After deriding those who would “set off [by bus] to make a day of going to the mall,” this afternoon Oliver and I set off by bus to make a day of going to the mall.

We caught the 2:00 p.m. Winsloe-University in front of the Confederation Centre of the Arts. We both slipped our $2 in the fare box, only to learn that Oliver, being 5 years old minus a day, is free. Until tomorrow. So we got back $2.

Those of you hoping for the gritty experience of New York or Boston transit you will go away from a Charlottetown bus ride disappointed: in addition to the kindly driver, there were two on-board concierge-educators and we passengers were smothered with helpfulness and direction.

My jury is out on the actual buses: they are “ye olde,” and one doesn’t want to encourage the innate tendency of City planners towards that aesthetic. But now that I’ve a trip under my belt and an hour sitting inside the buses, I’m leading towards thinking of them as “Pee-wee Herman absurd” rather than “Benny Hill absurd.” I know the distinction is a fine one, but when you combine the faux San Francisco exterior with an interior that crosses city park with the set of Striptease (complete with brass-work and leather), it’s hard not to feel proud that we’re cutting our own crazy transit path and not following the footsteps of those lame conformists with regular old buses.

There were the usual bunch of rabble-rousers on board — “public transit advocates” and the like. And a half dozen people on the way to the Atlantic Superstore to buy groceries and a couple bound for the University of PEI.

The scheduling was a little rough around the edges, as was the “finding places to stop the bus that don’t block traffic,” but that’s to be expected on the first day. The wooden park-bench-style seating was, in addition to being ugly, mildly uncomfortable; the saving grace was a brand new suspension in the bus, so the ride was smooth.

We arrived as scheduled at 2:25 p.m. at the Charlottetown Mall. Unfortunately the Charlottetown Mall is about as exciting when you arrive by bus as it is when you arrive by car; fortunately the return bus was scheduled for 3:15 p.m. so we didn’t have a lot of time to kill. We went to Winners and Zellers, bought a birthday present for Isleen, ran into one of Oliver’s kindergarten friends and then, before we knew it, it was time to come back downtown.

The return bus ride was uneventful save for several additional episodes of staff niceness, including a heroic dash back to assist a man with a walker who had been waiting in the wrong place at the University. We got off the bus at 3:35 in front of the Jean Canfield Building on Fitzroy and walked up to the office. So now we know.

Transit user tips: they’re still getting used to the schedule, so it can’t hurt to be 10 minutes early at your stop, especially if you’re catching the bus somewhere other than the beginning or end of the line; the buses are quite low to the ground, and claim wheelchair accessibility (although we didn’t see any wheelchairs on board, so I don’t know how this works); kids 5 and under are free, everyone else (seniors included) are $2 each way, no change provided.

More photos over in the Flickr.

The Olympian reports on the fate of Harold Stephens’ old schooner Third Sea: Fabled boat’s journey ends as derelict in Budd Inlet.

It’s a big day here in Charlottetown: public transit has arrived (routes and schedules). And only 156 years after Upper Canada got theirs!

As our family’s car use has decreased almost down to nothing, with the remaining rationale being trips to Canadian Tire and the grocery store, that we can actually travel around Charlottetown on buses for the first time is a Big Deal.

The actual hardware implementing the system is a bizarre fleet of modern “ye olde” buses dressed up to look like trolley cars. You thought people made fun of us over the goofy Anne thing, just wait until they get a load of these.

Yet one doesn’t want to look a gift-bus in the mouth, so I’ll grit my teeth, don my waistcoat, and mount the trolleys just as if we had infrastructure not to be ashamed of.

The schedule presents something more of a challenge. Rumours were that the buses would run every half hour; indeed I had a city councillor in my office earlier in the week suggesting that missing one, and having to wait 30 minutes for the next one, might be a deal breaker. As it turns out, he didn’t know the half of it: the buses every two hours. While that might be fine for people who would set off to make a day of going to the mall, I can’t see how a schedule like that meshes with anyone’s real life.

Last night, for example, I needed to go out to Wal-mart. I thought perhaps I would wait until this morning and take the bus out rather than driving my car. So I looked at the schedule: if I caught the 10:00 a.m. bus at the Confederation Centre, I would be at Wal-mart at 10:30 a.m. I could get out, do my shopping, and catch the 11:15 a.m. bus back downtown, arriving at 11:50 a.m. Figure in time to walk to the bus, and it’s taken me two hours to do an errand which last night, once I decided to drive, took me 20 minutes.

