Here’s an email from my old friend Stephen, currently based in Lubbock, Texas:

We want to take a trip this weekend but I can’t figure something out - whether by plane or by car, I can’t figure out how to find trip packages that will start from Lubbock and take us wherever - all the sites I’m using want me to specify a destination, but I don’t care where we go, I just want it to be cheap.

Stephen identifies a glaring weakness of the travel services world: it’s not set up to help people who don’t know where they want to go.

Dozens of times I’ve contacted various travel agents with a query similar to Stephen’s. The response is usually no better than “well, where do you want to go?” or perhaps “I have cheap flights to Florida sometimes.”

In technical terms, their systems don’t support wildcards as the destination: they can’t, in effect, type “select trip where start = Lubbock and destination = *”. And if they can’t do that, they certainly can’t do “select trip where start = Lubbock and destination = * and hotelprice = cheap and kidvalue = fun”.

Travel is still set up based on the notion that it is difficult, expensive, and requires a lot of lead time. The planning infrastructure hasn’t caught up with “maybe we should go to Europe for the weekend.”

I emailed Stephen back and suggested they head to Santa Fe. It’s about 6 hours drive from Lubbock, is beautiful, and, courtesy of my friend and Santa Fe resident Martin I have a list of interesting things to see and do.

I’ll let you know where they end up.

I held off reading Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential for years. I love eating in restaurants. The scuttlebutt about the book was that it “blew the lid off the restaurant industry.” I simply wasn’t prepared to have my eyes opened to this.

Fortunately, in a sudden bout of urgent audiobook buying before a recent trip to Halifax, I bought the audio version of the book, read by Bourdain himself. And Catherine and I, along with G., along for the ride, entertained ourselves by listening to a good part of it on our way over and back. I finished it off during my repeated midnight rides to Moncton a couple of weeks ago.

The scuttlebutt was wrong. Yes you do get to hear that restaurants recycle the bread in their bread baskets. You do get to hear that Monday is not a good day to order fish. But this lid-blowing information is limited to a short section in the second chapter called “From Our Kitchen to Your Table.” And even then it’s not particularly lid-blowing: there aren’t the tales of salamanders and health inspectors and rancid lettuce that you might expect. I gained confidence in the restaurant world from reading this chapter.

The balance of Kitchen Confidential is an autobiographical sketch of Bourdain’s life inside New York kitchens. It’s wry, witty, hard-edged, and very, very compelling. I enjoyed it. I regret not having bought the book sooner. If you’re interested in food or restaurants or even just “colourful North Americans with interesting lives,” you will enjoy this book.

When I get interested in something, I get interested in something. The around the world travel thing is still stuck in my craw. There was the time I forced Catherine to watch the collected works of Frank McCourt while she was pregnant (astute readers will recall that Angela’s Ashes is filled with considerable baby death, which is not good pregnancy entertainment). And the time I essentially dropped out of university to read everything written by Robertson Davies followed by everything written by Margaret Atwood (except the poetry, of course).

Needless to say, I’ve started an exploration of the Bourdainoverse in a similar fashion.

If you’d like to play the home game, here are some links to follow:

• AnthonyBourdain.com (Bourdain’s own website)
• Anthony Bourdain Eats Out (interview at Powell’s Books)
• Interview at Savvy Traveler (scroll down for a RealAudio interview)
• Interview at ExtremeChefs.com

The most interesting output from Bourdain of late is his Food Network programme A Cook’s Tour, the website of which looks like this, somewhat oddly, as I write:

In A Cook’s Tour, Bourdain travels the world and eats. Interesting things. In interesting places. Bourdain is good on camera: wry, interested, funny. It’s good television. You can watch the show here in Canada on Food Network Canada. There’s a great episode coming up on Sunday afternoon shot in San Sebastian, Spain that I watched last night. It made me want to jump on a plane.

The show has spawned a book of its own. And being published this fall is another book, Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking.

In other words, my addiction can be fed for a while longer.

Here’s a screen snip of the people current online on my iChat buddylist:

As if the new parking obelisks weren’t enough, users trying to pay their parking tickets online this morning here in Charlottetown were greeted with this message:

The City’s digital certificate expired at 3:03 a.m. this morning. Same message appears for utility bill payments.

While I question the value of a proprietary online system for parking tickets and utility bills in a place the size of Charlottetown, the least the City can do is to ensure that the electronic behemoth is properly fed.

Can somebody warn the City fathers about this for me?

