Every now and again I get asked to write a “Letter of Reference” for a friend or colleague. It’s a hard thing to do: I’ve never considered it very useful to write complete bullshit, but it’s equally difficult (or at least unhelpful) to tell the full truth.

When putting together my thoughts for one such letter tonight, I dug up a letter I wrote for a librarian friend back in 2001. Here’s the heart of it, with the names changed to protect the innocent:

I’ve not worked with Sergei recently, and my experiences with him largely pre-date his work in librarianship, so I am unable to offer any comment on his specific technical or reference skills.

I can, however, offer you some comment on Sergei’s “interpersonal and communication skills, [and] his ability to work as a member of a team.”

My experience as an employer has taught me that the greatest challenge when staffing a position is to find an employee who will care passionately for the work - a person who will “own” their position, and feel a deep and personal commitment to the work and to the organization. I have no hesitation is telling you that Sergei is such a person.

Sergei is a person of unquenchable curiosity. He has a tremendous imagination, and an ability to look at problems in a novel way. He is a hard, dedicated worker and applies himself to tasks, monotonous or interesting, with equal intensity.

I have always found Sergei to be an effective manager and “team player.” My only caution in this regard is that Sergei can be very direct; he is not a skilled “bullshit artist” and sometimes his honest, straightforward, directness can be mistakenly interpreted. If Sergei is surrounded by a group of equally dedicated team members, effectively led, then he will be an invaluable and appreciated member of the team.

Sergei is theatrical. He certainly doesn’t fit the stereotypic of the “dour librarian” and he has an infectious enthusiasm and a love of life; he is witty and intelligent, and quick to make friends.

I wish you well in your deliberations; please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be of further assistance.

Down there in paragraph number five is the kicker: I wanted to be honest about “Sergei’s” inability to suffer fools gladly but I wanted to give it an upside. I always work under the assumption that the reader will appreciate my honesty, and that it will make the rest of what I say ring truer.

The risk is that this will backfire, they’ll read this as “he’s an incorrigible wingnut” and Sergei will be left in the cold.

My inspiration in all of this is the cover letter I wrote to the PEI Crafts Council back in 1993 wherein I attempted to mask the fact that I’d no experience whatsoever in the crafts industry by spinning a yarn about how my experiences hitchhiking across the country afforded me a flexibility that transcended the need for specific job experience. It was a risk, but it worked (and it made for a good story for many years).

Sergei, on the other hand, didn’t get the job.

What’s your take on all of this? How do you write references (or cover letters). And what do you think about those that cross your desk?

I don’t suppose there’s any other sort of spam but the annoying kind. But man has something happened in the last month or so — the spam dam has burst and my annoyance levels are peaking.

For a long while the combination of SpamAssassin and the Mail.app junk filtering was trapping almost everything and I was seeing at most a couple of spam messages a day.

Recently, though, I’m seeing upwards of 50 spam emails a day, and that’s on top of the couple of hundred that are being filtered out through various means.

Certainly the dreaded “image spam” — where the spamminess is hidden inside a graphic surrounded by plausable-reading text — is one culprit: Mail.app seems unable to trap this (the suggested rule to trap this, alas, routes too many of my Air Canada reservation confirmations, etc., to the junk mail filter for my comfort).

But it’s not all image spam — there’s a lot of seemingly basic “VkAGRA for LESS” spam that’s getting through.

Is it only me?

Dr. Helen Caldicott was interviewed on The Current this morning during a segment examining the nuclear weapons situation in North Korea.

Her central thesis was that we should be paying more attention to the real nuclear weapons problem — the one where there are still thousands of nuclear missles in the U.S. and Russia ready to launch at a moment’s notice.

She also brought up the issue of the safety of nuclear power plants, and used the example of a recent “near meltdown” situation in Sweden as an example of why we have more to fear from our own nuclear power stations than we do from North Korea.

She mentioned this at the very end of her interview, and the host, Anna Maria Tremonti, said something like “and that didn’t get reported here” and signed off.

