I have a cold. So I went looking for information about why. And ended up at this helpful (and simple) Chilling Out with Colds page. It’s part of the KidsHealth website.

KidsHealth is a project of Nemours, which is charitable foundation created in 1935 by Alfred I. duPont and funded by the Alfred I. duPont Testamentary Trust.

The organization is called Nemours “after the French town his great-great-grandfather, Pierre Samuel duPont, represented in the court of Louis XVI” and its mission is:

…to provide leadership, institutions, and services to restore and improve the health of children through care and programs not readily available, with one high standard of quality and distinction regardless of the recipients financial status.

All of which seems about as laudable as can be.

Gong Bao Thursday was a much quieter affair today, both because the lads upstairs abandoned me to my lonesome by moving their Friday lunch to Thursday, and because [[Interlude]] was uncommonly abandoned itself today.

I got the better of the situation, however, as it turned out to be the best Gong Bao of the season.

If you’re looking for a tasty place to memorialize the passing of Christ tomorrow for lunch, they tell me at Interlude that they’ll be open regular hours. And pad thai is the special (my operatives tell me both that the pad thai is excellent and also that it’s egg-free).

By the way, in addition to learning this week that trees take carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen (which seems like a wonderful miracle to me, and very handy for we humans), I also learned that the “Good” in “Good Friday” isn’t supposed to mean good as in “happy, great, top-of-the-morning,” but rather is derived from either “holy” or “God’s” depending on which wiki and/or religion you follow.

Also of interest: our colleagues at [[Yankee]] have neither Good Friday nor Easter Monday as a holiday, something they seem to share with other Americans. Except, for some reason, those that live in Buffalo, New York. Go figure.

I had an unexpected email today from a woman I went to high school with. Which prompted me to drop in to the school website (the school has the same name — Waterdown District High School — but it’s in a new building since we were there). On the website I found the Student Handbook and inside this book is a Code of Conduct, something I don’t recall existing back in the early 1980s.

Among other things, the Code of Conduct outlines unacceptable clothing (it’s in the section “Respect for Self”):

It is the responsibility of students to dress in a neat, clean, safe, and sensible manner suitable to the school environment. Outdoor clothing is not to be worn in class. Clothing imprinted with symbols of alcohol, racism, drugs, sex, religious discrimination, or obscenities is unacceptable. Clothing, hairstyles, make-up, jewellery or costumes that are representative or symbolic of anti-social cliques or gangs will not be tolerated on the school grounds. School simulates the world of work therefore our dress code reflects an acceptable manner of dress.

• NO boxers or other undergarments showing
• NO bra straps showing or halter tops/tube tops/muscle shirts
• NO bare midriffs showing
• NO bare backs showing
• NO cleavage showing

Setting aside any objections I might have to the notion of enforcing a dress code at all, the item here that I’ve got the biggest philosophical problems with is “School simulates the world of work therefore our dress code reflects an acceptable manner of dress.”

Huh?

Whatever happened to the halcyon days of youth? Thankfully the “simulation of the world of work” rhetoric was absent from my high school days, and there was no suggestion that we were anything other than kids being prepared for life in its many colours; sadly, it would appear that the “training for your future in the workforce” approach to education is winning out.

On the upside, I see that it’s now mandatory, under something called the “Community Involvement Program,” for students to complete 40 hours of “unpaid community involvement activities” in order to graduate from high school. That seems like a Good Thing to me (although I suppose “of your own volition” volunteer work would be preferable to “mandatory” volunteer work, which is something of an oxymoron). Their definition of what qualifies seems broad enough to include almost anything, and I imagine that some students use this to engage in some creative extensions of their “simuluation of the world of work.”

About 82 miles from my birthplace of Rochester, New York is the community of Lycoming, NY. And in Lycoming on April 5, 1966 — the day I was born — the following UFO encounter is reported in the Comprehensive Catalog of 1,500 Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns:

3 a.m. — Lillian Louis, 42, went to get a glass of water in her kitchen and saw a spinning vapor-like sphere, 10 feet in diameter, shooting its exhaust onto the ground from 20 feet height near her house, which departed very suddenly, leaving a trail.

I always knew that I didn’t quite fit in here on earth; now I know why.

See the boyfriend trouser. And Ethel Merman — one of my favourite singers of all time.

One more Google Maps experiment: All the Places I’ve Lived. I’m missing a couple — Ottawa when I was young, and a house on the river in Peterborough were I lived for less than a month. But otherwise the 19 places there are where I’ve called home.

Google unveiled a fantastic new feature for Google Maps this week: the ability to create your own maps, with markers, lines and polygons. The interface is very slick, and it’s really, really easy to start cranking out customized maps. My first effort is Things to See and Do in Lisbon, based on the places we visited a couple of weeks ago.

This just in from George Stewart at Sears Travel in Charlottetown: flights from Halifax to London (Gatwick) leaving May 3, 10 or 24 and returning June 1 for $445 return — all taxes and fees included. That’s cheaper than flying to, well, anywhere. Call George at 902-892-1172; his email says “extremely limited seats available… first come first serve.”

Tod is is reporting that among the shows that won’t be on CBC Television’s fall schedule is Venture.

Venture was never the same after Robert Scully stopped being host — he was a great interviewer, and managed to make business seem interesting in a way that it never was on the pages of the Globe and Mail. Before “reality television” was popular, and before shows like Opening Soon came along, Venture perfected the “following entrepreneurs around with a video camera through the ups and downs and seeing how business actually works” segment, and Scully provided excellent play-by-play.

In recent years the program has bounced around the schedule, and launched inane side-projects like “let’s make the FedEx delivery driver CEO for a day.” The program never regained the focus and soul it had under Scully, and it doesn’t surprise me that it’s not being renewed.

It’s too bad, however, that we’ll no longer had an irreverent weekly look at the business world from the inside.

Okay, so I’ve done a little more procrastinating today and taken the simple [[JaikuGrowler]] AppleScript and attempted to create a bona fide Mac OS X application, using AppleScript Studio.

You can grab JaikuGrowler.dmg and follow the instructions in the README to try it out.

Some of the nice things about this grown-up JaikuGrowler:

• Doesn’t require manual installation of any OSAX — XMLLib osax is bundled right in (thanks to the generous licensing terms from Satimage).
• Something of a GUI instead of the “nothingness” in the old AppleScript.

On the downside:

• This is a very early version, released mostly to get feedback on whether it works for anyone else. It’s not even a beta.
• I don’t really know what I’m doing, so this might not work at all for you (although it does for me). I make applications for the web, not for the desktop, so this is mostly new to me.
• At present the application only loops through your new Jaikus once — it doesn’t sit in the background waiting for new ones to come along. This will change. Soon.

If you’re running Mac OS X (version 10.2 or later), have (or are willing to install) Growl, and are a Jaiku user, and have a sense of adventure, please try this out. And if it doesn’t work, please let me know.