From Brenda Brady, College Librarian at Holland College, comes a pointer to Wayfaring.com, which describes itself like this:

We’d would like it to be a community of travelers who use our web-based tool to create, use, or share information about their travels and the places in their lives. We built Wayfaring because we thought it would be cool to see people share trip ideas and places with each other. That seemed like as good a reason as any.

Think of it as RealCharlottetown.com for the entire world. And with polish. And lots of features.

The Guardian is reporting that local developer Tim Banks “is asking Charlottetown Mayor Clifford Lee to remove Coun. Kim Devine as the chair of the city’s downtown revitalization committee.” Banks is quoted as claiming that Councillor Devine has an “obstructionist attitude.”

Apparently in Mr. Banks’ world, anyone who disagrees with his “take no prisoners” attitude towards developing ugly downtown buildings in the name of “revitalization” is an obstructionist.

Councillor Kim Devine is my representative on council. I voted for her. She’s also a friend and neighbour. She’s a smart person, with the best interests of her constituents and her city at heart.

All evidence suggests that Mr. Banks is a megalomaniacal developer intent, under the banner of “embracing change and seizing opportunities,” on developing Charlottetown mega-projects — like his proposed (and now withdrawn) “$8-million head office building at 190 Water St.” — while paying no need to anyone else’s opinion, least of all residents of the neighbourhoods that he seeks to cannibalize.

Under what definition of “progress” the notion of building an office tower on Charlottetown’s waterfront fall I don’t know. But I know it’s not mine.

Tim Banks is looking out for Tim Banks’ interests. Kim Devine is looking out for the interests of me and my neighbours and she has my wholehearted support in doing so.

One of Mr. Banks’ favourite political tactics is to threaten to pack up and develop elsewhere. I say let’s call him on this, vote him off the Island, and be done with his insolent whining for good.

Tod Maffin is traveling the country “to meet with Canadian podcasters so we can meet each other share ideas, swap geeky tech tips, and more.”

Tod is hitting several major (and several minor) cities across the country, from St. John’s to Whitehorse, but he’s not coming to Charlottetown!

Hey, Tod: come to Charlottetown! Podcasting was sort of invented here on PEI. And we’re podcasting pioneers to boot.

We’ll even pay for lunch at the Formosa Tea House.

We’ve put together a suite of tools to help you find your polling station location for the Plebiscite on Mixed Member Proportional Representation System.

Remember that you can vote at any of the polling station locations in your electoral district. The first advance polls open this Saturday, November 19th at 9:00 a.m.

For many years now there has been talk of creating a local Prince Edward Island “Internet traffic interchange” where traffic from one Island-based ISP to another Island-based ISP could crossover locally rather than going “out onto the Internet.” I’ve long been a supporter of such an initiative, suffering as I have from working on servers connected to Aliant while connected myself to ISN’s bandwidth.

Here’s an example of what this means, in the real world; it’s a traceroute showing the path that traffic from my iMac takes to get three blocks south to the Elections PEI server:

traceroute to www.electionspei.ca (142.176.20.4), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  gw.isn.net (198.167.161.254)  49.664 ms  2.320 ms  2.756 ms
 2  chtw-asr1.eastlink.ca (24.222.97.237)  5.730 ms  5.635 ms  3.059 ms
 3  hlfx-br1.eastlink.ca (24.215.101.161)  14.468 ms  11.344 ms  13.646 ms
 4  hlfxnsaldr02.bb.telus.com (154.11.184.37)  12.966 ms  19.410 ms  12.010 ms
 5  hlfxnsalbr01.bb.telus.com (154.11.7.226)  76.290 ms  77.149 ms  75.740 ms
 6  * mtrlpqfbbr00.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.197)  78.142 ms  77.185 ms
 7  toroonnlbr00.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.169)  77.768 ms  113.038 ms  77.092 ms
 8  wnpgmbabbr00.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.145)  95.022 ms  75.486 ms *
 9  edtnab02br01.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.85)  83.315 ms  76.504 ms  75.822 ms
10  edtnabxmbr01.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.73)  76.433 ms  76.140 ms  75.585 ms
11  clgrab31br01.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.70)  75.769 ms  76.922 ms  75.639 ms
12  * * *
13  clgrab21gr01.bb.telus.com (154.11.10.217)  75.677 ms  75.450 ms  75.323 ms
14  bell-canada.clgrab21gr01.bb.telus.com (154.11.3.46)  90.996 ms  107.607 ms *
15  64.230.249.253 (64.230.249.253)  101.971 ms  104.196 ms  106.429 ms
16  64.230.207.86 (64.230.207.86)  81.166 ms  83.564 ms  80.917 ms
17  * 64.230.240.17 (64.230.240.17)  82.586 ms  81.818 ms
18  * rtp629207rts (64.230.167.89)  95.580 ms *
19  rtp629008rts (64.230.167.74)  92.913 ms  90.662 ms *
20  rtp629048rts (64.230.203.30)  108.556 ms  90.879 ms  132.622 ms
21  alpe-pcr-oc3.aliant.net (142.166.181.150)  235.873 ms  100.957 ms *
22  142.166.182.102 (142.166.182.102)  112.616 ms  108.111 ms  101.306 ms
23  142.176.20.4 (142.176.20.4)  104.890 ms  122.166 ms  100.093 ms

Near as I can tell, my packets are going through Halifax, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton until they hit the Bell Canada network in Calgary and come on back in this direction.

