I think hydrogen fuel cells have entered the public consciousness to the extent that they are now being generally treated as a viable “alternative fuel” mechanism.

I would hazard a guess, however, that the average person thinks:

• Hydrogen is everywhere, so it’s a “free,” readily available fuel.
• Hydrogen fuel cells “burn” hydrogen in a fashion similar to the way that gasoline engines burn gasoline.

Neither is strictly correct.

In the book Fuelling the Future, Dr. Geoffrey Ballard, ” the father of the fuel cell industry,” cleary outlines the following points:

• Hydrogen to be used in fuel cells must be manufactured.
• Fuel cells, which create electricity through a chemical reaction, aren’t an efficient method for creating electricity, but they are an efficient method for storing electricity. They are, basically, batteries.
• From his perspective, the most viable way to create the hydrogen needed to power fuel cells is nuclear power.

This came as a shock to me: I’d been operating under the mistaken, uneducated assumption (mostly fueled by General Motors ads) that hydrogen fell into the same class a solar and wind power; quite clearly it doesn’t.

I’m not revealing anything profound here, but it seems to me that Ballard’s model implies a rebirth of the nuclear power industry, an industry I think many of us thought was effectively dead after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

If that’s honestly what’s required, then it’s time to start the public debate about that part of the the fuel cell equation.

I just came from the Formosa, where I was reading this week’s New Yorker, and noticed:

Editor’s Note: The poem by Philip Larkin, “We Met at the End of the Party,” in the October 20th issue, should have been printed in quatrains.

That struck we as eminently worthy of blogcomment. Except Ben beat me to it. Which, as you can see, hasn’t held me back.

One of my favourite things to do when travelling is to sit somewhere and have a cup of tea and read the local newspaper. There is something about reading a local newspaper that captures the essence of a place in a way that’s difficult to get otherwise: both the experience of reading the paper, and what I learn from the paper itself are instructive and often entertaining.

In a somewhat diluted version of this spirit, I noticed that Eastlink’s Digital Cable offering here in Charlottetown now includes channels 260 through 279, a package titled the “Time Zone Pack,” and available for free until February.

These channels are all mirrors of existing basic cable networks but from other time zones. There are CTV, CBC and Global from Vancouver, NTV from Newfoundland, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and PBS from Seattle and CITY from Toronto.

Not only does this afford the opportunity of watching programs at unusual times of the day — the supper hour news from British Columbia at 10:00 p.m., for example, or Survivor at 1:00 a.m. — but it also makes local market commercials from “foreign” markets available, which, for me, is the most interesting part of watching different television.

In a similar vein, I noticed that fred, the alternative weekly newspaper from Fredericton, is now available on the newsstand at the Formosa Tea House. More political and issues-driven than The Buzz, reading fred gave me an interesting insight into life in Fredericton. There’s a particularly interesting article in the current issue about a man who’s been camping on the front lawn of the New Brunswick Legislature for 152 days in a campaign to have Ritalin use curbed.

Don Bonnell, from Aliant Mobility, dropped by the mediaplex this afternoon to meet with a group of seven of us, all but one current Aliant Mobility cell phone customers. This meeting stems from an email I sent back in October to Chuck Hartlen, Vice President, Aliant Mobility, in which I said:

I’m one of a group of perhaps half a dozen Aliant Mobility customers in Charlottetown that would like to attempt to engage your company in a discussion about your products and services. We are all longtime cell phone customers; most of us work in the technology industry. We are seeking an avenue to bring forward our concerns in a venue that would actually be helpful to Aliant, and, we would hope, ultimately helpful to us. Would you be willing to meet with us, at your convenience, in Charlottetown?

Don, who is the product manager for data and handsets at Mobility, was Chucks’ designate, and he kindly came over from New Brunswick this afternoon and spent three hours in a room talking about cell phones with us.

I think we all came away having learned something from the meeting: Don was very open about explaining how things worked, why things work the way they do, and how they might change. He talked to us about AMPS and CDMA and 1xRTT, about handsets, customer service, the Mobility website and broken antennas.

I was impressed with his openness and his attitude, and encouraged by what he told us about plans for the future.

In my experience, Aliant has many people like Don lurking inside; too often their efforts and ideas get obfuscated by the beastly nature of the organization. It’s nice, as a result, when you can sit across the table from them and have an honest dialogue.

So thanks to Chuck for taking my original request seriously, and thanks to Don for visiting, and putting up with our barrage of questions and criticisms.

Having my name plastered all over this website means that, from time to time, I get old friends, from the pre-digital-Peter, dropping by as the result of an errant Google. As inveterate fan of keeping in touch with old friends, this is a source of great joy to me.

Today Neil dropped by, and he now officially qualifies as the person in the world I’ve known for the longest to have digitally dropped in for a visit.

