Several of my recent procrastinations came crashing together tonight. Earlier in the week I did some experiments scraping of Charlottetown City Council minutes. Back in November, I documented a method for grabbing PEI civic address data into a local database. And my Interactive Charlottetown Transit Map and RealCharlottetown.com projects have taken me into the world of “Google Maps mashups.”

So what happens when you take all those projects and jumble them together? The Charlottetown City Council Minutes: Addresses Mentioned map. It looks like this:

Here’s how I made it:

• Because of my earlier RSS experiments, I already had a MySQL table containing the web addresses of Charlottetown City Council meeting minute PDF files — basically a list of the links you’ll find here. So I began by writing a little script to grab each of the PDF files and store it locally.
• Next, I used pdftotext (part of Xpdf) to convert each of the PDF files to a plain old ASCII text file.
• I extracted the names of all of the streets in Charlottetown from my database of PEI civic addresses, and then ran through each meeting minutes file using a PHP script looking for occurrences of a number followed by the first word in each of the 496 streets in the city — like “84 Fitroy” or “100 Prince”.
• For every match found, I looked up the civic address in my database, and if I found a latitude and longitude, assumed it was a valid civic address, and I inserted an entry in a new MySQL table recording the location, the address, and the minutes file PDF I found it in.
• Using the RealCharlottetown.com Google Maps-making code as a starting point, I created a “mash up” script in PHP that plots each of the 265 addresses I found on a map.

The process is, of course, imperfect. My address matching could be better. My process for grabbing the “excerpt” of the minutes could use some work. Sometimes the minutes don’t record a street number, so I don’t pick up a match. And of course the minutes don’t necessarily record every mention of an address at council meetings. But it’s still a pretty neat way of visualizing council business geographically.

Take note that the page might take a slightly long time to load, especially in Safari. Firefox might complain “a script on this page is taking too long” (you can just click “Continue). And I haven’t tested this, as yet, in any version of Internet Explorer.

I’ll cobble together an open source release of the source code for all this ASAP. Comments welcome.

After abandoning del.icio.us back in December, and replacing it with my own locally-hosted system based on Scuttle, I’m jumping back into the del.icio.us fold. Why? I realized that although my locally-hosted solution was faster, it completely lacked the social part of “social bookmarking.” And that, as a result, I was missing out. I also missed the subtle niceties of the del.icio.us UI.

So I hacked together a little script, using class.delicious.php, to grab my recent bookmarks and punt them over into del.icio.us. And I’ve sent an email to the few others who joined the Scuttle party with me and poured their own bookmarks into my local system. And in a few days, bookmarks.ruk.ca will be no more.

So if you want to play the home game, point yourself over to del.icio.us/reinvented from now on.

And if this is all confusing to you, and you’ve made it this far, What is del.icio.us? is a concise introduction to this world.

Every year at the New Year’s Day Levees here in Charlottetown (see reports for 2004, 2005 and 2006), our day ends with the Premier’s Levee at the Confederation Centre of the Arts.

And every year Provincial Photographer Brian Simpson is at the end of the receiving line, taking pictures of each visitors shaking hands with the Premier.

The miraculous part of this endeavour is that no effort is made to attach the person being photographed to a name or address, yet somehow the photographs make their way by mail, over the course of the year, to the homes of those pictured. I suspect that there is an entire secret department of government devoted to photographic analysis and address matching.

In 2004, I got mine a month later. In 2005 it took a little later: I didn’t receive mine until Nov. 27, 2005. Here, for comparison’s sake, is our 2004 photo:

And here’s our photo for 2005:

Besides the Premier’s moved from a striped tie to one with a diamond pattern, notice that my degree of sartorial splendour shot through the roof; indeed this is one of the rare photos of me, outside of a wedding environment, wearing jacket and tie. I also seem to be a lot happier in 2005, and I seem to have much better Premier interaction. I also seem to be very, very tall, something I’m not usually conscious of. Oh, and I think I was 10 pounds heavier in 2005 too.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that Catherine is looking resplendent in the background of the 2005 photo.

As I suggested here, and based on the same approach I took with building permits, I’ve prepared an RSS Feed for Charlottetown City Council Minutes.

The index of council minutes on the City’s website is slightly less useful, scraping-wise, than the building permits page because the file naming scheme for council minutes is all over the map. As a result, I’m using the “last-modified” HTTP header as the item date for the minutes.

I’ve added a page in the Rukapedia that documents the creation of the Charlottetown Building Permits RSS feed that I wrote about yesterday. You can also grab the code itself if you’re interested in rolling your own.

I expect it would be trivial to modify the code to RSSify other regular reports from the City, like:

• Bylaws
• Budgets
• Council Meeting Minutes
• Council Meetings Audio (could become a podcast with some savvy RealAudio to MP3 hacking)
• Photos of the Mayor
• City Events
• Tenders

Of course it would be even easier if the City simply published RSS data themselves, and I would certainly encourage them to do so.

I’ve hacked together an RSS Feed for Charlottetown Building Permits. The feed doesn’t index building permits themselves; it’s simply an index of the weekly PDF building permit summaries published here by the City of Charlottetown.

In theory, whenever that page gets updated with a new weekly summary, the RSS feed should get updated with a new item, pointing to the new summary. It appears that the weekly summaries are released every Monday, but I’m not completely certain about that.

Please don’t build the RSS feed into anything important, as its contents may change, and the feed itself might disappear; this is only an experiment. I’ll release the “feed creating” code when I’ve got a little more time.

