Here’s a new poster that Downtown Charlottetown Inc. is using to promote the core as a place for working. Ah yes, downtown working — I can take my jacket off, sling it over my shoulder, and talk on my sleek mobile phone. At least when I’m not gathered around a laptop in a pure white room working with colleagues.

I’ve always been firmly in the “if it’s a good idea, it will work” camp, and I find lifestyle marketing like this to not only be insulting — I actually do work downtown, and that’s about as far from my photographic reality as you can get — but simply misguided and wasteful.

For more of same, see the companion website where you can learn about the “endless excitement around every corner.”

Moving a refrigerator with a bicycle.

Now that there’s a version of the Plazer for Series 60 mobile phones (it’s in beta right now), the question of how much data it actually takes to ping the Plazes server with location information becomes important — at 5 cents/KB, data costs can mount quickly, especially for an application designed to run all the time.

Here’s what my Nokia N70 reports was the GPRS data usage after launching the Plazer and identifying my current location:

That’s 3.06KB of data sent out and 8.09KB of data returned, for a total of 11.15KB. It cost me 50 cents with a Rogers Wireless “Pay As You Go” account:

Assuming 5 location changes a day, that would amount to about 1.7MB in data, or $75/month in data charges to run the Plazer all the time. This could be mitigated somewhat by upgrading to a “real” data access account — Rogers sells a $25/month plan that includes 3MB of data transfer.

One of the reboot presentations that intrigued me the most was the one by Steve Coast on the OpenStreetMap project.

The goal of the project is to assemble an freely available set of street map data, data that will enable the building of interesting map application free of the encumbrance of costly and complicating map data licenses. To this end they’ve built a robust set of tools to allow grassroots users to gather data about streets using inexpensive GPS devices, add them to a central data set, and then convert them into “ways” — streets to you and me — with names and directions and connections.

In other words, the kind of project that has “I’ve got to get this started for Charlottetown” written all over it.

So I’ve started. Here’s how I do it.

First, my “gather GPS traces” setup. I’ve installed Python for S60 on my Nokia N70. This lets me run the excellent and free S60 Python NMEA Bluetooth GPS Info Viewer tool that logs GPS traces to an NMEA-format file. The GPS stream itself comes from my GPSlim 236 Bluetooth GPS which talks to the phone, as you might imagine, via Bluetooth. Here’s what the process of getting things running looks like:

Start the nmea info application.

Select the Bluetooth GPS receiver to use.

The logging of GPS traces starts automatically.

Once I’m done, I find the nmea_gga_log.txt file in E:\System\Apps\nmea_info…

…and I send it to my desktop for processing.

Now I’ve got a file on my desktop called nmea_gga_log.txt that’s in the NMEA format. To send this to OpenStreetMap I first need to convert it to GPX format. Fortunately the (excellent) GPS Visualizer website has a tool for this job:

I end up with a GPX-format file that I can upload to OpenStreetMap:

Once my traces are uploaded and processed, I can use the OpenStreetMap web-based edit applet to see my traces:

That’s a trace of a walk from the office to home, followed by a cycle, via Water St. and Grafton St., back to the office. The next step — which I’ve yet to do — is to convert those raw traces into “real streets.” I’ll document that process once I’ve done it once!

The latest episode of YANKEE’s podcast has just hit the net, and it’s fantastic: the magazine’s Food Editor, Annie Copps, tells you everything you want to know about using your barbecue. Annie’s great, and she had me — the anti-barbecue king — salivating. A good listen.

Cora’s Breakfast and Lunch on Queen Street is apparently in the middle of a transfer to a new franchisee, and so is closed temporarily. Not a good time of year for this sort of think, I would think.

Meanwhile, the Downtown Diner is about to re-launch as “Barristas,” leaving us with Yet Another Coffee Shop:

Up the street a little, the Maple Grille is also “closed for renovations,” but there’s no indication, at least from the outside, that it will re-open until a new name:

And I finally got a chance to visit the new grocery store, the Clover Farm on Queen Street, that opened while we were away:

First impression: it’s clean, well-staffed, and has a good selection. Unfortunately it doesn’t turn downtown Charlottetown into downtown Italy, but that was probably just wishful thinking on our part. Think “roast chicken” not “fresh goat cheese.”

Local gadabout Andrew Sprague has teamed with my friends Anne MacKay and Wayne Barrett to create Taste, described as a “virtual tour of Prince Edward Island through its restaurants.” The book is having its formal release this Wednesday, June 21 at 8:00 p.m. at the St. James Gate in Charlottetown.

