It seems that there’s a Frank Rukavina running for the Conservatives in the putative upcoming federal election. Frank Rukavina philosophy:

I hope you will give me the opportunity to be your voice in Parliament to fight for better health care, lower taxes, the abolishment of the gun registry, and for better support for our municipalities. We need to fight for a more transparent government, for renewed fiscal responsibility, and for the end of cronyism and corruption in Ottawa. It is time to send the Liberals a clear message - we are sick of their tired and arrogant regime.

And if that wasn’t enough, Mary Ann Sures, a “longtime personal friend” of Ayn Rand, was born Mary Ann Rukavina. She and her husband Charles wrote the memoir Facets of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand philsophy:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

The PEI Public Transit Coalition has a weblog.

I received a very complete and helpful reply to an email query to Trius Tours about why the bus never came down Prince St. on Saturday; apparently the Richmond-Sydney loop that Route #4 is said to make on the route map was removed because of traffic and construction problems.

In today’s tea house news: the folks at the Formosa Tea House hope to open their new Ellen’s Creek Plaza branch sometime later this week; plans for the Water St. branch have been delayed. Remember that you can take the West Royalty - North River Rd. bus directly to Ellen’s Creek Plaza from downtown Charlottetown.

Dan mentioned last week that he’d heard that the Formosa had a new branch in Halifax; had that confirmed today. It’s in Dartmouth, and they’ve taken over the operation of an existing restaurant. Didn’t get location or hours details.

Catherine reports that she and Oliver had lunch at the new Aing’s Tea House on Grafton Street opposite the Polyclinic. Today is their opening day. There are noodles, stuffed buns, fried rice, and a variety of teas. No word on hours of operation yet. Stay tuned for more.

The CBC reports at this hour that “the Canadian Hurricane Centre has issued warnings for both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. However, the Island should be sheltered from the worst of the weather.”

Prince Edward Island’s motto is “Parva sub Ingenti,” which can either be taken as liberating (this brochure about our Great Seal says “the Motto of Prince Edward Island suggests nurtured growth from small beginnings to greatness”) or emasculating (the more usual, and literal translation of “the small under protection of the great,” positioning us more as the puny kid on the playground with the big brother to watch out for him).

Today, though, it means “Nova Scotia and New Brunswick take a beating for us,” and for that we should be thankful.

Thanks to the wise counsel of my colleagues upstairs, I’ve set up a WebSVN server that allows painless browsing of the Charlottetown Transit Map and Plazes repositories.

WebSVN is set up at:

While we’re on the topic of the lads, they’ve been busy with their own open source project, a web application toolkit that makes it easy to plop oft-used widgets into PHP5 code.

My first involvement with the apparatus of the City of Charlottetown came in the mid-1990s when I worked on Victoria Row and we were working with the City to have the street turned into a pedestrian mall during the summer months. It didn’t take very long before the name Dukie came into the picture, often used as “we’ll have to check with Dukie about that.”

In the intervening years I’ve known Dukie as “one of the guys who responded to a fire call at the COWS building at 3:00 a.m.,” “landlord to the original Little Mac Shoppe,” and “guy who received the gift of a lawn tractor when he retired.”

I still don’t know what Dukie’s job with the City of Charlottetown was. Indeed although he is purported to be retired, I continue to see him around a lot in what looks like an official capacity. Or maybe after having had an official capacity for such a long time, it’s hard to shrug it off.

All of which I was prompted to think about as I returned a video of Closer this morning and had to walk by Dukie’s house on Grafton Street where I spotted the photo shown here: “Private Parking: Dukie.”

I assume Dukie has a last name. I’ve just never heard anyone use it.

I realize that I’m probably quite late to the party on this one, but I’ve become quite fond of The Mountain Goats after hearing their song Cotton used as music on Weeds.

In other music news, my Dad points the way to Gogol Bordello. I’m still trying to understand.

After using SquirrelMail for our web-based email for several years, I installed the sexy new RoundCube webmail system over the weekend. It works very well — very polished and intuitive and very easy to install. Makes SquirrelMail, IMP and the like feel like 1996.

It’s a rainy Sunday. I just ran over to Tim Hortons for a break. I saw “Café Mocha” on the menu, and my head immediately took me back to last week in Montreal where Johnny and I had cafés mocha and chocolate croissants on Mont Royal. It turns out that Tim Hortons has a rather different way of making a café mocha:

1. Pour half a cup of regular Tim Hortons coffee into a cup.
2. Fill the rest of the cup up with hot chocolate from the hot chocolate machine.
3. Remove a special café mocha bucket from the fridge.
4. Take bag of white gloop from bucket and squeeze on top of coffee/hot chocolate mixture.
5. Take cinnamon shaker from bucket and sprinkle.
6. Hand to customer.

The result? Something that tastes vaguely like a café mocha, albeit with a subtle undertaste of plastic wrap.