It’s a little hidden on the their website, but the City of Charlottetown does release a weekly report of building permits issued. It would be nice if they released the data in a more useful form than PDF, but I’m happy to see that it’s there at all, and don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Two items of late jump out:

• 665 University Avenue (Shoppers Drug Mart) - Exterior shell & base building
• 685 University Avenue (Subway) - Exterior shell & base building

I presume these are both for new buildings on the old Pizza Hut location near Sobey’s and Canadian Tire in West Royalty.

I tried writing a script to scrape the data out of the PDF files, but there’s just not enough consistency in the files to make this reliably possible.

Canadian Tire has sells Solar Power and Alternative Energy products, including this $800 wind generator.

The generator is an Air-X model, made by Southwest Windpower of Flagstaff, Arizona. They describe the model as an “ideal product for the person that needs a little power for basic appliances such as TV, radio and a few lights.” The company also sells a variety of other generators and they have a Is Wind Right For Me? document that provides a basic introduction to determining whether a given site is a suitable location for a wind generator.

There’s a Wind Atlas for Prince Edward Island that might help Islanders in this regard. Here’s what downtown Charlottetown looks like in the atlas:

The maps are, from left to right, wind speed at 30m, 50m and 80m, and the colour scheme is arrange so that “redder is better.” The rightmost map, at 80m, shows most of the downtown at the “excellent” level.

I wonder if this represents the end of the “mainframe” era of wind energy, and the dawn of the cheap, easy to use “PC-level” wind appliance.

Café Cacao is “is an original dining destination located at the factory of Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker in Berkeley, California.”

Okay, so I’m a little obsessed with goings on in the “drug store space” here in Charlottetown (see Annals of Island Pharmacies, Annals of Island Pharmacies, Part II, etc.).

But it’s an interesting part of the economy, perhaps the retail sector that’s undergoing the most change, and the only part of the Charlottetown retail sector that’s investing money in new designs and approaches.

So I thought this would be a Big and Exciting Week, as a new Lawton’s store opened up in the space formerly occupied by Home Hardware in the Ellis Brothers Plaza in Sherwood:

This store takes the place of the small and somewhat decrepit Pharmasave that flipped to Lawton’s earlier in the year and that was located in a small corner opposite the new location. The new location is obviously a reaction to the new Shoppers Drug Mart store design, the local example of which is the University Ave. store that opened last year.

In other words: bolder design, more space, wider aisles, big cosmetics section, and about a quarter of the space devoted to food products.

Unfortunately, Lawton’s new store is a pale imitation of Shoppers. They certainly have the “bolder” down pat, with a new orange colour scheme right out of the Home Depot playbook. And they’ve got the space, aisles, cosmetics and food.

But the key to the Shoppers Drug Mart formula for me has always been in their product mix: they’ve always owned product categories that they alone bring to a market, especially out here on the edges.

Of course Shoppers has me wrapped around their finger on the iced tea front, but there’s more to it than that.

High-quality chocolate, for example. Back in the 1980s, for example, if you had a hankering for anything more than a Kit Kat in Peterborough, Shoppers was the place to go. And these days, the University Ave. location has a selection of Lindt and Cote d’Or product that rivals what we found at the local grocery in France.

Same thing goes for mixed nuts. And film. And batteries. And trashy magazines.

None of these are staples, and none of them are, alone, enough to differentiate the chain from other drug stores. But put together they effectively telegraph “there’s more here than just a drug store.”

The only “innovation” I could see in the new Lawton’s was a new section call “Nutritional Snacks.” When I couldn’t actually find any nutritional-looking snacks, I asked a of the staff to point me the way, and we ended up in a small section that contained granola bars and tuna-on-crackers. I was not impressed.

What Shoppers lacks in humanity — and they’ve got almost no humanity — they’ve always more than made up for in what you might call “the Target approach:” the “slightly upscale from the pack” approach that Target has taken in the U.S. to differentiate itself from Wal-mart, K-Mart et al.

While the old Pharmasave store might have been small and somewhat decrepit, it did have a sort of shabby warmth and charm, and the kind friendly long-time staff that Shoppers lacks.

Unfortunately, in trying to go head-on with Shoppers, the new Lawton’s comes up short on almost every measure, and they’ve cast off the shabby charm to boot. What we’re left with is a cavernous orange warehouse that lacks any sort of personality, and provides no compelling reason for not simply driving the extra 5 minutes over the Shoppers.

Ray Brow took exactly the opposite tack when he opened the Friendly Pharmacy a few years ago. There’s nothing bold and orange about the Friendly, but they’ve put all their eggs in the customer service basket, knowing that’s something that Shoppers is simply incapable of competing with them on. You might not find 85% cacao Lindt at Friendly Pharmacy, but I’ll bet if you phoned the pharmacist at 3:00 a.m. and asked them to meet you at the store so you could get some cough syrup, they’d beat you there, and have a smile on their face to boot.

Similarly, when Ray Murphy expanded the Parkdale Pharmacy earlier in the year, he didn’t turn it into the Starship Enterprise. It’s the same old Murphy Pharmacy, just refreshed a bit. Take their always solid customer service, add in the “most generous man on PEI” reputation that Ray himself has in some circles, and mix with an expanding medical centre surrounding the pharmacy, and you get another (sustainable, I would argue) approach still.

Okay, now I’ve written almost 1,000 words on the local pharmacy marketplace. I am weird.