Drive randomly: make right and left turns when the mood strikes you. Eventually you will end up on Quinpool Road. Then you will know where you are going.

Phone (603) 258-6798. Press ‘5’ for ‘Amazon.com Lookup.’ Enter the ISBN number of a book. Hear the current price for that book on Amazon.com. Repeat.

Here’s what’s happening:

• You’re calling a Voicepulse Connect DID number in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
• The call is routed to my Asterisk server here in Charlottetown, PEI.
• The Asterisk server has an extension defined to call a Perl script that accepts a 10-digit number and then uses the Amazon.com API to look up the book price, which is read back to you.

You’re free to use the Perl source code as an example of how to do this sort of thing. No guarantees that it’s error-proof, or that it takes into account all possible outcomes.

As I suspected, prices for hotel rooms in Boston during the Democratic National Convention are a little crazy. Witness this quote from Expedia for a room at the Holiday Inn Express (aka a generic bland hotel):

Of course it does include parking!

By some miracle, I’ve been accredited as a blogger for the Democratic National Convention. Given that the convention starts on July 26 (in 14 days), I think that qualifies as “late notice.”

Now the question is whether or not I can make the practical arrangements to attend. I would expect, to put it mildy, that hotel rooms are in short supply.

The phone call was fun: “Hello, is this Peter? This is the DNC.”

We had a colleague staying overnight in Charlottetown on Saturday, headed for a 6:15 a.m. flight on Sunday morning. She overslept, and awoke with a start at 5:38 a.m. She made the flight with time to spare — indeed she had to wait in line at the check-in counter.

Try that in Toronto.

As far as I know, I have never watched people dancing nakedly in a bar-like setting. I can’t say as though I’m particularly excited about the notion of people dancing nakedly in a bar-like setting in my home province. But, beyond the effects that such naked dancing might have on the surrounding neighbourhood — noise, lecherous disorderliness, etc. — I don’t think my government should be expressing opinions or taking action on the naked dancing issue.

I don’t feel this way because I think governments shouldn’t involve themselves in the business of enhancing or policing morals-related issues — clearly there is at least some role to play for government there. A small one, but a role nonetheless.

No, I feel this way because when governments try to speak out on issues of morality, inevitably something approaching inane xenophobic ranting tends to result.

Witness this comment from our Premier on the naked dancing issue, as quoted by the CBC:

“I think P.E.I. is a fairly homogeneous society and our norms, and customs and values I think are such that we want to encourage sort of wholesome entertainment that reflects the history of this community. The Island community. And we just think that this kind of entertainment is going in the wrong direction and that’s not where we want to be.”

I gather that, if the Premier had his way, we would all be attending historical pageants wherein fully-clothed Scottish and Irish people would enact vignettes from the Island’s past.

Surely there has to be a way to express concern about the naked dancing, and even to work to control the unseemly parts of the naked dancing, without casting Prince Edward Island as some sort of chaste homeland for like-minded boring people?

One more tip for the premier: it’s probably not a good idea to be reinforcing to the media how PEI is a “fairly homogeneous society” in the middle of Pride Week. It makes you — and all of us — look more antediluvian than we should be striving for.

The Frisbee Golf Tournament is on, starting at 10:30 a.m. at Strathgartney.

And the weird server implosion that happened here in the middle of last night is over and things are running as normal, as least for now: a sudden influx of spamy email is causing stress on SpamAssassin.

I was talking to a colleague yesterday, let’s call him “Sam.” We were talking about travel destinations. He was shopping for a place to go for a week with his wife this winter, and we were talking about Europe. He had some hesitation about going to Europe for short little trip because they have longer-term plans to “do Europe” later, and didn’t want to sneak in little preliminary bits of Europe before the big event, lest they ruin the surprise (I am paraphrasing here).

Here’s the thing: get in your car right now and drive to Halifax and get on a plane that leaves there tonight. If you fly west to Vancouver, it will take you about 9 hours to get there, including a 2 hour layover in Toronto. If you fly east to London, England, it will take you about 7 hours to get there, including a brief stop in St. John’s.

Once you’re at Heathrow, you’re basically less than 3 or 4 hours from of almost anywhere else in Europe. For example, you can fly from Stansted (a quick bus ride from Heathrow) to Prague the same day, and you’ll be in Prague by 4:00 in the afternoon (and on EasyJet, you’ll only pay $120 for the flight).

And so on.

San Francisco is 9 to 11 hours away. Whitehorse is about 12 hours. Dallas is 8 or 9 hours from Halifax.

Granted, there are passports, and borders and other things to consider when going to Europe (although arguably there are more complications going to the U.S. these days).

But for some reason we still think of Vancouver as “close” and Europe as “very, very far away.” To the extent that many think of traveling to Europe as being in the “once or twice in a lifetime” category.

And this isn’t something unique to travel: the thought of picking up the phone and actually calling someone in, say, Rome or Madrid would be something that I, even with all my voice-over-IP and “man of the world” posturing, would treat as a special event. Even though calling Rome right now would cost me about 7 cents a minute, which is about half as much as it costs to call Summerside at Aliant’s regular rates.

Even the thought of mailing something “overseas” seems exotic, and something that would deserve a special trip to the post office.

This concerns me on several levels.

Personally, I’d like to be able to get over my “far far away” hang-ups about Europe because I think I would go there more often, have more fun, be a better person.

Provincially (so to speak), I’d like more of the people I work and live alongside to be able to do the same: I think the way we plan our cities, live our lives, eat our food, etc. would be dramatically changed with more European travel under our collective belts.

And I think if we all treated European (and for that matter worldwide) travel less like a 50th wedding anniversary and more like a trip to the corner store, we would get a heck of a lot more out of the travel experience.

The thing is, I’m not sure how to make this happen, personally or otherwise. Maybe it just takes more traveling, calling and mailing.

They say we should all be drinking more water. And personally I’ve been feeling sort of dehydrated of late.

So, with Johnny’s support, I said “hey, let’s get a water cooler at the office.”

As my friends upstairs are patrons of Prince Edward Springs, the water arm of the company formerly known as Seaman’s Beverages, I called there first. And I immediately got trapped in the spider’s web of interactive telephone menus that kept leading me to the “general mailbox for the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Group.” I didn’t want to leave a message, I wanted to order some water. So I hung up. I tried three of four more times over the afternoon, and always ended up at the same place. If they can’t answer their phone, I reason, perhaps they will forget to bring the water too.

Next.

Things looked more promising at Sparkling Springs: they have a website, and that website has an order form. I dutifully filled this out, and was assured by the response that they check their email every day, and that I would hear back shortly. That was 48 hours ago. I have yet to hear back. If they can’t answer their email, I reason, perhaps they will forget to bring the water too.

My third option is Culligan. However I have latent fears about Culligan, for I associate their brand with “water treatment.” Which implies that the water in question was originally in need of treatment. And the last thing I want is fetid water that’s been made better by technology.

Perhaps I should simply turn to the tap.

It turns out that our family is not alone in our love of the Amazing Race. Tuesday night’s episode was very good: I’m already adding “that zip line thing” to my list of things I must try sometime (apropos of which, I can’t wait until Phil’s Book comes out in the fall; I’ve a feeling it will change my life).