Speedtest.net seems like a much friendlier (and prettier) alternative to the broadband speed tests at DSLReports.com that I’ve been using all along.

Catherine brought home some bread from Just Us Girls yesterday after seeing a big sign in the window advertising that they’re now selling their own loaves. This first loaf was encouraging, but was a little doughy and uncooked inside. I hope they keep at it.

If you’ve read Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik, you will recall his admission of the real reason he uprooted his New York City family to Paris:

When people asked why Martha and I, not long after the birth of our first child, left New York for Paris, we can usually think of a lot of plausible-sounding reasons. They vary in tone from the high-mindedly agonized (we couldn’t endure the malling of our SoHo neighborhood) to the cloyingly whimsical (we wanted to live within walking distance of the Gérard Mulot bakery, on the rue de Seine). The real reason was Barney. We had seen one after another of our friends’ children — charming children of parents who parse Greek texts or write long metafictions set in the eighteenth century — sunk dumbly in front of a television set watching a man in a cheap purple dinosaur suit sing doggerel in an adenoidal voice with a chorus of overregimented eight-year-old ham actors.

In our family, the battle is not against Barney (Oliver had a brief Barney flirtation, but it passed quickly), but rather against the ubiquitous colossus that is Disney.

When we had a family meeting a few weeks ago, for example, to discuss where in the world we’d go for March school break this year — anywhere in the world — Oliver announced that he wanted to go to Disney World.

One vital front in this war against Disney is Oliver’s web browser: we’ve strategically omitted any Disney links from Oliver’s Firefox bookmarks bar, choosing instead to provide him with links to things like Croatian television shows, perhaps Disneyesque in the old country, but somehow exotic and parent-friendly over here.

Of late, however, we’d been hearing Disney sounds coming from the office while Oliver was using the computer.

We’d leave him alone with Kids’ CBC and a few minutes later we’d hear the violins and flutes of the Make your Disney vacation a Magical Beginning page.

We had no idea how Oliver was making his way to Disney. He can type, but not well enough to string d-i-s-n-e-y-.-c-o-m together. Was it a surreptitious link from the CBC or Danish Children’s Televsion? Secret URL crib notes kept under the desk?

We got our answer over the weekend: seeing Oliver determinedly surfing through the Disney Princess site, I asked him how he got there. So he showed me: in Firefox he selected Bookmarks and then Organize Bookmarks and then simply selected one of the several links to Disney that appeared there.

Now these aren’t bookmarks that we put there. And we’ve never showed Oliver how to use the Firefox bookmarks system. Indeed I don’t think we’ve ever discussed with him exactly what a bookmark is. It is thus a testament to Firefox’s UI and/or Oliver’s intellect (and willingness to click on absolutely anything in sight, noting what the result is) that he’s been able to make Firefox do what he wanted to do: provide him with a quick (and heretofore secret) pathway to the wonderful world of Disney.

Every once in a while Catherine and I get accidentally transported out of the hoi polloi and invited to party with Charlottetown’s elites. As the city lacks for wealthy industrialists, the elites here are mostly dentists and judges. A few politicians. And Tim Banks. Last night was one such.

Regular readers may recall that two years ago I took Mr. Banks to task for being a megalomaniac. Last night was my first time sitting couch-to-chair with him in a social setting, and, to my surprise and delight, he neither gave me the finger, tore anything off the wall, nor threatened to replace my comfortable couch with an office tower. He was actually somewhat aloof, and didn’t appear to have it in him to rip out my still-beating heart and eat it for breakfast. What a relief.

By fortunate happenstance, among the elites in attendance at last night’s party were several people I knew, so I was spared the indignity of hiding in the corner nursing my drink while my arch nemesis scattered bon mots to those that would listen. Oh, and there was absolutely amazing tzatziki to boot. If not for the presence of cats and their attendant dander, which saw me lose my ability to speak at any volume after about 45 minutes, it would have been a perfect night.

Tonight we will resume our regular mundane life of Seinfeld reruns and being entertained by G. about his adventures in the Hindu Kush.

We woke up this morning to the news that there had been a fire at the corner of Prince and Kent Streets in downtown Charlottetown — just two blocks from our house. The fire destroyed the former Johnny’s Mayfair Tea Room (most recently a tattoo and piercing shop), the City Cab stand, Rose’s Barber Shop, and the Tribes shop. It looks like the Princess Nails shop, and the Thai restaurant, as well as the Velvet Underground bar around the corner, were spared, but I imagine they suffered water damage. Here’s how the scene looked on the way to work this morning:

This is a both a devastating loss for the tenants of the building and significant loss for the city. My heart goes out to the firefighters who waged a long and bitterly cold battle against the fire last night.

