For those of us in the eating-out-for-lunch crowd, downtown Charlottetown has been difficult terrain this month: [[Interlude]] is closed until January 16, the [[Formosa Tea House]] closed for a week, the Thai food place on Kent Street is closed until March. I’ve been forced to explore new terrain.

Today it was [[The Maple Grille]], the recently renovated restaurant on University Avenue just north of Kent Street.

Every earlier visit I’d made to The Maple Grille had been disappointing. The space was cramped — tables too close to the benches in the booths, no place to hang coats — the food mediocre and the service sometimes shockingly slow.

Today’s visit erased all of those bad memories.

The space has been entirely transformed: the wall to the space next door, now a blues club operated by the same owners, has been opened up, the booths re-designed, the interior has been redecorated, and there’s even a heated coat rack near the door.

The food was excellent.

There are few places in [[Charlottetown]] that can cook vegetables properly — [[Cedar’s]] and the Delta Hotel are two that come to mind. And now The Maple Grille: the baby red potatoes were perfectly cooked; the side of celery, carrots, onions and broccoli hit the sweet spot of al dente without being too crunchy.

The meatball sandwich on a kaiser — something I ordered despite the fact that I’d never ever had a meatball sandwich before — was hot, tasty and had just the right amount of cheese.

The chocolate cheesecake, which I was warned before ordering was “more like a chocolate caramel cake” was indeed exactly that. And it was fresh and very tasty.

Service was warm, attentive, and friendly.

Recommended.

The summer of 1983 was an interesting one for me.

After several years of working at the Hamilton YMCA as a summer day-camp counsellor, I graduated to the big leagues and took a position at a real “overnight” summer camp at Lakefield College School north of Peterborough.

The camp — Lakefield Computer Camp — was a startup operation, poised to capitalize on the growing popularity of small computers and the attendant desire of those in the upper middle class to educate their kids in their operation.

That said, there was surprisingly little geeking around, and the camp — operated by a scion of the Southam family with a deep summer camp background — had all the swimming, capturing the flag, campfires and dining hall fun that any proper summer camp might have.

That the camp was in its first year of operation gave we staff the added fun of being able to make things up as we went along; many of us had been to summer camps ourselves, so the result was a hearty melange of camp traditions from across Ontario. Our leader was the great Molly Lawson, Trent University alum, and perhaps one of the best summer camp people I’ve ever encountered.

Tuesday was my day off. Lacking a car, and being stuck out in Lakefield, this didn’t offer much opportunity for fun diversionary activities. Fortunately Molly had a bicycle, and with a crude map of the route down to Peterborough, I set off early one Tuesday morning for some big city fun.

The ride, on the road parallel to the Otonabee River, is quite gentle and very scenic, and at the Peterborough end I had my first encounter with Trent, an encounter that sowed the architectural seeds that would later take me there for college.

Alas it was also there that things went horribly awry.

The bike got a flat tire.

Fortunately I had $10 in my pocket, which gave me access to some resources. I figured out how to catch the city bus south, found a Canadian Tire, bought a patch kit and a pair of pliers (which I figured were the handiest and most universal of the tool family), caught the bus back, and went to work. After about an hour of fiddling and prying and patching and fiddling, I was back in business. Just in time to head back up to Lakefield.

The ride back up, in the heat of the summer afternoon, was slightly up hill. To take the edge off, I decided to stop for a swim in the river; I pulled over to the side of the road when I spotted a house-sized Island just off the shore, hid my bike in the bushes, waded over, and had a pleasant dip and a little rest in a shady green glen.

Alas it was there, at the time unbeknown to me, that things again went horribly awry.

I dried myself off, rode back to camp, returned the bike to Molly and went on to finish up the remaining week of the camp season before returning home to [[Carlisle]].

Shortly after returning home for the summer, I started to develop a red rash. All. Over. My. Body. The kind of red rash that not only itches, but that oozes and spreads and generally makes life a living hell. A trip to the well-tempered Doctor Hunt revealed that I had a severe bout of poison ivy. It seems that the “shady green glen” where I’d had a rest after swimming in the Otonabee was a shady green glen of poisonous plants. Some summer camp counsellor I was!

