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.

Air Canada is in the middle of another seat sale, although the prices aren’t nearly as attractive as those they offer in the winter and spring. Oddly, the list of on-sale destinations from Halifax is limited to the following:

• Edmonton International (AB) - YEG
• St. John s (NF) - YYT
• Atlanta (GA) - ATL
• Copenhagen Airport (DK) - CPH
• Munich (DE) - MUC
• Stuttgart (DE) - STR

Can anyone tell me what those cities have in common? I certainly don’t know.

We should be thanking Air Canada, though: I’ve often said that the most debilitating challenge of vacation travel planning is choosing where to go. Air Canada has, in limiting the scope of the world, made planning much easier: will it be Stuttgart or St. John’s this year?

In a related development: Catherine and I had a brief discussion last night about whether it would be appropriate to plan a future trip to France entirely around a rather excellent cup of coffee that Catherine had in the walled medieval village of Capendac. Our jury is still out.

After being a total 100% diehard Firefox user for almost a year, I’ve switched back, at least 1/2 the time, to Apple’s Safari browser after upgrading to OS 10.4 “Tiger.” I can’t explain why this is, as Safari hasn’t changed all that much. But it seems faster and slicker and Firefox is starting to seem bloated. Probably all in my head.

Jud’s New England Journal is a longstanding audio feature of YankeeMagazine.com, one of the sites we maintain for our friends at YANKEE Magazine.

Jud’s New England Journal is a monthly audio commentary about life in New England by the always-interesting Jud Hale, Editor in Chief of the magazine. Jud is a lifelong New Englander, and his columns cover everything from New England humour to “fishing for scrod.”

The commentaries pre-date the “podcasting” phenomenon by several years, but seemed well-suited for podcast delivery, so in addition to their home on the web, there’s now a Jud’s New England Journal podcast feed.

I’m looking around for a PHP class that can generate RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures. I’ve been using rss_writer_class to date, and it’s excellent, but it doesn’t support RSS 2.0. I could roll my own, but I’d rather stand on the shoulders of giants.

Can someone smart tell me what the difference between AppleScript and Automator is under Mac OS X? Both appear to exist to allow the automation of applications, but in different ways. Are they related at all?

If you go to this page here, which is the support page for the HP PSC 2355 printer/scanner, you will see a helpful link identified as “Chat with an online technician.” As I can’t get my PSC 2355 scanning features to work after an upgrade to OS X “Tiger,” and can’t find any information about why this isn’t working on the HP website, I clicked on the link.

There’s a note on the subsequent page that reads “The HP Chat application does not support Mac Operating System. Mac customers can still access a support technician via e-mail or phone.” I didn’t see that, so I entered the requested information and clicked “Connect” and, for some magical reason, the system worked on my Mac. Here’s how it went.

Ricky: Hello Peter.

Ricky: Welcome to HP Total Care for All-in-One products. My name is Ricky.

Peter Rukavina: Hello

Peter Rukavina: I’m having problems with my HP2355 All in One.

Peter Rukavina: It’s connected to my iMac via USB.

Peter Rukavina: I’ve just upgraded to OS X “Tiger”

Peter Rukavina: I can print, but I cannot scan.

Ricky: Peter, I understand that you have PSC 2355 and installed on MAC OS. Am I right?

Peter Rukavina: Yes.

Ricky: Peter, let me explain you.

Ricky: At the present time HP does not offer Chat Support for this product in the Macintosh operating environment. HP does offer full support for your product in the Macintosh environment through our telephone support teams. They can be reached by calling us at 1-800-474-6836 or 1-800-HPINVENT. We apologize for the inconvenience and look forward to serving you.

Peter Rukavina: But your website says “click here to chat online” right on the Mac support page…

Ricky: I would like to help you to resolve the issue. As the support is restricted for Windows versions, we need to have sufficient documents to support you on MAC OS. So, I recommend you to contact the phone support team and they will help you in resolving the issue.

At this point, leaving the chat window open, I called the 1-800 number that Ricky gave me. After following through a series of voice prompts that led me to identify my product and operating system, I was told that the support centre was closed on Sundays. I returned to Ricky:

Peter Rukavina: I called your 1-800 number, but the recording there says you aren’t open on Sundays.

Ricky: Peter, let me confirm, is this the number you have called now:1800-474-6836.

Peter Rukavina: Yes. I called, followed the prompts to identify the PSC 2355 for Mac, and received a recorded message saying you are only open on Mon-Fri and on Saturdays.

Ricky: Peter, I think the MAC support team is opened from Monday to saturday.

Ricky: The support center for Windows is opened for 24 / 7.

Peter Rukavina: Is there any way I can get Mac PSC 2355 support on a Sunday at all?

Ricky: Let me check.

Ricky: Peter, thank you for your time.

Ricky: You can email the issue to the email support team and they will reply you with in 1 hour with the solution.

Peter Rukavina: Thank you for your help. Have a good day!

Ricky: Open the above link. Click on link which is under Email and post the issue to them and they will help you to resolve the issue.

I’ll let you know what happens next.

The sum total of my cycling in France was an hour long jaunt around Aniane, so I can’t claim to have real personal experience with French cycling. However I did make a couple of observations:

• Cyclists are treated with much more respect by motorists than they are here in Canada. That means always giving cyclists a wide berth when passing (a few metres wasn’t unusual), always signalling the intention to pass, and not trying to pass if conditions weren’t safe.
• If you wear cycling shorts, shoes, etc. and are “pro” or “semi-pro” then you also wear a helmet. We never saw an amateur “around town” cyclist wearing a helmet.
• Cycling seems much more popular as casual recreation; it was not unusual to be sitting at a remote café and have a gaggle of 10 or 15 cyclists show up, dismount, and grab a coffee before continuing on their way.
• Everyone, pro and amateur, uses hand signals.

I just brought my bike up from the basement this afternoon and I rode it in to the office for the first time after filling up the tires at the Ultramar gas station on the corner.

Read more about cycling on PEI from new cyclist Rob Paterson.

My friend Harold Stephens is getting together with author Robert Davis to launch a Bangkok Restaurant Reviews website. Reviews should start to flow shortly; if you hungry and near Bangkok and looking for sage advice, this will be the place.