As I flipped through the cable channels last night at the [[Jack Daniels Motor Inn]] I stopped on the movie Sixteen Candles for a minute. In the scene I watched, a very young Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald were sitting in an open-topped Jeep in a garage.

And suddenly I realized that the entire course of my life had been changed by a Jeep.

Back in the early 1980s, one of the recruiting tools used by [[Trent University]] was a 10 minute film that told the story of a student arriving at Trent for the first time. She arrived in her cool Jeep, and as she pulled into the parking lot a gaggle of fresh-faced coeds emerged to help her move in. She then proceeded to benefit greatly from small-group teaching, stunning architecture and the proximity to the Trent Canal.

I was hooked. And I think it was the Jeep that sold me.

And so I went to Trent. Dropped out. Stayed in Peterborough. Left. Came back. Met Catherine. And the rest is history.

My old friend, housemate and business partner Simon Shields has just launched Isthatlegal.ca, a site he’s created:

…to share my knowledge, experience and research regarding law with those in our society who most need it - and with those who work towards a better world.

In many ways this project is an evolution of some early hypertext experiments that Simon and I hatched back in the late 1980s in [[Peterborough]] when Simon was running the Community Information Agency. This was pre-web, and mostly pre-Internet, but the nature of those experiments was similar — organizing information about The Law into a more navigable form.

Apparently Amy fell off Autumn yesterday. These are the things you overhear when lining up for a cheese danish here in Peterborough.

The other big news here is that Little Roy’s is closed for renovations; fortunately Big Roy’s next door has taken over the newspaper business for the duration of the closure, so it’s still possible to buy the Times. Indeed Big Roy’s is staying open until 8:00 p.m. every night (except Sundays) to compensate. When I questioned the cashier at Big Roy’s last night on the reason for the reno he said that Little Roy’s hadn’t been modified in more than 30 years and it was time for an upgrade.

Meanwhile on the personal front, my entire Peterborough morning routine has been thrown into a tizzy by changes in the schedule here at Twelve Pine. My routine — and am willing to admit here and now that I am a creature of habit — has included a refreshing [[Honest Tea]] accompanied by aforementioned danish and a bowl of fruit salad. The fruit salad man, however, doesn’t get in until later in the morning these days, so I’m left fruitless. It’s a hard adjustment.

It’s municipal election night here in New Hampshire tomorrow night. While not quite surrounded by the hoopla that greeted me when I was here for federal and state elections in November of 2004, it’s still exciting to be here at this time, what with democracy being so much “closer to the ground” than it is back home.

My favourite item up for voting tomorrow is on an amendment to the Peterborough Zoning Ordinance (it’s one of several on the ballot):

Peterborough seems to be at a crossroads, with factions supporting a sort of pure laine approach — “Peterborough for Peterboroughians” so to speak — lined up against a pro-business camp that wants a new grocery store and other abominations. The issues are, no doubt, much more complex and shaded; one only has to look up Route 101 to Nashua, however, to see what everyone’s either afraid of (or seeking), as Nashua is a veritable commercial wasteland (or paradise) compared to bucolic ye olde Peterborough.

A colleague at [[Yankee]], Jack Burnett, is up for the vacant Selectman position on tomorrow’s Peterborough ballot. Jack is winning the sign war, with his “Burnett Means Business” signs lining almost every street. If only because we’ve come to admire Jack’s razor sharp copy-edit skills, I’m prepared to throw my endorsement, such as it is, behind Jack (even if he does “Mean Business”).

If you want to get some idea of what Peterboroughians are in for when they go to vote tomorrow, take a look at the Ballots for Town Officials, Zoning Amendments, and ConVal School District — that’s meaty stuff there, the kind of stuff, alas, that is deemed too complex for we simple residents of Charlottetown to leave up to ourselves.

Perhaps the most controversial item on Tuesday’s ballot concerns a “special warrant” of $548,112 to acquire laptop computers (Apple iBooks, as it turns out) for every sixth grade student in the district. This proposal, explained by the school board here, would not only see schools acquire 300 iBooks and assorted other gear ($410,000), but would also bathe the schools in wifi ($44,000) and train teachers how to use them ($15,000).

In a story about the warrant, the Monadnock Ledger notes that not all are in favour of the initiative:

Although the board’s Budget and Property Chair Craig Hicks said he “would love to see every sixth grader with a laptop computer,” resident Tom Baker of Temple said giving laptops to sixth graders was “folly.” He predicted that to do this would lead to vandalism and losses. “I heard the worst thing you can do is leave students alone with a computer,” he said.

