One of the cool unanticpated side-effects of being able to see the library books I’ve got checked out as an RSS feed is that when inter-library loans come in, I see them in my newsreader well before I get an email from the library telling me they’ve arrived. Case in point:

This is true because ILL books get “pre-checked out” for you when they arrive, I assume because they have an immovable due date (when they have to get back to the “home” library).

While I’m here, let me again sing the praises of the inter-library loan. For the uninitiated, this is a service offered by most public libraries wherein if a book is not held in their own collection, they will scour the globe (or at least the continent) to find a copy for you and have it shipped to your home branch where you can borrow it just like a regular library book.

In the olden pre-computer days when ILL requests had to be delivered by canoe and sled-dog, this could take several months; with modern technology (along with the excellent ILL sleuths of the Provincial Library here on PEI), I’m finding many requests arrive within a week or two.

Inter-library loan makes your local public library much more powerful because it means, albeit with a time lag, their collection is essentially infinite.

From my mother comes a link to the top 1000 books, described as:

…the “Top 1000” titles owned by OCLC member libraries—the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the “purchase vote” of libraries around the globe.

OCLC is the “Online Computer Library Center,” a “a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs.”

If you have compact fluorescent lightbulbs in Charlottetown and need to dispose of them, you can do this by dropping them off at the Superior Sanitation drop-off on Mt. Edward Road every Tuesday and Saturday between 7:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. More details here, including locations elsewhere on PEI. Others in the U.S. and Canada can check here at Earth911.org.

I just ordered one of these Kill A WATT energy use monitors and eight of these compact fluorescent lighbulbs from Energy Alternatives in Victoria, BC on the strength of this article by Mag Ruffman in the Calgary Sun.

Anne-o-philes will recall that Ms. Ruffman played Alice Lawson in the Anne of Green Gables television series, and Olivia King Dale on the Road to Avonlea. She is now a home improvement guru. Proving that everything does indeed begin and end on Prince Edward Island.

From my friend Ann comes a link to this article in the New York Times about Amtrak’s new automated telephone system. I decided to take it out for a test drive. Here’s how it went [4.6MB WAV]. I was impressed, although things did go off the rails in the end when I tried to leave.

Because either we’ve been away, or our family doctor has been away, we managed to miss her flu shot clinic, and now she has exhausted her supply of the vaccine.

Looking for alternative sources, I phoned the Office of the Chief Health Officer. I had to leave a message because there was nobody in the office when I called. An hour later, Dr. Lamont Sweet himself phoned me and gave me the information I needed. Prince Edward Island is very small.

There is a flu vaccine clinic in the basement of the Polyclinic in Charlottetown on Wednesday, December 1, 2004 from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and again from 1:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Actual header of actual email received from Air Canada this morning:

Carolyn Bertram, Liberal MLA, and Hon. Chester Gillan, Minister of Health and Social Services, had a lengthy exchange during today’s Question Period [RealAudio] regarding the Best Start program.

Bertram is not a great orator: she appears somewhat ill at ease, and sometimes it seems like her passion gets in the way of her clarity. But she’s got passion, and it shows.

Gillan isn’t a great orator either: he tries to play the misdirection “talk loftily and nobody will notice I didn’t answer the question” card, but it doesn’t work, largely because his punch lines just fade away into nothing.

Bertram wanted to know why the Government is freezing funds for Best Start. Gillan wanted to say “we don’t have the money, but we still care about the children.” He didn’t do a very good job.

It wasn’t a decisive victory, but on balance I think Bertram won the day.

Prompted by the example of my officemates, I went shopping for compact flourescent lightbulbs tonight for the house. I was dismayed to find that all brands I could find have a big warning label on the back saying “contains mercury: use proper disposal methods.”

Can anyone point me to an evaluation of the comparitive evils of the presence of mercury in these bulbs vs. the energy they save?

The bar formerly know as “The Playhouse” at the corner of University Ave. and Fitzroy St. in Charlottetown, under renovation for as long as anyone can remember, reopens Wednesday, November 24 at 5:00 p.m.

As far as I understand, the Reid family, formerly of JR’s (etc.) down by the railway station, are the owners now. I think their renovation qualifies as the slowest in history; I’m quite excited to see the results inside.

My first meal out with a Real Islander (okay, he wasn’t born here, but he had recorded a CD of his songs, many of which were odes to PEI, so I think he qualified for some sort of “early-release program” from mainlandedness) was at the basement restaurant at JR’s. There was a lot of beef involved. And country music. It was great.