We’ve just updated the Find your Electoral District tool with polling locations for the upcoming Provincial General Election. As in 2003 there’s a much wider range of voting options available, with a week of advance voting (two full-day Advance Polls followed by four half-day Returning Office polls). Just enter your civic address and you can find out what your location locations are.

Eleven years ago the team developing the www.gov.pe.ca website had a meeting with Merrill Wigginton, then Chief Electoral Office of PEI. There was an election coming up on November 18, 1996 and we were interested in putting the election results online on our nascent website.

Merrill, to put it mildly, was skeptical. The Internet was still called the “information superhighway” back then (proof) , and nobody was completely sure that it was going to “take.” Why should Merrill risk the integrity of the electoral process by loosing the result out into the ether?

To Merrill’s credit, he had faith in us, and he let us have our shot. And it worked. And we went back and did it all over again in 2000 and then again, after a hurricane, no less in 2003.

With the dropping of the writ tonight, we’re back in “election mode” once again. And this time, as in 2003, in addition to processing the results on polling day, we’re maintaining ElectionsPEI.ca and are overseeing the technology side of the province-wide door to door confirmation process.

Between now and Election Day on May 28th, I’ll be immersed in districts and polls and lists and audit trails and the like. As I spoke about at Zap Your PRAM in 2003, we use a lot of open source technology at Elections PEI and while I’ll be stepping away from commenting on any issues related to the candidates, the issues and the parties, I’ll be blogging here about some of technology story of the election.

Here’s a little experiment: if you call +1 (902) 367-3694 (that’s DOPE-MY-I if you need a handy mnemonic) you’ll here a short recording instructing you to “press 1” if you want to record an audio advertisement (project offline for a while). If you do press 1, you can record a message of up to 30 seconds, and shortly thereafter your “audio ad” will appear in the sidebar here, along with your name (from your Caller ID) and your telephone number.

You’re welcome to call in messages about anything — your business, your organization, your passion, your event. I reserve the right to remove anything insane, but I’ve got a pretty decent insanity tolerance. Up to six ads will appear at any given time — the six most recent ones phoned in.

This is free (unless, of course, you’re phoning long distance), may disappear at any time, and isn’t guaranteed to work.

The Guardian is reporting Charlottetown mayor orders halt to bottled water:

In a letter to the local branch of the Council of Canadians, Charlottetown Mayor Clifford Lee said city council recently met to discuss a letter from the group requesting the city switch from using bottled water to tap water.

“It was the decision of (city) council that the City of Charlottetown would cease purchasing bottled water,” Lee said in the letter.

Bottled water will no longer be permitted in all city premises and workplaces and all city council and committee meetings.

Now while in the grander scheme of things this might seem a trivial move, I still think it’s an important statement. The commodification of drinking water has been something that’s happened in my lifetime; we’ve moved from:

to this:

While this obviously has ramifications for how we think of water locally, and for our relationship with our ground water, more significantly it contributes to the erosion of access to clean drinking water being treated as a basic human right around the world.

Kudos to Mayor Lee and council for showing leadership in this regard, especially given their earlier dismissal of this as an important issue.

The Brackley Drive-in Theatre opens for the season on Friday, May 4 with Spiderman 3.

Well, it only took 6 years, 6 months and 27 days, but yesterday we finally got to confront one of those things that eventually must happen to all parents and children: Oliver and I found ourselves on opposite sides of a locked washroom door.

In our case the setting was Tai Chi Gardens. Yesterday afternoon after a morning of hair cut and market visit Oliver and I rendezvoused there with Catherine for a snack.

When Oliver announced that he had to pee, I figured that, familiar as he was with Kenny and Winnie’s washroom — turn on the chicken light, shut the door, and don’t forget to flush and wash your hands — he could go it alone.

As on an earlier visit Oliver had completed all of the above but with the door wide open, I reminded him to shut the door. Therein sowing the seeds of our undoing.

It didn’t take very long for Oliver to realize that he’d locked himself in — we heard tentative shrieks of terror after only a few minutes. After an vain attempt to talk Oliver through the unlocking process, Winnie generously came to our assistance with a kitchen knife and engaged the special override mode of the lock and Oliver was freed.

With this episode over (and Oliver now thoroughly schooled in the arts of unlocking the door from the inside) I’m now free to obsess about “Oliver falling down a well,” “Oliver stranded on an ice floe” and “Oliver taking the car for a ride at age 7.”

I’ve had a re-occurring sinus infection for the last month — just when I think it’s gone, it comes back with a vengeance. But what, I ask myself, sinuses? It says here that sinuses are “air pockets located inside the bones in the skull” that are “probably present to reduce the weight of the skull as well as to create resonance to the voice.” Who knew.

A sinus infection — sinusitis — occurs when the ostium, a tiny hole “about the size of a pin hole which provides drainage for the sinus,” gets blocked. The result is that “mucus that normally is expelled from the sinus builds up in the sinus.” This I know very well by now.

The most interesting fact about sinuses I learned on my question:

Since the Spring of 1990, we have noticed a significant increase in the number of people who have sinus infections. The reason for this is not clear at the present, but it is most likely due to increasing amounts of pollution and ozone. There have been similar increases in other major cities in the United States.

It says here that the rise is 50 per cent:

Between 1990 and 1992, people with sinusitis reported approximately 73 million restricted activity days — a 50 percent increase from the 50 million restricted activity days reported between 1986 and 1988.

To my untrained eye this would seem, like the sudden disappearance of bees one of those “canary in the coal mine” signs that there might be Something Wrong.

But then again, my sinuses are plugged and I’m not thinking straight.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture hosts a weekly farmer’s market in Washington, DC. They call it “an integral part of USDA’s commitment to develop effective direct marketing strategies for farmers.”

I’ve released an update to class.jaiku.php, a PHP class that allows Jaiku presence information to be set and retrieved. The updated version uses the swanky new Jaiku API.

One obvious-to-civilians spin-off of this is that my Jaiku-driven “What am I up to?” message in the sidebar here on ruk.ca will be complete rather than an abbreviated snippet.

As a test of what I might learn I’ve wired this site into Quantcast and you can see the results on the ruk.ca Quantcast page (always handy under the “What Are You Like?” link in the sidebar on the website).

Quantcast works by collecting anonymous personal data about website visitors (see their Privacy Policy here) and using this to develop an aggregate demographic profile.

The profile of ruk.ca visitors is early on in its maturity — the more data Quantcast gathers, obviously the better guesses it can make — and of course all such tools are at best a “decent estimate” of the actual nature of actual people. That all said, it would seem, from the ruk.ca profile, that this site is popular with childless college-educated 65+ Hispanics with a household income of $30-60K.

I think that I can honestly say that I don’t personally know anyone who falls into that demographic category. So if it’s true, I’m obviously opening up whole new vistas of worldliness.

I assume that shortly the profile will flip over to show April 2007 data, which should be more accurate and tell us all something about who we’re sharing these pages with.