As much as I’d love to, money and schedule won’t allow me attend the I’ve cleared the time and found the money to attend the reboot conference, from June 10 to 11 in Copenhagen, Denmark. It looks like a great roster of participants, though. When we were planning Zap Your PRAM, reboot was one of our models.

Okay, I’ve decided that today will be the day I stop pining for pain au chocolate and the gentle winds of France and return my head back to Prince Edward Island. Apologies to friends and family for three weeks of plaintive moaning.

To go with the return to home I’ve got a new morning routine worked out that involves a sesame bagel with cream cheese and tomato and a pot of English Breakfast tea at Timothy’s. For $3.38 I figure I can’t go wrong.

Just to confuse my newfound sense of familiarity, my friend in the aubergine jacket has mixed up his morning routine, diverting to the under-new-management café in the Polyclinic. This means that our paths now cross at the corner of Prince and Grafton. Very confusing, but not unwelcome.

I picked up the National Post after my encounter with DJM (they sell it at the Guardian office), and noticed the following example of “corporate synergy” (red arrow is mine):

(I got the front page snap from this helpful page at the Newseum). The complete story is here (behind a fee gateway), but you can rest easy that it’s a corporate sister puff piece that extolls the totally excellent shows on Global this fall.

And finally, I noticed yesterday that Fido’s network has expanded and seems, at least from their tiny map of Atlantic Canada, to now include most of Prince Edward Island. Johnny and Jodi had abysmal service from Fido, so I’m not eager to jump ship to them, but then again they do have the cool Danger Hiptop.

Apparently there’s an Amazing Race DVD on the way. No release date yet, and you can’t place an order, but word is it’s in development.

Through the magic of BitTorrent and UKNova we’ve been able to watch a lot of BBC and ITV television recently. Here’s what I liked:

• A Short History of Tall Buildings, a series on the Imagine programme hosted by Alan Yentob, is a series of vingettes on skyscrapers and other tall buildings all around the world.
• Horizon is the BBC’s science programme, a British Nature of Things. We enjoyed a couple of episodes: An Experiment to Save the World about the search for workable nuclear fusion, and The Day the Earth Almost Died about the mass extinction of 95% of all life on the planet 250 million years ago.
• Martin Bashir, famous over here for his Michael Jackson programmes, hosted a programme in 2003 called Major Fraud: Charles Ingram’s Millionaire ‘win’ that examines how Charles Ingram cheated on the British version of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire show. The show is somewhat over-produced, but it’s an interesting tale nonetheless.
• A series called The Tube does for the London subway system what the ITV show Airline does for easyJet: it’s a “day in the life” sort of show, going behind the scenes into various aspects of the Tube’s operations.

If you use the BitTorrent search engine, searching for “BBC” or “ITV” to find British TV works well; UKNova has only British TV (although it does require registration).

Remember that School Trustee Elections are this Monday, May 30, 2005. You can find you school district, a list of candidates, and the your local polling location on the Elections PEI website.

France votes today on the European Union constitution. Here’s a sampling of the “Non” posters we saw there earlier in the month:

One small orange, one large orange, a Kinder Surprise Egg and a bottle of mineral water:

There is a store we saw many times in France called France Loisirs that sells books, CDs, DVDs and develops film. Oliver and I went into the branch in Limoges in search of a colouring book; we found a good one, but when we went to pay we were told we had to be a “member” to purchase. While I wasn’t entirely clear on the details, it seems as though you must be a resident of France to qualify. Fortunately, the kind clerk let us proceed without membership, although she made it perfectly clear with her body language that we shouldn’t return.

If anyone knows more about France Loisirs and how its works — perhaps it’s a coop like Mountain Equipment Coop? — let me know.

Today is the late Bob Hope’s birthday. Turns out he was born in 1903, the same year as my grandfather. Bob was two months older. I don’t believe they ever met.

From Doug Kaye comes a pointer to Freesound, which:

…aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.