From Online Travel Review:

Good news for travelers in Portland, Maine: With Independence Air going the way of the dodo bird, you’ve been left without low fare service. Those days are numbered. JetBlue announced 4 times daily service to JFK beginning in May. The good news? Fares start at $59 each way, rather than the current $149 each way, with top fares only hitting $149.

This is the closest that JetBlue has come to Prince Edward Island yet. Okay, so it’s an eleven hour drive from Charlottetown. But it’s a good sign.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been running the Reinvented bookkeeping through Quicken for Home and Business. This is a enhanced version of Quicken with some basic small business features — invoices, accounts receivable, etc. — added on. It’s easy to use, and although I get no respect from my accountant, it served my purposes well.

When I made the switch from PC to Mac several years ago, I was in mid-financial-year, so I bought a copy of Virtual PC for my Mac; this lets me continue to run Quicken for Home and Business, albeit in a somewhat glacial fashion, as Virtual PC has to constantly pretend to be a PC, which makes it quite slow.

In recent years my aforementioned accountant has been pressing me to move to a more adult bookkeeping solution, mostly because when I hand over the Quicken data dump at the end of each year they have to expend considerable manual efforts slurping the data into their Big Accounting System. There is also some apparent discomfort with the lack of “double entry” features, which I believe is related more to addiction than to real practicality, but I’ll play along.

And so, yet again, I’m looking for some basic accounting software for Mac OS X. That works in Canada. And imports digital data from my credit union. And that I can save files from that my account can import.

And those four features seem not to exist in any software I’ve been able to find.

QuickBooks was an early favourite. There’s no specific Canadian version, but they claim that the U.S. version supports unique Canadian features like the GST. But then I read the reviews. And made a couple of calls to Intuit (the company that makes QuickBooks) and found (a) that the U.S. version for the Mac I would be forced to use won’t output data that can be imported into the Canadian PC version my accountant would be using and (b) that the U.S. version doesn’t support import of Canadian financial institution data and (c) that “support” for GST isn’t exactly elegant.

So now I’m trawling for recommendations from others: are you keeping your accounts on a Mac in Canada? Are you happy? If so, what software are you using?

When I was in the Halifax International Airport earlier in the month on my way to LIFT, I noticed a Finnair flight from Helsinki on the arrivals display. When I got back to Canada, I tried to find out more information about Finnair’s flights to and from Halifax, but a search of the Finnair website came up with nothing.

I cleared up the confusion this morning with a call to the Finnair office in Toronto: apparently these flight are non-scheduled “leisure flights” that are making a “technical stop” (presumably for re-fueling) in Halifax en route from Finland to the Caribbean.

Finnair doesn’t have the rights to pick up or leave off passengers in Halifax, so although the flights might show as “arriving” on the displays in the airport, you can’t actually fly on them from Halifax.

Which is a shame: if I could fly from Halifax to Helsinki, I probably would.

In the meantime, my friendly Finnair agent told me that they fly year-round from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver to Finland in partnership with American Airlines and British Airways, and direct from Toronto during the summer three times a week.

You can buy T-shirts with the old CBC logo online now. They call the logo the “exploding pizza” — I always heard much less restrained terms back in the day.

It’s been a busy week here in the shop, as the Premier called a by-election for District #2 and we’ve been working with Elections PEI to fire up the boilers for the confirmation process — a door to door canvas of every address in the district.

In ye olde times this was done starting from a blank slate; with changes to legislation before the 2003 Provincial Election, Elections PEI now maintains a Register of Electors, and Reinvented maintains the “computer-based system” referenced in section 24.1 (4) of the Election Act:

The Register may be created or revised manually by means of any computer-based system and may be maintained in printed form or may be stored in any computer-based system or any other information storage device that is capable of reproducing any required information in legible form within a reasonable time.

The “computer-based system” is a RedHat Enterprise Linux-based server stored inside a vault (really — it has two floors) and the “information storage device” is a MySQL database, maintained with a set of custom PHP applications.

Once the locations for the polling stations were nailed down by the Returning Officer for the district yesterday, we burned a cut of the Register for District #2 along with a base PDF file of the “Confirmation Record” and provided these to the Queen’s Printer to do a print run on their extremely fast and capable Xerox Docutech machine. By mid-afternoon, just over 2,400 forms, in duplicate, will be packaged up in binders and on their way to the Confirmation Officers in the district who, over the next several days, will go door to door making adds, edits and deletes on the printed forms.

Early next week, the forms will come back to Elections PEI and the Register of Electors will be updated using the web-based system, and the following morning we’ll run the Preliminary List of Electors.

Working with Elections PEI is always thrilling, interesting work: there’s no margin for error, and the timeframes are always very compressed.

By the way, Elections PEI now has an RSS feed. It’s a low-volume feed that mirrors the news items on the Elections PEI home page.

