I think I have a blepharospasm. Weird.

I swear that that CBC management sent themselves to monotony camp to prepare for their lockout duty. Listening to the national management-hosted “CBC Radio Morning” broadcast on Radio One this morning, I couldn’t believe my ears: it was worse than the worst college radio. Why not just turn off the transmitters?

A good source for the union side of the story is the union’s Toronto website (be sure to read the From the Floor newsletter for an exciting word search puzzle!). There are also links to employee blogs (like this and this and this). The CBC has their own website to give their side of the issues.

As an accidental journalist, I mistakenly came upon the press conference this morning where the name of the name federal building in Charlottetown was revealed: it will be the Ella Jean Canfield Building, named after Ella Jean Canfield, Member of the Legislative Assembly for First Queens, and the Island’s first elected female member.

For more on Canfield, and other women in the Legislative Assembly, Elections PEI has a backgrounder on women in Island politics.

This week I found out that my RSS newsreader, NetNewsWire works really well with my OS X del.icio.us front-end Cocoalicious. So I decided to make a screencast (what’s that?) to show how I use them together:

This just came across the wire on CBC Prince Edward Island’s RSS feed:

They must really be on strike if the RSS stops flowing!

Best regards to my friends on the picket lines up on University Ave. We’ve got your back if you need it.

I am a longtime user of Microsoft’s ergonomic “split” keyboards. I’ve gone through three so far: I use them until the letter wear off the keys (my “touch typing” style, although it’s pretty fast, requires an occasional glance at the keyboard, which requires letters on the keys to work).

The latest model in the fleet is the “Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro,” and I’ve been banging hard on it for two or three years. It’s a USB-PS/2 hybrid keyboard (it has two plugs at the computer end of its cable), it’s got a good feel, OS X drivers, a set of extra function buttons that I can program to do whatever I like, and it’s got two USB ports that I can use to plug in a bluetooth adapter, digital camera or my phone.

I decided that I needed a twin keyboard for my visits to [[Yankee]], and so on the way up to Dublin last week I stopped in at both Computer City and then Staples to pick one up. Much to my chagrin, I found that Microsoft no longer makes the Natural Keyboard Pro: it’s been replaced by the Natural Multimedia Keyboard (which is nice looking, but PS/2 only, which means it won’t work with my Mac), and the tiny Natural Keyboard Elite (which is missing the extra function keys, has a compressed Insert/Delete, Home/End key cluster, and an “arrow key” arrangement that’s in a “cross” rather than the “T” I’m used to).

A quick search of the web shows everyone sold out of the old Natural Keyboard Pro; eBay has just four on offer. Obviously I need to identify an alternative, or start stockpiling.

I ordered Apple’s new “Mighty Mouse” (buy | info) on the day it was announced, due both to my “standing policy of ordering everything that Apple produces” and because I’m a well-known mouseaholic. It arrived while I was away at [[Yankee]] last week and I’ve been using it for the last four hours.

I love it.

I’ve been a happy user of the standard one-button Apple mouse for many years. I was never a member of the camp that regarded this as a deficiency. But I’ve tried others’ scroll-wheel mice over the years, and could immediately see the advantage of adding a scroll gizmo to a mouse. And as the “right click” (which with a one-button mouse is “hold down the Control key on the keyboard and click”) becomes a more important user interface element, having a right mouse button seemed like it would be a good idea too.

But I didn’t want to buy one of those Microsoft or Logitech mice with hundreds of buttons. I wanted something simple.

And the Mighty Mouse is that.

The old one-button mouse had, well, one button. The Mighty Mouse has the same form-factor and “hand feel,” but it adds:

• A scroll nub (or whatever you want to call it…). This is a little pencil eraser-sized rubbery thing at the head-end of the mouse. It rotates in two directions — side to side and back and forth. It’s in exactly the right place, and I’ve been surprised by how much I use the “side to side” scrolling (it’s great inside a text editor when editing code, for example). And of course I use the “back and forth” action to scroll through everything — web pages, NetNewsWire, email, Pages, whatever.
• Both a right button and a middle button. They’re not technically “buttons,” I guess, because they’re not laid out in the usual “piano key” fashion of other mice. To “right click,” you simply click on the right side of the mouse. Same thing with the “middle click.” The Mighty Mouse is a three-button mouse in disguise. And, to my surprise, this all just works (I originally thought there would be a lot of “mis-clicks” because the mouse couldn’t figure out which “side” I was clicking; there aren’t).
• A squeeze button. On either side of the mouse, flush with the mouse housing, are two little buttony things. Squeezing them generates another sort of click, one that’s set to call the Exposé “make everything on the screen into little thumbnail windows” action in OS X, but that you can set to do other actions too. I’m not sure I’ll use this feature: I find the squeezing isn’t intuitive, and it takes more effort than is comfortable (presumably to remove the possibility of a lot of mis-squeezes).

The nicest thing about the Mighty Mouse is that it took me about 5 minutes to get used to, and then it just felt natural… I’m scrolling, clicking, and even sometimes squeezing like there’s no tomorrow. If you’re a Mac user, get one.

Jon Udell put together a screencast about del.icio.us which provides a good introduction to how it can be used for more than just “web-based bookmark storage.”

When [[Felix Petersen]] emailed me his biography a couple of weeks ago, one of the ways he described himself was as a “metroblogger.” I thought he was just coining a phrase for what it’s like to be urban and blogging and in Berlin; turns out he really is a metroblogger.

For some insight about what weblogs and Wifi and creativity might mean for the evolution of our cites, read Cities, technology, and creativity, a interesting post from Jyri Engström.

If you are bothered by the new huge banner ads on the CBC Prince Edward Island website:

…and you’re using Firefox, then you can check the preference for “load images for originating web site only:”:

…and the result will be:

Beware the this setting will prevent the loading of all images on websites that draw their images from elsewhere (not such a bad thing, as this is usually done to present you with ads anyway).