Maybe the real problem in New Orleans was that everyone in a position to plan for emergencies simply assumed that everyone has a car.

Think about it: if an announcement came that you had to leave your home right now because of an impending disaster, how would you get away? And if you have a car yourself, how many of your neighbours don’t? Would you remember them? How would we ensure that nobody got left behind?

I live on a small, narrow Island. My house is 3 blocks from the ocean. I have no idea what, if any, plans are in place to get me, my family, and my neighbours to safety is Katrina-style weather was on its way.

Well, technically Shelagh Rogers did not say “shit” herself, she lured one of her minions into doing so, in this CBC lockout podcast.

But it got me thinking: although the CBC lockout podcasts are messy and angry and flippant and not at all “professional” like the “real CBC,” they also serve to make the CBC presenters — like Shelagh — a lot more likable and, well, human.

I’ve heard Bill Richardson and Ian Hanomansing and Kelly Ryan and a gaggle of other CBC hosts through their podcasts, and I think they’re making better radio than when they’re forced inside the straightjacket of CBC “authoritativism.”

Yes, there is a place for rigor in broadcasting, and that is indeed one of the appeals of the CBC. And I’m not quite sure I’m ready for an anarchic improvised Island Morning.

But perhaps in the lockout CBC staff are rediscovering parts of their soul that, of necessity, they lock away while they’re working “on the inside;” would it be such a bad thing if, once they’re let back inside, they keep some of that soul around?

This is very last-minute notice, but if you’re in front of a PBS station tonight (Monday) at 11:00 p.m. Eastern and you’re interested in food, tune in to Charlie Rose for guests Johnny Apple, Thomas Keller and Gordon Ramsay. Appears to have been replaced by a Supreme Court rebroadcast.

My first time in front of Executive Council (aka “Cabinet”) I was more “below” than “in front.” The Deputy Minister of Economic Development of the day, Rory Beck, was making a presentation to the Catherine Callbeck Cabinet, and I was asked to accompany him and run a laptop showing a Harvard Graphics presentation. I was positioned — I’ve never been sure whether it was by design or accident — on a chair about a foot lower than the rest of the chairs in the room at a small child-sized desk. If the effect was to make me feel diminished in the presence of greatness, it worked.

Amazingly enough, the presentation went off without any technical glitches, and I emerged with my contract for services intact. I was so relieved, I celebrated with a steak dinner at the CP Hotel.

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll have the pleasure again, albeit under much different circumstances. Cabinet is holding meetings in various different locations around the province this summer, and tomorrow they hit New London. The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust is making a presentation; Hon. Marion Reid, our President, will lead things off and I will follow up with a brief “this is what we do and how we do it” nuts and bolts session.

I’ll let you know tomorrow afternoon what sort of chair I get to sit at, and whether my laptop explodes or not.

File this under “best foliage quote of the year.” In this L.A. Times story, Yankee’s Internet Editor Barbara Hall is quoted:

And yet, “You can’t predict foliage,” said Barbara Hall, Internet editor of Yankee Foliage.com. “We’re not in charge of it; it just happens.”

Foliage is my obsession this week as we help Yankee prepare for the fall colours (or, in their language, fall colors). Watch YankeeFoliage.com if you’re going to be in New England for the next while (or if you’re just leaf-obsessed).

It says here that The Complete New Yorker will work on both PC (Windows 2000 and XP) and Mac (OS 10.3 or higher).

I pre-ordered mine back in June, so this is good to know.

You may think that, as a Canadian, you’ve already bought data about your country with your tax dollars. But you are wrong. Here’s a contrast between Canada and the USA regarding availability of digital geographic names data:

• Canada (cost: $660.00)
• USA (cost: free)

Ironically, you can get some Canadian data from the USA. For free.

I’ve been doing some hacking with the downloadable files available from the U.S. State and Topical Gazetteer page. Each of the 1,844,756 features in the Gazetteer has a “feature type” associated with it; here’s an interesting breakdown of the number of each feature in the 50 states:

If you use TextWrangler to edit PHP files, you may find the following shell command useful (pointer from here):

defaults write com.barebones.textwrangler Services:ADCReferenceSearchTemplate “http://www.php.net/search.php?show=quickref&pattern=%@”

This will set the TextWrangler “Find in Reference” contextual menu item to look up the selected text on the PHP website (rather than on the Apple Developer Connection site, which is the default).

Here’s how the world of public relations and marketing works now:

1. In June I go to the reboot conference and meet the guys who made Plazes.
2. Plazes is cool, so I join up and start evangelizing.
3. Months pass.
4. Robert Scoble blogs about a need for an open database of locations.
5. I recommend Plazes.
6. Robert signs up and makes his current location a Plaze.
7. Robert says Plazes is cool.

And now more people will know about Plazes. Important things to remember:

• I didn’t make Plazes.
• I have no stake in Plazes (other than an emotional one).
• It’s a Sunday on a holiday weekend and it’s after supper in Berlin, where Plazes calls home, just after lunch here, and just after breakfast where Robert is.
• Robert and I are connected by a very thin, mostly digital thread: we met at Pop!Tech four years ago, and again at reboot (ironically). But I’m not an “insider” and, mostly, I just read his blog.
• All of the above happened in the space of about five minutes.

So in there somewhere are two continents, three time zones, some blog posts, and a neat product. No money has changed hands. No advertisements in trade publications have been purchased. And yet more people will know about Plazes.

This is the new world of PR.

Postscript: Stefan Kellner from Plazes emailed a link to this interesting page of Plazes statistics. I pulled off the following graphic, which shows a jump in the number of Plazes after Robert’s blog post: