Stringer David Joseph Malahoff was first to spot Interlude a new café on Kent Street advertising “bubble tea.” Oliver and I took a field trip over this evening to take a look, but they were closed. Peering in the window, things look very interesting. Perhaps all the Charlottetown firefighters will become bubble tea addicts now?

In other coffee and tea news: the Formosa Tea House has changed its hours: they’re now open from Noon to 6:00 p.m. (an hour later in both opening and closing). My friend Ann commented that if they extend forward by about another six hours, they’ll hit the sweet spot for my patronage.
Also, renovations to the former Uncommon Grocer space on Queen St. continue, as Cora’s Breakfast and Lunch readies for operation.

Keep eating…

I have become addicted to bluegrass music, and have set my virtual radio dial to BluegrassCountry.org. Go figure.

The Angus TeleManagement Group reports in today’s Telecom Update:

AT&T Canada has announced its new name three months earlier than required by its deal with AT&T Corp. The new name, Allstream Inc, is effective immediately: the company can continue describing itself as “formerly AT&T Canada” until December.

The company has a page on their website explaining the new brand.

Will Pate, who I think is wise beyond his years, said something at the last Charlottetown weblogger meeting that has stuck with me.

We were talking about the Wifi Charlottetown project, and the notion of locating WiFi hotspots in various cafes and restaurants in the city.

Will said this was important because as work intrudes more and more into our leisure time, we need to make work “more leisurely.” This is another way of stating a goal I’ve had for a while, which is having a “vacation like life.”

As I sit here typing this in Timothy’s coffee shop, using the Little Mac Shoppe WiFi connection, it’s surprising how, even though I’m doing “work,” it doesn’t feel like it.

Somehow being outside of an office, with a phone and a desk and other work trappings makes me about twice as productive; the white noise of the coffee shop hubub makes for a good workspace, I guess.

Perhaps this is the greatest selling point downtown Charlottetown (or downtown anywhere) has a workspace: working out and about makes working an obvious thing, and something that is inexorably linked to the community around. Sitting in front of my terminal in my home office, I could be anywhere — in a hotel room in Budapest, in an office tower in Toronto. Sitting here at Timothy’s, I am in Charlottetown, participating in the life of my community.

As if on cue, Dwight, who I worked with on a potato project several years ago, and who hails from Emyvale, up the road from our old house in Kingston, and who’s now working for Food Trust PEI, drops in for a coffee. We spend 10 minutes catching up on our current projects, our kids, and so. Dwight goes back to the office, and I pick up where I left off.

I was a participant in the Google AdSense program for 3 days. I made 35 cents. The Terms and Conditions of my agreement with Google prohibit me from revealing the clickthru rates for the ads; the 35 cents should speak for itself in this regard.

In the discussion about my original post on this topic, reader “Wayne” said:

The “in your face” money-grab commercialization has spread far and wide. Perhaps it is the new reality, but nontheless, a sad one, faced every day by us all, everywhere. And, I think it has conditioned us to develop personal filtering systems that require “shock and awe” to penetrate.

And reader “Ken” said:

Freedom of speech does not apply to repetetive viral conditioning from McCains, McDonalds or Coke. Especially when phone ringing, door-bell, horn-tooting anoyances grab for our attention by preying on our conditioning to these alerts.

Both insightful comments. From my end of the bargain, making, on average, 10 cents a day from advertising doesn’t come anywhere near close to compensation for the intrusion of advertising into the writing and reading space. For that matter, I’m not sure how much, if any amount, would warrant this.

In any case, this space now returns to its regularly scheduled ad-free configuration. Apologies for the disruption.

Shaddy’s Shwarma Palace opened the week I arrived on Prince Edward Island, ten years ago. It was the first place I ate dinner. Now it’s for sale. No word on why. Still the best place to get a shish taouk if you like garlic.

Shaddy’s isn’t the only Island restaurant for sale: The Red Rooster, in Crapaud, and The Salad Stop and The Jukebox, both in the Confederation Court Mall, are for sale as well.

When I was in my early twenties, I ran for a position on the Peterborough County Board of Education. I was prompted by a desire to have a young voice on the Board, and by my friend Simon calling me the day the nominations closed to alert me that there weren’t enough candidates for the number of positions, so if I hurried up, I could get acclaimed (in the end, this word reached others, and I was one of 13 candidates for 9 positions).

One of the issues on the table that year was the recently-released Radwanski Report, the result of a committee headed by George Radwanski. To be honest, I have no idea what was said in the Radwanski Report, for I never read it. But I was repeatedly asked, on the campaign trail (such as it was), questions like “what is your reaction tot he recommendations in the Radwanski Report.”

For a kid like me, who was running on a platform of student autonomy, I couldn’t care less about the Radwanski Report. It was like asking an aetheist his reaction to the recommendations of the Bible.

So now the chickens are coming home to roost, and my arch nemesis Radwanski is feeling the heat. Poor guy.

Oliver and I went out to Avonlea for the afternoon yesterday. Careful readers will recall that I was involved in the very early stages of this project, my prime claim to fame involving the purchase of the Belmont School House from a man in Lot 16 who was using it to store his boat.

Avonlea has evolved over the years (if you had to pick the thing that Scott Linkletter is best at, it’s evolving ideas). It started off as a very commerical sort of “ye olde mall” the first year; now almost all of the commercial activity is gone, save the chocolate and cordial stores and the Anne of Green Gables Store and what’s left is a very pleasant, well constructed historical theme village, with a rich collection of actors, musicians, farm animals and other distractions that can keep a pair like Oliver and I busy for several hours.

The highlight for Oliver and I was Michael Pendergast. Which surprises me, as if you had told be five years ago that I would write a sentence like that, I would have laughed at you. Children’s entertainers are a hard bunch for adults to like: the exaggeration and necessary general goofiness turns them into sort of anti-adults, and thus while they entertain and delight children, they make adults (or at least this adult) feel uncomfortable. But Michael Pendergast, who roams the grounds of Avonlea playing a show hear, strumming his guitar there (in what must be a musician’s dream job), has the right mix of humour, style, musical abilities (which are considerable) all without too much “old timey-ness” or saccharine. He’s a consumate entertainer.

On the way out of Avonlea, we stopped by the barn to visit the pigs and the chickens; over in the corner were Michael and his fiddler quietly playing Will You Go Lassie?. The effect was magical.

I started running Google AdSense content-targetted ads over there on the right-hand side of this website yesterday. This isn’t from a desire to make millions of dollars from the clickthrus of my inquisitive and demographically well-tuned readership; I’m simply interested in seeing how this works, and whether one can actually make any money.

In theory, the ads that appear — they come directly from Google’s servers — are targetted to the content that appears here. When I turned things on yesterday, however, I was getting ads for the American Cancer Society and Habitat for Humanity (maybe it’s because I mentioned “progressive” and “David Suzuki,” who knows).

Today, as you can see here, I’m advertising for the Chrysler Sebring:

This is because I mentioned the Chrysler Sebring in yesterday’s story about fuel economy. The obvious irony is that the Sebring was at the bottom of the fuel economy ratings, so doesn’t exactly come off in a good light. I can filter out advertisers; I wonder: can advertisers filter out me?

Look here for thumbnails of how this website looks in about a gazillion different web browsers (this link may explode or cease to operate at some indefinite time in the future).