It’s a little hidden on the their website, but the City of Charlottetown does release a weekly report of building permits issued. It would be nice if they released the data in a more useful form than PDF, but I’m happy to see that it’s there at all, and don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Two items of late jump out:

• 665 University Avenue (Shoppers Drug Mart) - Exterior shell & base building
• 685 University Avenue (Subway) - Exterior shell & base building

I presume these are both for new buildings on the old Pizza Hut location near Sobey’s and Canadian Tire in West Royalty.

I tried writing a script to scrape the data out of the PDF files, but there’s just not enough consistency in the files to make this reliably possible.

Canadian Tire has sells Solar Power and Alternative Energy products, including this $800 wind generator.

The generator is an Air-X model, made by Southwest Windpower of Flagstaff, Arizona. They describe the model as an “ideal product for the person that needs a little power for basic appliances such as TV, radio and a few lights.” The company also sells a variety of other generators and they have a Is Wind Right For Me? document that provides a basic introduction to determining whether a given site is a suitable location for a wind generator.

There’s a Wind Atlas for Prince Edward Island that might help Islanders in this regard. Here’s what downtown Charlottetown looks like in the atlas:

The maps are, from left to right, wind speed at 30m, 50m and 80m, and the colour scheme is arrange so that “redder is better.” The rightmost map, at 80m, shows most of the downtown at the “excellent” level.

I wonder if this represents the end of the “mainframe” era of wind energy, and the dawn of the cheap, easy to use “PC-level” wind appliance.

Café Cacao is “is an original dining destination located at the factory of Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker in Berkeley, California.”

Okay, so I’m a little obsessed with goings on in the “drug store space” here in [[Charlottetown]] (see Annals of Island Pharmacies, Annals of Island Pharmacies, Part II, etc.).

But it’s an interesting part of the economy, perhaps the retail sector that’s undergoing the most change, and the only part of the Charlottetown retail sector that’s investing money in new designs and approaches.

So I thought this would be a Big and Exciting Week, as a new Lawton’s store opened up in the space formerly occupied by Home Hardware in the Ellis Brothers Plaza in Sherwood:

This store takes the place of the small and somewhat decrepit Pharmasave that flipped to Lawton’s earlier in the year and that was located in a small corner opposite the new location. The new location is obviously a reaction to the new Shoppers Drug Mart store design, the local example of which is the University Ave. store that opened last year.

In other words: bolder design, more space, wider aisles, big cosmetics section, and about a quarter of the space devoted to food products.

Unfortunately, Lawton’s new store is a pale imitation of Shoppers. They certainly have the “bolder” down pat, with a new orange colour scheme right out of the Home Depot playbook. And they’ve got the space, aisles, cosmetics and food.

But the key to the Shoppers Drug Mart formula for me has always been in their product mix: they’ve always owned product categories that they alone bring to a market, especially out here on the edges.

Of course Shoppers has me wrapped around their finger on the iced tea front, but there’s more to it than that.

High-quality chocolate, for example. Back in the 1980s, for example, if you had a hankering for anything more than a Kit Kat in [[Peterborough]], Shoppers was the place to go. And these days, the University Ave. location has a selection of Lindt and Cote d’Or product that rivals what we found at the local grocery in France.

Same thing goes for mixed nuts. And film. And batteries. And trashy magazines.

None of these are staples, and none of them are, alone, enough to differentiate the chain from other drug stores. But put together they effectively telegraph “there’s more here than just a drug store.”

The only “innovation” I could see in the new Lawton’s was a new section call “Nutritional Snacks.” When I couldn’t actually find any nutritional-looking snacks, I asked a of the staff to point me the way, and we ended up in a small section that contained granola bars and tuna-on-crackers. I was not impressed.

What Shoppers lacks in humanity — and they’ve got almost no humanity — they’ve always more than made up for in what you might call “the Target approach:” the “slightly upscale from the pack” approach that Target has taken in the U.S. to differentiate itself from Wal-mart, K-Mart et al.

While the old Pharmasave store might have been small and somewhat decrepit, it did have a sort of shabby warmth and charm, and the kind friendly long-time staff that Shoppers lacks.

Unfortunately, in trying to go head-on with Shoppers, the new Lawton’s comes up short on almost every measure, and they’ve cast off the shabby charm to boot. What we’re left with is a cavernous orange warehouse that lacks any sort of personality, and provides no compelling reason for not simply driving the extra 5 minutes over the Shoppers.

