Oliver is quite a book fanatic. He comes by this honestly, of course: he’s got two grandmothers who worked as kindergarten teachers (one of whom was a librarian too, in later life), and four uncles with razor sharp minds. To say nothing of his grandfathers (scientist and farmer) and mother (artist). Put that all together and you get a well-rounded set of influences, and a diverse set of interests.

Which is why, for Oliver, a visit to the public library is like a visit to a candy store.

Now that Catherine is painting every night, Oliver and I need a suite of activities to fill up our evenings, and the library qualifies for duty. And so off we went tonight.

Evenings at the Confederation Centre Public Library are a great time to visit, as all bona fide children are, at least in theory, at home snug in bed.

As childrens’ libraries go, the Confederation Centre was not dealt a great hand: it’s on the second floor (which means a long flight of stairs, or risking one’s life in an elevator that has a sign pasted on it that says “look down before entering” — really!). The space is cramped (perhaps cozy?) There’s not a lot of space to curl up with a book. And the acoustics of the place are better suited to tuba recitals than quite contemplation (whose idea was it to design a library like a church anyway?).

But that all said, the librarians have molded it into a pretty special place. There are books, of course, but also dress-up clothes, a toy castle and toy people, a giant bumble bee, a puppet theatre and lots of chairs with tennis balls on the feet (see “acoustics” above). There’s even a life-size cast statue of Peter Pan.

Oliver’s practise at the library is to spend his entire visit like a manic racoon. He grabs a book from the shelf, brings it to me, we read the first few pages, he places it on the table and goes to get another book, repeats. Then he plays with the giant bumble bee for a while. Then more books. Then a set with the castle people. More books. Perhaps some magazines for effect. Then we go.

It’s a little bit un-library-like for the father looking on, but at this stage building a respect for and joy of the booky arts is the goal; quite contemplation can wait.

Here’s a summary of my personal experiences with the latest from Apple:

The new Safari browser, while beautiful and elegant, isn’t ready for prime time yet. Steve Jobs halfway admitted this in his keynote address by demonstrating the “report a bug” feature. While it works well on most of the sites I visit regularly (and on most of the ones I maintain), it breaks down on weird voodoo sites that incant mystical bucketloads of CSS. I’m sure it will improve; for now, I’m sticking to Chimera which, for my money, is the best browser available on any platform.

The updated iCal is a fantastic improvement over the last version, primary in that seems to respond about twice as fast. It’s now very usable. Same thing for iSync’s latest version: it’s much faster, and far less clunky.

The new “synchronize my address book with my dotmac address book” feature, while not yet released, looks promising, and I’ll find it very helpful when out and about.

While I’m not a big presentation giver, the new $99 Keynote presentation system looks interesting, and I may invest in it for those presentations that I do give.

New releases of iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD are scheduled for the end of the month; if they work as promised today, I’m sure I’ll use them all. It might be finally time to invest in a digital video recorder; Oliver won’t be young forever.

By the way, the webcast of the keynote streamed in her flawlessly: not a missed frame in 2 hours.

I’ve said it many times, many ways, but I’ll take a brief moment to remind the readership of the general excellentness of the Metro Credit Union in Charlottetown.

There are two primary reasons that the Credit Union is attractive to me.

First, they have, without exception, the friendliest, most helpful staff of any financial institution in town. While staff at the mainline banks always make me feel that they are doing me a favour by letting me lend them my money, Credit Union staff never make me feel this way. Today I showed up at 4:59 p.m. (with a closing time of 5:00 p.m.) and engaged a teller in a complicated U.S.-dollar cheque deposit, followed by a cheque certification. This ran us well past 5:10 p.m., and she never gave me a hint that I was inconveniencing her. You can’t train or cajole people to be this way: you simply start with good, honest, friendly people, and back them up with systems and policies that support and encourage this.

Second, my money is staying on Prince Edward Island. The money I have on deposit can be loaned out to local businesses, used to develop the credit union, and so on. It’s not going to build large skyscrapers in downtown Vancouver.

The Credit Union is not without its drawbacks: their local website is ugly and useless; their online banking site is, as I’ve mentioned here before, only getting worse. And though you might think that the credit unions of Canada are a happy cross-pollinating bunch, this turns out not to be the case: walking into Charlottetown and trying to deposit money into a VanCity account is just as onerous as depositing the same money into a major bank account.

