The CBC is reporting a protest from the Public Service Alliance about the moving of jobs to Halifax. Vaughan Davies, representing the union, is quoted as saying:

“The employer is unable to fill the manager position in Charlottetown because no one wants to move to Prince Edward Island, which is extremely tough to buy seeing as Prince Edward Island is the most beautiful province in Canada and is the finest province in Canada to live in.”

Johnny has spent the past little while transitioning the Elections PEI website to its new home at www.electionspei.ca. New server, new organizational scheme, same black-and-white look and feel. My favourite features:

• Candidate Search: search a database of candidates nominated for provincial elections from 1900 to the present.
• Find Your District: quick way to find out where you vote.
• Chief Electoral Officer Reports: reports of every election from 1966 to the present. My favourite is the infamous election of 1966.

There is a wealth of information there about Prince Edward Island elections. As always, our colleagues at Elections PEI have been a pleasure to work with.

It seems that the Shoppers Drug Mart in at University Ave. and Allen St. in Charlottetown will be open from Noon to 5:00 p.m. on Christmas Day this year. Remember this when you need a quart of milk, some emergency hair dye, or a tasty bottle of Honest Tea.

The Formosa Tea House will be open regular hours this week up to Friday, when they will close at 3:00 p.m. for the holiday. They re-open at the regular time on Monday morning.

Oliver woke Catherine up at 5:00 a.m. this morning, wondering when we were going to get the Christmas tree. He wouldn’t go back to bed. He could have tried with me, but he knew I would have ignored him; Catherine is the better, or at least the more waking-hours-flexible parent.

I expect he will be awake just as early next Saturday morning. I believe I’ve been nominated, in absentia, to get up with him.

Our house is now equipped with a freshly-cut tree.

Anyone who has ventured outside of the quiet confines of North America will have encountered “touts” — local residents who gather at bus and train stations, airports and other tourist-intensive locations to hawk their hotel, private room, taxi service, or other tourist service. Touts can be helpful or annoying, depending on the situation and how relentless they are.

On our first solo international travel of any great length, to Prague in the fall of 1998, Catherine and I made the mistake of trying to ignore a man who seemed like a tout but who was actually a bona fide transit “honour system inspector.” We survived.

In the Dominican Republic the next spring, we had a taxi tout spirit away our luggage to a waiting cab before we noticed; once Catherine had climbed inside, he moved between me and the door, looking for a tip. When I offered $5 Canadian — essentially worthless outside of Canada, but all I had — he wasn’t impressed, and quite a flurry of exasperation ensued.

But there have been situations where we’ve arrived in a strange city late at night, needing a place to stay, and having a “lodging tout” present themselves has been a very valuable service.

Until this week, I’d never seen a tout in North America. On Thursday, though, at the SMT bus station in Charlottetown picking up G., I saw my first: a man was approaching all “look like they’re not from around here” types getting off the bus asking if they were looking for a place to stay.

We’re slowly joining the international community…

Bergmark Guimond Hammarlund Jones appear to be webcasting video of their Christmas party. It looks like the webcam is pointed at the oyster bar. Catherine and I are going over in about 20 minutes. The staff and guests don’t appear to know that the webcam is turned on. Weird.

On the right of the screen shot above are B, G, and J themselves (annotation is mine), serving oysters.

You can open Windows Media Player directly to http://24.222.25.75:8080 for the live feed.

I’ve been on a mad hunt for BRIO-brand construction toys today. Along the way I found out here what BRIO stands for:

BRIO stands for the Brothers Ivarsson of Osby, the three sons of founder Ivar Bengtsson. Today Osby in southern Sweden remains BRIO’s headquarters, while a large proportion of the production takes place in Osby and Killeberg.

The BRIO website has the weirdest FAQ section I’ve ever seen: most of the questions seem to be missing answers.

Lindsay Lohan made an appearance on ellen earlier this week, and sang the song Over from her debut album Speak.

I am not nor do I plan to be a fan of Lindsay Lohan, but I post here just to alert you, should you have formed your opinion of her voice from that segment, that you look up her album and listen to clips: she’s much better in the studio than the out-of-tune, out-of-breath live singer she was on television.

Back in the olden days of the Internet, I approached the local CBC operation here on Prince Edward Island about doing a website for them. I was mostly concerned with them simply starting to do something — they had no web presence at the time — so I made them a deal they couldn’t refuse: I would take their materials and create a simple site for them for $150. They didn’t refuse.

Their first website, thus, was www.isn.net/cbc, hosted on the Island Service Network server. The Internet Archive cache of that page doesn’t go all the way back to the very beginning, but you can get a sense of the simplicity of the original design from the later 1998 version. I remember having to resize a lot of photos of Roger Younker and Wayne Collins. I handed things over to Mike Wile at the CBC almost immediately, and he maintained the site from there.

Of course it wasn’t much later that the CBC got organized, and a national, standardized web effort took the place of this simple local site, an effort now ably maintained locally by Mitch Cormier.

The first post-ISN version of the site was at charlottetown.cbc.ca, which later migrated to pei.cbc.ca.

This week the address changed again, this time to cbc.ca/pei. I’m sure there are important technical reasons for the change, but it’s a shame that the change involves adding a slash to the name: given the confusion about slashes and backslashes you just know that people are going to mis-hear or mis-type as cbc.ca\pei, which doesn’t work.

In any case, the change in address brings an updated new design, with some new applications (like a live radio schedule widget on the right-hand side), and some nice clean-up of some inconsistencies of the old design.