Longtime readers will recall that there’s a tricky bug cum feature that inconveniently forgets the “New since your Last Visit” and “Discussion since your Last Visit” items once you’ve clicked on a link anywhere on the site. This has always kind of made these features only half useful (you could work around by clicking “Back” in your browser, and reading the page with the links that was cached, but that was kind of inelegant).

I’m happy to say that I’ve [probably] solved this problem once and for all. The fix hasn’t received extensive testing yet, but suffice to say that the site should now remember the new items for the entire duration of your visit.

We’re back on the Island after a week away.

Friday last we drove over to Halifax and, from there, flew Air Canada to Montreal. Other than an hour’s delay for the flight (we were frequently updated by the ground staff), the trip was uneventful. We arrived in Montreal at about 11:00 p.m., and faced with a complicated bus-metro-bus trip to brother (aka uncle) Steve’s (on the Plateau), we took a cab.

Oliver is at a difficult age for getting around without a car: we’ve stopped traveling with his car seat for the airplane, so when we take cabs, he gets belted into the middle seat at the back, which isn’t exactly the safest thing, but is better than nothing. I’d be curious to know how other parents traveling with small children handle this problem. Of course anything is safer than scooting around the streets of Bangkok in a Tuk-Tuk with Oliver clutching me for dear life. Everything is relative.

We were all happy to see Steve, especially Oliver, who obviously remembered our trip there in December (he may not be able to talk in complete sentences, but Oliver remembers everything detail of every place he has ever been). Oliver slept like a rock in his makeshift bed, made from the leftover cushions on Steve’s pull-out couch.

Saturday morning we woke up to a nice steady snowfall, which made our trip to the Fête des Neiges all the more snow-themed. We walked to the Metro (Steve’s house is about a 30 minute walk east of the Mont-Royal station), and then took the Metro to Parc Jean-Drapeau. When we emerged, we found the weather just on the cusp of bitterly cold, which we reacted to by trying to maintain constant activity: we took a ride in a horse-drawn sleigh (horse was Bella, driven by Danny), ate boiled maple syrup poured onto snow, and walked through the various displays of ice and snow carvings. There was a most pleasant warming hall set up, which included a baby changing area complete with free diapers, wipes, cream, and francophone grandmother to assist with operations.

Saturday night Steve cooked up a pasta feast (it’s so nice to shop along Mont-Royal at various specialized shops rather than slurping up everything at the super-giant grocery store), and we watched Secondhand Lions which was actually quite good, despite the presence of the robotic crying machine Haley Joel Osment.

Sunday we diddled and doddled, and then headed to Bill, Laurence, Jimmy and Juliette’s house for dinner near the Côte Vertu Metro stop. Oliver had a wonderful time wearing their Bear in a Big Blue House bear costume around and playing with their seemingly infinite collection of toys. We had a great meal, listened to some great music, and then headed off back into the night.

Monday and Tuesday I spent working with Bill and Laurence on secret modern dance projects (the nominal purpose of our trip) while Catherine and Oliver explored Montreal and Steve was at work at the CBC. Monday night we had an excellent Jamaican meal called Mango Bay on Bishop Street, just south of Ste. Catherine.

On Wednesday, Catherine went off on her own, and Oliver and I went out to lunch with Steve at a Japanese noodle bar near the CBC and then went magazine shopping downtown. Wednesday evening we took a taxi back to the airport and were in Halifax about 11:30 p.m.

Rather than a long late slog back to Charlottetown, we decided to head into Halifax for the night. With some Internet research assistance from Johnny and Jodi, we reserved a room for $99 at The Lord Nelson. I thought that by staying at The Lord Nelson we were going to have a comfortable, well-appointed room in the heart of the city. Instead we got a rather grotty room, with avacado bathroom fixtures, overlooking a noisy construction site. The hotel did, however, have a nice lobby.

Thursday morning we sped around Halifax grocery shopping, including the purchase of a rice cooker, which is something we’ve wanted to add to our kitchen for a long time. Given that rice is an almost daily part of our diet, it seemed logical to make the jump from the cheap, ineffective $45 Black and Decker model we’ve have for 5 years to something more substantial, so we now own a $210 Japanese-made rice cooker that claims to use fuzzy logic to obtain maximum quality rice cooking. The rice is cooking now, and we’ll know whether it worked out in about 25 minutes.

On the way out of town we stopped at Pete’s Frootique in Bedford (and spooted Pete himself getting white wine for his wife’s birthday dinner; note for future reference that she is allergic to shellfish) and stocked up on Ting, ginger beer, and exotic fruits. Then it was a quick dash back to the Island.

