Here’s a snip from an email newsletter from Simple Shows. The “dear fellow polluters” subject line caught my eye.

It’s worth noting that Simple is a division of Deckers Outdoor Corporation, a California corporation with $264 million in revenue. This kind of puts the whole “a nice little shoe company” conceit in a new light. As does Deckers’ corporate mission.

Our mission is to build niche footwear lines into global brands with market leadership positions.

None of which, of necessity, takes away from the authenticity of their Simple Shoes message. But it does make we wonder how deep their thinking goes, and how much of it is simply brand posturing.

I had lunch today with Marc Leggott, Dave Cormier and Grant Johnson, open source warriors from the University of Prince Edward Island. They are rambling about in some interesting pastures. Some web things I learned about at lunch that I didn’t know about before:

• Loomware — UPEI Librarian Mark Leggott’s weblog.
• Dave Cormier — UPEI polymath Dave Cormier’s site and blog.
• Digitization Projects at UPEI
• DSpace — “digital repository system captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material.”
• Institute of Interdisciplinary Research in Culture, Multimedia, Technology and Cognition and CMTC Virtual Research
• cribchronicles — “a dumping ground for motherhood-related ramblings.”
• Evergreen — an open source “library automation software product.”
• koha — “a full-featured open-source ILS.”

While there are plenty of cool librarians on PEI, I’ve been waiting for the arrival of a serious contingent of open source librarians, and a cabal seems to be emerging. To seriously engage with them I’m going to have to get over my prejudices against “projects with long and complicated names and many acronyms” and, indeed, “projects that have government funding.” If I can do that, there seems to be a possibility of some interesting grounds to play in.

I got curious yesterday about how size of the readership of our local newspaper, The Guardian compares to the size of the readership here.

The Canadian Newspaper Association reports that The Guardian has an average daily readership of 20,237.

The traffic statistics for ruk.ca show that there are approximately 1,000 unique visitors to this site every day. Google Analytics reports similar numbers.

So, in simple terms, The Guardian has 20 times the daily readership.

Of course our counting methods are different, their’s are independently verified, and they have web traffic too. And many of my readers aren’t local.

My advertising revenue is about $6.00 a day (from Google AdSense). My expenses amount to my time — probably about 30 minutes a day, on average — and a slice of a $100/month hosting bill.

The Guardian makes a lot more money, but they also need employees and trucks and paper and paper carriers. I assume they make a lot more money at the end of the day, but I’m willing to bet that when expressed in terms of tonnes of carbon per reader, I’m running a greener operation.

This is not to suggest that I aspire to newspaperness, but it’s and intriguing comparison nonetheless. And it seems to suggest that a wily entrepreneur/journalist could make a run at creating an online publication that would rival The Guardian in readership.

I’ve pointed before, but it’s worth pointing again: KPIG is an excellent example of how commercial radio doesn’t have to be generic and faceless. Here’s how they describe themselves:

We’re an anachronism - a throwback to the days when real DJs picked out the music, and listeners expected something more from a radio station than just a couple of hundred songs repeated over and over, with some “big voice” guy yelling about how great it all is. We’re also - to the amazement of all of the radio “professionals” who make the rules we thumb our noses at - very successful, though we try not to let it go to our heads.

Next time you find yourself wishing for more than Kirk and Kerri Wynne in the morning, drop over to listen to the live KPIG Internet stream.

In a flight of fancy on Sunday afternoon, I ordered a Nabaztag/tag from ThinkGeek.

Partly from gadget addiction, partly because Catherine and Oliver think it’s neat, and partly because any company that thinks rabbits should be connected to the Internet deserves my financial support. And because Henriette has one.

Watch our rabbit fly home.

The Genealogy of Influence website is exactly what I was looking for. It’s a “a visualization of the connections between the most influential writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians of Western culture.”

What I want now is exactly the same thing, except for Prince Edward Island. Something like this ^*:

Link from boingboing via Fabrica.

* Note that this is a random selection of politicians “back room boys” and should not be taken to indicate actual spheres of influence.

CBC Archives celebrates the life of Peter Gzowski, who died five years ago today. Please go an listen to A ‘sleeping’ cricket right now; it’s among the best bits of radio ever.

This year is also the 10th annivesary, on May 30th, of the last episode of Morningside. I know this in part because it’s also the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Confederation Bridge; we listened to the entire final Morningside while lined up on the Trans-Canada Highway on our way to Borden for the opening. I can’t drive that stretch of highway without thinking of that day and the show and its host.

My own last appearance on Morningside was two years earlier. Listen to the MP3 — more details here.

I’ve recently become addicted to re-runs of the old CBC drama Street Legal (I think I’ve won Oliver over; Catherine has her doubts about the utility of reliving the 1980s); last week there was an episode that guest-starred both Peter Gzowski and Gordon Pinsent. I dare say there’s never been a more Canadian moment on television.

What Does 200 Calories Look Like?. Very interesting. Link from Tasty Thinking, interesting in its own right.

I’ve been using MacFamilyTree this week to try and make some order out of the various email messages, scraps of paper and family histories that together describe my father’s side of the family.

I’m new to the arcane world of genealogy, and one of the things that strikes me as odd is that there’s no was to enter non-related people in MacFamilyTree; I assume this means that, in genealogy in general, the notion of “friends” isn’t considered; it’s all about family.

Given that genealogy is “a line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor,” I suppose this makes technical sense. But if my goal is to understand the context of my ancestry, surely the people that were friends, acquaintances, shopkeepers, neighbours and otherwise a part of my ancestors’ lives are important, aren’t they?

I wonder if anthropologists, or perhaps sociologists, have digital tools that are MacFamilyTree-like, but not so rigid in their rules about who matters.

In theory, I should be able to use the Address Book application on my MacBook to send SMS messages from my Nokia N70 phone. The phone and the MacBook communicate with Bluetooth for all other purposes — sending and receiving files, syncing calendar and address book entries, Salling Clicker — quite well. But I can’t get Address Book’s cell phone-related features to work properly.

My N70 is paired with my MacBook, and the MacBook is set as “authorised” in the N70’s Bluetooth settings so the two should be able to communication back and forth without further intervention. When I open Address Book, I see the Bluetooth icon in the toolbar as I should:

Clicking on the icon, however, I get prompted to pair with a Bluetooth device, even though I’m already paired with my N70:

When I select my phone — ruk.ca in the list — and click Pair, I get prompted “Please enter a Passkey to use with this device:”

No matter what I enter for a passkey — 0000, 1234, anything — the pairing appears to work, and the Bluetooth icon gains a blue “halo:”

However the “halo” soon disappears, and any attempt to use the “SMS Message” or “Dial with Cell Phone” options that appear when you right-click a telephone number show these options as “greyed out:”

Watching the Bluetooth connection between the MacBook and the N70 while this is happening (using Bluetooth Explorer, which is part of the OS X Developer Tools), the connection appears, then disappears after about 5 seconds. Even during that period, the contextual menu options for using the cell phone are disabled.

I spent an hour on the phone with Apple support this morning trying to sort this out. After going through the usual zapping the PRAM, creating a new user, running disk utility, etc., I was no further ahead; I suspended things when they wanted me to launch into a non-destructive reinstall.

I’m posting this here just in case anyone else encounters the same problem. Or, better yet, has a solution.