There’s some freaky shit going on regarding wind, hydrogen, and Prince Edward Island energy policy. So freaky that it’s hard to believe. For example, here’s Hon. Jamie Ballem, Minister of Environment and Energy, quoted in a CBC story:

“It’s such a renewable, and it’s so clean,” says Ballem. It’s our oil. It’s our opportunity because it’s one thing we do have here. We have good wind conditions. Maybe we should be maximizing it. If we can get Maritime cooperation then it makes it a lot easier for us to look at. Instead of 15 per cent of our energy coming from wind, can we make it 50 per cent, can we make it 100 per cent?”

I had to read that paragraph three times before I believed it. Some days, it’s just good to be alive.

Thanks for Rus, a helpful reader, I have news of Hermann Kleefisch, the Islander who is driving around the world. Rus points to this story from Chiang Mai which provides an update on Hermann’s progress to date. To summarize: he’s made it as far as Thailand, although without, alas, his VW Microbus, which was sent back to Germany without him at the Vietnamese border. Hermann is continuing by foot, train and bus.

In the mid-1950s, in a student residence at Cambridge University in England, the Oxford and Cambridge Far East Expedition was born:

It began, like almost everything else at Cambridge, late at night over gas-ring coffee. I lived on the same college staircase as Adrian Cowell, and I had gone up to his room one winter evening for a nightcap. He started talking of an idea he had for a combined Oxford and Cambridge overland expedition to Singapore.

Six men, one from Oxford and five from Cambridge, set off from London in a convoy of two Land Rovers, to drive to continuously overland to Singapore. The book First Overland, written by Tim Slessor, one of the team, is the tale of their voyage.

Largely because of the nature of the expedition team members, the book is chock full of interesting technical information: we learn how the Land Rovers were packed, what that carried, and how they performed. There’s information about food on the road, camping on the road, and relations among the team members on the road.

While Offbeat in Asia concerns expedition by a team of two, and In the Circle of the Sun by a rollicking family, this book is very definitely about a bunch of wise-cracking sophomoric graduate students. They’re smart, witty, ingenious, and not a little pretentious. If my landlords at silverorange decided to travel around the world together, I imagine the tale would be similar. While this might not be every reader’s cup of tea, it was mine, and I flew quickly through the book over a couple of nights.

The writing is as you might expect from such a group (Slessor is primary author, but there are diary excerpts from others, and several other team members take on chapter):

Up at six and off by seven. Stacks on the agenda to-day. The usual fried eggies and buffalo butter for breakfast. Mustafa, the driver of the jeep, wants a chit signed to testify to his mechanical ability Authority delgated to Henry, who writes, “Mustafa is a bloody marvellous mechanic, signed Chief Engineer Oxcam Far Eastern.”

The expedition set off from London and headed south-east through Vienna, Belgrade, and Salonika, then east through Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Burma and then south-east through Thailand to Malaysia and finally to Singapore.

Perhaps the most compelling section of the journey is that which took the expedition along the Stillwell Road, a road constructed for World War II that had been unused, and assumed impassable, since the end of the war. Using a combination of connections, guile, tenacity and copious use of the winch, both Land Rovers made it down the Stillwell Road. What’s more, they did so in a rather miraculous three days:

On looking back, the first hundred miles of the Stillwell Road was much easier than we had ever expected. Anticipating very difficult conditions, we had armed ourselves with everything from three weeks’ food supply, to water-sterilizing tablets, from winches to machetes. A part of our success so far was due to luck — the monsoon had been unusually light, and therefore the rivers and hills were not as sodden as they might have been, neither were there any big landslides to block our way. But undoubtedly another part was due to the preparations we had made, and without eight forward gears, four-wheel drive, and winches our overland venture might had have unstuck a dozen times in the first twenty-four hours from Ledo.

While the book relates the tale of the overland drive from London to Singapore, in fact the expedition continued with a drive back the other direction (albeit steaming from Singapore to Calcutta over sea). Slessor explains: “I have decided to leave them out… because, although on reaching our outward destination we had to turn round and come back, it occurs to me that it is expecting too much of the reader to do likewise.”

The book closes with a series of appendices covering medical, mechanical, navigation, photographic, quartermastering, cookery and money issues. There are well-drawn maps throughout, and several sections of photographs.

First Overland was a lent to me by my friend Daniel, in December of 2002, temporarily purloined from his parents’ library. It is out of print, but used copies are abebooks.com.

