Coming into the office this morning, I found Fitzroy St. blocked off and a toppled dump truck at the Palmer Electric demolition site:

Just yesterday [[Catherine]] and I were walking by the site and I saw the steam shovel gorging itself and remarked that it was a miracle that heavy equipment like that didn’t fall over more often.

From Emily Chang comes a pointer to SuprGlu, a web-based aggregator that slurps in your own del.icio.us, Flickr and weblog feeds and turns them into an integrated flow. Here’s mine. I know that I railed against aggregation last week. But SuprGlu is just so darned elegant.

In a radical departure from the everyday, [[Oliver]] and I went shopping at [[Sobeys]] instead of the [[Atlantic Superstore]] this afternoon. After several years of vacillating back and forth between the two, our family became regular Superstore customers around the time Oliver was born; I hadn’t been inside a Sobeys for a weekly shop for almost 5 years.

What a pleasant surprise.

The Superstore is almost always crowded and chaotic. And there’s about 3 acres worth of non-grocery items in the middle of the store — everything from deck chairs to DVD players — that makes the trip from bread to dishwashing liquid a 5 minute slog. Combine this with the “never enough cash registers” problem, and shopping at the Superstore is like an hour long prison sentence.

Of course what the Superstore has a lot going for it, or at least the appearance of a lot going for it: a very broad selection of foods. Before the Superstore you couldn’t buy a baguette on Prince Edward Island; the Superstore has several varieties, including ones purportedly made from French flour. They’ve got oodles of olives, and salmon on cedar planks, organic soy milk and a flower section bigger than most florists. For Islanders itching for a simulation of big city living, the Superstore provides a decent facsimile.

For a while it looked like Sobeys was trying to meet them head on. Sobeys installed a sushi chef. And an olive kiosk. And a “health food” section. They gave out exotic recipes that used exotic sauces. They installed wood-fired pizza ovens. And they even imported the deck chairs and the DVD players into a newly expanded middle section of non-grocery fluff.

I’m happy to say that those days are now over. Sobeys sells groceries now. The DVD player section has been replaced with a mini marshmallow island. The health food section, while still present, has lost its on-site nutritionist and scaled back to just the healthy basics. No more sushi. No more TD Bank branch. No more video rentals or shoe repair. Just a regular grocery store.

Oliver and I were shopping at the height of the grocery buying week, Saturday afternoon, yet we made quick work of [[Catherine]]’s complex shopping list. The only thing we couldn’t find: fresh pizza dough. There was no wait at the checkout: we just breezed right through. What would have taken us 90 minutes at the Superstore was done in 45 at Sobeys.

Of course the paucity of Saturday afternoon customers probably isn’t such a Good Thing for Sobeys. But I’m certain that once the word gets out that at Sobeys you don’t have to wade through live eel tanks and exotic star-fruit carving displays, that you can just, well, go in and buy groceries, the aisles will start to fill up. You heard it here first.

Just heard a bit of Christine Kane on Grassy Hill Radio. Very nice. Her discography page has generously long sound clips.

By the way, [[Dad]] just discovered John Prine. I’ll have to get him together with [[Tom Cullen]] on the next visit down.

For the last couple of months, doing a File, Save As… from every application on my iMac has taken a very, very long time. An annoyingly long time — often as long as 15 seconds.

The delay is between the select of Save As… from the menu and the appearance of the dialog box that lets me choose the location for the save; once I actually enter a filename and click Save, everything proceeds speedily.

I originally thought this was because I had drives on my Linux machine mounted on the iMac, but I’ve eliminated this as a possible cause by experimenting without these mounts present.

I’ve made a movie that shows just how long it takes, using BBEdit as an example.

I have to assume this isn’t normal behaviour, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s wrong. Some notes:

• I’m running Mac OS X version 10.4.3, but the problem predates this update, and several previous.
• The iMac is on a local LAN behind a Linksys router.
• If I unplug the Ethernet cable from the back of the iMac the problem goes away; when I plug the Ethernet cable back in, the problem returns.
• Personal File Sharing, Windows Sharing and Personal Web Sharing are all turned off; Printer Sharing is turned on. The Mac OS X firewall is turned off.
• On occasion I mount Samba shares from Linux machines on the local LAN, but the problem occurs whether these are mounted or not.
• Nothing shows up in the Console Log when I try to save files.
• I’ve repaired disk permissions using Disk Utility several times; no effect.

I’d welcome any advice from Mac-literate readers about what I should try next.

Here’s a little screen snip from the Eastlink DVR page:

I naively assumed that when I clicked on the big Order Now button, and filled out this online order form, I was actually placing my order.

It appears that this “order online” exercise is simply a cleverly disguised hoax, however, as almost 48 hours later I received back this email:

Dear Peter,

Thank you for your email.