None of these, save perhaps the local drech-site, is really under local control. And none detracts from the general wonderfulness of the institution and its staff.

If you’re currently dissatisified with your major bank’s services, you cannot go wrong switching to the credit union.

You can watch could have watched the Steve Jobs MacWorld Keynote starting in about 12 minutes (1:00 p.m. AST).

The conference is being held in the Moscone Centre in San Francisco. The conference centre is named after former San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. Moscone was murdered, along with Harvey Milk, on November 27, 1978, a part of history brilliantly captured in the 1984 film The Times of Harvey Milk.

The incidental music playing before the keynote is by Joni Mitchell.

IAEA = International Atomic Energy Agency. “Serves as the world’s foremost intergovernmental forum for scientific and technical co-operation in the peaceful use of nuclear technology.” [from here].

IKEA = Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. “A unique concept offering quality home furnishings at a low price at numerous stores around the world.” [from here].

It’s important to keep these things clear.

I headed over to the Confederation Court Mall this afternoon about 3:30 p.m. to do some shopping. The city was like a ghost town, with the snow storm seemingly keeping everyone at home. Just as I arrived at the mall, all of the merchants decided to close (it was freaky watching this happen: there was no controlling legal authority, the decision to close simply passed through the mall like a virus).

Thankfully, Tweel’s, source of important storm-stay magazines, was oblivious to all of this and remained open (their position outside the mall afforded them immunity to the virus, although I did mentioned that the mall was closing, which infected them).

Of all the people I know, the one least likely to have become a “cat person” is Kevin O’Brien. Kevin’s persona is approximately 33% Rex Murphy, 33% Irish dockworker and 33% Truman Capote; these are not personae that one tends to equate with satisfied cat ownership, to say nothing of devoted cat obsession.

But it has happened: Kevin is a bona fide cat guy. At first it was the “hey, did you hear what my cat did last night?” witty anecdotes; now he’s graduated to full-fledged “hey, here’s a picture of my cat doing something funny!” Witness:

Pictured is a cat named Supernews (nickname “Dooder”), brother of a cat named Snack; Kevin describes Dooder as “engaging in one of his favourite pasttimes.”

It can’t be too long now before we see cats appearing in ISN ads. And after that, it’s clear sailing through to the personalized cat-themed license plates.

I remain, faithfully yours, a dog person, through and through.

I will note, only for completeness sake, that it seems odd to me that there has been no news for a week on Prince Edward Island, at least as far as the CBC is concerned.

If you click deeper, you find “Prince Edward Island news will return on Jan. 2.” Lord help us if anything actually does happen in the interim.

Presumably this is simply a resource issue: the web maestros need time off too. It’s a shame the CBC still doesn’t consider web news important enough to cover over the holidays; it’s still the bastard offspring of television and radio in their world, I guess.

December 31 is Hogmanay in Scotland. While I don’t begrudge the Scottish their fun, it does seem odd to celebrate “the traditional present of an oatmeal cake” with its own day.

I am not one of those “movie people” who can expound at length about the genius of Kinji Fukasaku.

But I do note with some surprise that Charles Crichton, who directed The Lavender Hill Mob in 1951 also directed, with John Cleese, A Fish Called Wanda in 1988.

Inexplicably, he also directed several episodes of Space: 1999, arguably the worst science fiction television series ever produced.

But perhaps I write that from the perspective of a disappointed 9 year old (which is how old I was when the series first aired); one website, in discussing the series, says:

In retrospect the series seems to a great extent to reflect the contemporary development of continental philosophy, illustrating in a fascinating manner central ideas and dictums elaborated by Adorno, Arendt, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Lyotard and so on.

Who am I to argue with that?

In any case, if you’ve never seen The Lavender Hill Mob, you should: it’s an excellent picture with a great cast.

While you’re at it, you can’t go wrong with the new three-DVD Audrey Hepburn set; it contains Roman Holiday, Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Hepburn is in The Lavender Hill Mob too, although it’s only for a few seconds, right at the very beginning.

Must go now, before I do begin to sing the praises of Fukasaku.