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.

I asked my friend David, an architect, to give me a ballpark figure for how tall a “story” is in a building. Because measurements in the media are often given in “stories” — like “the giant wave was over 10 stories tall” — I wanted to have an ability to make approximate calculations. Here’s what David told me:

A building like the new Government of Canada building would be 4 to 5 metres a story. A house would be more like 3m.

My original reason for asking was to add some real-worldness to this post about wind turbines. The wind seems to get really interesting at the 80m level here in Charlottetown — using David’s figures, that’s about the height of a 17 story office building. In other words, very tall.

Too tall for my back yard.

Congratulations to the City of Charlottetown on the release of its new heritage database. This project, brought to life on the wings of our friend Catherine Hennessey’s passions, aims to be a complete database of properties and buildings for the city. There are records there for our house; nothing yet for the office at 84 Fitzroy Street.

I put together a little demonstration project called Roll Your Own Plazes Launcher for OS X that takes the PlazesPHP class that Olle and I have been working on and uses it to create a simple Plazes launcher.

I think it would be quite helpful for the hospital to send home a note with every newborn… something like this:

Please note: at some random time over the next five years, probably in the winter, your child will wake up in the middle of the night unable to breath properly. They will likely be barking like a seal or a dog. They will probably be quite distressed, and you will probably think they are about to die, and will become quite distressed yourself. Welcome to croup.

And, indeed, this is exactly what happened in our family yesterday.

Things started off normally: Oliver went to bet about 8:00 p.m., and Catherine followed shortly thereafter — exhausted from a day at the Jack Frost Festival for Freezing Parents. I got to bed about midnight. And at 1:03 a.m. I awoke to the aforementioned seal barking sound, and found Catherine in Oliver’s room, with a very distressed little boy, pointing at his throat and quite concerned that it didn’t seem to work anymore. He was shivering. And wheezing. And trying to cough by unable.

I was absolutely sure he was going to stop being able to breath completely Any Second Now.

So Catherine and I got dressed faster than we ever have before, and we all piled into the car for a mad dash to the Emergency Room at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital — a 10 minute drive during the day, but we did it in about 4 minutes what with the lack of traffic and the panic-induced creative driving techniques I employed.

Whereas almost all previous visits the the Emergency Room had placed us 374th on the triage list, leaving us to stew in the waiting room safe in the knowledge that gunshot victims et al were getting treated ahead of is, last night we were whisked into the special “pediatric resuscitation” room, and before I knew what was happening Oliver had a mask on, and a dedicated team of experts swarming all round, looking calm and collected, and like this happens all the time (apparently, it does).

Oliver, it seems, was having his first experience with “the croup.” And he was having a barn-burner of an experience thereof.

It took about an hour before any sort of normality returned (i.e. all three of us stopped shaking): they gave Oliver various powerful “stop the croup symptoms” drugs through the magical face mask, and within about 15 minutes of arriving the worst was over. I think I saw his pulse max out in the 190s at the worst of it. After about 30 minutes he was breathing somewhat normally. When they took the mask off, he complained to the nurse that he had a runny nose — the first words he’d spoken since we’d left home.

At 3:00 a.m., after another check by the doctor and some helpful advice about what to expect over the next several days (like “it might happen again tomorrow, but probably not, but be sure to drop back in if it gets this worse again”), we were off home again. Oliver went right to sleep. I listened to the Voice of Russia for an hour before I was de-paniced enough to get any sleep.

This morning Oliver seems quite fine — to be expected, as the doctor told us that “the croupy ones are always okay during the day.” So, other than being unable to revisit the Jack Frost Fun this afternoon, things are mostly back to normal. We’re biding our time, of course, until tonight around bed time, and hoping that the evil croup monster stays in his cage. I don’t think we could take another night like that so soon.

Everyone at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital was amazing: thank you!

Isn’t parenthood wonderful.

Postscript: a Google BlogSearch for ‘croup’ leads to lots of similar tales. Nice to know we’re not alone.

Several of my recent procrastinations came crashing together tonight. Earlier in the week I did some experiments scraping of Charlottetown City Council minutes. Back in November, I documented a method for grabbing PEI civic address data into a local database. And my Interactive Charlottetown Transit Map and RealCharlottetown.com projects have taken me into the world of “Google Maps mashups.”

So what happens when you take all those projects and jumble them together? The Charlottetown City Council Minutes: Addresses Mentioned map. It looks like this:

Here’s how I made it:

• Because of my earlier RSS experiments, I already had a MySQL table containing the web addresses of Charlottetown City Council meeting minute PDF files — basically a list of the links you’ll find here. So I began by writing a little script to grab each of the PDF files and store it locally.
• Next, I used pdftotext (part of Xpdf) to convert each of the PDF files to a plain old ASCII text file.
• I extracted the names of all of the streets in Charlottetown from my database of PEI civic addresses, and then ran through each meeting minutes file using a PHP script looking for occurrences of a number followed by the first word in each of the 496 streets in the city — like “84 Fitroy” or “100 Prince”.
• For every match found, I looked up the civic address in my database, and if I found a latitude and longitude, assumed it was a valid civic address, and I inserted an entry in a new MySQL table recording the location, the address, and the minutes file PDF I found it in.
• Using the RealCharlottetown.com Google Maps-making code as a starting point, I created a “mash up” script in PHP that plots each of the 265 addresses I found on a map.

The process is, of course, imperfect. My address matching could be better. My process for grabbing the “excerpt” of the minutes could use some work. Sometimes the minutes don’t record a street number, so I don’t pick up a match. And of course the minutes don’t necessarily record every mention of an address at council meetings. But it’s still a pretty neat way of visualizing council business geographically.

Take note that the page might take a slightly long time to load, especially in Safari. Firefox might complain “a script on this page is taking too long” (you can just click “Continue). And I haven’t tested this, as yet, in any version of Internet Explorer.

I’ll cobble together an open source release of the source code for all this ASAP. Comments welcome.

After abandoning del.icio.us back in December, and replacing it with my own locally-hosted system based on Scuttle, I’m jumping back into the del.icio.us fold. Why? I realized that although my locally-hosted solution was faster, it completely lacked the social part of “social bookmarking.” And that, as a result, I was missing out. I also missed the subtle niceties of the del.icio.us UI.

So I hacked together a little script, using class.delicious.php, to grab my recent bookmarks and punt them over into del.icio.us. And I’ve sent an email to the few others who joined the Scuttle party with me and poured their own bookmarks into my local system. And in a few days, bookmarks.ruk.ca will be no more.

So if you want to play the home game, point yourself over to del.icio.us/reinvented from now on.

And if this is all confusing to you, and you’ve made it this far, What is del.icio.us? is a concise introduction to this world.