Dale relates a story about returning some rancid vegetable chips and, after lots of wrangling, getting a dozen free bags for his trouble.

When [[Oliver]] and I saw the TV advert (starring Oliver’s friend Lily) last night for The Owls Howl, the new toy section of Leisure World, it was pre-destined that it would be part of our morning market run today. We were not disappointed: Owls Howl has ably picked up the ball from the defunct Whippersnapper, and is now the best (perhaps the only?) toy story in the city. They have aisles and aisles of Lego, Playmobil, and Thomas toys, and an intriguing selection of other things — everything from [[Canasta]] sets to “sun print” kits. Recommended.

Whatever happened to Back Alley Discs? Radio@UPEI reported the closure back in July, but gave no details as to the reason for the closure. I’m sure the whole “nobody buys CDs anymore” thing must have had something to do with it.

Our friends Kenny and Winnie, formerly masters of the Ellen’s Creek Plaza [[Formosa Tea House]] (this branch is now defunct), have been renovating the building that once housed the Thai Food place on Pownal St. next to the Royal Canadian Legion. Oliver and I dropped by this morning when we saw their car out in front and got the Royal Tour. They’re doing an fantastic job, and are taking it slow and steady. It’s a huge building — 3 floors, six washrooms — and they’re still pondering exactly what their ground-floor business will be and when it will open, but once they figure it out, we’ll all be luckier for it: they’re among the kindest folks we know, and any space they run will be a pleasure to be in. Stay tuned.

Speaking of the [[Formosa Tea House]] — they’ve added some new content to their website, including some history. Here’s how the describe their early months in business at their old location on University Avenue:

We spend about $3000 to do a little renovation. The shop can only fit around 10 seats. It’s not very high end but it’s clean and comfortable. It has a scene of early Taiwan and Japan , simple Chinese tea with some selection of juice and coffee. The working hour is from 11 am till 5 pm. The total income for first month is only $450. It was from 2002/2/22 to 2002/3/22 , it’s a big shock to me but I didn’t give up. I made a few changes within the tea house. I added a few traditional Taiwanese dish, get rid of some juice and coffee, and added teas from Taiwan and China . The income from second month doubled from first month and doubled again for the third month. Then I added an outside seat and decorated the inside with more plants to make the tea house more pleasant.

Is it just me, or is CHTN gradually increasing the volume on their outdoor speaker at the corner of University and Fitzroy? I was talking to Ann on the corner in front of their studios that other day, and we couldn’t hear each other. I’m not opposed to the idea of piping the signal out front, but they could lower the volume by half and make street conversation a lot easier. Agree with me? drop them a line.

And finally: it had to happen. Oliver has developed a taste for [[Karin LaRonde]]’s iced tea. This morning he asked if he could “try a little bit” and by the time I looked up he’d sucked half of it back. As this week’s edition was Island-ginseng infused, Oliver will no doubt be nervous and excitable for the rest of the day.

And speaking of Karin: she’s giving 60% of her liver to her sister. Which is quite generous, I think you’ll agree. Read the 2sisterliverexchange website for details of this amazing procedure.

One more thing: it’s time to order your smoked salmon gifts for Christmas. Mmmmm.

When The Goodbye Girl was released in 1977 I was eleven years old. And actor Quinn Cummings, who played daughter Lucy McFadden in the film, was 10. Needless to say that the sassy barb she played in the movie was everything an 11 year old boy could hope for in a girl, and Quinn Cummings thus became my first movie-star-crush. Throw in Marsha Mason and an incensed Richard Dreyfuss — fresh off Jaws and Close Encounters — and The Goodbye Girl remains of my favourite movies. CBC aired it in the middle of last night and I recorded it and watched a bit this morning and it’s still as good as it ever was.