Ray Brow took exactly the opposite tack when he opened the Friendly Pharmacy a few years ago. There’s nothing bold and orange about the Friendly, but they’ve put all their eggs in the customer service basket, knowing that’s something that Shoppers is simply incapable of competing with them on. You might not find 85% cacao Lindt at Friendly Pharmacy, but I’ll bet if you phoned the pharmacist at 3:00 a.m. and asked them to meet you at the store so you could get some cough syrup, they’d beat you there, and have a smile on their face to boot.

Similarly, when Ray Murphy expanded the Parkdale Pharmacy earlier in the year, he didn’t turn it into the Starship Enterprise. It’s the same old Murphy Pharmacy, just refreshed a bit. Take their always solid customer service, add in the “most generous man on PEI” reputation that Ray himself has in some circles, and mix with an expanding medical centre surrounding the pharmacy, and you get another (sustainable, I would argue) approach still.

Okay, now I’ve written almost 1,000 words on the local pharmacy marketplace. I am weird.

[[Daniel Burka]] rates a mention early in this week’s episode of Diggnation. He is invoked — as “digg’s designer” — in that casual way that people used to refer to Woz as the “the inventor of the personal computer.”

And praise again be to Daniel for Simple CSS Tabs, a technique I’ve stolen to good end in places like this and this. It’s a neat, compact CSS hack.

Can it be too long before Daniel is featured special guest star on TWIT?

I’ve been a regular listener to the Travel Commons Podcast for the past six months. It’s a weekly show produced and hosted by Mark Peacock, a frequent business traveler, and it concerns the minutiae of life on the road — airports, hotels, wifi, restaurants, rental cars and the like.

After hearing Mark discuss the issue of transportation to and from the airport a few episodes back, I emailed him a note:

In a recent episode you talked a little about the challenges of getting to and from the airport by various means — taxi, car, train, bus.

I wanted to point out a few of my favourite airports for this sort of thing:

Here in my small city of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in Canada, the airport is 10 minutes north of the downtown where I live. While there’s no public transit to the airport, a $10 cab gets there quickly, and the airport is never very busy, so I regularly leave home for a 6:10 a.m. flight by catching a cab from home at 5:30 a.m. My big city friends don’t believe me when I tell them this.

My favourite U.S. city for getting into town from the airport is Boston, where a free shuttle to the ‘T’ subway system leaves regularly from all terminals at Logan Airport, and downtown is just 3 or 4 subway stops and less than 10 minutes away. When my Logan flights are delayed for a couple of hours, I often pop into the city for a bit to kill the time.

Although it’s not the most convenient thing in the world, I’m a regular user of National Express buses from London’s Heathrow airport to either Stansted, Gatwick or Luton airports — all in other areas around the city — to allow me to marry cheap international flights to London with cheap intra-Europe flights on RyanAir and easyJet. Buses leaves from the Central Bus Station at Heathrow, and generally take 1 to 1-1/2 hours depending on the destination airport and traffic. For going to destinations in Europe, and London flight, plus bus, plus discount flight can often save hundreds or thousands of dollars compared to the price of a direct flight to the destination.

Finally, I just got back from Geneva, Switzerland. There’s regular train service from a station that’s 300 m from the arrivals area that runs into the main station downtown. Tickets are only 3 CHF, or about $2.30 US. Gotta love that.

To my surprise and delight, Mark opened Travel Commons Episode #32 with my email. It was weird to turn on my iPod shuffle on the way home yesterday and hear my own words unexpectedly echoed back to me.

If you’re interested in the mechanics of travel — and Mark conveys some really useful information — I recommend subscribing to Travel Commons.

Oh, by the way Mark: it’s Charlottetown not Charlottestown (no ‘s’) and Prince Edward Island not Prince Edwards Island (no ‘s’ there either). You obviously need to pop over for a visit sometime soon!

[[Olle]] introduced me to the weblog of Pelle Braendgaard yesterday. And, by coincidence, Pelle dropped by here yesterday with a pointer to What do computer consultants, immigrants and Dominican fruit sellers have in common?. It’s an interesting read, and especially relevant for me, as many of the issue he raises are likely to bump into me as I further experiment with the “Europe: it’s right next door” lifestyle.

