I took this picture of the sign for Ferry’s, a clothing store in Barcelona, while walking home from dinner one night. I think that, in terms of typography, colour and shape, it might be the nicest retail sign I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a picture, taken inland from the Costa Brava in Spain, of our little Toyota Yaris, rented from EasyCar.

The Yaris is really a Toyota Echo hatchback. It’s wildly popular in Europe — we saw them all over Spain and London. And now the model is coming to Canada (but, oddly, not the USA): the Echo Hatchback will be available here, says Charlottetown Toyota, starting in August.

I’ve always found the standard Echo to be a frightfully ugly car, with its jaunty high rear end. The Yaris/Echo Hatchback has the same form factor, but without a trunk, that which offends me is cut off, and the result is a sport looking car with a lot of room inside.

Although the Yaris is smaller than our 2000 Jetta Sedan (it’s 72cm shorter, 7cm thinner and almost exactly the same height), the interior space is laid out in such a way as to feel much roomier. This was most obvious with Oliver in his car seat in the middle of the back seat: in the Jetta, his feet touch the back of the front seats; in the Yaris he had lots of leg room.

Fuel economy-wise the Yaris was fantastic: we filled it up in Barcelona, drove around a lot for 3 days, and didn’t use a half a tank of gas. The Yaris is rated at 41/57 mpg (city/highway); our Jetta is 19/28 mpg. In other words, the Yaris can go twice as far on a gallon of gas as the Jetta.

Needless to say, we’re going to take one for a test drive when they arrive in Charlottetown at the end of the summer.

Presumably in preparation for their escape to West Royalty, Tweel’s in Charlottetown has started to consolidate their magazine racks.

Historicallly, the position at the “end of the hall” at Tweel’s has held travel and cooking magazines. And the long stretch at the “bottom of the el” section has held niche magazines: photography, hunting, cars, dogs, and so on.

As you can see from the following photo, snapped yesterday, a consolidation is in progress, with the “hunting, killing and paint shooting” titles merging east into the bottom of the travel rack.

My favourite juxtaposition is Trailer Life with its new neighbour Solider of Fortune. Although MotorHome with neighbour Action Pursuit Games run a close second.

Conventional wisdom is that airlines are in the hardware business. But look at this notice that appeared on the front page of JetBlue’s websire this afternoon:

Due to required system maintenance, we are currently unable to process reservations. Some flight delays may also be possible, please click here for a status on JetBlue flights. Next information update will be at 5:00 PM EDT.

It says some flight delays may also be possible. In other words, this is not hardware causing software problems, but rather software causing hardware problems.

Need more convincing? The article Delta’s Last Stand talks about technology at Delta Airlines:

Over the past five years, Delta spent $1.5 billion on a computer and communications infrastructure, called the Delta Nervous System, that cuts inefficiencies out of virtually every area of its operation — an investment that Delta chief information officer Curtis Robb notes Delta could not afford to make today. A study by Baseline finds Delta is realizing about $700 million this year in savings and is generating $150 million in new revenue from such things as maintenance, which previously hadn’t been a profit center.

In an industry where airports, airplanes and all the other hard items are basically interchangeable and generic, he with the best software wins.

Here’s a local case in point.

When you want to find out the status of an Air Canada flight, you need to know the flight number. This is a hardware-centric view of the world: airplanes are hard goods; the flight number is their routing code.

On the WestJet and JetsGo websites, you just need to know where the flight started, and where it’s going to end. Simple. This is a software-centric view: airplanes are simply a platform on which people-moving software runs.

I would not be surprised if Delta’s software-centric worldview allows them to survive. And Air Canada’s obsession with hardware takes them down.

From my friend Stephen comes a link to a New York Times story, Rewards in Restlessness. It’s written by the CEO of JetBlue and starts:

A year ago, I officially learned that I have attention deficit disorder, but I’ve known it since I was in my 30’s. I’m 43 now.

Stephen says of the article “I’ve never heard ADD described in such glowing terms.” There was actually an early article in WIRED that took a similar tack. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see a high-profile businessperson “out” himself like this.

Personally I find people with ADD some of the most interesting of my friends and colleagues; I don’t think the world could run properly without them.

