Remember the whole “portal” craze? A couple of years ago everything on the web was about aggregation and “one stop shopping.” Here in Charlottetown we taxpayers wasted a good part of $4.5 million creating VirtualCharlottetown.com, a “Charlottetown portal.” Hell, even I jumped on the bandwagon.

Thankfully, though, portals went away when it collectively dawned on us all that the browser and the web are the portal; we didn’t need an additional layer of intermediating abstraction pasted over it.

Microsoft, however, doesn’t appear to have been listening; witness their description of their new “Windows Live” project:

Windows Live is a set of personal Internet services and software designed to bring together in one place all of the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with more safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web.

Smells like a portalization play to me. Not just a portal, either: a Web 2.0 portal. Yawn.

In 1967, a year after I was born, I was living in Ottawa with my parents. My mother was pregnant with Mike. And it was the summer of Expo 67 in Montreal, and Canada’s 100th birthday.

Although I can’t claim any conscious memory of that summer, being in the centre of Canada’s celebrating obviously had an effect on me as whenever I hear Ca-na-da, the Bobby Gimby song (listen via RealAudio) written to commemorate the year, my heart swells up.

Back in 2001, I wrote a post here called Why Founders’ Hall Fails, a review of the then-new tourism attraction on Charlottetown’s waterfront. In the post I said, in part:

Once through the Nunavut world, you emerge into a theatre where you can watch a video presentation that’s one half Molson Canadian commercial and one of Bobby Gimby. And then it’s on to the Canada, Eh! Store, which has an uninteresting collection of the kind of tchotchke that can be purchased around the corner at Tweel’s.

This afternoon I got a call from Bobby Gimby’s daughter Lynn. She’d recently gotten herself wired up to the Internet, and a web search for Bobby’s name led her to my post. She was curious, and wanted to know more. We had a good chat. I had to explain, alas, that I was speaking metaphorically about her father in the video presentation, not literally — as far as I know there is no actual Bobby Gimby content at Founders Hall (although I’ve emailed them for confirmation of this).

I know I shouldn’t get so excited about calls like this, but Bobby Gimby, for whatever reason, holds an exalted place in my life; imagine getting a call from, say, Jack Kerouac’s daughter or Neil Armstrong’s son and you’ll have an idea of what it’s like.

I was just speaking with Mom about the call, and she reminded me that Bobby was also in the The Happy Gang, a seminal Canadian musical group that played on CBC Radio from 1937 to 1959. I knew of The Happy Gang when I was growing up because my parents had listened to it, but also because Gang member Cliff McKay was my best friend Timmy Whibley’s grandfather.

All of this looking backwards got me thinking about Expo 67. I’d always assumed that I’d gone, and was sure that Mom and Dad had pictures. So I phoned them to check, and neither of them had a memory of either going or having pictures. Dad called back 30 minutes later, though, with news from his diary that we had, in fact, gone twice that summer, once on Saturday, June 10 and again on Tuesday, Sept. 19, the second time with my grandparents from Cochrane. At least Dad assumes that I went twice; the first entry makes no mention of me, but he couldn’t imagine what else they’d done with me. The second entry, however, contains the line “little Peter came too.” I haven’t been called “little Peter” for a long time.

Gotta run — Amy Carter’s calling on line one.

The developer has an archive of photographs of the new Turning Torso building in Malmö, Sweden. There’s an excellent article in The New Yorker (note that they don’t seem to have permalinks for their articles, so that’s likely to break soon) about the building.

I failed completely in my attempts to take photos of the building when I was in Malmö in June — I could never get close enough to make it appear anything more than a needle on the horizon.

Remember back four years ago when I told you to clean your glasses. Well I’m back, with more exciting optical fun.

A few weeks ago, I started to realize my glasses — which I wear from dawn to dusk these days — were pressing into the side of my head. While this wasn’t noticeable for most of the day, by 10:00 p.m. or so I found that I was starting to get a headache from it — a headache that I didn’t even really know I had until I took my glasses off and felt much, much better.