I’d like to hope that The Current will follow up on this; in the meantime, here’s what I’ve been able to glean:

• Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant [Wikipedia]
• Swedish nuclear reactors stopped — Four of Sweden’s 10 nuclear reactors have been shut down, following an electricity failure. [BBC]
• Sweden gives quarter of nuclear reactors green light to restart after safety shutdown — A quarter of Swedish nuclear reactors that have been shut down since a malfunction in July can be restarted next week, while the others need further safety measures, Sweden’s nuclear inspection agency said Thursday. [IHT]
• Forsmark incident “worst ever in Sweden” — A leading atomic expert on Thursday said Sweden’s emergency shut-down of a nuclear reactor at the Forsmark power plant at the end of July was the country’s worst nuclear incident. [The Local]
• Call for immediate closure of Sweden’s nuclear reactors following near-meltdown incident — Sweden’s nuclear regulator SKI will meet in emergency session tomorrow (3 August) to decide on a possible immediate shut-down of all but one of the country’s nuclear power stations supplying up to 50% of Sweden’s electricity. Greenpeace has called for the reactors to be shut down following a serious incident last week at Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear power station, in which “it was pure luck there wasn’t a meltdown” according to a former director of the plant. [Greenpeace]
• Swedish nuclear incident revives safety debate — Initially, a short-circuit in the Forsmark 1 reactor caused a blackout. Two of four backup diesel generators failed to start automatically. This revealed other faults in the electrical system that “need to be investigated before the reactor can be restarted”, the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) said in a statement. [ENDS Europe Daily]

As a little experiment I shot a series of photos of the west side University Avenue between Kent and Fitzroy in downtown Charlottetown this morning. I stitched them together using the excellent Doubletake application, uploaded the resulting panorama into Flickr, and then used Flickr’s “Add Note” feature to add notes to the photo:

See the entire set of annotations here. This seems like an interesting way to layer comments and pointers and ideas over urban geography.

In my forty years I have, with a few exceptions, had my hair cut at only three barber shops. So much for being a restless change agent.

Through my childhood it was the Longacres Barber Shop in Aldershot, Ontario. There it was either Kurt, Otto or Louis who cut my hair. There was a picture of a kid with a stock haircut up on the wall, and every time I went in with my mother, she told them to cut my hair like him. I wonder who that kids was, and whether he realized that he had a bunch of hair clones running around Aldershot.

Louis had a little plaque about his mirror that said “Filo” and my mother told me this meant he was the owner, and that we didn’t have to tip him. Which began a life of confusion about owner-tipping that continues to this day.

When I was 18 I moved away from home and I needed to find a new barber in Peterborough, Ontario. I wandered the streets for days without finding a single one, and it seemed that perhaps men in that city didn’t have their hair cut at all. Eventually I found place on Hunter Street near the Red Dog Tavern. It was such a traumatic experience finding a new barber that I wrote an article for Arthur, the Trent University student newspaper. It was my first newspaper byline. And that’s how Ernie’s became my second barber shop.

Years later, after Ernie had moved next door to a spruced up place off the street, I was surprised to find my Arthur article taped to the mirror in front of his chair. I never let on that I was the writer.

When we moved to Charlottetown in the early 1990s I had to go through the trauma of finding a new barber yet again. I was older and wiser by this time, of course, so it was far less traumatic when I found Fergie’s on University Avenue. Fergie’s moved three times over the years, gradually making its way down the street where it finally came to rest next door to where The Maple Grille is now.

Fergie, a nickname I later learned came from his last name of Ferguson was your barber’s barber: he had a twinkle in his eye, a quick wit, and he knew how to cut hair. A few years back I got into the habit of letting my hair grow unnaturally long and then getting it cut really short, which I believe Fergie took to be an austerity move on my part (it probably was) and he always had a sly comment to make about the practise.

By my count I’ve had a haircut from someone other than Kurt, Louis, Otto, Ernie or Fergie only four times in forty years.

There was the time I was working in the Fleetwood Motor Home plant in Lindsay, Ontario as a temp. On my first day I came in with hair in a ponytail and at lunch I went out and cut it cut very short and when I returned they thought the other guy had quit and I was his replacement.

There was a time in Halifax when I went to a very, very old-school barber on Quinpool Road who had, somewhat anachronistically, a giant portable stereo mounted on the shelf, the kind you see at Wal-mart all tricked out with flashing lights and wacky features. If memory serves he gave me a really, really bad haircut.

My brother Mike and I both got our haircut one Sunday in Phoenix. We went to something more like a “men’s cigar spa” than a barber, and I got the only straight razor shave of my life, which was both terrifying and dreamy. Those guys knew how to cut hair.

And there was a regretable time up in Summerside when I realized that I was about to go on stage to make a presentation to a bunch of well-turned-out radio executives and I needed an emergency hair cut and I ended up going to a “hair salon” where they washed my hair before cutting it. The horror!

True to form, I’d been letting my hair grow long over this summer — my last time in at Fergie’s was before we went to Europe in the spring. In the meantime Fergie’s moved, again, this time to the space next door and in the back of an antique shop. I went in this morning all ready to joke with Fergie about how if he kept things up he’d be down at the waterfront before he retired. Only to find that Fergie had retired.

