It being November 30, it’s again time to remind ourselves of the time Oscar Wilde came to Charlottetown.

It’s also a good time to remember that our friend Catherine Hennessey has been blogging longer than most — her first post was back in the winter of 2000. She’s been “on hiatus” too long (2 years!).

Johnny and I are off to Elections PEI to set up for the Plebiscite. Watch the fruits of our labours, starting at 7:00 p.m. AST, at results.electionspei.ca.

In addition to the RSS feed for the Plebiscite on Mixed Member Proportional Representation that I announced yesterday, there’s now also a podcast feed. This experimental feed contains a brief computer-generated audio update of the current unofficial province-wide percentages for “no” and “yes,” and will be updated every time one of the 90 polls reports results.

Regular readers of this space may have inferred that I am not on Jesus’ Christmas card list. As such, the yearly coming around of the “holiday season” is always tinged with a vague mist of “okay, I’ll join in, but you know this is insane, don’t you?”

The sting of the vague mist is lessened considerably given the “peace, love, goodwill towards man” upside of the holidays. And the presents. And the delightful lights. And the sparkle of wonder in children’s eyes. Etc.

So, in other words, it’s usually just best to fall in line and get with the Christmas program rather than bringing up the whole “insane” thing.

But this year, being Oliver’s kindergarten year, brings new challenges with it, and at this time of year one of the challenges is the Annual Christmas Play.

To the kindergarten’s credit, they do ask parents for permission for their child to participate, and they do warn that the play is pretty well 100% “The Christmas Story,” with angels, sheep, unpregnant women, etc. So if our convictions were steelier, and we were willing to pay no heed to Oliver’s wishes, we’d have him sit out the play. It’s a good story and all, but it’s just not our story.

But our convictions are not steely, and Catherine and I have both been child outcasts enough to know that being branded as “the weird kid who doesn’t love Jesus like we do” at age five isn’t exactly the path to getting a good prom date.

And Oliver loves singing and acting. So he’s in. As a shepherd. Tending his flock by night. Getting the glad tidings of great joy. Etc.

And we’ll go to the play, and sit happily and enthusiastically in the audience. We’ll laugh in all the right places, and cry in all the right places, and we’ll probably even sing out loud and sing out strong when called upon.

So I’m not complaining.

But it does have me thinking about the best way to match up public education and religious traditions.

The 2001 Statistics Canada Population By Religion data indicates that Prince Edward Island has 93% of the population, or 123,795 people, self-identifying as some sort of Christian variant, 625 people identifying as another religion (Hindu, Jewish, “eastern religions,” Buddhist, or Muslim) and 8,950 people (or about 7% of the population) marking themselves as having “no religious affiliation.”

Looking specifically at the City of Charlottetown, the numbers are about the same: 90% Christian, 1% “other” and 8% “none.” (By comparison, there are some Island communities, like Tignish and Wellington, with 100% Christian sign-on).

So you’ll get no argument from me that we live in a “predominantly Christian” place. It’s not everybody, but it’s pretty close.

(Which makes you wonder when it’s the 90% of my neighbours who are insane or maybe just me).

That aside, I’m not one to suggest that we emasculate Christian holidays in the name of equality. I don’t see the point of “Happy Holidays” over “Merry Christmas.” I don’t mind that there are Christmas songs blaring from speakers at City Hall throughout the season. Close down the city for a Saturday afternoon for a Christmas parade: I’m in. Think what you will about Christian birth festivals, they’re central to the Canadian winter, and to pretend otherwise — or worse to try and “universalize” them, does nobody any good.

At the same time, I’m mindful of that whole “freedom of conscience and religion” part of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Of course there’s also the oft-overlooked “Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God” part of the Charter too. Which kind of sets up a “we all agree God is charge, but we also agree that we’re all free to disagree” system.

So, back to the shepherds tending their flocks: I’m wondering if teaching the stories of the predominant religion, even with an opt-out clause, is properly living up to the “freedom of conscience and religion” agreement.

I’m wondering if, given the predominance of Christian mythology for the month, it shouldn’t be at least part of the role of public education to support and encourage tolerance, to open childrens’ eyes to the notion that the entire world isn’t like them. That it’s okay to think differently. To believe something else. Or not believe at all. Surely equipping kids with dissonance management skills is not only good for breeding religious tolerance, but might also come in handy later in life.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how to do this in a way that doesn’t offend Christian parents, doesn’t stigmatize non-Christian kids, and doesn’t suffer from the style of “multiculturalism” education that I received 30 years ago (wherein the net message was that “customs of other lands” are quaint and all, but that’s them, not us).

