Tod Maffin is traveling the country “to meet with Canadian podcasters so we can meet each other share ideas, swap geeky tech tips, and more.”

Tod is hitting several major (and several minor) cities across the country, from St. John’s to Whitehorse, but he’s not coming to Charlottetown!

Hey, Tod: come to Charlottetown! Podcasting was sort of invented here on PEI. And we’re podcasting pioneers to boot.

We’ll even pay for lunch at the Formosa Tea House.

We’ve put together a suite of tools to help you find your polling station location for the Plebiscite on Mixed Member Proportional Representation System.

Remember that you can vote at any of the polling station locations in your electoral district. The first advance polls open this Saturday, November 19th at 9:00 a.m.

For many years now there has been talk of creating a local Prince Edward Island “Internet traffic interchange” where traffic from one Island-based ISP to another Island-based ISP could crossover locally rather than going “out onto the Internet.” I’ve long been a supporter of such an initiative, suffering as I have from working on servers connected to Aliant while connected myself to ISN’s bandwidth.

Here’s an example of what this means, in the real world; it’s a traceroute showing the path that traffic from my iMac takes to get three blocks south to the Elections PEI server:

traceroute to www.electionspei.ca (142.176.20.4), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  gw.isn.net (198.167.161.254)  49.664 ms  2.320 ms  2.756 ms
 2  chtw-asr1.eastlink.ca (24.222.97.237)  5.730 ms  5.635 ms  3.059 ms
 3  hlfx-br1.eastlink.ca (24.215.101.161)  14.468 ms  11.344 ms  13.646 ms
 4  hlfxnsaldr02.bb.telus.com (154.11.184.37)  12.966 ms  19.410 ms  12.010 ms
 5  hlfxnsalbr01.bb.telus.com (154.11.7.226)  76.290 ms  77.149 ms  75.740 ms
 6  * mtrlpqfbbr00.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.197)  78.142 ms  77.185 ms
 7  toroonnlbr00.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.169)  77.768 ms  113.038 ms  77.092 ms
 8  wnpgmbabbr00.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.145)  95.022 ms  75.486 ms *
 9  edtnab02br01.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.85)  83.315 ms  76.504 ms  75.822 ms
10  edtnabxmbr01.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.73)  76.433 ms  76.140 ms  75.585 ms
11  clgrab31br01.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.70)  75.769 ms  76.922 ms  75.639 ms
12  * * *
13  clgrab21gr01.bb.telus.com (154.11.10.217)  75.677 ms  75.450 ms  75.323 ms
14  bell-canada.clgrab21gr01.bb.telus.com (154.11.3.46)  90.996 ms  107.607 ms *
15  64.230.249.253 (64.230.249.253)  101.971 ms  104.196 ms  106.429 ms
16  64.230.207.86 (64.230.207.86)  81.166 ms  83.564 ms  80.917 ms
17  * 64.230.240.17 (64.230.240.17)  82.586 ms  81.818 ms
18  * rtp629207rts (64.230.167.89)  95.580 ms *
19  rtp629008rts (64.230.167.74)  92.913 ms  90.662 ms *
20  rtp629048rts (64.230.203.30)  108.556 ms  90.879 ms  132.622 ms
21  alpe-pcr-oc3.aliant.net (142.166.181.150)  235.873 ms  100.957 ms *
22  142.166.182.102 (142.166.182.102)  112.616 ms  108.111 ms  101.306 ms
23  142.176.20.4 (142.176.20.4)  104.890 ms  122.166 ms  100.093 ms

Near as I can tell, my packets are going through Halifax, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton until they hit the Bell Canada network in Calgary and come on back in this direction.

All of this is happening at the speed of light, of course, so it’s not taking hours. But practical maintenance of a server over so many hops — to say nothing of what happens when things go awry — is problematic.

The logical home for a interchange like this is the University of PEI, as there already both Eastlink and Aliant bandwidth running through their facilities, they’ve got the smarts to make it work, are impartial and public-spirited and, I think, willing and ready to serve.

What’s it going to take to make this happen?

If you’re a regular customer at Timothy’s in Charlottetown, you may have seen the imposing-looking Keurig B100 on the roof of the cold drinks cooler. This is one of those “sealed pod” coffee and tea makers, where you take a manufactured, sealed “pod” of coffee or tea, pop it into the machine, and second later you have a single serving of your favourite hot beverage.

This is the same general approach taken by the Senseo from Philips that Adam Curry promotes regularly on his Daily Source Code podcast.

Timothy’s is selling a branded version of the B100, and that’s why you see a demo model in the store.

If you want to see a B100-like machine, and taste the results, drop by City Cinema for a cup of coffee or tea: Derek has the smaller cousin, the B50 in action there at the concession counter.

