongest memory from that and future budgets was the green-tinted Nanaimo bars in amongst the collection of snacks and sandwiches provided to we temporary prisoners (I think they came from the Central Farmer’s Coop on Queen Street). They were dreamy. And caused my blood sugar to skyrocket. Which only added to the heady excitment of it all.

A quick review of the budget pages from the late 1990s provides a good tour through the evolution of the design of the Government website: 1997, 1999, 2003 (my favourite design of all) and today.

It’s easy to forget that back then we were considered foolish (at best) or crazy for bothering to put things like the budget online. Ten years later it’s expected.

There’s a company in [[Summerside]] called ReTherm that produces drain water heat exchangers for the home. Does anyone have experience with these?

The night after there’s a big snow in [[Charlottetown]] we can expect to be kept up all night — or at least woken up early in the morning — by the sounds of snow being moved around. The City is very thorough in its snow clearing efforts, clearing out all the snow from the on-street parking and moving it to the middle of the street:

The next step, later today, will be to come along with a giant snow-blower and move the snow into dump trucks where it’s then moved to, well, somewhere else (they used to dump it in the harbour — do they still do that?).

Our longtime client the Brackley Drive-in is looking for summer canteen staff as well as for a projectionist. Details at drivein.ca. They run a great show out in Brackley, and if you’re a fan of the movies and have always dreamed of running the big iron, now’s your chance.

Hidden under the How many are you? link in the sidebar I’ve been running the excellent Mint traffic analysis application. Today I upgrade to version 2, which is even more sparkly and fresh than version 1. Take a look to see some numbers about you and your ruk-reading brothers and sisters.

Grab the latest JaikuGrowler for a version that, in theory, actually works. The original version suffered from a bug on start-up related to the fact that AppleScript doesn’t understand “YYYY-MM-DD” as a valid date format.

Oh, and there’s now a documented Jaiku API. Cool.

It’s time to sort through [[Oliver]]’s outgrown clothes and shoes and pass them into the pool of friends and family. Before letting the shoes out the door, we took a photo.