From Ben comes a link to Type, handwriting, and lettering. I’ve only begun to plumb its riches.

Workers at Aliant, our local [sic] telephone company, have been on strike since April 23. That’s 107 days. Everything I’ve read about the effects of the strike suggests that that managers/scabs who are attempting to keep the company operating are completely consumed with the everyday. In other words, Aliant is either standing still or moving backwards in terms of keeping up with the pace of telecommunications technology.

For example, back in December we had a meeting with Aliant Mobility here in the office. One of the things that came up was the possible availibility of the Treo 600, and we were assured that we would see this available “first quarter 2004.” First quarter has come and gone, and presumably any work on qualifying the Treo 600 for Aliant’s network ground to a halt on April 23.

Look at this sort of thing spread over all of the technologies Aliant deals with, add in the relative technology eternity of 107 days of not paying any attention, and I start to wonder whether the company is digging itself into a hole from which it might never emerge.

If this strike goes on much longer, Aliant is going to be fixing Model T’s while the rest of us are busy driving jet cars. Provided by someone else.

This is a problem for Aliant. But it’s also a problem for us. Like it or not, Aliant has its tentacles deeply embedded in almost every facet of life here in Atlantic Canada. When Aliant falls behind, we all fall behind.

I related here how many words I had written here over five years. You in the readership have written even more: 546,536 words. Including over 10,000 words on that whole Toby McGuire thing alone.

From my expert on the local graveyard scene, G., comes news that there are in the neighbourhood of 10,000 people buried in the “Elm Avenue Cemetary” on University Avenue in Charlottetown just down from the Metro Credit Union. This news came as a big shock to us: I would have guessed there were, say, 150 people buried there. But we did the math: 10,000 people taking up 12 square feet is 120,000 square feet. The lot is 350 feet square, or 122,500 square feet. Crowded, but possible.

By the way, courtesy of the Travel Channel, I just learned the meaning of “Potter’s Field” — a graveyard for “unknown or indigent persons.” I always thought it was a field where people working with clay hung out and made pots and mugs together.

The Duluth News Tribune is reporting State Rep Rukavina pleads guilty to drunken driving. Minnesota is a prominent Rukavina stomping ground.

It was Rep. Tom Rukavina’s father Martin’s funeral that Senator Paul Wellstone was on the way to when his plane crashed in 2002, killing Wellstone, his wife and one of his daughters. The result of his death was the senate run of Vice President Walter Mondale in 2002.

The second interview I did with Deutsche Welle at the Democratic National Convention has been used as part of a story on bloggers at the Convention for Spectrum their weekly science show. You can listen to the show in RealAudio, or listen to a local MP3 of just that piece.

My favourite part of the bit I taped was my description of bloggers as offering “opinionated narrative.” I think the introductory description of what blogs are by the Spectrum host is pretty good too: it’s a hard concept to sum up, and he did it pretty well. You can read the Dinner for America blog that’s mentioned here.

I was curious to know how many words have appeared here since I started writing them in May of 1999. So I wrote a little script to find out. The answer, give or take a few here and there, is 409,089.

Release early and release often, they say. Following this credo, I present the very, very first draft of a little video project I’ve decided to hack together. It occured to me that new visitors to this website might make use of a little introduction to the community: who are the people and places in my life that I write about, and how do they all tie together? And so was born the idea of a video guide to same.

I know nothing about video, little about sound, and almost nothing about how to use the two together, combined with something interesting to say. It’s a challenge, in other words.

I needed to to start somewhere, and so this afternoon I just dove right in. After an hour’s work, here’s a rough draft; consider it the video equivalent of a sketch on a napkin:

The video was shot with my Canon S1 IS digital still camera, which has some pretty decent video-taking capabilities. The microphone in the camera is really intended for the photographer to take notes with, though, not to pick up people across the room. And there’s no external microphone input. So the audio is pretty poor quality.

I edited it all together using iMovie which was stunningly easy to use and surprisingly capable (letting me do things like upping the audio on the speakers and lowering the music when it was called for).

While the final product isn’t much like my mind’s eye, it does bear some resemblance, and is a good place to start from. Stay tuned.

Hard-hitting CBC News is reporting at this hour Citibank slow to clarify dubious email.

You know it’s a slow news day when the weight of the CBC’s journalism is applied to investigating one of the perhaps seventy-five gazzillion “send us your password” scam emails that circulate around the world hourly.

As detailed here, I ordered a copy of this album from Amazon.ca on Wednesday night. It arrived in the mail this morning, roughly 36 hours after I ordered it. While I expect this sort of thing is commonplace in Brooklyn, I live in Charlottetown, on the outer banks of nowhere.

I know that music on CD is all irrelevant and everything, but this is still pretty amazing logistics.