After 6 months of using my trust Sony Ericsson T610 phone, I’m ready to upgrade: I’ve become addicted to its built-in camera, but the image quality from the camera is abysmal, and I’d like something better.

Other than the poor-quality camera, I like almost everything about the T610: it has good battery life, syncs well with my iMac, and it has a decent user interface. It also works pretty well as a GSM phone.

So here’s a list of “must haves” for a replacement:

• As small as the T610 (or smaller).
• Bar format (rather than flip-phone).
• Bluetooth.
• Built-in camera with better than 352 x 288 resolution (which is what the T610 has). Preferably much better.
• Unlocked. GSM.

I welcome recommendations.

I’m starting to think that my Dad has the world’s largest audio archive. At least of sounds emitted by his family. Latest to turn up in his collection: “lost” episodes of the 1994 Island Morning summer series I produced for CBC Radio here in Charlottetown.

Back in those days, Island Morning was hosted by Wayne Collins (now MLA for District 15, Winsloe-West Royalty). Working with Wayne on the other side of the desk was all a cub reporter could ask for: he was curious, personable, and able to lift my words off the page and give them a life of their own.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I owe most of the credit for my brief career as a broadcaster to Ann Thurlow. Ann recruited me, edited me, and goaded me along.

Only eleven years has passed since the summer of 1994, and yet it’s amazing to me how the vocabulary we used to talk about technology. Here’s my favourite quote:

When you hear people talking about actually using the information highway today, what they’re usually talking about is using something call the Internet. The Internet is an experimental information highway that you use with a computer.

I wasn’t trying to simplify things for the “common person” — that’s the way we used to talk back then.

Dad unearthed three episodes of A Users Guide to the Future, and you’ll find them as audio attachments to the next three posts here.

Here is musician Jane Siberry’s new music store. It’s amazing. How? From the Pricing Info page:

What Should I Pay? - It’s up to you. Really. Although they’re not meant as guidelines, you can see two prices for each download. One is the “standard” price, which is just the old catalogue price before we instituted Pay What You Want. The other is the average price recently paid by customers, which is displayed when you make a menu choice. But they’re not guidelines, just fun statistics, just like the percentages of customers who have chosen each style of payment.

Like I said: amazing. This is how musicians should (and, I think, will) sell their music in the future.

Oliver and I stopped in at the “pharmacy formerly known as Pharmasave” in the Ellis Brothers Shopping Centre this afternoon only to find it re-branded at “Lawton’s.”

What’s more, our friendly Lawton’s cashier told us that with the rebranding comes a move to the old Home Hardware premises on the other side of the mall. The new store, she told us, will be much, much bigger, and will include non-pharmacy items like food and an expanded makeup section. Sounds like a run for the “everything you want in a drugstore” crowd that Shopper’s Drug mart so effectively consumes.

Speaking of Lawton’s: did you know that it’s a subsidiary of Sobeys? I didn’t.

And speaking of Island pharmacies: the big renovation at the Parkdale Pharmacy — a job that’s seems to have been going on for almost a year — looks like it’s nearing completion. As our family doctor has just moved in to the offices right next door, I suspect this cold and flu season we’ll be spending a lot of time buying Kleenex there.

And speaking of Shoppers Drug Mart, they’ve fallen down again in their Honest Tea stocking. They had a shipment it about 3 weeks ago, and I bought a good chunk of it, but they’ve been sold out for the last two weeks. I wonder why the giant glaring tea-less whole in the health foods cooler doesn’t prompt someone to make an order?

Thirteenmonths.com chronicles the journey of “a fairly normal pre-kids couple on the adventure of [their] lives.” Here’s how they describe their trip:

Instead of taking a honeymoon, we decided to fulfill a lifelong dream and travel the world for a year (13 months, actually). We started slowly saving soon after we met, and with the proper planning, it all turned out to be more affordable than we originally anticipated (let us know if you’d like more info on this). With a few exceptions, we have opted to stay in each place for about a month. We think this approach allows us time to immerse ourselves in the culture and experience how different people live. We’ve also found it to be less stressful (not to mention cheaper) than traveling constantly for a year. We hope that it also allows some of our friends and family to visit.

They left home October 5, 2004 and their last entry (at this writing) is from Brazil in June. They’re still at it, though, and they’ve got a lot of compelling tales of their adventures, including the sort of nitty gritty that’s usually left out of travelogues, like descriptions of their gear, their clothes and what it’s all costing them.

Alas, there’s no RSS feed, so you’ll have to drop by regularly if you want to keep up.

I don’t know how I missed this earlier, but the complete text of The Canadian Encyclopedia is online, thanks to the Historica Foundation. They’re the same bunch that brings us the Canadian Heritage Minutes.

Here’s the Lake Ontario article co-authored by my Dad.