Anyone who’s been using a Mac to make the web for a while will recall the venerable Fetch, the granddaddy of Mac FTP clients.

Fetch gradually fell out of favour with Mac web developers as the world migrated from the “hey, Internet, here’s my password” world of FTP to the more secure SFTP. Many of us left Fetch aside with considerable regret, as it had a very robust feature set.

It seems that Fetch 5.0, now in private beta, will introduce SFTP support. So perhaps Fetch is back?

Our friend, the notorious E.G.C., has been tunnelling through the provincial archives and every time he comes across something related to our house at 100 Prince St., he emails it to me. Here’s what we have so far:

PEI Register Tues., 1 April, 1828. THE Office of the Assayer of Weights and Measures, is Removed to the House lately occupied by Mr. Henry Smith, fronting on the East end of Queen’s Square. March 31. G.R. Goodman

PEI Register Tues., 1 April, 1828. REMOVAL — The Subscriber has removed to the House lately occupied by Mr. Henry Smith, fronting on Queen’s Square, within three doors of Mr. S. Nelms, where all notices of MARRIAGES, FUNERALS, &c. &c. are requested to be left.

Royal Gazette Tues., 30 Nov., 1830. JOSEPH WEEKS BOOT & SHOEMAKER BEGS leave to inform the Inhabitants of Charlotte Town and it vicinity, that he has commenced business in the house of Mr. Richard Gibson, between Capt. Nelmes’s and Mr. Henry Smith’s fronting Queen’s Square - where he hopes by strict punctuality and attention to his business, to merit a share of public patronage. He has just imported an excellent supply of Sole and Upper Leather.

Haszard’s Gazette 19 July, 1854, p 3. Contract for Building a Cottage. Tenders will be received until Wednesday the 26th, at 12 o’clock at the works, for building a Cottage at the Gas Works. Plans and Specifications may be seen at Mr. Henry Smiths. By order of the Board. D. Rennie, Sec’y. Charlottetown, July 19th, 1854.

It’s easy to see why street numbers were a very positive innovation.

Last week I had the word gestalt at the tip of my tongue for days. I asked Johnny and Mom — usually they can track down almost anything in the corners of my mind — but to no avail.

I described the word to them as meaning “mindset” or “worldview” or “personal zeitgeist,” none of which was entirely accurate. I like this definition of gestalt, from WordNet:

a configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that it cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts

I remember when I first discovered the word: it was the perfect word to describe whatever it was I was thinking or writing about at the time. I write about it here simply to reinforce those neural pathways.

The relationship between Bruce (anchor) and Boomer (weather) on Compass, our local CBC television news, one that I characterized in its early days, has graduated to a new level: they’re now vacationing together — in Rimouski of all places!

Boomer did the weather live from Rimouski tonight, with Bruce making a cameo appearance. They are there for a hockey game with father (Bruce) and son (Boomer) in tow.

The nature of Islanders’ relationship with their weatherman provides a fascinating look into Island sociology: despite our better judgment, we find him endearing, and look forward to watching him on Compass every night. It makes no sense.

Travel well, boys.

By the way, if you’re looking for a way to keep the Compass in Compass, you now need look no further.

This Frommers.com article shows you “where you’ll get the most bang for your buck” for international travel by pricing common items like a cup of coffee and a movie ticket. Suddenly Argentina is looking very attractive.

I woke up this morning to the news that JetsGo has ceased operations. Oddly, I first heard the story on the 9:00 a.m. CBC news just as I woke up. In my sleepy haze, I didn’t recognize the reporter’s voice. It was my brother Steve, live from Trudeau Airport in Montreal.

The JetsGo website has either been taken off the air, or is overwhelmed with [angry] traffic.

Oliver and I took our first JetsGo flight almost three years ago. It was great. It wasn’t so great for others.

Oliver and I are heading to Ontario again in a week. I came close to booking us on a JetsGo flight, but decided, in the end, that it was more convenient (and cheaper) to fly WestJet from Moncton to Hamilton, which is closer to Mom and Dad’s house.

Having taken a European trip in the middle of the last Air Canada strike, I’m familiar with the chaos that airlines shutting down causes for passengers: if you’re stranded on the other end of a JetsGo flight, you have my sympathy.

For the record, given my history of killing airlines with my patronage, I have not flown JetsGo at all in the last two years.

This video, which talks about Second Life, provides a pretty good explanation of what it is. I’m still at a loss, however, as to why this is attractive to anyone. Maybe I a “virtualist,” but I think real life (first life?) is really excellent and I can’t imagine the need for a pretend one, especially one that costs money and time, and involves playacting with poorly rendered disembodied people on a computer screen.

That said, there’s something to be understood and examined here: the success of this sort of thing either means that I’m missing something about the joys of virtual worlds, or the virtualoids are missing out on the pleasures of the flesh.

From time to time, our upstairs officemates will take time out of their busy schedules to engage in rousing rounds of various video games. When we first moved in it was Super Mario Cart; in recent months it has been some variety of football.

Today, while deep inside the minutiae of the aforementioned art website, busily cutting and pasting French over English, I heard evidence of the latest tourney wafting down. Except, because I was deep “inside the zone,” I temporarily forgot where I was, and thought to myself “wow, there’s some pretty wild sex going on up there.”

Work, alas, will never be the same.

We’re working on an art education website. It’s in English and French. My there are a lot of art-related works with the letter (letters?) œ in them!

Now that I have a pod upon which to catch the casts, I’ve been listening a lot as I walk home, or as I fall to sleep. Here are three podcasts from IT Conversations that I really enjoyed:

• In Bill Gross: Snap, the founder of idealab! discusses their new [in October 2004] snap.com search engine. The podcast is interesting mostly because it provides a quick overview about the rationale for the new site; I was most intrigued by the references to “transparency,” which include this statistics application that lets you look at everything from what snap.com advertisers are paying per day to what keyword are popular.
• Merriman and Fitzroy: Real-Time Filmmaking on OS X is an extended-play session that walks through the process of creating a film in 48 hours as an entry in the 48 Hour Film Project. The speakers, Sean Fitzroy and Vikki Merriman, winners of the 2003 contest for their film Pie In The Sky are interesting and tech-savvy. The film, which you can watch here, is played on the podcast, so I heard it before I watched it. Interestingly, it was much, much better than I thought it would be once I actually saw it.
• Stewart Copeland: The Think Different Drummer is a presentation by the former drummer of The Police. Copeland is a good speaker, and he covers a lot of territory: digital music, MIDI, scoring films, upgrading to OS X. There are some interesting questions from the audience.

Another podcast I really enjoyed was the March 2, 2005 Daily Source Code from Adam Curry. The podcast was recorded “live” as Curry took his daughter to school. I’m a big fan of “live radio in odd locations” (I once wrote a letter to Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark and Ed Broadbent asking them to appear in a radio series I called “Radio by Canoe;” they all said no) and so I found this interesting. Curry and his daughter are both compelling personalities, and the character of their father-teenager relationship is enough to give any parent hope.