Even if you’re not a regular customer of Shoppers Drug Mart, if you have any interest in the future of retail design you should really pay a visit to the new location on University Avenue in Charlottetown: it is truly a sight to behold. The design makes every other drugstore in the city look like a relic from the 1970s: the store is bold, bright, airy, and dramatic.

Whether or not we should be making our pharmapurchase decisions based on retail design is another issue entirely (certainly The Friendly Pharmacy, which went in an entirely different direction, emphasizing service over design, would have us not).

For me what’s important about the new store, though, is that they sell my absolute favourite iced tea, that being the product of the Honest Tea company of Bethesda, Maryland. This bottled iced tea is almost perfect: not too sweet, not too tart, and in a good range of natural flavours (my favourite is the Peach Oo-la-long). There are five bottles sitting in the fridge here at the office, waiting to fuel my trips into “the zone.”

You can find the Honest Tea in the new Shoppers in the “natural foods” section, right at the back of the store on the right in the cooler. Enjoy.

One of the features of NetNewsWire is that it can show you the changes that have been made to a post if the author makes edits after originally posting. For the Old Farmer’s Almanac feeds, which get completely regenerated each day, this is somewhat less useful, but also occasionally interesting. Witness:

What a day in history!

If you’re a regular reader of these virtual pages, you’ll notice that there’s been a rather dramatic re-branding here.

After a little more than five years writing under the Reinvented corporate banner, I’ve relocated my writing under a non-corporate banner that you can variously call ruk or ruk.ca.

How come?

Back in 1999 when this weblog sprang to life, Reinvented was just me. In recent years I’ve been joined by others: my brother Johnny is a fulltime programmer, and my partner Catherine is a part-time jack of all trades. Who knows: someday there might be others!

So where it used to be true that “Reinvented = Peter,” this is no longer the case. And it didn’t seem fair to be making broad pronouncements about important issues (or irrelevant blather, as the case may be) using a “royal we” that is no longer just me.

There’s a slightly more verbose explanation for the move on the About page. You’ll also find a neat little visual trip through website history there.

Some important things to note:

• The old trifurcated “Reinvented,” “Reinvented Labs” and “Reinvented World” blogs are gone, the posts from each aggregated under this new site. The “Labs” and “World” sub-blogs were drafty places that never got the attention they deserved.
• I’ve ditched the Google AdSense ads. While I was deriving some income from these — about $140US a month — I decided that I could no longer conscience having random ads, not under my control, appear associated with my writing. If I run ads in future, they’ll be for products and services I would use myself.
• There’s a somewhat more minimalist design to this site. I’m sure things will get more cluttered with time. Type and headlines are also larger; I’m getting older and feeling bolder. Thanks to Steven for some tricky CSS debugging help with the new design.
• Links to posts on the old blog should get auto-redirected here. There’s some chance that quirky links and images might be missing or mis-directed; I’d appreciate a note if you notice anything awry.
• The URLs for the RSS feeds have changed: read posts via RSS at ruk.ca/rss/index.xml and read comments at ruk.ca/rss/discuss.xml. The old RSS addresses will redirect (if your reader follows redirects), but please update addresses as required.
• The “Search” feature has disappeared for a bit; it will return. Same thing for the “audio comments” feature.
• I’ve succumbed to conventional usage, and that formerly known as “Discussion” is now known as “Comments.” I still think of it as discussion though and welcome you to do likewise.

I’m sure the design and features of the new site will evolve over time, much as they did at the old home. The Reinvented.net website will [eventually] become a “who is Reinvented and what do they do site” but for now it’s serving mostly as a redirector to this site.

Some welcome to the new place. Make yourself at home.

From Chris comes a link to this Sarah McLachlan project.

Somewhere about October 2003, I stopped filing. Every month I’d pay my bills, and I’d pile the paid bills along with invoices, tax receipts, and the other leftovers of everyday business life in a big “to be filed” pile on my desk.

But the “to be filed” day never came.

The business was audited by Revenue Canada. I went to San Francisco. Then Boston. Then Montreal. Then Boston again. Did a lot of work. Created a lot of web pages. Even went to the beach once.

But the filing never happened.

Eventually the “to be filed” pile grew into two, then three “to be filed” piles. On the floor. Hidden in the closet.

Finally the potential energy of the growing piles grew overwhelming: something had to be done.

