On last night’s Compass there was a story, reported by Kerry Campbell, about a illegal tree cutting inside PEI National Park by Island Coastal Services.

As is increasingly the case at CBC Prince Edward Island, the audio from the story was re-purposed this morning to run as an item on the local news during Island Morning.

A small snippet of the story [MP3] illustrates a greater problem with this practice: when Kerry Campbell reports “these trees were cut to allow golfers a view of the water” it makes perfect sense when it’s on television because accompanying these words was video of the trees and the water in question.

But when the story aired on the radio the point was dulled because, well, we couldn’t see “these trees.”

While it may be appropriate in many situations for CBC Radio and CBC Television to share reporting — it doesn’t really make sense to send two reporters to tape the same speech, for example — if this “rip off Compass stories for the radio” trend spreads much further I think the CBC runs the risk of seriously degrading the quality and impact of local radio news.

Radio is not simply “television without pictures” (nor is TV simply “radio with pictures”) and good radio reporting demands a very different vantage point and expository style than television reporting.

I imagine the rationale behind this sort of re-purposing reflects a combination of fiscal issues and the CBC’s broader drive towards “synergizing the platforms.” While the old school, territorial “radio is radio and TV is TV and never the twain shall meet” world obviously had its own drawbacks, I think it’s important for we listeners to state clearly that local radio news is important, that it’s simply not good enough to re-run Compass on the radio in the morning, and to advocate for more resources for local radio news to make this happen.

I first met Lorna Hutcheson twenty years ago. We became casual acquaintances while both working at Trent Radio; when Lorna and my friend Al got together a few months later we entered that weird “the girlfriend of my friend” asymmetry, a combination of a free pass to friendship combined with the eggshells of each knowing that we might eventually end up on either sides of a break-up.

When Lorna moved to the west coast a few months later, and Al decided to follow, I agreed to come along for the ride — hitchhiking as far as Thunder Bay and then the bus the rest of the way — and then suddenly found myself in the middle of Lorna and Al grappling to figure out whether they could carve out a longer-term thing.

Lorna’s move west was precipitated, in part, by a desire to explore alternatives to the social work career that she’d developed in Ontario. Empathetic by nature, and constitutionally unable to pay only partial attention, she was struggling, I think, with finding a way of being helpful to others without losing herself completely.

While Lorna worked at finding a new path, she and Al persevered and I was their house-guest several times on visits west over the next few years.

While I flitted about on the sidelines of vegetarianism, progressive politics and what we used to call “social change,” Lorna and Al were all-in. Oddly my strongest memory of this was that their politics required making potato pancakes out of sweet potatoes rather than regular ones. And there were sprouts; lots of sprouts. I reacted by sneaking out after-dark to the Mac’s Milk on the corner to purchase contraband Reese Peanut Butter Cups.

After a while Lorna and Al relocated to Vancouver Island and while they remained intertwined, they eventually moved apart. I heard from Al from time to time, and other friends of mine crossed paths with Lorna and reported back, but we gradually lost touch with each other.

Then one day, several years later, out of the blue, Lorna called me. She’d been to Mexico, had fallen ill, had made it back to her mother’s in western Ontario to recuperate, and was looking for a place to crash for a while and plan her next moves.

I’d just moved into an overly large apartment in downtown Peterborough and so I invited Lorna to come and live in the back room.

It was strange having Lorna suddenly back in my life: we’d known each other for what, young as we were, amounted to a very long time, but we’d never really gotten to properly know each other as friends outside of our connections to others.

Spending time with Lorna was intense, and sometimes a little overwhelming. We were both on the precipice of large life course-corrections, and over the four three weeks we spent a lot of time talking about the big issues of life (to be honest, I’m sure that I did most of the talking and Lorna most of the listening; our natural inclinations tending that way).

While we never quite managed to completely overcome the “friend of a friend” geometry that was the bedrock of our relationship, in that month in the summer of 1990 we certainly got to know each other a lot better, and I came to appreciate a lot of Lorna’s approaches to life.

My closest companion that summer was my dog Penny, an irascible lab-spaniel cross with seemingly endless energy. When I was due to visit friends in Montreal for a week and needed someone to look after Penny, Lorna stepped in, drove up with me, and continued on with Penny down into New Hampshire (to rendezvous, I only realized much later, with her new friend Jay).

