Back in January, I predicted a Kerry + Edwards ticket. Now it’s happening.

The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust is holding a fundraising concert at Avonlea Village in Cavendish on Sunday, July 11, 2004 at 1:30 p.m..

Tickets are $15 per person, and this includes the concert, strawberries and ice cream, and admission to Avonlea Village for the day.

The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust works to preserve the scenic coastal lands on Prince Edward Island’s north shore in agricultural use. We work to acquire the “development rights” on land, leaving it otherwise owned and controlled by local farm families, who can continue to farm it in perpetuity, free from development pressure. It’s a worthwhile cause, and I’ve been a supporter, and member of the Board, for five years.

The fundraising concert is being generously sponsored by Avonlea Village: all funds raised will go to the Land Trust.

Avonlea Village is a great place for kids: I took Oliver out last year and we had a great time.

You can purchase tickets to the event directly from me (email avonleatickets@reinvented.net), or from any COWS on the Island.

Here’s an example, from Ben Hammersley, of using Perl to scrape an HTML page (in this case the FedEx tracking page) to grab data and spit it back out as RSS. Might be a good starting point for others, as he includes the source.

My father’s father, Dan Rukavina, was born in Croatia, in the village of Konjsko Brdo (he left for Canada in 1928). I just discovered that there were four people from Konjsko Brdo on the Titanic. Three died, one survived.

It’s Sunday, and I bought new socks yesterday, so it must be “renovate my own website day.”

I’ve fixed the RSS feed for the site: it has been broken since the beginning of time, with the date stamp for each item being set to the current date and time, not the actual date and time of the item. This probably didn’t break much, but it did make it look like I was writing everything all the time. Which would be exhausting. So I fixed it.

I modified search tool (in the sidebar on the right of the site) to use Google for searching; I’ve experimented with various mechanisms for self-hosting this, but in the end all were inferior to Google. Upside is that all of the Googleisms that you’re used to will work; downside (for users, not me) is that Google text ads will appear with the search results. I think it’s a reasonable compromise, but I’ll see what happens. Here’s a sample search, which will show you everything I’ve ever written about Aliant or Island Tel.

Other smaller things “under the hood” too, some of which might make things a little better, faster, stronger, others of which may or may not cause your computer to light on fire.

You can now read all of the blogs generated here at 84 Fitzroy Street in one place.

If you’re a North River Road regular, you’ll know that we’re getting a The Home Depot in Charlottetown. Squeezed in between North River Road and the Wal-Mart. And leaving Sporting Intentions, the sporting goods store next door, dwarfed in the empty space inside the ‘L’ formed by the behemoth taking shape next door.

Oliver and I decided that we needed to support Sporting Intentions in their hour of need, so we dropped in yesterday and bought a Nalgene bottle (a bottle that Dan says in unbreakable and doesn’t take on smells or odours of its contents, thus making it eligible for extreme testing by our small family).

We were well-served at the store: the staff-to-customer ratio, including Oliver as a bona fide customer, was 3 to 1. And the staff were helpful, witty, and willing to entertain and enhance Oliver’s eccentricities (i.e. they all went to the back room to get their Nalgene bottles when Oliver asked, repeatedly, “where you bottle?”).

Although I am unfortunately sedentary by nature, I do aspire to sporty greatness (something that will be put to the test next weekend), and I have a sudden urge to outfit myself with sea kayaks, winter-ready pup-tents, and all manner of mountaineering first aid equipment every time I go into stores like Sporting Intentions. We were lucky to escape with only a Nalgene bottle.

If you, as I, would feel like Charlottetown would be less of a place without great local retailers like Sporting Intentions, and you want to make a small protest against the incursion of Giant American Retail, perhaps you could do as we did, and drop in for a spot of Nalgene this week. Tell them we sent you. And tell them thanks for sticking in there.

My iBook, which appears to be operating normally otherwise, and still retains its ability to take and hold a battery charge, has stopped telling me how much battery life I have left:

I’ve tried resetting the PMU, and zapping the PRAM; neither had an effect. I’m open to suggestions.

Coming in to Timothy’s this morning for a chai latte (Steven says I shouldn’t admit sort of thing that out loud), I was surprised to find small globes on every table. According to my server, this is a bold Campbell Webster Initiative. Bravo, I say: I love globes (as does Oliver, although mostly he just wants to see where Charlottetown is), and I think they should be ubiquitous.

We’ve seen a collection of “art bike racks” crop up on the streets of Charlottetown over the last month.

While I am generally an active supporter of infusing art into the conduct of everyday life, and while I’ve become an active and enthusiastic short-distance bike rider of late, and thus someone who is painfully aware of the need for non-parking-meter bike racks, I’m sad to say that these new racks miss the mark on the two most important criteria for measuring the effectiveness of bike racks.

First, they are located in places where they aren’t needed. All respect to City Hall and the folks who use ScotiaBank as their stock brokers, but are these well-known bike destinations? Did the City’s bike planners actually look to see where people might be parking their bikes before choosing these locations?

Second, and perhaps more importantly, they don’t look like bike racks. This is of course to be expected when one takes the “art bike rack” approach, and I’m not suggesting that we require standard-issue industrial bike racks. But something vaguely evocative of cycling, or even a “park your bike here” sign would be useful, especially for out-of-towners who won’t have the opportunity to figure it out over time.

I’m hesitant to criticize anything that comes out of City Hall that looks progressive and forward-thinking. But it’s not enough to just look like you’re doing something progressive and forward-thinking, it actually has to be progressive and forward-thinking. And some common sense would help.