Today is the most stressful financial day of the year for me — RRSP day. For those of you in the readership from outside of Canada, RRSPs — Registered Retirement Savings Plans — are tax-sheltered retirement investments that we Canadians can may each year. Basically we can each take a defined chunk of our income, place it in a special type of investment, and thus exempt ourselves from paying tax on the chunk in the current year; when we retire, the money comes out of the investment and we pay tax on it then, but by then we are in a lower tax bracket.

And we have until the last day of February to make the arrangements to do this each year.

And of course, given my laissez faire attitude towards my finances, I always wait until the last day in February to make the required arrangements.

The stress comes because the actual amount that Catherine and I are each permitted to invest is sent to us by Revenue Canada on the previous year’s “Notice of Assessment,” a piece of paper we are mailed once our previous year’s tax return is processed.

So to be effective today required locating those two pieces of paper, sent to us mid-2005. In a sea of other as-yet-unfiled paperwork stretching back quite a while.

Then Oliver and Catherine and I had to drive up to Metro Credit Union where we received characteristically good and stress-free service to complete the deal.

Did I mention that I hate scrounging for paperwork? I was sending out so much negative energy, that Johnny shouted over to make sure I wasn’t having a nervous breakdown.

Anyway, it all worked out in the end. And in the process of sorting through my multi-year pile of un-filed miscellany I found what appears to be an instruction sheet for a rocket-powered motorcycle that I have no recollection of actually having acquired:

If you were with me when I purchased same, please let me know.

Kudos to the ECMA and the CBC for a good show tonight, but could somebody please fire the sound people: the voices of the performers weren’t synced properly to the video for the first 15 minutes or so of the broadcast, and the quality of the mix, especially starting off, was abysmal (note to Rest of Canada: Chucky Danger Band sounds about 1000% better than you heard them tonight on the CBC). Then there were the drop-outs and the fuzzy bits that appeared at random throughout. Things got better as the broadcast progressed, and by the time Buddy MacMaster came on stage they appeared to be over the worst.

As to the new PEI television commercials, I’m going to reserve judgement until I’ve seen the whole lot.

It seems that my friend David Weale’s reaction to being banished from the kingdom has been to become a nerd. Witness this actual Skype transcript, with an anonymous correspondent, captured this evening:

I am Im-ing with David Weale right now too…he types very slow.

This is the kind of thing that can make my head explode. Cyberspace will never be the same.

In case you hadn’t noticed, in addition to being able to track my whereabouts in a browser, the imaginative folks over at Plazes have enabled the same information to be made available as an RSS feed:

A rather remarkable thing happened yesterday. I decided that it would be a useful and interesting tool for one of my clients to be able to see the location of the customers for their online store on a map. So I took the customer database, the excellent open source MapServer system, and some simple PHP code, and produced this map:

Then, on a lark, I decided to see what the map would look like if I added customer’s first names. And the revised map looked like this (actual customer names changed):

I was caught by surprise: the map suddenly went from being purely statistical to being personal. Bob from Oregon is our customer is a much more powerful piece of information to glean from a map than There is one customer from Oregon.

And I don’t mean to suggest that this is powerful because it allows us to do all sorts of Zellers-like “men between the ages of 24 and 34 who drive Datsuns are more likely to buy power mowers after 7:00 p.m.” kinds of divination.

I mean to suggest that this is powerful because it forces us to see our customers as real people.

Which might sound absurd.

But so much of the web is becoming all about volume. And clickthrus. And CPM. The funds from the people who click right thru this weblog and on to Google-provided ads more than pays for the cost of maintaining the webserver; but to maximize the revenue from those clickers requires treating them as nameless, faceless dupes (“you thought you were coming here for cowboy sex advice — ha! — click on, man!”)

When customers have real names, they suddenly pop into view. And become people. And we’re far more likely to create websites that are, well, people-friendly.

I think that’s a good business model.

After hearing Jill Barber live this afternoon, I immediately wanted to purchase her music. So I went to her website, which led me to Zunior.com, a download-for-money site with a refreshingly enlightened attitude:

All music downloads are in MP3 format (encoded at 192 kpbs, using Lame MP3 Encoder). We believe MP3 format still provides the most flexibility for music lovers. We want you to own the music you buy. Digital Rights Management encryption that is used by major labels (ITunes, Napster) severely limits your options and flexibility. Our MP3 music files do not require special players, or special permissions. When you buy from Zunior, you own the music. Although we do encourage you not to upload the music to file sharing sites like Kazaa, we realize that you want to own the music you buy. File sharing is part of the modern music exerience, and we support the philosophy of sample…then buy. zunior.com allows you to buy, and own, the music you ve discovered. We hope you discover even more on zunior.com.

I bought both of Jill Barber’s albums from them. It was quick and easy, and I’m enjoying her music as I type this. I encourage you to do the same.

As music overtakes the city this weekend, it seems our neighbourhood is on the bluegrass side of the street: St. Paul’s Anglican Church (across the street from us at 101 Prince St.), not otherwise known as a hotbed of funky rhythm, is bluegrass central all weekend long. Oliver and I are going over for the Bluegrass Songwriters Circle 2:00 p.m. this afternoon; there’s more bluegrass action tonight from 7:00 p.m. onwards, and again at the same time tomorrow. Somewhere in the middle I assume they’ll break for some solemn old tyme religion.

If you’re here in Charlottetown, tune your radio to 90.1 FM to listen to Radio ECMA for 24h/day of east coast music; if you’re not, tune your PC to the live audio and video streams.

For time-delayed action, radio@upei is blogging and podcasting. I especially like this Catherine Maclellan set (I see Catherine all the time at the Formosa Tea House, and only learned last week, after seeing her on Compass, that she’s a musician).

There was a great confluence of GTD energy washing over me today. First, I listened to the latest Inside the Net wherein Amber and Leo interview Merlin Mann of 43 Folders. Then, following up on a mention of Kinkless GTD, I upgrade my OmniOutliner to “pro” and installed the set of add-ons known as kGTD. Finally, I spent about 3 hours emptying my email in-box, either deleting, archiving, or moving items into my snazzy new GTDly outline. And so now, for the first time in many months, I’ve achieved:

And:

I’m the last one to adopt new “organizational systems” like Getting Things Done; I’m just too suspicious. But the coincidence of overwhelmingness, an organizational system, and a cool Mac OS X tool that can help has pushed me over into the deep end.

I’ll let you know if it works.

Next time you’re making a salad, take a flour tortilla, roll it up, and then slice it up so that you’re left with stringy tortilla ribbons. Put under the broiler until crisp, and sprinkle on top of salad. Mmmm. (stolen from Nigella Lawson)

Need a quick dessert? Buy a bag of Lindt chocolate squares and serve with ginger snaps: you can’t beat the taste sensation of the combination.

Now that I’ve been schooled in the ways of ‘I’ vs. ‘me’ (not that I’ve completely reformed), I feel that I need some help on the “which” vs. “that” front. I’ve a vague feeling that I’m forever using the wrong one of these in the wrong place. Please help.