The second half of that summer I had another job lined up: a freelance programming job working for my high school vice principal, Mr. Japp, crafting a new computer-based student records system.

While such systems are commonplace today, and available off the shelf, small computers were a novelty in those days, and not much used for office work. The machines on the desks of the school secretarial staff were IBM Selectric typewriters, not IBM PCs. But Mr. Japp, for some reason, thought that we should harness the awesome power of the Commodore PET computer to keep track of the 600-odd students that would be attending Waterdown Distict High School that fall.

WDHS was about 10 km from our house. I didn’t have a car, so the only way to get to work was to ride my bike. Every day. 20 km round trip.

While certainly healthy exercise, if you’ve ever considered riding a bicycle for 20 km when your body is covered with oozing red sores. And the temperature is in the mid-20s. I would not recommend it.

I persevered however and, with the help of modern medicine, the poison ivy died down after a week.

The programming job turned out to be an interesting one. While my first freelance job involved modifying code, this one was a “from scratch” project. The Commodore PET 4032, with a 1MHz chip (yes, 1MHz), 32 kB of memory (yes, 32 kB), although unbelievably under-resourced in modern terms, was all I knew at the time, and the possibilities it offered seemed infinite.

My strongest memory of that project was that I ended up typing the names of the 600 WDHS students into my nascent system about a dozen times. As a result, every time I heard someone’s name on the PA system that fall, I felt like I already knew them.

The job also afforded me an opportunity to work with the vice-principal and the secretarial staff as peers, which did wonders for my self-confidence, and also served me well through the school year when I needed favours.

The summer of 1983 was also the summer that War Games, starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, came out. Without that movie my summertime job would have been regarded as an entirely nerdy experience; although it didn’t exactly make me captain of the football team, War Games gave my chosen occupation a slight sheen of cool, and that too helped with my grade 12 self-image as the year played out.

While my virginity was still solidly intact, and I didn’t have a drink of alcohol for another 3 years, that summer I was seventeen years old — the summer I had my first job away from home, crafted my first piece of real useful stuff (and suffered my first embarrassing malady) — was the summer I came of age.

Spotted on the bulletin board at [[Beanz]] this morning, an ad for a house for sale in East Reality:

For those of you not familiar with the Greater [[Charlottetown]] area, there is a community of East Royalty here in the city.

Frankly, the idea of living in East Reality has strong appeal for me; I imagine that it would be close to the outer suburbs of reality, and that one could go for rather Jungian walks with the dog.

Earlier this week I heard that Bobby Clow has suffered a stroke; this morning I was deeply saddened to learn that he died last night.

When we moved to Kingston, PEI in 1995, going up to Clow’s Red & White became a regular part of our life: we bought our gasoline there, rented videos, bought groceries and hardware, and learned what was up in the community. The first time it snowed after we moved into our new house I drove up to Bobby’s to buy a snow shovel, and when I needed to do some emergency plumbing one Saturday afternoon, his wife Verna sold me 4 inches of metal strapping for 37 cents. And when the emergency plumbing didn’t work out, I got a recommendation for which plumber to call.

When my parents came to the Island for the first time for Christmas, I took my mother up to pick up our fresh turkey. Bobby greeted my mother like royalty, and he proudly took us into their house — attached to the store and reached by walking through the post office — and showed us his Christmas display.

Many refer to Clow’s as the “last of the old-time general stores” on PEI. But once you scratch below the surface you quickly realize that there’s nothing “old-time” about Clow’s: the store has succeeded by constantly evolving: adding products, dropping products, re-merchandising the store. What is old-time, however, is the service: consistently helpful, willing to go above and beyond the call of duty, and truly the centre of the community. And, with Bobby in the room, often incorporating some straight-talking wit that would either entertain you, or floor you, and often both.

When [[Dave Moses]] and I needed to hire a programmer to craft the [[Vacancy Information Service]] for, we ended up hiring Bobby and Verna’s son Gary. Not only did we receive the gift of a talented and irreverent programmer, but I also learned a little bit about what growing up in the middle of the maelstrom was like.

