The Public is new arts centre in the wilds of the U.K. You can learn more from this BBC programme (it’s the first segment on this week’s episode).

There’s an update on Hermann Kleefisch in today’s paper. A year ago, we were wondering where Hermann was. He’s back on PEI. Welcome home.

To try and bring slightly more order to the random content stream that is this weblog, I’ve started to categorize posts into an arbitrary set of homebrew topics.

I’ve never been able to extract a definitive answer from my library friends as to whether freestyling my own controlled vocabularly is a Great Innovation or a Great Evil. But no other vocabulary would fit, so I opted to make one up.

This will all manifest itself in a couple of ways, some immediate, some coming soon.

First you will notice that each post in the RSS feed has a , so your newsreader might display something like this:

You’ll also notice that there are now topic-specific RSS feeds available. I stole this innovation from my colleagues at silverorange; it lets you just pay attention to particular topics via RSS rather than the full-bore flow.

I’ll add a topic-specific set of archive pages soon, too. I’ve added category archive pages so that you can browse past posts by topic too (note that not all past posts have been categorized yet, so you won’t find everything except in the complete chronological archive).

First, Aliant’s selection of cell phones is still the pits. They seem to have an uncanny ability to select all the ugly, dorky, slightly non-functional phones from the myriad of those available in the marketplace. So while our cousins in other areas are drooling over the latest in cell phone wizardry, we’re left with the AMC Pacers of the phone universe.

That said, it’s nice to have real Aliant staff back on the job: I visited the Phone Center on Belvedere Ave. this morning, and the person I talked to was friendly, knowledgable, and ultimately quite helpful. I’m glad they’re not on the picket lines any longer.

Driving north, I found, by chance, that there are about 10 open WiFi access points between Aliant and the North River Road Tim Hortons. If you need a good place to pull over and check your email, the road in from North River Rd. to Charlottetown Rural is a good place, with two WiFi networks to choose from.

Stopped at Apple Auto Glass to get a stone chip in my windshield repaired (my first in 22 years of driving, so I’m doing pretty good on that front). I learned two things: first, stone chip repair is covered by my auto insurance, there’s no deductible, and making a claim doesn’t affect my rates. Second, the magical “we can fix a stone chip and the repair is invisible” rhetoric isn’t actually 100% true, and the Apple Auto Glass man admitted as much when he told me that I’d notice a “small white dot” on my windshield. Which I did. It’s still pretty magical, though.

I also learned that my auto insurance company — the one I’ve been with for about 16 of those 22 driving years, Dominion of Canada — still has a local Charlottetown contact number. Apparently a lot of other auto insurers force places like Apple to call national numbers in Ontario or Quebec where, I’m told “we have to wait on hold for 15 minutes.” My guy phoned Hyndman and Company, spent about 15 seconds on the phone, and we were ready to rock.

Looping over to the Ellis Brothers shopping area, I found the service at the Canadian Revenue Agency wicket quick and friendly — I was there to make sure my corporate payroll remittances were in by Nov. 15, lest I suffer the wrath of their huge penalties. Nice to know these folks aren’t on the line any more either.

Finally, I drove back downtown to pick up an ailing Oliver (he was running a mild fever, and has had a runny nose for a week, and the pre-school thought he should come home) and we stopped in at a very, very busy Formosa Tea House for lunch around 1:30 p.m. The place was literally packed to the gills, and Oliver and I had to shoehorn ourselves into a table for one in the back room. It’s nice to see them busy, but I got the sense that they were all a little run off their feet. If I had to guess, I’d say it was the pressure of all those teachers with a day off for “professional development” catching a late lunch.

It’s 3:00 p.m. and I’m back in the office now, ready to start my day.

Phil Keoghan’s new book, No Opportunity Wasted, is shipping today from Amazon.com. They describe it, in part, as follows:

In dramatic narrative form, Keoghan transports the reader from Yucatan Jungle to the African Congo, from the depths of an underwater cave to the top of an erupting volcano. But this is no armchair traveler book. It is an urgent call to action, inspiring and enabling people to overcome fear and seek out memorable experiences of their own. With his fresh and compelling N.O.W. philosophy, this is a book that will help us all dream more freely and live more fully.

Regular readers will recall that Keoghan is host of The Amazing Race on CBS, the sixth season of which starts next Tuesday, November 16, 2004.

Maggie Brown’s excellent piece on the new walk-in day clinic is shocking, if only because of the odd characterization of walk-in medical clinics as “fast food medicine” by the head of the PEI Medical Society.

Dr. Kathy Bigsby is quoted in the piece as saying:

What we’re seeing is that this is taking business, if you will, away from the regular family doctors, and the folks who are out there practising family medicine recognize that what makes the quality of their care especially good is continuity of care and I think they find it really alarming to think that folks are going to be choosing what some consider the equivalent of fast food medicine over their regular family doctor.

The day clinic at the Boardwalk Medical Center is a dramatic improvement over not only the night clinics, but also over the sub-par service available from many family doctors.

Catherine and Oliver have been to the Boardwalk clinic several times over the last couple of months, either because our family doctor has been on vacation, or because the wait to see her has been too long. In all cases they’ve been served quickly and professionally.

Continuity of care is great, and I agree that a personal, long-term relationship with a family physician is probably the best scenario. But this assumes that doctors have a reasonable patient load and thus lots of time to spend with patients, and enough free time in their schedule to allow them to see people without appointments. This is seldom the case.

Backbone Magazine runs an article that picks up on the WiFi for God post I made over at WiFiCharlottetown.org.

The “people sitting on the sidewalk in front of my house” are, in large part, Daniel.

Apropos of this earlier post about the Delicious Library, there’s another application, called EvoBarcode that lets you use your iSight as a barcode scanner. It will “type” barcodes into any Mac application.

This seem like one of those “this will enable a lot of interesting other applications” kind of tools.

Sidenote: in my experience there’s a strong corelation between retailers that use Macs as their point-of-sale systems and retailers that have interesting products and good service. Two examples: Swipe and Olivier.

Olivier, by the way, has a new retail store in the Champlain Place mall in Moncton. They make excellent, if somewhat expensive, soap. But if you’re going to blow your money on self-indulgences, I’d rather small-scale indulgence makers using high-quality ingredients get my money.

I don’t know how I missed this one.

At lunch today, Dan revealed that one of the fundamental tenants of Christianity is, to paraphrase, “we are all evil.”

This ran head on into one of my own fundamental beliefs, which is that “we are all good.”

Obviously this has implications. It also explains a lot about why the world sometimes seems so weird to me.

About two years ago, I downloaded a free developer edition of IBM’s DB2 database server. To do this required that I jump through all sorts of registration hoops on the IBM website, but in the end I got what I needed.

The unintended side-effect of all this registering was that I got dropped inside the IBM database, and they are relentless in their sending of both paper and electronic mail regarding my DB2 “subscription.”

All of which culminates in this email received yesterday:

Hi Peter. This is Arthur Yuen from the IBM Software Maintenance group. In mid-August we sent you a letter for the maintenance renewal of a DB2 licence that is due for November 1st. This is a free software and has a $0 renewal.

I have enclosed the quotation below. Could you return my e-mail and approve this renewal? This way we will ensure proper maintenance on your software.

Attached to the email was a three-page PDF file, which ended with invoice for $0.