Setting down to do a large piece of concentration-requiring work this afternoon, I cranked the iTunes volume up on KCRW and started to work. Almost as soon as I did so, a call came in on the house line from my inlaws, Grant and Marina. In my work-drenched, paranoid state, I glanced at the phone and immediately assumed they were calling to ask me to turn the volume down.

Here’s a secret client care / customer service weapon: every once in a while, especially when there are no immediate fires to put out or active projects on the go, phone your clients just to check in and see how things are going. In my memory, nobody’s ever done this to me; I don’t do it myself as much as I’d like, but when I do, the reaction is almost always once of surprise and delight, and I learn a lot in the process.

It seems to me that cities, towns and villages on Prince Edward Island are always twinning up with ye olde townes from the old country — Uigg, PEI twins with Uigg, Ireland, for example (note: I don’t know this to be the case, nor do I know if there’s a Uigg, Ireland, and, indeed, Uigg might be a Scottish placename, in which case I might find my barn burned down tonight).

I would like to propose that we abandon this, and move to a “cool city twinning” system. Let’s twin up Stratford with Venice, Cornwall with Barcelona, and Charlottetown with New York or LA.

This will mean fewer tea cosy exchanges, but might result in more interesting techno DJs from Seville making guest appearances on the Island.

When in doubt, ask!

I am a newly minted New Yorker subscriber. Since Tweels closed this summer, I’ve had a hard time re-establishing a New Yorker buying system, so I finally decided to move from “regular newsstand purchased” to subscriber.

My first issue arrived yesterday, and because it was the Sept. 22, 2003 issue (and yesterday was Sept. 17), I got curious about when the New Yorker is actually published relative to its cover date.

So I emailed the publisher. And 45 minutes later, he emailed back (this is one in a series of events that proves that the magazine has a great publisher).

Here’s what he told me:

The magazine arrives on newsstands one week prior to cover date (9/22 issue, arrives on stands 9/15), and subscribers get it the Mon, Tue, or Wed of that week. The cover date is really the date that the magazine comes off sale, not goes on sale.

So the issue I received yesterday was published two days ago, which is pretty amazing, and makes me almost feel like I’m actually living in New York (but not quite).

For reference, the magazine is generally available on the cover date here in Prince Edward Island on the newsstand. Which means that the magazine that I received yesterday, Tuesday, in the mail won’t be available otherwise until next Monday, which is the date it goes off sale in New York.

I note, with some irony, that pretty well the only spam I receive these days (what with SpamAssassin killing things on the server-side and Apple’s Mail deleting a good amount of the rest) is Viagra-related. Even virtually, the stuff can make things go where they’re not otherwise intended by nature.

There’s no doubting that “dick unhardness” (the official Pfizer term is “erectile dysfunction”) is a valid problem, and something that Viagra can help with. It’s unfortunate that the spamsters have taken this on as their latest cause.

Pfizer, makers of Viagra, have a helpful page on their website called “Tips for Talking to Your Doctor.” They include some helpful opening lines that you can use to break the ice. For example:

“Doctor, I’m having some trouble getting erections and I’m concerned.”

and:

“I need to talk with you about my sex life.”

Fair enough: as I can’t even imagine talking to my doctor about Viagra (or anything nether, for that matter), I can see how these might be helpful.

But what about:

“Have you seen the VIAGRA commercial with Winston Cup Driver Mark Martin?”

and:

“Have you seen the VIAGRA commercial with Major League Baseball Star Rafael Palmeiro?”

Must we really turn our lives into branded parodies of themselves to overcome our discomfort with talking about sex [or not]?

The Zap Your PRAM Conference now has a conference blog. I’ll move most conference-related discussion over there now.

Synesthesia and synchronicity have got to be two of the greatest words in the English language.

Synesthesia was the name of the radio program that used to come before mine on Trent Radio in the late 1980s. It was the creation of a woman named Leah Tremain who quickly became, and remains, one of my favourite people in the world. Our friendship was sparked by radiophonic proximity, and kept burning by a sort of double-reverse cuckold maneuver that we both unknowingly participated in, only learning the details of which when she was in Switzerland (or was it Sweden, I can never remember) and I was in Texas years later.

One dictionary definition of synesthesia is:

a sensation that normally occurs in one sense modality occurs when another modality is stimulated

In other words, “hearing colours” or “tasting sound.”

I told you it was a good word.

Synchronicity, on the other hand, means:

the relation that exists when things occur at the same time

That’s a far less dramatic definition, but the concept is interesting when you overlay reality on it. Like The Police did.

I had a small outbreak of synchronicity this weekend. I suddenly had a need to produce well-formatted reports, as PDF files, from a webserver. For two different clients. Elections PEI needed a nice-looking Supplementary List of Electors for the upcoming election, and Yankee Publishing needed nice-looking credit card transactions reports.

Fortunately, a smart bunch in Romania came to the rescue.

Interakt is a Bucharest-based software development house that produces a very sharp tool called PDFReports that happened to fill two voids for me this weekend almost perfectly (for those of you more techincally inclined, I’ll follow on with a more detailed review over on the Reinvented Labs website).

So I spent half the weekend lining up the last names of untold Gallants, Macdonalds and Doirons, and the balance lining up VISA, MasterCard and Discover payments. Synchronicity.

Next week: symmetry.

Here’s what happens when you have a bad website.

Dico went to the Dr. Hook concert on June 11 and hasn’t updated his weblog since. Is he okay?

I’ve worked in and around the Provincial Government complex — the Shaw, Sullivan and Jones buildings here in Charlottetown — for almost a decade now. It only just dawned on me today that none of the offices or other rooms in any of those buildings have numbers on them. If you want to know where someone works, the best they can tell you is “Shaw North, fifth floor, down at the back.”

It’s only in the past year or two that people even had their names on or beside their doors.

There is a simple, small-scale elegance to this absence that I enjoy, even if it does make finding people difficult sometimes.

And I think it’s another example of how, traditionally, Prince Edward Island has been a relative rather than an absolute society. On PEI, the relationship of something — person, building, whatever — is almost always described in terms of its relationship to other things.

So I live in “Bill Reid’s old house,” which is “around the corner from Province House.” Our old house was “on the Kingston Road across from the church.” And so on.

I would hazard a guess that the decay graph of “the Island way of life” would parallel a graph of the move from relativism to absolutism.