All in all a nice almost-week away. Steve is an excellent host, it was nice to see Bill and Laurence and Jimmy again (and Juliette for the first time). It was Catherine’s first trip to Montreal lasting more than 2 hours, and only my second since the long, cold winter of lonely unemployment back in the late 1980s, so we’re still in that nascent phase of our relationship with the city, but all signs are positive.

Oh, and I think I may have committed to driving to Murmansk next summer. Stay tuned for details.

To put this $7.5 million loss into context: that’s about $75 per elector on Prince Edward Island. Question: if, by some direct mechanism, you had been asked “can I take $75 of your money and invest it in a fish processing company?” would you have said yes?

Because I’m involved in local elections administration work here and, before that, was contracted to the Province of PEI, I’ve made a point of refraining from political commentary here in the weblog and in public otherwise, so as to avoid problems of real or perceived bias.

But there’s another half of me, the half born in the USA that remains a dual citizen, that can freely participate, without problems of perception or bias, in the American political process.

And today, for the first time, that half of me donated to a Presidential campaign: I made a $50 donation to Howard Dean’s campaign.

Why?

Well, the immediate impetus was this email from Gov. Dean this morning (which I received because I’d subscribed to the Dean for America mailing list before heading down to New Hampshire last week):

The entire race has come down to this: we must win Wisconsin. We must launch our new television advertisement on Monday in the major markets in Wisconsin. To do that, I need your help to raise $700,000 by Sunday…

…We will get a boost this weekend in Washington, Michigan and Maine, but our true test will be the Wisconsin primary. A win there will carry us to the big states of March 2-and narrow the field to two candidates. Anything less will put us out of this race.

I was impressed with the directness of that request: give us money and we’ll try to win Wisconsin; if we don’t, it’s over.

I wasn’t prepared to see Dean lose in Wisconsin without contributing at least something myself.

More generally, after a week in the eye of the New Hampshire Primary storm, I came away actually believing that Dean’s approach to the Presidency is different than Kerry, Edwards and Clark.

Not because of the Internet, or blogs, or bringing new electors into the process (although those are all impressive).

But because he has convinced me that he’s not a bullshit artist.

I watched John Edwards’ victory speech on Tuesday night in South Carolina: it was brilliantly executed, and should go down in the annals of speechcraft as one of the best.

I spent a week in and around the Kerry campaign, and came away having absolutely no grasp of the man or his ideas, save the fact that he can skate.

I sat in the 5th row in Nashua while Wes Clark tried to convince me of his humble beginnings, his military service, his three religions, checking off a demographic scorecard as he proceeded.

But what America needs is not a motivational coach.

We need a doer.

And when you strip away the talking points, and the position papers and the TV ads, Howard Dean has convinced me that’s the primary skill he brings to the job: focused, deliberate, results-oriented leadership with an eye on achievable goals.

I wouldn’t mind working for a company where Howard Dean was the boss.

Combine that with his approach to the issues, most of which I agree with, and you get my vote.

I don’t think Dean’s a revolutionary.

I don’t think the Dean campaign is a quantum leap foward, and that politics has been “changed forever.”

I simply think that, of the candidates in the field that have a chance of beating George W. Bush in November, Dean will do the best job. Both for America and, ultimately, for the world.

If that’s not worth $50, I don’t know what is.

Much to my surprise, I realized this afternoon that I have never been to France. I would have thought that somehow in the last 37 (going on 38) years I would have ended up in France, if only by accident. By no, I have never been to France.

I came to this realization after following the link to world66.com’s tools for traveller page on Scripting.com.

Here’s a map showing the countries I have visited:

I’ve got a lot of countries left to visit, and not many years left!

I do better with the US states:

A couple of trips on Southwest Airlines and I could complete my game card.

I had always considered Nature’s Harvest, the “health food” store in the Confederation Court Mall, to be a place best avoided. Most of what they sell is pills of various sorts, not unlike the new “improved” Root Cellar. And I’m not a big pill guy.

Recently, though, I’ve been stopping by several mornings a week at their juice bar, and this has given be a chance to wander around the store a little. There are still lots and lots of pills, and weirdo products with names like “Fat Burner” and “Nutrobooster.” But there’s also good whole-wheat bread — the same bread you can otherwise buy at the Farmers Market — and, in the cooler, some low-fat snacks (vegetables and dip, yoghurt and granola parfait). And they do make a mean juice.

The staff are very friendly too.

