Here’s a thought: people who think like me probably bookmark like me, and so if I follow the trail back to people who have bookmarked the same links I have in del.icio.us, maybe I’ll find good workmates.

Pointer from programming language savant Olle Jonsson comes a pointer to Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook, a sort of Rosetta Stone for programmers. Neato.

The CBC reports that Pat Binns thinks “[r]esidents of P.E.I. support changing daylight time to stay in synch with the United States.” Mr. Binns knows this, the article says, because:

The P.E.I. government conducted an online poll to gauge how Islanders feel about changing daylight time, and Binns revealed that the results were overwhelmingly in favour of adopting the same system as the U.S.

Since when did we agree that it was okay for the government to make policy decisions based on the results of an “online poll?”

At dinner with my Yankee friends last night I was called on to provide iPod technical support. Young Jamie’s iPod mini wasn’t being found by iTunes on his iBook when he plugged it in; it would show up as a mounted drive on the desktop, but he couldn’t get music onto it.

Turns out that his iPod spent a brief time, before Jamie got an iBook, as a “Windows iPod” and it seems that once an iPod has suffered that fate it is rendered unusable in the Mac world until it undergoes gender realignment.

The solution: get the latest iPod Updater from Apple, run it, and select the “restore factory settings” option. This will erase everything from the iPod, but leave you with a fresh, clean, Mac-compatible iPod. It worked, and Jamie is rocking out to Billy Joel as we speak.

I’ve spent an exhausting, but ultimately very satisfying couple of days here at Yankee evangelizing the kind of things that generally get poured into the “Web 2.0” bucket.

This afternoon we had a long “state of the web” session with a group of people from across the company, and I led everyone on a journey through open source, APIs, XML, weblogs, RSS, podcasting, tags, AJAX and wikis. The interesting part was when my Yankee brethren took the ideas I fed them, and started to imagine out loud how they could be used to enliven the useful storehouse of data, ideas and authority that Yankee brings to the table.

I suppose it was unreasonable for us to expect that the CBC’s web properties would remain advertising free forever. But they’d been free and clear of adverto-clutter for so long that it came to seem to be in their nature. But now we have:

Good bye ad-free CBC… nice knowing you. (Pointer from Dan).

Kudos to the Town of Peterborough here in New Hampshire for saturating their downtown with free wifi. Here’s the Plaze and here’s what they say on their website:

This free service is made available through a combined effort of the Town and several downtown businesses, to enable people visiting or having appointments in the covered area, to “stay in touch” electronically.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the general excellentness of Strongspace. Strongspace does one thing: it sells secure (SFTP, rsync) disk space on well-maintained remote servers. What it really sells, though, is customer service.

The Strongspace website makes it easy to sign up for an account, easy to pay for an account, and easy to use an account. And when things go wrong, they’ve got a real person — his name is Justin — to answer questions. Quickly and completely.

David Cairns taught me an important lesson more than a decade ago: it’s not if your hard drive is going to fail, it’s when. Hard drives are tiny machines that are moving all the time; they have to fail eventually. Now think of all the email, photos, music, and whatever else you have on your computer that you’ve neglected to back up. Now imagine it gone. Forever. Now go and sign up for a Strongspace account and back your stuff up: for $8/month, it’s worth it, and you’ll be supporting a good group of people doing a good thing well.

Strongspace is one of an interesting new breed of web offerings that do simple, important things well. Let’s call them “microservice companies.” Unlike Yahoo!, which wants to sell you love, sell you greeting cards and heal your dog, these new microservice companies leverage open source software, commodity hardware, commodity bandwidth, and smart people to create useful tools.

And because these tools are built on open standards by open people, they can often be combined in interesting ways. Flickr (yes, I know, owned by Yahoo! — a microservice mouse inside a all-in-one elephant) photos can live inside Plazes. Bookmarks from del.icio.us can be read inside NetNewsWire. My blog posts can be digested by Technorati, and then fed back to me as an RSS feed.

In a sense what we’re seeing is the implementation of the UNIX command-line philosophy — a bunch of small, simple tools that can be combined together to become more powerful — on the web. It’s fascinating to watch, and compelling to consider the possibilities of getting involved.

Did I mention that your hard drive is going to fail?

Lack of disclaimer: I’ve no connection, other than as a satisfied customer, with Strongspace and I receive nothing other than good karma if you sign up.

