ImageWell is a fantastic little OS X utility that eases the process of uploading images to a server. It’s the OS X weblogger’s best friend. I’ve been using the soon-to-be-released version 2 for the last week, and it’s even better. Highly recommended.

Rob points out the striking similarity of the guy in this comic to yours truly. Eerie.

Because Johnny and I can connect to the Internet with our laptops almost anywhere, we need a way to allow us (but only us) to send email through our mail server. Alas setting this up is something that appears to require a lot of mystical incantations. Until I read this extremely helpful document that documents the simple three or four steps required to turn on SMTP authentication under RedHat Linux.

Perry and Susan Williams were kind enough to invite us out to their place in St. Catherine’s this evening for what Perry termed a “combination house party and commercial shoot.”

Perry is one of the rungs in the wheel that is Hedgerow, a new Island singing and storytelling supergroup, the others of which are Allan Rankin, Alan Buchanan and Brad Fremlin.

Hedgerow will be performing at the Nils Ling Centre for the Performing Arts in Stanley Bridge this summer, and because they’re fresh out of the gate, they needed footage of enthusiastic followers to paste into a television commercial.

Allan, whose praises I have sung here before, is a superb singer-songwriter whose songs about the Island perhaps best capture both its specialness and its fragility. And Alan, who has sometimes appeared across a great gulf from me (but who is no doubt a better man than any corporation would ever allow him to be) is a consumate storyteller. Perry and Brad work their musical magic into the background in a way that seems effortless and casual even as you know that it’s demanding and highly skilled.

While what we saw tonight was something of an unpolished gem, it was good stuff, and once it gels, it will be great stuff.

A friend of mine — a new Islander — remarked last week at the irony that many of the projects that Island tourismocrats engage in to attract people to PEI in fact work to erode that about the Island that is special and interesting and attractive to visitors in the first place, as if being outselves wasn’t simply interesting enough. Projects like Hedgerow — “distilled” Island culture served live — while not quite as unvarnished as a midwinter night at he BIS, are about as far from Nickelback-on-the-Water as you can get. What Perry and Allan and Alan and Brad are saying is, in essence, “this is an interesting place: let us tell you something about it.” That’s a laudable activity, and worthy of support and encouragement.

By the way, any event at the Williams Compound is bound to be a learning experience about their extended family, of which there was much evidence this evening. New information I gleaned tonight: Alan Baker (who I worked with briefly on a Rob Paterson-led hullabaloo several years ago) is married to Perry’s sister Lily. Who knew? I also met Bonnie MacEachern’s neighbour, and we reminisced about the Goodwill Ave. pesticide tussle related here.

Oliver was left in the able hands of Ann’s daughter Cassady. Who was named after Neil.

Enough information for one day. Off to bed to prepare for Day Two of the “experiencing a small slice of what life is like every day for Catherine tour.” Catherine, by the way, spent the day experiencing the joys of Little Italy in New York. She and Joy are off to the theatre tomorrow night and, before that, to this. I am appropriately jealous.

Catherine flew off to New York City this morning, leaving Oliver and I to fend for ourselves for the first time in a long time. So far we have managed to keep care of each other, and are eating, washing, etc. as required. We even brushed our teeth this morning!

Catherine just phoned and said the weather in New York is beautiful.

Must go and read Bear on a Bike.

A reminder that Taken, the digital exhibition that knocked my socks off, closes on Sunday at the Confederation Centre. You should really try to get over and see it today or Saturday.

Back in the mid- to late-1980s, I was a member of a graphic design movement I will call “Times + Helvetica.” It’s not really proper to call this a movement, of course, but I will anyway. This movement turned out a lot of logos, ads, posters and magazine pages the chief design effect of which was the cunning mixture of Times and Helvetica. Like this:

The latest example of my own work that uses this technique is the logo I designed for ISN in the mid-1990s, a perverted-by-ISN, badly-kerned version of which you can see here.

This morning in the mail there was a piece from Conservative candidate Darren Peters that rather effectively uses this same technique. Everything old is new again, I guess.

Policies and personalities aside, Darren has established a strong presence in the political graphic design horse race. We’ll have to see what his opponents come up with.

The Brackley Drive-in is opening for the season on June 4 with Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban. We can’t wait.

Here’s a map showing the county lines in the United States:

It’s a weird alien skin.

That’s my mouse pointer coming up from the south, not a giant cruise ship or undiscovered island.

The PEI Climate Change Hub has published a magazine called Blowing in the Wind: Answers to Climate Change with a stated purpose to “educate and encourage people to take action on climate change.”

This is a laudable goal, and the newsletter does, indeed, contain many useful bits of information, pointers to websites, and practical steps we can all take to lower our personal climate change profile.

That said, the newsletter also brings to light a marketing issue that often afflicts “change” movements, and that is the implication that to achiece practical change requires cultural change.

Here’s an example: David Daughton has a poem called Missing Olympia published in the newsletter, to which he has attached an author’s note that says, in part:

Climate change causation has its roots in human attitudes and actions that are lacking in respect and love for natural balance. As we concede a gap between the personal and planetary states of being, much of the magic/science of the healing power of love and care for our surroundings lapses.

Now I have a lot of respect for David and the work he does. And I don’t want to deride the thought process that has led him to work in the climate change movement. But reading tracts like that makes me feel the same way I feel when I read hardcore evangelical religious rants telling me that Harry Potter is the devil.

I’m ready to turn down my thermostat, insulate my attic, ride my bike to work, and buy wind power. But if it seems like I have to embrace the “magic/science of the healing power of love and care for our surroundings,” to be able to do this, well all of a sudden we’re back in 1973 and you’re that guy on the steps of Carlisle United Church trying to convince me to come to Sunday School instead of riding my bike to the playground.

I don’t mean to suggest that Blowing in the Wind is full of this sort of “change as religion” material, because it’s not: the balance of the material is practical and commonsensical. I merely wish to communicate that to sell me on climate change, you simply have to tell me what to do, and make a case for why. If the power of love leads you to do that, fine; I just don’t need to know that.