Here in the Air Canada lounge at Dorval Airport there are two “showcasing” areas: a Sony-branded entertainment area, and an IBM-, Xerox- and Steelcase-branded business centre.

Presumably the thinking goes “we will expose our products to the elite and powerful and thus increase sales.”

“I used some peachy IBM software down there at the airport, Bob… I think we should buy IBM!”

The problem is that these “showcase” setups are usually new and twinkly and wonderful when they’re first installed. And then they get old. Fast. And people use and abuse them. To the point where here in the IBM slash Xerox slash Steelcase Business Centre the showcase is more of a disincentive.

The workstation I type this on, for example, is a slow old IBM NetVista PC running Windows 98. Internet Explorer took about 30 seconds to start up. The keyboard is a replacement — a generic one that probably replaced the original IBM one several years ago. The Steelcase furniture is dirty; part of the foam is ripped out of the side of the chair handle and it no longer adjusts properly. The sleek, well-designed lamps are missing bulbs.

The whole picture is akin to a grocery store handing out samples of rotten produce to entice people to buy.

The solution: treat showcases like this as a constantly evolving system rather than an <>install. Every time a new product is released, make sure 5 get sent over here and installed. In fact you should probably rotate bring young tech people through here — set them up with a desk and let them help people out of jams. Then give them a free trip to Paris for putting up with all the grief.

Is there a better way than podcasting to fill the empty hours in the Sargasso Sea of the airport? So taking a page out of Adam Curry’s book, here’s 5:43 from the third floor of the Trudeau (nee Dorval) Airport parking garage.

Recorded on the iBook internal microphone with Sound Studio. I tried recording from here inside the Air Canada lounge (where I’m doing the upload), but this seems to be some sort of electromagnetic vortex — flourescent lights, air conditioning, microwaves, and who knows what else — so I got a fierce background hum that I couldn’t shake.

More from Europe tomorrow morning.

I’m off at 5:00 p.m. on Air Canada (North America’s favourite airline!) to Copenhagen via Montreal and London, arriving tomorrow afternoon.

My old friend Stephen Southall will be popping in with a movie review podcast every week or two from his home in Lakefield, Ontario. I’ve seen more movies with Stephen than with anyone else, and trust his opinion more than most.

Today’s review is the Ron Howard film Cinderella Man, which opened in North America last week. Stephen’s take, in a nutshell: “there’s nothing there… it’s empty.”

New entrant into the Canadian mobile phone business, Virgin Mobile Canada has expanded their coverage to include almost all of PEI.

How can life be dull when you have a job like mine: today I am working on a system that supports, in part, the promotion of a service that promises to “remove evil spells.”

Back in April I lamented that Rogers Wireless’ implementation of “email to SMS” was, well, a pain in the ass. Because receiving an email by SMS required sending a “yes, I really want to read this” SMS back before the original email would be forwarded on.

In recent weeks Rogers has dramatically increased their storefront presence on the Island, fronted by AML Communications stores downtown in the Atlantic Technology Centre and uptown in the Charlottetown Mall, so I decided I’d try to see if anyone locally could tell me whether this “feature” can be removed.

And the news is good: Don Wills, from the Technology Centre outpost, did some research for me today, and in only a couple of hours was able to determine that Rogers can turn this off so that Rogers’ phones behave just like Aliant’s, with email appearing directly on the mobile phone without the intermediate step.

This makes the Rogers offering worthy of serious consideration; I’ll let you know how I proceed.

Have you noticed that this season in Charlottetown there are more men in their mid- to late-30s wearing hats (porkpie, fedora, etc.) than ever before? Just sit in Timothy’s for an hour and you’ll see most of them.

I watched David Letterman interview Paris Hilton yesterday. Although I’ve been drenched by the Paris Hilton meme as much as anyone, this was the first time I’d every actually seen her “in person.” It was, I think, a brilliant interview, mostly because Letterman was able to walk a line between his obvious contempt for Hilton and the realization that he is as much a part of the charade as she is. There were strong, strong echoes of Johnny Carson.