Air Canada ‘upgraded’ their aircanada.com website today, and in doing so they appear to have left Firefox (and Safari) on the Mac behind:

The “Viewing Tips” section of their site says, in part:

aircanada.com is designed to be compatible with most browsers on the Windows platform, but we recommend specific configurations. Many older versions of these browsers do not support the latest Internet technology (such as style sheets, JavaScript, SSL security or frames).

Their “Recommended Macintosh Configuration” is “Macintosh OS 9 or later / Internet Explorer 5.0 and above.”

Has anyone at Air Canada actually ever used Internet Explorer on a Mac?

I am not versed in the difference between the PAL and NTSC video standards, but I was operating under the assumption that to play on a North American television, video had to be in the NTSC format. While this might be true for other applications (videotapes?), it appears that if I have a PAL-format MPEG movie, and I use Toast to burn a VCD of it, I can still watch it on my (cheap, recently purchased, no-name) DVD player. Curious.

Our two-year-old 10GB iPod has died. After refusing to accept a charge for a week, it will now no longer start, and isn’t recognized by my iMac when I connect it by Firewire. Here’s what Apple wants to repair it, out of warranty:

A brand new 20GB iPod (they don’t make the 10GB ones any more) costs $299 $429 (I had originally looked up the U.S. price — sorry for the confusion!).

Ring ring.

“Hello, Indigo.”

“Hi there. How late are you open tonight?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“Great, thanks.”

“You gonna drop on in?”

“Sure.”

And I did.

I normally avoid Java applications, mostly because, at least in the early days of Java, such applications tended to be clunky, slow, and easily breakable. A lot has changed, and without speaking directly to the “is Java still evil?” question, I point to Azureus as a very positive example of a non-clunky, non-slow, and, at least so far, non-easily-breakable Java application.

Azureus is much more capable BitTorrent client than the ‘official’ Mac client: it gives you a lot more information about what’s flowing up and what’s flowing down, and it allows you to throttle bandwidth used in both directions.

I’ve been taking it for a ride this afternoon, and so far I’m quite impressed. Thanks to Ben Hammersley for the pointer.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, the song in opening of Closer trailer is a version of The Blower’s Daughter found on the Damien Rice album O. More details here and video of the song here.

The trailer for the new movie Closer is so finely targetted at my demographic it’s painful: I will have no choice but to see the film.

What’s interesting is that the trailer shown in theatres (this one with Damien Rice/Suzanne Vega music) is running in parallel with another one (this one with music by Jem) on television; the TV trailer doesn’t draw me in at all, and is obviously meant for a group of people with completely different tastes. I wonder which group will actually enjoy the movie?

The trailer for Spanglish, on the other hand, appears to try to appeal to all demographics in three minutes and five seconds, running through a dizzying variety of musical genres and takes on the plot in that short space. Having seen it perhaps a dozen times now, I still have no idea what the film is about, or even whether it’s a comedy or a drama. And rather than being left hungry to find out by actually going to see the it, I’ll avoid it, if only due to the risk that the confusing trailer is simply a reflection of a confusing film.

Finally, the trailer for the ABC special Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven is so horrifyingly bad that I’m tempted to actually avoid the living room at our house on Sunday night on the off chance that I might accidentally click over ABC and see part of it. What the hell is that beard that Jeff Daniel’s is wearing?

Back about 25 years ago, I worked part-time at my local Canadian Tire store in Burlington, Ontario. I started off “on the floor,” selling Commodore 64s and autobody fiberglass, and later moved upstairs to work in the comptroller’s office making Lotus 1-2-3, then a novelty, do nifty things with wage and sales analysis.

The owner of that Canadian Tire store was a man named G.W. Line. We called him “Mr. Line.” He was a smart guy, who ran a tight ship. He gave good Christmas bonuses, and was generally well-liked by his employees. And he didn’t shy from coming “out on the floor” to talk to the people who worked for him.

Tonight, looking over a donation solicitation from the QEH Foundation here in Charlottetown, I remembered a story that Mr. Line told me once.

He was on the Board of the Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital Foundation (two of my brothers were born there), and part of this meant going “door to door” to larger businesses to seek donations. Starting out that day, he’d hit a couple of places that he was sure would give generously, only to find himself walking away with small cheques of $100, or $500 — this from businesses doing millions of dollars worth of business each year selling cars or building houses. Towards the end of the day, somewhat dispirited, he dropped by Voortman’s, a cookie maker up the road and across the highway from the store.

He was shown into the Mr. Voortman’s office and he made his sales pitch. Given the day he’d been having, he didn’t expect a lot.

After hearing what he had to say, Mr. Voortman took out his cheque book, made out a cheque for $50,000, and handed it to him. “Obviously the hospital is important to my community: you look after my employees, my customers, and my family. It only makes sense that I contribute.” And that was that.

Needless to say, Mr. Line’s day was made.

When I think about all that my small family has been through at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital here in Charlottetown over the past 10 years — everything from gallbladder surgery to knee surgery to having a baby — it’s hard not to feel like Mr. Voortman. We don’t have $50,000 to donate, of course, but every year we try to make a donation. It only makes sense.

Our regular little Formosa Tea House lunch group shared a table today with Jim Lea, President & Chief Executive Officer of Maritime Electric. We’d been talking a lot about energy lately, and we invited Jim to lunch to help fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge.

One of the interesting things I learned is that Maritime Electric can, without a lot of difficulty, provide information about the current Island-wide demand for electricity at any given time. I call this “the big VU meter,” and we encouraged Jim to look into adding a “live” reading on their website.

Thinking about this more this afternoon, it occured to me that in addition to this, it might make sense to provide the same information in machine-readable form, perhaps as an RSS feed, or in an alternative XML format.

Why?

Because then others could build energy-saving applications built on this information.

If I could always grab the current electricity demand number over the web from Maritime Electric, I could, for example, write an application that would turn my clothes dryer on or off depending on current conditions. Or I could automaticaly turn the air conditioner down in the server room. Or automatically turn off my Christmas lights.

Not everyone is going to do this, and there’s probably more “neato” potential than practical energy savings to be derived, at least right now. But the general principle — a utility freely sharing information, in an open format, using the Internet — has a lot of potential because it moves us from a model where we’re all working in isolation to a model where we’re working as an interdependent, symbiotic system.

A good friend has invited my entire extended family to her house for a Christmas Eve open house. She sent along the following rules for the occasion:

• Show up.
• Under no circumstances dress up.
• Stay as long or as little as you like.
• Do not even think about a hostess gift.

This reminded me of an overnight visit to my friend Simon’s father’s house on the shore of Lake Huron about 20 years ago. Simon’s Mom had died a few years before, and I was driving Simon home to spend Christmas with his father, and spending the night before continuing on to my own family.

Being naturally socially ill at ease at the best of times, never having met Simon’s father before, and knowing him only as a public school teacher, a Mason, and through Simon’s stories about growing up, I was a little intimidated by the prospect. Even more so when he announced that “there are three hard and fast rules about staying in my house.” I shuddered: no gambling, no swearing, no rock and roll — something like that — was what I imagined was about to be presented.

“First,” he said, “you can sleep in as late as you like, and nobody will bother you.”

“Second, you can spend as much time in the bathroom as you like, and nobody will bother you with a knock on the door.”

“Third, you can eat as much or as little as you like for supper, and nobody will bother you about it.”

We had a great night: I was put completely at ease right from the bat, and we all got along like gangbusters. Smart man.