For the music. For the logo. It’s Regina Spektor. Her music was featured on this week’s (Canadian-aired, on Showcase) episode of Weeds. Which is a brilliant show in its own right. I’ve become particularly enamored with Someday from the album Soviet Kitsch.

Our eagle-eyed man in the field G. spotted our bright red 2000 Volkswagen Jetta immortalized in the pages of Heritage Houses of Prince Edward Island, a new book by Robert Tuck and James MacNutt:

Oddly, the book offers no commentary on the juxtaposition of the fine German engineering and the mid- to late-Victorian architectural style of the house here at 84 Fitzroy Street.

Interestingly, co-author Robert Tuck was part of another odd happenstance earlier in our time here on PEI. Way back in the early 1990s I was listening to Nils Ling hosting Mainstreet on CBC Radio one afternoon; he announced that after the news he would be interviewing “Ken and Robert Tuck” about their illustrations of Charlottetown buildings.

I was called away and didn’t hear the piece. It was several years before I realized that it wasn’t “Ken and Robert” but rather Canon Robert — as in The Rev’d Canon Robert C. Tuck, B.A., D.D of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Charlottetown.

I’m still waiting to meet Ken.

I’d been happily working along on my 3-year old 17” iMac since I bought it back in 2003, using an even older 12” iBook while on the road. It’s a credit to Apple that, although long in the tooth, these machines kept on running the latest version of OS X, albeit in a fashion that seemed ever more poky as time went on.

Over the last year, as the number of applications “running in the background” grew to include Plazer, Adium, Skype, Snapz Pro and Quicksilver, along with Firefox, Safari, BBEdit, OmniOutliner, YummyFTP, iTunes, NaviCat and a few others running in the foreground, memory started to become an issue, and so I got used to the occasional — and then not-so-occasional — “spinning beachball” that means “hold on, I’m busy” on a Mac.

With Isaac singing the praises of the new MacBooks, along with my desire to amalgamate my digital life onto one machine (that whole “keeping things in sync” thing never actually works in practice), I decide that it was time for an technology upgrade.

And so last week I placed an order for a fully tricked-out MacBook, along with a 23” Cinema Display to use here in the office. While the display is currently on a truck between Mississauga and Charlottetown, the MacBook arrived on Friday, and I’ve been busily moving my digital life over.

Man is this thing ever fast!

While I’ve got the irrational and interminable need to upgrade as much as the next guy, this time I hung onto the old gear for a lot longer than I normally would; the upside is that the MacBook, with its faster processor (2 GHz vs. 667 MHz on the old iBook), quicker video, extra memory (2GB vs. 384MB on the iBook) goes like a bat out of hell. In the old world it would take most applications 4 or 5 seconds to launch; slower apps, like OmniOutliner, would take 10-15 seconds. Now everything just starts. Right away.

While this might seem a trivial issue, when you’re living in front of a machine, constantly switching tasks and focus, just being able to seamlessly move around without delay is a really big psyche-saver. I think of my old pre-upgrade gear as offering “death by a thousand little delays.”

Of course this too shall pass, and the sheeny quickness of the new gear shall soon feel as poky as the old stuff. But I’m enjoying the thrill of high velocity while it lasts.

Some brief notes about other cool upgrade spinoffs:

• Parallels Desktop for Mac is amazing. With it I can run Windows 2000 apps “Virtual PC style” without a reboot. Except where Virtual PC ran apps like molasses, running them in Parallels feels like I’ve got a modern-day really fast PC buried inside here somewhere. I’ve got Quicken for Home and Business (my only reason, really, for running Windows) running like a top.
• The first time I opened up the MacBook (with battery charged: thanks, Apple), I ran through a 2 minute configuration process, then a 15 minute wait for various software updates, and I was good to go; installing Windows 2000 from scratch took 10 reboots, several upgrades of the ‘Windows Updater’, a separate upgrade of the browser, installation of Service Pack 4, and several more reboots — about 2 hours in total — before I was ready to use it for the first time.
• This is my first machine with USB 2.0 — my iPod, which used to work, but slowly now gets filled up real quick.
• The “fit and finish” of the MacBook is brilliant: it’s beautiful, well-crafted, lighter than the old iBook, and is full of design candy.
• The only app that I need to run that isn’t “Universal” (i.e. designed to run natively on the Intel processer inside the MacBook as opposed to through emulation) is AppleWorks (it was my word processor before Pages, and is still my primary spreadsheet). I don’t notice the difference: AppleWorks works just like it used to.
• Quicksilver, which I’ve only begun to plumb the usefulness of, is a much, much more useful tool when you have enough memory: being able to known that a quick press of Control + Space will call it up, rather than having to wait and see if there will be a delay while memory gets shoveled around, makes it a different experience entirely.
• The most noticeable increase in pure speed comes when using Google Maps (or Google Maps-dependent sites, like Plazes) — these pages used to load slowly, and operate like a turtle. On the MacBook they load about twice as fast, and I can zoom in and out with my Mighty Mouse like I’m using a local GIS app.

Expect more gushing with the larger-than-life display arrives tomorrow.

In one CBC newscast yesterday I heard the terms “militants” and “rebels” used to describe various people. The CBC has a very useful page, written by Blair Shewchuk (Senior Editor of Journalistic Standards) that examines the use of these words in a journalistic context.

Four years ago in this space I wrote about meeting David Joseph Malahoff, courtesy of my friend Ann Thurlow. Well my matched set of Basic Black staffers grew larger by one this weekend when Ann introduced me to Chris Straw, another of the crew that produced the show.

Chris is working as a CBC trainer these days, based out of British Columbia. As coincidence would have it, he met my brother Steve a few weeks ago in Montreal, proving again that there are really only 17 people in the entire world.

I’m happy to report that, as with the other members of the Basic Black cabal, Chris was affable and full of interesting stories. Oh, and he also went to Trent University and he knows Marg Meikle.

I’ve just booked tickets on Air Canada for a trip to Italy this fall. My fare from Halifax to London was an unprecendented $398 return ($646 total with taxes and fees) — the lowest I’ve seen this fare since I became obsessed with it.

By comparison, the fare from Charlottetown was $646, which is over $900 with taxes and fees; for $300 I’ll happily drive to Halifax.

My ultimate destination is Colletta di Castelbianco, which describes itself as “a medieval hill-top village restored as an internet e-village.” I’ll spend two weeks there getting lots of work done and enjoying the olive harvest, which will be happening all around me (I must admit that some of my motivation for the trip was to be able to say “I’ll be in Italy for the olive harvest”).

Meanwhile, Catherine and Oliver are going in the opposite direction, visiting her parents, and mine, in Ontario. Their tickets to Ontario cost more than mine to London.

Doing currency conversions on the fly is something that strains my brain. When I was in Copenhagen in 2005 for reboot I never got the Kroner-Dollar conversion right, and I was always buying things I thought were $5 but that were actually $50.

Things aren’t so bad in Japan right now, however: according to the Bank of Canada, the current value of the Canadian dollar is almost exactly 100 Japanese Yen, which means that to get Dollars from Yen you simply divide by 100.

The first BarCampCopenhagen is being organized for November 17, 2006 and Henriette has unleashed her first “video blog” to talk about it. The background music seemed to have a “Woody Allen movie” feel to me, and Henriette confirms that’s indeed where it comes from.

I noticed something odd about the setup of Oliver’s partition on Catherine’s iMac tonight and further investigation showed that Oliver had turned on the Afghan (Pashto), Turkish and Welsh international keyboard layouts. As this isn’t easy to do “by accident,” I can only assume it was intentional. I imagine Oliver is maintaining some sort of pan-national Myspace page without our knowledge.