Today is one of those days when the weather in my MacBook’s “dashboard widget” is an exact representation of the weather outside my window:

It’s useful for me to recall that on the Mediterranean in Cannes 9 days ago in sunny 18 degrees C weather:

You know those annoying Subway commercials featuring Jon Lovitz? Since they started airing earlier this year, I’d wondering about who the target demographic for them is. I don’t pay any attention to them and, in fact, I will often click to another channel when they come on because they’re so annoying.

Well, on Sunday [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] and I had to go to Home Depot (yes, even though) and as we were hungry mid-trip we stopped at the new Subway out by the Charlottetown Mall for a quick sandwich. As soon as the restaurant was in sight and our plans were clear, Oliver shouted “Eat Fresh!” (the tagline for the ads, similarly shouted by Jon Lovitz) at the top of his lungs. And then continued the theme for the next hour or so.

So now I understand.

A short collection of odds and sods:

• I suppose everyone else already knows this, but if you go to Google and search for keyword what is followed by a word, you get the definition. Like what is miscellanea.
• More help catching image spam in OS X Mail.
• Dannie Jost relates a tale of mobile woe in Switzerland.
• Uncle Mark 2007 Gift Guide & Almanac by Mark Hurst is very compelling.
• I found that link on Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site. The Whole Earth Catalog echoes on.
• Freeware to make your Series 60 phone home if it’s lost or stolen.
• The PHP-based PhotoStack photo gallery system looks interesting.
• Perhaps I’ve linked before, but Plazes + Google Earth is still very cool.
• s60tips.com points to Analysis of IMEI numbers, a tool that parses a mobile phone’s IMEI number. If you’ve got a Series 60 phone, they’ve also got some useful secret codes for revealing things like the IMEI.
• 43 Folders points to NextBus, a real-time transit information website.
• Notes on In-Ear Headphones for your Nokia.
• Create Quicksilver plug-ins using PyObjC and py2app (pointer from Olle — who has been busy at Polar Rose this season).

I’ve long had the idea of sending a GPS unit, left on and gathering “location breadcrumbs” by mail or courier just to see where it went. Here’s someone who actually did it. Neato.

Having failed to obtain cappuccino this morning, I launched a special follow-up mission at 11:45, integrated with lunching with [[Dan]] and [[Steven]]. Our destination: The Marketplace Café, the restaurant arm of Bruce MacNaughton’s multi-tentacled downtown retail space in the old Woolworths store. I was not disappointed:

The coffee was excellent — Bruce tells me he sources it from Robert Bourgeois — and it was served piping hot in a quality Island-crafted mug. While the foam was a little too foamy for my taste, given the dreadful foam I’ve experienced elsewhere, I’ll not complain. Given the hour I had chocolate sprinkles added to the top, something I wouldn’t do at dawn; they were a nice touch.

All said, it was a pretty darn good cup of coffee; not quite hard-scrabble Italian workaday, but enough to satisfy my cappuccino fix.

Sadly the Marketplace Café doesn’t open until 9:00 a.m., thus disqualifying it from a place in my newfound early-morningness. But as a later-morning fallback, I’ll happily put it into rotation.

The rest of the lunch, by the way, was also quite good: I had a toasted club sandwich on focaccia and a bowl of cauliflower soup. This was served, pleasantly and unusually for french fry-obsessed Charlottetown, with a healthy bunch of raw carrots and celery . It was all very tasty.

This morning I crossed the divide from “places in Charlottetown that make allowances for cappuccino, but don’t really do it all that well” into “places in Charlottetown that snear at the very mention of anything that’s not regular coffee.”

They don’t actually serve cappuccino at all at Chambers Restaurant and Bar in The Charlottetown Hotel. Their english muffin, however, is perfectly acceptable.

You would think that the Delta Prince Edward, being the largest hotel on [[Prince Edward Island]] and thus temporary home to international financiers, rulers, and royalty, would seek to make the best cappuccino in town.

While the presentation was nice — look at that elegant swirl! — and the service was world-class, the cappuccino itself was moribund.

The worst of it was that it was served luke-warm. There was also the deflated foam and the coffee that was bland and tasteless.

If you’d asked me which would have a better cappuccino, tiny Linda’s next door or the Delta, I’d have picked the Delta every time. I was wrong. Sorry.

One of the nicest things about [[Charlottetown]] on a Sunday morning is that you can, literally, walk down the middle of the main street and not encounter any traffic:

I was up and out of the house by 6:45 a.m. this morning — I still haven’t recovered from being on Central European Time for two weeks — and the few people I encountered on the streets were either coming home very, very late, or going to work very, very early.

Frankly, Cora, I expected more of you. With your over-the-top fruit plates and endless variety of lavishly done waffles and pancakes, I fully expected that you would similarly pull out all the stops when it came to coffee.

But you didn’t.

I sure hope what you served me this morning came out of a pre-mixed cappuccino packet, because if you made it with a real coffee machine, you’re really in trouble:

I’ve a feeling that I could get a better cappuccino in an Irving Big Stop. Charging more than $2.50 for this luke-warm, tasteless coffee-substitute is criminal. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Back in the 60s when we first moved to Prince Edward Island (okay, it only seemed like the 60s — it was only 14 years ago…) you basically had two places to go for coffee that was better than plain old swill: the market and the hospital.

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital was home to the only Second Cup outlet on the Island, and thus one of the few places to have a machine capable of making good coffee. This led to the somewhat odd habit for Catherine and I of “going out to the hospital for coffee” when we first arrived here. Add in a couple of hours at the Charlottetown Driving Park betting on the horses, and you had a Saturday.

The [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] was, and is, home to Brett Bunston’s small coffee stand, a regular stop for many market-goers.

This morning this included me:

Now I understand what all the fuss is about, and why market people will arrange themselves in a claustrophobic line for 15 minutes to get a their fix: it was very, very good coffee.

The Styrofoam cup, of course, leads to some demerit points (they do offer “fill your own mug” service that would mitigate this). But otherwise I’d have no complaints: their foam was, at least in my limited 3-weeks as a cappuccino drinker, world-class. The coffee was robust without tasting like burnt rubber. Service was friendly.

This adds a new layer of complexity to the Saturday morning market routine: Saturdays have always been firmly rooted in [[Karin LaRonde]]’s excellent iced tea, and I wasn’t prepared to give that up (there’s a good chance, I think, that if I stopped drinking Karin’s tea, the whole house of cards might tumble down and she would stop making it). The solution was to go to the market earlier and stay longer, bracketing the experience with a cappuccino on one end and an iced tea — peach this week! — on the other.

The longer time spent at the market meant that we actually had time to buy produce, something, oddly, that we’ve never done before. So in addition to a coffee/tea buzz, we came home with 5 pounds of blue potatoes (from Taylor’s Taters, operated by two of the absolutely nicest people you’ll every meet: buy your vegetables there, please), 2 pounds of carrots (on orders from [[Don the Dentist]], in order to encourage Oliver’s wiggly tooth to exit), a cowboy cookie and three samosas.

And rather than splitting a smoked salmon bagel from [[Kim Dormaar]]’s stand, we each ordered our own this morning, allowing Oliver to indulge in his love for capers and me in my love for dill.

Caledonia House has earned my Saturday morning cappuccino business, and I’m prepared to give Linda’s a couple of days a week. Which means that the search is still on. Stay tuned.