So today I fueled up with an Iced Cowpuccino from COWS, gritted my teeth, and went on a file-a-thon.

As I type this, it’s 10:50 p.m. on Sunday night. And the piles are gone.

Wow.

From Wayne Thibodeau at The Guardian, via my friend Ann, comes a pointer to the National Writers’ Symposium 2004, being held in Charlottetown on Oct. 23 and 24.

There’s an impressive roster of speakers, including the following name writers you’ll probably recognize:

• Scott Taylor
• Linden MacIntyre
• Scott Russell
• Ira Basen
• David Weale

Wayne says “The three-day event is designed specifically for journalists but is open to anyone interested in devoting some time to the magical skill at the heart of all effective communications, the craft of writing.”

And while we’re slinging video: the best burgers in town (with apologies to Rob for keeping the dream alive).

Remember the days, not so long ago, when our local phone company was actually a local phone company. Take a look at this old commercial. It seems inconceivable, at a time when Aliant’s claim to fame is being “an innovator and pacesetter in the sector” that the lyrics of their jingle once contained the words “in a place where there are friends you trust and neighbours who care” and “sharing the all the pride we feel in living here.”

On paper the idea of having a giant 70-mile long yard sale through the hills and valleys of Southern Kings County is laudable: you get a whole bunch of people out and about on a nice fall day, spending a little bit of money, eating in restaurants, buying gasoline and generally giving a boot to the local economy now that the tourists, by and large, have gone home.

The only problem is that the entire operation is based on the collected unwanted mechandise of the residents of Southern Kings County. And that, friends, is not a pretty picture.

Our informal survey of the sale route, starting just outside of Hazelbrook and driving although through Wood Islands, Murray Harbour, Murray River, and then looping up through Caledonia did, however reveal a lot about what’s not hot in consumer products this year.

Hot air popcorn makers. Fondue sets. Small microwave ovens. Kitchen sinks. Stuffed Disney toys. Typewriters. Clock radios. Bread makers. VHS videotapes. Music from the 1980s on CD. And copies of everything Danielle Steel has ever had published.

There was oodles and oodles of all that.

Along with endless, endless piles of clothes, chairs without seats, dead-looking plants. And even remnants of the Phentex revolution (wherein science found a wool that was cheaper, synthetic, and felt like cardboard and entranced knitting aunts from coast to coast).

The successful yard sale is based on the “your else’s junk is someone else’s treasure” principle. And when the 70-mile yard sale started seven years ago, there may indeed have been some treasure to be found on the tables. But what was on offer today wasn’t just “the stuff that people didn’t want any more” but also “the stuff that people didn’t want any more after they spent 6 years selling the good stuff they didn’t want any more.”

There were little bits of treasure here and there — our friend G. found some resaleable old books and a couple of good door handles in Vernon Bridge; Oliver and I found a box filled with Lego, toy trucks and a headless Barbie for $3 in Wood Islands. And the sausages and perogies at Phil’s Organic Garlic were second to none. Oliver, of course, is a mostly uncritical consumer at age four: anything that’s bright and colourful and/or branded by Disney or Henson meets his approval; he had lots of fun, punctuated by a brief tantrum as it came time to leave each waystation to prepare for the next.

And the day was beautiful. The people were nice. And Southern Kings is Prince Edward Island’s undiscovered jewel (the view from Phil’s place was worth the entire trip). And maybe that’s the secret of the event: it’s not really about the stuff at all, it’s simply a good excuse to go out for a Saturday drive in one of the most beautiful places on earth, see some people you know, and scarf down a pungent sausage or two.

A backslash looks like this: \. A slash, also known — albeit rarely — as a slant or oblique stroke or simply stroke looks like this: /.

There are no backslashes in web addresses (technical note: okay, maybe sometimes, but so effectively never as to be never).

All of the “strokes” or “slashes” in a web address are just regular old slashes, not backslashes.

So you read something like http://www.almanac.com like this: h t t p colon slash slash w w w dot almanac dot com.

In conventional everyday normal person world, the only time you’ll have cause to use the word backslash is when you’re using the MS-DOS command line, and need to refer to a directory. In MS-DOS, directory names use the backslash. So you read C:\fred as c colon backslash fred.

When you read web addresses, though, ditch the back and embrace the slash.

Side note: newspapers, especially small local ones, have an annoying habit of reproducing web addresses with backslashes. They should stop this.