Will Pate has the Formosa Tea House RSS Feed running in the Tea House website now. Please update your links; I’ll be taking the local version here down sooner or later.

My close associates know that, despite my forays into early rising, I am, at heart, a late riser. I don’t feel guilty about this (mostly), as it’s complemented on the flip side by a tendency to go to bed quite late. I think the root causes are related to years of forced early rising at the hands of public schools (with a dose of “brother Stephen practices Suzuki cello at 6:30 a.m. every morning,” which is enough to turn anyone off the wee hours). Plus, something in my DNA.

And thus comes the delicate balance between wake time and bed time — how late can I work and still get up at a reasonable hour? Or how late can I sleep in, and still get in a day’s work, and still participate in the life of my family?

This delicate balance situation is made worse by my total lack of accuracy at estimating anything to do with time. I’m either chronically late, or chronically early, depending on the season, the event, and the wake/sleep epoch.

Which is all a very long preamble to an important disclaimer: I got up too early today. Or rather I went to bed too late last night. Or, actually both.

The result of this folly was that I have very little recall of what happened between the hours of 7:30 a.m. and Noon.

I know I visited Elections PEI, bought a copy of The Guardian, checked my email, taped an interview with Matt Rainnie for Mainstreet, pimped for Nils Ling, and ate lunch. I also visited silverorange (where a Keystone Cops like faxing exercise deserves a whole post of its own), consulted Ann, my spelling oracle, and operated a motor vehicle several times. And talked to brother Johnny on the phone from Vancouver. And visited Kwik Kopy (only in a daze would I patronize someplace with such callous disregard for the letter K).

If you were an actor in any of these dramas, and if I appeared out of sorts, or unintelligible, I apologize. If I insulted you, or offered to pay you a million dollars, or gave you the root password to my Linux server, well, I’m sorry for that too (and I take it back). And if I appeared to be a rabid fan of Nils Ling, well, let’s just leave that one alone.

I need a nap. Again.

One of my first Island media memories is watching CBC’s Mainstreet do a live show from the plaza at the Confederation Centre of the Arts. This was back in the early 1990s, and the hosts at the time were Nils Ling and Christie Luke (filling in for the pregnant Karen Mair). Those were the days, man.

In any case, Nils, after filling out his term at the CBC, reinvented himself as a raconteur-for-hire, and, if reports from the field are accurate, has developed quite a following (brother Steve reported that the people of Regina were vertiably swooning in anticipation of a live Ling several years ago). Things are now at the point where even the people in Boise are getting Linged.

If you miss having Nils in your living room every day, you can now profit from virtual Nils, in blog form.

What’s more, you can read Nils other blog and, even more so, you can read Nils other other blog.

Nils Ling in and almost quadraphonic bloginess.

Rock on.

Should you be wondering, MapQuest tells us that it takes 34 hours and 9 minutes to drive from my house in Charlottetown to downtown Orlando, Florida. That seems like a very, very long time.

A reminder that it’s Municipal Election Day on Prince Edward Island. You can find out where to vote and, after the polls close, you can follow the results online.

Here’s a line that could begin a good first novel:

I began my trip like everyone begins every trip, having their girlfriend pick them up at 5:30 in the morning.

And so begins Dan’s adventure, what we used to call, in the olden days, the “mid- to late-twenties mandatory celibacy period” back in the day.

Listening to FolkAlley.com in iTunes. Catherine calls me for an audio iChat. iTunes automatically mutes. I talk to Catherine. She signs off. iTunes automatically goes back to normal. This is what Steven is talking about.

Although it has some aesthetics challenges, this Breadalbane Community website has a very nice flavour. I especially like the section on the nature trail.

I was also intrigued to find this image which rips off a very ugly mottled green base map of Prince Edward Island that I created about 10 years ago. You can never escape your past design crimes.

To assist Will Pate in moving the Formosa Tea House RSS Feed over to its logical home on the Formosa Tea House website, I’ve put together a cleaned up and commented version of the PHP source code that generates the RSS feed.

This isn’t a profound chunk of code, but I’ve commented it liberally, so if you’re new to PHP, RSS and/or manipulating dates programatically, you might find it interesting.

You’ll need a couple of PHP classes in addition to the source here; this is all explained inside the comments.

Download the source, which is licensed under a Attribution - ShareAlike License.

If you run Virtual PC on your Mac, it’s easy to forget that you’re actually running a Windows machine, albeit in a weird, simulated way. And because Virtual PC allows you to save your virtual PC’s state, it’s easy to, in essence, never turn the PC off.

This means that it’s also easy to forget that Windows PCs accumulate internal cruft at an unusual rate, and benefit from a rebooting every once in a while. Today I realized that my virtual PC hadn’t been rebooted in about two years (two years, mind you, of occassional 5 minute usage here and there; it’s been dormant most of the time). Things were starting to get wonkly — applications not starting up, Windows Explorer behaving weirdly.

So I rebooted it.

And everything is fine now.

Moral: even simulated Windows machines need a kick every now and again.