The Peterborough Transcript reports, however, that officials are not without answers to the potential dangers that rampant laptop use might lead to; the paper quotes South Meadow School Principal Dick Dunning:

The use of the computers away from school has been a concern of many, and Dunning said a plan has been developed to track the history of what computers have been used for.

“We will conduct random checks,” Dunning said, “and if we find the student has been using it inappropriately, they will receive one strike against them.”

If the student receives three strikes, the opportunity to take the laptop home will be revoked and they will only be able to use it in the classroom.

Apparently Live Free Or Die does not apply to the pre-teen set.

I will, alas, miss the Peterborough Town Meeting coming up on Saturday; word on the street is that it offers more democracy than you can see almost anywhere else, all packed into one fun-filled marathon day.

Left [[Charlottetown]] later yesterday afternoon on what seemed like an endless Dash 8 flight to Montreal (I understand why they invented jet planes). Glided through U.S. Customs pre-clearance on a cloud (it’s much, much, much faster to go through on a Sunday night than on a Monday morning).

Walked the entire length of the international terminal to Gate 87 to catch my micro-flight to Hartford, Connecticut and found half a dozen others waiting. Our departure time came and went. Ten minutes after we were to be in the air a harried gate agent showed up and we found that the original gate agent was MIA and the air crew were trapped on the other side of the security doors, unable to do anything.

The “air crew” on the tiny Beechcraft plane was the captain and co-pilot cum flight attendant. The best part of the flight was the taxi to the runway with the cockpit doors open coming up right behind a giant British Airways jet; otherwise it was about an hour in the air and uneventful.

Bradley Airport in Hartford has taken a page from the Hamilton, Ontario airport design book: drab, featureless and confusing. It was additionally full of shifty-looking types.

I expected the Hertz counter to be as deserted as every other stop on my trip. I was wrong: for some reason everyone was waiting in line there, and I stood in line for about 15 minutes. Fortunately my time in line allowed me to overhear someone at the counter being handed the keys to a Toyota Prius. As I’ve tried and failed to find someone to rent me a Prius for several years, when I got to the counter I asked if I could swap out my Subaru for a Prius. Initially it looked like this wasn’t going to happen; fortunately an eagle-eared clerk next door tracked one down for me, and so five minutes later I was in the future, trying to figure out how to power the thing on.

I figured it out (key fob in slot, press Power button — easy). And then spent another five minutes navigating through the dashboard computer, figuring out how to tune the radio and defrost the windows. The 121 mile drive from Hartford to Peterborough, NH took me through Massachusetts and Vermont, making for travel through two provinces and four states in the space of an evening. The drive was very, very foggy — “can’t see the centre line” foggy at times. But I took it slowly, and didn’t have to do much navigating, as it was mostly a straight shot up Interstate 91 and east on Route 9 to Keene, then Route 101 to Peterborough.

I arrived at the venerable [[Jack Daniels Motor Inn]] at exactly 1:00 a.m. and fell almost instantly to sleep.

Gas mileage for this leg: 47.7 miles per gallon. Meaning that it cost me about $5.60 in gas to get here. More on the Prius as we get to know each other.

Two new transit routes start in Monday, March 13, 2006 here in [[Charlottetown]].

Route #5, the “Around Town Loop,” is a reconfiguration of the old “Senior’s Bus” that pre-dated the new transit system. It’s now available to everyone. As the name suggests, it runs in a loop around the city, starting at the Confederation Centre of the Arts and ending at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, then going back the other way. I’ve updated the Interactive Charlottetown Transit Map with this new route’s route, stops and schedule information (you can grab the updated source if you’re playing the home game). Note that this route only runs Monday through Friday.

Route #6, the “Up Town, Across Town, Downtown” route, is a new route that runs at “certain times of the day for added customer service” (so says the schedule). Because it’s a somewhat more complex new addition — it’s really actually five distinct special purpose runs rather than a distinct route unto itself — I’ve not had a chance to add it to the map yet; I do expect it to be there within a week, however. In the meantime, a PDF schedule is available from the City of Charlottetown.

By the way, I asked my contact at Trius Tours about the odd-looking non-trolley buses branded “The Classic” and “The Caboose.” Have no fear — these are regular (if oddly branded) transit buses, and you may find situations where they’re running on routes normally served by the trolleys.

A couple of weeks ago, right in the middle of a big Elections PEI data entry session, [[Oliver]] got a button stuck up his nose. Catherine took him to the hospital, they took it out, and by the time I got home later that night the episode was over save for some stern fatherly “you should never put anything in your nose Ever Again!” After which the matter has not been spoken of.