Meanwhile, my friend, business partner, and gadabout in his own right, Dave Moses, is out in Vancouver tending to his television series, and you can read of his adventures while he’s there. The series itself — Robson Arms — has its own production weblog, an interesting look into the world of Canadian television.

Over the last month we’ve cruised the still waters of the Douro, taken trains in two countries, subways in three countries, and buses in four, ridden the streets of Copenhagen by bicycle, glided down the side of the hills of Porto by funicular and cruised the verdant byways of New England in a luxurious Volvo station wagon. That we would rumble into Charlottetown at 1:30 a.m. last night in a rented Chevrolet Impala thus made for something of an ignominious return.

It’s easy to understand why General Motors is in such dire straights as soon as you sit behind the wheel of an Impala: it’s a car designed to completely isolate you from the driving experience, and the “road” thus feels like an abstract concept located somewhere underneath several layers of padding. It is not at all a pleasant car to drive.

But it got us home to our own beds, and for that we were thankful.

The whole “car rental costs less than Halifax hotel” idea was eliminated when I neglected, in my early morning haze, to fill the tank up on the way to return the car to the airport, and found myself stung with a $69 fuel bill. But $69 was a small price to pay for avoiding the check-in, security lines, and flying stresses involved in a hop from Halifax to Charlottetown this morning.

Charlottetown appears much the same as when we left in early May. There are a few more bricks in the new federal building, the new grocery store downtown has a month under its belt, and the trees are in full bloom. G. decided to renovate our house while we were gone, which included repainting our front porch pewter green. There have been two deaths among friends and acquaintances while we’ve been gone, and three cancer operations. Apparently North Korea is preparing to attack Kansas City and someone was plotting to behead the Prime Minister. And we missed the hockey play-offs. Oh, and I forgot how to order at the Formosa Tea House. But it’s summer on Prince Edward Island, and that’s nice to return to.

Here’s a brief summary of our time away in numbers:

• Days away: 42
• Days spent working at Yankee: 7
• Photos uploaded to Flickr: 1,096
• Countries visited: 6 (USA, Ireland, Portugal, England, Denmark and Sweden)
• Currencies in my wallet: 5 (US dollars, Canadian dollars, Euros, Danish Kroners, Swedish Kroners)
• Modes of transport used: 11 (automobile, airplane, taxi, tram, subway, bus, funicular, river-boat, bicycle, monorail, dugout canoe)
• Value of Playmobil and Lego acquired: $150.00
• Ways of saying thank you: 3 (Thanks, Tak, Obrigado)
• Medical emergencies: 1 (puffy eye)
• Airlines flown: 4 (Air Canada, US Airways, Ryanair, easyJet)
• Lost luggage: none
• Aeroplan miles earned: 7,526 (US Airways Boston to Dublin return — they’re a Star Alliance carrier)
• Mobile SIM cards acquired: 3 (Denmark and two in Portugal)
• Telephone calls received: 4 (two from Johnny, one from a client, one from a distant relative)

There was about 3 cubic feet of mail waiting for us on the dining room table, and my “inbox to zero” plan is faltering with 52 messages waiting for my attention (where you’re used to zero, 52 seems like a mountain). And Catherine seems convinced that the inside of the house is covered in dust.

Bring on the summer…

Back in March when I booked us on an Aeroplan flight for the return leg of our complex Copenhagen - Dublin - Boston - Charlottetown trip, I didn’t give much thought to the inconvenient Halifax overnight imposed by Aeroplan’s anemic availability. Overnight in Halifax was just another delightful part of the journey.

From this end up the trip, however — so close to our own beds, yet so far — spending the night in Halifax seems like spending the night in jail.

So a quick rearrangement and we’re flying to Halifax and then renting a car for a drive over to the Island tonight. We’ll sleep in our own beds, avoid an early departure tomorrow morning, and it’s actually cheaper because the cost of a one-way rental to PEI ($143) is less than the cost of an airport hotel room ($163).

We’ll spend the day rambling around the scorching heat of Boston (temperature at 11:00 a.m. as I write: 30 degrees C), head to the airport around supper time, and be back on the Island by midnight if all goes according to plan.

Of course, Air Canada might interfere with this excellent plan. And we do have to get through customs with our 6 weeks of ephemera. With luck, we’ll see you at Timothy’s in the morning.