Created at the intersection of Steven Garrity’s notions about using RSS to power our lawnmowers and the The Trojan Room Coffee Pot Camera, I’m happy to release the Is the Formosa Tea House Open or Closed? RSS Feed.

Feed this RSS goodness into your newsreader and you’ll never be without up to date information on whether the Formosa Tea House is open or closed.

I believe I have now reached the pinacle of procrastination.

If you’ve stopped using the Mac OS X “Help” feature under Jaguar or previous versions thereof, you might want to take another look under Panther: there’s a dramatic speed-up of the Help application, and it’s now very usable.

On Sunday night, after Zap and before heading home to the calm and craziness of America, Ian and Tessa came to dinner here at 100 Prince.

Catherine and I had a “we’ll just get pizza” discussion that morning while she was asleep, which she maintains we never had. As a result, Catherine whipped up one of her excellent “meals created as if from nowhere” dinners which somehow involved baklava and ice cream at the end, which seemed like a miracle to me.

At the point in the post-dinner conversation where the fiddles and guitars come out in a regular Island evening, the iBooks and PowerBooks came out instead, which felt oddly natural (something which alternately delights and frightens me).

And then they went off into the night. Lots of fun.

Notes: I use “dinner” here to mean “supper” as I’ve not lived here long enough to use “dinner” to mean “lunch.” Also, notice the unearthly glean in the photo bouncing off the back of the 2004 Edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac; in finer stores now!

What the Formosa Tea House is selling is calm. They have the market to themselves: everyone else is selling convenience and stimulation.

For years I have struggled with getting the right workstation setup. After injuring myself slowly but effectively for two years in my mid-twenties spending eight hours a day sitting on a secretarial desk chair made for someone half my size, I’ve been flirting on the edges of wrist and neck pain. Just on the edges: I can go for months with no problems, and then, after a late-nite orgy of programming or writing, can have two weeks of “pins and needles.”

In an effort to come to better understand the dynamics of all this, I shopped around for an occupational therapist. If I worked for a Big Corp, or paid WCB premiums, I would have ready access to ergointelligence; but I don’t, and you’d be amazed at how hard it is to find on your own.

Thankfully, with the help of someone at the WCB, I got referred to Marie Brine, a freelance occupational therapist. I called her up, explained my situation, and we made an appointment for her to come and give me an ergoaudit (my word, not hers).

And so on September 12, along she came. We spent about an hour talking about my chair, my table, my posture. She showed me two or three really important adjustments on my ObusForme chair that I didn’t know about. She watched me work, She gave me some helpful exercises.

What impressed me the most was that she was willing to work in the real world, not some ergonomically perfect world where I would be expected to do the equivalent of eating all my vegetables.

For the last month and a half I’ve been experiencing the benefits of my session. It’s not been a dramatic or life-changing thing, just a combination of little hints that have made me a better, more comfortable, more productive worker.

Late last week I got a call from Marie: she had been at the Summerside Clearance Centre, a used furniture store, and had seen a desk/table set she thought would work really well for me. On Monday I drove up with Oliver, and she was right. I’m now the proud owner of an infinitely adjustable table and desk. Both are extremely ugly (with ugliness verification provided by the aesthetes at silverorange). But they’ll make me a better worker.

I highly recommend Marie’s services to anyone who spends any amount of time in front of a keyboard. For less than $100, you can get advice that will potentially save you years of pain and agony later.

Contact Marie at (902) 393-5151 or by email at mbbrine@islandtelecom.com.

After reading Rob’s soliloquy on activism (note to Rob: I recommend a listen to this and this and this, all interviews with activists about why they’re active), I was reminded of my own personal Mobius loop of a logical problem.

Conventional wisdom has it that parents will automatically, without thinking, do anything to save the life of their child. I knew this going in. But I always thought it was going to be some sort of intellectual thing, this burning building, speeding car, thundering bison rescue exercise. What nothing prepared me for is that it’s neither intellectual nor emotional, at least in any conscious sense: I simply would. Without thinking, or feeling. My defense of my son has become a part of me. Or it has always been a part of me. Or something like that.

