Back in 2003, during a visit to Charlottetown on his honeymoon, Ian Williams remarked that the poster of Anne of Green Gables hanging on the side of the Confederation Centre of the Arts was “so hauntingly awful that I stared at it for hours.” Here’s the next the series, this one plastered on the side of a cube van:

The last time I went looking for a desktop GIS application for my Mac all I found was the beast of a system that is GRASS (it looked so powerful, but yet so far beyond my reach to properly grasp).

Suddenly it seems that GIS apps for the Mac are all over the place: Quantum GIS and uDIG are two I tried tonight with good success (both are cross-platform PC-Mac-Linux).

The task at hand was updating an old MapInfo layer of The Old Farmer’s Almanac long-range weather forecast regions and getting it ready to live as a MapServer-friendly SHP file.

I began by exporting the MapInfo file as an ESRI shapefile using the trial version of MapInfo running on my Mac using Virtual PC. Both Quantum GIS and uDig then opened this file with no problems:

Now the fun begins: I’ve got some “ZIP code in polygon” magic to perform and my next step is to see which tool supports this sort of thing best. Stay tuned.

Update: There’s also Thuban.

New England singer/songwriter Jennifer Kimball has a new album Oh Hear Us. It’s very, very good.

Although it’s rather dreary tonight, last night’s sunset in Charlottetown was spectacular:

The CBC is reporting that “organizers of September’s Black Eyed Peas concert on P.E.I. will keep the provincial sales tax on ticket sales under a special arrangement with the province.”

While this is being cast as some sort of enlightened “we’re not really giving them money” scheme, what is boils down to is more like “concert organizer can charge 10% more for tickets and get away with it.” That just smells wrong.

While I’ve no particularly strong feelings on the notion of the concert itself, other than a sense that it will suffer from all the “orgasmic tourism” problems that afflict other mega-super-concert of the century events, I am glad that they decided to hold it out in the wilds of Alexandra rather than in my front yard. Of course I also have some sympathy for the non-hip-hop-lovers in Alexandra.

Although it seems rather absurd, in this day and age, to pay for a web browser — there are at least 4 high-quality free browsers available for OS X — I decided to give the OmniWeb 5.5 Beta a try, mostly because most everything that emerges from the brilliant minds at OmniGroup is golden.

Wow!

I thought that my little old iMac was just getting slow in its old age — either that, or my Internet connection was wilting. OmniWeb disabused me of both notions: this browser flies. It’s also got a couple of nice features — like a new take on “tabs” — that remind me that browser UI hasn’t moved very far in the past 5 years.

I’ve got 29 days left on the free trial; so far, I’m delighted enough to seriously considering upping for a license and making it my primary browser. More later.

The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust is holding a fundraising variety show in Cavendish on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 3:00 p.m.

The show features Michael Pendergast, Leon Gallant, Neil Matthews, Allison Ling and the characters of Avonlea Village and will be held inside the old Long River Church at Avonlea Village.

Tickets are $15 per person, and this includes admission to the concert, ice cream and strawberries, and entrance to Avonlea Village for the day.

Oliver and I went up to the concert two years ago, and it was fantastic; the $15 ticket price is a deal, especially if you’re planning to visit Avonlea Village anyway, as you save $3.95 off the regular admission.

If you’d like to purchase tickets, please send me an email.

I’ve been subscribing to David Smith’s del.icio.us links since I heard him speak at reboot back in June. Perhaps because we appear to have a significant interest overlap, I find three or four very useful things in the stream every day. This is notable for me because it’s the first time I’ve every truly profited from the “social” part of “social software” — before this I’d only ever use del.icio.us as a souped-up bookmarks menu.

Laurent Haug has some interesting observations about reboot 8.0.