Back of the Mackenzie Theatre, Charlottetown:

In the alley between the Royal Trust Tower and Tim Horton’s in downtown Charlottetown, October 31, 2003 at 1:17 p.m.:

The middle of December heralds the return of the Well-dressed Men to Charlottetown.

There are only four resident Well-dressed Men in our city year-round: Darren Peters, Ritchie Simpson, Robert Ghiz and Brian Cudmore.

The rest of us dress like either Peter Gzowski, Red Green or Kurt Cobain. Or some combination of the three.

But each December two groups of additional men migrate to our city: the Returning Successful Men, and the Well-dressed Spouses.

Because these migrants arrive from the Big City, where fashion is king and the dollars flow freely, they dress themselves in the kind of clothes the likes of which you just don’t see on the streets of town the rest of the year.

The Returning Successful Men are Islanders who’ve gone off to make it Big. They’ve started multinational companies in Toronto or are working as neurosurgeons in Zurich. Or both. Now they’re home for the holidays. And while they know enough not to flaunt their riches and better taste, you have only to look at their SUVs, their shoes, and their scarves to know that they’ve got it goin’ on. And to know that they know that they’ve got it goin’ on.

The Well-dressed Spouses, which is to say those men from away lucky enough to have married a native Islander, tend to carry their couture slightly differently: for them it’s not nouveau fashion, it’s the way they’ve always dressed. So they’re more confident, more self-contained. They look less like fish out of water than like fish for whom water isn’t technically required.

If you are having difficulty spotting the Well-dressed Men as you walk about the downtown doing your Christmas shopping, here are some guidelines:

• Watch for gloves, hat and scarf that are colour-coordinated, often in complementary shades of grey or black.
• The wool pea coat is the winter outerclothing of choice among this group.
• Collarless shirts are also popular.
• Ultimately, it’s all about the shoes. Look at the shoes and you’ll be able to tell in a heartbeat.
• If you’re looking for behavioural references, watch for the use of the word Lapsang Souchong in restaurants: this is an easy tip-off.

While you might take my tone to be mocking, rest easy in the notion that, as a perennially poorly-dressed resident of Charlottetown, it’s more avarice than spite that I seeth with when I see these well turned out visitors on our streets.

“Oh to be well-dressed,” I sigh.

And then I sooth myself with this notion: when one is forced to assemble a wardrobe from the men’s departments at Mark’s Work Wearhouse, Zellers and Wal-Mart, just how high is it appropriate to set the bar?

Some technical notes (with apologies to Ritchie Simpson):

• The reinvented.net and www.reinvented.net URLs for this site should now be pointing at the same place. That they were not explains why some of you noticed strange content voodoo over the course of today.
• The site search is now working properly (it broke after the move from the old server because of some updates to the [excellent] SWISH-E indexer).

It was heartening, if mildly disturbing, that so many of you pointed out the problems. Perhaps it was because it’s a snow day, and nobody had anything better to do?

ImageWell is a great little program with a simple purpose: it makes it easy to post images to a webserver from a Mac.

Using ImageWell to post an image works like this: drag image onto the ImageWell icon, name it, and upload. The URL of the image gets automatically copied to the clipboard, where it can be then pasted into a weblog editor.

This is so much easier than the old way of doing this — open image editor, crop image, resize, save, open MacSFTP, transfer the file — that it makes frequent image posting an easy, painless task where once it was an occasional inconvenience.

All of which leads me to this image, one of a series of images of Charlottetown graffiti that I took this fall.

Stay tuned for more graffiti as the week progresses.

Here’s a picture of my mother, Oliver’s grandmother, talking with Oliver using Apple’s iChat AV. Both ends of the conversation have an iSight camera, so grandmother and grandson can talk to each other and see each other at the same time.

The video and audio are of excellent quality, even with full-screen video. There’s no complicated setup, directories or other confusion: click on the buddy list and start talking.

This is the “picture phone” future we were promised in the 1960s finally come to effective, easy to use, practical life. If you’re looking for revolutionary, life-changing technology, this is it.

Here’s a snap of my new office. Notice the quality floor refinishing by floor expert Paul Holmes, the rectangular chair mat ($68 at Colpitts), the very adjustable desk (from Summerside Clearance Centre, thanks to Marie Brine’s pointer) and the cool green paint job and plants (both thanks to Catherine).

There’s also absolutely no paper.

I like Safari, especially the fact that my Safari bookmarks are automatically synced to my iDisk. But I also like Firebird, and I’d like to use the same bookmarks in that browser as I do in Safari.

Safari stores its bookmarks in:

~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist

Firebird stores its bookmarks under:

~/Library/Phoenix/Profiles/default/[uniqueid]/bookmarks.html

Converting from the Safari-format XML file to the HTML-format Firebird file seemed like a good task to use XSLT for.

Using TestXSLT from Marc Liyanage as a testing tool, I created this Safari2Firebird.xslt style sheet that can be used to transform a Safari bookmarks file into a Firebird bookmarks file.

To do this using TestXSLT:

• Under the XML tab, select the Safari Bookmarks.plist file.
• Under the XSLT tab, select the Safari2Firebird.xslt file you downloaded here.
• Click Process and, optionally, save the result as bookmarks.html and copy to your Firebird profile directory.

I’m neither an XSLT expert nor particularly familiar with Firebird, so I may have missed something here, and this may not work for you. I welcome comments on how to improve the process.

Update: Marcus Kazmierczak helpfully modified the script; here’s his explanation:

I convert the BookmarksBar Folder to Firebird’s Personal Toolbar (including setting the property). I also discard the Address Book and Rendezvous folders and move all the folders in the BookmarkMenu to top level.

I’ve replaced the link above with a link to the updated version.

They may having been doing this all along, but I just noticed that CBC Prince Edward Island has a winter storm watch page.

I’ve switch the server that this website is hosted on, from the old 1995-era machine sitting in my basement at home, to the mildly more sleek 2000-era machine sitting above my head here at the new data centre. The move should be seamless and painless. Please alert me to any irregularities. If you’re reading this post, then you’re seeing the new server.