Sometimes we have the odd situation where an actor appears in two prime time series at the same time, often while they’re on the way out of one and a new series is debuting. Here are some examples from this season:

• Abraham Benrubi finished his run as “Jerry” on ER while starting a role as “Ben” in Men in Trees.
• Sara Gilbert has minor roles on both ER and the new sitcom The Class.
• Sally Field started the season reprising her occassional role on ER and is in the cast of the new ensemble drama Brothers & Sisters.

Odd how ER is one rung of all three ladders. Other examples?

You certainly can’t accuse our provincial government of a lack of imagination when it comes to trying to convince us that they’re being innovative.

You’ll recall the casino that’s not a casino. Well now we’re to have a “call centre that’s not a call centre.” As Phil Taylor, director with AMVESCAP, took great pains to drive home this week at his company’s announcement thereof. From the CBC:

While the AMVESCAP office will consist of people taking phone calls and answering questions, Taylor said the operation would be a lot more sophisticated than what Atlantic Canadians have come to think of when they think of call centres… “This is really a client relations operation. So we would be dealing with sophisticated financial advisers, or our end clients, or the back office admin groups of our corporate clients, like, let’s say, RBC Dominion here in Canada.”

And from The Guardian:

The Global Enterprise Centre will not be a call centre, said Taylor. It will provide client relations with financial advisers, as well as act as a backup to its Toronto headquarters in the event of a weather or terrorism-related crisis.

Spin-decrypting lesson number one: watch carefully for what they claim it isn’t; that’s probably what it is. Earn bonus points if the obfuscation involves the word “global.”

Presumably the move to Prince Edward Island is related to AMVESCAP’s goal, stated in their 2005 Annual Report, to:

…decrease our operating expenses by approximately $120 million… [w]e expect 50% of the expense reduction to be realized in Compensation costs, with the remainder of the savings from decreases in Property and Office, Technology/telecommunications, and General and Administrative costs.

And therein lies the rub: whether it’s called a “Global Enterprise Centre” or an office for telephone-based “client relations with financial advisers” or a call centre doesn’t really matter: it will still suffer from the same “fair weather friend” nature of all such enterprises.

Everything’s rosy and revolutionary right now; until something better comes along, a more lucrative package from another desperate jurisdiction, or the market dips, or the parent company gets acquired and operations “consolidated.”

Ask the people in Austin, Texas where the Houston Business Journal reported in 2003 that “Downtrodden market forcing AIM to close Austin call center:”

Underscoring the extended bear market, mutual fund manager AIM Investments will slash its Austin staff by about 200 positions this year. AIM, a Houston-based unit of London financial services giant Amvescap PLC, plans to make the cuts when it shuts down an Austin call center operation by the end of this year, says AIM spokesman Ivy McLemore.

Or the people in Denver, where, in 2004 the Denver Post wrote this about Invesco, another Amvescap subsidiary:

At its peak in 2000, Invesco Funds Group was flush with 860 employees and $56 billion in assets under management. The company built a new headquarters in Denver for up to 2,000 workers. The next year, Invesco Funds was confident enough in its future to pay $120 million for naming and advertising rights at Denver’s new football stadium, Invesco Field at Mile High. “We’ve just begun our work,” Invesco Funds chief executive Mark Williamson said at the time. It turned out to be the beginning of the end… Invesco Funds Group operations here are now managed by an executive out of Louisville, Ky.

While tarted up call centre jobs have all the sheen of “high tech” jobs that provide what the Premier qualifies as “good job opportunities for post-secondary graduates,” they are jobs that exist at the pleasure of decision makers with interests that predominantly lie elsewhere. These are not sustainable jobs, and they add nothing to the “natural capital” of Prince Edward Island.

Remember the old days, when absentee landlords owned Prince Edward Island? Here’s how Britannica defines absentee ownership:

…originally, ownership of land by proprietors who did not reside on the land or cultivate it themselves but enjoyed income from it. The term absentee ownership has assumed a derogatory social connotation not inherent in its literal meaning, based on the assumption that absentee owners lack personal interest in and knowledge of their lands and tenants.

Substitute “our children” for “land” and the words ring more true today than ever.

Here’s an iCal file for the 2007 publication schedule for The New Yorker magazine, extracted from their editorial calendar.

While placing full episodes (replete with full commercials and no fast-forward button) on the web is all the rage for U.S. networks, all of the networks have “U.S. only” filtering in place to prevent non-U.S. viewers from tuning in on the web:

Here in Canada we’re thus limited to watching TV, well, on TV. There are, however, a few exceptions:

• Global is making full episodes of Survivor: Cook Islands and Brothers & Sisters available, as well as some of their games shows and Canadian programming like Falcon Beach.
• CTV is making some of their Canadian shows, like Corner Gas and Whistler available online, but none of the U.S. shows they carry here. They don’t make it easy to find — you have to hunt for the “CTV Broadband Network” to load the players, and it seems to be Windows-only.
• CBC is making some content available on Google Video, although it’s mostly news items and short clips.

If you come across anything else, let me know.

If you’re resourceful, of course, there are ways of working around these U.S.-only restrictions. They are, after all, simply checking your IP address to see if it’s in the U.S. So if you set up your web browser to use a U.S. proxy server you will appear to be “in the U.S.” and you’ll be let in the door. Here’s some basic details about how to do this.

I’ve kept an AOL account for many years, mostly so I can test AOL’s spam filtering on clients’ email lists, and so I can test AOL’s gradually less wonky rendering of HTML email. It’s been costing me $6.95 a month for the “bring your own Internet access” price plan, which was reasonable. Today, though, I happened upon the fact, completely by accident, that AOL is now free for those that bring their own access.

Given AOL’s history of making it next to impossible to cancel an account once you sign up for one (endless telephone calls, tricky questions once you talk to the right person), I assumed it would be a Herculean task to turn off my $6.95/month account. Kudos to AOL for actually making it very, very easy; witness what I saw when I logged on to my AOL account:

Note the prominent Change to Free tab. I clicked there, confirmed, and now I’m on the “free plan.”

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.