Lorna and Penny got on like gangbusters on that trip and so when, a few weeks later, I had an opportunity to move to Texas and needed a temporary home for Penny while I was gone, Lorna generously stepped in. And when Lorna got her own opportunity to move — back to Vancouver Island — she gamely took Penny with her and we made tentative plans to rendezvous a few months down the road to transfer parentage back.

As things worked out, I ran out of money, didn’t make it west, and eventually it became obvious that Penny’s new home was with Lorna. While Lorna and I weren’t in sync philosophically on everything, I had no hesitation in this regard, as it was obvious that she and Penny were meant for each other (and what better life could there be for a dog than having free reign to bound through the forests of Vancouver Island).

Every now and again I’d hear reports about Penny’s new life from traveling friends, and Al, still a friend and also living on Vancouver Island, sent letters with updates. I learned about Lorna’s new love Jay, and knew something of their life together, but for the most part Lorna and I lost touch with each other for several years after that.

I met Catherine, we moved to Prince Edward Island. And then one day came another surprise call from Lorna: she and Jay were living in Colorado, had two children, and were thinking about relocating to PEI.

Although I knew something of Lorna’s Island connections — I’d been working with her Uncle Merrill at Elections PEI for several years by this time — I didn’t know she’d spent summers here as a child, and that it was, in many ways, her second home.

Lorna was calling to look for advice on making the move. I helped out in whatever small way I could, and then, as was our habit, we fell out of touch again.

The next time I heard from Lorna she and Jay and their kids were set up in Little Sands making a go at running a camp-cabin operation. We visited them — and Penny, now almost 10 years old and a sort of “dog emeritus,” with the spirit to be energetic but not always the flesh — and got to meet Armando and Yolando and Jay for the first time and learn something of their path since I’d last seen Lorna many years earlier.

While we did a little bit of web work for Lorna and Jay, and ran into them from time to time around town, our lives didn’t overlap nearly as much as I think we each might have imagined them to have.

Last week came another call out of the blue, although this time not from Lorna but from her Uncle Merrill: Lorna suddenly and unexpectedly died on Friday morning.

Yesterday at the wake I got to meet Lorna’s parents and brother and sister for the first time and see Armando and Yolanda almost all grown up. And waiting in the long line I came to realize that in Lorna’s time back here on the Island she’d touched the lives of many, many others.

I’m happy to have known Lorna. My thoughts and prayers go out to Jay, Armando and Yolanda whose time with Lorna was so suddenly cut short.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the marriage of my great-grandparents Alexander Fraser and Agnes Elizabeth Jane Mathison. They were married April 24th, 1907.

I never met either of them, as they both died before I was born. Mom sent along this photo of the two of them at their 50th anniversary in 1957:

If there was ever any doubt that Oliver and I have Fraser blood, you’ve only to look at this photo of Alexander.

USA Today reports that Yotels are set to open soon at Gatwick and Heathrow airports. I’ve been following Yotel for a while; having now stayed near Heathrow overnight twice before catching a morning flight back to Canada, I’ve twice had to suffer the hassle of getting to and from airport hotels. Having a cheap, well-outfitted hotel right in the terminal will be a great boon to Heathrow travel.

As any Canadian small business owner will tell you, monthly federal payroll remittances are are formidable foe. This isn’t because of the amount of paperwork — it’s one form, three fields, and a cheque — but simply because the penalty for not remitting by the 15th of the month is immediate and severe.

I encountered this for the first time last year when, because I had the flu and was at home sick, the remittance envelope was late into the mail, and arrived at Revenue Canada 2 days late. The penalty for that 2-day tardiness? Just over $250.00.

I disputed the penalty, explaining that I’m the only person doing the monthly payroll, and couldn’t be expected to do this from my sickbed. They were unforgiving, and, after a length review period, my request was turned down with the explanation that I didn’t have a valid excuse and should have made other arrangements. Fair enough, I suppose.

There’s nothing like a $250 penalty to chasten you, and so since that time I’ve been obsessive about getting the brown Revenue Canada envelope off well in advance of the deadline.