Bobby was perhaps the best-known contemporary Islander: I don’t think, in 14 years here, I’ve yet to meet someone, from down east to up west, who didn’t know Bobby. I remember flipping through the channels several years back and stopping at Cable 10 when I saw he was a guest on the Point of View call-in show. The calls didn’t let up, and everyone who called had some sort of connection to Bobby; it was an amazing sight.

Matthew Rainnie interviewed Bobby’s friend Gordie Lank this afternoon and shone more light on Bobby’s life.

My thoughts are with Bobby’s family tonight.

When they give out the awards for well-designed, comprehensive and truly useful making public data public[er] web applications, can someone please make sure that Automated Genealogy gets one.

This volunteer-produced website took on the truly amazing task of transcribing the 5.6 million lines of the 1901 Census of Canada and making the result freely available, with links to the original documents, in an easy-to-use web search. Not only that, but they’re closing in on completing the 1911 Census of Canada too.

Not only is the scale of such a volunteer effort a testament to the tenacity of genealogists with a mission, the interface to the data is stellar example of how very “Web 1.0” techniques, combined with no need to accommodate advertisers or graphic designers, can lead to a very usable web application.

I found my great-grandmother’s sister and brother-in-law, for example, about 15 seconds after arriving at the site. The search is easy to use and provides clear results, with helpful sound-alike suggestions, and there are hyperlinks galore, linking everything to everything else (the fact that is remarkable says a lot about how un hyperlinked a lot of modern web content is).

Another search, and I found the eight (!) residents of [[100 Prince Street]] in 1911:

If you’re curious about Canadian ancestors who would have been in the country in either 1901 or 1911, Automated Genealogy should be your first stop.

I’ve just had a manila envelope slipped under my door: when the CBC Television news for Prince Edward Island returns to an hour-long format this February, it will be re-branded as Compass (history of the name).

And they say dogged persistence doesn’t pay off.

For reasons multiple and various, the television program thirtysomething, which ran on ABC from 1987 to 1991, left an indelible mark on me.

Perhaps it was because I was twentysomething at the time, so it was a preview of things to come (marriage, babies, jobs, etc.). Perhaps because I watched most of the series on the same television, with the same group of devoted regulars. Perhaps it’s because I went to Herculean lengths to watch the series finale: I was living in El Paso, Texas at the time, without a television; I applied for a credit card, received it the day before the finale, bought a TV at K-Mart, watched the show, and then returned the TV the next morning. Perhaps because I’m a fan of W.G. Snuffy Walden music. Perhaps it’s because, in its own way, the show was ground-breaking, depicting relationships and work and life that seemed more “real” compared to Happy Days and Remington Steele.

I don’t really know. But oh how I loved that show.

Thirtysomething is, alas, one of the programs from the 1980s that has yet to be released on DVD. And it hasn’t run in syndication in North America for a long time. So I’d not seen a single episode in more than 15 years.

Over the holidays, my friend David mentioned that he recently developed an interest in YouTube. While I’d used YouTube myself to distribute videos in a hurry, I’d never had much use for it otherwise, and had assumed that its content was limited mostly to Star Wars movies re-enacted with Jello and other captured hijinks. David’s interest, and a pointer to another seminal piece of TV history prompted me to take another look.

To my surprise, I found thirtysomething there, entire episodes. YouTube limits videos to 10 minutes in length, so the episodes are split up into 10 minute chunks. And they’re low-quality TV captures. But they’re there, and by grabbing the files and putting them together in a Democracy playlist, I was able to approximate 1989 last night in our den.

And when Elliot told Nancy that he loved her, and that they should be together again, despite what people might think. And when Hope told Michael that she wanted Melissa to look after Janie if something should ever happen to both of them. Tears came to my eyes.

Regular readers will recall my fondness for Honest Tea, a variety of bottled iced tea brewed in the U.S. and until last year available locally here in [[Charlottetown]]. One of the things I like about Honest Tea is that it’s much less sweeter that commonly available iced teas from Lipton and Nestle.

A 16 oz. bottle of their Moroccan Mint Green variety, for example, has 10g of sugar, compared to 36g of sugar in the same sized bottled of Lipton Original Iced Tea - Sweetened.

