Google Transit. Only for Portland, OR right now. Thanks to the many people who pointed me there.

So, Oliver survived the Christmas play. We admired his steely resolve (read “stage struckedness”) to not sing any of the words to the “and shepherds salved Jesus’ heart upon the breast of Mary”-type songs. He was cute in his shepherd costume, delighted to see Santa Claus, and happy to introduce his Uncle Johnny to all his friends and teachers.

Earlier in the day our attempt to go to Interlude for “Gung Bao Thursday” was thwarted by Jodi’s revelation that they are closed until Dec. 14th. So I had to make do with a cheeseburger platter from The Town & Country. I miss you, Gung Bao… I miss you.

On the way to the T&C I noticed that the City of Charlottetown is about to unveil a new Town Clock on a pedestal on the corner of Kent and Queen. As the person who (inadvertently) drummed the last public clock out of town back in 2002, don’t I deserve some place at the opening ceremonies later in the month?

Finally, I am giving serious consideration to the notion of switching from a “bar” shaver (a Braun 3612) to one of the newer “rotary” models, like those made by Philips. When I first started to shave, it was with my Grandpa Ross’ Norelco (it was later stolen from my house, believe it or not, in a brazen robbery); I’ve been using Brauns (with a break for a Panasonic wet/dry, also a “bar” shaver) ever since. I simply seems like the three rotating blades would inevitably make shaving go faster and “closer.” I welcome any comments from the readership on this feeling.

Here’s an error message thrown by a NOAA application:

Error: Not Enough Data Available to be Displayed

There are less than 5 observations available for the selected parameter. Attempting to graph this data may give the impression that no data is available, so building of the graph was aborted.

I understand completely what the error message means, mostly because it sounds like the kind of error message that a programmer (like me) would write to describe what had happened. But it does strike me as rather user-hostile.

Courtesy of Microsoft’s new “Google Maps killer,” here’s a bird’s eye view of downtown Boston.

On the right is Government Center, running up the middle is the New England Holocaust Memorial and near the middle is The Yankee Publishing Building, at 33 Union Street, home to our advertising department colleagues at Yankee Publishing.

Just out of view at the top of the photo (you can scroll) is Faneuil Hall.

Doesn’t work in Safari, but works fine in Firefox on the Mac.

Ran into a PHP problem this morning, and Olle helped me find a workaround, so I thought I should publish here for the benefit of others.

If you are comparing two values in PHP — let’s say a password that a user has entered and a password that it stored in a database. In most cases you can compare them like this:

But — and here’s the problem — if the two values you are comparing both look to PHP like they are numbers, PHP will compare them as numbers even if they “look different.”

For example, if you are comparing 1234 with 001234, PHP will consider them to be “equal” if you compare them as above.

This is because PHP is “too smart for its own good” and “helpfully” converts all integer-like strings to integers for comparison purposes (as explained here: “If you compare two numerical strings, they are compared as integers”).

The simple solution:

By prepending a string (“s”) to each side of the comparison, PHP is prevented from helpfully converting the string to integers, and the two are thus deemed not equal as they should be.

Thanks for the help, Olle.

Tod Maffin, who almost singlehandedly broke the back of the CBC lockout with his seminal role in marshaling podcasting efforts from the line (yes, I’m exaggerating, but not completely), is covering the tech beat for this federal election in a new blog. Good stuff.

The December issue of YANKEE has a piece about Massachusetts singer-songwriter Lori McKenna. YANKEE is making a free MP3 of her song If You Ask available. It’s a worthwhile download.

I’m now convinced that there are episodes, perhaps induced by sunspots or other amorphous forces, that cause sudden surges in technology-related problems. In the past 48 hours we’ve been experiencing DNS problems, server problems, network problems, and AOL email problems. Everything appears unrelated to everything else. Technology, of course, is expected to break. Why does it have to happen all at once, though?

A few notes gathered in the field today:

• The café at the Friendly Pharmacy (down on Water St. on Charlottetown’s waterfront) is no more. Word from the pharmacist is that they needed the space for a new doctor’s office.
• Honest Tea is back at the University Ave. Shopper’s Drug Mart. At least for now. There’s no longer any trace of Bottle Green, which appeared to have replaced it.
• My dentist (the excellent Dr. Don Stewart at Cornwall Dental Clinic) gives out free Oral B “sensitive” toothbrushes. Presumably he gets these for free from Oral B in return for the exposure. Except that it seems as though you can’t actually buy the same toothbrush in stores. Weird.
• All of the Murphy’s Pharmacies appear to be tied together with a common inventory system (hence you’ll often be prompted “do you want me to check the other stores?” if a particular store is out of stock of something). Interestingly enough, when I requested a product that none of the stores carry regularly, the clerk at their West Royalty Pharmacy branch told me that they could order it in and it would be there tomorrow. This makes me think they’re tied into some giant drug warehouse that they can tap into at will.
• The Pharmasave at Ellis Bros. shopping centre that, as reported earlier, is moving to much bigger quarters next door, still hasn’t moved. Looks like construction is taking a little longer than expected.

We experienced a brief server outage here due to disk crash on our main DNS server. Things are back to normal now, but you may have had either difficulty getting here this morning or, if you arrived, have noticed weirdness in the sidebar.