You would think that it would be in the best interests of telephone companies to make it easy to find telephone numbers on the Internet. It’s a lot cheaper to have a web application give out numbers than it is to hire someone to do it. And the easier it is for people to find phone numbers, the easier it is for them to make phone calls, which is presumably a Good Thing for telephone companies (although admittedly less good than it used to be).

So why does canada411.ca, the “official” way of finding telephone numbers from Canada’s incumbent telephone companies, look so ugly:

Not only is there flashy advertising all over the page (which causes it to load quite slowly, in addition to being annoying), but the user interface is pretty stupid: why not simply have Google-style simplicity with one text field that lets me type in anything from “Peter Rukavina in Charlottetown” to “Pizza Shop near Bloor and Yonge.” Surely the telephone company computers are smart enough to figure that out.

I’ve been on the board of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust for several years. We hold our monthly meetings at Ravenwood, on the Experiment Farm in uptown Charlottetown.

Every time a monthly meeting comes up, I take the car into work, and then drive up to the meeting. It’s usually a hassle finding parking, and Charlottetown traffic (such as it is) is pretty heavy around the noon hour, so it’s not a pleasant drive.

For some reason it dawned on me this morning that I might be able to ride my bike to the meeting instead of driving. While this might be an obvious approach, and one you think would have occurred to me earlier, it’s important to recall that people in Charlottetown drive everywhere.

So although I’ve managed to largely avoid driving the five blocks from home to office every day, the notion of driving out past Allen Street — almost to the K Mart! — simply never seemed possible.

Except that today, it did.

I made sure to set off early — I left at 11:15 a.m. to leave plenty of time to get there by 12 Noon. I imagined that to go that far might take 30 minutes, maybe 45.

I got there in 8 minutes. Without pedaling very hard.

Although I was somewhat fatigued by the trip — more a reflection of my total lack of fitness than the degree of difficulty — it was generally a pleasant way to get there, and, all things considered, was net positive on time, money and fitness (mine and the planet’s, etc.).

If we set aside the fact that I may simply be an idiot, it seems like I’ve discovered a major barrier to the adoption of alternative (i.e. non-automobile) means of transport: a well-ingrained status quo. Olle rides his bike to work every morning in Copenhagen because that’s what everyone else is doing. I drove my car to meetings for the same reason. How on earth are we ever going to remember to take our wacky new olde buses when they hit the roads this fall, let alone remember that most of our city is within easy walking or biking distance.

Steven reports that Barack Obama has a podcast. I’m convinced that he will some day be President, so you can tune in now for a preview of U.S. history. Here’s a photo a took, by chance, at the Democratic National Convention last summer:

It turns out that the domain name registration for colemanlemieux.com, one of our clients, was handled through DirectNIC, a New Orleans-based company. Doc Searls interviews Sigmund Solares, CEO of DirectNIC, about how they went through Hurricane Katrina with no downtime. It’s a great interview, and well worth listening to if you’re responsible for disaster response planning for a data center.

The wonderful irony is that, right in the middle of the hurricane, I had to made a DNS server change. I had no idea DirectNIC was in New Orleans, and blithely made the change unaware of the technical miracles that were holding the infrastructure I was using to do so together.

Back in the early 1990s CBC Prince Edward Island reporter Pat Martel interviewed me for Compass. It was my first television interview and, remarkably enough, a job I got two years later came as a result of someone seeing that interview. Pat, along with his 5,500 colleagues at CBC, is locked out of his job. But now, through the magic of QuickTime, he’s back.

Somehow I missed the fact that the local branch of the Canadian Media Guild has its own website.

If you live on Prince Edward Island, you may want to drop by the Emergency Measures Organization website. If we’ve learned anything from Hurricane Katrina it’s that we’ve all got to take more responsibility for dealing with disasters. Can’t hurt to learn now, before disaster strikes, what the theoretical provincial response is.

Last night this interview with Geoff Davis, President and CEO of Unitus showed up on my iPod. Unitus calls itself a “global microfinance accelerator.” Here’s their pitch:

A $100 loan from a microfinance institution can be all it takes for a hard-working self-employed woman to lift her family out of poverty. Our innovative approach as a microfinance accelerator can bring this economic miracle to millions of the world’s poor.

At Unitus, we bridge the gap between making a donation and making a difference. Please unite with us to create a permanent solution to global poverty.

They’re hiring.

Ever since I “upgraded” the Mac OS X software for my HP 2355 “all in one” printer/scanner, the following HP Software Update message appears every day and random intervals:

Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad, has a useful post about the Northwest and Delta airline bankruptcies. Salient point:

If you haven’t bought tickets yet, don’t buy tickets on an airline that is already bankrupt. A bankruptcy filing is your final warning before an airline could be shut down by the bankruptcy court, leaving ticket holders stranded. A better schedule, a more direct route, or a lower price probably aren’t worth the greater risk that you might not get where you are going at all, or might not get back home.

Read the rest of the post for more details.

This development is of particular importance to Prince Edward Island, as Northwest’s feeder airline, Northwest Airlink, operated by Pinnacle Airlines, is the only airline operating direct flights from Charlottetown to the U.S. Here’s Pinnacle’s stock price.

If for some reason you need email me about something to do with Rolex watches — you want to send me one as a gift, you want me to redesign the Rolex website, you have a Rolex watch stuck in your ear and need help getting it out — please be aware of the email rule added this afternoon:

For some reason the only spam I’m getting these days is Rolex spam. Yes, I know that this rule won’t catch everything, but it will cut it down some. If you want to email me about Rolex watches and want the email to get through, just refer to “a nice watch” instead (“I have a nice watch stuck in my ear…”).