Let’s all take a minute this morning and honour Baba O’Riley. Perhaps neutered somewhat by its role as the theme music for CSI:NY, but a great song nonetheless.

I’ve update the blogroll page here to accurately reflect the weblogs and podcasts that are in my NetNewsWire — i.e. the ones I read and listen to every day.

As an added bonus, the page is now formatted using the xFolk standard, meaning that if you’ve installed the nifty Operator extension for Firefox, the page will do extra magical things

And while dallying in the world of microformats, I took a couple of additional steps: all of the posts here in the weblog have their tags formatted using rel-tag and my contact information page is now an hCard if you look under the hood.

I’ve also updated the PlazesPHPBlog code to automatically insert the latitude and longitude of my current Plazes location using the geo microformat.

Pipes is a new service from Yahoo! that doesn’t appear to have any value until suddenly you realize that you can use it for something really useful.

In my case the usefulness manifested itself as IRAC Applications - French River Area, which takes the RSS feeds from the IRAC LPA Applications Databank and filters them to create a new RSS feed that is limited to applications in Park Corner, French River, Sea View and Springbrook — the areas of interest for the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust.

Pipes doesn’t do anything you couldn’t otherwise do with some scripting in Perl or PHP, but it lets you do it a dead-easy-to-use visual way:

This ease-of-use meant that creating my first pipe took about 5 minutes.

Three years ago on a hot summer day in downtown Boston, in the middle of the Democratic National Convention, I stumbled across Barack Obama on a balcony off the media trailer posing for an unseen photographer. I snapped a photo from far across the parking lot:

Back then he was State Senator from Illinois running for U.S. Senate. Today, now as junior U.S. Senator for Illinois, he announced that he’s running for President.

At 7:48 a.m. this morning, CBC Prince Edward Island reported Flu passing Island by again. Eight hours later, at 5:05 p.m. today, they reported P.E.I. struck by first flu outbreak in 2 years, make for an interesting juxtaposition on the CBC website:

Taken in the early morning light on the way to the office this morning:

We just finished a 15 minute voice chat from our hotel here in Halifax to my parents’ condo in Florida. They were using my Mom’s iBook and were dialed into an Earthlink account with the iBook’s internal modem; on our end was my MacBook connected by Ethernet. Using iChat voice quality was better-than-telephone, which seems like some amazing feat of technology.

They report, by the way, that Earthlink, which they signed up for when wifi was not in evidence, was easy to sign up for and works well. They especially mentioned the friendliness and efficiency of the Earthlink support staff.

I’m becoming a big fan of the Marriott Residence Inn here in Halifax.

It’s central — across from the Neptune Theatre, down the street from the Metro Centre, a short walk to Barrington St. and Spring Garden Road, only a few blocks from the waterfront, and surrounded by many excellent restaurants. You can walk almost anywhere downtown easily, and there are buses running everywhere else leaving from the next block over.

It’s relatively inexpensive — in the winter a “junior suite” (think “studio apartment with small kitchen, couch, easy chair, desk and queen bed”) is in the $139 range and there seem to be several deals that can bring this down lower. For example, we’re staying here this week with the “Cars Eat Free” promotion that gets of $75 worth of Petro Canada credit for gasoline and free indoor heated parking.

Breakfast is included in the rate, and it’s a good breakfast at that — a lot more than the “toast and juice” that passes for many hotel breakfasts. They even have a “make your own waffle bar” that was the hit of the visit when Oliver and I stayed here in 2004. And Uncommon Grounds, in the same building, is a coffee shop serving excellent cappuccino.

Staff are pleasant and helpful without being overly perky. Rooms are very clean and well-appointed. High-speed Internet is included (via Ethernet cord, which is provided).

We’ll stay here again.

I’ve hacked together a little PHP script, which I’ve called Plabaztag, that makes our new Nabaztag rabbit announce my Plazes location every time it changes.

This means that while we’re here in Halifax and Oliver is at home in Charlottetown and we go out to dinner, our rabbit pipes up and says something like “Peter is now at The Hungry Chili in Halifax.”

Now that we’ve been gone a couple of days this may be driving Nana and Poppa crazy, but Oliver seems to continue to be delighted by the idea of a rabbit telling him where we are.

I know I am.

You can find code and basic instructions for using it in the Rukapedia.

Catherine and I are in Halifax for three days this week while Oliver is in the loving care of his Nana and Poppa back at home. This will be the longest that both of us have been away from wee O since, well, ever. He seemed quite non-plussed by the prospect of our extended absence; his only concern, according to Catherine, was that we be back in time for Valentine’s Day.

We’re using our time here in the Big City to do all the things one can’t do back in the Little City. Like eating chili-pepper infused food, Turkish mezes and drinking good coffee, shopping for organic cotton boxer shorts (well, not exactly “shopping,” more “marveling at the sheer variety of stuff on sale here”).