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.

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.