Before I headed off to Italy for two weeks last fall, a trip that spanned the end-of-month payroll time, I prepared everything well in advance, and had my remittances off to Revenue Canada by November 24th.

They claim to have never received them, and I got whacked with another penalty.

This time, though, justice and truth were on my side: another cheque, sent in the same envelope, was cashed, proving that they received the envelope and that it was a processing error on their end, not mine.

It only took five months to sort out, but my dispute of this penalty was — miracle of miracles — accepted, and the penalty was canceled. Here’s the letter I got from CRA a few weeks ago (personal CRA staff details excised):

Note that they felt compelled to add a “before you go off half-cocked and thing you’ve got a free ride in future” paragraph before signing off, just so my chastening wouldn’t wear off as a result of this minor victory.

Juhu is a nicely designed Jaiku application for Mac OS X.

From Fabrica comes a link to 5 Minute Friend:

If you access to the site with a webcam it will randomly connect you with another person in the world just for 5 minutes. There is no way to meet the other person again if you didn’t exchange your contacts during those 5 minutes. This site works only if many many people from around the world keep connecting every moment…

Today’s side-project: bring the world of Plazes together with the world of 2D barcodes to create printable information sheets for individual Plazes. The result: http://givesome.info/, a tool that makes things like this:

The idea is that crazy mobile camera-phone owners can walk up to the sheet posted on the wall at the Plaze in question and use a barcode reader application (see here to get one) to translate the barcode into a URL:

…that can then be used to open the mobile browser on the phone to the page for that Plaze. In theory, on that page they’ll find useful information about where they are: reviews, comments, who’s been there before, and so on. It doesn’t take too much imagination to imagine this becoming the mechanism for a new-style “point and shoot” Plazer.

This is just a little experiment in bridging Plazes to the physical world: please let me know if you have any difficulties making this work. I owe a great debt to the excellent Semafox project, from whence the “make a barcode in JavaScript” code comes.

Six years ago we were forced to renovate our kitchen in the middle of the winter after water flowed in from the roof as a result of tremendous ice build-up that February. We used the opportunity to purchase a new stove and we decided to spend more than was necessary to get a higher-end convection oven in a model from KitchenAid:

We bought this stove from Sears in the spring of 2001, and we’ve always been very happy with it. Until last month, when it slowly stopped working. The stove-top elements have no problems. But the digital clock stopped displaying the time, and refused to allow itself to be set. Then the electronic touch controls that are used to drive the oven stopped working. First it was just some of the time, now it’s almost all the time.

Catherine had our excellent appliance man in to take a look, and his diagnosis was a problem with the wiring for the controls. It wasn’t something he could repair, either: we needed a whole new set of electronics. And the cost? $465.

With installation, that’s as much as it would cost, almost, to replace the stove entirely. And we could certainly get a slightly more modest stove and have money left over.

So now we’re faced with a decision: do we fork out the $600 and repair this stove, which will prevent the stove from ending up in the landfill and is the “green” thing to do. But in another 6 years might require we fork out the same amount again when the next set of controls fry. Or do we buy a whole new stove — probably not from KitchenAid! — and junk the old one — perhaps the more “sensible” thing to do.

Sigh.

I first got interested in 2D barcodes after following a link on Guy Dickinson’s website to Semacode.org last July.

So interested, indeed, that I made myself a T-shirt:

The 2D barcode on the T-shirt, when it gets “decrypted” by a barcode reader, translates to http://ruk.ca — the address of this website. The idea is that a suitably equipped mobile device can be pointed at the T-shirt and its web browser automagically taken to this web address.

I did my original experimenting with the Semacode reader for my Nokia N70. This week, inspired by Nokia’s recent interest in 2D barcodes — they call them “mobile codes” — I grabbed The Kaywa Reader. It’s a very slick application that “just works.” I fired up the app, pointed it at my T-shirt and, without any action on part, the following popped up on my mobile:

It all worked so seamlessly that it was magical enough to show off some of the true promise of this crazy scheme. Of course this could all turn out to be simply another variation on the CueCat debacle. But I’ve got some ideas…

If you want to try making your own 2D barcodes, you can use Kaywa’s tool or the Semacode tool.