As if the new parking obelisks weren’t enough, users trying to pay their parking tickets online this morning here in Charlottetown were greeted with this message:

The City’s digital certificate expired at 3:03 a.m. this morning. Same message appears for utility bill payments.

While I question the value of a proprietary online system for parking tickets and utility bills in a place the size of Charlottetown, the least the City can do is to ensure that the electronic behemoth is properly fed.

Can somebody warn the City fathers about this for me?

As described in bitter detail here, my mostly trusty Apple iBook laptop suffered a hard disk crash in the hours leading up to my departure for the Democratic National Convention.

Fortunately it was still covered under Apple’s “AppleCare” warranty (now officially “the best investment I’ve ever made”), and so through the good offices of Little Mac Shoppe, it was winged off to the experts in New Brunswick for repairs, and returned today.

I’m happy to report that it’s ship-shape and running better than every (it appears to have returned with a hard drive about twice the size of the old one, but I may be imagining this…). I did lose the entire contents of the old hard drive in the process (I knew this was likely), but fortunately, as my secondary machine, there was nothing irreplacable on it before (at least not that I’ve encountered yet).

CBC Prince Edward Island is quoting Police Commissioner Garrity as saying “These will not go down they tell us…” about the new parking kiosks being installed in Charlottetown.

Evidence suggests that this is where Murphy’s Law is due to take effect. I expect the parking kiosks to start keeling over any day now. No technology is infallible, especially technology (a) that is located out in public on city streets, subject to the elements, snowplows, etc. and (b) that has several slots into which mischievous members of the public will feel duty bound to stick all manner of Krazy Glue-bearing objects.

We replace the analog with the digital at our peril.

Watched this episode of Six Feet Under tonight. Heard a nice version of I’m a Lonely Little Petunia In An Onion Patch over the closing credits.

Found this useful music credits page on the HBO website, and identified the singer as Imogen Heap. Searched Google for Imogen Heap and ended up on her website.

Found that Imogen Heap has a weblog (and a moblog). Found this blog post that says, in part:

So i stuck together a load of little video clips i made on my mobile phone while i was on that cycling trip following the River Thames with the original version of “lonely little petunia” i did. Some of you saw it lst night on the “Six feet under episode “the dare” last night. I had a few emails to hear it again. This is the version i did that I like the most xx if some of you prefer the one you heard i’ll get round to sticking that one up too…

Which led me to this Quicktime movie of I’m a Lonely Little Petunia In An Onion Patch sung over a movie shot on a mobile phone (genesis here).

All of which was enough to push me to buy this album from Frou Frou, one half of which is Imogen Heap.

A “perfect storm” of television + website + musician + weblog + mobile phone + ecommerce.

Usually convergence looks like this; thank goodness that’s not all there is.

The movie Garden State, which is about to open, features a track from a Frou Frou. I saw Zach Braff interviewed last night, along with Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard, on Charlie Rose. This probably means we will be hearing more about Imogen Heap soon.

Looking for pointer: is there anywhere to get keys cut in downtown Charlottetown? Note that the new hardware store in the Confederation Court Mall does not do this, as Catherine has just discovered.

Edward Hasbrouck is hosting an evening about around the world travel at Airtreks.com on August 5th. If San Francisco weren’t so far away, I’d be there.

I spent most of last Monday and Tuesday perched high in the Fleet Center about 10 feet from David Sifry’s command post. So I had a front-row seat to David’s CNN blog-wrangling duties.

And I also got to see what a couple of days in the life of trying to keep Technorati alive is like (from the sheer volume of flurriful instant messaging flowing from David’s PC, it looks like it’s a considerable chore).

Which makes this post from Adam Greenfield about Technorati (along with this followup) all the more interesting.

Last week, courtesy of CNN, Technorati had a televised coming out party. Problem was, if my own usage is a gauge, it wasn’t working more than it was. At a time when we vain convention bloggers were relying on it as a measurer of our linkfulness, profiles were coming up “no such user,” and searches were coming up with no (or wildly inconsistent) results.

David was obviously aware of all this — there were several times I heard a live shout-out from the bloggerati like “Hey, David, is Technorati down?” only to hear a response a few minutes later “Things should be okay now.” It was kind of neat to watch the process up close like that. And it certainly made me prone to being more forgiving for Technorati’s shortcomings.

Things seem to be on a more even keel now (and don’t get me wrong: Technorati, when it’s working, is a fantastic service). But last week’s experiences do prompt me to consider how much these new worlds we’re experimenting with rely on fragile, under-resourced, centralized infrastructure. While there are good alternatives to Technorati (like Feedster and Bloglines), we’re still relying on bottleneck-prone centralization rather than more robust, decentralized technologies. Maybe this is inevitable, I’m not sure.

I’m pretty sure if Google went down for a week, my personal productivity would suffer enormously. In fact it might be impossible to get any work done. What happens when I come to rely on services like Technorati to the same degree?

The PEI Provincial Library has started to email out “pre-overdue” notices, 4 days before an item is due back. This is very useful. Thank-you.

Here’s an example. Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary is quoted in the Irish Independent as saying:

“Are we going to apologise when something goes wrong? No we’re f**king not,” said O’Leary. “It doesn’t matter how many times you write to us complaining that we wouldn’t put you up in a hotel because there was fog at Stansted. You didn’t pay us for it,” he added.

Maybe the problem with corporations and customer service is not that they offer poor customer service, but that they claim they don’t. If a company says “we suck,” any service looks good. If RyanAir can get me from point A in Europe to point B in Europe for $20, I’ll put up with pretty well anything.

Rob says what I think about this season of Six Feet Under. I just finished watching the episode Rob mentions; it is, indeed, a brilliant piece of acting.

The series is very different this season: darker both visually and thematically, more “real” or perhaps simply less surreal. It’s still very compelling drama. Drama, however, that this season I’m forced to watch on tape in the wee hours of the night, as it’s too much for Catherine and Oliver.