I lamented the late of proper snacks in my life in May.

In response, my kind caregiver Libertia dropped off a snack “care package.”

In the package was a bag of “vegetable fries” that, alas, tasted like greasy slivers of sharp cardboard (this is not Libertia’s fault: she was unable to find her tried and trusted brand of this particular snack and, in a pinch, was forced to subsitute).

There was also a bag of curiously wonderful nuts. I am ashamed to admit that I can’t properly name these nuts, though I know that I should, as an adult, be able to. They have a greenish hue. They are salted, and their shells are best described as “partially open” — sort of like the nutworld equivalent of cooked mussels. They are quite tasty and, most intriguing, each time I’ve sat down for a fill of them, there’s come a time when I’ve said to myself “this will be my last nut for today” and I’ve walked away sated and happy.

The snack drought isn’t over. But, thanks to Libertia, there’s enough water to get us through the summer.

Four times in the past six months I have visited the Irving Car Wash on St. Peters Road in Charlottetown. Each time I’ve gone to the cash to buy my ticket and been told some variation of “it’s broken” (today I was told “it’s closed” and when I asked “forever?” I was told it was just until tomorrow because “somebody has to come and look at some of the parts”). I’m beginning to wonder if they actually still run a car wash — perhaps it’s just a “get them in the door, let them down, and they’ll buy a chocolate bar to console themselves” bait and switch?

The only reason I keep beating my head against this wall is because I had a very good car wash there last fall. But enough is enough; I’m never going back.

The alternative? The car washes on North River Road (behind Apple Auto Glass) and in Southport (turn left before Robin’s Donuts) are both good, and they’ve never been broken when I’ve visited. They both have good “self serve” bays as well; the North River Road car wash has a very slight edge in terms of user interface design, but that’s not reason enough for me to prefer one over the other.

Charlottetown, I think most would agree, is a sort of culinary gulag. It is difficult to find menus in this city where the majority of the menu does not consist of “X with french fries.” In discussing the use of spices in restaurants in the city last week with a friend, we agreed that the tendency in most is to simply “none.” The same friend, when I asked her where should would eat if it was a really special occassion, and she wanted the best, replied “at home.”

There are, thankfully, exceptions. We are graced with a Lebanese-Canadian community that gives us shish taouk, baba ganoush, tabouli and falafel. We have a passable Indian restaurant (and another serving Anglo-Indian food that, inexplicably, many love dearly). But we are left out of the fragrant flavour panorama offered by the rest of the world’s cuisine.

When living under these harsh conditions, the opening of a new restaurant is an event of great anticipation. “This might be the one,” we say to ourselves.

It was with this sense of anticipation that Catherine, Oliver and I headed out to dinner to Angels last night. Angels is the new Kenny Zakem-fronted restaurant that occupies the space formerly filled with Hughes Chrysler on Belvedere Avenue.

I am a big Kenny Zakem fan. He took over the Perfect Cup Cafe from Bruce MacNaughton back in the early 1990s, and served uncommonly good breakfast and lunch fare. When he packed that operation up, I was left without a breakfast place that serves something other than fried eggs and bacon. I’m still looking.

I’d heard good early reports from others, and when we drove up last night the parking lot was overflowing with cars.

The signs, in other words, were all good.

Before I continue, I should mention, by way of disclaimer, that Oliver really, really didn’t want to go out to dinner last night. He didn’t tell us this before we got out to dinner, of course, and even then his method for communicating his feelings was less “Mother, Father, I’d rather eat at home this evening!” and more “crying, thrashing and generally making a scene.” The conditions for evaluating Angels, in sum, were not ideal. But then again, the best restaurants can really come into their own when faced with parents with cranky kids: waiters in Spain and Thailand know Oliver’s moods well, and came up with some novel (and successful) placation devices.

We had a 20 minute wait for a table. Can’t knock them for that, and, besides, they’ve got a doorway right into Dow’s Furniture next door, so we could go and browse there while waiting.

Once we were seated, we were immediately offered a high chair (bonus points; this is often forgotten) and menus. And then we waited about 40% too long for the waiter to come and take our orders. I don’t mind waiting for a table — there’s only so much space to go around! — but there simply weren’t enough wait staff on duty, and our man was forced to serve too many tables.

