The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has a Recalls, Market Withdrawals and Safety Alerts page that’s also available as an RSS feed.

I’ve been subscribing to the feed for the past couple of weeks, and it has provided me with an interesting (and somewhat disturbing) look into what can go wrong with food; for example:

Product testing by several states has now confirmed that Peter Pan peanut butter and certain Great Value brand peanut butter are the sources of the foodborne illness outbreak of Salmonella Tennessee that began in August 2006. To date 329 individuals have become ill from consuming the contaminated peanut butter, and 51 of those persons were hospitalized.

and:

Castle Produce, a subsidiary of Tropical Produce, Inc., a wholesale importer of fresh fruit and vegetables announced the recall of cantaloupes in California due to potential health concerns. Some cantaloupes delivered on or after 2/16/2007 have tested positive for Salmonella, although no illnesses have been reported.

and:

Americas Kitchen of Alpharetta, GA, is recalling its 32-ounce packages of “Wellsley Farms” Green Bean Casserole sold from September 1, 2006 through February 22, 2007 because they have the potential to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, an organism which can cause illness, mild, moderate or even severe.

and:

The American Italian Pasta Company (AIPC), the independent manufacturer of Giant Eagle brand Egg Free Pasta Ribbons, has notified Giant Eagle that a recently produced shipment of the product may inadvertently contain eggs.

And those are only from this week.

A story in the Hamilton Spectator about the gender balance in the Ontario Legislature caught my eye this morning, specifically the note that “[o]nly two provinces, Quebec (28 per cent) and Prince Edward Island (26 per cent), have higher percentages” of women in the house than Ontario (which has 25%).

Given that more than 50% of PEI electors are women, 26% isn’t something to be proud of in any absolute way, but it is interesting to note that PEI, which is seen by many as a bastion of old school ways, is, with Quebec, leading the country relatively speaking.

Elections PEI has an overview of women in politics in Prince Edward Island; the PEI Coalition for Women in Government has a similar overview.

[[Catherine]] has started uploading photographs of interesting doors from around the world to her Flickr.

I arrived early this morning at the Air Canada check-in area here at Halifax International Airport to find about 200 people in the line. Despite the fact that they’re pushing people to the automated check-in kiosks, there was no dedicated bag drop-off area, so checking my bag would have involved a wait that looked like about an hour. So I dumped my “liquids in containers of more than 50ml” and decided to carry-on instead.

I found some hidden check-in kiosks out in the main departure lounge, printed a boarding pass, breezed through security, and was cappuccino-laden 10 minutes after airport arrival.

I’m mindful of the fact that this is probably exactly what Air Canada’s vision of heaven is — passenger check-in with no need to actual staff. I suppose if they continue to decrease the number of counter staff, this is what we’ll all inevitably be pushed into. I just pitty the single parent traveling with 2 kids and 4 bags who has to wait in line.

I haven’t even flown on Delta to Halifax, and they’re already impressing me. A few years back I remember reading about a Delta initiative to improve the quality of their in-airport passenger information. It’s working:

The top screen is a large plasma display hanging near the gate. It lists everything from the names of passengers on stand-by to the weather at the destination to information about the nearest washrooms. The bottom screen is the “departure information” screen; pretty standard except that you’ll see that my flight to Halifax at 8:10 is listed as “At Gate,” which is a helpful little bit of information (especially in light of the many Air Canada flights I’ve taken that are listed as “on time” when the actual airplane is 500km away).

Delta obviously understands that flying is frustrating and stressful, and every little bit of information you can provide can help to mitigate that.

I’m flying out of Delta’s new Terminal A here at Logan: it’s beautiful and bright and well laid-out, with many eating and shopping options. I just polished off a very good plate of pasta and chicken from the “Legal Seafoods Test Kitchen” around the corner.

Delta to YHZ tonight; Air Canada to YYG tomorrow morning.

[[Compass]], of course, is already “saved.” I mean “save” like “I want to save a local copy of the Compass video stream to my local computer so I can watch it over and over again.” Here’s how I do it; I’m new to most of this, so your mileage may vary and there may be better settings to use. I suspect it’s probably okay to use this for “time shifting” Compass to watch later; if you’re planning to sell bootleg Compass DVDs on street corners, I wash my hands of you (although I would also secretly laud you). This same technique will probably work for any other CBC video stream.

First, go and get the most recent version of the VLC media player. I’m using version 0.8.6a for Mac OS X; it’s available for many other operating systems, and I suspect that you can make it work equally well if you’re of another persuasion. It’s free.

Once you’ve got VLC up and running on your machine, do a File \| Open Network, select HTTP/FTP/MMS/RTSP as the type, and enter the following URL:

http://www.cbc.ca/ondemand/compass.asx

Check the Streaming/Saving box, and click the Settings… button beside it, and set the following:

• Select the File radio button, and enter a file name; I used compass.mpg.
• Select an Encapsulation Method of MPEG1.
• Check the Video transcoding box, and select mp1v from the drop-down list; I selected a bitrate of 512 and a scale of 1; you can play with these values (enter 0.75 as the scale, for example, to get a resultig video 75% of the original size).
• Check the Audio transcoding box, and select mpga from the drop-down list. I used a bitrate of 96 with one channel; again, you can fiddle here.
• Click OK.
• Click OK on the original Open Source dialog box.

Here’s how the settings look for me:

At this point, if all goes according to plan, you should see VLC’s controller start “playing” the Compass video. You won’t actually see the video — it’s spooling to the file you specified on your local disk. You will probably see a VLC error pop-up reporting something like “access_mms: cannot read data” — this is okay, as it’s simply pulling apart the Compass video stream URL, looking for the actual stream itself on the CBC’s video streaming network.

It will take, in theory, 60 minutes to complete, and when it’s done you should have a rather large file on your local disk that you can play to your heart’s content in either VLC or in the QuickTime Player.

In theory you should be able to get a much smaller file by selecting MP4 or H264 for video transcoding, but in my experiments while I can get the video to work with those, I can’t get the audio to work. The only pair that I can reliably get working with audio and video is MP1V video and MPGA audio. Let me know if you find otherwise.

With some additional tweaking, and the right video player and enough storage, you should be able to prepare a version of Compass playable on everything from a [[Nokia N70]] to a Sony PSP. I welcome reports of any adventures that you have experimenting with this.

You’ve watched the show, now download the ringtone! If you’ve got a mobile phone that allows you to set MP3 files as ringtones, grab this MP3 and be delighted with the blaring trumpets of [[Compass]] every time you get a call. Better yet, set up a personalized ringtone for calls from 902-629-6400 and know instantly when your favourite Compass reporter or producer is calling!

At long last an episode of the newfangled Compass can be watched on the web.

There’s a bold new SCTV-like opening montage with trumpets blaring accompanying a dizzying array of flying heads and PEI landmarks. It’s a little unnerving to see Sally Pitt’s head flying through the air sandwiched between a lobster and a lighthouse:

I’m dumping the video into an MPEG right now (handy instructions on doing that to follow shortly) and will watch the whole hour once I return from dinner; more accolades and biting commentary to follow.

All of the check-in and gate counters in the new cross-border terminal at Halifax International Airport are fronted by pulsing lights that slowed change colour from red to green. They are purely ornamental — the lights colours don’t mean “stop” or “go.” But people in line have no way of knowing that, making for confusing line behaviour. Stop. No, go. No, stop. Oops, no, go.

Those sharp minds at Toyota think of everything: my rental RAV4 even has an “Auto LSD” button. I haven’t pressed it yet, because being wiped out on acid would decrease my ability to function in a business environment. But it’s nice to know that I could if I wanted to.