All of this is happening at the speed of light, of course, so it’s not taking hours. But practical maintenance of a server over so many hops — to say nothing of what happens when things go awry — is problematic.

The logical home for a interchange like this is the University of PEI, as there already both Eastlink and Aliant bandwidth running through their facilities, they’ve got the smarts to make it work, are impartial and public-spirited and, I think, willing and ready to serve.

What’s it going to take to make this happen?

If you’re a regular customer at Timothy’s in Charlottetown, you may have seen the imposing-looking Keurig B100 on the roof of the cold drinks cooler. This is one of those “sealed pod” coffee and tea makers, where you take a manufactured, sealed “pod” of coffee or tea, pop it into the machine, and second later you have a single serving of your favourite hot beverage.

This is the same general approach taken by the Senseo from Philips that Adam Curry promotes regularly on his Daily Source Code podcast.

Timothy’s is selling a branded version of the B100, and that’s why you see a demo model in the store.

If you want to see a B100-like machine, and taste the results, drop by City Cinema for a cup of coffee or tea: Derek has the smaller cousin, the B50 in action there at the concession counter.

After 6 months of using my trust Sony Ericsson T610 phone, I’m ready to upgrade: I’ve become addicted to its built-in camera, but the image quality from the camera is abysmal, and I’d like something better.

Other than the poor-quality camera, I like almost everything about the T610: it has good battery life, syncs well with my iMac, and it has a decent user interface. It also works pretty well as a GSM phone.

So here’s a list of “must haves” for a replacement:

• As small as the T610 (or smaller).
• Bar format (rather than flip-phone).
• Bluetooth.
• Built-in camera with better than 352 x 288 resolution (which is what the T610 has). Preferably much better.
• Unlocked. GSM.

I welcome recommendations.

I’m starting to think that my Dad has the world’s largest audio archive. At least of sounds emitted by his family. Latest to turn up in his collection: “lost” episodes of the 1994 Island Morning summer series I produced for CBC Radio here in Charlottetown.

Back in those days, Island Morning was hosted by Wayne Collins (now MLA for District 15, Winsloe-West Royalty). Working with Wayne on the other side of the desk was all a cub reporter could ask for: he was curious, personable, and able to lift my words off the page and give them a life of their own.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I owe most of the credit for my brief career as a broadcaster to Ann Thurlow. Ann recruited me, edited me, and goaded me along.

Only eleven years has passed since the summer of 1994, and yet it’s amazing to me how the vocabulary we used to talk about technology. Here’s my favourite quote:

When you hear people talking about actually using the information highway today, what they’re usually talking about is using something call the Internet. The Internet is an experimental information highway that you use with a computer.

I wasn’t trying to simplify things for the “common person” — that’s the way we used to talk back then.

Dad unearthed three episodes of A Users Guide to the Future, and you’ll find them as audio attachments to the next three posts here.

Here is musician Jane Siberry’s new music store. It’s amazing. How? From the Pricing Info page:

What Should I Pay? - It’s up to you. Really. Although they’re not meant as guidelines, you can see two prices for each download. One is the “standard” price, which is just the old catalogue price before we instituted Pay What You Want. The other is the average price recently paid by customers, which is displayed when you make a menu choice. But they’re not guidelines, just fun statistics, just like the percentages of customers who have chosen each style of payment.

Like I said: amazing. This is how musicians should (and, I think, will) sell their music in the future.

Oliver and I stopped in at the “pharmacy formerly known as Pharmasave” in the Ellis Brothers Shopping Centre this afternoon only to find it re-branded at “Lawton’s.”

What’s more, our friendly Lawton’s cashier told us that with the rebranding comes a move to the old Home Hardware premises on the other side of the mall. The new store, she told us, will be much, much bigger, and will include non-pharmacy items like food and an expanded makeup section. Sounds like a run for the “everything you want in a drugstore” crowd that Shopper’s Drug mart so effectively consumes.

Speaking of Lawton’s: did you know that it’s a subsidiary of Sobeys? I didn’t.

And speaking of Island pharmacies: the big renovation at the Parkdale Pharmacy — a job that’s seems to have been going on for almost a year — looks like it’s nearing completion. As our family doctor has just moved in to the offices right next door, I suspect this cold and flu season we’ll be spending a lot of time buying Kleenex there.

And speaking of Shoppers Drug Mart, they’ve fallen down again in their Honest Tea stocking. They had a shipment it about 3 weeks ago, and I bought a good chunk of it, but they’ve been sold out for the last two weeks. I wonder why the giant glaring tea-less whole in the health foods cooler doesn’t prompt someone to make an order?