The menu was, unfortunately, standard ho-hum fare; basically the same items you’d find at the Brennan’s (nee Pat’s Rose and Grey): seafood, thin-crust pizza, club wrap, beef and pork done various ways. Appetizers fell into the same category: bruschetta, bacon-wrapped scallops and three salads (Caesar, house and Greek). Beverages were standard; beer selection lacking (Catherine likes Clancy’s; or rather, Catherine dislikes Clancy’s the least, and they didn’t have it; she had to make do with a Moosehead).

The interior of Angels is interesting. Table are arranged in a large ‘U’ around a glass-wrapped open kitchen. Our table was directly in front of the appetizer prep station, and just down the hall from desserts; mains were prepared on the opposite side. This aspect of Angels makes it a marginally more compelling place to eat than other places in its class: something about the cooks having to make the food out in the open makes me feel better.

Unfortunately, this aspect of Angels was about the only thing that set it apart from the run of the mill.

Our appetizer — we choose the bacon wrapped scallops, for it was the only thing that seemed like it might offer some excitement — sat on the counter about 3 feet from Catherine’s head for about 5 minutes before our busy waiter figured out it was there. The scallops were small and dried out; the bed of greens underneath was an unnecessary distraction.

Our mains, which, like the menus, arrived about 40% later than seemed proper, were a disappointment.

I ordered the “clubhouse wrap,” remembering that Kenny used to make a very tasty “chicken in a pita” dish at the Perfect Cup. There was, I believe, no spice whatsoever in this dish (I was promised a “special sauce;” perhaps its exceptional quality was its tastelessness?). Good cooking takes a collection of regular ingredients and enlivens them in their combination; my clubhouse wrap was somehow less than the sum of its parts. The only highlight was the roasted potatoes, which were well-spiced, hot, and nicely cooked. But by the time I came to taste the potatoes, the battle was already lost by the moribund sandwich, and it was too late.

Catherine ordered the thin crust “Mediterranean” pizza. At its best, thin-crust pizza (with “thin crust” acting as a sort of code word for “not regular everyday Dominos style”) has a delicate crust, and a frugal selection of well-combined ingredients. This was not pizza at its best: the crust was cooked to “hard to cut through” solidity, and ingredients were slathered on. The result was a too-oily, too-cheesy morass that was, somehow, simultaneously too crisp and too soggy. Catherine’s summary: “there was so much cheese and oil that you couldn’t taste any of the other ingredients.”

Oliver’s orneriness necessitated an exit before we had an opportunity to try the desserts: this area seemed to have some promise, at least visually, but I can’t comment on how this translates into when it comes to the eating.

All in all, alas, a disappointing evening: service was amateur, food was uninspiring. Back into the gulag we go.

On Monday, June 16 at 7:00 p.m. a group of weblog publishers will be presenting an “introduction to the world of weblogs” in Charlottetown. The general public is invited to attend — everyone, young or old, Internet literate or not. The seminar will be held in Lecture Theatre A, Atlantic Veterinary College on the campus of the University of PEI.

Presenting will be Steven Garrity, Catherine Hennessey, Rob Paterson and me.

We’ll each talk about our own weblogs (how they came to be, why we publish them, how we publish them, and so on), and we’ll demonstrate the tools we use to publish. They’ll be a healthy time for questions.

We’ve prepared a poster for the evening [30KB PDF file] that you can print off and post if you like (we appreciate help spreading the word).

The evening is sponsored by the University of PEI, Reinvented Inc., silverorange, The Renewal Consulting Group and Island Identity.

Come one, come all!

Here is the definition of Peter from the Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):

Peter Pet”er, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Petered; p. pr. & vb. n.
   Petering.] [Etymol. uncertain.]
   To become exhausted; to run out; to fail; — used generally
   with out; as, that mine has petered out. [Slang, U.S.]

After getting up at 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday, at 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, and at 11:00 a.m. on Friday, I am, true to form, feeling “exhausted, run out and failing.”

Luckily, if I keep this up, I will wrap around and be up at 4:00 a.m. in about 2 weeks.

As a side point, I am also feeling as though my etymology is uncertain.