Stephen Desroches has posted photos here and here of my paint-ball performance yesterday at the Steven Garrity all-day bachelor party. Think “cowering.”

Remember Dick Gordon? Back in the post-Gzowski days when CBC tried to mix the oil of Avril Benoit and the water of Michael Enright with a rebranded morning show called This Morning, Dick Gordon was one of the few bright lights: when he guest-hosted, the show had a grace that it never reached otherwise.

He moved to Boston shortly thereafter to host the NPR-affiliate WBUR’s morning show The Connection. I listen to it every time I’m in Boston, and find Gordon as compelling a host there as he was on the CBC.

Alas WBUR has cancelled The Connection (official announcement here).

Perhaps this means Dick Gordon can return to the CBC, where he belongs?

I’ve been experimenting with Ruby of late, and decided it would be good practice to try and code up a Plazes “Where Am I?” application to learn more about the languages ins and outs.

The result is PlazesWhereAmIRuby-0.2.tar.gz. This is my first Ruby script (or whatever they’re called), so I can’t claim that this is anywhere near Ruby best practices. But it works. To use the script:

• Get Ruby (here’s a place to start). Mac OS X users (post-Jaguar) can skip this step; you already have Ruby installed by default.
• Download PlazesWhereAmIRuby-0.2.tar.gz.
• tar -xzvf PlazesWhereAmIRuby-0.2.tar.gz
• Edit the file PlazesWhereAmIRuby.rb and replace the ‘username’ and ‘password’ with your Plazes username and password.
• ruby PlazesWhereAmIRuby.rb

The result will be something like this:

{“plazestate”=>”Prince Edward Island”, “username”=>”reinvented”, “plazelat”=>46.2361, “plazelon”=>-63.13, “plazecity”=>”Charlottetown”, “plazename”=>”Reinvented Office”, “plazeurl”=>”http://beta.plazes.com/plaze/2dbbe7a819b01317eb2ce58272b95f70/”, “plazecountry”=>”CA”}

…which is simply a dump of the parameters returned from the Plazes server.

Update: I’ve created a more general-purpose module for Ruby that implements not only the WhereAmI API, but also the Launcher API.

Skype chat with Olle Jonsson this afternoon (earlier in the day I had Skyped Olle when I meant to Skype me father):

Sorry about earlier kerflufle — I am still getting used to the UI in Skype, and I am always mistakenly calling around the globe when I mean to call across the street.

My old friend from Peterborough, Sandy Hunter, continues her adventures. In today’s episode, she goes sailing and breaks her ribs.

Dan James, Nick Burka and I are hosting a “little travel slideshow” tonight (July 19th, 2005) at 7:00 p.m. at the Queen Street Commons. Dan will show slides of his trip to Peru, Nick of his time in Paris, and me of our time in the south of France. Everyone is invited — you don’t need to be a member of the Commons or a silverorange insider.

The CBC is reporting that Air Canada will cut its direct flight from Charlottetown to Toronto this fall. They quote a Globe and Mail story that begins:

Air Canada is cancelling its Toronto-Charlottetown fall and winter flights because it’s livid about the PEI government’s subsidies for rival WestJet Airlines Ltd.

The change won’t exactly leave the Island cut off from the rest of Canada, but it certainly will have a negative impact on leisure and business travelers flying off-season because it will mean that all connections through Toronto will involve a flight to Montreal or Halifax first.

Mark McQuaid passed along a pointer to Free Beer for Geeks, a WIRED story about an open source beer project in Copenhagen.

On August 6th, Derek Martin and I will transform ourselves into The Ruk City Racers to enter the Race About Charlottetown, an The Amazing Race-style event in support of the Kidney Foundation of Canada. Here’s our (totally awesome) team photo:

Do we not look trim, fit and ready to race around the city and eat worms for charity!

Word on the street is than Dan James and Nathan Frederickson are entering a team as well.

My friends Steven Garrity and Jennifer McQuaid are getting married on Friday afternoon. Today is an all-day “bachelor party” for Steven. Things began at 10:00 a.m. at Smitty’s with a hearty breakfast and are continuing as I write with 9 holes of golf out in Cornwall. Later in the afternoon there’s a rousing orgy of paintball out in York, followed by a barbecue at Dan James’s house. I was there for the breakfast, opted out of the golf module, but I’m in for violence and food.

I snapped some photos at breakfast this morning and uploaded them to Flickr with tag garritymcquaid.