It’s no secret that this year’s race between incumbent Clifford Lee and former Mayor Ian ‘Tex’ MacDonald for Charlottetown Mayor is a street fight. But last night saw things reach a new low, with allegations, aired on [[Compass]], that Lee is involved with the nuclear weapons industry. The closed captioning tells the story:

Watch the video [1.6MB MPEG] for the full story.

Here’s the situation.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, an NBC show that concerns a fictional late-night TV show at a fictional network, has a stellar cast, great writing, excellent provenance, and slices of some of the best TV of the year. And yet, despite all that, seems to be floundering. It just doesn’t hold together, and if it continues like this, it might not last until Christmas. Maybe Sports Night plus The West Wing isn’t actually a good idea?

Meanwhile, 30 Rock, an NBC show that concerns a fictional late-night show at an actual network, with a rag-tag cast that includes Alec Baldwin, seems like a show that should fail — a Saturday Night Live spin-off that should see Tine Fey, actor/writer of the moment, finally fail. And yet its debut episode had an odd brilliance, and there’s a remote chance it might be the next Seinfeld.

Meanwhile, Saturday Night Live itself, an actual NBC show actually at NBC, two episodes into this season has failed to produce a single sketch that’s anywhere near funny. It’s not that they’re aiming too high, or too low: they’re just not aiming. Everything dies. And the cast seems to know it.

Weird.

My friend Yvonne visited us this week. This morning I realized that I’ve known Yvonne for twenty years, which is longer than I’ve known almost anyone else.

Yvonne and I have never lived in the same city. We didn’t become friends in the classical way but through a circuitous route that involved old boyfriends and shared apartments and her sister Lori and a green pickup truck.

But somehow in the twenty years since we first met back in Peterborough in the mid-1980s, when we were both in our early 20s, we’ve stayed friends. She has moved across the country several times, from Saskatoon to Halifax and back to Saskatoon. And again. As I moved from Peterborough to Texas to Montreal to Peterborough to Charlottetown.

I’ve seen her through 4 boyfriends; she’s seen me through 4 or 5 girlfriends (depending on how you count). I’ve met her parents, went to her wedding, washed the windows in her apartment off Quinpool Road.

She used to drive a Plymouth Horizon. I used to drive a Datsun 510. Now we both drive VW Jettas, although hers is more of a classic than mine.

Through all this I’ve become good friends with Yvonne’s husband Bob too (who would’ve thought I’d ever meet someone more sarcastic than me!) And her daughter. And her next daughter. And the daughter after that.

And Yvonne has become good friends with Catherine. And with Oliver. She’s met my brother Mike, and spent Thanksgiving one year with my brother Steve.

We once drove from Peterborough to Burritt’s Rapids together to visit her old boyfriend. I ended up sleeping in a room that hadn’t been repainted since 1975, with orange walls and a big purple stripe running around it. In the morning Yvonne headed east to Nova Scotia with my friend Stephen, and I headed west.

In the early 1990s we rendezvoused at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. They I went to Calgary with my girlfriend to meet her parents on the way back east we staying in Yvonne’s apartment; by the time we got there she had left again, off to teach at a summer camp.

My first memory of Yvonne is being at a party in Peterborough at the home of people neither of us knew very well. Yvonne was there with her boyfriend, and I was there alone. The three of us hid out in the front hall and I think I laughed harder that night with the two of them than before or since.

When we’re 21 we take all our friends for granted. We think we’re going to have hundreds of friends over the course of our lives, and we think friendship comes easy.

And of course I’ve met many people since I met Yvonne, and I’ll meet many more. But I’ve come to realize that good friends are rare, and the there’s something special about knowing someone for so long: having a rich shared history, a collection of reference points, the ability to pick up conversations where they left off three years ago — that’s a special, valuable thing.

Three years ago Bob and Yvonne moved back to Saskatoon, and we’d fallen out of touch. They had another daughter in there somewhere and news reached us. But it seemed like maybe we’d fallen out of touch.

