We’re into the last week of free access to the digital channels in our cable package — you know, those ones like “National Geographic Channel” and “Game Show Network” that have tiny subscriber bases and very, very narrowly focused programming.

With the exception of English Teachers: Taiwan, which I’ve become addicted to, and the occasionally novel BBC Kids, I can’t say as though I’ve found much that I couldn’t do without. In fact it seems that most of the programming on most of the digital channels most of the time is either Frontiers of Construction or Opening Soon.

But I did record Die Hard II last night on Scream, a channel that plays nothing but horror movies. Wow: people don’t swear like they used to in movies back in the 90s; what happened?

For the record, I am 11 years younger than Steve Jobs, and the same age as Kiefer Sutherland.

Ever since I saw my first spotlights, I’ve been a huge fan of the genre. I remember being able to go right up to the big spotlight trucks at the Canadian National Exhibition back in the 1970s: it was like looking into the eyes of God. Which is why it’s so exciting that, due to the presence of the East Coast Music Awards here in [[Charlottetown]] this week, we have spotlights of our very own:

For my next trip down to visit my colleagues at [[Yankee]], I’m taking a new route: Charlottetown - Montreal - Hartford, this after years of flying into Boston, either via Halifax or via Montreal.

Besides the novelty, my rationale for the switch is Air Canada’s schedule: travel time to Hartford is only 4-1/2 hours from Charlottetown, whereas most routings through to Boston take 6 or 7 hours once you factor in all the time in various airports (to say nothing of the airline’s increasing tendency to route Montreal - Boston flights through Ottawa).

Flying to Hartford also lets me leave Charlottetown later and get back earlier: I leave PEI at 5:20 p.m. and get to Hartford at 9:00 p.m., and on the return flight I leave Hartford at 5:40 p.m. and I’m back on the Island at 11:00 p.m. In both cases my layover in Montreal is about an hour. By comparison, to get back from Boston to Charlottetown in one day usually requires leaving Logan by 2:00 p.m.

There are only two downsides that I can see: the plane from Montreal to Bradley Airport in Connecticut is a Beech 1900D, a truly microscopic airplane. And it appears as though it’s going to take about 45 minutes longer to drive up into New Hampshire from Hartford than it does from Boston (although if you factor in Friday Boston traffic, I might still come out ahead).

Oh, and the Hartford routing was $150 cheaper than any Boston flight I could find for the same dates.

If you’ve any pointers or advice regarding Bradley Airport in Hartford (or the drive north into New Hampshire), I’d welcome it.

From Online Travel Review:

Good news for travelers in Portland, Maine: With Independence Air going the way of the dodo bird, you’ve been left without low fare service. Those days are numbered. JetBlue announced 4 times daily service to JFK beginning in May. The good news? Fares start at $59 each way, rather than the current $149 each way, with top fares only hitting $149.

This is the closest that [[JetBlue]] has come to [[Prince Edward Island]] yet. Okay, so it’s an eleven hour drive from Charlottetown. But it’s a good sign.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been running the [[Reinvented]] bookkeeping through Quicken for Home and Business. This is a enhanced version of Quicken with some basic small business features — invoices, accounts receivable, etc. — added on. It’s easy to use, and although I get no respect from my accountant, it served my purposes well.

When I made the switch from PC to Mac several years ago, I was in mid-financial-year, so I bought a copy of Virtual PC for my Mac; this lets me continue to run Quicken for Home and Business, albeit in a somewhat glacial fashion, as Virtual PC has to constantly pretend to be a PC, which makes it quite slow.

In recent years my aforementioned accountant has been pressing me to move to a more adult bookkeeping solution, mostly because when I hand over the Quicken data dump at the end of each year they have to expend considerable manual efforts slurping the data into their Big Accounting System. There is also some apparent discomfort with the lack of “double entry” features, which I believe is related more to addiction than to real practicality, but I’ll play along.

And so, yet again, I’m looking for some basic accounting software for Mac OS X. That works in Canada. And imports digital data from my credit union. And that I can save files from that my account can import.

And those four features seem not to exist in any software I’ve been able to find.