As I write this in the Air Canada lounge at Trudeau Airport in Montreal I’m on my way to Yankee — I’ll be there until Friday evening.

Had the World’s Best Flight Attendant this morning on the Air Canada Jazz flight from Charlottetown. The “free” bandwidth here in the lounge is abysmal — crawls along at a snail’s pace — but at least it’s here. And hey, it’s a new Plaze!

You can follow my journey by watching the Where is Peter Rukavina page on Plazes. Or you can just watch the top-right corner of the weblog.

Well, we made it! Yesterday was the big Race About Charlottetown, and my “Ruk City Racers” teammate Derek Martin and I made it to the finish line. Indeed we completed the required 10 of 12 tasks, answered all our trivia questions, gathered all our scavenger hunt objects, and placed somewhere around 15th out of 60. Not bad for two guys outside the 18 to 35 demographic. A few photos here; I’m sure more will follow on the Race About Charlottetown website.

Our [almost] winning strategy was to leave the pack immediately, heading for the task that was farthest away first and then making our way back through town and up to UPEI. Derek kept me to a brisk “almost collapsing but not quite” pace, and we worked well together as a team.

Our other ace in the hole was a team back at home base, connected to us by cell phone, that was able to answer all of our obscure Charlottetown trivia questions; kudos to G., Claude and her sisters for coming through for us.

For posterity, here’s what we did, in the order we did it:

1. Joe Ghiz Park: I had to shoot Derek in the bum with a paint-ball gun from a a distance of about 20 feet. Got it on the second shot.
2. Basilica Rec Centre: played a bingo game, had to get three lines on a card before we could leave. Took about 10 minutes.
3. Confederation Landing Park: Derek gets handcuffed to a rope under the band-shell while I sprint to the end of park and use binoculars to find 4 numbers located somewhere across the harbour. I’m lucky and find the numbers quickly (although the binoculars + glasses combination is challenging, and I don’t get them right the first time). I then return to the band-shell where we have to use the numbers to solve a cryptic puzzle; we struggle, but then Derek comes up with a plausible guess and it’s right!
4. Queen Charlotte Armories: we have to put up a tent, following instructions, and then once it’s up disassemble it and repack. That went well, although we spent a little too much time at it. Next we had to eat either a bag of marshmallows or a can of beans, decided by a coin toss. We “won” marshmallows, and finished them off in short order between the two of us (therein ensuring I will never ever again eat marshmallows).
5. Rochford Square: Derek puts on a firefighter’s pack, I fill it with water, Derek runs to the end of a course and pumps the water into a bucket. Derek was really fast.
6. Confederation Court Mall: we fell slightly off the rails looking for this location, but eventually found it beside the Mermaid Art Gallery. Derek dressed in a suit and tie, I put on a very fetching denim dress and we ran over to Province House to get our picture taken and to answer three trivia questions. Stumbled briefly on the trivia, but a phone call to G. back at home base saved us.
7. Atlantic Technology Centre: I answered three movie trivia questions using a mobile phone while Derek played a car racing game on a computer. We were quick.
8. Fitzroy Parkade: Derek raced a remote control car around a course; when he hit pylons, I had to run out and bring the car back to the finish line. Derek got the hang of it quickly, and I only had to run out twice.
9. Metro Credit Union: One partner had to spit five sunflower seeds across a 10 foot gap into a cup held by the other. I started out as spitter, but failed abjectly; we switched and Derek made short order of spitting while I caught.
10. University of PEI: This was my opportunity to pay Derek back for his yeoman’s service in the earlier tasks. The team arriving ahead of us got to choose three ingredients from a selection of various disturbing foods (herring, chili peppers, etc.) which were then placed in a blender and turned into a frothy “milkshake.” As Derek is a vegetarian, and we didn’t have a way of knowing what was in our drinks, I downed both of them. Less unpleasant than I thought it would be, but not something I’d want to do every day!

We then sprinted to the finish line, checked in, and that was that. Our rivals Dan and Nathan arrived just ahead of us, placing us, we think, 14th and 15th out of about 60 teams. There was a barbecue for racers and volunteers later in the afternoon, followed by an event for the top six teams inside the UPEI sports centre to select the winner of the grand prize; I managed to last through about half of that before exhaustion got the better of me.

The Kidney Foundation deserves a lot of credit for a well-organized event that was lots of fun. Derek reports this morning that just over $13,000 was raised. Watch for our return next year.