There is a park in front of the Coles Building in downtown Charlottetown that contains a rock from every province in Canada (I wrote of the park earlier when Little Bo Peep invaded it).

We are currently all memorial crazy here in Charlottetown: nary a years goes by without a new memorial going up or an old one being refurbished. I’m all for memorials and tributes and what they memorialize, but I don’t think that new monuments should be allowed to plow over old ones.

In this case, the new $300,000 Service Memorial Fountain has displaced the rock from Quebec: as you can see in the photo here, the rock and its descriptive plaque have been left asunder, lying barren on the ground.

Presumably it took some Islander some considerable effort sometime in the past to assemble this rock collection. To say nothing of the efforts of the provinces who found representative rocks to send our way. The park has taken a beating in recent years: if it’s not gaudy light displays being draped around, it’s Parks Canada removing the nice path that used to interconnect them all. This latest indignity, however, reaches a new level. We owe it to them to steward the rock park with respect.

Okay, I’m just claiming another podcast feed for Odeo. Here’s the link: My Odeo Channel. Confusing. I’ve added a cricket chirping as an audio attachment just to make sure it’s flagged as a podcast.

Stay tuned for more Live From the Formosa Tea House; in the meantime I’m just claiming the podcast feed by sticking this link in: My Odeo Channel. Go on about your business.

I’ve posted my photos from The Chieftains concert that took place in downtown Charlottetown on Sunday, July 17, 2005. You’ll recall that we discussed the concert back in June when it was first announced.

While I’m still conflicted over the notion of walling off public streets for private concerts, I gotta say that the venue was pretty good, and the concert was very well organized. In the end my decision to attend went something like “The Chieftains are playing outside a block from my house… The Chieftains!”

Our friends [[Ann Thurlow]] and [[David Malahoff]] went to the concert early and grabbed us seats (indeed they brought ours seats with them from home), so we were right in the thick of it all.

The demographic skewed much older than the hijinks down at waterfront; although there was a good representation of all ages, Catherine and I were certainly on the young end of the crowd, and there weren’t many young rockers present.

I’m the wrong guy to be asking about whether the music itself worked — I enjoyed the concert, but I can’t tell good fiddle from bad — so I’ll leave post-game musical analysis to others restrict my comments to the concert’s organization.

Pros: no heavy security (frisking, etc.) at the gate, no huge walls around the venue (and lots of opportunity for interested onlookers to take in the concert without paying), no prohibition of photos or recording, good on-site food service from the Centre’s own foodservice folks, thrill of sitting on Queen Street, very minimal sponsor advertising (not an inflatable beer can in view).

Cons: sun was shining in the eyes of the audience for a good chunk of the concert (hint: The Old Farmer’s Almanac can tell you all about this stuff in advance, and it’s inexpensive and very portable!), there was a special VIP “walled garden” for sponsors (it’s bad enough to wall off the streets; do we need to create even more special classes of people?), sound was poor on occasion (many instances of feedback, crackle, etc.)

The Confederation Centre of the Arts hasn’t released audience numbers yet, so we don’t know whether they broke even (I suspect they didn’t, as the venue didn’t exactly seem “packed to the gills,” but we’ll wait and see). In any case, they do deserve credit for putting on a well-organized concert.

Back in the days when I was working for Scott Linkletter and Chris Cudmore, partners in The Anne of Green Gables Store, on the concept plan for what became Avonlea, I spent a lot of time up in the offices at Henderson and Cudmore, the venerable clothing store in downtown Charlottetown.

Every time I walked through the front doors, pictured below, I noticed that the door handles weren’t aligned. So one day I asked Brian Cudmore why this was: he told me that the glass in one of the door had been broken at one point, and the company that repaired it put the replacement in upside down. Although H&C is no longer, the doors are still there, emblazoned with the store logo. And one of them is still upside down.

All other issues aside, it appears as though, in the game of political chicken that resulted in Air Canada cancelling their direct Charlottetown-Toronto service the airline may have misjudged its opponent.

Something Premier Pat Binns knows that Air Canada doesn’t is that in any match that pits Islanders against an Upper Canada corporation, Islanders will always side with Islanders.

I don’t know if Air Canada was hoping that the Binns government would be swayed by some sort of public groundswell against their subsidies for WestJet, but I’ve a feeling it ain’t coming.

While I don’t always agree with the Premier or his government, listening to him on As It Happens last night, my thoughts were not to the political minutiae but rather more along the lines of “You Rock, Pat — Give ‘Em Hell!”

[[Stephen Desroches]] has posted photos here and here of my paint-ball performance yesterday at the [[Steven Garrity]] all-day bachelor party. Think “cowering.”

Remember Dick Gordon? Back in the post-Gzowski days when CBC tried to mix the oil of Avril Benoit and the water of Michael Enright with a rebranded morning show called This Morning, Dick Gordon was one of the few bright lights: when he guest-hosted, the show had a grace that it never reached otherwise.

He moved to Boston shortly thereafter to host the NPR-affiliate WBUR’s morning show The Connection. I listen to it every time I’m in Boston, and find Gordon as compelling a host there as he was on the CBC.

Alas WBUR has cancelled The Connection (official announcement here).

Perhaps this means Dick Gordon can return to the CBC, where he belongs?

I’ve been experimenting with [[Ruby]] of late, and decided it would be good practice to try and code up a [[Plazes]] “Where Am I?” application to learn more about the languages ins and outs.

The result is PlazesWhereAmIRuby-0.2.tar.gz. This is my first Ruby script (or whatever they’re called), so I can’t claim that this is anywhere near Ruby best practices. But it works. To use the script:

• Get Ruby (here’s a place to start). Mac OS X users (post-Jaguar) can skip this step; you already have Ruby installed by default.
• Download PlazesWhereAmIRuby-0.2.tar.gz.
• tar -xzvf PlazesWhereAmIRuby-0.2.tar.gz
• Edit the file PlazesWhereAmIRuby.rb and replace the ‘username’ and ‘password’ with your Plazes username and password.
• ruby PlazesWhereAmIRuby.rb

The result will be something like this:

{“plazestate”=>”Prince Edward Island”, “username”=>”reinvented”, “plazelat”=>46.2361, “plazelon”=>-63.13, “plazecity”=>”Charlottetown”, “plazename”=>”Reinvented Office”, “plazeurl”=>”http://beta.plazes.com/plaze/2dbbe7a819b01317eb2ce58272b95f70/”, “plazecountry”=>”CA”}

…which is simply a dump of the parameters returned from the Plazes server.

Update: I’ve created a more general-purpose module for Ruby that implements not only the WhereAmI API, but also the Launcher API.

Skype chat with [[Olle Jonsson]] this afternoon (earlier in the day I had Skyped Olle when I meant to Skype me father):

Sorry about earlier kerflufle — I am still getting used to the UI in Skype, and I am always mistakenly calling around the globe when I mean to call across the street.