Pete Townshend turns 60 today.

As I write there has been a vote call on Bill C-43, Budget Implementation Act, 2005 in the House of Commons. You can watch the proceedings live on Parliament’s excellent ParlVU webcast site. 12 minutes until the vote, members have been called:

Update at 5:59 EDT: So the first vote is done: the Liberals, NDP and Conservatives supported it, the Bloc voted against. Results: 250 to 54. Now on to the next vote.

Update at 6:01 EDT:They’re now on to Bill C-48, An Act to authorize the Minister of Finance to make certain payments.

Update at 6:04 EDT: Liberals all supported. NDP all supporting. Parrish supports. Cadman supports. Now counting the Nays.

Update at 6:10 EDT: Conservatives and Bloc opposed. Kilgour opposed. Final tally: 152 to 152. Speaker has to vote: “I don’t know why honourable members keep doing this to me.”

Update at 6:13 EDT: Speakers votes for the bill. Motion carries. Bill stands referred to the Standing Committee on Finance.

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.