I never met Urban Carmichael. We once sat at different tables in the same restaurant, but that’s as close as I ever came. I never even heard him perform, save for a couple of snippets on the [[CBC]] here and there.

But our lives intersected in innumerable ways.

Urban’s sister lives just over our back fence, and her kids say hello to us every time we walk by (one of them comes over to the house to work for Catherine every Sunday afternoon, another walks Johnny and Jodi’s dog for them).

I worked with another sister during my time with the Legislative Assembly.

Mix another way, and add another couple of sisters, and you get The Carmichael Sisters — I bought their first CD soon after arriving on the Island, and I listen to it often.

We spent our first Christmas on PEI with Urban’s nephew, hunkered down in Catherine Hennessey’s old place on Dorchester St., and he’s since become a friend.

And of course almost all of our friends, acquaintances and co-workers here on PEI have regaled us with stories about working and playing with Urban over the years.

So although I never met Urban, I feel as though I know him through reflection in the eyes and hearts of others.

When last summer I made a little post about a benefit for Urban, I suddenly became, according to Google, an authority. And so I started to receive email messages. Like this one:

I hope you wont think my request is intruding on you. My wife and I only learned today about Urban Carmichael’s health while listening to CBC radio. We, my wife Anne and I, met Urban in 1986 in Saint John NB during ‘Festival by the Sea’ when Urban was representing PEI and we were part of a contingent from the Yukon. Because of the small numbers of both contingents, PEI and Yukon shared a common dormitory at the performers village. Urban kept us entertained 24/7 for the whole two weeks.

A dozen others followed, from all over North America. With the help of Urban’s friends and family, I managed to steer people in the right direction, and many of the correspondents wrote back to thank me, letting me know they’d made contact with Urban.

Urban died last night, at the age of 53. CBC Radio is reporting that he died surrounded by members of his family — they called him a “legendary Island entertainer” — and said he was born into a family of 10 (which means there are still more Carmichaels for me to meet).

This morning, picking up a cup of tea at Timothy’s, I ran into my friend, Urban’s nephew. And again I saw Urban in reflection, this time in a deep sadness in his eyes.

Goodbye, Urban.

Early last week I finished off a chocolate bar that I’d been keeping for late-afternoon sugar emergencies at the office. To my surprise, immediately after consuming the last bite, one half of my lower lip puffed up to about twice its regular size. I was disconcerted, to say the least, especially as this was something I’d never experienced before, and I’d had no problems after the first half of the same chocolate bar. After a couple of hours my lip returned to its normal size, and I’ve suffered no ill effects since.

I decided to alert the manufacturer of the chocolate bar to my problems, and I followed the website address on the back of the wrapper to a feedback form. Today (appropriately enough, Valentine’s Day), I received the following reply:

We regret that you have noticed healthy disorders after consumption of a [brand name] chocolate bar [chocolate bar name]. However we are not able to inform you about the reasons for the mentioned occurance. As you have written, you ate the first part of the bar without any problems, we can not imagine why the problem appears when eating the second part.

Please understand that we cannot give any explanations without the product or without a diagnosis what could have happened.

We can assure you that we only use high quality raw materials for the production of our chocolate bars. Every raw material and production lot is checked by various parameters to guarantee the high quality and the consumer and food safety.

We ask for your understanding and hope you will be a sufficient consumer of our products in future. We will inform our distributor partner in Canada sending you a little chocolate package, regardless any legal duty, for compensation.

The note is delightful for its “native German speaker writing in English” style, and they actually took the time to write back, which most of the places I send customer service email don’t do. As a result — and because I don’t want to start a worldwide panic over something that may have been a coincidence — I’m leaving the manufacturer’s name out of this post. And awaiting my “little chocolate package” with much anticipation. Of course it might kill me, but I’ll die happy.

Given that the little Applescript I wrote to set the Adium status messages to the current [[Plazes]] location proved popular, I thought I’d have a go at setting the Skype status message in a similar fashion.

Except that the Skype status message doesn’t allow for custom values — it’s limited to a pre-defined list of settings like “ONLINE”.

However recent versions of Skype have something called a “mood message” and this can be set with AppleScript quite easily. The result, thus, is [[PlazesSkype]], a little AppleScript that grabs your current Plazes location and uses it to set your Skype mood message.