Last year one of my father’s colleagues asked for advice on planning a family camping trip to Prince Edward Island. I just heard back from him that my advice was helpful, so I thought I’d post it here.

For campgrounds, I recommended:

Cedar Dunes Provincial Park: near West Point. Right on the ocean. Breakfast available from the local West Point Lighthouse restaurant. Very scenic — amazing sunsets.

Strathgartney Provincial Park: near Charlottetown. An excellent campground if you want to explore Charlottetown, as it’s only about 15 minutes east west (!) of the city. In the Bonshaw Hills, and very green and forested. Access to the West River for swimming. Children’s playgrounds and frisbee golf course. The Town of Cornwall, 1/2 way to Charlottetown, is very handy for groceries and supplies.

Panmure Island Provincial Park: on the eastern side of the Island. Beautiful beach. Quite isolated, and very scenic. Close to Montague for supplies.

Red Point Provincial Park: very very east, near Basin Head. Amazing beach, beautiful views, and a good reason to go this far east. Basin Head Fisheries Museum is next door, and is worth a visit.

For restaurants and things to do, I suggested:

The restaurant near the North Cape Atlantic Wind Test Site is excellent, and has a great view. The Wind Test Site is worth the drive to the far north-west tip of the Island: the giant wind turbines are now providing 4% of the Island electricity, and are a site to behold.

The MacAusland’s Woolen Mill in Bloomfield is very interesting, and much unchanged over the last 50, 60, 100 years. The turn raw fleece into great blankets, and you can walk around and see all of the machines at work. You should certainly buy a blanket as well, as they are top-rate.

The Brackley Drive In (www.drivein.ca) blew down last year, but if they manage to rebuild by the time you’re here [ed: they did!] it’s worth a visit. Very nice drive-in movie theatre in the woods near Brackley Beach.

Also near Brackley Beach is The Lobster Claw, an unassuming family restaurant with good food and excellent service, The Dunes, and architecturally interested gallery and studio, with a restaurant attached, and Shaw’s Hotel, which is a hundred-year-old seaside inn that’s a good place to splurge on a room or cottage if you’re looking to do that (reservations are needed well in advance).

In Charlottetown, we like the Formosa Tea House (186 Prince St.) for Taiwanese-inspired snacks and drinks, Interlude (Kent St. across from City Hall) for a different take on the same, COWS for ice cream, the Town & Country for a simple, uncrowded family restaurant with a great outdoor patio. Timothy’s on Kent St. or Beanz on University Ave. are both good for coffee. Sirenella’s is good for slightly formal Italian food (it’s across from the Delta Hotel on Water St.).

As I said, some of my advice seemed to have worked: the family did, indeed, visit MacAusland’s and bought a blanket. They stayed Cedar Dunes and Panmure Island, and went to the wind test site.

My friends John and Sherin at Yankee have been covertly distributing pirated copies of a hand-sketched map of PEI that I made to accompany them on their visit here a couple of years ago. I should try and track down a copy of that and post it here.

Look at me… I’m a budding Nancy Chandler!

Oliver got a new second cousin this morning, Tlell (reference), baby girl to Pam and Bill. Welcome to the world.

I sent the following letter to Sounds Like Canada in reaction to this morning’s broadcast:

Hello there.

I was very disappointed to hear, on this morning’s “50 Tracks” segment, your “bleeping out” of the word “fuck” in the Alanis Morisette song “You Oughta Know” (in the line “And are you thinking of me when you fuck her.”)

One expects this sort of gratuitous censorship from commercial radio stations; for the CBC to do so, especially in the context of a segment like “50 Tracks” that purports to be judging the “essential” quality of Canadian songs, it is unconscionable.

That line, it could be argued, is the emotional centre of the song; to lop off the word “fuck” is to rip out the song’s heart, and to neuter its power.

I think your listenership deserves to hear the song in its original glory.