Neil is the son of John Strickland, one of my father’s Victoria College roommates. There are pictures of Neil and I playing with pots and pans on the floor of someones kitchen when we were both no more than 2 or 3 years old.

Short of the OB/GYN who delivered me at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester in 1966, I can’t imagine anyone from an earlier time in my life stumbling across here.

So, welcome Neil, and Merry Christmas to you and your family!

Edward Hasbrouck, who, for my money, is one of the best travel writers around today, has posted a commentary on Priceline.com that sheds some interesting light on how airlines price tickets.

Now that I’ve choosen to maroon my working life across town, I walk to work every morning. While my walk isn’t anywhere as near ambitious as my brother Steve’s — he walks from St. Joseph down to CBC Montreal every morning, which, I think, is about 17 miles — it’s still an interesting change.

This morning was full of exciting morning walk events.

First, I was stopped on the street by Mandy, from HelloDita.com. She’s been on my blogroll for a while, but I didn’t have a face to put to the name. We had a brief chat on the way to Timothy’s, and then jumped back underneath our digital covers.

Inside Timothy’s, I spotted my arch nemesis Leo Broderick engaged in leftist plotting over in the corner. I managed to avoid eye contact.

And finally, the curiousity getting the best of me, I phoned my sources inside the Hardware Building and secured the knowledge that the secret new development now shrouded in plywood on Kent Street is, in fact, soon to be some sort of pub, apparently starting with the word “St.”. Leaving aside that what the world needs is a good Croatian pub, not another one that starts with “St.” (although who knows, maybe it’s St. Vlaho’s pub!), this will be a welcome addition to the downtown eatery community.

After first admitting that the Prince Edward Island deficit had ballooned from $11.5 million to $53.3 million, and then from there to $83.8 million, Treasurer Mitch Murphy today admitted that the deficit is, in fact, infinite.

“I realize that ‘infinite’ may be a hard concept for Islanders to grasp,” Murphy said to reporters, “so I’m happy to announce a targetted series of town hall sessions on the concept of infinity, to be held in January, to introduce Islanders to infinity.”

“We’ll also be covered concepts like ‘eternity,’ ‘timelessness’ and ‘forever,’” Murphy added.

Responding to opposition questions in the Legislature, Murphy suggested that Islanders think of “infinite” as “a whole lot,” but cautioned that he is working hard with his colleagues to develop a plan to harness the deficit, and went on to blame the infinite nature of the deficit on a series of unforseen infinite cuts in federal transfer payments, combined with an infinite drop in tourism because of SARS and infinite problems experienced by Island farmers this season.

Murphy also blamed the province’s math. He said that if PEI used the same accounting method as other Canadian provinces, PEI’s deficit would only be “almost infinite.”

According to an anonymous guy named Joe, Steven Garrity is a “dink,” is “in the know,” “need[s] to take a chill pill” and considers himself “cooler than the rest of the losers.”

This is not an unusual sort of blogback.

The common pattern is: blogauthor writes something that appears to suggest that they are part of a certain elite group (i.e. they listen to a particular band, wear a particular kind of knee-highs, or use a particular sort of computer) and the blogcritic responds along the lines of “you think you’re so important, you member of an elite group you.”

Leaving all of the pluses and minuses of anonymous blogflaming aside, I’m left to wonder what the alternative is.

If we humans don’t do things that distinguish us into little sub-groups of humans, wouldn’t we all be “the same?” And wouldn’t that be boring?

Isn’t Steven really saying with his radio show “I’m Steven, and here’s something that makes me unique.”

And isn’t “Joe” really saying “stop pretending you’re unique.”

Me, I’ll take unique over mundane any day.

Dink on, Steven!

Yesterday I went to the TD Canada Trust ATM at the corner of Queen and Kent in Charlottetown to withdraw some money.

I asked for $60.

The machine, helpfully, said “I can’t give you $60, but I can give you $50.” I say “okay.”

The machine then spit out a $50 bill.

Not wanting to trouble the merchants of Charlottetown with a $50 bill (actually, not wanting to be seen as a flashy bigshot with a wad of $50 bill(s)) I lined up to speak to a real live teller to get some change.

To get $50 changed into two $20 bills and a $10 bill, I had to:

• Attest to the fact that I have an account with TD Canada Trust
• Wait while the $50 was tested to see if it was counterfeit.
• Wait while the $50 was sealed inside a plastic bag.
• Wait while two sheets of paper were printed by a computer.
• Sign both sheets of paper, one confirming I had given them $50, the other confirming I’d received the change.
• Receive my two $20 bills and a $10 bill.

This rigamarole, from entering the line to leaving with my change, took approximately 10 minutes.

I know for certain that if I walked into the Toronto Dominion Bank in Carlisle, Ontario when I was 12 years old, and asked to have a $50 bill changed into two $20s and a $10, the teller would have taken the $50, opened her drawer, taken out my change and handed it to me.

So how is this progress?