As described in bitter detail here, my mostly trusty Apple iBook laptop suffered a hard disk crash in the hours leading up to my departure for the Democratic National Convention.

Fortunately it was still covered under Apple’s “AppleCare” warranty (now officially “the best investment I’ve ever made”), and so through the good offices of Little Mac Shoppe, it was winged off to the experts in New Brunswick for repairs, and returned today.

I’m happy to report that it’s ship-shape and running better than every (it appears to have returned with a hard drive about twice the size of the old one, but I may be imagining this…). I did lose the entire contents of the old hard drive in the process (I knew this was likely), but fortunately, as my secondary machine, there was nothing irreplacable on it before (at least not that I’ve encountered yet).

CBC Prince Edward Island is quoting Police Commissioner Garrity as saying “These will not go down they tell us…” about the new parking kiosks being installed in Charlottetown.

Evidence suggests that this is where Murphy’s Law is due to take effect. I expect the parking kiosks to start keeling over any day now. No technology is infallible, especially technology (a) that is located out in public on city streets, subject to the elements, snowplows, etc. and (b) that has several slots into which mischievous members of the public will feel duty bound to stick all manner of Krazy Glue-bearing objects.

We replace the analog with the digital at our peril.

Watched this episode of Six Feet Under tonight. Heard a nice version of I’m a Lonely Little Petunia In An Onion Patch over the closing credits.

Found this useful music credits page on the HBO website, and identified the singer as Imogen Heap. Searched Google for Imogen Heap and ended up on her website.

Found that Imogen Heap has a weblog (and a moblog). Found this blog post that says, in part:

So i stuck together a load of little video clips i made on my mobile phone while i was on that cycling trip following the River Thames with the original version of “lonely little petunia” i did. Some of you saw it lst night on the “Six feet under episode “the dare” last night. I had a few emails to hear it again. This is the version i did that I like the most xx if some of you prefer the one you heard i’ll get round to sticking that one up too…

Which led me to this Quicktime movie of I’m a Lonely Little Petunia In An Onion Patch sung over a movie shot on a mobile phone (genesis here).

All of which was enough to push me to buy this album from Frou Frou, one half of which is Imogen Heap.

A “perfect storm” of television + website + musician + weblog + mobile phone + ecommerce.

Usually convergence looks like this; thank goodness that’s not all there is.

The movie Garden State, which is about to open, features a track from a Frou Frou. I saw Zach Braff interviewed last night, along with Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard, on Charlie Rose. This probably means we will be hearing more about Imogen Heap soon.

Looking for pointer: is there anywhere to get keys cut in downtown Charlottetown? Note that the new hardware store in the Confederation Court Mall does not do this, as Catherine has just discovered.

Edward Hasbrouck is hosting an evening about around the world travel at Airtreks.com on August 5th. If San Francisco weren’t so far away, I’d be there.

I spent most of last Monday and Tuesday perched high in the Fleet Center about 10 feet from David Sifry’s command post. So I had a front-row seat to David’s CNN blog-wrangling duties.

And I also got to see what a couple of days in the life of trying to keep Technorati alive is like (from the sheer volume of flurriful instant messaging flowing from David’s PC, it looks like it’s a considerable chore).

Which makes this post from Adam Greenfield about Technorati (along with this followup) all the more interesting.

Last week, courtesy of CNN, Technorati had a televised coming out party. Problem was, if my own usage is a gauge, it wasn’t working more than it was. At a time when we vain convention bloggers were relying on it as a measurer of our linkfulness, profiles were coming up “no such user,” and searches were coming up with no (or wildly inconsistent) results.

David was obviously aware of all this — there were several times I heard a live shout-out from the bloggerati like “Hey, David, is Technorati down?” only to hear a response a few minutes later “Things should be okay now.” It was kind of neat to watch the process up close like that. And it certainly made me prone to being more forgiving for Technorati’s shortcomings.

Things seem to be on a more even keel now (and don’t get me wrong: Technorati, when it’s working, is a fantastic service). But last week’s experiences do prompt me to consider how much these new worlds we’re experimenting with rely on fragile, under-resourced, centralized infrastructure. While there are good alternatives to Technorati (like Feedster and Bloglines), we’re still relying on bottleneck-prone centralization rather than more robust, decentralized technologies. Maybe this is inevitable, I’m not sure.

I’m pretty sure if Google went down for a week, my personal productivity would suffer enormously. In fact it might be impossible to get any work done. What happens when I come to rely on services like Technorati to the same degree?