At long last we have our very own craigslist for Prince Edward Island.

To the uninitiated craigslist can appear confusing; I can tell you from personal experience that it’s worth wading through: we found our rental houses in France, Portugal and Denmark all through the site, and they were good experiences all.

Right now the craigslist pei site isn’t exactly filled to the brim with amazing listings — indeed because it’s so new it’s mostly spam-like postings or paid “small biz ads.” Take a look at craigslist san francisco to get a sense of what the site can be when it’s humming along.

As reported here back in March, Tommy and Lina Ko have taken leave of [[The Noodle House]], the restaurant they founded up on University Avenue in [[Charlottetown]] that’s arguably always been the best place for Chinese food in the city.

Fortunately a new family has taken up where they left off, and last night [[Catherine]] and I had our virst visit to the restaurant’s new incarnation.

It’s hard to match the kind of customer-server bond that builds up over 13 years — Lina always knew what our “regular” was, and always brought chopsticks to Catherine, but not to me, and gave us an extra dish of hot sauce, and knew exactly how spicy we wanted our food. I’m pretty certain that she raised a bar that will never be reached.

That said, the service remains warm and efficient, and perhaps with time we’ll build up a relationship with the new folks too.

The menu remains the same, although a few dishes have been excised and they were out of simosas last night, which is always the highlight of any meal there (they’re still on the menu, so I hope it’s just temporary). There’s a new soy sauce/hot sauce management system at every table, the chopsticks are green now, but otherwise things seem to be much as we left them.

Without Lina to guide the chef as to our spice level preferences we ended up with food with about 50% more “kapow” than we were used to — who knew we could have been ordering “hot” intead of “medium spicy” all along? — and my Hot Szechuan Noodles with Tofu were truly excellent, as were Catherine’s Singapore Rice Noodles. The only disappointment of the night was the Satay Chicken, which was tough an essentially inedible; its the anchor of Catherine’s appetizer experience, so I hope this improves.

Perhaps the biggest change of all is the new hours: they’re open to 10:30 p.m. every night and they’re now open on Sundays too, which was never the case before. Oh, and there’s the big green sign on the front too:

Longtime readers will recall my detailed survey of the Nicholson family four years ago, in which I revealed how the various tentacles of the family surround us in a warm Island embrace.

Well yesterday, for the second year in a row, we got to see the entire clan gathered in one place. The occassion was young Shaw Nicholson’s birthday, the place was King’s Castle Provincial Park, that anachronistic enclave of concrete nursery rhyme characters in the verdant barrens of southern Kings County. And, like last year, it was the highlight of our summer social calendar.

Aspiring to truer Islanderhood, we pulled off the main highway to Wood Islands just the other side of Orwell Corner and hit Route 23, a straight shot to Wood Island that avoids all the twisting and turning of the shore route:

This would have been fine, of course, if we’d actually been going to Wood Islands. But we were headed for Murray River, and so as our L-shape route clearly demonstrates, we shouldn’t expect to be hearing from the Islanderhood Commission any time soon. On the way back we hugged the shore, so as to not accidentally end up in Souris.

Words cannot do justice to the effect of so many Nicholsons, and Nicholsons-by-association, and members of the Nicholson entourage, all gathered in one place. They’re all extremely generous people, and the effect for us was less like invading a sacred family ritual and more like being invited on in to join the family itself.

And they make a 3-bean salad that’s to die for.

The afternoon was taken up with various birthday-related festivizing, punctuated by mandatory trips into the woods to visit the nursery rhyme characters:

The characters have been spruced up this year after some unfortunate vandalism; I’m happy to report that the sprucing didn’t diminish their maniacal charm.

The delightful thing about Kings Castle is that, far from the centre of the tourism universe as it is, the park suffers from a very pleasant sort of neglect; nowhere else, I think, could you get away with a children’s playground that includes attractions like this airplane:

And yet attractions like that make the place so endearing.

Back at the party there were games for kids — the “everyone’s a winner” kind that are in vogue these days — and food on the barbecue and birthday cake and presents. And an unusual number of small dogs. Even Rob Lantz was there.