But this week they swung over to the Island as part of a week-long visit to Halifax. Last night their family tumbled into our house, and we had dinner and our kids played together and we talked about the old times and suddenly our friendship was snatched back from the brink and renewed again.

I feel very lucky.

Every now and again I get asked to write a “Letter of Reference” for a friend or colleague. It’s a hard thing to do: I’ve never considered it very useful to write complete bullshit, but it’s equally difficult (or at least unhelpful) to tell the full truth.

When putting together my thoughts for one such letter tonight, I dug up a letter I wrote for a librarian friend back in 2001. Here’s the heart of it, with the names changed to protect the innocent:

I’ve not worked with Sergei recently, and my experiences with him largely pre-date his work in librarianship, so I am unable to offer any comment on his specific technical or reference skills.

I can, however, offer you some comment on Sergei’s “interpersonal and communication skills, [and] his ability to work as a member of a team.”

My experience as an employer has taught me that the greatest challenge when staffing a position is to find an employee who will care passionately for the work - a person who will “own” their position, and feel a deep and personal commitment to the work and to the organization. I have no hesitation is telling you that Sergei is such a person.

Sergei is a person of unquenchable curiosity. He has a tremendous imagination, and an ability to look at problems in a novel way. He is a hard, dedicated worker and applies himself to tasks, monotonous or interesting, with equal intensity.

I have always found Sergei to be an effective manager and “team player.” My only caution in this regard is that Sergei can be very direct; he is not a skilled “bullshit artist” and sometimes his honest, straightforward, directness can be mistakenly interpreted. If Sergei is surrounded by a group of equally dedicated team members, effectively led, then he will be an invaluable and appreciated member of the team.

Sergei is theatrical. He certainly doesn’t fit the stereotypic of the “dour librarian” and he has an infectious enthusiasm and a love of life; he is witty and intelligent, and quick to make friends.

I wish you well in your deliberations; please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be of further assistance.

Down there in paragraph number five is the kicker: I wanted to be honest about “Sergei’s” inability to suffer fools gladly but I wanted to give it an upside. I always work under the assumption that the reader will appreciate my honesty, and that it will make the rest of what I say ring truer.

The risk is that this will backfire, they’ll read this as “he’s an incorrigible wingnut” and Sergei will be left in the cold.

My inspiration in all of this is the cover letter I wrote to the PEI Crafts Council back in 1993 wherein I attempted to mask the fact that I’d no experience whatsoever in the crafts industry by spinning a yarn about how my experiences hitchhiking across the country afforded me a flexibility that transcended the need for specific job experience. It was a risk, but it worked (and it made for a good story for many years).

Sergei, on the other hand, didn’t get the job.

What’s your take on all of this? How do you write references (or cover letters). And what do you think about those that cross your desk?

I don’t suppose there’s any other sort of spam but the annoying kind. But man has something happened in the last month or so — the spam dam has burst and my annoyance levels are peaking.

For a long while the combination of SpamAssassin and the Mail.app junk filtering was trapping almost everything and I was seeing at most a couple of spam messages a day.

Recently, though, I’m seeing upwards of 50 spam emails a day, and that’s on top of the couple of hundred that are being filtered out through various means.

Certainly the dreaded “image spam” — where the spamminess is hidden inside a graphic surrounded by plausable-reading text — is one culprit: Mail.app seems unable to trap this (the suggested rule to trap this, alas, routes too many of my Air Canada reservation confirmations, etc., to the junk mail filter for my comfort).

But it’s not all image spam — there’s a lot of seemingly basic “VkAGRA for LESS” spam that’s getting through.

Is it only me?

Dr. Helen Caldicott was interviewed on The Current this morning during a segment examining the nuclear weapons situation in North Korea.

Her central thesis was that we should be paying more attention to the real nuclear weapons problem — the one where there are still thousands of nuclear missles in the U.S. and Russia ready to launch at a moment’s notice.