I’m not smart enough to figure out which films should win what. But I watched anyway, and had these thoughts:

• I want to hire Morgan Freeman to narrate my life. Every day. You know, just like in The Shawshank Redemption.
• Is Beyonce really that good that she needs to be called in for two three (!) songs? Aren’t there other singers out there?
• I liked the “live from the seats” style of giving out selected awards (although there was that stunned looking guy on the lefthand side of the aisle who didn’t know what to make of it all). I liked it when the guy nominated for best short spelled out “I Love You” with his hands.
• I didn’t like the “lets bring all the nominees on stage while we announce them” trick; it’s bad enough to lose without having to stand beside the winner. And they only did this for the “don’t really matter all that much” categories anyway.
• I liked Chris Rock as host.
• How do they do that magical “show video on little panels on the roof” thing? Neato.
• Rene Zellweger was best dressed, hands down.

As my officemates can attest, from the large recycling bag full of Honest Tea bottles outside my door, I am an addict. Here’s a list of where to buy Honest Tea in Canada. Note that in Charlottetown, the only source I’ve found so far is the Shopper’s Drug Mart on University Ave.; they carry only four varieties there: Peach, Green Dragon, Lemon and Mint. The Green Dragon is my personal favourite and, as a result, you’ll very seldom find it in stock there, as I regularly buy it out.

Last night, instead of going to the movies as we usually do on Saturday nights, Catherine and I got obsessed with the Estonian city of Tartu. Tartu’s motto is “city of good thoughts.” That’s almost enough to get me to move there.

Where is Tartu, you might ask. Right here.

From Steven comes a link to this very interesting trip through the history of a Wikipedia article.

The screencast comes from Jon Udell, famous otherwise for LibraryLookup. It turns out that Jon lives in Keene, New Hampshire, just a hop skip and a jump up the road from Yankee in Dublin.

Amazingly enough, there’s no way to link directly to the “Now Playing” page on the Empire Theatres website for a given cinema. If you navigate down through Showtimes, then By Theatre and select Empire Studio 8 in Charlottetown, you’ll find the URL has the current date appended by their server:

…Day=2/26/05

If you remove this to make a “permalink” to the theatre, then you end up with this link to movies for December 30.

This makes the Empire Theatres website spectacularly ineffective.

Back in Peterborough I babysat a couple of times for my friend Sandy Hunter. She lived in an interesting one-room loft on the top floor of Sam the Record Man downtown. I think she paid me in paintings.

We left Peterborough around the same time, and had the odd experience of renewing contact by each hearing the other interviewed by Peter Gzowski on Morningside the same season. Our mutual friend Patrick has kept us in random touch too.

And now, these many years later, we’ve ended up working on the same stuff.

Sandy emailed today that she’s started a new weblog which she says she’ll use to “document the journey I am taking.” It’s an interesting and insightful read.

We ran the Vacancy Information Service for many years for TIAPEI. The service provided information about lodging vacancies on PEI by telephone or from a website. The telephone service, which was expertly crafted by Gary Clow (son of Bobby Clow, of Clow’s Red and White in Hampshire), was designed to provide callers with a random selection of five properties with vacancies in their area of interest.

The service was truly random: every time a new call came in, a brand new random selection was culled from the database and presented. Over the season of thousands of telephone calls this meant that every property with vacancies had an equal chance of having their information delivered to callers. We had statistics that showed this clearly.

The problem was that although this was true over time it wasn’t, of course, true for just one or two calls. Because every property had an equally random chance of being selected during a given call, it was quite possible that a specific property would show up in two successive calls. Or that a specific property wouldn’t show up in three or four successive calls.

If you were Bob’s Bed and Breakfast, and you called in twice and heard Jane’s Bed and Breakfast on both calls, you assumed that Jane was somehow getting a “special deal.”

And that’s the problem with randomness.

I had cause to think of this today when I read this Newsweek article that calls into question the randomness on the iPod shuffle. I think the problem is the same: if the iPod shuffle is truly random, then it’s likely that it will appear that certain songs are being preferred over others, even if, over the long term, the exposure of every song is statistically equal.

And if Apple’s experience is anything like ours, a lot of people will never believe that.