From librarian-to-the-stars Brenda Brady comes a pointer to a great new service called isle@sk, which is a web-based distributed reference service that flings queries at a collection of a dozen or so Island librarians, and promises a response within 24 hours.

The isle@sk project falls under the Town Square umbrella; with the library catalogue gateway it now forms the core of the “few projects funded under Town Square that aren’t insane” collection.

Nice to see librarians getting some funding to do some experimenting.

The online International Herald Tribune is truly a thing of beauty. I believe it’s the first online version of a newspaper that matches the richness of the printed page. The “bells and whistles” of the site are useful rather than garish. The paper is building its online brand by simply being better rather than trying to layer a digital skim coat over its newsprint.

The International Herald Tribune is a familiar and welcome friend to travelers: when you are out at the edges of the earth (from a Prince Edward Island perspective), the IHT is often the only local English-language newspaper available.

At long last the Island gets what it deserves: a capable supper-hour news interviewer. Sara Fraser was an excellent newsreader, but one always got the impression that she wasn’t comfortable on the fly. Roger Younker had an annoying habit of talking to interviewees in the third person (like “What’s next for Laurence Macaulay?”). Bruce Rainnie comes into his own on the improv stage: tonight’s political panel was the best example of this yet. I look forward to more of same.

Art relates some detective work that traced a network problem back to sticky keyboards.

Reminds me of the time that my friend Leslie mistakenly wired the HP LaserJet into the telephone system.

As I alluded to on the motherblog, I was happily renovating my blogroll when I ran into problems with François Nonnenmacher’s blog. Here’s what happened.

It’s all about the ç.

I use NetNewsWire as an RSS newsreader. It occurred to me that because I have all of my RSS feeds handily organized in that tool already, I might just as well use it as the source well from which to draw my blogroll. Because NetNewsWire is AppleScriptable, this should have been an easy task (if you ignore the fact that AppleScript itself is one of those “just enough like regular English so as to be completely incomprehensible to me” programming languages).

The actual process of dumping the data out was easy:

tell application “NetNewsWire”
    set s to “”
    set linefeed to “\n”
    repeat with thisSub in subscriptions
        set s to s & (is group of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (inGroup of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (display name of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (givenName of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (givenDescription of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (home URL of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (RSS URL of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (icon URL of thisSub) & linefeed
    end repeat
end tell

set blogroll to “/Users/peter/blogroll.txt”
set f to (POSIX path of blogroll)
set n to open for access file f with write permission
write s to n
close access n

Where I ran into problems was that François’ name was output as a Mac OS Roman character with hex value 0x8D.

That’s not a big problem, in the grander scheme of things, as I could have worked up, using this table, a translator that would convert all instances of 0x8D to ç. And done the same for all other accented characters.

But I wanted a cleaner solution.

So I entered the murky world of Unicode and UTF-8 and tried experimenting with AppleScript’s ability to output Unicode text, and Perl’s ability to deal with it.

This led me off on an series of wild goose chases. I’m sure this is all supposed to be easy to figure out, and my difficulties may be that I’m assuming it’s much more difficult than it is. However at this stage, I’m suffering from Unicode fatigue, and need to step away for a minute and understand the issues on a broader level. Joel’s piece helps tremendously.

I’ll report back when I’ve cracked this nut.

The blogroll that used to appear to the right of the body copy here is in the shop for some upgrading. I planned to have the operation be simple and painless: the idea is that I’ll use NetNewsWire to maintain my blogroll and kick it out to the website automatically. I ran into some problems, however, when I hit François Nonnenmacher’s weblog: suffice to say I’ve learned a lot more about AppleScript, Unicode, UTF-8, Mac OS Roman and other aspects of internationalization than I ever hoped to.

The blogroll will return shortly.

Here’s what’s showing up on the Reinvented consumer products radar these days.

Toothpaste: If you ignore the propganda (like “Showers your whole mouth with rich Micro-Active Foam”), the new AquaFresh Extreme Clean is actually pretty exciting toothpaste. Who would have thought that “orange” and “toothpaste” would ever be a good combination. But it works. And the space-age stand-up tube is the first useful innovation in toothpaste tubes to come along in a long while: not only does it clear deck space on the sink, but it somehow removes the need to squeeze and curl the tube.

Furniture: In his latest move to control all aspects of Island Life, Tim Banks’ empire now extends to furniture: the Southport Home Hardware has an new mezzanine devoted to beds, couches, and chairs. While the design sensibility isn’t exactly breathtaking, it is a cut above the “colonial pine” aesthetic that so infects most Island furniture stores. Catherine found a very nice orange easychair that would be perfect in the new DataBunker. Unfortunately, it sells for $1620, which is, by any reasonable measure, too much to spend on an easychair.