As these things happen, musing about Trooper got me thinking “what was I doing in 1979,” which got me thinking “how long have I lived on PEI,” which got me thinking “when did I start school.” All of which ended up on a time-consuming procrastination event culminating in a new Timeline page in the Rukapedia.

It was an eye-opening exercise to go through: I was surprised just how much I’ve forgotten about the macro-events of my almost-41 years of life. My mother helped out with some of the early details, and I stacked things on top of each other and looked at the relative positions of home, work and school to figure out later things.

I always thought that my first two relationships of note — coded on the timeline as “TH” and “MCP” — went on for 3 or 4 years each. Turns out that they both lasted about a year. Catherine and I have been dating (very, very serious dating) for 16 years. Which turns out to be the longest thing I’ve ever done.

When I got confused about the order of things around 1990 when I was flitting around from Ontario to Texas to Quebec I received invaluable documentary assistance from my first credit card statement — I just knew there was going to be some value in keeping all that stuff:

I was living in El Paso, Texas when I applied for my first credit card, a MasterCard. I needed it, in part, so I could afford to get back to Canada. When it arrived the first thing I did was to go to K-Mart and buy a small black and white television so I could watch this episode of thirtysomething (another surprise; I always thought it was the season finale I watched). I returned the TV the next day (see the third transaction).

Two days later I was on the road — first to Amarillo, over to Oklahoma (where I stopped to visit Bill Coleman in Bartlesville), then up through Missouri, Illinois and Ohio. I crossed over into Ontario at Detroit and I was home by the 19th. I did the trip in my trusty 1980 Toyota Tercel (which I later sold to my neighbour).

The EasyTimeline extension for MediaWiki made creating the timeline itself super-easy; I recommend it if you want to launch a similar effort.

For several weeks — it might actually be several years — I’ve had the Trooper song 3 Dressed up as a 9 [MP3 sample] running through my head. It was a staple on AM radio when I was 13 years old (the only kind of radio there was — CKOC was where it was at when I was a kid).

Regular readers will recall (I hope) that the last time I had my hair cut was at the new Fergie’s back in October. As this was a full five months ago, my hair was getting pretty long. So was Oliver’s. So we decided that today would be father-son haircut day. And in the spirit of this bold new adventure, we decided to switch barbers: today was our day to become customers of Ray’s Place.

Ray’s has been immortalized several times by Rob; with Fergie in retirement and Fergie’s transformed into an annex of an antique store, I decided we were ready to move up to the barber shop of choice for the elite of the city. And so, at the stroke of noon, in we walked.

It was a wonderful experience. We were seated in barber chairs on opposite sides of the room so that I could see Oliver in the rear-view mirror. When Ray found out that it was Oliver’s first time to a bona fide barber, he brought the camera out and took “before and after” photos of us together. Oliver’s barber, obviously a veteran of the travails of cutting kids hair, was a pro at it; across the way my five months of shag was lopped off with dispatch and a good part of my life story, or at least the part of it taking place on PEI, was relayed as well.

Oliver was a model client — he sat still, did what he was told, answered questions about his favourite foods, etc. $12.50 for me, $7.00 for Oliver and we were out by 12:30. So now we have a new barber. Note to Ray: please don’t retire any time soon.

To celebrate our new discovery we headed down to Tai Chi Gardens for lunch, only to find Sandy and Bailey there. Bailey was looking mop-headed himself, and after some mentoring action from Oliver (including revelations about the wondrous “drawer of lollipops” that awaits child clients), Bailey was sold: Sandy took him right up for his own hair cut.

Our “alpha prototype” Chumby arrived yesterday. Plugged it in, turned it on, went through a brief configuration and now we’ve got both a souped-up wifi-enabled digital clock, and a physical object on which to do some interesting widget development using content from The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

The Chumby joins our Nabaztag rabbit in our stable of “smart networked objects,” a class of things that I’m finding particularly interesting of late: I like the idea of “using the Internet without a computer” and I like the idea of “ephemeral” or “accidental” information flow as opposed to “directed information gathering” (like “search Google for information about Keith Richards”).

Stay tuned. (Can a Plazes widget be too far in our future?) Meanwhile, here’s my favourite exchange from the Chumby Forums so far:

User: If we hack or Mod do we still get a warranty.and a repair if it brakes

Chumby: No. We obviously can’t finance an industry of folks mangling their chumbys, because, well, that would be insane.

Interesting to note, via this list of Google companies filed with the SEC that Google Canada Corporation is a Nova Scotia corporation, something you can verify here at the Nova Scotia Government website. Curious.