Remember a month ago when I pledged allegiance to Getting Things Done. Well, much to my surprise, it seems to have taken. I’ve been faithfully using kGTD, a Mac-based outliner add-on that lets me organize items on my “to do list” into nice compartments that seem to have some magical way, in this new environment, of prompting me to actually do them.

So I’ve had an extremely productive two weeks. I’ve also felt a lot less “confusing ill-defined sludge of tasks waiting to be completed”-related stress (which seems to be one of the big GTD selling points).

There’s a new version of kGTD out today, and it looks pretty sweet, rasping a lot of the rough edges off the old version. I’m installing as we speak.

Another restaurant has come and gone from the ill-fated space on University Ave. next door to [[Cedars]]. This time sees the demise of Forbidden Palace, a restaurant that advertised itself as having “the real Chinese taste of Toronto.” Something that always seemed a little odd, although I know what they were trying to get at.

We only ate at Forbidden Palace once, and it was a good meal. The space, however, couldn’t shake the “moldy cavernous warehouse” aesthetic, no matter how many plants they scattered around. And who wants to eat in a moldy cavern? There’s a Sheriff’s notice up on the door looking for $8000ish in back rent.

Word on the street is that the folks who ran the former restaurant in the space, Green Jade, picked up and relocated to Stratford where they’re raking in customers. Not hard to do, I suppose, when your only local competition is Subway and KFC.

The program for the 2006 City and Regional Magazine Association Conference has been released. I’m speaking in the “Production” track and my talk is described, somewhat open-endedly, as:

Web 2.0 - An introduction to current Web technologies that publishers can take advantage of now or in the near future. Discussion will include RSS, blogs, podcasting, social software, tags, Flickr, and Google Maps.

While my [[friends upstairs]] get all jiggly about the Web 2.0 meme, what I’m really interested in talking about is less “bubble 2.0” and more “how traditional print publishers can stop thinking of themselves as ‘print publications with an accidental website’ and more as ‘actors in a network’ ”. Which sounds, perhaps, equally pretentious. But it’s also where the “why doesn’t my magazine have an RSS feed?” conversation has to start.

The reboot 8.0 wiki has rumbled to life. Already 29 participants signed up. I’m looking forward to it.

In response to my suggestion that the venerable Charlottetown food store The Root Cellar “went all Leacock,” a reader comments:

What do you mean by “..went all Leacock”, Peter?

This was an obtuse reference to the Stephen Leacock short story The New Food, published in the 1910 collection Literary Lapses. The story begins:

I see from the current columns of the daily press that “Professor Plumb, of the University of Chicago, has just invented a highly concentrated form of food. All the essential nutritive elements are put together in the form of pellets, each of which contains from one to two hundred times as much nourishment as an ounce of an ordinary article of diet. These pellets, diluted with water, will form all that is necessary to support life. The professor looks forward confidently to revolutionizing the present food system.”

The punchline comes when baby eats eats the entire Christmas dinner:

“Oh, Henry, quick! Baby has snatched the pill!” It was too true. Dear little Gustavus Adolphus, the golden-haired baby boy, had grabbed the whole Christmas dinner off the poker chip and bolted it. Three hundred and fifty pounds of concentrated nourishment passed down the oesophagus of the unthinking child.

And finishes with:

And when they gathered the little corpse together, the baby lips were parted in a lingering smile that could only be worn by a child who had eaten thirteen Christmas dinners.

If you compare the modern day Root Cellar to its earlier incarnations you’ll find that its shelves are now indeed stocked with pellets and powders, and much of the “food” that used to grace its shelves has been removed.

As I’ve retreated inside the earphones so as to avoid the invasion of the jackhammers ([[Daniel]] to Peter this morning: “That’s the noise that’s bothering you!?”), I have rediscovered Radio Paradise. In this age of rampant podcasting, it’s easy to neglect the good old streaming music “stations” out there like Radio Paradise and its spiritual east coast cousin Grassy Hill Radio.

Special correspondent [[Ann Thurlow]] just dropped by, fresh from a news conference at City Hall announcing that a new grocery store has been secured for downtown [[Charlottetown]]. Here’s an artist’s rendering:

The store, to be branded Clover Farm, will be housed in the old Carter’s store on Queen Street, most recently home to Home Accents and Beyond The Beach. It’s a wonderful space, with high ceilings and wood floors; I have many fond memories of buying office supplies there from Carter’s. The store will be operated by Gary Currie.

Ever since the Coop and Uncommon Grocer closed and the Root Cellar went all Leacock, buying food downtown has meant trudging up to one of the grocery megastores uptown. This new store, which Ann reports to have all the variety and richness of inventory we might ask for, has the potential to reinvigorate the downtown as a residential destination. Kudos to the Mayor, to Councillor Kim Devine, and to the City’s development staff (to say nothing of Mr. Currie) for making this happen.

So here I am on Sunday afternoon, in at the office hoping to get some work done without the din of the jackhammers. Except that today’s the day that [[Nathan]] has decided to construct some sort of sailboat out of 2x4s in the back yard, 4 feet from my office window. Which requires use of Noisy Power Tools.

Try as I might, thus, I cannot escape the din. I might as well fold and move to New York City and set up on the sidewalk. Sigh.

This project, an “Animated Atlas of Flight Traffic Over North America,” produces oddly compelling time-lapse animations of flights over North America. Look at the sample animation of Atlanta airport traffic.

The more I peel off the layers of the new Plazer application for OS X, the more I like. Truth be told, the original Plazes Launcher for the Mac didn’t have any layers to peel; the Plazer, though, is a bona fide Mac app with lots of nice touches. My favourite so far is this:

No more “left the Launcher running at the office so everybody thinks that I’m there and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The big Plazes challenge for me now is to convince other locals of its value. While it’s proved an excellent tool to locate [[Cynthia Dunsford]], its practical utility as a general purpose “find my friends and family” tool has been limited by slow uptake (or uptake and then opt out). If you’re interested in experimenting with Plazes, but need an overview (complete with what the privacy implications are), get in touch.