Dust: The Swiffer revolution continues. Catherine and my mother both report that the new Swiffer-Red Devil combo unit is great. My claims that “I don’t know how to run that Swiffer thing” grow weaker and weaker every day.

Air Travel: There appears to be a move by Air Canada to switch traffic that would have once gone Charlottetown - Halifax - Somewhere to go, instead, Charlottetown - Montreal - Somewhere. I’ve noticed this particularly with Boston routings: the early morning flight that puts you on the ground at Logan around 9:30 a.m. Eastern now flies through Montreal. Conceptually this is hard to grasp — it feels like doubling back. The gulag like Air Canada Jazz waiting room at Dorval (Gate 46 et al) doesn’t make this any better, although the opportunity to pre-clear customs in Montreal (which I’m only assuming exists) is attractive, as it saves time on the Boston end.

Aeroplan: After grousing about how hard it is to find last minute Aeroplan routings, Oliver and I ended up flying on points to Montreal this weekend, reserving only a couple of days in advance. While we would have preferred a Friday-Sunday trip, the compromise, which was Saturday-Tuesday, suited us well enough.

Yoghurt: I’m sensing a resurgence in the yoghurt market. Dan James reports that “putting yogurt on your cereal/harvest crunch/oatmeal is WAY better than milk. For so many years I have been lied to. Honestly, you think it weird, it’s not.” This parallels my own discovery of yoghurt, over the last six months, as the core of my morning meal. I’m particularly partial to the blueberry Danone, but I’m finding new and interesting flavours and textures are available in other brands, so it pays to experiment. While my environmental sensibilities would see me buying big containers of the stuff, I’ve become enamoured of the little one-serving sizes to the point where I cannot conceive of the tubs as a delivery vehicle. Hint: a small container of blueberry yoghurt at 4:00 p.m. will leave you feeling much better than a Coffee Crisp.

Chocolate Bars: After a good 25 years of diehard chocolate bar consumption, my exciting gallbladder adventure, which rendered all sugar and chocolate like poison, weaned me quite effectively. I tried a Coffee Crisp yesterday, and found it much like eating sickly sweet flavoured cardboard. Why bother? Even Zero bars hold little allure. Although I gotta say that a good hunk of Scharffen Berger is still quite delightful.

I’ve been having a debate with myself lately (I have a lot of debates with myself) about whether or not to provide a blow-by-blow account of Reinvented’s audit by CCRA (aka Revenue Canada; think IRS if you’re in the USA) in this space.

In mid-July, at our regular yearly meeting with our accountant, we learned that CCRA planned to audit the company. We didn’t actually hear from CCRA ourselves until earlier this month, and the details about their areas of interest didn’t get spelled out in detail until last week. So I’ve had a lot of time to think about this issue.

On one hand, I realize, from immediate personal experience, how stressful this experience can be.

It’s not that we have cash stashed in Cayman Islands-based shell companies are are worried about being found out.

It’s simply a matter of being faced with the scrutiny of an antagonistic (by nature, not personality) force with infinite resources: in the back of my mind there are worst case scenarios where they come and take Oliver away, charge us $50,000 to get him back, and make us ride bicycles down endless paths while rabbits and donkeys try and knock us off.

In other words, irrational fears.

In this climate of paranoia, the notion that I might antagonize my overseerer, directly or indirectly, through what I write here, is a little daunting. And there’s always that I might accidentally blurt out some fact that, in the wrong hands, might cause them to say “oh, you design websites, well then we need to double your taxes for the last 10 years.”

In other words, irrational fears.

Counterbalancing this is the notion that by writing about the experience here in a a workaday way I might take the edge off the same experience for others who might experience it. To be honest, I’m not sure whether being audited is stressful, to this point, because of anything that’s actually happened or simply because whenever I mention that it’s happening people universally emit this weird kind of gasp, the same kind of gasp they might admit if I told them my foot had fallen off.

So maybe being audited is stressful only because everyone says it is.

I’m still debating this with myself. Stay tuned to see what I decide.

Oliver and I arrived YYG last night at 11:00 p.m. (that flight from Montreal and I are becoming fast friends!). Exhaustion prevails. This morning, it’s off to Revenue Canada for the first meeting of their audit of Reinvented. Back when my head rises to the surface.

Back in Charlottetown. Five hours to sleep. Then back to Montreal. How do the shuttle diplomats manage it?