If you’ve got an Eastlink business telephone line, and want to know how to activate the various Centrex features, here’s the PDF of the Centrex User Guide — it’s hard to find on their website.

I went into the post office this morning on the way to work to buy a book of ten stamps. The postal clerk sold me a book of 51 cent stamps, even though the official cost of mailing a letter is now 52 cents. He assured me that Canada Post will honour these old, less expensive stamps, for the rest of 2007. There’s some discussion of this here.

It’s been a month an a half since I launched my new morning cappuccino regime. Surely you’ve been asking yourself “how’s it going so far, Pete?” (assuming that you are [[Ann Thurlow]], [[Catherine]] or [[Oliver]], the only three people in the world who call me Pete).

For about the last month I’ve settled into a comfortable routine of alternating back and forth between [[Beanz]] and [[Timothy’s]], with a Saturday diversion to the Farmer’s Market.

And so on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings around 7:30 a.m. you’ll generally find me at [[Beanz]], perched on a stool in the front window. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays you’ll find me at [[Timothy’s]], sitting at a table for two along the wall.

I am nothing if not a creature of habit, so I order the same thing in both places: regular cappuccino and a toasted sesame bagel with swiss cheese and tomato.

The cappuccino isn’t world class in either place, but it’s somewhere between “okay” and “acceptable” and I’ve decided that’s got to be good enough for me. I’ve even gotten used to the fey glass mugettes at Beanz.

The bagel with swiss and tomato is a throwback to my youth: every morning during the summer of 1985 I would take the GO Train into Toronto, get off at Union Station, walk across to the food court under the CIBC skyscraper, and order swiss tomato bagel and an apricot nectar. I’d then walk over to the subway and ride up to the Museum station where I’d split my days between volunteering at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Athenians project.

Beanz and Timothy’s are study in contrasts.

At Beanz my order is exactly the same every time: same bagel, same cappuccino, always served with a teaspoon and a napkin, always the same price. And I always have to get my own sugar.

Timothy’s is more improvisational: the cappuccino’s always the same, but the bagel comes out different every time (sometimes more cheese, sometimes less; sometimes open faced, sometimes not), and the price seems to vary between about $3.00 and about $5.00 depending on the day and the server. And I always have to get my own sugar, and reach around behind the counter to get a teaspoon.

Each place has its own attractions, which is why I alternate back and forth.

Interestingly, my standard order was recognized as “your usual” on two successive days at each place, suggesting that it takes about a month of regular morning visits to be recognized as “a regular” at a Charlottetown coffee shop.

With recent updates to the front end “slippy map” at OpenStreetMap, all that cycling around with a GPS receiver in my pocket last summer now has a much more impressive gateway to the world. This map of downtown Charlottetown, for example — the results of my cycling labours — has colour-coded streets, street name labels, different rendering for the Confederation Trail and it works very “Google Maps-like” in that you can pan by dragging the map around. Neato.

An item in my weekly Air Canada email newsletter caught my eye this morning:

This is all very well and good, but it would be helpful if the newsletter actually told us which new terminal Air Canada is moving to tomorrow. There’s information on neither Air Canada’s nor Logan Airport’s website about the change, and it took a call to the airline’s toll-free number to find the answer: they’re moving to Terminal B.

For those of us who fly in and out of Logan on Air Canada a lot, this is a Big Change. Their old home at Terminal C was moribund once you got through security, with a tired old Burger King as the only restaurant and a couple of cramped waiting rooms. The indignities of Terminal C were compounded by the fact that Air Canada moved there from the forever-being-renovated Terminal E just as the renovations were completed. Terminal E’s departure lounge had sushi and rocking chairs.

We flew out of Logan’s Terminal B last year on US Airways on our way to Dublin, and I recall it is being a might better resourced (and much brighter looking) terminal. I’m due to head south sometime this season and I’ll report back on what Terminal B means for Air Canada passengers.

By the way, Terminal E, the international terminal at Logan, is to be renamed Terminal D sometime this year; the gates at the old Terminal D were amalgamated into Terminal C last year.

In other Air Canada news, here are the special webSaver deals from Charlottetown for this week:

Not that I turn my nose up at travel to Peru or Australia, but it does seem like an odd combination of destinations to put on sale given all the other places in the world they fly. The fares don’t seem that fantastic, either: in classic Air Canada style, they are “sample low one-way fares” so if you want to get back from Lima or Sydney you have to double them and add taxes and fees.

