Do this. Right now. Please.

Go to your closet. Or your shoe tree (do people still have shoe trees?). Select a pair of shoes in need of repair. We all have them: the treasured pair of well-worn shoes that have fallen on bad times.

Sneakers and other plastic contraptions need not apply: we need something in need of repair that can, in fact, be repaired.

Now take these shoes and walk over to Currie’s Shoe Repair on Queen Street in Charlottetown. It’s on the west side, just south of Kent Street, near The Bookman. It’s in the basement.

Walk in the front door and down the stairs. And leave your shoes to be repaired.

They’ll probably be ready on Friday, or maybe early next week. You will be given a tag to take home to remind you. You will have a pleasant conversation with the owner.

Your life will improve immeasurably.

Do this. Right now. Please.

FedEx announced today it’s acquiring Kinko’s. FedEx.com has details, with audio and video.

Here’s what’s new in the restaurant trade in Charlottetown.

The Taj Mahal, serving Indian cuisine on University Avenue, has closed its doors until June 1st. While I can’t claim to have had any barn-burner Indian meals there, one doesn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I’m sad to be without them for the long cold winter.

Perhaps it’s just me, but after a good start, things at Cora’s Breakfast and Lunch seem to be flagging a little. My perennial favourite the fruit crunch (granola, English cream, and lots of fresh fruit) used to be presented with much fanfare, and lots of extra fruit bonuses on the plate. This took something of the edge off paying close to $8.00 for a bowl of fruit. Lately, though, and especially this morning, this dish has been significantly reduced in spleandour: gone are any trace of plate garnishes, and the variety of fruit is diminished, with much more of the [traditional, for restaurants] reliance on melon and cantaloupe. Over Christmas, Catherine ordered the “St. Nicholas Special,” which is a hot turkey dinner with stuffing and mashed. She said, and I quote, “that’s the worse turkey dinner I’ve ever had.” Service at Cora’s has also suffered: it’s not unusual to see a line 5 or 6 customers deep waiting to cash out. I hope the downturn isn’t permanent, especially as they’re very nice to Oliver there, and he loves their pancakes.

The folks at the Formosa Tea House are hard at work in the former premises of Big Momma’s (which Gary insists on calling “The Windmill” for historical reasons). Word on the street is that they are shooting for a March opening, with a menu and hours expanded from the Formosa. No definitive word on the future of the University Ave. location; I hope they stick with it, because it’s so handy to the new office.

Catherine and I had dinner at the new St. James Place on Saturday (it’s in the old Home Hardware location on Kent Street). I had the vegetarian mushroom burger which, although too drenched in various fats, oils and cheeses to be considered technically “healthy” was very tasty. Catherine, who had breakfast there early Saturday, urged me on to the roasted potatoes over the jasmine rice, and they were, as she predicted, very good. Catherine had some sort of complex pasta dish that was baked in parchment. It didn’t change her life, but she enjoyed it. There were a wide variety of beers on tap (I’m not a beer drinker, but I was impressed with the various unusual names that seemed, to my untrained eye, quite exotic). The only downside food-wise was an expensive ($7.00) piece of mediocre raspberry cheesecake. It would have been pleasant at $3.95; at $7.00 I want the earth to move. I could take or leave the “ye olde” decor; I’m not sure why we feel compelled to recreate pretend olde interiors with fake plaster and fake beams, but I’m not mortally opposed to it, and the room has a nice feel. We were back last night around midnight, and the place was hopping with a crowd of 25-35 year olds, all looking very sophisticated. Presumably the St. James Place is an upgrade path from Myrons, and it certainly is handy by.

Now that I have used the phrase “handy by” I must stop writing.

My Sipura SPA-2000 arrived today. With some fiddling, greatly aided by this helpful article by Dorian Gray, I was able to get the Sipura talking to my Digium Wildcard X100P.

I’ve only just started configuring Asterisk, but I’ve already got the this all hooked up to (902) 892-2556, and it’s accepting my voicemail and emailing me my messages as audio file attachments (interestingly, this was the easiest part of the system to set up).

All of this is something of a relief, as I spent so many frustrating hours trying to get USB and the Digium S100U to play happily — I never succeeded — that this was my first real opportunity to be impressed by Asterisk. And it is impressive.

More information, and a detailed step-by-step, coming soon.

I’ve noticed that in this U.S. primary campaign, all television and radio advertising by the candidates contains a section where the candidate says “I’m blahblahblah and I’ve approved this message.”