We contacted you regarding the dvr installation. The monthy fee for the dvr rental is 14.95 plus tax and the installation would be 19.95 plus tax if you were to order before November 31. To get more information on appt. times or other services please call our customer care line at 367-2800 or 1-888-345-1111 and we will be happy to assist you.

Thank You,

Customer Care

So to actually place an order, I had to get on the phone, wade through the telephone tree, give over my identifying information (phone, name, address), and describe what I wanted to order. At least in theory I have now “ordered.” We’ll see what happens next.

In the annals of Air Canada’s deceptive practices, this one takes the cake. Here’s their quote, direct from their website, for a return flight from Charlottetown to London at the end of November:

The base fare is $556, and the “fuel surcharge” of $168 is 30% of the fare. Shouldn’t the fuel surcharge just be called “part of the fare?” It’s extremely deceptive to lead customers through a process of booking a flight and then, at the last step before payment, dropping in an extra 30%.

Apparently Air Canada agrees; witness this news release from January, in which they say:

“Customers want a simple fare that includes all charges and by incorporating the fuel surcharge into our base domestic fares, we are taking the first major step in that direction,” said Montie Brewer, Executive Vice President, Commercial. “The incorporation of the fuel surcharge will help our customers truly understand how much they are paying for their travel.”

Apparently for international travel it’s not important that we “truly understand how much” we’re paying for travel.

As an experiment, I’ve created an iTunes enhanced AAC version of the plain old Live From the Formosa Tea House, Session Five, that contains chapter markers, images and links to websites we mention. Here’s what it looks like:

Because of the AAC encoding, and the embedded images and links, this is a much larger file than the regular MP3 version (32MB vs. 12MB). But it also sounds a lot better. Feedback welcome on whether this is worth it.

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Session Five this afternoon over lunch.

The focus of this episode was on Zap Your PRAM 3, the next incarnation of the Zap Your PRAM conference we organized in the fall of 2003. Zap3 is running February 16 to 19, 2006 in Cavendish, PEI; details forthcoming shortly on the new Zap3site.

There is, alas, an annoying bit of electrical interference that runs throughout the episode — it’s most noticeable at the beginning. I tried various methods for filtering it out, but they all made [[Dan]], [[Steven]] and I sound like drunken fish. Here’s a rundown of what you’ll hear:

• 00:00 - The intro and extro stingers are from Royalty Free Music.
• 00:15 - We start off with a somewhat dorky and stilted introduction to Zap Your PRAM (early-episode dorkitude seems to stike us every time). We get better as we go along. 
  • Video and Audio of Zap Your PRAM One
• 19:45 - The “people standing in from of webcams” phenomenon.
  • The Island Cam (Dan stood here).
  • The YankeeCam.
• 21:15 - People at silverorange buying digital SLR cameras?
  • Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT
  • Canada EOS 20D
  • Nikon D200 (with GPS capabilities)
• 22:30 - Peter takes a picture of Steven with his T610 camera phone (either Peter or Steven was moving, so the photo is more jiggly than it would be otherwise).
• 24:00 - What podcasts do we listen to?
  • Peter: Daily Source Code, The MacCast, Meet the Press, BBC Podcasts, Yankee Foliage Podcast
  • Steven: LugRadio, Diggnation
• 26:45 - Peter’s television addiction leads him to rent a Eastlink DVR.
• 28:00 - Steven and Dan love Homestarrunner.
• 28:30 - Steven to make a LongBet with Ray Kurzweil?
• 28:45 - WikiPEI, Wikipedia, Tourism PEI Website RFP.
• 32:00 - The Rukapedia pages for Dan and Steven and the compromising photo.
• 34:45 - Interactive Charlottetown Bus Map, RealCharlottetown.com and Open Locations.
• 41:02 - Dan has an “unbelieveable hate-on” for Web 2.0 so we avoid talking about it at all costs.
• 41:44 - Steven talks about going to The Gnome Summit in Boston: Springboard and Tango Project.
• 51:44 - Queen Street Commons update from Dan.
• 54:15 - silverorange releases Swat, a PHP web application toolkit.

In addition to the RSS Feed for the Podcast, we’ve also registered LiveFromTheFormosaTeaHouse.com where you can always find show notes, links to previous shows and more fun.

Early last year I posted a review of First Overland, a fascinating tale of a mid-1950s overland voyage from London to Singapore. Since I made the post, Antony Barrington Brown, one of the expedition members, has made several helpful comments, the most recent of which came today with news of a First Overland Reunion.

The reunion is being held in London (England) at the Royal Geographical Society on Friday, 25 November at 7:00 p.m. and will be introduced by Sir David Attenborough. Tickets are free and available from Tim Slessor at 37 Southdean Gardens, London SW19 6NT, telephone 020 8788 7054 or email timslessor@aol.com, and from Antony Barrington Brown at 26c Upton Lovell, Warminster, BA12 0JW, telephone 01985 850 106.