When Shoppers Drug Mart, my local source for Honest Tea, dropped the brand and replaced it with the Canadian Urban Zen brand, I made the mistake of not looking at the nutrition label: it was in the “health” section of the store, after all, and replaced a brand with less sugar. So it must be “healthy,” right?

Recently, however, I began to notice that after downing a 16 oz. bottle of the Urban Zen Green Tea with Ginger, I felt a little like I’d just eaten half a chocolate cake. A glance at the label showed me why: every bottle contains 41 grams of sugar: that’s as much sugar, it says here, as a can of Pepsi, and equates to “seven teaspoons or 13 lumps of sugar.”

No wonder I felt like I’d just eaten half a chocolate cake: I had.

Contrast this to the one packet (equals 1 teaspoon, equals 4 grams) of sugar I put in my morning cappuccino, and is it any wonder that the cappuccino lifestyle makes me feel much less frenetic.

Inside the heart of many modern pieces of electronics lies a technology called Bluetooth. It has nothing to do with either the colour blue, nor with teeth: Bluetooth is simply a brand-name for the ability of electronic gizmos to talk to each other wirelessly using a certain standard.

Somewhat confusingly, the “wirelessness” of Bluetooth is a different sort than that used by “wifi,” the increasingly common way we connect our laptops to the Internet. “Different” in the sense that Bluetooth-enabled gizmos and wifi-enabled gizmos can’t talk to each other (although similar at a more basic level in that they both use little tiny radios).

Bluetooth has been “the next great thing” for quite a while; it’s only been in recent years that enough printers, mobile telephones, keyboards, mice and laptops have had Bluetooth capabilities for regular everyday people to start paying attention.

One of the intriguing aspects of Bluetooth is that its range is quite limited — it’s roughly limited to a space equal to your “personal sphere of influence” — a radius of less than 30 feet, give or take walls and ceilings. This not only saves power, but it’s fundamental to the role that Bluetooth is expected to play, shuffling bits of data to close-by things. In other words, you can beam pictures from your Bluetooth phone to your Bluetooth printer if you’re in the same room as it, but not if you’re three floors away or around the corner.

Which is all a very longwinded introduction to Imity, an idea with supporting website and tools, that leverages the “personal sphere of influence” nature of Bluetooth, along with mobile devices to create what they describe as a “pocket radar.”

Bluetooth devices often need to be on the lookout for other Bluetooth devices. Your Bluetooth phone needs to know if it’s around your Bluetooth computer so it can sync its calendar; your Bluetooth laptop needs to know if it’s around your Bluetooth printer so it can print. So one of the features built in to Bluetooth is the ability to look around for other Bluetooth devices.

The Imity idea is at once elegant and simple: create a little application for Bluetooth phones that’s constantly on the lookout for other Bluetooth phones. When they’re encountered, take note of them and upload what’s been encountered to the web. Then let these new devices be named, tagged and filed away, and subsequent encounters matched against this noted-earlier information.

Imity.com has a more complete and visual explanation of how this all works and why it might be useful.

I first saw Imity in action at reboot, and I got a sort of cook’s tour of the idea from [[Nikolaj Nyholm]] as we walked around Copenhagen this spring. The Imity application has gone into beta testing this week; if you’ve got a Bluetooth-enabled mobile device that’s on the list of devices that Imity supports right now, you can sign up at Imity.com.

I learned this morning that there is a Canadian organization called the Association for Genital Integrity that’s “committed to raising public awareness of the issues surrounding infant male circumcision.”

I learned this because I found this table on their website that suggests that Prince Edward Island has the highest proportion of male infants circumcised in Canada: 29.5% in the year 2003. This is remarkable mostly because it contrasts so sharply with the rate in neighbouring provinces (Newfoundland, 0%; Nova Scotia, 1.1%; New Brunswick 14.9%) and with the Canadian average of 13.9%.

Setting aside any of the medical, moral or religious arguments about circumcision, this dramatic difference would seem to be a fascinating route into understanding more about mass culture: here we have a domain completely free of marketing and advertising, with no great financial upside for anyone (doctors get paid $129.49 on PEI to circumcise a child under 12), in an area of life that’s not often discussed around the dinner table.