QuickBooks was an early favourite. There’s no specific Canadian version, but they claim that the U.S. version supports unique Canadian features like the GST. But then I read the reviews. And made a couple of calls to Intuit (the company that makes QuickBooks) and found (a) that the U.S. version for the Mac I would be forced to use won’t output data that can be imported into the Canadian PC version my accountant would be using and (b) that the U.S. version doesn’t support import of Canadian financial institution data and (c) that “support” for GST isn’t exactly elegant.

So now I’m trawling for recommendations from others: are you keeping your accounts on a Mac in Canada? Are you happy? If so, what software are you using?

When I was in the [[Halifax International Airport]] earlier in the month on my way to [[LIFT]], I noticed a Finnair flight from Helsinki on the arrivals display. When I got back to Canada, I tried to find out more information about Finnair’s flights to and from Halifax, but a search of the Finnair website came up with nothing.

I cleared up the confusion this morning with a call to the Finnair office in Toronto: apparently these flight are non-scheduled “leisure flights” that are making a “technical stop” (presumably for re-fueling) in Halifax en route from Finland to the Caribbean.

Finnair doesn’t have the rights to pick up or leave off passengers in Halifax, so although the flights might show as “arriving” on the displays in the airport, you can’t actually fly on them from Halifax.

Which is a shame: if I could fly from Halifax to Helsinki, I probably would.

In the meantime, my friendly Finnair agent told me that they fly year-round from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver to Finland in partnership with American Airlines and British Airways, and direct from Toronto during the summer three times a week.

You can buy T-shirts with the old CBC logo online now. They call the logo the “exploding pizza” — I always heard much less restrained terms back in the day.

It’s been a busy week here in the shop, as the Premier called a by-election for District #2 and we’ve been working with Elections PEI to fire up the boilers for the confirmation process — a door to door canvas of every address in the district.

In ye olde times this was done starting from a blank slate; with changes to legislation before the 2003 Provincial Election, Elections PEI now maintains a Register of Electors, and [[Reinvented]] maintains the “computer-based system” referenced in section 24.1 (4) of the Election Act:

The Register may be created or revised manually by means of any computer-based system and may be maintained in printed form or may be stored in any computer-based system or any other information storage device that is capable of reproducing any required information in legible form within a reasonable time.

The “computer-based system” is a RedHat Enterprise Linux-based server stored inside a vault (really — it has two floors) and the “information storage device” is a MySQL database, maintained with a set of custom PHP applications.

Once the locations for the polling stations were nailed down by the Returning Officer for the district yesterday, we burned a cut of the Register for District #2 along with a base PDF file of the “Confirmation Record” and provided these to the Queen’s Printer to do a print run on their extremely fast and capable Xerox Docutech machine. By mid-afternoon, just over 2,400 forms, in duplicate, will be packaged up in binders and on their way to the Confirmation Officers in the district who, over the next several days, will go door to door making adds, edits and deletes on the printed forms.

Early next week, the forms will come back to Elections PEI and the Register of Electors will be updated using the web-based system, and the following morning we’ll run the Preliminary List of Electors.

Working with Elections PEI is always thrilling, interesting work: there’s no margin for error, and the timeframes are always very compressed.

By the way, Elections PEI now has an RSS feed. It’s a low-volume feed that mirrors the news items on the Elections PEI home page.

Apparently there is a time in the morning before the stores open. So I discovered this morning, well into week three of my “alarm clock set for 7:08 a.m.” odyssey.

I was out of the house by 8:15 a.m. After a brief stop by [[Elections PEI]], I thought to myself “maybe I’ll stop by Bruce MacNaughton’s new place for a cup of tea.” But they don’t open until 10:00 a.m.

“Perhaps a bracing smoothie from Nature’s Harvest,” I thought to myself. Not open.

“Well, I could pick up a copy of the Globe and wait until they open,” I reconciled to myself. Bookmark not open.

I eventually settled for a low-far cranberry-orange muffin and an orange juice from the Great Canadian Bagel, and came on in to the office.

I was the first one here.

The other revelation this morning: lots of people walk to work in downtown Charlottetown. I always wondered why I never saw anyone walking to work; now I realize it’s because they do so at this ungodly hour.