She also brought up the issue of the safety of nuclear power plants, and used the example of a recent “near meltdown” situation in Sweden as an example of why we have more to fear from our own nuclear power stations than we do from North Korea.

She mentioned this at the very end of her interview, and the host, Anna Maria Tremonti, said something like “and that didn’t get reported here” and signed off.

I’d like to hope that The Current will follow up on this; in the meantime, here’s what I’ve been able to glean:

• Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant [Wikipedia]
• Swedish nuclear reactors stopped — Four of Sweden’s 10 nuclear reactors have been shut down, following an electricity failure. [BBC]
• Sweden gives quarter of nuclear reactors green light to restart after safety shutdown — A quarter of Swedish nuclear reactors that have been shut down since a malfunction in July can be restarted next week, while the others need further safety measures, Sweden’s nuclear inspection agency said Thursday. [IHT]
• Forsmark incident “worst ever in Sweden” — A leading atomic expert on Thursday said Sweden’s emergency shut-down of a nuclear reactor at the Forsmark power plant at the end of July was the country’s worst nuclear incident. [The Local]
• Call for immediate closure of Sweden’s nuclear reactors following near-meltdown incident — Sweden’s nuclear regulator SKI will meet in emergency session tomorrow (3 August) to decide on a possible immediate shut-down of all but one of the country’s nuclear power stations supplying up to 50% of Sweden’s electricity. Greenpeace has called for the reactors to be shut down following a serious incident last week at Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear power station, in which “it was pure luck there wasn’t a meltdown” according to a former director of the plant. [Greenpeace]
• Swedish nuclear incident revives safety debate — Initially, a short-circuit in the Forsmark 1 reactor caused a blackout. Two of four backup diesel generators failed to start automatically. This revealed other faults in the electrical system that “need to be investigated before the reactor can be restarted”, the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) said in a statement. [ENDS Europe Daily]

As a little experiment I shot a series of photos of the west side University Avenue between Kent and Fitzroy in downtown [[Charlottetown]] this morning. I stitched them together using the excellent Doubletake application, uploaded the resulting panorama into Flickr, and then used Flickr’s “Add Note” feature to add notes to the photo:

See the entire set of annotations here. This seems like an interesting way to layer comments and pointers and ideas over urban geography.

In my forty years I have, with a few exceptions, had my hair cut at only three barber shops. So much for being a restless change agent.

Through my childhood it was the Longacres Barber Shop in Aldershot, Ontario. There it was either Kurt, Otto or Louis who cut my hair. There was a picture of a kid with a stock haircut up on the wall, and every time I went in with my mother, she told them to cut my hair like him. I wonder who that kids was, and whether he realized that he had a bunch of hair clones running around Aldershot.

Louis had a little plaque about his mirror that said “Filo” and my mother told me this meant he was the owner, and that we didn’t have to tip him. Which began a life of confusion about owner-tipping that continues to this day.

When I was 18 I moved away from home and I needed to find a new barber in Peterborough, Ontario. I wandered the streets for days without finding a single one, and it seemed that perhaps men in that city didn’t have their hair cut at all. Eventually I found place on Hunter Street near the Red Dog Tavern. It was such a traumatic experience finding a new barber that I wrote an article for Arthur, the Trent University student newspaper. It was my first newspaper byline. And that’s how Ernie’s became my second barber shop.

Years later, after Ernie had moved next door to a spruced up place off the street, I was surprised to find my Arthur article taped to the mirror in front of his chair. I never let on that I was the writer.

When we moved to Charlottetown in the early 1990s I had to go through the trauma of finding a new barber yet again. I was older and wiser by this time, of course, so it was far less traumatic when I found Fergie’s on University Avenue. Fergie’s moved three times over the years, gradually making its way down the street where it finally came to rest next door to where The Maple Grille is now.