Now here’s the thing: I would also, in exactly the same vein, risk my life to save Catherine’s. And my brothers’. And my parents’. I’d run into a burning building to save my nextdoor neighbour. If a speeding car were speeding down on the kid from around the corner, I’d try to save them too.

All of these are easy and natural.

The question is: where do I draw the line? For whom, as the ripples of familiarity wend weaker, would I not try to distract the bison or jump across the rushing gulch?

Which is where things get complicated. Right now there are probably things I could be doing that are far less self-indulgent than sitting in front of a computer in a warm house at 2:12 a.m. writing about bison. Things that could save lives. I could be donating money to Save The Children, or writing letters for Amnesty International, or on call for the local volunteer fire department. I could be writing an educational pamphlet about the dangers of globalization, or caulking my windows to reduce my reliance on oil.

But I’m not.

Which means that, somewhere after, say, my 6th grade teacher (save) and an anonymous [insert malady here] kid in [insert far away place here] (don’t save), lies the line. Somehow lives I know are worth more than lives I don’t know.

I’ve a feeling that in that lies the root of a lot of what ails the world.

I’ve spent the last couple of days ramping up my newly-returning iMac, which comes back to me from the shop with a new hard drive and a new SuperDrive. The machine seems to moan and burr and grizzle a little more than it used to, but it’s zippy, and it has a really, really big screen, which I realized I missed a lot.

Part of the “getting to know you again” process involves installing my set of everyday tools. Here’s what I’m using at the moment:

• Camino — the best web browser on any platform. Simple. Fast. Never crashes. Standards-compliant.
• NetNewsWire — a great RSS newsreader.
• MacSFTP — lets me securely transfer files to a from various servers.
• OmniDictionary — simple and wonderful, and something I couldn’t write without.
• BBEdit — simply the world’s greatest text editor. Period.
• OmniOutliner — a useful tool for keeping track of almost anything.
• AppleWorks — Who’d have thunk? It turns out to be a capable word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program. Much less bloated (and evil free!) than Office.
• GraphicConverter — Like PaintShop Pro on a Windows machine: munges images in various ways.
• X11 — Lets me run programs on remote servers like they were running locally.
• Virtual PC — Alas, I’m still wedded to Quicken for Home and Business, which only runs under Windows. Everyone needs a little evil.

Put all of the above together with Apple’s own tools like Terminal, iChat, Safari and Sherlock, and you’ve got my toolbelt stocked.

Those who have been exposed to the silverorange virus will know that their basic negotiating tactic is akin to a full court press. In a sense they simply rearrange the planets in the universe so that they conform to their desired result. (I mean this in a good way).

Witness this sign, part of this pairing. Do I really have any choice but to move in with them now?

It seems to me that in the readership of this blog are some of Aliant’s most active cell phone users. Perhaps not in terms of network usage (although maybe…), but certainly in terms of “early adoption” and “pushing the envelope.”

Aliant is uniquely dorky when it comes to the cell phone market: they are always behind the curve by a good amount, and by the time they release “new” handsets, they tend to resemble Oldsmobiles in terms of street cred.

The result is that we who are in a position to help them spread the word about new and cool mobile applications and devices are left, instead, complaining about what a crappy phone company we have, and have to sit at the back of the room when we travel because our gadgets aren’t cool enough.

So here is my proposed solution: we form an ad hoc “Aliant Mobility Consumer Panel” and then attempt to engage Aliant at a fairly high level to tell them our stories and offer feedback.

Worst case scenario, we get more frustrated. Or perhaps we manage to find someone who will listen to us collectively in a way that they’ve never been able to muster individually, and some real change happens.

Anyone interested?

Here’s an amazing demonstration of the camera in the new Treo 600 thingy, which is a PalmPilot, a phone, and a camera.

Buzz brought his to Zap and we all got to fondle it.

The photos — obviously taken by a good photographer, which admitedly makes them look better — are amazing given that they were taken by a telephone.

This device might be the killer combination for me. Alas, it’s available only in America right now.

By the way, apparently, if I’m to use Steven as a guide, you pronounce the name of this phone Trey-oh. I say Tree-oh. I’m so outside the curve.