I must admit to being lax in the “maintaining machines” part of my life. The worst example of this was when I ignored the brake light’s constant illumination in my 1980 Honda Civic for 2 months (I figured the light itself was broken), an episode that ended when I pulled up to an intersection out in North River, went to apply the brakes, and found nothing to apply (fortunately the car had a manual transmission and I wasn’t traveling too fast, so I was able to gear down to a stop without killing myself or others).

It’s this same natural disinclination that gets me into trouble with Revenue Canada all the time; I can never seem to remember when to send in the brown envelopes with payroll remittances.

And so it was that I left my bicycle unmaintained for three years. Over that period it gradually accumulated various layers of guck, the brakes didn’t work very well. And so on.

While I usually find the “make an appointment, then wait two weeks” way of working problematic, this year I stormed through my lethargy, called up [[Smooth Cycle]] and made a date. I brought the bicycle in yesterday, left it overnight for treatment, and picked it up just now.

They don’t lie with they call themselves smooth, them Smooth Cycle folks: the bike runs like a top now. Even just walking it along the street it seems to roll like butter. It’s like a brand new bike.

The best $29.99 I’ll spend this year.

Well, I survived an iced tea-free weekend. Actually, it wasn’t completely iced tea-free: the [[Formosa Tea House]] downtown was open on Saturday, so I had a lemon iced tea there, and I whipped up a nice batch of homemade rooibos on Sunday to tide me over.

Speaking of tea, I’ve discovered a money-saving chai trick that would make my grandmother proud. Here at [[Mavor’s]] at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, a “chai latte” in a big bowl costs $4.50. If you order a “chai tea,” however, and then add milk yourself, you end up with a reasonable approximation of same for only $2.35, with the added bonus of being able to sweeten to taste.

On the food front, I’ve become addicted to the Food Network. I never thought it could happen — it’s a rare day when I darken the kitchen’s door at home — but it has. Three shows have dragged me in.

Chef At Large, hosted by local chef Michael Smith, moves out of the kitchen set and into the real world of “food logistics.” My favourite episode looked at how much profit Earl’s in Vancouver makes on a $27.99 steak dinner (it’s less than $1.00).

Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is a British show hosted by uber-chef Gordon Ramsay. The show is like “Dr. Laura for failing Restaurants.” Each week Gordon visits a restaurant on the brink, and over the course of 7 days, through “tough love” and lots of swearing, works to right them. Ramsay is bombastic, but in a completely compelling way. And his medicine actually seems to work. Besides the drama, the show provides an interesting look into what the real challenges of running a restaurant are (food and labour costs, discipline, cooking).

My unlikeliest Food Network passion of all is Jamie’s Great Italian Escape, hosted by British food phenom Jamie Oliver. It’s hard not to think of Jamie Oliver as a lightweight “TV chef” in the same vein as Emeril, Nigella and company. But this new program, wherein Oliver travels to Italy in a VW camper van to “get away from it all” demonstrates a creativity and wit, to say nothing of an excellent command of Italian, that I never expected was there. Yesterday’s episode saw him visit The Abbey at Farfa hoping to dip into a thousand year old cooking tradition. What he found was fish fingers and boiled vegetables. His reaction is to try to enliven the place with fresh food: he replants the dormant herb garden, gets the monks cooking, and it’s all very comical. It’s good entertainment.

Otherwise in the food world, Oliver (my Oliver, not Jamie) and I took the bus to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday: the chill was gone out of the air enough to allow outdoor wandering. The Sherwood route stops right at the door, and you can catch the bus back from the Superstore about an hour later, so the timing is perfect. Roy tells me that the buses will come alive with the sound of music this weekend in a big Earth Day promotion put together by the eco people; thebus.ca can get your where you want to go.

Oliver and Catherine are off to Ontario for two weeks starting Wednesday, so I’m either going to have to learn to darken the kitchen door or go hungry. I may have to call on [[Catherine Hennessey]] to whip up a batch of macaroni and cheese.

Let me take a brief moment to sing the praises of OmniOutliner, iCal and the AppleScript that allows them to easily be glued together.

In a drive to get our travel plans for the next while organized, I created a simple outline in OmniOutliner:

OmniOutliner is a good tool for this, in part, because it’s very smart about understanding dates — I can enter “June 12 at 8:00 a.m. EDT” and it will understand what I mean, and do all the time zone conversion required (it also understands shorthand like “next week” too).

Once I had my itinerary organized, it seemed like a good idea to somehow automagically get the events from OmniOutliner into iCal. Fortunately, there’s a collection of handy AppleScripts available to make this sort of thing easy to do: a few modifications to the Export to iCal sample script, and I had myself an iCal:

A few more clicks, and the iCal calendar became a Google Calendar:

It’s so nice when everything just flows together so seamlessly; makes those old “trying to load WordStar 2000 documents into WordPerfect” days seem like a distant memory.