[[Catherine]] told me that this is the second generation of Nicholson kids to have their birthday parties at Kings Castle (it was probably still called Fantasyland back then, before the big Disney crackdown). We were happy to be part of it.

So our friend G., who likes to stay well behind the technology curve, up and bought a DVD player this afternoon. They cost less than $30 now, and he was finally ready to take the plunge. In doing so he managed, at the same time, to completely miss the complicated “video tape” era altogether, thus saving himself years of waiting for tapes to rewind.

As it turns out his television is from the 70s, or at least the 80s, and is missing the interface required by modern cheap DVD players, so we had to head out to Wal-mart and invest an additional $22 in a little box that bridges the gap (kudos to Wal-mart staff for being helpful and knowledgeable). So now he’s got lots of wires running around the room, but he can rent DVDs.

Which is how we ended up standing in front of this thing at 9:30 p.m. this evening:

This is a robotic DVD dispenser, recently installed under a “Niko Video” banner, in the little plaza behind Source for Sports on University Avenue. Once you sign up for an account (you just need photo ID), and add some money (minimum $5) to a stored-value card, you can use the robot to rent DVDs 24 hours a day.

Besides the “no interaction with artificially peppy Blockbuster kids” benefits that the faceless robotic system affords, their prices are cheap and you can rent for as little as six hours ($1.83).

The whole “six hours” thing is a little deceptive: it seems like an awfully long time, but when I brought Proof home I realized that I had to have it back before 3:00 a.m. to make it under the 6 hour window. Even 12 hours — the next plateau — would leave me with 9:00 a.m. Still, it’s nice to have the choice, and you don’t need to decide your rental window when you rent — the robot just adds it up and deducts the appropriate amount from your account when you return the DVD.

The robot isn’t completely in control, actually: the new account process involves real human interaction (humans present until 10:00 p.m.) and, in fact, it helped to have said human around to explain how to interact with the robot, which is a little complicated and could use some UI work (i.e. the button you press to scroll “down” actually points “up”).

No word on what G’s first rental will be.

I’ve hacked together a little Python script that sets the time on my [[Nokia N70]] mobile phone from the GPS time grabbed by my [[GPSlim 236 Bluetooth GPS]]. Details and source code here. This is all towards making my photo geocoding experiments easier to pull off.

The [[Formosa Tea House]] is opening a third location sometime in August at 231 University Avenue in Charlottetown. They’ve purchased the house — beside Bowlan’s Electronics — and renovations are well underway. I dropped by this afternoon for an early look:

The floor in the front room is amazing.

Local eatery cum clothing store [[Just Us Girls]] had a banner day for media coverage today, with two stories on the CBC Prince Edward Island website at the same time:

They’re not only denied a patio liquor license, but they’re selling truckloads of sandals.

I have a question for the Europeans in the readership: it seems, from afar, that the notion of “what week it is in the current year” is a something that is referenced quite often in everyday European life. Like “licenses will be available after week 49” or “school will run from week 32 to week 53 this year.”

Is this true?

It turns out that the Online Sharing Software for the Nokia N72 also works with the older [[Nokia N70]]. The only confusing thing I ran into when trying to get it to work was what to enter as my username and password when setting up my Flickr account on the phone; it turns out that you use your email address (not your Flickr “screen name”) as a username and that you need a special password, one that you can get on your Upload via Lifeblog page once you’re logged into Flickr.

This photo of Steven and Dan is the first “phone to Flickr” photo I’ve uploaded; note that I purposefully set the size to “small” to save on bandwidth costs. Even at that small (640x480) size, it cost me $1.98 to upload.

Every night this summer [[Compass]] is broadcasting live from the [[Charlottetown]] waterfront. I’ve long been a fan of “get the art out of the galleries and into the real world” and this is a good example of doing just that: regular everyday people get to see television being made, and CBC people get to interact with real live viewers.

All that, and the promise of a free CBC frisbee, were enough to pull [[Oliver]] and down to the waterfront this evening just after 6:00 p.m. to see the big show.

Boomer and Bruce were both very kind to Oliver, and invited him onto the set for pictures and discussion of the finer points of television news:

If you’re around the waterfront on a weekday evening this summer, I highly recommend a visit; 6:00 p.m. every night.