And finally, something I missed when it was announced earlier this month: Air Canada is starting up flight from Halifax to New York again. Starting April 1, 2007 they’ll have a daily flight, on a 50-seat CRJ, leaving Halifax at 11:45 a.m. and arriving New York LaGuardia at 12:30; the return flight leaves LaGuardia at 1:00 p.m. and arrives Halifax at 3:40 p.m. The late-morning departure should mean that it’s possible to string together flights to LaGuardia from Charlottetown with a change of planes in Halifax with little problem; and indeed a look at the schedule for April 1 shows this to be true:

Looking at some sample fares for April, it looks like the YYG to LGA return fare will be about $575 with all taxes and surcharges in. Oddly, it looks like it’s almost always cheaper to fly to New York via Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa than it is to fly via the new Halifax flight; seems you can save about $50 this way.

Every once in a whole I stumble across an aspect of the excellent BBEdit text editor for Mac OS X that’s new to me. This morning, for example, the following dialog box popped up:

I noticed that if held down the “Command” key (the one with the Apple on it on a genuine Apple keyboard), the buttons in the dialog box changed so that their keyboard shortcuts were displayed:

As near as I can tell this isn’t standard OS X behaviour. Maybe it should be?

Here’s a snip from an email newsletter from Simple Shows. The “dear fellow polluters” subject line caught my eye.

It’s worth noting that Simple is a division of Deckers Outdoor Corporation, a California corporation with $264 million in revenue. This kind of puts the whole “a nice little shoe company” conceit in a new light. As does Deckers’ corporate mission.

Our mission is to build niche footwear lines into global brands with market leadership positions.

None of which, of necessity, takes away from the authenticity of their Simple Shoes message. But it does make we wonder how deep their thinking goes, and how much of it is simply brand posturing.

I had lunch today with Marc Leggott, Dave Cormier and Grant Johnson, open source warriors from the University of Prince Edward Island. They are rambling about in some interesting pastures. Some web things I learned about at lunch that I didn’t know about before:

• Loomware — UPEI Librarian Mark Leggott’s weblog.
• Dave Cormier — UPEI polymath Dave Cormier’s site and blog.
• Digitization Projects at UPEI
• DSpace — “digital repository system captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material.”
• Institute of Interdisciplinary Research in Culture, Multimedia, Technology and Cognition and CMTC Virtual Research
• cribchronicles — “a dumping ground for motherhood-related ramblings.”
• Evergreen — an open source “library automation software product.”
• koha — “a full-featured open-source ILS.”

While there are plenty of cool librarians on PEI, I’ve been waiting for the arrival of a serious contingent of open source librarians, and a cabal seems to be emerging. To seriously engage with them I’m going to have to get over my prejudices against “projects with long and complicated names and many acronyms” and, indeed, “projects that have government funding.” If I can do that, there seems to be a possibility of some interesting grounds to play in.

I got curious yesterday about how size of the readership of our local newspaper, The Guardian compares to the size of the readership here.

The Canadian Newspaper Association reports that The Guardian has an average daily readership of 20,237.

The traffic statistics for ruk.ca show that there are approximately 1,000 unique visitors to this site every day. Google Analytics reports similar numbers.

So, in simple terms, The Guardian has 20 times the daily readership.

Of course our counting methods are different, their’s are independently verified, and they have web traffic too. And many of my readers aren’t local.

My advertising revenue is about $6.00 a day (from Google AdSense). My expenses amount to my time — probably about 30 minutes a day, on average — and a slice of a $100/month hosting bill.

The Guardian makes a lot more money, but they also need employees and trucks and paper and paper carriers. I assume they make a lot more money at the end of the day, but I’m willing to bet that when expressed in terms of tonnes of carbon per reader, I’m running a greener operation.

This is not to suggest that I aspire to newspaperness, but it’s and intriguing comparison nonetheless. And it seems to suggest that a wily entrepreneur/journalist could make a run at creating an online publication that would rival The Guardian in readership.

I’ve pointed before, but it’s worth pointing again: KPIG is an excellent example of how commercial radio doesn’t have to be generic and faceless. Here’s how they describe themselves:

We’re an anachronism - a throwback to the days when real DJs picked out the music, and listeners expected something more from a radio station than just a couple of hundred songs repeated over and over, with some “big voice” guy yelling about how great it all is. We’re also - to the amazement of all of the radio “professionals” who make the rules we thumb our noses at - very successful, though we try not to let it go to our heads.

Next time you find yourself wishing for more than Kirk and Kerri Wynne in the morning, drop over to listen to the live KPIG Internet stream.