As my officemates can attest, from the large recycling bag full of Honest Tea bottles outside my door, I am an addict. Here’s a list of where to buy Honest Tea in Canada. Note that in Charlottetown, the only source I’ve found so far is the Shopper’s Drug Mart on University Ave.; they carry only four varieties there: Peach, Green Dragon, Lemon and Mint. The Green Dragon is my personal favourite and, as a result, you’ll very seldom find it in stock there, as I regularly buy it out.

Last night, instead of going to the movies as we usually do on Saturday nights, Catherine and I got obsessed with the Estonian city of Tartu. Tartu’s motto is “city of good thoughts.” That’s almost enough to get me to move there.

Where is Tartu, you might ask. Right here.

From Steven comes a link to this very interesting trip through the history of a Wikipedia article.

The screencast comes from Jon Udell, famous otherwise for LibraryLookup. It turns out that Jon lives in Keene, New Hampshire, just a hop skip and a jump up the road from Yankee in Dublin.

Amazingly enough, there’s no way to link directly to the “Now Playing” page on the Empire Theatres website for a given cinema. If you navigate down through Showtimes, then By Theatre and select Empire Studio 8 in Charlottetown, you’ll find the URL has the current date appended by their server:

…Day=2/26/05

If you remove this to make a “permalink” to the theatre, then you end up with this link to movies for December 30.

This makes the Empire Theatres website spectacularly ineffective.

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.