I had a interesting telephone call today from a woman I knew more than 10 years ago. She was the subject of a post I wrote on the site last spring: I had interviewed her for a radio piece back then, and I posted the audio of that interview along with my reflections.

She had recently “Googled” herself, and found that said post was the first search result for her name. While originally intrigued, she later found that others — friends, colleagues — had also Googled her name, found the same post, and were alternatively bemused and concerned by the content, in part because they thought it was a contemporary interview, not one conducted 10 years ago.

She called me to ask me to remove the post and the audio, and I complied, reasoning that since (a) I hadn’t originally asked her permission to post the audio, that (b) it was causing her some grief, and that (c) I consider her to own her own words, it was the Right Thing to Do.

At the same time, I cautioned her that once something is on the web, it’s difficult to completely retract: Google will cache it, other sites may archive it. And so on.

I mention this by way of notifying the readership of the absense of the item previously found here, and also to prompt some discussion about the greater issues at play here.

For example, who owns a radio interview? If I was interviewed on the CBC this morning, and they decided to replay my interview in 10 years, would they respond to a request from me to not do so?

Or, let’s say I write a masters thesis, and take a point of view that, 5 years later, I have denounced, and I want to remove my thesis from the university library? Should I be able to?

Or, is it okay to simply write about people without their permission, considering that doing so will effect how they’re seen by the rest of the world (friends, family, potential employers, legal adversaries, etc.) through the eyes of Google. My experience is that if I write about someone at all on this website, if they are not otherwise engaged in Internet work, they’ll likely appear high up on the Google search results for their name. Do we need new rules to deal with the power that this affords me?

Or, if I decided that I wanted to go and get a job with Aliant, and decided to improve my chances by removing all of the posts here that have been critical of that company, is that okay? Do I have any obligation to anyone to not do that?

I’d be interested in others’ thoughts.

Here’s some essential preparatory material for tonight’s big Barn Dance at Robert and Robin’s hacienda.

It also wouldn’t hurt to read up on J. Walter Jones, former owner of their tract.

And remember, nothing could make me happier than if a spontaneous game of charades were to break out.

It occured to me that my computer already “knows” whether I’m in the office or not because my iChat status (aka my AOL Instant Messenger/AIM status, as they use the same IM network) is automatically set to “Away” if I’m idle, and “Available” when I return.

As such, shouldn’t my voicemail be able to reflect this — i.e. not bother ringing my phone if I’m not in the office?

Here’s how I achieved this using Asterisk and an AGI script written in PHP.

First, I needed some code to grab my AIM status. The easiest way to do this is using cURL (note, you’ll have to have cURL compiled into your PHP; see this page on the PHP site for details).

I use cURL to connect to the URL that is otherwise used to display graphical “I’m online” messages on users’ websites; because I’m not actually displaying graphics, just grabbing the status, I can use the arbitrary strings ON and OFF:

$url = “http://big.oscar.aol.com/screenname?on_url=ON&off_url=OFF”;
$ch = curl_init(); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 4);
$result = curl_exec($ch);

Executing this (substituting your actual AIM/iChat screen name for ‘screenname’) will result in the variable $result being set to either “ IMG SRC=ON” (with the leading space) or “ IMG SRC=OFF”. You can then react accordingly in the rest of your AGI script. For example:

if ($result == ” IMG SRC=ON”) {
    print “EXEC Playback TryingPeterNow\n”;
    print “EXEC Dial SIP/100\|20\n”;
    print “EXEC Playback PeterIsNotHere\n”;
    print “EXEC Voicemail 100\n”;
    print “EXEC Hangup\n”;
}
else {
    print “EXEC Playback PeterIsNotHere\n”;
    print “EXEC Voicemail 100\n”;
    print “EXEC Hangup\n”;
}

This code plays a message like “I’m trying Peter now” if my AIM status is “ON”, and rings my SIP extension, sending to voicemail if I don’t pick up in 20 seconds. I’ve my AIM status is “OFF,” then I say something like “Peter’s not here” and send directly to voicemail.

Why do I get spammed with email that contains nothing but seemingly random words?

