A spray-paint image of George Bush on the traffic signal switching box, corner of University Avenue and Grafton Street, Charlottetown:

Here’s a list of Land Rover expeditions. I’m currently reading Tim Slessor’s tale, First Overland, which was kindly leant me by Daniel.

Rob Paterson is organizing a post-holiday blogger bash on January 13, 2004 at his barn in Bunbury.

This is shaping up to be the must-attend geek event of the winter season, so get your RSVPs in early. Rob is providing beer, and promises to dance. Dan and Steven have committed to not dancing (I fully support this, and will join them in solidarity).

The only thing this party is missing is a special mystery visitor from a foreign land. Any takers?

Try this. Construct a URL as follows:

http://realcharlottetown.com/streetname/streetnumber

Replace streetname with the name of your street, substituting an underscore (_) for any spaces and replace streetnumber with your street number. Now visit the URL in your web browser.

For example:

• http://realcharlottetown.com/fitzroy_st/84
• http://realcharlottetown.com/grafton_st/199

If every address in Charlottetown had its own URL, what could we use this for?

Back of the Mackenzie Theatre, Charlottetown:

In the alley between the Royal Trust Tower and Tim Horton’s in downtown Charlottetown, October 31, 2003 at 1:17 p.m.:

The middle of December heralds the return of the Well-dressed Men to Charlottetown.

There are only four resident Well-dressed Men in our city year-round: Darren Peters, Ritchie Simpson, Robert Ghiz and Brian Cudmore.

The rest of us dress like either Peter Gzowski, Red Green or Kurt Cobain. Or some combination of the three.

But each December two groups of additional men migrate to our city: the Returning Successful Men, and the Well-dressed Spouses.

Because these migrants arrive from the Big City, where fashion is king and the dollars flow freely, they dress themselves in the kind of clothes the likes of which you just don’t see on the streets of town the rest of the year.

The Returning Successful Men are Islanders who’ve gone off to make it Big. They’ve started multinational companies in Toronto or are working as neurosurgeons in Zurich. Or both. Now they’re home for the holidays. And while they know enough not to flaunt their riches and better taste, you have only to look at their SUVs, their shoes, and their scarves to know that they’ve got it goin’ on. And to know that they know that they’ve got it goin’ on.

The Well-dressed Spouses, which is to say those men from away lucky enough to have married a native Islander, tend to carry their couture slightly differently: for them it’s not nouveau fashion, it’s the way they’ve always dressed. So they’re more confident, more self-contained. They look less like fish out of water than like fish for whom water isn’t technically required.

If you are having difficulty spotting the Well-dressed Men as you walk about the downtown doing your Christmas shopping, here are some guidelines:

• Watch for gloves, hat and scarf that are colour-coordinated, often in complementary shades of grey or black.
• The wool pea coat is the winter outerclothing of choice among this group.
• Collarless shirts are also popular.
• Ultimately, it’s all about the shoes. Look at the shoes and you’ll be able to tell in a heartbeat.
• If you’re looking for behavioural references, watch for the use of the word Lapsang Souchong in restaurants: this is an easy tip-off.

While you might take my tone to be mocking, rest easy in the notion that, as a perennially poorly-dressed resident of Charlottetown, it’s more avarice than spite that I seeth with when I see these well turned out visitors on our streets.

“Oh to be well-dressed,” I sigh.

And then I sooth myself with this notion: when one is forced to assemble a wardrobe from the men’s departments at Mark’s Work Wearhouse, Zellers and Wal-Mart, just how high is it appropriate to set the bar?

Some technical notes (with apologies to Ritchie Simpson):

• The reinvented.net and www.reinvented.net URLs for this site should now be pointing at the same place. That they were not explains why some of you noticed strange content voodoo over the course of today.
• The site search is now working properly (it broke after the move from the old server because of some updates to the [excellent] SWISH-E indexer).

It was heartening, if mildly disturbing, that so many of you pointed out the problems. Perhaps it was because it’s a snow day, and nobody had anything better to do?

ImageWell is a great little program with a simple purpose: it makes it easy to post images to a webserver from a Mac.

Using ImageWell to post an image works like this: drag image onto the ImageWell icon, name it, and upload. The URL of the image gets automatically copied to the clipboard, where it can be then pasted into a weblog editor.

This is so much easier than the old way of doing this — open image editor, crop image, resize, save, open MacSFTP, transfer the file — that it makes frequent image posting an easy, painless task where once it was an occasional inconvenience.

All of which leads me to this image, one of a series of images of Charlottetown graffiti that I took this fall.

Stay tuned for more graffiti as the week progresses.

Here’s a picture of my mother, Oliver’s grandmother, talking with Oliver using Apple’s iChat AV. Both ends of the conversation have an iSight camera, so grandmother and grandson can talk to each other and see each other at the same time.

The video and audio are of excellent quality, even with full-screen video. There’s no complicated setup, directories or other confusion: click on the buddy list and start talking.

This is the “picture phone” future we were promised in the 1960s finally come to effective, easy to use, practical life. If you’re looking for revolutionary, life-changing technology, this is it.