I have purchased Canadian postage stamps twice in the last month. Both times I have been sold self-adhesive stamps that do not require licking. The last time I recall purchasing such stamps it was as part of a “special experiment,” but as far as I can tell, self-adhesion is now the norm rather than the exception.

Kudos to CCRA for releasing their Payroll Tables for the Mac. This was previously a PC-only program.

I was eating dinner at the Town & Country Restaurant on Queen Street tonight (they’ll be in business 40 years this April; make sure you congratulate them next time you’re in). While I was sitting there eating my cheeseburger platter I realized Catherine and I had sat at exactly the same table the night before Oliver was born. We went home and watched a Kevin Costner/Paul Newman movie, spent a fitful night of contraction weirdness, and were at the QEH at 9:00 a.m.

This got me thinking about other significant restaurant meals in my life.

There was the time that Catherine, before “our time of dating,” took me to The Only Café in Peterborough only to act as a decoy lest her almost-old boyfriend show up. And then, several months later, our first of many Indian meals, at a restaurant in Waterloo. And a little after that when her parents came to visit for the first time and I ended up suggesting, completely by mistake, that we go and eat at the most expensive restaurant in town.

Much earlier, in the years before Catherine, there was the meal at The Parkhill Café where my girlfriend of the day took me and revealed that while I’d been away on the coast for two weeks she had started dating the man only known as “the folksinger.”

And several years after that there came the end of another erstwhile relationship, which suddenly imploded after a bizarre discussion about the merits of World War II.

I remember the time that Catherine and I took Oliver out to eat for the first time: he was about a month old, maybe even a little less, and we went out to the Lone Star, the now-defunct TexMex place in Charlottetown. He sat on the table in his car seat and just stared silently for the entire meal.

And the time in Phitsanulok, Thailand when the wait staff whisked Oliver off to the kitchen. He reappeared, magically, on the makeshift stage, in the arms of the young woman singing U.S. power ballads in a heavy accent. Oliver had the microphone in his hands, and was trying to sing along.

My brother Mike and I had our “first adult conversation” (in the sense that we were adults, not children) in Charlotte Ann’s, across from the Peterborough Examiner.

With my friend Stephen Good, nee Elliott, I used to go out to Kelsey’s Road House, on the Lansdowne Street strip in Peterborough, every week after our meetings at The Systems Group at Trent and talk about life for a while. Every week we earned another “decorative Coca-Cola glass.” I think I accumulated a half dozen. By the time they got to Charlottetown I was sick of them, and in a fit of insanity I tried to crush them between cutting boards, which succeeded mostly in impregnating the cutting boards with shards of glass.

My Dad and I used to go to the Beehive Restaurant, at Clappison’s Corners near Hamilton, every Friday after I was done at the YMCA. It was the best diner, ever. And the Coca-Cola there tasted better than anywhere before or since. It’s gone now, replaced by a Tim Horton’s and a Wendy’s.

When we were kids and visited my grandparents in Cochrane, Ontario, my Mom’s home town, Dad used to smuggle us out every day after dinner and take us to the Chinese restaurant downtown for french fries. It was a welcome antidote to the roast beef and potatoes.

I remember the time my grandmother came to the Island and we took her out to the lobster supper buffet in North Rustico and, mindful of the astronomical $20 price for the meal, proceeded to eat ever dessert in sight so as to ensure we got our money’s worth.

And the time that Oliver and I snuck over to Mcdonalds in Bangkok while Catherine was shopping for quality Thai crafts and Oliver ate his first french fry (delivered in 60 seconds or it was free).

And the meal that my brother Steve ordered for us in Seoul on my second day in the country. After ordering in passable (to me) Korean, he admitted that he’d had no idea what he ordered. We ended up with a hearty melange of broth, eggs and bits of squid.

My first big meal without my family was a trip to Hamilton’s Mr. D’s Restaurant with my YMCA friends Steve, Sam and Tom. It was a big deal, and we got dressed up. There was sorbet to “cleanse your palet, Sir.” And the total bill for the four of us came to over $100, which we thought was amazing.

I had a spate, about 6 years ago, where I wrote a monthly restaurant review column for The Buzz here in Charlottetown. It was, to be honest, mostly a failure. I realize now that this is because I like restaurants not for the food, or the decor, or the service. I like restaurants for what’s happened in them. And what will.

I am a sucker for good design. And there’s no doubting that Belinda Stronach’s website is well-designed: it’s simple, bold, and set apart from the dull competition.

And so I think “hey, maybe I should look at that Belinda Stronach — she’s got a well-designed website after all!”

And so I do. I surf around the website, like what I see, process-wise, and get a good feeling from all the “My vision is clear. But I believe in an open, inclusive, consultative approach to getting there.” rhetoric.

Maybe, ancestors turning over in graves aside, I will consider even voting for her.

Recall at this point that I still have no idea what she believes in or espouses.

Now, later in the day, I cringe at my naivety, as the site starts to fill up with content like this, and some of Stronach’s views are exposed.

Note that these are just points, and use policy codewords that I may or may not fully understand. But it’s pretty clear that Stronach and I don’t share a neighbourhood on the political spectrum.

Which makes me realize how easy it is to be seduced by the power of good design.

Still, it’s an awful swell site…

Interesting sidenote: do a Google search for Stephen Harper and you’ll likely see a Belina Stronach text ad.

Obviate has got to be one of the better words going:

To anticipate; to prevent by interception; to remove from the way or path; to make unnecessary; as, to obviate the necessity of going.

I used it for the first time today.

Here are pointers to the events calendars for candidates in the Democratic Primary in New Hampshire next week:

• Clark
• Dean
• Edwards
• Kerry
• Kucinich
• Lieberman
• Sharpton

There’s also a Where the Candidates Are page on the New Hampshire Democratic Party website.

