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).

Here are three easy-to-remember web addresses to get information about the Plebiscite on Mixed Member Proportional Representation System:

• vote.electionspei.ca - where to vote
• results.electionspei.ca - results (starting Nov. 28th after 7:00 p.m.)
• display.electionspei.ca - results suitable for display with a projector

Rogers Magazines, publisher of titles like Maclean’s, has a promotion on wherein new subscriptions to their magazines can earn you Aeroplan miles.

Under the terms of the promotion, subscribing to 1 title earns 350 miles, 2 magazines earns 1,000 miles and 3 magazines earns 1,350 miles.

All other things being equal, does it make financial sense to subscribe only to earn the miles?

Let’s find out:

The cheapest three magazines one can select are Chatelaine, Loulou and Loulou (French), each of which costs $14.95 a year for a subscription.

Aeroplan allows for the purchase of up to 15,000 miles a year, and they charge 4 cents a mile. So here’s how outright purchase compares to magazine subscription cost:

It would seem that, assuming you were going to buy the Aeroplan miles anyway, it does make sense to buy magazines instead, and get the miles indirectly. Of course this is only true if you buy the cheap magazines like Lou Lou — subscribing to Maclean’s ($39.95) and Canadian Business ($34.95) would cost almost $75, so there’s no deal to be had there, unless you were going to subscribe to the magazines anyway.

Maclean’s hasn’t exactly won points in the “integrating the website with the print publication” game this week. The magazine launched a new visual identity starting with the issue dated Monday, but much of the branding on their website, including their subscription pages, still bears the marks of the old brand.

About 95% of Reinvented’s income comes from the U.S.A. So we get paid in U.S. dollars. And U.S. dollars keep getting less valuable. He’s a snapshot of the last week, for example:

In the real world of cashing cheques (or rather checks, as they spell down there) this means that a $US10,000 check cashed last Wednesday would have garnered $CDN1630 in exchange while the same check cashed today would garner only $CDN1450, a difference of $180 in only a week. That’s a lot of lunches at the Formosa Tea House.

The unfortunate irony of all this is that it’s in my best interests for the Canadian dollar to be worth less, something which happens, I presume, only when Canada is a less attractive and stable place to live. If only Quebec would separate, I could cash in!

We’re in the midst of a Plebiscite on Mixed Member Proportional Representation System here on Prince Edward Island this week: advance polls ran last week; office voting is this week; Plebiscite Day is Monday — see vote.electionspei.ca to find out where to vote.

One of the interesting side-effects of the plebiscite is that I have spent more time talking with friends and family about the intricacies of the democratic process in the past month than I have in my entire life leading up to this month. Evidence suggests that I’m not alone.

No matter the results of the plebiscite vote, an enduring legacy of the plebiscite will be a population more aware of how we are governed. And that’s a Good Thing.

Regular readers will know of my fondness for Honest Tea iced tea, and of my difficulties with finding a local supply.

I’m sad to report that it looks like Shoppers Drug Mart, the only local supplier of Honest Tea here in Charlottetown, has given up the ghost, as shelf space previously dedicated to Honest Tea has been given over to Bottle Green, a link of lightly-carbonated fruit drinks from the Mississauga-based Canadian licensee of the U.K. softdrink maker.

I’m drinking a “Cranberry & Orange Pressé” as I write. It’s certainly a cut above the common soda, but it is, alas, no Honest Tea. I purchased the entire fleet of flavours tonight, and I’ll report back once I’ve had time to sample them.