Catherine is a big fan of the CSI shows on television (the original, CSI, and its spin-off CSI: Miami). And so often when I stumble in from the office late at night, that’s what I find on the television.

I find myself fascinated by one specific aspect of the shows, something I’ll call “CSI style writing.”

The nature of the shows — each show takes the viewer through a crime from the point of view of the crime scene investigator (hence ‘CSI’) — means that there’s a lot of forensic science happening. And because there’s nothing more deadening than watching machines whirr, or people hunting around picking up bits of some important foreign substance relevant to the crime, especially if you don’t know what they’re doing, what generally happens on CSI is that the actors, in a way that would never happen in the “real” world, talk in a very expository manner.

So rather than saying “Let’s stick the sample in the X-22 analyzer,” they say “Let’s stick the sample in the X-22 analyzer” and then their crimefighting buddy says “Ah yes, the X-22 will analyze the blood stain and compare it to millions of other samples in the crime database so we can match it to the killer.”

In other words, the show provides its own footnotes, and tries to do so in a way that seems sort of natural, especially if you squint your ears a little.

Once you get over the vague sense that these people talk too much, this is a pretty compelling trick, and once that I think the world outside of CSI television might profit from. Especially my little corner of the world, the techno-writer-geek space.

The AIMRelay perl script, from Eric Andresen is scratching my itches in all the right ways.

I was looking for a way to have various servers send me alerts through iChat (Apple’s instant messaging system that uses AOL’s instant messaging network). I wanted iChat to pop up a message when, say, a call was coming in for me on the Asterisk PBX. Or when the load average was high. Or when someone posted a comment on my weblog.

I started with Net::OSCAR, which is a Perl module that implement’s the AIM OSCAR protocol (AIM has two protocols, an old one called TOC, that is used by Net::AIM, and OSCAR, which is newer and more functional).

The problem with simply running a Net::OSCAR process every time I want to send a message is that AIM quickly protests if you signon and signoff too quickly in a short space of time — you start to get error messages when you attempt to signon again.

This is where AIMRelay comes it. It creates a sort of “Net::OSCAR daemon” that signs in to AIM once, and then accepts incoming commands (via AIM, telnet, or a Perl client provided) and relays them to the AIM network.

I ran into some problems when initially setting things up: Net::OSCAR was complaining when AIMRelay commited the buddylist:

You must use a tied Net::OSCAR::TLV hash! at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Net/OSCAR/Utility.pm line 139

I solved this problem, for the moment, by commenting out the line:

$oscar->commit_buddylist();

Doing this hasn’t caused any problems so far, but I understand there may be some ramifications if I try to send messages to AIM screen names that aren’t signed on.

Be aware that AIMRelay has some problems with handling iChat screen names: because they contain an ‘@mac.com’, AIMRelay thinks they’re email addresses and tries to handle them as such. This is trivial to fix, mostly because it simply involves making AIMRelay ‘stupider.’

I’ve been running an AIMRelay-based system for a couple of days now, and things have been working well.

I just mistakenly stumbled across this feature of BBEdit: if you drag-and-drop an image (either from the Finder, or from a browser window) into an open BBEdit document, you’ll get a pop-up dialog of options, and the result will be an HTML tag for the image in question. Cool.

In the middle of a torrential downpour, I headed out this afternoon to experience Leo’s Thai Food and Dimsum Palace, a 4-day-old restaurant on Pownal St. in Charlottetown, just south of Grafton, just north of the Legion [MAP].

Wow.

After a lunch of spicy basil chicken and rice, heading back to the office in the rain I almost started to cry. I love Thai food.

Leo’s is not a “restaurant” in the traditional sense of the word: there’s a serving counter and an eating counter. You sit on rickety stools facing the window. The menu is limited. And the food — or at least my spicy basil chicken and rice part of the menu — is fantastic.

In all of these respects, then, eating at Leo’s is not unlike eating in Bangkok. There was even a stiffling, humid feel to the air.

The staff were friendly and helpful (and brought back many happy memories of friendly, helpful restauranteurs we met in Thailand).

Leo’s is just the kind of Thai restaurant I would order up in my dreams.

I am very, very happy.

Total bill, $7.75. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. 119 Pownal Street, Charlottetown.

My friend Harold Stephens has posted an article about his experiences with Marlon Brando. Take a look at the great picture of Steve in Tahiti in front of the Bounty replica too.

Here are the technology-related expenditure motions at the April City of Charlottetown Council meeting :

Moved by Councillor Stu MacFadyen, seconded by Councillor Ken Gillis:

That the City of Charlottetown agrees to enter into the Oracle 11(i) Upgrade Agreement with DeltaWare Systems Inc. as per attached. (The Mayor and CAO are hereby authorized to execute standard contracts/agreements to implement this resolution). MOTION CARRIED 10-0.

Ever since I read this post from Doc Searls, I’ve had this running through my head. Here’s the entire speech.

I was riding my bike down Grafton Street tonight around sundown, and noticed, to my surprise and delight, that there appears to be a new Thai restaurant on Pownal Street, in the location formerly occupied by the comic shop. The sign on the front says simply “Thai Food.”

If this is true, and the food is good, then I believe Charlottetown will have tipped into a full-fledged North American city.

On Mr. Dressup this morning they played a game of “I Spy.” The introductory line to this game is “I spy, with my little eye…”

Why little eye?

I was at the Interlude this afternoon eating a very tasty lunch and reading The New Yorker when I came across an advertisement for Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, described in part as: “[b]orn into a wealthy Palo Alto family, Rose, a depressed and isolated child, didn’t take a real job until age 40, when she became a receptionist at the New Yorker in the 1980s.”

As a sucker for the non-fiction sub-genre of “books about The New Yorker”, I was moved to make an impulse purchase.

On a lark, I pulled out my cell phone, searched “amazon” in the stock “Google: WAP” search on the phone’s little web browser, got connected to the Amazon.com “cell phone enabled website,” search for and ordered the book. In about 2 minutes.

I never understood why “one click ordering,” Amazon.com’s patented scheme for a sort of “instant checkout,” was all that useful. Now I do: having your billing and shipping addresses, and your credit card information on file at Amazon.com and attached to your username and password makes ordering by cell phone (and other devices yet to be invented) possible. Can you imagine trying to type in all that information using the phone’s keypad?

Very cool.