What I hadn’t reckoned on is young Quinn Cummings growing older just as I have. But she has, and she’s become an inventor and entrepreneur: The Hiphugger baby carrier is hers:

Quinn Cummings wanted to carry her daughter securely and comfortably. She wanted something safe and cuddly. She wanted it to be easy to use, easy to fit, and easy to stuff into a diaper bag. And, after shedding her pregnancy weight, she wanted to look good again. She didn’t want a padded contraption adding bulk to her finally-springing-back-to-shape body.

From radical librarian Brenda Brady at Holland College comes word of an intriguing and worthy fundraiser.

The Island Libraries group that Brenda helps shepherd has adopted a partner library in Frewoyeni, Ethiopia, and is raising funds at an evening at the Holland College Culinary Institute cafeteria on November 22 from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.. Brenda explains:

It’s an open mike event, with performers, singers/instrumental soloists, a jazz combo, and several rock musicians. The star attraction, however, will be the food: the Culinary guys are whomping up a batch of African street food for us, including ostrich, spicy shrimp, lamb sausage, fried plantain, Kenyan soda bread, and other yummy delights. For a $5/head admission fee, you’ll get a sampler of African food plus drink (fair trade Ethiopian coffee or lemonade) and will be royally entertained. There will also be a silent auction (books, music, etc.), bake sale table, and sale of fair trade coffee.

My friends Bill and Laurence have been beefing up their website. Latest addition: video clips. Those clips came from the Press Kit DVD — I ripped them to MP4 files using Handbrake and then converted them to Flash Video using the Flash 8 Video Encoder. They appear on the website via the excellent Drupal Video Module that makes it all very easy.

As you may know, I’ve long been an evangelist for [[Plazes]], the “where” web project based in Berlin. I’ve done radio interviews and art gallery talks about Plazes, developed applications and code for talking to Plazes, and later this week the wraps will come off a series of instructional screencasts I’ve been working on this fall.

All of this extends from a demo I had of Plazes at [[reboot]] in 2005: I was simply so impressed with the imaginative spark that gave birth to Plazes, and the elegance of the idea, that I wanted to advocate for it, support it, and be involved with its evolution.

Plazes is all about nouns. At its core it’s about leaving digital bread crumbs in your wake: publishing information about your location, contributing to the richness of data about locations, sharing the locations of others.

At [[reboot]] in 2006 I saw a demo of another elegant idea, one that’s very complementary to Plazes: Jaiku.

If Plazes is about where I am, then Jaiku is about what I’m doing: it’s a system that lets me publish information about my “presence” to my personal Jaiku website, and also to the Jaiku-enhanced contacts application in Series 60 mobile phones.

Here, for example, is a screen shot of my Jaiku presence page:

What you see integrated there, in chronological order, is a combination of manual updates I’ve made on Jaiku.com — Hacking Drupal, for example — posts from my weblog, my del.icio.us links, and updates I’ve sent by SMS message to Jaiku — “Stuffed bun and lemon iced tea” — when I’ve been out of the office.

Taken together this “presence stream” gives you a decent idea of what I’ve been up to lately, and my “current presence” — the latest entry — gives you some idea of whether it’s a good time to invite me out to coffee (“Procrastinating and Lonely”) or not (“Working heads down for a deadline”).

Interestingly, the killer Jaiku feature for me is its simplest: while you can use the fancy mobile app, and RSS feeds, and SMS messages to set your presence, you can also use a simple web app right on the front page of the Jaiku website. It looks like this:

Somehow those pale-blue icons roped me in, and took Jaiku to a whole other level for me. I don’t want to oversell this feature, but sometimes it’s the small elegances like this that can add an intangible allure to a web application.

Plazes and Jaiku are obviously both “playing in the presence space” and there is some overlap in their utility. But it’s also not hard to imagine them working together quite well, and integrating hooks for one into the tools of the other.

Plazes is obviously the more mature of the two right now — several years in and several website revisions later there’s a polish and feature-set at Plazes, along with a rich API, a set of code snippets in many languages, and a large user base.