Apparently there is a time in the morning before the stores open. So I discovered this morning, well into week three of my “alarm clock set for 7:08 a.m.” odyssey.

I was out of the house by 8:15 a.m. After a brief stop by Elections PEI, I thought to myself “maybe I’ll stop by Bruce MacNaughton’s new place for a cup of tea.” But they don’t open until 10:00 a.m.

“Perhaps a bracing smoothie from Nature’s Harvest,” I thought to myself. Not open.

“Well, I could pick up a copy of the Globe and wait until they open,” I reconciled to myself. Bookmark not open.

I eventually settled for a low-far cranberry-orange muffin and an orange juice from the Great Canadian Bagel, and came on in to the office.

I was the first one here.

The other revelation this morning: lots of people walk to work in downtown Charlottetown. I always wondered why I never saw anyone walking to work; now I realize it’s because they do so at this ungodly hour.

I asked my friend David, an architect, to give me a ballpark figure for how tall a “story” is in a building. Because measurements in the media are often given in “stories” — like “the giant wave was over 10 stories tall” — I wanted to have an ability to make approximate calculations. Here’s what David told me:

A building like the new Government of Canada building would be 4 to 5 metres a story. A house would be more like 3m.

My original reason for asking was to add some real-worldness to this post about wind turbines. The wind seems to get really interesting at the 80m level here in Charlottetown — using David’s figures, that’s about the height of a 17 story office building. In other words, very tall.

Too tall for my back yard.

Congratulations to the City of Charlottetown on the release of its new heritage database. This project, brought to life on the wings of our friend Catherine Hennessey’s passions, aims to be a complete database of properties and buildings for the city. There are records there for our house; nothing yet for the office at 84 Fitzroy Street.

I put together a little demonstration project called Roll Your Own Plazes Launcher for OS X that takes the PlazesPHP class that Olle and I have been working on and uses it to create a simple Plazes launcher.

I think it would be quite helpful for the hospital to send home a note with every newborn… something like this:

Please note: at some random time over the next five years, probably in the winter, your child will wake up in the middle of the night unable to breath properly. They will likely be barking like a seal or a dog. They will probably be quite distressed, and you will probably think they are about to die, and will become quite distressed yourself. Welcome to croup.

And, indeed, this is exactly what happened in our family yesterday.

Things started off normally: Oliver went to bet about 8:00 p.m., and Catherine followed shortly thereafter — exhausted from a day at the Jack Frost Festival for Freezing Parents. I got to bed about midnight. And at 1:03 a.m. I awoke to the aforementioned seal barking sound, and found Catherine in Oliver’s room, with a very distressed little boy, pointing at his throat and quite concerned that it didn’t seem to work anymore. He was shivering. And wheezing. And trying to cough by unable.

I was absolutely sure he was going to stop being able to breath completely Any Second Now.

So Catherine and I got dressed faster than we ever have before, and we all piled into the car for a mad dash to the Emergency Room at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital — a 10 minute drive during the day, but we did it in about 4 minutes what with the lack of traffic and the panic-induced creative driving techniques I employed.

Whereas almost all previous visits the the Emergency Room had placed us 374th on the triage list, leaving us to stew in the waiting room safe in the knowledge that gunshot victims et al were getting treated ahead of is, last night we were whisked into the special “pediatric resuscitation” room, and before I knew what was happening Oliver had a mask on, and a dedicated team of experts swarming all round, looking calm and collected, and like this happens all the time (apparently, it does).

Oliver, it seems, was having his first experience with “the croup.” And he was having a barn-burner of an experience thereof.

It took about an hour before any sort of normality returned (i.e. all three of us stopped shaking): they gave Oliver various powerful “stop the croup symptoms” drugs through the magical face mask, and within about 15 minutes of arriving the worst was over. I think I saw his pulse max out in the 190s at the worst of it. After about 30 minutes he was breathing somewhat normally. When they took the mask off, he complained to the nurse that he had a runny nose — the first words he’d spoken since we’d left home.

At 3:00 a.m., after another check by the doctor and some helpful advice about what to expect over the next several days (like “it might happen again tomorrow, but probably not, but be sure to drop back in if it gets this worse again”), we were off home again. Oliver went right to sleep. I listened to the Voice of Russia for an hour before I was de-paniced enough to get any sleep.

This morning Oliver seems quite fine — to be expected, as the doctor told us that “the croupy ones are always okay during the day.” So, other than being unable to revisit the Jack Frost Fun this afternoon, things are mostly back to normal. We’re biding our time, of course, until tonight around bed time, and hoping that the evil croup monster stays in his cage. I don’t think we could take another night like that so soon.

Everyone at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital was amazing: thank you!

Isn’t parenthood wonderful.

Postscript: a Google BlogSearch for ‘croup’ leads to lots of similar tales. Nice to know we’re not alone.