Well, tonight I went upstairs to go to bed, iPod and earphones in hand to let me drift off to sleep listening to the dulcet tones of Adam Curry. I lay me down to sleep, popped the earphones in (the Shure e2c’s I mentioned here). And then things went horribly wrong.

Somehow one of the rubbery things that slide over the end of the e2c’s and form a tight seal in the ear became dislodged. By the time I realized what had happened, said rubbery thing had been pushed far enough into my ear canal that I couldn’t pop it out.

Low-grade panic set it. I called [[Catherine]] and out came the tweezers and the high-powered spotlights.

But try as she might, Catherine couldn’t get the tweezers to latch. And so, mindful of the dangers of permanent hearing loss due to accidental tweezer jab, I reconciled myself to a trip to the emergency room at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

Luckily I hit the QEH on a slow night, and with only three people in front of me, I only had two hour wait. I managed to watch most of Bonnie & Clyde on the [[CBC]], read the front section of The Guardian and made it halfway through the “my most embarrassing teen moments” article from a 1999 issue of YM magazine before my name was called.

As chance would have it, my friendly ER doc turned out to be none other than the famous Dr. Chris Lantz, brother of Rob and occasional commenter here on the blog. After an initial trip into the ear, Chris proclaimed my stuck earphone thingy “one of the most challenging foreign ear bodies” he’d ever seen. I beamed with pride.

After a brief pause to requisition a high-powered ear scope, he was back in, and the rubbery thing was out 10 seconds later. I felt like a lion with thorn removed from my paw (which means, I think, that I now owe Dr. Chris Lantz three wishes; or something like that).

I fully expect to get a good dose of “don’t put things in your ears Ever Again” from Oliver in the morning. I’m counting on his underdeveloped sense of irony to pull me through.

In the computer programming world when we speak of dependencies we mean “stuff that you have to install first, after which you can install what you really need.” So you want to install the “GrappleGrommit for Perl” module, but to be able to run that, you need to first install the “GrappleGrommit Enabler” module and the “XML for GrappleGrommit” module. These are the dependencies.

Sometimes — and often in an infuriating way — you run into a situation where two things are dependent on each other. Or where the “chain of dependencies” seems infinite (“to install A you must first install B; to install B you must first install C; and so on”).

I’ve been hitting real world dependencies recently. [[Oliver]] needs a new passport (hard to believe, given that he’s only 5 years old). To get a new passport you need a birth certificate. Which Oliver has. Except he doesn’t have the right kind of birth certificate: although the kind he has — a wallet sized model — was sufficient to obtain his first passport, for some reason he now requires a “suitable for framing” model, one that lists my name and [[Catherine]]’s as his parents.

So I had to trudge in the sleet and snow this morning to the Charlottetown Vital Statistics Office where, for $42 (which included a $7.50 “rush” fee), I applied for the new-fangled super certificate. And then returned four hours later to pick it up. The woman I dealt with was extremely friendly, and it all went off without a hitch.

Fortunately, I was the only dependency for obtaining a new certificate — I just had to fill out an application form, show some photo identification, hand over the $42 and we were in.

As I type Oliver’s second try at getting the new passport is Expressposting its way to Gatineau.

Sidenote one: on the envelope used to mail in the passport application, there’s no province listed for Gatineau, suggesting that it’s some trans-provincial virtual place that’s neither in Quebec nor Ontario. Although its postal code starts with K, indicating Ontario parentage.

Sidenote two: when I applied for my U.S. passport, I had to first apply for a Social Security card. Fortunately by the time I did so, getting one was no longer dependent on registering for Selective Service (aka “the draft”), so I didn’t have to sign up for a possible tour of duty. My U.S. passport expires in 2009; I can’t imagine what sort of post-9/11 hoops it will take to get it renewed from Charlottetown. I suspect several trips to Bangor will again be required.

The number of our friends who are taking “one last trip” with their kids this year — one last trip before their oldest child goes off to university — has now reached 4. I’m sure there are more. So far there are two Italys, a Scotland and a Greece. This makes me realize that the vast majority of people I know are 15 years older than I am.

Frank Gehry has designed a new hotel in Elciego, Spain: Hotel Marqués De Riscal. It opens on July 1, 2006. It looks stunning.

You can find photos and construction notes here (in Spanish).

Elciego is midway between Bilbao and Zaragoza, two of my favourite places. It may be time to take the next journey on the “Frank Gehry tourism cavalcade” that’s previously taken us to Prague (Fred and Ginger), Bilbao (Guggenheim) and Seattle (EMP).