I’ve started to spread my Yellow Arrows around Charlottetown. Here are the first two:

• Formosa Tea House
• The Reinvented Doorbell

The YellowArrow.net website is, alas, Flash-drenched, and thus much less friendly to the web than I would like, but I’m intrigued enough by the project to dive in.

A reminder: the first of the Advance Polling Days for the Plebiscite on Mixed Member Proportional Representation System open tomorrow morning, November 19, 2005, at 9:00 a.m. Here’s complete information on where you can vote.

You wouldn’t think that a hospital would be the kind of place you would find an anvil. Indeed the presence of an anvil at the bedside would terrify most of us. This morning, however, I got to see the Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s anvil, and I was glad for it.

Ever since I typed the names, addresses and products of 5,000 suppliers to the crafts industry into a database back in the early 1990s (while sitting on a chair that was too low, using a bad keyboard and an awkward mouse) I’ve flirted on the edge “repetitive stress injury” or “carpal tunnel syndrome.”

At its worst — thankfully not for 10 years or so — this has meant night pain in my wrists and a constantly sore neck. Otherwise it’s meant a near-constant “tingle” in both hands, more sensitivity to cold, and, when I work too much under too much stress, little tremors in my thumbs.

Fortunately, I’ve learned enough about how much I can work, and when to stop, and how to sit, and what keyboards and mice work for me, that I’ve been able to manage pretty well, and not plunge myself over the cliff into “you need a wrist operation” territory.

In recent years I owe a lot of thanks to Marie Brine, who’s helped my ergonomics situation. But back at the very beginning, when I first started to have symptoms, it was the Physical Medicine Department at the QEH that really, really helped me out.

I was referred to them after firing one family doctor (“just take lots of Aspirin and the pain will go away”) and replacing him with another, who was smart enough to give me a referral. After an assessment there, I was outfitted with a custom-molded plastic wrist brace for my right arm, and it’s that brace that has allowed me to continue typing all these years.

Over the years, though, the “hook and loop tape” that holds the brace onto my arm had become frayed, and the brace needed a renovation. With Marie’s assistance, I scheduled an appointment with Physical Medicine to get an updated assessment, and went along this morning, brace in hand.

The friendly and talented staff there gave my condition a once-over, decided with me that my fraying brace was doing its job and just needed to be refreshed, and then proceeded to do exactly that, reaming out the old rivets with a drill, attaching new “hook and loop” with new rivets, and generally making everything ship-shape. That’s where the anvil came in handy — they used it to finish up on the riveting (over 10 years, by the way, rivet technology seems to have come a long way, as the new ones the installed are much snazzier than the old ones).

The Physical Medicine Department is a hackers wonderland: they’re set up there to “make stuff to help people,” and can whip up all manner of braces and supports to help arms, legs, fingers, and hands work better. They’ve got chop saws and sewing machines and rivet guns and mold making ovens. And anvils. And some talented people who know what needs to be known.

When you walk in the main entrance at the QEH, it’s likely that you see the department’s big physical therapy room, with its big picture windows looking over the parking lot. Give them a wave; it’s likely you’ll be needing their help some day soon.

The CBC aired a report this evening on The National about the continuing fall of Conrad Black. Towards the end of the segment, reported by Havard Gould, a statement from Black’s lawyer “Eddie Greenspan” was read over an image of “Greenspan:”

I’m fairly certain that isn’t Conrad Black’s lawyer Eddie Greenspan, but rather Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan.

The Quicktime version of the story currently running on the CBC website has a different graphic:

I guess even the best news organizations in the world can make mistakes.

Have you been accused of “promoting a not-in-my-backyard attitude?” Loathe to “embrace change?” Not one to “seize opportunities?” Maybe you have an obstructionist attitude! Don’t shy away your defiant lifestyle: celebrate it, with quality products from The Obstructionist Attitude Store.

We’ve got a complete range of products for sale, from clothing:

…to baby wear:

And even coffee mugs:

All proceeds from the sale of obstructionist attitude products go to charity. Start shopping today!.

