Listening to Adam Curry’s Source Code this morning, and hearing him describe the role of the “drive time” slot in the radio world: it’s valuable because it’s the time of the day when people who are commuting have nothing better to do than sit in their cars listen to the radio.

Hearing this, I realized why I’m not consuming as much audio as I’d like: I have no drivetime.

Most days I either walk to work (where wearing an iPod seems both antisocial, and counter-productive because the audio of the street is interesting too) or I ride my bike (where wearing an iPod would simply be dangerous). My long car trips are limited to the three or four times a summer that I drive out to Park Corner for Land Trust meetings, and the once or twice a year we drive to Halifax or Moncton.

I could listen at home, instead of watching television (do I really need to watch more episodes of Seinfeld?), but I find it odd to just sit there and listen. Perhaps I need a hobby. Or perhaps I should wash the dishes or clean up the kitchen. Or exercise. As it is, my attention is fully occupied almost all of the time. Maybe that’s not such a good thing.

I saw Before Sunset last night and really, really liked it. The dialogue was a little forced at times, especially Julie Delpy’s, but that might just be an inevtiable feature of a movie that consists entirely of one conversation shot with a series of long tracking shots (and also because Ethan Hawke — and I can’t believe I’m writing this — is arguably the better actor of the pair). Hawke and Delpy are a little younger than me, but we’re clearly all of the same generation; a lot of the film’s appeal to me extended from the same sort of “hey, that’s us!” feeling that people one or two generations up the line felt when they watched The Big Chill. I don’t have a confining loveless marriage, but there are certainly times I’d like to run away to Paris.

Before I went to bed I tuned in to Hardball on MSNBC. I don’t know why, but I used to find the program almost unwatchable, and now I’m completely compelled by it. I used to find Chris Matthews brash and bombastic; I now find him delightful and bombastic. In any case, last night’s interview with bombastic turncoat Senator Zell Miller was amazing television; here’s Matthews blogging about the interview (there’s a link to a video of the internew on that page, but it’s only viewable in Internet Explorer).

In that small sub-section of watching televised events that concerns fantasizing about having casual sex with members of the live audience, I can confidently say, after two nights of watching the Republicans at play, that they’re not doing it for me.

Back in 1984, I did some basic genetics research on drosophila melanogaster, aka fruit fly. Mostly this involved looking at them under a microscope while they were anaesthetized with ether and breeding them in different combinations to see how various characteristics got passed down to children.

I though it was all innocent enough — they were just fruit flies. Obviously I was wrong, as this year the fruit flies have finally gotten around to exacting their revenge by reproducing in great numbers and spreading their armies throughout Charlottetown.

This summer you cannot mention the species in this city without sighs of tired resignation from all around. The fruit flies have taken over, and there doesn’t appear to be anything we can do about it.

Catherine has tried these gizmos from Lee Valley Tools. They work, but they simply can’t keep up with the exploding population.

No matter of cleaning, putting everything remotely attractive to fruit flies in the fridge or in sealed canisters, or any other maneuver we’ve taken has had any effect at all.

Much of the problem extends, no doubt, from the hundreds of these compost containers that now populate the city. Alas the Island Waste Management System has a waste video game, but no advice on their website as to how to control the raging drosophila.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac has this advice:

You may want to try trapping the flies by inserting a paper or metal funnel into the mouth of a quart jar baited with bits of overripe fruit. The flies will get into the jar, but they will not be able to get out. To decrease the number of fruit flies outdoors, promptly get rid of any “dropped” fruits or vegetables and keep all garbage cans tightly closed.

Perhaps that’s what we’ll try next.

Speaking of the Internet Archive, here’s another of their great projects: the International Children’s Digital Library.

Here’s a page from archive.org site that shows The IslandCam — the “live” online digital camera photo we put in place for the PEI Government website — seven years ago, on March 19, 1997.

The design in place for the site at that point was almost the first one. I think it holds up, albeit in a “Netscape 1.0” sort of way. Here’s the home page that was in place at that point. And what was perhaps my favourite project over the years I worked with the Province: A Bag of Rubber Hammers.

Here they are.

Even though Fiddles and Vittles closed several years back, Captain Bart’s didn’t open for the season, and the tourism world is drenched in “golf product,” there are still some classically Island tourist attractions — things that, by all rights, shouldn’t exist in a sensible universe, but that have delightfully squeaked through.

King’s Castle Provincial Park is one example: a free, giant children’s playground created and maintained by the Province of PEI.

The latest addition is the Elmira Miniature Railway, a new addition to the Elmira Railway Museum.

Leaving aside that the project cost $237,000, which seems, well, insane, the resulting little railway through the forest is wonderful: Oliver and I visited on Saturday, paid our fare, got our tickets, and had the train to ourselves as we sped through the wilds of rural Elmira. This is no carnival ride: there’s a mile of tracks through the woods, and the ride takes about 20 minutes to complete. It’s perfectly child-sized, and because this is PEI and not Orlando, there are no superfluous seatbelts or roll cages: you just sit in an open carriage and enjoy the ride.

This is one of those great times when political need — funnel money into Eastern Kings — results in a crazy hare-brained scheme that is probably doomed to fail (great as it is, I don’t see the railway as the key to the revitilization of Eastern PEI) but that also results in something that is actually a lot of fun, and will become, I think, a favourite destination for Island families.

CBC is reporting that Superior Sanitation applies for city wind turbine. Mark this day, for it’s the day that wind power reached a tipping point.

Thanks to this very helpful comment, I’ve found that my local OPAC speaks XML. And not just for search results, but for every page in the OPAC! This is truly amazing, and will enable some fantastic tools. Kudos to Dynix and the Provincial Library; I’ll modify the script I created earlier today to take advantage of this capability shortly.