Apparently this is required by law, as the result of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 [PDF] that states, in s.311 (3) (d) (1) (a):

Any communication described in paragraph (1) or (2) of subsection (a) which is transmitted through radio shall include, in addition to the requirements of that paragraph, an audio statement by the candidate that identifies the candidate and states that the candidate has approved the communication.

And in s.311 (3) (d) (1) (b):

Any communication described in paragraph (1) or (2) of subsection (a) which is transmitted through television shall include, in addition to the requirements of that paragraph, a statement that identifies the candidate and states that the candidate has approved the communication.

Thanks to IsleAsk for research assistance.

 I think Catherine and I have had about two dozen conversations about the moon. She would claim it was five dozen.

They all go something like this:

Peter: Hey, look, the moon is really bright tonight, and it was really dark last week.

Catherine: Yes, that’s the way the moon is.

Peter: That’s amazing.

Catherine: Yes, it is.

Despite working every day on a project for which the moon is, perhaps more than for any other project save the moon landing, front and centre, I’m surprisingly amazed (read “dense”) when it comes to the moon.

For some reason, I managed to skip any sort of formal training in the ways of the moon. I vaguely remember some discussion of the tides in Grade 11 Geography. But none of my classrooms had those neato mobiles that cleverly illustrate the moon revolving around the earth revolving around the sun.

So I have decided that this is the year I will come to understand the moon.

First project towards this goal was the creation of the Moon Phase RSS Feed, which, because it gives me a daily whack on the side of the head about the moon, has proved invaluable (if you can’t RSS, you can look here for similar effect).

Next, I’m going to have to get all these nested revolvings understood.

Of course that leaves the wonder of the sun still hanging: Oliver and I sat on the big orange chair in the living room this morning and the sun was aligned so that it was shining right through the piano window at us. It was surprisingly warm. Yet it’s winter. Go figure.

The Yahoo! Around the World Travelogues section is a good place to start if you’re interested in web information from circumnavigators.

Here’s the link that lets you make a donation to the Canadian Red Cross in support of their work with the earthquake in Iran (and here are the American and British counterparts).

And here’s a useful statement from the British Red Cross titled Why we ask for money, not gifts:

It is often thought that a ‘free’ donation of clothes, medicine, or tinned food helps the victims of disasters, but with cash the British Red Cross can help more people, more cheaply, and more efficiently.

As part of the world’s largest emergency response network, the British Red Cross is ready to meet crisis needs anywhere, at any time. That means having the right equipment, personnel, aid and technical know-how to respond to anything from a major earthquake to the outbreak of war.

Cash is the lifeblood of rapid response. It can be instantly transferred and converted into whatever is most needed, anywhere in the world. Cash not only allows us to use our strong purchasing power to benefit the maximum number of people; it also allows us to adjust our response very rapidly to changing needs and priorities in the affected country.

The Drive Around the World expedition has a weblog (and a companion RSS feed).

One of the items mentioned in First Overland, the story of the Cambridge-Oxford expedition to drive from London to Singapore that I just finished reading, is that the so-called Burma Road (also known as the Stillwell Road, after General Joseph Stillwell), which was built during World War II to connect Ledo in Assam, India, to Kunming, China, cost the U.S.A. $137 million to build.

I was curious to know how much this would be “in today’s dollars,” which led to a further curiousity about how “in today’s dollars” amounts are calculated.

I sent this question in to the IsleAsk service and received a very helpful reply from Brenda Brady at the Holland College Library with some pointers to relevant websites:

• Current Value of Old Money from the University of Exeter.
• How Much Is That? from the Economic History Association.
• The Value of Money from Suburban Library System in Burr Ridge, IL.

What one learns from these and other websites is that, to quote Brenda, “determining the relative change in the value of money is not as simple as it looks, and can depend on context, changing technologies, changes in supply and demand, etc.”

That said, using the calculator on the How Much Is That? site, the $137 million figure comes out to anywhere from $1.5 billion (using the Consumer Price Index) to $2.3 billion (using the unskilled wage) to $4.2 billion (using the Gross Domestic Product per capita).

Calculated using any of these methods, it’s still one heck of a lot of money for a 1,079 mile road: even in 1942 dollars it was more than $125,000 per mile. Although, of course, not as much as our Confederation Bridge. But they had to go over water.

If you haven’t tried IsleAsk, I would encourage you to do so: it’s an easy way to get high quality reference information, from local sources, at no cost.