And so where one would find Fergie working alone or with a temporary partner — they never seemed to stay long — there are now three chairs and a new bunch of barbers. It’s still called Fergie’s. There’s still a racy calendar on the wall and The Guardian to read and the old cash manual register by the door. There’s just no Fergie.

And thus for the third time in my life I’m at a crossroads: do I stay with the new-style Fergie-less Fergie’s or follow Rob Lantz over to Ray’s Or perhaps try Rose’s, just around the corner from our house. Or even, perish the thought, follow the path of the urbane young hipsters upstairs and get my hair “styled” rather than just “cut.” Oh, the trauma of it all.

Good-bye, Fergie. Thanks for being a good barber.

I’ve been experimenting with Amazon’s S3 web service, something that’s a sort of cross between a “remote hard drive” and a “remote database.” I’m testing it as a possible repository for a client’s nightly backup of about 40GB of data and scripts, and so far Christopher Shepherd’s PHP scripts (which use Geoff Gaudreault’s PHP S3 class to talk to S3) are the leading contender for a useful S3 toolkit.

I also did a lot of experimenting with s3sync, an rsync-like S3 backup solution in Ruby, but ran into some crashing problems seemingly related to some HTTP timeout problems in Ruby itself, so I left it aside for now.

I’ve enjoyed my thrash through S3 so much that I created an episode of The 3LA Podcast about it. If all of the above is Greek to your eyes, try giving it a listen — I attempted to sum it all up in rather less buzzwordy language in the podcast.

And, yes, I know that S3 isn’t a “3LA”.  But it’s awfully close!

Compass ran a story on Friday evening about how the Children’s Wish Foundation built a playground in the back yard of Cameron MacDonald. Part of the story was an interview with some of the builders at a local cabinet company who volunteers their time to help build the playground, and one of the builders was a man named Barry Calder. Here’s a transcript of what he says:

I’m healthy. And this childen that we’re doing this for is not. And I wish I could give him my health. But you can’t. So… every little thing you do to brighten somebody’s day is a worthwhile thing to be a part of.

I’d always been something of a cynic about the Children’s Wish Foundation — yes, I realize that makes me tantamount to the devil — but in 14 seconds Barry Calder convinced me of its value. Hats off.

With moves by the Government of Nova Scotia this week, Prince Edward Island will soon be the only province in Canada to have laws preventing wide-open Sunday shopping. Which means, in practice, that while we can shop for Catcher in the Rye and quality Island crafts on Sundays (there are exemptions for bookstores and craft shops, among others), we’re prevented from doing a full-on weekly grocery shop and from purchasing 39-inch plasma screen televisions.

The issue of “Sunday shopping” makes for strange bedfellows. You’re not likely to find me in church on Sunday; indeed I’ve been accused of “outright hositility toward the choice made by the vast majority of Island society who follow a Christian lifestyle and are devout worshippers.”

You would think then, given my irreligious attitudes, I’d be in favour of wide-open Sunday morning Canadian Tire attendance. But I’m not.

I’ve got nothing against shopping. But I tend to think that we’re all growing a little too used to deriving much of our sense of personal well-being from the acquisition of stuff. So when historical precedent, religious or not, hands us a day without shopping, a day when, in theory, we can look elsewhere for our well-being, I’m on board.

Whether it’s going to church, or going to the golf course, or playing with Lego, going for a walk, or reading a book, our current largely commerce-free Sundays here on PEI are a valuable gift that we should treasure.

“But what about the other 32 million Canadians — shouldn’t we strive to stay in step with modern times?” one hears in response. To this I offer the suggestion that it might just be possible that Prince Edward Islanders are smarter than the rest of Canadians, that we recognize that life doesn’t have to revolve around Home Depot, and that it’s okay to take a day off every week.

Or perhaps one hears “this is a Christian thing — we can’t impose Christianity on everyone!” No we can’t. But there’s something special about a shared day off. A sense of quiet, you might say. A collective recognition. That this choice of day happens to extend from Christian practice doesn’t need to imply that we’re all up for Jesus — but it is useful that there are so many Christians who take Sunday so seriously, and that’s a useful fact to leverage for the good of all of us, Christian or not.