So today I resolved to do something about it. I went in to Boyles Optical in the Polyclinic for a glasses tune-up. The personable Ron Boyles took the glasses into the back room, and when he emerged 10 minutes later they had been completely transformed: what had once dug into my skull now fit perfectly around my head; Ron even installed new “nose pads” to keep the glasses from sliding down my face (a problem I didn’t know I had).

So now it’s like I have completely new glasses. Headache gone, outlook on life improved, clarity amplified.

Amazing.

Okay, this might be the geekiest post I’ve ever made. But I’m just trying to do my part to feed the Googlebot.

If you are running into problems with RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL 3) not having i2c modules installed, and this is causing you not to be able to run lm_sensors, you might need to download and install the RPM called “kernel-unsupported,” for that’s where the i2c modules live.

My friend Ann Thurlow helpfully pointed out to me this evening that the poppy that we wear leading up to Remembrance Day on November 11 is supposed to be worn on the left-hand side of the body, over the heart. Up until that point I’d simply assumed that any old jaunty place would suffice.

As such I offer an apology to any veterans and others whom I’ve offended during the 38 previous Remembrance Day periods I’ve lived through when there’s been a 50% chance that I’ve had it wrong.

For the complete rundown, see this helpful Veterans Affairs Canada page, which includes:

The Royal Canadian Legion suggests that the Poppy be worn on the left lapel of a garment or as close to the heart as possible.

I realized this evening that it has been 21 years since 1984. I can remember 1984. Very clearly. And 21 years before I was born in 1966 was the end of World War II. That kind of thinking kind of compresses the time stream.

The latest update for OS X, 10.4.3, arrived on the scene today. It’s a 97MB download. That’s 5x more data than the entire hard disk on the first computer I owned that had a hard disk, and would take up approximately 70 floppy disks if it was distributed old school. Amazing.

Here’s a complete rundown on the changes included in the update.

Next up in the Google Maps experimenting game is RealCharlottetown.com, an annotated map of the City of Charlottetown.

The idea is this: take a Google Map, and wrap around it a simple “tag this place” interface that lets anyone associate a geographic location with a name, some tags, a URL and a description. Think of it as “Plazes for ditches.”

This is still a very, very beta-quality application, but it does work, and you’re free to tag all the places you like.

Some important things to note:

• As described here, the Tele Atlas map layer for the Charlottetown area is somewhat out of date; you’ll notice this particularly when you’re browsing in the “hybrid” view — sometimes the roads don’t line up with the satellite imagery.
• Still to come are things like an RSS feed of newly tagged places, XML export of all places, browsing the map by tag, etc. Stay tuned.
• No way to edit or enhance already-tagged places yet.
• The user interface, especially the visual indication of where you’re tagging a new place, needs some work.
• It seems to work in Internet Explorer for Windows, but I haven’t tested extensively.

Comments welcome.

I’m developing a follow-up application to the Interactive Charlottetown Bus Map that also uses the Google Maps API. During my experimenting, I started to notice that in the “hybrid” view, where the API returns a satellite map overlaid with a map, the streets in “reality” weren’t lining up with the streets on the map. It seems, however, that this isn’t a problem with Google’s own implementation of Google Maps. Witness the following examples:

The map above is a screen snap of my application, which uses the Google Maps API. If you know Charlottetown, you’ll realize that the map information is out of date, showing railway tracks where none are, and not showing the addition to Water Street that was completed several years ago. Looking at the same area on Google’s own site shows a different, more up to date, data set:

Notice how the railway tracks are gone and Water Street is extended. Additionally, in the “hybrid” view the streets in Google’s map “line up” with the satellite streets much better.

Am I missing something here? Do I need to flip a switch that I’m not flipping, or is Google simply serving more up-to-date maps for their own maps then they are for third-parties using the API?

For the second time in as many weeks I’ve received an email request for permission to use photographs I’ve posted to the web in other media.

First it was a request to use some of my photos of the 2004 U.S. election in the film Who Kidnapped My Vote.

Today came a request to use some of my photos of the Grand Canyon in the next edition of Landscape Architecture: A Manual of Site Planning and Design.

I’m fairly confident that I’m not a good photographer. And I’m certainly not religious about taking and posting photographs. In both cases I’ve given the okay to use the photos. Makes me wonder what would happen if independent pro photographers started exposing their entire stock library to Google.