Back in Peterborough I babysat a couple of times for my friend Sandy Hunter. She lived in an interesting one-room loft on the top floor of Sam the Record Man downtown. I think she paid me in paintings.

We left Peterborough around the same time, and had the odd experience of renewing contact by each hearing the other interviewed by Peter Gzowski on Morningside the same season. Our mutual friend Patrick has kept us in random touch too.

And now, these many years later, we’ve ended up working on the same stuff.

Sandy emailed today that she’s started a new weblog which she says she’ll use to “document the journey I am taking.” It’s an interesting and insightful read.

We ran the Vacancy Information Service for many years for TIAPEI. The service provided information about lodging vacancies on PEI by telephone or from a website. The telephone service, which was expertly crafted by Gary Clow (son of Bobby Clow, of Clow’s Red and White in Hampshire), was designed to provide callers with a random selection of five properties with vacancies in their area of interest.

The service was truly random: every time a new call came in, a brand new random selection was culled from the database and presented. Over the season of thousands of telephone calls this meant that every property with vacancies had an equal chance of having their information delivered to callers. We had statistics that showed this clearly.

The problem was that although this was true over time it wasn’t, of course, true for just one or two calls. Because every property had an equally random chance of being selected during a given call, it was quite possible that a specific property would show up in two successive calls. Or that a specific property wouldn’t show up in three or four successive calls.

If you were Bob’s Bed and Breakfast, and you called in twice and heard Jane’s Bed and Breakfast on both calls, you assumed that Jane was somehow getting a “special deal.”

And that’s the problem with randomness.

I had cause to think of this today when I read this Newsweek article that calls into question the randomness on the iPod shuffle. I think the problem is the same: if the iPod shuffle is truly random, then it’s likely that it will appear that certain songs are being preferred over others, even if, over the long term, the exposure of every song is statistically equal.

And if Apple’s experience is anything like ours, a lot of people will never believe that.

Earlier in the week I wrote about Whole Earth magazine, and mentioned that it had “given up the ghost.”

As any regular reader of Whole Earth, or its predecessors the Whole Earth Review and Coevolution Quarterly will remember, the magazines were always on the edge of financial collapse, and it was a rare issue that didn’t include a plea for financial assistance (like this one), or a story about how “we’re out of the woods now that we’ve found a new generous benefactor.” I remember seeing Marlon Brando’s name in the list of the most generous benefactors that ran at the back of every issue, and wondering how that donation happened.

It seems that this time the magazine has actually really died. There’s a blog post about this, which includes many comments from those involved that tells at least part of the story.

There’s a sort of obituary on the Utne website. Selected articles from the never-published last issue, Spring 2003, are available online as PDF files.

I remember back many issues — maybe it was the late 1980s? — when the magazine had a deal wherein if you made a substantial donation ($5000?), your gift would be an invitation to spend time in the magazine’s library in Sausalito. I remember seriously considering selling all my stuff and taking them up on their offer. I kind of wish I had. Apparently all or some of the library is or will be relocated to the Thoreau Center in San Francisco.

My old friend Bill Kimball had, I think, close to an entire collection of back issues of the magazine on a bookshelf in his living room on Union St. in Peterborough, all the way back to Coevolution Quarterly issue #1. I was very jealous. I wonder if he still has them. For my part, I’ve got a pretty complete collection of the various editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, and a good chunk of the Whole Earth Review from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.

Whole I mourn the magazine’s passing, it’s remarkable how much of the back catalog still has relevance, even though we’ve gone through one, two, three technological revolutions since much of it was written. If you see a copy of of the Catalog or the magazine at a flea market, pick it up; still a good read.

Because services like this that connect IP addresses to geographic locations are becoming more prevalent, I’m starting to see the occasional offer for “Sexy Cornwall Women Want To Meet YOU” when I visit various websites. This is because the IP address here at the office is part of a block registered to ISN, and ISN’s mailing address was in Cornwall when the IP block was registered.

Derek has just updated the City Cinema website with the film schedule up to April 3. That’s spring!

For some reason there is a cardboard box that used to hold Mcdonald’s french fries sitting outside my office in the hall. One of the ingredients listed on the box is “beef tallow.” I wondered to myself “what is beef tallow, anyway.” So I found this nutritional analysis of a cup of beef tallow.

Back in the early 1980s, after I turned 16 and could borrow my parents’ car, I used to drive down into Hamilton to the H.G. Thode Library of Science and Engineering. Because the library building is round, because it’s located next door to McMaster University’s own nuclear reactor, and because of the library’s futuristic-sounding nickname of “Thode,” it felt a lot like driving down into the future.

My reason for driving to Thode was that they had subscriptions to both Byte and Creative Computing magazines (both published in Peterborough, NH near Yankee as it turns out). For a geekly, curious teenager like me, those magazines were fascinating reading, and I regularly photocopied pages of BASIC programs from their pages and took them home to type into my TRS-80 Model I.

One of the features of Byte back in the day was a column called Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar. Written by engineer Steve Ciarcia, it was a monthly “DIY” column that showed you, say, how to make your own remote control for your television, or how to make a 1200 baud modem. Most of what was covered in the columns was way, way above my head (I could barely manage a soldering iron, and still can’t), but the notion that the technological world could be so malleable was extremely alluring to me, and I looked forward to each new issue.

Several years later, after moving up to Peterborough, I discovered Coevolution Quarterly, which grew out of the Whole Earth Catalog and later became Whole Earth Magazine (and which recently gave up the ghost). While the Whole Earth sensibility was different, it was still firmly rooted in the “DIY” ethic: self-reliance, access to tools, and so on. I became hooked, and bought every back issue I could lay my hands on.

In the same vein now comes a new quarterly, Make: magazine from O’Reilly. My first issue arrived today in the mail, and I’m happy to report that it reads like the spiritual ancestor of both Circuit Cellar and Whole Earth. It’s about malleable technology, hacking, self-reliance, and remodelling the world. It’s a spirit I still love, and even if I don’t build a rig to let me take aerial photographs from a kite, or hack my XM satellite radio, I’ll still slurp it all up eagerly.

Make: has a weblog where you can gather their ethic via RSS. It’s a worthwhile print subscribe, though, if you share my passion for going malleable.

I was expecting to be able to return to the Formosa Tea House tomorrow for lunch; alas walking by today I saw a sign on the front door advising that they’ll not reopen until this Friday, February 25. Three more sleeps.

I’ve got an icon problem. Look at the screen snip here: it shows a section of my Mac OS X dock, with icons for (from top to bottom) Mail, Firefox, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, YummyFTP, CocoaMySQL and BBEdit.

It’s the five round icons in the middle that are causing me problems: they all look the same. I don’t mean “look the same” in the sense that they are visually identical, but rather in that flick of a second when I’m navigating from one application to the next, or selecting an application from the dock, they’re similar enough so that it’s easy to confuse one for the other.

About half a dozen times a day, I find myself, say, clicking on YummyFTP when I meant to click on CocoaMySQL.

I’m not sure if this is a failure of the OS, or a failure of the icon designers, or a failure of my own visual processor. Or not a failure at all.

But it does seem that a lot of OS X applications use an orby sphere as the superstructure of their icon — perhaps inevitable given the whole “worldwide” part of the www — and that is the basis of the visual confusion.

Can anyone tell me why a Google image search for site:almanac.com produces lots of results, but a similar image search for site:ruk.ca produces no results?