We woke up this morning to the news that there had been a fire at the corner of Prince and Kent Streets in downtown Charlottetown — just two blocks from our house. The fire destroyed the former Johnny’s Mayfair Tea Room (most recently a tattoo and piercing shop), the City Cab stand, Rose’s Barber Shop, and the Tribes shop. It looks like the Princess Nails shop, and the Thai restaurant, as well as the Velvet Underground bar around the corner, were spared, but I imagine they suffered water damage. Here’s how the scene looked on the way to work this morning:

This is a both a devastating loss for the tenants of the building and significant loss for the city. My heart goes out to the firefighters who waged a long and bitterly cold battle against the fire last night.

As these things happen, musing about Trooper got me thinking “what was I doing in 1979,” which got me thinking “how long have I lived on PEI,” which got me thinking “when did I start school.” All of which ended up on a time-consuming procrastination event culminating in a new Timeline page in the Rukapedia.

It was an eye-opening exercise to go through: I was surprised just how much I’ve forgotten about the macro-events of my almost-41 years of life. My mother helped out with some of the early details, and I stacked things on top of each other and looked at the relative positions of home, work and school to figure out later things.

I always thought that my first two relationships of note — coded on the timeline as “TH” and “MCP” — went on for 3 or 4 years each. Turns out that they both lasted about a year. Catherine and I have been dating (very, very serious dating) for 16 years. Which turns out to be the longest thing I’ve ever done.

When I got confused about the order of things around 1990 when I was flitting around from Ontario to Texas to Quebec I received invaluable documentary assistance from my first credit card statement — I just knew there was going to be some value in keeping all that stuff:

I was living in El Paso, Texas when I applied for my first credit card, a MasterCard. I needed it, in part, so I could afford to get back to Canada. When it arrived the first thing I did was to go to K-Mart and buy a small black and white television so I could watch this episode of thirtysomething (another surprise; I always thought it was the season finale I watched). I returned the TV the next day (see the third transaction).

Two days later I was on the road — first to Amarillo, over to Oklahoma (where I stopped to visit Bill Coleman in Bartlesville), then up through Missouri, Illinois and Ohio. I crossed over into Ontario at Detroit and I was home by the 19th. I did the trip in my trusty 1980 Toyota Tercel (which I later sold to my neighbour).

The EasyTimeline extension for MediaWiki made creating the timeline itself super-easy; I recommend it if you want to launch a similar effort.

For several weeks — it might actually be several years — I’ve had the Trooper song 3 Dressed up as a 9 [MP3 sample] running through my head. It was a staple on AM radio when I was 13 years old (the only kind of radio there was — CKOC was where it was at when I was a kid).

Regular readers will recall (I hope) that the last time I had my hair cut was at the new Fergie’s back in October. As this was a full five months ago, my hair was getting pretty long. So was [[Oliver]]’s. So we decided that today would be father-son haircut day. And in the spirit of this bold new adventure, we decided to switch barbers: today was our day to become customers of [[Ray’s Place]].

Ray’s has been immortalized several times by Rob; with Fergie in retirement and Fergie’s transformed into an annex of an antique store, I decided we were ready to move up to the barber shop of choice for the elite of the city. And so, at the stroke of noon, in we walked.

It was a wonderful experience. We were seated in barber chairs on opposite sides of the room so that I could see Oliver in the rear-view mirror. When Ray found out that it was Oliver’s first time to a bona fide barber, he brought the camera out and took “before and after” photos of us together. Oliver’s barber, obviously a veteran of the travails of cutting kids hair, was a pro at it; across the way my five months of shag was lopped off with dispatch and a good part of my life story, or at least the part of it taking place on PEI, was relayed as well.

Oliver was a model client — he sat still, did what he was told, answered questions about his favourite foods, etc. $12.50 for me, $7.00 for Oliver and we were out by 12:30. So now we have a new barber. Note to Ray: please don’t retire any time soon.

To celebrate our new discovery we headed down to [[Tai Chi Gardens]] for lunch, only to find [[Sandy]] and [[Bailey]] there. Bailey was looking mop-headed himself, and after some mentoring action from Oliver (including revelations about the wondrous “drawer of lollipops” that awaits child clients), Bailey was sold: Sandy took him right up for his own hair cut.

Our “alpha prototype” Chumby arrived yesterday. Plugged it in, turned it on, went through a brief configuration and now we’ve got both a souped-up wifi-enabled digital clock, and a physical object on which to do some interesting widget development using content from The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

The Chumby joins our [[Nabaztag]] rabbit in our stable of “smart networked objects,” a class of things that I’m finding particularly interesting of late: I like the idea of “using the Internet without a computer” and I like the idea of “ephemeral” or “accidental” information flow as opposed to “directed information gathering” (like “search Google for information about Keith Richards”).

Stay tuned. (Can a Plazes widget be too far in our future?) Meanwhile, here’s my favourite exchange from the Chumby Forums so far:

User: If we hack or Mod do we still get a warranty.and a repair if it brakes

Chumby: No. We obviously can’t finance an industry of folks mangling their chumbys, because, well, that would be insane.

Interesting to note, via this list of Google companies filed with the SEC that Google Canada Corporation is a Nova Scotia corporation, something you can verify here at the Nova Scotia Government website. Curious.

I returned to the Town & Country this afternoon, my second visit (first one got reported here) since Louis and Faida retired.

Wow — what a different a couple of weeks makes: everything was running like a top, service was super-quick, complete and friendly. And the food — I ordered the chicken saté with rice — was well-prepared and spiced with an excellent amount of fire. After we’d eaten the owner came over to make sure everything was okay.

So it looks like the T&C is back — it’s not the old T&C, and it never will be. But if they keep this up, it will become a regular stop on my lunch rounds.

My brother [[Steve]] is on the bus with PQ leader André Boisclair during the Québec election campaign. He’s writing a daily Reporter’s Notebook and, from time to time, you’ll see him, Forrest Gump-like, on the front page of a daily newspaper holding his microphone up to Boisclair: today they’re on the front page of the Globe and Mail (although not, apparently, on the Toronto edition, where the front page story is “ ‘Stay off the streets,’ mayor says”).

Jaiku underwent a UI upgrade while I wasn’t looking. Apparently “Jaiku” is now a noun — “type your new Jaiku here.” Rhymes with haiku?

Remember last year when Radio Shack got all switched around here in Canada, the end-up of which was that “Radio Shack announced that it would be forming a Canadian subsidiary to oversee its expansion into Canada, using the Radio Shack brand name.” Well my [[Dad]] pointed out that they’re giving up on that plan:

RadioShack Corporation closed nine company-owned stores in Canada at the end of January 2007 as the company focuses its attention and resources on strengthening its core business in the U.S.