I know it’s wrong to make generalizations about international travel and Canadians. But every time Air Canada produces a list of “sample round-trip fares” for one of their seat sales, I find it odd that they seem to pick the most unlikely of city pairs:

I can understand there being a good amount of “Calgary - London, GB” traffic, but how many tickets is Air Canada expecting to sell on the “Saskatoon - Duesseldorf” or “St. John’s - Bogota” runs?

Of course if they left out such seeminly obscure city pairs, you’d probably find me complaining that they were making generalizations about international travel and Canadians, so I suppose they can’t win with me.

I noticed a green “Exchange” sticker on the ATM machine at [[Metro Credit Union]] yesterday, and stumbled across the reason why on the Metro website. The most interesting part of all this:

In addition, we anticipate by November 30/2005 our member owners will have access to ATMs with HSBC Bank, National Bank and Canadian Western Bank, as these financial institutions are all on the EXCHANGE Network.

…which seems to suggest that we’ll finally have surcharge-free access to cash here in downtown [[Charlottetown]], as there’s a National Bank branch on Kent St. Additionally:

The EXCHANGE Network will offer access to thousands of ATMs as well as an extensive Point of Sale network in the US.

I think that means I’ll be able to pay for groceries with my Credit Union ATM card at Stop &Shop when I’m in New Hampshire.

The Exchange Network has its own website that has more details.

This helpful, if disclaimer-rich, page on the Motorola website is uncharacteristically open about the option to hack your Motorola DVR and get the video from it to a PC:

...but some people on their own have devised a way to access digital recordings on the DCT6208 or DCT6412 and offload them to a PC hard drive or Digital High Def VCR... Here's how to transfer non-copy protected recordings via IEEE1394/Firewire...

I wish all manufacturers were so open an honest about the hackability of their products. The DCT6412 (or is it the 6408?), by the way, is the DVR that [[Eastlink]] offers here in Prince Edward Island for $14.95/month.
Here's how to do much the same thing with a Mac.

Learning to swim is one of my earliest memories. I can’t even remember where it was, but I remember going with [[Mike]] to an outdoor pool somewhere in [[Burlington]] — must have been the early 1970s — to take swimming lessons. “Motor boat, motor boat, moves so slow…”

Tonight [[Oliver]] went to his first night of swimming lessons, so another torch has passed to the next generation.

The [[CARI Pool]] uses the new Red Cross set of programs; in this regime, Oliver ends up a sea turtle: “3 years of age or older, and just starting out, previous lessons not necessary.”

There are two other kids in Oliver’s group, both a little younger but somewhat more “put my face in the water” comfortable, so it all seems to balance out. Tonight’s session contained a lot of “aimless wandering down the pool” activity by Oliver, but then again it was “assess their skills” night, and the mere fact that he was in the water and not clutching on to [[Catherine]] or I for dear life was a big achievement.

On first blush Oliver appears to have a “relaxed hep cat” approach to in-water movement; imagine Joe Camel, but in the water.

The biggest shock of the evening came when I realized that my presence was not, in fact, required and that I was to retire to the sidelines to watch the lesson play out. First of many, many hours on the sidelines, I imagine.

We’re back in the water on Thursday. Or at least Oliver is.

Remember the whole “portal” craze? A couple of years ago everything on the web was about aggregation and “one stop shopping.” Here in Charlottetown we taxpayers wasted a good part of $4.5 million creating VirtualCharlottetown.com, a “Charlottetown portal.” Hell, even I jumped on the bandwagon.

Thankfully, though, portals went away when it collectively dawned on us all that the browser and the web are the portal; we didn’t need an additional layer of intermediating abstraction pasted over it.

Microsoft, however, doesn’t appear to have been listening; witness their description of their new “Windows Live” project:

Windows Live is a set of personal Internet services and software designed to bring together in one place all of the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with more safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web.

Smells like a portalization play to me. Not just a portal, either: a Web 2.0 portal. Yawn.

In 1967, a year after I was born, I was living in Ottawa with my parents. My [[mother]] was pregnant with [[Mike]]. And it was the summer of Expo 67 in Montreal, and Canada’s 100th birthday.

Although I can’t claim any conscious memory of that summer, being in the centre of Canada’s celebrating obviously had an effect on me as whenever I hear Ca-na-da, the Bobby Gimby song (listen via RealAudio) written to commemorate the year, my heart swells up.

