I was expecting to be able to return to the Formosa Tea House tomorrow for lunch; alas walking by today I saw a sign on the front door advising that they’ll not reopen until this Friday, February 25. Three more sleeps.

I’ve got an icon problem. Look at the screen snip here: it shows a section of my Mac OS X dock, with icons for (from top to bottom) Mail, Firefox, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, YummyFTP, CocoaMySQL and BBEdit.

It’s the five round icons in the middle that are causing me problems: they all look the same. I don’t mean “look the same” in the sense that they are visually identical, but rather in that flick of a second when I’m navigating from one application to the next, or selecting an application from the dock, they’re similar enough so that it’s easy to confuse one for the other.

About half a dozen times a day, I find myself, say, clicking on YummyFTP when I meant to click on CocoaMySQL.

I’m not sure if this is a failure of the OS, or a failure of the icon designers, or a failure of my own visual processor. Or not a failure at all.

But it does seem that a lot of OS X applications use an orby sphere as the superstructure of their icon — perhaps inevitable given the whole “worldwide” part of the www — and that is the basis of the visual confusion.

Can anyone tell me why a Google image search for site:almanac.com produces lots of results, but a similar image search for site:ruk.ca produces no results?

My old friend Leah is producing Read-TV, “an innovative series on video and DVD that engages and educates beginner readers.”

Our copy arrived today, and Oliver is captivated. Oscar. Makes. Muffins. If you have a child of pre-school to grade one age, you should take a look; full story, and online ordering on the Read-TV website.

Back last September when this weblog got all personal, I let our corporate website wither on the vine.

I’ve started to water and feed it this week, and because we’re starting to use it to make a lot of client websites, I’m using Drupal to do it. Consider it a work in progress, and as much an experimental sandbox as a piece of business propaganda. Look there for news more “corporate” than personal, including notes about important updates to our client websites, interesting projects, and the like.

You can find it all at the new Reinvented.net. There’s an RSS feed over there too.

From my friend John comes a pointer to Radio Free Peterborough, founded to answer the question “I wonder how much Peterborough music you could put together in one place on shuffle?”

My erstwhile alma mater Trent University is the subject of a news weblog that purports to “advocate for accountability and transparency in university governance.” Things were so much simplet back in the 1980s when the issues of the day were things like renaming the “Bata” library the “Biko” library.

Actual quote from the CBC website:

Radio 3 regularly airs on CBC Radio Two.

Oh, and in 1995 ten years later, www.gov.pe.ca came online.

It has been twenty years since 1985. During that year, I:

• Bought my first PC.
• Borrowed a carbon monoxide tester from the Ontario Ministry of Environment.
• Graduated from high school.
• Went on my first real date.
• Turned 19 years old.
• Decided not to become an aerospace engineer.
• Decided to go to Trent University.
• Worked the summer at the Royal Ontario Museum and for John Traill at Athenians.
• Took a course in beginner’s Greek at the University of Toronto.
• Ate lunch almost every summer day at Bogey’s Sandwich Shop on Bloor St.
• Ate a lot of ice cream from Greg’s, next door to Bogey’s.
• Could ride the TTC for 35 cents with my student card.
• Had a two-month long argument with my dad.
• Moved out of my parents house and went to Trent University.
• Made my first radio programme.
• Was published in a newspaper for the first time (a review of Ernie’s Barber Shop in Arthur)
• Met my friends Lisa Howard, John Muir, Stephen Badhwar and Patrick Gracey, all of whom I’m in touch with to this day (I’d already known my friend Oliver — wee’s namesake — for a year).
• Took a reading course from newly-minted professor Stephen Regoczei in “Natural Language Understanding by Computers.” I don’t believe we actually talked about that at all. Stephen is still a good friend.
• Watched a lot of Hill Street Blues on television.
• Still hadn’t ever taken a drink or kissed a girl (although Nancy Robinson did hug me during a thunder storm, but that was in 1975).

In the intervening twenty years, I’ve had half a dozen ill-fated relationships and one very good one (it’s still going strong).

Among other things, I’ve worked in a motorhome factory as a computer operator, as a au pair in El Paso, in a Minute Maid orange juice factory as a data entry clerk, and in a daily newspaper composing room. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of computer code, and designed hundreds of posters and brochures.

I acquired and then gave up a beautiful, spirited lab-spaniel cross named Penny. I’ve traveled to every Canadian province and to South Korea, Germany, the Czech Republic, Japan, Thailand, Spain, England, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy and, innumerable times, the USA. I lived in Ontario, Quebec, Texas and finally here in Prince Edward Island.

One friend was murdered, two overdosed on heroin. All four of my grandparents died.

I was interogated once by the police, committed one act of civil disobedience, and sat in on one cabinet meeting.

I was stopped by the police for illegally kissing Catherine in a car on the side of the highway.

I began eating yogurt and sushi.

And had a son.

In twenty years I’ll be on the cusp of 60.