My first involvement with the apparatus of the City of Charlottetown came in the mid-1990s when I worked on [[Victoria Row]] and we were working with the City to have the street turned into a pedestrian mall during the summer months. It didn’t take very long before the name Dukie came into the picture, often used as “we’ll have to check with Dukie about that.”

In the intervening years I’ve known Dukie as “one of the guys who responded to a fire call at the COWS building at 3:00 a.m.,” “landlord to the original Little Mac Shoppe,” and “guy who received the gift of a lawn tractor when he retired.”

I still don’t know what Dukie’s job with the City of Charlottetown was. Indeed although he is purported to be retired, I continue to see him around a lot in what looks like an official capacity. Or maybe after having had an official capacity for such a long time, it’s hard to shrug it off.

All of which I was prompted to think about as I returned a video of Closer this morning and had to walk by Dukie’s house on Grafton Street where I spotted the photo shown here: “Private Parking: Dukie.”

I assume Dukie has a last name. I’ve just never heard anyone use it.

I realize that I’m probably quite late to the party on this one, but I’ve become quite fond of The Mountain Goats after hearing their song Cotton used as music on Weeds.

In other music news, my [[Dad]] points the way to Gogol Bordello. I’m still trying to understand.

After using SquirrelMail for our web-based email for several years, I installed the sexy new RoundCube webmail system over the weekend. It works very well — very polished and intuitive and very easy to install. Makes SquirrelMail, IMP and the like feel like 1996.

It’s a rainy Sunday. I just ran over to [[Tim Hortons]] for a break. I saw “Café Mocha” on the menu, and my head immediately took me back to last week in Montreal where Johnny and I had cafés mocha and chocolate croissants on Mont Royal. It turns out that Tim Hortons has a rather different way of making a café mocha:

1. Pour half a cup of regular Tim Hortons coffee into a cup.
2. Fill the rest of the cup up with hot chocolate from the hot chocolate machine.
3. Remove a special café mocha bucket from the fridge.
4. Take bag of white gloop from bucket and squeeze on top of coffee/hot chocolate mixture.
5. Take cinnamon shaker from bucket and sprinkle.
6. Hand to customer.

The result? Something that tastes vaguely like a café mocha, albeit with a subtle undertaste of plastic wrap.

Rob Lantz blogs his bus trip. These days if you’re not blogging about taking the Charlottetown Bus with your children, you’re not blogging at all.

Today was the day for [[Oliver]] and I to take our public transit adventures to the next level: we were going to transfer.

According to the official map and to my derivative of it, at 9:55 a.m. the East Royalty - Kensington Rd. bus should have ambled by the corner of Prince and Richmond (map) before turning right onto Sydney to loop back to the Confederation Centre of the Arts where we could catch the 10:00 a.m. Winsloe - University Avenue bus out to the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market. We were out on the corner at 9:40 a.m. just to be sure. The bus never came.

Whether this was because the bus drove by early, because the schedule or route has changed, or because I misunderstood the route map (although it’s hard to interpret it any other way), I’m not sure. But we had to react quickly, running over to the Atlantic Technology Centre to catch the Winsloe bus on its way out of town.

We only made it as far as the corner of Kent and University (map) before the bus came along. Fortunately the kindly bus driver stopped for us (although we did get a kindly “you know this isn’t an official stop” dressing down).

We got to the Atlantic Superstore at about 10:15 a.m. and walked over to the market. As with our first trip by bus to the market, we were the only ones making the trip, which makes me think that either all the pro-transit hippies live out in [[Breadalbane]] and have to drive, or that their commitment to transit extends only providing it for others. In any case, the parking lot was as chock full o’cars as it usually is. Score one for Big Oil.

The market was unusually pleasant today perhaps because I consumed both the berry-mint iced tea blend on offer from [[Karin LaRonde]] and an freak moccacinno from Caledonia House (freak only because coffee buzzes me all the way to next week).

When time came to leave I realized that there was still an hour to go before the next bus south, so Oliver and I consulted and decided to walk home along the [[Confederation Trail]] instead of taking the bus.

This proved to be a very pleasant walk, taking us through the [[Experimental Farm]], past the [[1911 Jail]], through Joe Ghiz Park and out to Grafton Street near Holland College.

Passing along the trail between Longworth Ave. and Euston Street, we overheard two neighbours talking to each other about the weather and other neighbourly things. Just as they were about to go their separate ways, one neighbour told the other to hang on a second, and he ducked up to the porch and pulled out a giant — giant! — beet.

“That’s some big beet,” said the beet-less neighbour in awe, “where’d you get it.”

“From a guy at work,” replied the beet-holding neighbour.

“Gonna be some tough,” came the response.

“Yah, some tough.”

The weather was fantastic — sunny and just a hint short of brisk — and we made good time: we were back home before 12 noon. Next week we’ll try the transfer again.

I’ve been hacking around with WML this afternoon, trying to patch together a mobile phone browser version of the Charlottetown Bus Schedule. Doing mobile phone development on a Mac has been painful because there’s not a good WAP/WML emulator for the Mac (if there is, please point me to it!).

What I’ve got so far is an application that prompts for bus route and street number and name; it then returns the closest stops to that civic address, with links to the schedule for each stop.

You can take this early version for a ride: if you don’t have a WML-capable mobile phone, use this web-based emulator. The address you need to enter in either case is:

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Prince Edward Island Tea Merchants, the restaurant at the front of the old GNK Marketplace (formerly known as Great Northern Knitters, and before that as Woolworths), serves 48 varieties of unsweetened iced tea. At [[Ann Thurlow]]’s recommendation I tried the Spiced Rooibos today (for more on rooibos, and iced tea in general, see this earlier post); very tasty. Of course you can ask them to add sugar if you are one of those crazy sugared iced tea drinking southerners.

My car radio ended up on Radio-Canada yesterday by mistake. And the most beautiful song poured out of the speakers. A little bit of Googling revealed that the song was Café Robinson from Moncton singer Marie-Jo Thério. I am willing to guess that this is the single most beautiful thing to ever come out of Moncton.

You can hear a clip over at Archambault and learn more about Marie-Jo Thério (confusing Google translation thereof).

The CBC is reporting that Mary Lou Finlay is retiring as of November 30. Currently the host of the radio program As It Happens on CBC Radio One, Finlay is perhaps least well remembered for co-hosting The Journal with Barbara Frum starting in 1982.

The CBC Archives page on The Journal says that Finlay left the show after two years because producer Mark Starowicz “believed a 38-minute show was too short to justify two hosts.” I always thought she was the better of the two hosts, and I’ve always enjoyed her on As It Happens.

Here’s some audio to remember the good old days by.