Thanks to Dan Cederholm for pointing this out: hover over a word (you need neither to click on it nor highlight it) anywhere in Mac OS X Tiger, press Control + Command + D and the dictionary definition for the word will magically pop-up right there:

So I’m sitting there inside /usr/local/src. There’s a subdirectory called sox-12.17.7. I want to move into that subdirectory. Apparently — and I only found this today for the first time — I can simply type cd sox and then press the TAB key, and the OS automagically inserts the rest for me.

I stumbled on this Google Cheat Sheet today. Very useful.

I’d like to know how many Prince Edward Islanders there have been. We all know the current population of PEI (137,734), and there are readily available statistics about births and deaths). What I want to know, however, is, from the beginning of humanity, how many people have been born on Prince Edward Island. In other words, what is the size of the community of “native born Islanders” that Oliver joined when he was born, current and “alumni” both.

By the way, there’s a very interesting population backgrounder, prepared in 1999 for the Premier’s Population Strategy. Here’s something I didn’t know, for example:

Stereotypes, both past and present, have tended to portray Prince Edward Island as a settled, stable place, outside the mainstream of population change. The data outlined above give the lie to this assumption, demonstrating that the Island has experienced substantial inflows and outflows of population throughout its history.

Here’s another interesting trend:

Families of common-law couples are still less common throughout the Atlantic Provinces than in the rest of Canada, and are the lowest in the country in PEI, at 7.7% of all families. However, this category is catching up, with particularly sharp increases in New Brunswick and Newfoundland, followed by PEI. While in most Canadian provinces, the number of common-law families with children is growing more strongly than those without children, PEI and Newfoundland are bucking the trend, with faster growth among common-law couples without children than among those with children.

The companion question to this one is “are there more people or cows on Prince Edward Island.” I was going to do a radio piece on this several years ago, but I never got around to it. Presumably this question is much easier to answer.

The Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute has an interesting article about taking kids on bikes. I’d been thinking about finding a way for Oliver and I to ride together; the article was enough to make me wait until he can ride his own.

I thought that our friend Buzz had disappeared from the blogosphere. Turns out he just changed his URL. I’ve updated the blogroll.

Back in 2003 we rented a Toyota Yaris in Spain. A year later, the Yaris became the Echo Hatchback in North America, and Steven Garrity bought one. Now comes the Yaris Verso, a European version of the Yaris/Echo that takes the front of Steven’s car and the back of a small minivan and conjoins them.

We saw a Yaris Verso on the highway in France. Web photos can’t do justice to how “miniature” it is in real life. Quite delightful really.

All of France was a smorgasbord of wonderful minature cars. We saw perhaps two or three full-size North American-style vehicles over our month there: a couple of Chrysler minivans, a Porsche Cayenne or two, and a couple of Mercedes. Everything else was as small as a VW New Beetle. Or smaller.

Steven, alas, has given up the Echo Hatchback now for what appears to be a 1983 Buick Skylark. If he would only slap the back of a VW Vanagon on it, he could be cool once more.

With barely a whimper, TownSquare.ca, Charlottetown’s well-funded, ill-conceived portal experiment has gone quiet — visit the URL and you get redirected to City of Charlottetown website.

I’d settled firmly into a post-exotic travel malaise this week. It happens every time I travel: after the constant stimulation of travel, home life seems, well, mundane. Of course returning to Prince Edward Island in the middle of a late-spring return to brisk rainy conditions makes it all the more challenging. “Why exactly do we live here,” I am forced to ask myself.

Faced with the stark reality that Prince Edward Island is not as [exotic \| stimulating \| old \| mountainous \| warm] as [exotic place] and that it doesn’t have anywhere near as wonderful the [wine \| cheese \| chocolate \| pad thai \| elephants], it’s easy to fall into a funk.

Today I popped out of the funk, as quickly as I fell into it.

Why? It’s the people, stupid. May sound trite and sentimental (or thoughtless), but I’d forgotten how many wonderful people there are here on the Island. And today was jam-packed with deliberate and happenstance encounters with an uncommon number of them, including:

• My fellow directors on the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, all of whom care passionately about the Island, and work to preserve it.
• Brother Johnny.
• Derek Martin from City Cinema, who single handedly maintains Charlottetown’s primary “big city” cultural lifeline.
• The enigmatic Eugene Sauve, owner of The Landmark Cafe, world traveler.
• The folks at the Formosa Tea House and Monsoon, who keep me alive. Literally.
• My friends and landlords at silverorange. You couldn’t ask for better lords. And today they threw away all of our accumulated garbage in the middle of a spring cleaning frenzy.
• Woman of many hats — interesting in all of them — Cynthia Dunsford.
• Diane and Jacques from Gaudreau Fine Woodworking and fibre artist Barbara Henry, all of whom I met during my time with the PEI Crafts Council.

There are many, many more Islanders, ones I didn’t happen to bump into today, who make this a good place to live. We might not have the cheese or the elephants, but we’ve got them. Thanks.

Here is the cover of the Aliant local telephone directory for Prince Edward Island released this week:

There are 62 babies pictured on the cover; there’s a note on the back of the book that says “All of the babies proudly shown here are children or grandchildren of Aliant employees or retirees.

Of the 62 babies, there are 3 or 4 that could be seen to be “visible minorities,” which Statistics Canada defines as:

The concept of visible minority applies to persons who are identified according to the Employment Equity Act as being non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour. Under the Act, Aboriginal persons are not considered to be members of visible minority groups.

Four of 62 babies is 6.45%.

The report Visible minority population, by provinces and territories (2001 Census) from Statistics Canada says that the “Total visible minority population” of Canada is 13.44% and of the four Atlantic provinces it’s 2.16%. Prince Edward Island has the smallest percentage of the four provinces with 0.88% (1,180 people of 133,385 residents).

On the face of it, then, Aliant’s representation of the babies of Atlantic Canada is a roughly accurate portrayal of the colour of the population in general.

I’m interested in what others think about this. I’ve asked Aliant for comment on the actual makeup of their workforce.