If you walk the streets of Charlottetown every day like we do, you can’t help but notice the continuing parking meter carnage downtown. On Prince St. alone, on the stretch in front of our house, there are more destroyed parking meters than working ones. And by “destroyed” I mean “the entire top part has been lopped off.”

Concomitant with this destruction, the City appears to be amidst an analog to digital upgrade program, as witnessed by the following photos taken on Queen Street this afternoon.

Here’s a shot of the old analog meters:

And here’s a shot of the whizzy new digital ones:

I’m flying from Moncton to Boston on Monday morning. I leave Moncton at 6:55 a.m., fly through Montreal and arrive in Boston at 10:41 a.m. I then have until 1:00 p.m. to get to the Westin Copley Place Hotel to pick up my press credentials.

If something — air delay, subway delay, customs delay — throws a wrench into my travels, there’s a chance I might miss the credential pickup. This might mean that Monday’s “coverage” of the DNC will consist of a crazy travelogue rather than biting political commentary. You have been warned.

By the way, I’m flying from Moncton, despite the hassle, because I can save about $500 doing so, mostly because of the $146 Moncton-Boston fare. Sometimes it is worth the drive to Moncton.

The mysterious overlords at Dun and Bradstreet called today to “update our information.” Their spelling of our company name was “Reinventive.” I kind of like that name. Perhaps we should start a subsidiary?

Better late than never. Here’s a photo I took on Election Day here in Canada, back on June 29th at our “watch the election results at 84 Fitzroy party:”

You see Steven Garrity on the left and CBC TV reporter Ian Petrie on the right.

I taped an interview with Matt Rainnie this morning up at the CBC that will air on this afternoon’s edition of Main Street [4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. ADT, Live Stream]. We talked about my trip to Boston next week for the DNC, how it came about, and why I’m going. We’re going to talk again, from Boston, sometime next week.

In related news, I had a very strange dream about Roger Younker last night.

In the spirit of this photographic muscle flexing from David Weinberger in advance of the DNC, I present this:

I’m debating as to whether my Canon S100 camera has still got it; I’ve got my eye on a shiny new Canon S1 IS, the primary allure of which is its 10x optical zoom and its image stabilization.

The S100 was our first digital camera — we bought it the month before Oliver was born have have probably taken 10,000 photos with it over four years.

This was in the window of the Tim Hortons on Kent Street this afternoon:

Despite my frequent customer service criticism, this slogan makes me feel sort of creepy. I’d be more comfortable with something like “Guest Courtesy: We’ll Always Try To Do Our Best.”

Here’s my official DNC portrait, created by Catherine on Oliver’s high-tech magnetic drawing board:

If you are so-moved, you can buy the T-shirt.

I’ve moved to a set of static XML files for all the RSS feeds on this site (it didn’t seem to make much sense to go through all the database grinding every time someone loaded the file). Redirects are in place, so if you have a relatively intelligent RSS reader, everything should automatically update (I’ve tested in NetNewsWire, and redirects work like a charm).

Here, for reference, are the new URLs:

• Main Weblog
• Posts: http://ruk.ca/rss/index.xml
• Comments: http://ruk.ca/rss/discuss.xml
• Reinvented Labs Weblog
• Posts: http://ruk.ca/rss/index.xml
• Comments: http://ruk.ca/rss/discuss.xml
• Reinvented World Weblog
• Posts: http://ruk.ca/rss/index.xml
• Comments: http://ruk.ca/rss/discuss.xml

The XML files are updated whenever the site is.

Our server here at Reinvented HQ is starting to groan under the weight of the myriad tasks it’s performing: it’s our phone system, our webserver, our mail server, our DNS server and more.

A new server will shortly be on order, probably online in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, especially to ensure that things don’t implode while I’m away next week, I’m paring down some of the resource-intensive parts of this site for the time being. First victims were the “Items Since Your Last Visit” and “Discussion Since Your Last Visit” collections in the right-hand side bar. These will return once things are on a more even keel, but loading those dynamic chunks of data on every page load was a resource hog, so I’ve turned them off for the moment.

If you’re not praying to the RSS religion yet, now might be a cool time to look into experiencing this website through an RSS newsreader. One of the nice features of most RSS readers is that they keep track of what you’ve read and what you haven’t read for you.