In many ways my personal task would be made much easier if I was either virulently anti-Christian, or at least strongly [insert name of deity here]. Or if I truly thought that Christian practice was insane. As it is, I’m generally content to be a non-affiliated free agent living in harmony with, but out of spiritual step with, 9 out of 10 of my neighbours.

Jesus, it seems, has won.

There’s now an RSS feed in place for the Plebiscite on Mixed Member Proportional Representation results on Monday night. Details and link on the Elections PEI website.

The feed — which contains one “dummy” item right now to let you set it up in a newsreader or aggregator — will get updated with a new RSS item each time one of the 90 polls reports results; at the same time an item with province-wide totals will get updated.

Remember two years ago when Romanian software came to my rescue an enabled the production of the Official List of Electors for the 2003 Provincial General Election?

Well it’s happened again.

This week I went looking for a “IAX softphone” for my Mac. A “softphone” is a piece of software (hence the “soft”) that acts like a telephone (hence “phone”). While I’ve had good success using my Asterisk system with regular old hardware telephones, it’s possible to use a computer’s speakers and microphone to replace the handset of the telephone, and that’s what a softphone allows.

Until this week the only Mac softphone product I’d ever used was X-Lite, the freeware Mac version of a cross-platform product produced by Vancouver, BC-based Counterpath. X-Lite is a “SIP softphone,” which means it uses the widely-adopted SIP protocol to communicate with the Asterisk server. And X-Lite actually works. But it’s slow to load, has a non-standard, unwieldy interface (that suffers from the “trying to look just like a phone” problem common to many softphones), and it’s bear to configure.

The Bucharest-based Modulo Consulting makes an IAX softphone for the Mac (IAX is simply a different voice-over-IP protocol, one that grew out of the Asterisk project itself) called LoudHush. It’s fast, extremely simply, worked right out of the box, and, at least in my experiments, has excellent voice quality when talking to my local Asterisk box. It needs a little more polish (but just a little), but it does everything I want it to do, and gets out of my way otherwise.

Romania is where it’s at, I tell you.

In a move to mix things up a little, Oliver and I departed from our usual post-Formosa Tea House trip to Indigo and went, instead, to Home Depot. I didn’t have anything specific in mind save for a vague sense that the time was ripe to buy some doohickies for the house. We emerged, an hour later, and $124 poorer, with pipe wrap, window film, goggles, rubber gloves, an outside electrical outlet, some expanding foam, a flashlight, four nine-volt batteries and four 100 watt light bulbs.

This was the most money I’ve ever spent at Home Depot, and I bought a lot of stuff that, all other things being equal, I would have purchased at Canadian Tire. Here’s some thoughts about the experience:

• Home Depot organizes things differently. I’m not exactly sure how differently, but I found it almost impossible to find anything in the “usual places” I would look (read “the places I’d look in Canadian Tire”). I don’t mean to suggest that their organizational system is bad, simply that it’s unusual.
• You can buy almost anything at Home Depot, from fridges and stoves to enough lumber to build a house. It’s sort of like Toys ‘R Us for adults.
• The grey-haired men in orange aprons really do seem to know what they’re talking about.
• The aisles are very pleasantly wide (except, oddly, in the hardware section, where they are way, way too narrow). Wide aisles make it easy to navigate a shopping cart around the store, and the smooth concrete floor makes for ez-glide shopping cart action.
• The smooth concrete floor ends, strangely, as you exit the main store into the entrance/exit area, meaning that ones shopping cart (and any children therein) get unpleasantly shaken all about upon leaving.
• They have really nice customer washrooms: clean, bright, spacious, and a boy-height urinal and baby change table in the men’s washroom. Oliver was very intrigued by the auto-flush toilets, and thought that I had super-powers rendering me capable of remotely flushing toilets when he wasn’t looking.
• All the giant Home Depot-like stores have a reputation (or at least a perception among the uninitiated like me) that because of their super-sized-ness, they have the best prices. I have no idea whether this is true, mostly because I have very little idea what things actually cost (anywhere). So perhaps they have excellent prices. Or perhaps they charge double what everyone else does. Who knows.