So while I’m not converted over to the pilly dark side, I have become a regular customer.

Online Mapping: What happened to MapQuest? It used to be a very flexible, free online mapping service. It’s still there, but it has been severely pared back feature-wise: it’s missing things like “make this map bigger” and “add an icon to this map” and “save this map.” MapBlast, from Microsoft, has better maps and more features, but it’s still not where MapQuest used to be.

Air Canada: Although flying Air Canada these days is the travel equivalent of buying generic “no-name” peaches, at least it’s cheap. Catherine, Oliver and I are flying Halifax to Montreal return for $58 each way. That said, the cheapness disappears if you’re trying to fly from Charlottetown, where the cheapest equivalent for our dates was $286 each way. For the extra $684 I’ll defy David Malahoff and drive to Halifax. By the way, JetsGo, WestJet and CanJet were each more expensive to Montreal from Halifax, and only CanJet flew direct.

Photo ID: How is it that we can be almost 3 years into the new airport security regime and people still don’t understand about the need for photo ID at the airport? I think you could improve the efficiency of air travel by at least 15% if people simply had their ID at the ready at every turn. As it is, I’d say about 25% of the traveling public act surprised when it’s requested at the gate (despite the “please have your photo ID ready” announcements), and about half of them take 2 minutes to root through their purses or wallets, slowing up the lines and frustrating the gate agents (and the people behind them).

Alamo: About two years ago, I registered with Alamo, and went through the rigamarole required to sign up for their Quicksilver program. This, in theory, allows me to reserve online, and then quickly check out my car from a kiosk once I arrive at their airport location. In theory. The problem is that in half a dozen visits said kiosk has only actually worked once, and even that time it mysteriously “upgraded” me to a Chevy Astro Van from a Toyota Corolla. Every other time I’ve had to get in the regular line because the machine has been completely or partially broken. Their cars tend to be horrible GM proto-cars like the Chevy Cavalier, and are often dirty, have filled ashtrays, and are missing ice scrappers in winter. I think it’s time to go back to Hertz: although they have a poorer reservation engine, I’ve never had a bad car from them, or a bad experience renting.

Ted Williams Tunnel: The opening of the Ted Williams Tunnel in Boston, which runs from Logan Airport in Boston under the harbour to downtown Boston and the I-93 north and south, has made it extremely easy to travel by car to and from Logan. But if you’re Canadian, it’s important to remember to have your $3.00 in US dollars with you before you leave the airport: the best I had was $5 Canadian, and they wouldn’t accept that. As a result, I had to wait for 5 minutes while the toll booth clerk filled out an invoice for me, and collected everything from my driver’s license number to the license plate of the car. I have 14 days to mail them a check for $3.00 or they’ll fine me $250. I’m not complaining, just warning you to be ready.

The Inn at Jaffrey Center: I spent seven nights last week at the Inn at Jaffrey Center, an 11-room inn just south of Yankee in Dublin. For most of the week I was the only one there. Beds are comfortable, staff is friendly and helpful, and rooms are clean and well-appointed. Breakfast isn’t exactly splendiferous, espcially if you eat neither eggs nor bacon, but it’s nice to have included, given the Inn’s remote location. And in the winter the pipes do knock a lot. And they’re really, really loud. But all in all it’s one of the nicest places to stay in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire.

Beverages: Regular readers will know that I love iced tea. The Dublin General Store now stocks the T42 brand, which is a happy medium between the syrupy overkill of the standard gas station Liptons and Nestea and the stripped-down unsweetened goodness of Honest Tea. The beverage highlight of my trip last week was a bottle of POM Wonderful pomegranate. It’s expensive as hell ($3.98/bottle), but boy is it ever good.

Here’s the terminal manager of the CTMA ferry that runs between PEI and the Magdelan Islands commenting on a recent crossing that took 16 hours (instead of the usual 5), as reported by CBC:

“The passengers are quite comfortable,” he says. “They’ve got plenty to eat and they’re warm. It’s a closed-in ferry so everything is very comfortable for them. It’s just that it takes so much longer to get from point A to point B, and it’s kind of boring because you can only go so far on a boat.”

A couple of weeks ago was the anniversary of The Molasses Disaster of January 15, 1919. It’s one of those historical events that is so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable. But it happened.

The lords upstairs mentioned last week that they had noticed a proliferation of Really Bad GarageBand-generated music on the net. Not wanting to be left out of this orgy of badinosity, I present my first GarageBand mixdown.

Notice my subtle blending of 4 or 5 genres in one fantastic power ballad.