I have a friend — let’s call him Dmitri — who got addicted to the Wikipedia. It served, I think, as the ultimate procrastination tool. And he was in deep, to the point where he got involved in the internecine battles that necessarily accompany any endeavour that involves both freedom and authority. I think he’s gone cold turkey now. So if you’re reading this, “Dmirtri,” don’t click on the link below.

Others, however, may wish to explore the definition of Captcha, a concept I’ve encountered often of late, and the name of which I only found here on the Drupal website.

By my calculations, I have been using computer mice for about 14 years — roughly the same amount of time Catherine and I have been together, which makes sense because it was her mouse-equipped supercomputer that was the first one I used with a mouse.

Knowing that our friend G. was in need of a mouse, I made the trip up to the attic tonight to the mouse archive. I thought I might have a spare one. Here’s what I found:

I have, as you can see, accumulated a lot of mice over the years.

My favourite is the square Logitech — quite un-ergonomic, I think. On the other end of the spectrum there is the Countour Design on the far-right: countoured to my big hand. Otherwise, there are, from left to right, an IBM, an Acer, a Microsoft, a no-name, a Perfect Micro, and a Compaq.

Truth be told, I don’t know why I’ve accumulated all of these.

As I type, they’re bagged up and ready to head up to G.’s to see which one will work with his ye olde laptop.

Do you remember that scene in Billy Elliot where Billy is dancing, and he enters another plane, a plane of pure happiness? For me, that plane is attained by playing charades.

My primary problem in this regard is that charades cannot be played alone, and I have managed to surround myself with a group of family and friends who either don’t embrace playing charades, or who are decidedly charades-averse.

And so I never get to play.

As my family members will, I’m sure, attest, I tend towards the manic side of the charades spectrum during play, always taking the labyrinthian and circuitous path so as to amplify the challenge (and, if I’m to accept an accusation of attraction to the pure “look at me” quality of the game, more time on stage). I recall a charade for “Happy Days” that I managed to sproing out into 9 or 10 individual clues.

From Isaac, charades-averse himself, comes a link to this hilarious trailer on the ZeD site (warning: hilarity may only exist if you are charades-positive). Watching it, I’m evermore thirsting for a match.

But alas, no.

If perchance anyone in the readership is a member of an underground charades playing speakeasy, please let me know. I’m in.

Imagine a horror movie in which a reclusive computer programmer is trapped in the back room of an old Victorian house while a dozen disembodied ghouls are trying to scratch their way into the house so as to be able to eat his brain for lunch.

As there are a dozen workers scraping down the outside of 84 Fitzroy St. today, in anticipation of a paint job, while we work inside, this is pretty much what the today feels at the office.

I was confused. Now I am not. Here’s a primer for those of you still confused:

The Far Side of the Moon - 2003 Canadian movie from director Robert Lepage. “After the death of his mother, a man tries to discover a meaning to his life, to the universe and to rebuild a relationship with the only family he has left: his brother.” says the Internet Movie Database.

Man on the Moon - Milos Forman’s 1999 film about comedian Andy Kaufman.

A Walk on the Moon - A 1999 Tony Goldwyn film wherein “[t]he world of a young housewife is turned upside down when she has an affair with a free-spirited blouse salesman.”

CBC News is reporting that RainMaker Call Centres is taking over the space in Bloomfield abandoned by Help Desk Now.

A couple of points not included in the CBC story:

• The company already operates sites in Tignish and Summerside (reference)
• Their primary client is Trendwest WorldMark Resorts (reference). RainMaker calls Trendwest the “3rd largest family oriented resort company in the world.” What that really means is that they sell timeshare vacations.
• RainMaker says they have “different culture and work practices” than Help Desk Now. Presumably this extends, at least in part, from the fact that they are an “outbound” call centre. This means that they’re not answering the phone, they’re making calls. To sell timeshare vacations.
• The call centre “solution” that RainMaker uses they bought from a company called Genticity, which is based in Charlottetown. The ACOA website says says that Genticity “received $450,000 in private equity investments, a $219,600 loan from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and a further $100,000 investment from Technology PEI.”
• The Chair of the Board of Genticity is Jamie Hill, formerly of Online Support, PEINet, Cycor, etc. (see here and here and here)
• Other customers of Genticity, highlighted on their website, are Island Waste Management Corporation (owned by the Province of PEI), On Line Support (Founder and former President: Jamie Hill), and iWave (Chief Executive Officer: Jamie Hill)

I’m not saying all this adds up to anything more than a bunch of facts. But I think a thorough examination of the public money that’s gone to call centres and related companies and the return on the investment in terms of tax revenue and employment, would be a useful exercise. Such a review may demonstrate that our public money has been wisely applied. Or not. I’d like to know.

You must admit there is some irony, especially in this slow tourism year, in our public money going, at least indirectly, to support a company whose primary business is selling vacations in places that aren’t Prince Edward Island.

An interesting side note: the most recent financial statements of iWave Information Systems Inc. (available from SEDAR) show that iWave paid $9355 for the Internet domain named iWave.com.

It’s odd to recall that back in 1982, when the film If You Love This Planet came out and I was 16 years old, we were all living under the very real and present fear of nuclear war. While I am too young to have lived the “duck and cover” drills, my childhood was very much lived under the specter of the Cold War.

The movie, by Dr. Helen Caldicott, was controversial when it came out: it was “officially banned in the U.S. Justice Department for being foreign propaganda” (reference, reference). They showed it at our high school.

The part of the movie that stays with me to this day is Caldicott’s commentary on Nagasaki. Here’s a more contemporary quote on the same theme:

Some people who escaped Hiroshima migrated then to the only Christian center in Japan, Nagasaki, thinking that it would never be bombed by the Americans. They arrived three days later, just in time to receive the second bomb. Many Japanese will say, if you visit there, “We can sort of understand the first bomb, but why the second?” One of the physicists who celebrated at the party the night after Trinity, recounted in “The Day After Trinity” how he felt after the bomb in Hiroshima was used. He said, “I was so nauseated that night I had to go to bed, and I was profoundly depressed. We are scientists. We never thought of human beings as matter.”

The threat of nuclear destruction is still here today (nuclear powers would have you think it’s from terrorists; my money is on the nuclear countries themselves, through accident or intent), it’s just faded into the background.

Oliver is almost four years old now. He doesn’t know about Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the Holocaust or the Bataan Death March or any of the innumerable other inhumanities we have committed on each other. I am stymied when I think of how to begin to tell him. “Sorry, Oliver, humankind isn’t as great as I led you to believe originally…”

Today is the 59th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. The Exploratorium has an online exhibition of photographs.

(Corrected anniversary date from 50th to 59th, thanks to a note from Edward Hasbrouck)

Will Pate came up to me on Friday with a good idea: aggregate the weblogs of independent world travelers in the same way we’re already aggregating the weblogs here in our workspace.

The result is BlogAroundTheWorld.com.

I’m gathering feeds, and trying to weed out people who have ended their travels, so it can be marked “experimental” for now.

I have an iMac at work, an iBook for the road, and an iMac at home. I run Firefox on all of the machines. And I want to have my bookmarks in sync across the three machines. Bookmarks Synchronizer (FTP) is the solution. I’ve installed it. And it works.

The ‘FTP’ in the title is something of a misnomer: you can sync using an FTP server, but you can also use WebDAV over HTTP or HTTPS, which is what I’m doing.