If you’re a North River Road regular, you’ll know that we’re getting a The Home Depot in Charlottetown. Squeezed in between North River Road and the Wal-Mart. And leaving Sporting Intentions, the sporting goods store next door, dwarfed in the empty space inside the ‘L’ formed by the behemoth taking shape next door.

Oliver and I decided that we needed to support Sporting Intentions in their hour of need, so we dropped in yesterday and bought a Nalgene bottle (a bottle that Dan says in unbreakable and doesn’t take on smells or odours of its contents, thus making it eligible for extreme testing by our small family).

We were well-served at the store: the staff-to-customer ratio, including Oliver as a bona fide customer, was 3 to 1. And the staff were helpful, witty, and willing to entertain and enhance Oliver’s eccentricities (i.e. they all went to the back room to get their Nalgene bottles when Oliver asked, repeatedly, “where you bottle?”).

Although I am unfortunately sedentary by nature, I do aspire to sporty greatness (something that will be put to the test next weekend), and I have a sudden urge to outfit myself with sea kayaks, winter-ready pup-tents, and all manner of mountaineering first aid equipment every time I go into stores like Sporting Intentions. We were lucky to escape with only a Nalgene bottle.

If you, as I, would feel like Charlottetown would be less of a place without great local retailers like Sporting Intentions, and you want to make a small protest against the incursion of Giant American Retail, perhaps you could do as we did, and drop in for a spot of Nalgene this week. Tell them we sent you. And tell them thanks for sticking in there.

My iBook, which appears to be operating normally otherwise, and still retains its ability to take and hold a battery charge, has stopped telling me how much battery life I have left:

I’ve tried resetting the PMU, and zapping the PRAM; neither had an effect. I’m open to suggestions.

Coming in to Timothy’s this morning for a chai latte (Steven says I shouldn’t admit sort of thing that out loud), I was surprised to find small globes on every table. According to my server, this is a bold Campbell Webster Initiative. Bravo, I say: I love globes (as does Oliver, although mostly he just wants to see where Charlottetown is), and I think they should be ubiquitous.

We’ve seen a collection of “art bike racks” crop up on the streets of Charlottetown over the last month.

While I am generally an active supporter of infusing art into the conduct of everyday life, and while I’ve become an active and enthusiastic short-distance bike rider of late, and thus someone who is painfully aware of the need for non-parking-meter bike racks, I’m sad to say that these new racks miss the mark on the two most important criteria for measuring the effectiveness of bike racks.

First, they are located in places where they aren’t needed. All respect to City Hall and the folks who use ScotiaBank as their stock brokers, but are these well-known bike destinations? Did the City’s bike planners actually look to see where people might be parking their bikes before choosing these locations?

Second, and perhaps more importantly, they don’t look like bike racks. This is of course to be expected when one takes the “art bike rack” approach, and I’m not suggesting that we require standard-issue industrial bike racks. But something vaguely evocative of cycling, or even a “park your bike here” sign would be useful, especially for out-of-towners who won’t have the opportunity to figure it out over time.

I’m hesitant to criticize anything that comes out of City Hall that looks progressive and forward-thinking. But it’s not enough to just look like you’re doing something progressive and forward-thinking, it actually has to be progressive and forward-thinking. And some common sense would help.

A great piece from Dan Brown at the CBC comparing the party theme songs from the federal election, with links to audio.

For my money, the Bloc had the best of the four.

It’s remarkable how the Conservative song sounds so much like a Simpsons parody. Or a new-age bilingual fascist rallying cry. If you’re trying to convince the country that you’re not evil, having a theme song where the singers sound like they’re wearing titanium spandex and gas masks is not advisable.

And the NDP, trying to package itself as new, hip and relevant, should have known better than to have repackaged Rise Up, a song that was first released in 1983.

The Liberal song, will, it’s just crazy.

Well, that was a bore, wasn’t it.

I’ve been using CocoaMySQL on my Mac to manage MySQL databases for the past month. It’s a great product.

If you’ve used “SQL Enterprise Manager” under Windows to manage MSSQL databases, you’ll have a good idea of what CocoaMySQL does (albeit with considerably more elegance than Microsoft’s product): you can add, edit and delete databases, tables, and indexes, run queries, look at data in a “data grid” and export data as CSV or XML.

Highly recommended.

Here’s a random selection of endorsements in this federal election:

• Conservative
• The National Post
• Green
• Rafe Mair
• Michael Harris
• Liberal
• The Globe and Mail
• The Toronto Star
• Unionized Building and Construction Trades Council of Ottawa-Gatineau and District
• NDP
• Ralph Nader

Either endorsement isn’t as common a thing as it used to be or news content has moved behind for-pay curtains, hidden from Google, because that’s all I’ve been able to find in an hour of searching. I welcome other pointers.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that Canada.com (which I won’t strengthen with a hyperlink) is an evil, evil website that is so poorly designed, drenched with “watch this on Global” advertising and banner ads, and organized in some chaotic nonsensical fashion, as to be effectively useless?

Monday is Election Day. Elections Canada can tell you where to vote, given your postal code. In Charlottetown, polls are open from 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

A reminder that everyone is welcome to join us here at 84 Fitzroy Street, starting around 8:00 p.m., for a night of results watching.

The next project for my choreographic friend Bill is a project called Grasslands, which he describes as a “site specific collaborative community performance [that] will share the uniqueness of the geography and culture of the grasslands area with the larger community of Saskatchewan and beyond.”