Jaiku is just getting started, and I find myself wishing for more flexibility and utility — an API to grab and publish my presence, for example, and an RSS feed of my presence stream. But the signs are good that there’s more to come.

When I emailed my [[Dad]] a link to an early draft of the Plazes screencast, he emailed me back “I can’t for the life of me though understand why it’s important to have the information that Plazes gives you.”

Truth be told, although I’ve probably put Plazes to as much practical use as anyone — and it is a useful tool by times — I think we’re all in the process of figuring out exactly what the “practical” use of location and presence tools is. I enjoy mucking about inside Plazes, and now Jaiku because, if nothing else, it’s interesting experimenting on myself to see what the answer to Dad’s question might be.

Or, as my friend Cynthia just messaged me:

Oh my frigging god…it’s not bad enough we know where each other is, now we will know what each other is doing, if we choose.

You can follow Cynthia’s verbs and Cynthia’s nouns to truly understand.

I got a call yesterday from a producer at [[Island Morning]] asking me if I’d like to recast Sunday’s Renting Our Children to Multinational Corporations post as a “commentary” piece for the show.

It’s always fun (if mildly gut-wrenching) to appear on Island Morning, so I said yes, and then spent about an hour reworking the post for radio — mostly taking out the long quotes and cutting out extraneous bits to chop it down to 3 minutes of spoken word (for my pace that worked out to 500 words, about two double-spaced printed pages — the original post was 700 words).

It’s interesting to explore what works in print that doesn’t work out loud. For example, the closing stanza from the blog post read like this:

Remember the old days, when absentee landlords owned Prince Edward Island? Here’s how Britannica defines absentee ownership:

…originally, ownership of land by proprietors who did not reside on the land or cultivate it themselves but enjoyed income from it. The term absentee ownership has assumed a derogatory social connotation not inherent in its literal meaning, based on the assumption that absentee owners lack personal interest in and knowledge of their lands and tenants.

Substitute “our children” for “land” and the words ring more true today than ever.

After I sent in a first draft, my producer made the point that this whole “substitute X for Y” construct doesn’t work in audio, so I reworked the closing to read:

Remember the old days, when absentee landlords owned PEI, and the destiny of the Island was in the hands of others?

When we develop our economy by paying multinationals to move jobs here, jobs that will come and go at the whim of shareholders with no particular concern for the future of Prince Edward Island, we’re simply repeating old mistakes, renting out the energy, imagination and drive of our children for a short-term economic hit.

We all deserve more than this.

A little more over-the-top, perhaps. But I think it makes the point more effectively. Even in print. At least it saved me from reading dictionary definitions on the radio, which is as dull as dull.

When I went in to the CBC studio this morning to record the commentary, my biggest challenge was to follow the stage direction to be more emphatic in my delivery; apparently one has to go completely over-the-top fire-and-brimstone to come off as simply “concerned” on the radio. Anything less and apparently it sounds monotonic and dull.

I think I managed to invoke about 50% more indignation-filled fury by the time we were done recording; which is probably about 50% less than I needed to be truly effective.

And, hey, I’m back in the union again!

The piece should air tomorrow morning sometime between 6:00 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. (it’s planned for 7:40 a.m.) on CBC Radio One in Prince Edward Island and on the live stream to the net.

One of the nice things about subscribing to Flickr tags by RSS means that every morning I see a stream of interesting photos of things that I love floating past me in my newsreader. Like this photo of the marsh gardens in Bourges, France where [[Oliver]] and I spent a very pleasant after last year at the tail end of our time in France.

The excellent CBC Archives website has a video clip of the end of Peter Gzowski’s 90 Minutes Live.

In an interview on tonight’s episode of The Hour (which is becoming oddly compelling TV), comedian Billy Connolly mentioned that he met Robin Williams for the first time on 90 Minutes Live. Here’s some video of Williams and Gzowski.

According to [[Oliver]], Ernie and Bert do not do their own laundry. Apparently this is too hard for them, and they need to bring Elmo in.