“But the cruise ship visitors — they want to be able to buy diamond jewelry on Sundays!” Right, sure. Even if that were true, I think it’s time we draw a line in the sand, a point beyond which we will not go to prostitute ourselves to the tourist economy. Cruise ship visitors in particular add little to the life of our community; they’re hear for a few hours, take a zip around in their air conditioned tour buses, and then they’re gone. If we can fleece them for a few bucks in the process, fine. But should we really reconfigure our lives for them? Aren’t there better, more honourable, less destructive ways to build an economy?

The final wave of pro-wide-open-shopping protest comes from those on the other side of the current Sunday exemptions. Sobeys and the Atlantic Superstore, for example — large grocery store chains — led the fight in Nova Scotia, presumably in part because they felt it unfair that little grocery stores were allowed to open and they weren’t. Bookstores can open, but shoe stores can’t. Nurses and police officers have to work, but programmers don’t. “It’s so unfair!” one hears.

I would hold, however, that our current laws have been rather skillfully crafted to allow for least impact on what’s special about Sunday. It’s one thing to pop over to Brighton Clover Farm to grab a tub of Cool Whip for Sunday dinner, quite another to spend two hours at Sobeys buying groceries. And that small crafts shops, serving the tourist economy, are allowed to open seems a reasonable compromise. Laws are imperfect tools that we use to shape the nature of our society; they don’t have to be black and white, and they should be allowed to reflect the eccentricities of a community. So while it’s impractical to shut down everything on Sundays (remember that, historically, Islanders weren’t even allowed to drive automobiles on Sundays), there’s no reason why the alternative has to see Sunday turn into another Monday.

Prince Edward Island wrapped itself in the promotion tag-line “What if the world had been to Prince Edward Island?” this year. And while the campaign itself was widely derided (and appears to not have actually worked very well), there’s truth in them thar words: what if the world had been to Prince Edward Island? Isn’t it possible that we’re on to something here, that we understand something about how to have a better quality of life, and quality of life where not everything has to come down to dollars and cents?

It is said that Islanders are averse to change. While this actually isn’t true (PEI has changed more than any other province in the last 40 years), there is a sense here that “the Island way of life” is something worth thinking about, and preserving. At its worst this leads to cruel xenophobia; at its best, however, the mere fact that there is a collective notion that we share a “way of life” — in other words a recognition that we’re all living “in community” — is a rare, even amazing thing. Something we shouldn’t take for granted.

And so while the Island seems to have fared the introduction of the horseless carriage and end of prohibition basically intact, I fear that the coming of Sunday shopping might reflect the smashing of an important buttress against becoming just like everywhere else. And that would be very sad indeed.

Online Travel Review points to a Reuters story reporting that Irish discount airline Ryanair has made a $1.9 billion offer for Irish “flag carrier” Aer Lingus.

By coincidence, I just finished reading Ryanair: How a Small Irish Airline Conquered Europe, a compelling account of how Irish entrepreneur Tony Ryan founded the airline, and how brash CEO Michael O’Leary turned it into the European colossus that it is.

Ironically, Tony Ryan began his aviation career working at Aer Lingus. One of his responsibilities was to oversee the leasing out of the airline’s planes during slack periods. This business evolved into a standalone spin-off business called Guinness Peat Aviation, which is where Ryan earned his first fortune.

At last count I’ve got 30 shows set up to record every week on the DVR. I’ll need to start winnowing that down soon, both to cut down on mandatory TV watching time, and also because I don’t think I can take much more courtroom drama.

While there are a couple of sitcoms that are attracting my attention this year — The Class has promise, for example — this year seems to be the Year of Hour Long Drama. And big themes seem to be the aforementioned courtroom (Justice, Shark), weird shit happening (Jericho, Six Degrees, Heros) and kidnapping and crime (Kidnapped, Vanished, Smith).

The real big trend, however, is the “last five minutes power montage,” a phenomenon that started a few years ago, and is even more the rage this year. The formula involves taking the last five minutes of a drama — basically everything after the last commercial — and running a mournful pop song or power ballad over a montage of one or more characters as they work out the ramifications of whatever killing, kidnapping, or random happenstancing they’ve engaged in over the episode.

So the end of an episode of Smith might be made up scenes of Ray Liota driving home from the latest crime spree, fading back and forth with scenes of his wife lying in bed wondering whether he’s back to criming again, overlaid with an Imogen Heap song.

I hope Imogen Heap is making out like a bandit herself this year, by the way: I’ve encountered her songs used montagely, in Six Feet Under, and also in several movies. Her Hide and Seek, which starts “Where are we? What the hell is going on? The dust has only just begun to fall…,” is all over the place this year, presumably because that opening line can be used to illustrate so much of the angst, criming, and weird shit that’s all over TV.