Self, please note that if it’s after 1:00 p.m., and you’re starting to feel run down, and you think “maybe I should just skip lunch so that I can save time and get this work done,” what will inevitably result is an afternoon where you are working at 35-50% efficiency. If you take 30 minutes and eat lunch, you’ll bounce back to peak efficiency, and more than make up for the “lost” 30 minutes. Really.

Let me note, for the record, that it is 7:08 a.m. Atlantic Time as I write this. Which is 6:08 a.m. Eastern (which is the time zone my body is still on). I have a lot of work to do today. I’m experimenting with opening up more time on the front end to see if that helps. I will either succeed, or fall asleep on my keyboard sometime around Noon. In any case, I’m off to Cora’s for a Fruit Crunch to give me the energy I need. Catherine and Oliver are back this afternoon at 4:00 p.m. on the jet from Toronto; happy day.

P.S. I note with some interest that it is actually dark this early in the morning.

Update: People are very groggy in the morning. I’m used to seeing my fellow citizens at 11:00 a.m., not 7:08 a.m. I just assumed everyone was as cheery and bright at 7:08 a.m. They’re not.

Just in time for Zap, Ian gets an RSS feed, with all the blogger street cred that brings with it.

For all you Zap stragglers out there, one of the highlights of the conference is going to be Ian and Tessa showing their film The Pink House followed by what I’m sure will be a rollicking good question and answer sesstion.

Although registrations officially closed on the 14th, and we’ve got a healthy complement of people attending (about 30 at last count), we can probably squeeze in a few more. Visit the Zap site for details.

As the official Island weblog repository for “memories of the 1970s and 1980s,” I feel an obligation to point out that Hinterland Who’s Who [QuickTime] is back. Music smoothed out; new announcer; same subject matter. Can’t put a good woodchuck down.

Which reminds me, speaking of the 1970s, does anyone else remember Hammy Hampster? This was a live-action animal show that aired, I think, on Global in the early days. Talking hampsters, with houses, boats, cars, etc. It was a magical little world.

By all rights, Peter Pan shouldn’t exist. Like its independent burger-focused restaurant brothers and sisters, it should have been rendered extinct by the fast food giants. I am convinced that Peter Pan survives because (a) the famous Peter Pan Burger Basket $1.99 commercial which, like Stompin’ Tom singing the 1-800 tourism number, drilled its way into the public’s mind and (b) because the only effective way to refer to the intersection of Rte. 1 and Rte. 2 by the Charlottetown Mall is as “the Peter Pan corner.”

They also make a good milkshake. And there’s that special relish.

Self, please note that your aging body no longer has the capacity to effortlessly absorb a large-format Hershey Chocolate Bar with Almonds. Your head will twitter and your limbs shake. Please avoid this behaviour in future. Really.

I’m just off the phone with a colleague. I asked him if he was “chomping at the bit” for a piece of work he’s waiting on. I suddenly realized that, without being totally aware of it, I may pepper my day-to-day conversation with expressions like this, and may thus be suffering from some sort of Dan Rather-like perception in the conversation space. I believe I may have actually said “oh, go on…” to someone the other day. What’s happening to me?

Those crazy idiots are at it again: every year at this time a study comes out from the Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft (see this post from 2002 for last year’s version).

Every year they report that Prince Edward Island leads the country in software piracy and make us out to be a bunch of criminals.

And every year I point out that their “research” is so broken that to get accurate numbers for a place the size of Prince Edward Island is impossible and that, by releasing their numbers anyway, they are slandering all 137,000 of us.

Nonetheless, watch CBC or The Guardian this week or next and, dollars to donuts, you’ll see a story called something like “Piracy Study Shows Islanders Lead the Nation.”

I’m a software developer — I make my living from writing software. If anyone should be concerned about this issue it’s me. But I can’t, in any way, give credence to the work of these people, and consider it criminal that, year after year, they spread their lies.

Sigh.

Earlier in the month, I wrote about my old friend Stephen Badhwar, and idly wondered where life had taken him.

Today I decided to get to the bottom of things, and so with the help of Google, and a kind woman named Heather in Atlin, BC who gave me Stephen’s home telephone number, I just simply rang him up.

“Hello,” I said, “is Stephen there?”

“Peter Rukavina!,” said Stephen.

That’s why we need old friends, to remember the sound of our voice.

Stephen, I’m happy to report, is alive and well and living in Atlin as a writer / teacher / parole officer / ranger / actor / storyteller / gadabout. He sounds content, which is about all one can ask for.

The telephone… such an amazing invention.

Congratulations to Bruce Rainnie, brother of our CBC afternoon radio jock Matt, just named the new Roger Younker for the supper hour newscast on CBC Television in Prince Edward Island.

When Steven Garrity and I were up at the CBC a couple of weeks ago, we saw Bruce nervously pacing, and now we know why. Bruce is well-spoken, amiable, excellent on his feet, and will be, I think, a great newscaster. We’re lucky to have him.

This move reinforces the importance of moving other Rukavinas here ASAP, as we don’t want the fragile Rainnie - Rukavina balance to be thrown out of whack. A longterm goal of mine has been to concoct some sort of CBC Radio game show that is peopled entirely by CBC-related siblings — we Rukavinas, the Rainnies, the McKenna brothers, Karen Mair and her sister, Norm and Ian Macdonald, Peter Mansbridge and his brother Malachy (okay, I made that one up). I can see this plan coming together now.

Kudos to Sara Fraser for handling Compass duties in the post-Roger period; I hope she’ll be re-assigned to reportorial duties and stick with the Corp.