Back in 2001, I wrote a post here called Why Founders’ Hall Fails, a review of the then-new tourism attraction on Charlottetown’s waterfront. In the post I said, in part:

Once through the Nunavut world, you emerge into a theatre where you can watch a video presentation that’s one half Molson Canadian commercial and one of Bobby Gimby. And then it’s on to the Canada, Eh! Store, which has an uninteresting collection of the kind of tchotchke that can be purchased around the corner at Tweel’s.

This afternoon I got a call from Bobby Gimby’s daughter Lynn. She’d recently gotten herself wired up to the Internet, and a web search for Bobby’s name led her to my post. She was curious, and wanted to know more. We had a good chat. I had to explain, alas, that I was speaking metaphorically about her father in the video presentation, not literally — as far as I know there is no actual Bobby Gimby content at Founders Hall (although I’ve emailed them for confirmation of this).

I know I shouldn’t get so excited about calls like this, but Bobby Gimby, for whatever reason, holds an exalted place in my life; imagine getting a call from, say, Jack Kerouac’s daughter or Neil Armstrong’s son and you’ll have an idea of what it’s like.

I was just speaking with [[Mom]] about the call, and she reminded me that Bobby was also in the The Happy Gang, a seminal Canadian musical group that played on CBC Radio from 1937 to 1959. I knew of The Happy Gang when I was growing up because my parents had listened to it, but also because Gang member Cliff McKay was my best friend Timmy Whibley’s grandfather.

All of this looking backwards got me thinking about Expo 67. I’d always assumed that I’d gone, and was sure that Mom and Dad had pictures. So I phoned them to check, and neither of them had a memory of either going or having pictures. Dad called back 30 minutes later, though, with news from his diary that we had, in fact, gone twice that summer, once on Saturday, June 10 and again on Tuesday, Sept. 19, the second time with my grandparents from Cochrane. At least Dad assumes that I went twice; the first entry makes no mention of me, but he couldn’t imagine what else they’d done with me. The second entry, however, contains the line “little Peter came too.” I haven’t been called “little Peter” for a long time.

Gotta run — Amy Carter’s calling on line one.

The developer has an archive of photographs of the new Turning Torso building in Malmö, Sweden. There’s an excellent article in The New Yorker (note that they don’t seem to have permalinks for their articles, so that’s likely to break soon) about the building.

I failed completely in my attempts to take photos of the building when I was in Malmö in June — I could never get close enough to make it appear anything more than a needle on the horizon.

Remember back four years ago when I told you to clean your glasses. Well I’m back, with more exciting optical fun.

A few weeks ago, I started to realize my glasses — which I wear from dawn to dusk these days — were pressing into the side of my head. While this wasn’t noticeable for most of the day, by 10:00 p.m. or so I found that I was starting to get a headache from it — a headache that I didn’t even really know I had until I took my glasses off and felt much, much better.

So today I resolved to do something about it. I went in to [[Boyles Optical]] in the [[Polyclinic]] for a glasses tune-up. The personable Ron Boyles took the glasses into the back room, and when he emerged 10 minutes later they had been completely transformed: what had once dug into my skull now fit perfectly around my head; Ron even installed new “nose pads” to keep the glasses from sliding down my face (a problem I didn’t know I had).

So now it’s like I have completely new glasses. Headache gone, outlook on life improved, clarity amplified.

Amazing.

Okay, this might be the geekiest post I’ve ever made. But I’m just trying to do my part to feed the Googlebot.

If you are running into problems with RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL 3) not having i2c modules installed, and this is causing you not to be able to run lm_sensors, you might need to download and install the RPM called “kernel-unsupported,” for that’s where the i2c modules live.

My friend [[Ann Thurlow]] helpfully pointed out to me this evening that the poppy that we wear leading up to Remembrance Day on November 11 is supposed to be worn on the left-hand side of the body, over the heart. Up until that point I’d simply assumed that any old jaunty place would suffice.

As such I offer an apology to any veterans and others whom I’ve offended during the 38 previous Remembrance Day periods I’ve lived through when there’s been a 50% chance that I’ve had it wrong.

For the complete rundown, see this helpful Veterans Affairs Canada page, which includes:

The Royal Canadian Legion suggests that the Poppy be worn on the left lapel of a garment or as close to the heart as possible.

I realized this evening that it has been 21 years since 1984. I can remember 1984. Very clearly. And 21 years before I was born in 1966 was the end of World War II. That kind of thinking kind of compresses the time stream.