One of the problems standing in the way of wider adoption of VOIP (voice-over-IP or, to over-generalize, “telephone calls that use the Internet”) has been “the directory problem.” If you ever tried to use Microsoft’s NetMeeting back in the day you will recall that it was almost impossible to figure you simply how to call someone.

One of the create achievements of systems like iChat and Skype is that they solved this problem, and made it point-and-click easy.

As we glue together our own VOIP experiments and fiddle with systems like Freeworld Dialup and Gizmo, we’re facing “the directory problem” again. Who needs more telephone numbers to remember (and distribute?).

Fortunately there are answers to these problems. And in fact the answers are based on rather long-standing technologies like DNS. Here’s a demonstration of how simple it can be to use open standards like SIP to glue “Internet calling” together with “regular old telephones.”

• Download Gizmo for your PC, Mac or Linux machine.
• Install. Register (it’s free).
• Call the “phone number” sip:peter@rukavina.net.
• The phone rings in my office.

Here’s a brief screencast that shows this all happening.

If you’re curious, I’ve created a page that explains how it all works.

Never satisfied to leave well enough alone, I’ve set up another SIP URI — sip:formosa@rukavina.net — that, if you call it, will automatically play you the latest episode of our Live From the Formosa Tea House podcast.

Oliver has an Arthur doll. He talks. When you squeeze his belly.

One day last week I heard Arthur talking to himself upstairs in Oliver’s room while we were all eating dinner. Catherine suggested that something had fallen on Arthur’s belly, thus forcing him into endless dialogue.

I sarcastically commented something along the lines of “well, I guess we’ll have to put up with this until Arthur’s batteries run down and Arthur dies.”

Those of you with more parenting experience (and innate compassion) than I will immediately recognize that this was a grave, grave error: one should never suggest that a lovable star of children’s television may be on his deathbed. Especially a lovable star of children’s television that your child has visited the house of.

Oliver, who is only 5 and, I thought, had only the vaguest sense of “life” and “death,” immediately broke down in tears of grief. It took several hours to get the episode out of his system. I think he is still suspicious that Arthur has some chronic disease that we’re not telling him about.

Let this be a lesson to me.

O un ejemplo para aprender a usar google maps.

Evidemente no tengo mucho interes en saber los horarios de los autobuses de Charlottetown, pero en este caso es interesante la aplicación web ya que se han molestado en publicar el codigo y en hacer lo que todo programador odia: documentarlo!.

Cool.

From Brenda Brady, College Librarian at Holland College, comes a pointer to Wayfaring.com, which describes itself like this:

We’d would like it to be a community of travelers who use our web-based tool to create, use, or share information about their travels and the places in their lives. We built Wayfaring because we thought it would be cool to see people share trip ideas and places with each other. That seemed like as good a reason as any.

Think of it as RealCharlottetown.com for the entire world. And with polish. And lots of features.

The Guardian is reporting that local developer Tim Banks “is asking Charlottetown Mayor Clifford Lee to remove Coun. Kim Devine as the chair of the city’s downtown revitalization committee.” Banks is quoted as claiming that Councillor Devine has an “obstructionist attitude.”

Apparently in Mr. Banks’ world, anyone who disagrees with his “take no prisoners” attitude towards developing ugly downtown buildings in the name of “revitalization” is an obstructionist.

Councillor Kim Devine is my representative on council. I voted for her. She’s also a friend and neighbour. She’s a smart person, with the best interests of her constituents and her city at heart.

All evidence suggests that Mr. Banks is a megalomaniacal developer intent, under the banner of “embracing change and seizing opportunities,” on developing Charlottetown mega-projects — like his proposed (and now withdrawn) “$8-million head office building at 190 Water St.” — while paying no need to anyone else’s opinion, least of all residents of the neighbourhoods that he seeks to cannibalize.

Under what definition of “progress” the notion of building an office tower on Charlottetown’s waterfront fall I don’t know. But I know it’s not mine.

Tim Banks is looking out for Tim Banks’ interests. Kim Devine is looking out for the interests of me and my neighbours and she has my wholehearted support in doing so.

One of Mr. Banks’ favourite political tactics is to threaten to pack up and develop elsewhere. I say let’s call him on this, vote him off the Island, and be done with his insolent whining for good.