That’s all very well and good, but you know the real reason that Home Depot works? It’s because it’s completely self-service. By coincidence I made a trip to Schurman’s later in the day, and found that I had to go to the counter to ask for many of the things — lumber, insulation, etc. — I was looking for. At Schurman’s these are all “out in the back,” which requires not only ordering inside at the counter, but then traveling out into “the yard” with ones car, finding a burly man to help locate purchases and loading them into the car. At Home Depot everything is right out in the aisle — 2x4s are the new apple juice — and you just load up a giant cart and roll up to the cash.

Remember the old days when you went to the liquor store and everything was kept behind the counter? You had to know what you were looking for, know its name, and be confident enough to ask for it. It was a great impediment to easy liquor purchase. Now we have self-service liquor stores, and I can spend hours wandering the aisles comparing rum brands. It’s much less intimidating, and therefor much more purchase-friendly.

The effect is the same at Home Depot. Dorks like me, prone to describing home building materials like “that stop-sign shaped metal box that the wires run into,” can be completely comfortable at Home Depot because all we need to do is wander around until we find what we’re looking for. And even if we do have to ask one of the orange-vested elders, the DIY environment means that the intimidation factor is much, much lower (they expect you to be a dork, you expect them to expect that you’re a dork, etc.).

All that said, I’m not entirely sure that we’ll make Home Depot a regular stop on the Saturday morning rounds. The experience was pleasant, but not in the soul-stirring way that a good trip to Canadian Tire is pleasant. Visiting Home Depot feels a little unpatriotic; going to Canadian Tire feels like fulfilling ones national duty.

Postscript: Rob Lantz blogged earlier in the week about his own disappointing experiences at Home Depot. So, this time at least, I’m forced to whine “Lantz!” (using the “Newman!” voice). Yes, this is an inside joke.

I’ve been working today on enhancing the online results available for Monday’s plebiscite.

In addition to the detailed results by district, there are now poll-by-poll results available for each district (click on each district name to see them).

I’ve also set up raw data files in a variety of formats for those looking to use the data elsewhere without having to retype it all.

I welcome comments about the format of the pages, and suggestions for alternative formats that readers might find useful.

All of these pages are accessible using the handy results.electionspei.ca address.

Remember that you can vote Saturday, Nov. 26th, at your local Returning Office, from Noon to 6:00 p.m., and on Plebiscite Day, Monday, Nov. 28th, from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., at one of the polling stations in your district. Find your polling location here if you don’t know it already.

I’ve written here before about the very useful Isle Ask service offered by Prince Edward Island libraries. Indeed just this week I received a strenuously complete answer to an obscure corporate question from librarian Betty Jeffery at the University of PEI through the service.

Today I went looking for information specific to New Westminster, British Columbia, and this took me to the community’s Public Library where I was intrigued to see that they offer ready reference service using MSN Messenger.

Another excellent example of librarians embracing communications technologies to reach out from behind the desk.

It’s Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.A. which means that our colleagues at Yankee are off for the week, leaving Johnny and I free to muck about on our own.

By coincidence, there are three particularly interesting “of the day” items running on Almanac.com today:

• What’s the best way to get rid of athlete’s foot?
• Is it difficult to grow your own saffron?
• Advice of the Day: Soak pine cones in a solution of 2 pounds Epsom salts and 1 gallon of water. When the cones are thoroughly dry, toss them into your fireplace for colorful flames.

Truth be told, Thanksgiving Day was well timed for us this year, as I’ll likely be spending a fair amount of the rest of the week assembling the digital infrastructure to support the plebiscite results tabulation on Monday.

And just to ramble off completely, let me mention that, as presaged by millions of Tivo users, the presence of an Motorola 6412 DVR from Eastlink in our house for the past three weeks has completely changed my relationship to television.

First, I haven’t seen a commercial in a long time — I just fast forward through them (this isn’t a good sign for advertisers; at the very least they’re going to have to design ads that still convey a brand message when broadcast at 4x speed).

Second, because I’m not watching commercials I can watch three shows in the space of two (an hour long show is 44 minutes of “editorial”, and I tend to fast forward through the boring “establishing the scene” segments now).

And finally, I don’t need to stay up to midnight to watch Charlie Rose any more — I just set up the show as a series recording, and watch it the next morning over breakfast (last night’s interview with Maureen Dowd was a classic).