In the book Almost French, Australian expat Sarah Turnbull describes the challenges of living as a new Parisian. She encounters particular difficulties in trying to understand the cool attitude of people she meets at dinner parties. She gets an opportunity to question a hard-won Parisian friend about this after he’s warmed to her:

“Why where you so unfriendly at first?”

Arnaud contemplates my question, which doesn’t seem to have offended or even surprised him. “The problem is the French aren’t very comfortable meeting new people,” he says. “For us, friendships form over years, at school or university. And after that, we’re not interested, we’re no longer curious. We think we’ve got enough friends already.”

I wonder how much the same could be said of Prince Edward Islanders, or, indeed, of people living in any place with a tradition of insularity.

Transit buttons: “a collection of 1-inch buttons featuring replicas of the tile art and visual landmarks of Toronto’s subway stations.” $45 for the entire set. Nice. An indirect link from Leah Tremain.

From the same source: The Details of the TTC: “some up-close details of the beautifully understated tile-work and design throughout Toronto’s transit system.”

Here’s a satellite image (on Google Maps) of the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand. The city walls are very clear.

Escaping Canada, by Robert Hof, is a quick summary of what it takes to stop being “Canadian” as far as paying taxes is concerned. Pointer, indirectly, from Daniel.

In this week’s episode, Stephen Southall reviews Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the new Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie movie.

After receiving some useful comments about the first Southall at the Movies, I did some experimenting with this one: I edited. The original tape was 34 minutes long; the version here is just over 12 minutes. I’m an apprentice digital audio editor, so the cut-down isn’t as smooth as it could be, and there were several instances where I was talking over Stephen so it was hard to make a cut where I would have liked.

There are some other rough edges: I just up and appear half way through out of nowhere (I tried to but myself out, but it just didn’t work). I go back and forth on the trailer clips. And we did sort of ramble on out.

But I think this one is better then the last. And I think we can get a lot better if we keep at it.

Again, comments are welcome.

Felix points out that Google now has satellite imagery covering the whole wide world. For example:

• Perusic, Croatia, where my grandfather Dan was born.
• The hotel I stayed at in Copenhagen.
• Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.
• Ljubljana, Slovenia.

From the project website:

Asterisk PHP allows you to control the dial-plan and write applications for Asterisk in PHP. This is faster and more flexible than phpAGI.

Doc Searls’ talk at reboot focused on the language we use to frame the network. When we use the network, are we users? the audience? participants? subscribers?

I thought of Doc’s talk this morning when I read this FAQ on changes to the Canadian Copyright Act. Question number seven is:

Is there a risk that protection of technological measures (TMs) will adversely affect users?

The answer to this FAQ doesn’t bear repeating, as it is essentially content-free.

The important thing to note, for me, is that we the people are referenced as “users” in this question. I thought the government was ours, looking out for our interests and that, at the very least, we should be addresses as citizens, not “users.”

I’ve got my City Councillor, Kim Devine breathing down my back (hey, isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?) about locations for bike racks in downtown Charlottetown. Apparently the city works department has four brand new single “circle and post” racks waiting for new homes, and Kim needs suggestions for places. Any ideas?

I did a tour of downtown Charlottetown tonight, most of the area south of Euston St. to the water, looking for open Wifi that I could document. The result is a big jump in the number of Plazes in Charlottetown.

There’s Wifi almost everywhere downtown — you seldom have to walk more than a block to find an open access point. The greatest concentration of Wifi is, as you might expect, around 84 Fitzroy Street. There’s also a heady flow up at the corner of Gerald and Upper Prince.

In my tour, I found 93 access points. Of these, 60 were “open” (i.e. not using WEP to secure access) and 33 were “closed.” Common names: default (19), linksys (13), and NETGEAR (4). Four access points (including my own) identified themselves as wificharlottetown.org.

Whenever I could both get access to the net, and find a place to park the car for a minute, I added a new geolocation to Plazes. So now there are 24 public Wifi Plazes in Charlottetown.