On Monday evening, Compass will again be called Compass. Proving that common sense, bolstered by a seemingly endless series of inane weblog posts and the dedication of Compass adherents inside the CBC (you know who you are), can prevail.

I have always been a big fan of the Brio carbonated beverage. Contrary to what I’d always thought, it seems that Brio, despite its Italian-style packaging, is only sold in Canada — in Italy it’s called Chino, after the small bitter citrus fruit that provides its distinctive taste.

It’s hard to describe the taste of the chinotto fruit, and it’s certainly not something that everyone enjoys. It’s sort of like drinking mild paint thinner, but in a pleasant way.

A few weeks ago I was happy to find a Prince Edward Island source of a chinotto beverage — the San Pellegrino Chinotto brand made in Italy and imported into Canada by Nestle Waters.

Because the Chinotto is sold in non-refillable cans and is carbonated, it’s technically illegal under Prince Edward Island’s Litter Control Regulations. As such, I’ll leave it to you to figure out where to get your clandestine Chinotto high.

I had lunch at the new Town and Country Restaurant in Charlottetown today (regular readers will recall that it closed in December of 2006 for renovation after a change of owners).

I suppose it’s never fair to judge a restaurant on how it does on its second day open; this is analogous to the “alpha testing” phase of a software project, and there are bound to be bugs.

And there were bugs.

I had to wait too long to be seated, and then another 10 minutes before my order was taken. My drink took another 10 minutes to arrive, and the food followed about 20 minutes later. What should have been a 30 minute lunch took an hour. And I wasn’t alone: several tables were working on a “have to be back at work at 1:00 p.m.” deadline and lodged complaints after sending obvious “putting jackets on because we have to leave soon” pantomime messages.

The staff were pleasant about all this, offering apologies when they noticed that there was something to apologize for (which wasn’t enough of the time). I’m sure if I return in a week or two the machine will be humming and these first-week service problems will be gone. I hope.

The new sign in the window promises “Canadian and Asian Fusion” food. The menu (see a scan of the take-out menu here) is thus an interesting amalgam of old standards like the “T&C Special Burder,” “Hot Hamburger” and “Poutine” with new-fangled cuisine like “Oyster Motoyaki” and “Kerang Saus Padang.” There’s also a good portion of the old Lebanese menu, including falafel, shawarma and shish taouk.

I ordered the “Fried Rice Plate” which was described as:

Indonesian Fried Rice mixed with sausages served with sate and shrimp.

In reality this was “spicy rice with chopped up wieners.” There was one tiny shrimp included, about the size of a quarter. The rice was well-spiced, but the presence of the wiener chunks, which provided me with flashbacks to uncomfortable grade 2 “hot dog days,” detracted from my ability to enjoy it fully. The tiny sate (choice of beef or chicken; I had chicken) was excellent: hot, well-spiced, high-quality chicken.

The promise of additional Asian Fusion delights is enough to make me overlook the service lapses and the wiener orgy: I look forward to returning to sample “Balinese Curry,” “Chicken Paprika” or “Tori No Karagae.” Or even “Classic Canadian Club.”

The restaurant is open odd hours: seven days a week from 11:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. and then again from 4:30 until 8:00 p.m. They offer delivery “within city limits” and it’s free for orders of more than $25 (phone 892-2282).

If you miss the old Town & Country you’ll be happy to find that The Sea Treat, at the corner of Euston and University, has expanded its menu to include Louis’ Chicken and Rice Soup and a good selection of Lebanese dishes. You’re also more likely than not to find Louis and Faida there having lunch, waiting on tables, or just keeping in touch. The Sea Treat has become a regular Sunday afternoon lunch stop for Catherine, Oliver and I.

I’ve been on something of a House binge recently, watching an episode or two from season one every night. Like most everyone else with the same affliction, I’ve become a Hugh Laurie fan. I’ve also started having dreams that I’m suffering from bi-cortical sub-cutaneous leeching syndrome.

The television channel cuatro, which airs House in Spain, produced a special called House Unplugged which, of course, is available on YouTube. If you concentrate really hard you can hear the English under the Spanish.

And if watching Hugh Laurie overdubbed in Spanish is your thing, HouseMD.es has lots of clips.

Back in what Oliver has taken to calling “the old times,” when Catherine and I lived childlessly out in Kingston and I had an office inside the Moses Mediaplex, I often worked late on Friday nights, driving home around midnight.

One of those nights I was listening to Brave New Waves on CBC Radio and they announced that the two weeks thence would be playing an “all covers” show and they invited listeners to contribute suggestions.

So when I got home I emailed in a suggestion that they play Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell and then play the cover version by BB Gabor. And then I promptly forgot all about it.

Two weeks later, again driving home late on a Friday night, just I was cresting the last hill on the Kingston Road before reaching home, I turned on the car radio on a lark. Only to hear Brave New Waves host Brent Bambury announce my Big Yellow Taxi request. And so as I glided down home, I got to hear BB Gabor again, singing his excellent cover. And recall my own old times, years before, hunkered down on a Friday night in a smoky Trent Radio with John Muir, who introduced me to the album, listening to him tell tales about chord changes and bass lines.

So on this Chelseaist of mornings, today’s musician is Joni Mitchell.

My week of procrastinating through microformats hacking culminated yesterday with reformatting of comments as hCards. So when you visit a comments page, like this one, and you have the Operator extensions inside your Firefox, you can do something like this:

I now return to my regularly scheduled paying work. Although I’m already scheming about adding microformatting to pages like this.

My old friend Sam Abuelsamid has started blogging for AutoblogGreen. It’s great stuff. Sam has been interested in cars for as long as I know him — I remember receiving a running commentary from him every Saturday morning at the YMCA as he took cars apart and put them back together again in the auto shop at high school. In later years Sam went on to work in Detroit for Big Auto, so he knows his stuff.

I missed this when it was released: Free GIS Products from the Province of PEI. Excellent. The province has also published PDF versions of the Road Atlas and Public Land Atlas.

I spent a little time this morning creating and documenting the process of creating an Operator handler for OpenStreetMap.

Ever since Oliver was born, I’ve been conscious of the lack of pedestrian signals at the corner of Prince St. and Grafton St. (46.236, -63.125) in downtown Charlottetown.

The intersection has been, as far as I know, one of only two in downtown Charlottetown without traffic lights but no pedestrian signals. To make matters worse, the traffic lights themselves are located such that they’re difficult for pedestrians to see from two of the four corners; in a central neighbourhood with large churches on two corners, many children, and a school up the road, the absence of signals seemed likely to lead, eventually, to a pedestrian accident.

I’m happy to report that late last fall signals were installed on three of four corners, and last week the fourth corner was added. It’s a hard intersection to install pedestrian signals at — the poles for the traffic lights were never positioned with them in mind, so their position is a little odd, and on one of the four corners the “push to signal” button is away from the sidewalk far enough to create a problem for anyone with mobility problems. Oh, and the signals aren’t actually “lit up” yet.

But kudos to the city nonetheless for acting on this. I look forward to many years of safer passage across Grafton and Prince on my way to work or school.