Here is the description from the Empire Theatres website of the new Disney movie The Wild, now playing here in Charlottetown:

An odd assortment of animals from the New York Zoo — including a lion, a giraffe, an anaconda, a koala, and a squirrel — discover what a jungle the city can be when one of their own is mistakenly shipped to the wild and they embark on a dangerous mission to rescue him.

Note that this isn’t the movie Madagascar that played in Charlottetown last year. That was a Dreamworks movie released in 2005. With the same plot. Fortunately the posters for the two movies look nothing at all alike:

[[Oliver]] and I dropped [[Catherine]] up in Cavendish on Friday morning, and then stopped in at the old Rainbow Valley site on our way back to town. You will recall that after we spent several happy summers basking in Rainbow Valley’s wonders, the park closed for good last summer.

Parks Canada, the new owners of the property, have been hard at work erasing all trace of Rainbow Valley: with the exception of a few picnic tables, and a couple of remaining buildings, everything else is gone. The castle at the entrance. The swimming pool. The water slides. The talking owl. All the rides. The old fire truck. The vegetable garden, with it’s concrete mushrooms. Even the statue of Anne of Green Gables.

We took the opportunity to record a short memorial podcast from the car after a walk through. As we used my [[T610]] mobile phone to do the recording, it sounds a lot like we recorded it under a pile of wool blankets.

I also took some photos of the destruction (the photos were taken on the same phone, with camera that takes photos that match the sound quality of the podcast).

It was a very odd feeling to walk the grounds: it was like walking through a colour photograph from which all the colour had been draining. It made me very conscious of the magical artifice that was Rainbow Valley: how a ragtag collection of people, structures and mythology could amount to so much fun.

We drove by the “replacement” theme park, up the road and across the street. Frankly, it looks depressing. Of course it’s under construction. And it’s still winter. And we had pathos in our hearts. So we’ll see what happens this summer. But Rainbow Valley is definitely, obviously, gone forever.

Recorded in our car at the old Rainbow Valley site in Cavendish.

I’ve whipped up a little tutorial about controlling Plazer with Salling Clicker. The end result: when I enter my office with my mobile phone in my pocket, Plazer marks me “Connected” and when I leave the office, I’m automagically marked “Not Connected.”

It’s very cool to watch once it’s working (and it’s easy to get working if you’ve got a Mac, Plazer, and a Bluetooth-enabled mobile device and Salling Clicker).

At Adam Curry’s suggestion, I got myself a MySpace profile. I imagine [[Oliver]] will have one, of his own volition, within the month; as a Responsible Parent, I need to see what the kids are up to these days.

I figured if I did a search of Charlottetown I might find a MySpace user or two. To my surprise, there are 1487 MySpace users within 5 miles of where I type. Who knew.

And they’re not all young rockers: Lobie Daughton and Campbell Webster are both there. I halfway expect to encounter Wilbur MacDonald in there somewhere (with apologies to Wilbur for using him as the archetypal “non-young rocker”).

Off to type my list of favourite bandz in.

Tomorrow is “Good” Friday. So we’ve all got the day off (or at least free to engage in solemn remembrance, etc.). For we of the tea-drinking persuasion, however, the day brings danger: Shoppers Drug Mart is out of Honest Tea, both outlets of the [[Formosa Tea House]] will be closed for the day, as will [[Interlude]] and [[Monsoon]]. Perhaps I’ll have to make my own tea.

[[Catherine]] has an appointment out in Hunter River for the day, and [[Oliver]] and I might use the opportunity for a drive to loop up to PEI National Park for a hike in the woods. Perhaps they’ll have tea on in Rustico?

At least we’ve got a free pass from doing yard work; according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac:

The Creoles of Louisiana believed that if the ground were cut open on this day, Christ’s blood would run out into the rows.

We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we.

I’m sad to report that PDFReports, an excellent Romanian-built product that I talked about in this video about the 2003 election, has been discontinued by Interakt. In response to an email I sent yesterday, I got the following kind reply this morning:

I am sorry to inform you but the PDF Reports tool has been discontinued for the past 2 years. We are no longer supporting nor updating this tool, so my best advice would be to search for something else that will offer you the same type of functionality.

What I can tell you is that due to the fact it has not been updated, PDF Reports will not work properly with PHP 5. I do feel sorry about this. If there is anything else we can do for you please let me know.

I’ve used PDFReports for a variety of systems: it produced the List of Electors for the 2003 election and for the municipal elections that followed, and we use it at [[Yankee]] to produce financial reports. It’s flexible, has an XML-based template system, and is quite extensible in PHP. So before we make the jump to PHP5 at [[Elections PEI]] and [[Yankee]], I’ll be looking for a replacement.