I don’t have a lot of money to invest, but we’ve got some RRSPs, and the company has a little money from the sale of digitalisland.com several years ago. My accountant has just suggested meeting with an “investment advisor” to discuss where this money sits. In getting back to him, I tried to express my investment philsophy; here’s what I told him:

I have no interest in investments that are stock market-related, so mutual funds and stocks are out. I don’t know enough about bonds to understand what I’d be investing in and what the risks are, but I’m open to learning. As you know, the Reinvented Inc. investments and my existing RRSP are both in Metro Credit Union GICs at present. I’m comfortable with them there, but I understand that I’m earning less interest there than I would otherwise; if there are other vehicles that would share about the same level of risk, and would also involve investing in my own community, I’m open. That said, I’m not interested in spending a lot of time on this, and I’m generally averse not only to risk, but to investment advisors.

I say this here in public only to declare that it’s possible to live a good and happy live without having anything to do with the stock market, which I consider to be inherently evil.

I’m probably more on the “needlessly stupid” side of the fence on this, of course. But I do have the benefit of having had to expend exactly no effort thinking about investing for the past 10 years. As such, I didn’t profit from the bubbles, but nor did I stress out over the crashes.

I think it’s a good idea, on HTML forms, to focus the cursor on the first field on the form. This means users won’t have to click in the field before starting to fill in the form.

I think it’s a bad idea to have the cursor automatically jump from section to section of multi-part fields, like area code and telephone number. While this might seem like “doing the user a favour,” it’s disconcerting, and because we’re all used to using TAB to jump from field to field, we’re more likely to jump one field too far. It also causes problems with making corrections.

Air Canada is the worst offender here: their prompt for a 3-part Aeroplan number is programmed to automatically jump from part to part as it’s entered.

In the late 1960s, Ann Woodin and her family set off to explore the deserts of Asia and Africa in a convoy of VW Microbus and Land Rover. In all, their party included Woodin and her husband, their four sons (aged eleven through sixteen), and three friends of the family. Their nominal route was “Calcutta to Casablanca,” and their interest in deserts appears to have stemmed from their work and life in Arizona.

Despite my strong interest in long driving expeditions, I couldn’t quite bring myself to read this book all the way through. There were two main reasons for this, both stylistic.

First, Woodin is an overly self-reflective writer, and the book is filled with passages like this one from the closing chapter:

If I am unconscious of my own inner being, can I perceive what is and speak out of that with a true voice? Unaware, I cannot live things out in flesh and blood, and I will have to steal images from other eyes and talk in borrowed voice. In the darkness of an unrealized spirit, I will continue being confused, fearful, grasping.

One can only take so much of that until it feels like being pummelled to death by words.

More frustrating still is Woodin’s style for relating the journey: rather than an integrated, meaningful story of a long voyage, what we get is a rather disconnected series of vignettes. One day they’re in Cambodia, the next day in Bangkok, and there’s no suggestion as to how they got from one place to the other. To add to this confusion, each dated sub-chapter is titled for the night’s destination rather than for the subject of the day’s activity, which makes it difficult to tie together what’s already disconnected to begin with.

The expedition began in Tokyo, and headed west from there to Hong Kong, Cambodia, Bangkok and Calcutta by air, and then from Calcutta west overland:

Our last day in Calcutta is ending. The boys are listening to Indian classical music which sounds, in parts, like rock and roll. Bill and the Latifs are examining maps. And I am thinking of our vehicle parked in the driveway. We have christened it the Sand Fish in hopes that it will prove as able to survive in the desert as the lizard of that name. The new cupboards have been filled with food, the water tank with twenty gallons of boiled water, the gas tank with gas at a dollar per gallon.

From Calcutta, they travelled to Agra, Delhi, Kabul, Meshed, Baghdad, Amman, Jidda, Aden and, Nairobi. After a break of two months in Switzerland (reached by air), they went on to Athens, Cairo, and through Libya to Algeria where their desert journey ended at Casablanca.

Over the course of the journey various members of the party drop in and out — certain children go off to study, family friends leave and rejoin, and so on. The author is the only constant, for she is with the journey from beginning to end.

Despite the stylistic problems, which make an enjoyable read through of the book next to impossible for all but the spiritually attuned, the notion of picking up a large family, including 4 teenagers, and heading off across Asia, is a brave and intriguing one, and perhaps it’s the possibility of doing so, rather than the details of the voyage itself, which is where the real value of this book lies.

In the Circle of the Sun was a gift from my friend Gary the bookseller, in December of 2002. It was formerly resident in the Colonel Gray Senior High School Library in Charlottetown, where it appears never to have been checked out. It is out of print, but used copies are available from Amazon.com.