But that’s not the worst of it: if I missed the 10:00 a.m. bus, I’d have to wait until the next one arrived, two hours later, at 12 Noon.

This morning Catherine walked out to the Superstore. She thought she might take the bus back downtown instead of a taxi. But she would have had to spend two hours waiting for the next bus to do that. She took the taxi.

Transit isn’t something you can do halfway. Buses that run every two hours aren’t simply “half as good” as buses that run every hour, or “25% as good as buses that run every 30 minutes.” Buses that run every two hours are “appointment” buses, not “transit” buses, and if I can’t think “I should take the bus instead of driving” and have a reasonable chance of catching a bus in the next 15-30 minutes, there might as well be no buses at all.

That all said, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief until I’ve had a chance to actually experience Charlottetown Transit first hand; I’m not unwilling to adjust my life to bend to the collective schedule, at least somewhat, so maybe this will work out. I just hope the City mothers and fathers have the patience to stick it out, and the tenacity to realize that before this is singing along we might need more rather than less.

The Zaurus arrived today, and thanks to help from Steven (who has a giant LCD monitor with built-in espresso maker and CF card reader), I’m wirelessly online from my couch at home. Details to follow. Cool.

I’ve switched to using Adium as my instant messaging Swiss Army Knife of choice. But I couldn’t figure out how to close the tabs that appear in the “each chat in its own tab” Adium window. Turns out the close feature is very elegant, but perhaps too subtle: hover over the icon in the tab and it morphs into a close button:

Upstart Stratford (Prince Edward Island) taxi company Taxi Taxi has added a Toyota Prius to their fleet. You can order it up by phoning (902) 393-9966.

The Complete New Yorker DVD was released last week. As an avid reader of The New Yorker, I’ve been anticipating its release all summer long; my copy arrived a few days ago, and I’ve been itching to crack it open but haven’t found a spare moment amongst all foliage, elections and BASH hacking.

In the meantime something interesting has happened: if you do a Google search for New Yorker DVD you’ll find one of my earlier blog posts is the first result. It’s higher than the magazine’s own page about the DVD, and higher than Amazon.com’s product page:

Back at reboot all the talk was about “the long tail” and I’d no idea what it meant; over lunch, Dan and Steven helpfully explained that it’s about the long drawn out part of the “power curve.” Steven’s example was that the total revenue to Amazon.com from selling one or two copies of obscure books millions of times over exceeds the revenue from selling millions of copies of Danielle Steel books (and the like).

Presumably this also pertains to marketing: Johnny said that everything he knows about the New Yorker DVD he’s learned about from weblogs, not from the “formal” publicity campaign. I wonder if they’ll sell more copies because of thousands of little mentions by passionate bloggers than from their full-page magazine ads.

I’m continuing my frantic release (aka procrastination) schedule for the Plazes Launcher BASH shell script with a new version this afternoon: here’s the updated version (version 0.4).

This is the first version of the script to approximate the behaviour of a “real” Plazes.com Launcher — not only does it handle initial registration with the Plazes.com server, but it also handles the updates every 4 minutes and re-launches every 8 minutes specified in the Plazes API spec.

This version is also laid out somewhat more modularly, and includes the option to log events to a file.

In theory there should be no reason this shell script can’t now be used as a day-to-day Plazes Launcher (setting aside, of course, that it has none of the fancy features that GUI launchers have).

The usual bunch were at lunch at the Formosa Tea House this afternoon and as we were checking out we were told about two new sub-Formosas that are opening, one on Water Street and on in the Ellen’s Creek Plaza. So now you’ll be able to buy lumber at Home Depot and stop for a stuffed bun on your way home.

I’ve modified the original Plazes Launcher BASH Shell Script to add Linux-compatibility. Here’s the updated version. This version also fixes a couple of bugs that only became evident under Linux.

I’ve not made any attempt to be “smart” about OS detection — you need to manually set an “OS” variable to either “linux” or “mac”. The only difference the setting makes is in the grabbing of the MAC address of the default gateway; I’ve added support for the output of the netstat and arp commands as they exist on my RedHat install (arp 1.88, netstat 1.42).

In theory, as long as OpenSSL and cURL are installed, this new version should work on a Linux-based mobile device like the Sharp Zaurus (mine is due to arrive Any Day Now, so I’ll be able to test shortly).