Google unveiled a fantastic new feature for Google Maps this week: the ability to create your own maps, with markers, lines and polygons. The interface is very slick, and it’s really, really easy to start cranking out customized maps. My first effort is Things to See and Do in Lisbon, based on the places we visited a couple of weeks ago.

This just in from George Stewart at Sears Travel in Charlottetown: flights from Halifax to London (Gatwick) leaving May 3, 10 or 24 and returning June 1 for $445 return — all taxes and fees included. That’s cheaper than flying to, well, anywhere. Call George at 902-892-1172; his email says “extremely limited seats available… first come first serve.”

Tod is is reporting that among the shows that won’t be on CBC Television’s fall schedule is Venture.

Venture was never the same after Robert Scully stopped being host — he was a great interviewer, and managed to make business seem interesting in a way that it never was on the pages of the Globe and Mail. Before “reality television” was popular, and before shows like Opening Soon came along, Venture perfected the “following entrepreneurs around with a video camera through the ups and downs and seeing how business actually works” segment, and Scully provided excellent play-by-play.

In recent years the program has bounced around the schedule, and launched inane side-projects like “let’s make the FedEx delivery driver CEO for a day.” The program never regained the focus and soul it had under Scully, and it doesn’t surprise me that it’s not being renewed.

It’s too bad, however, that we’ll no longer had an irreverent weekly look at the business world from the inside.

Okay, so I’ve done a little more procrastinating today and taken the simple JaikuGrowler AppleScript and attempted to create a bona fide Mac OS X application, using AppleScript Studio.

You can grab JaikuGrowler.dmg and follow the instructions in the README to try it out.

Some of the nice things about this grown-up JaikuGrowler:

• Doesn’t require manual installation of any OSAX — XMLLib osax is bundled right in (thanks to the generous licensing terms from Satimage).
• Something of a GUI instead of the “nothingness” in the old AppleScript.

On the downside:

• This is a very early version, released mostly to get feedback on whether it works for anyone else. It’s not even a beta.
• I don’t really know what I’m doing, so this might not work at all for you (although it does for me). I make applications for the web, not for the desktop, so this is mostly new to me.
• At present the application only loops through your new Jaikus once — it doesn’t sit in the background waiting for new ones to come along. This will change. Soon.

If you’re running Mac OS X (version 10.2 or later), have (or are willing to install) Growl, and are a Jaiku user, and have a sense of adventure, please try this out. And if it doesn’t work, please let me know.

From Guy comes a link to the announcment for Skim, a new PDF reader for Mac OS X.

The Summits of Canada Expedition is “the single largest expedition of discovery and adventure in Canada” with a goal of “putting the first Canadian team on the summit of every province and territory.”

Here is the route planned for the summit of Prince Edward Island’s highest point, at Glen Valley (map):

Take Highway 2 to Fredericton to Glen Valley. Turned left onto a dirt road and park car. GPS to a small forest beside a potato field.

Is it any wonder that Islanders are humble folk.

Most Tuesday mornings I read the Sunday edition of the New York Times at Beanz. And one of the features I like reading are the wedding announcements.

I noticed this morning that the Times has added video to the web version of the announcments, including this video about how Aislinn met Jeffery.

This is an interesting example of how web and print work well together: I can’t imagine deriving any pleasure from reading wedding announcements on the web but I like having the option of going to the web to learn the story behind the story.

Video of a debate on BBC Breakfast about personal carbon rationing.

It says here on Al Gore’s website that:

Number of gallons of gasoline is multiplied by the emissions factor of 19.6 to convert to pounds CO2, or 22.4 for diesel vehicles. These emissions factors come from the Energy Information Administration, Fuel and Energy Source Codes and Emissions Coefficients.

According to Terrapass, the fuel efficiency of my 2000 Jetta with a manual transmission and standard gasoline is 24 miles per gallon in the city (which is where I usually drive it).

This means that for every one mile I drive I use 0.0416 gallons of gasoline and emit 0.81536 pounds of C02. Assuming my car is out of tune, and has aged somewhat after 40,000 km of driving, and so has poorer gas mileage than that, a figure of 1 pound per mile driven is probably a reasonable ballpark.

The round-trip from our house to the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market is 3.2 miles, so if we drive we emit roughly 3.2 pounds of C02. Over the course of the year, assuming we drive every week, that adds up to 166 pounds of C02 (or 0.08 tons).

The carbon calculator tells me that my personal carbon emissions are 8.1 tons per year (the big contributors to that are flights to Europe and New England and oil heat in our house).

While we’re heavily abstracted from real numbers by this point, it seems like that driving to the Farmer’s Market every week would contribute about 1% of my annual C02 emissions.

It’s interesting to note that when we moved from rural Kingston to urban Charlottetown seven years ago, I cut out a 6 day a week commute of 20 miles return, resulting in a reduction of roughly 6,240 pounds (or 3 tons) of C02 emissions per year.

Please point out the errors in my math and logic if you find any.

I took some time this afternoon to craft together JaikuGrowler, an AppleScript that uses Growl to alert you every time you or any of your contacts emits something into Jaiku:

The script, which you can grab here, takes advantage of Jaiku’s new RSS feed capabilities. I created it as a sort of poor man’s Twitterific.