I have found newspaper paradise. Newspapers from around the world. No propriatary software required. Updated around the clock (for example, today’s National Post is now available; it’s only midnight in Toronto). Cool.

Thanks to the assistance of Dan and Steven I was able to identify a problem with the RSS feeds from this server.

Technically the problem was with the newsreaders (in Steven’s case Straw and in Dan’s case NewzCrawler), not the RSS feed itself. I turned on gzip compression on my Apache server about three weeks ago to preserve bandwidth. In theory, user-agents like web browsers and RSS readers should be able to either send a “Accept-Encoding: gzip” header and accept compressed data, or, if they don’t, be sent the original non-compressed data.

Somehow this mechanism was causing problems for Steven and Dan and their RSS readers (although it didn’t affect NetNewsWire, which is what I use). For the time being, I’ve turned off compression, and this appears to have solved the problem.

In the summer of 1950, Ben Carlin and his wife Elinore left Halifax, Nova Scotia in a World War II amphibious jeep, nicknamed Half-Safe, bound, ultimately, for Birmingham, England. Carlin’s book Half-Safe: Across the Atlantic by Jeep is the tale of their journey.

Unique among “voyage around the world” books, reaction of my friends and family upon hearing me summarize Half-Safe’s voyage was, more often then not, to deny that such a voyage was possible. Indeed the Carlins found the same problem during their voyage, and sometimes found it difficult to get the publicity and sponsorship their voyage deserved.

But it is true: Half-Safe, a souped-up amphibious Ford jeep, purchased surplus after the war near Washington, DC, carried the Carlins on land and on sea, and therein allowed them to work around the usual need to “ship the Land Rover across the Atlantic and then pick up the trip” that characterizes most if not all other round-the-world expeditions.

The impetus for the trip was, like most others, the result of a dare. Carlin, an Australian, was in India during the war working as a Field Engineer. He relates in the opening chapter, still in India at the close of the war in 1945:

With my opposite number in the Air Force, Squadron-Leader M.C. Bunting, OBE, RAF, I was inspecting installations on the deserted field and had no business looking at vehicles, but a battered amphibious jeep caught my eye. I have always been interested in salt water, small boats, and vehicles and fancy I know something about them all. After fifteen minutes around, over and under this oddity of which I had heard but never before seen, I mused, as much to myself as to him, ‘You know, Mac, with a bit of titivation you could go around the world in one of these things.’ Mac was a very polite, sober and laconic character. He said, ‘Nuts!’

It took Carlin five years to get to America, locate, modify, test and refine the jeep, find and marry his wartime sweetheart, and make his way to Halifax for departure.

Halifax did not fare well in the eyes of the Carlins:

This is as good a time as any to pay a tribute to Halifax — the finest departure point anyone ever had. I’d gladly leave Halifax any time for anywhere in anything. The city glows with the same rich, warm flame of enlightened liberalism which lit medieval Aberdeen. In two years there, we entered only seven private homes, not more than two of which we are likely to see again.

Once the major voyage-ending bugs were worked out of Half-Safe’s systems — and there were a large number of them, mostly involving different methods for carrying fuel — the Carlins set off for the Azores from Halifax on July 19, 1950.

Their plan was to head for Flores; they arrived there 32 days later, having travelled through a hurricane, the jeep pummelled almost to the breaking point, having suffered tremendous seasickness (especially Elinore) and, one would imagine, testing their marriage severely.

From the Azores they steamed to Madeira, and then made land at Africa at Cap Juby before driving overland through Agadir, Casablanca, Gibraltar, Lison, Madrid, Paris, Brussels, Denmark, Sweden, London and finally Birmingham, where they arrived on New Years Day, 1952.

Despite their adventures at sea, the voyage overland was perhaps more challenging that the one over sea, mostly because of the variety of borders to cross, breakdowns of the jeep, and the need to hold shows to raise money to support the trip.

The Carlins weren’t rich, and although there was some sponsorship from a North American magazine, and the promise of more from other sources, not more than once they were down to their last dollar and had to pawn their movie camera, or sell surplus fuel to continue on.

Carlin is a witty writer, and the book is a rollicking good tale of adventure, and contains considerable technical details of their voyage.

While the voyage the book relates ends in England, Carlin did, in fact, continue onwards from there, and this helpful Australian website contains a brief summary of that voyage. The tale of this second leg of the voyage is available as The Other Half of Half-Safe, which can be purchased from Carlin’s alma mater, Guildford Grammar School, which has a page devoted to Carlin’s adventures. The school is also the final resting place of the jeep Half-Safe where it is, says the school, “displayed prominently within the grounds.”

Interestingly, Carlin’s second voyage took place at the same time as the Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition, although, as this commentator notes, “So, there were two overland expeditions in southern Burma at the same time. Both expeditions wrote up their adventures, yet neither mentions the other.”

Carlin continued on around the world, and ended up back in Montreal on May 12, 1958, almost eight years after starting out.

I purchased Half-Safe used from a bookseller in the U.S. using abebooks.com. It is out of print, but many other used copies are available for sale there.

My friend Ann asked me last week if I had a particular issue of The New Yorker from last fall, as a friend of hers suggested that she read an article therein. I looked and looked, and could never find this article and so ended up dumping all of my fall issues on Ann’s doorstep on Saturday night with hopes that she would be more successful.

This morning, on a lark, I went to the PEI Provincial Library Online Databases page, entered my library card number, searched the “General Reference” database, and found the text of the article, in its entirety.

I’ve mentioned this resource before, but it bears repeating: you’ll find a lot of “offline” resource hidden in those databases, and as our PEI tax dollars have already paid for access to them, we might as well take advantage of them.

And next time you see Harry Holman, give him a hug.