Fergie, a nickname I later learned came from his last name of Ferguson was your barber’s barber: he had a twinkle in his eye, a quick wit, and he knew how to cut hair. A few years back I got into the habit of letting my hair grow unnaturally long and then getting it cut really short, which I believe Fergie took to be an austerity move on my part (it probably was) and he always had a sly comment to make about the practise.

By my count I’ve had a haircut from someone other than Kurt, Louis, Otto, Ernie or Fergie only four times in forty years.

There was the time I was working in the Fleetwood Motor Home plant in Lindsay, Ontario as a temp. On my first day I came in with hair in a ponytail and at lunch I went out and cut it cut very short and when I returned they thought the other guy had quit and I was his replacement.

There was a time in Halifax when I went to a very, very old-school barber on Quinpool Road who had, somewhat anachronistically, a giant portable stereo mounted on the shelf, the kind you see at Wal-mart all tricked out with flashing lights and wacky features. If memory serves he gave me a really, really bad haircut.

My brother Mike and I both got our haircut one Sunday in Phoenix. We went to something more like a “men’s cigar spa” than a barber, and I got the only straight razor shave of my life, which was both terrifying and dreamy. Those guys knew how to cut hair.

And there was a regretable time up in Summerside when I realized that I was about to go on stage to make a presentation to a bunch of well-turned-out radio executives and I needed an emergency hair cut and I ended up going to a “hair salon” where they washed my hair before cutting it. The horror!

True to form, I’d been letting my hair grow long over this summer — my last time in at Fergie’s was before we went to Europe in the spring. In the meantime Fergie’s moved, again, this time to the space next door and in the back of an antique shop. I went in this morning all ready to joke with Fergie about how if he kept things up he’d be down at the waterfront before he retired. Only to find that Fergie had retired.

And so where one would find Fergie working alone or with a temporary partner — they never seemed to stay long — there are now three chairs and a new bunch of barbers. It’s still called Fergie’s. There’s still a racy calendar on the wall and The Guardian to read and the old cash manual register by the door. There’s just no Fergie.

And thus for the third time in my life I’m at a crossroads: do I stay with the new-style Fergie-less Fergie’s or follow Rob Lantz over to Ray’s Or perhaps try Rose’s, just around the corner from our house. Or even, perish the thought, follow the path of the urbane young hipsters upstairs and get my hair “styled” rather than just “cut.” Oh, the trauma of it all.

Good-bye, Fergie. Thanks for being a good barber.

I’ve been experimenting with Amazon’s S3 web service, something that’s a sort of cross between a “remote hard drive” and a “remote database.” I’m testing it as a possible repository for a client’s nightly backup of about 40GB of data and scripts, and so far Christopher Shepherd’s PHP scripts (which use Geoff Gaudreault’s PHP S3 class to talk to S3) are the leading contender for a useful S3 toolkit.

I also did a lot of experimenting with s3sync, an rsync-like S3 backup solution in Ruby, but ran into some crashing problems seemingly related to some HTTP timeout problems in Ruby itself, so I left it aside for now.

I’ve enjoyed my thrash through S3 so much that I created an episode of The 3LA Podcast about it. If all of the above is Greek to your eyes, try giving it a listen — I attempted to sum it all up in rather less buzzwordy language in the podcast.

And, yes, I know that S3 isn’t a “3LA”.  But it’s awfully close!

[[Compass]] ran a story on Friday evening about how the Children’s Wish Foundation built a playground in the back yard of Cameron MacDonald. Part of the story was an interview with some of the builders at a local cabinet company who volunteers their time to help build the playground, and one of the builders was a man named Barry Calder. Here’s a transcript of what he says:

I’m healthy. And this childen that we’re doing this for is not. And I wish I could give him my health. But you can’t. So… every little thing you do to brighten somebody’s day is a worthwhile thing to be a part of.

I’d always been something of a cynic about the Children’s Wish Foundation — yes, I realize that makes me tantamount to the devil — but in 14 seconds Barry Calder convinced me of its value. Hats off.