Our friends at The Old Farmer’s Almanac have started podcasting their daily radio report.

We received bittersweet news from the [[Noodle House]] this weekend: in April owners Tommy and Lina Ko are moving to Toronto. The news is only bittersweet because they’re remaining partners in the business, and they’ll be back every summer.

The new day-to-day partners will be arriving from Toronto in April, and they’ll be a three or four week crossover period while they learn the ropes. Seems as though they might have some exciting new developments planned, including the possibility of dim sum on the weekends.

There’s no doubt that Tommy and Lina deserve a break — they’ve been at the restaurant six days a week since we moved here 13 years ago (to say nothing of the regrettable events of last year) — but we’ll miss them dearly nonethless.

If you’ve grown used to Lina remembering your order by heart, you’ve got another month or so to drop in and say thanks.

Back in the summer of 2003, my friend [[Oliver Baker]] made a comment here where he wrote, in part (emphasis mine):

I’d be interested to hear your philosophy of tipping, Peter. Tipping is just paying again for what you already paid for, and letting the corporation snooker you into paying the workers’ salaries, and yet I imagine you are a regular or even generous tipper.

The thing is, until that point I had been an irregular and not particularly generous tipper. That Oliver would imagine I was forced me to immediately change my behaviour, and since that time I’ve probably paid out 50-100% more in restaurant tips.

Earlier in the winter I ran into my friend [[Ann Thurlow]] at [[Timothy’s]] — it was one of those crazy post-Eurotravel mornings when I was getting up at 7:00 a.m. Ann sat down, we had a pleasant chat, and then when we stood up to leave Ann took her dishes to the back counter rather than leaving them on the table; I asked her why, and she said “oh, I always clean up my dishes at Timothy’s.” So, since that day I have always cleaned up my dishes at Timothy’s too.

On Friday afternoon my friend [[Cynthia Dunsford]] and I made a pilgrimage out to the Ellen’s Creek Plaza location of the [[Formosa Tea House]] for lunch. On the way out there in Cynthia’s car we had to stop at my house so I could run inside for a second. When I got back to the car I noticed that Cynthia had turned it off; when commented on this, she simply said “I don’t idle.”

So last night, waiting in the driveway to drive our babysitter home, I didn’t idle. It was a little chilly, but I made do.

We think it’s so hard to change the world, but, at least in my case, often a few well-placed words will do.

I’ve spent a very pleasant half hour browsing the rich Cinema Treasures website. They claim listings for over 13,000 theatres around the world. Some of my favourites:

• Capitol Theatre in Port Hope, Ontario. I visited Rod Stewart of Furby House Books in Port Hope in the last 1980s when there was a gleam in his eye about restoring the theatre; the effort has since been taken over by a foundation, and the theatre is in business.
• Clappison Drive-In in Waterdown, Ontario - the drive-in theatre of my youth.
• Highlands Cinemas in Kinmount, Ontario - the most amazing cinema you will ever visit.
• Elgin Theatre in Ottawa, Ontario - I saw War Games there the summer I worked as a summer camp counsellor.

Okay, so I’ve almost found a way of using Internet Explorer 6 for Windows from my Mac. Almost:

I installed WINE on my RedHat Linux box, then installed IEs 4 Linux (following a pointer from [[Steven]] — thanks). Then I simply fired up X11 on my iMac, ssh’ed to the Linux box, and typed ie6. What I ended up with is what you see above.

On the plus side, it’s extremely snappy, seems not to crash, and has loaded and rendered every site I’ve tried so far.

On the perplexing side, as you can see above, the fonts are not appearing properly in the browser’s UI (although they don’t appear to be any font-related problems with sites themselves in the browser window).

This problem doesn’t occur if I run ie6 directly from the X console on the Linux box, so I assume that my problem is related to fonts missing on my Mac, or something to do with the mysteries of XFS.

I’d appreciate any pointers or advice.

Discount airline easyJet announced new service from London Luton to Rijeka, Croatia today (thanks to pointer from Online Travel Review). Service starts June 30 and runs four times a week. Where’s Rijeka? Here’s a map of Croatia:

Honest Tea is hiring. “Great benefits and all the tea you can drink.” Based in Bethesda, Maryland.

In the Atlantic Canadian tourism television commercial race, 2006 edition, Newfoundland and Labrador has, I think, pulled into an early lead: their Cupids commercial, with its tag line “Where is this place exactly… it’s about as far from Disneyland as you can possibly get.” is brilliant.

A suggestion, though: find a shorter URL than this one.

As Coleman & Lemieux head to Gros Morne this summer, we will likely follow.

Today is the most stressful financial day of the year for me — RRSP day. For those of you in the readership from outside of Canada, RRSPs — Registered Retirement Savings Plans — are tax-sheltered retirement investments that we Canadians can may each year. Basically we can each take a defined chunk of our income, place it in a special type of investment, and thus exempt ourselves from paying tax on the chunk in the current year; when we retire, the money comes out of the investment and we pay tax on it then, but by then we are in a lower tax bracket.

And we have until the last day of February to make the arrangements to do this each year.

And of course, given my laissez faire attitude towards my finances, I always wait until the last day in February to make the required arrangements.

The stress comes because the actual amount that [[Catherine]] and I are each permitted to invest is sent to us by Revenue Canada on the previous year’s “Notice of Assessment,” a piece of paper we are mailed once our previous year’s tax return is processed.

So to be effective today required locating those two pieces of paper, sent to us mid-2005. In a sea of other as-yet-unfiled paperwork stretching back quite a while.

Then [[Oliver]] and [[Catherine]] and I had to drive up to [[Metro Credit Union]] where we received characteristically good and stress-free service to complete the deal.

Did I mention that I hate scrounging for paperwork? I was sending out so much negative energy, that [[Johnny]] shouted over to make sure I wasn’t having a nervous breakdown.

Anyway, it all worked out in the end. And in the process of sorting through my multi-year pile of un-filed miscellany I found what appears to be an instruction sheet for a rocket-powered motorcycle that I have no recollection of actually having acquired:

If you were with me when I purchased same, please let me know.