Dan asks “Peter, could you list and describe the ‘laudable’ things in the townsquare project? Your sleuthing skills must be more refined than mine.”

The Island Libraries project is laudable: using Z39.50 (an open standard for talking to library catalogues) and open source PHP and Apache tools, this is a common web search interface to the Provincial Library and Holland College Library catalogues. It was funded under the aegis of Town Square, and put together by Donny Moses.

The new online ticket sales application on the Confederation Centre website is very nice and, having purchased tickets for Lennie Gallant mid-summer, I can tesify that it works. It was funded by the Town Square project, and put together by a team that includes Lorrie Jollimore, who used to work for us at Okeedokee.

The City of Charlottetown’s parking ticket payment system is a Good Idea. It appears to be constructed in PHP, and while I’ve not been unlucky enough to have to use it yet, from the look of it, it’s well designed. Same goes for the water bill payment application. Both were funded by Town Square.

The live broadcast of council meetings is a good thing for municipal democracy (although it is slightly disconcerting to hear the Mayor ask the councillors to “please login” at the beginning of the meeting). This is funded by Town Square.

There’s no doubting that the Town Square website itself isn’t a model of good design (to say nothing of the Virtual Charlottetown site, a textbook example of how not to design a website). And there are, as several have pointed out some crazy aspects to the Town Square project. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater: there’s some neat stuff happening under the Town Square banner.

Where I come from, the town square is the guy wearing plaid pants, but that’s another story. There are many laudable things about the Town Square project here in Charlottetown, but giving businesses the ability to create ugly dreck like this is not one of them.

The aim of this “microsite” part of the Town Sqaure project is to “assist local business owners in utilizing E-business in their day to day operations.” What they have done, in the case of Sherwood Do-it Centre, is to ensure that nobody with any sense of aesthetics, design or style will patronize the business.

Design is hard. It takes smart people to do well. The more this “empowerment through amateur crap distribution” philosophy takes hold, the further we’re going to be from a day where the web actually is useful.

The irony? Sherwood Do-it Centre already has a website (I guess this would be their “macrosite?”) and while it’s not a paragon of design excellence, it considerably more well put together than its micro cousin.

Apparently Hungary is the centre of Europe.

…that’s about all the CBC Newsworld could muster for the coverage of the mid-term elections in the USA last night. We were treated to Don Newman and Henry Champ, two “veteran journalists” with classic “like watching paint dry” style, sitting in a room somewhere in Washington on two desk chairs, with a Canadian and a US flag in the background.

The “trusted. connected. canadian” CBC is obviously of the opinion that the elections in the US don’t matter all that much to Canadians.

The irony is that the election the night before, in Yukon, received wall-to-wall Newsworld coverage. The fact that the elections in Yukon are completely irrelevant to the lives of most anyone outside Yukon doesn’t seem to have factored into the equation.

The results of the Republican sweep last night in the US will have tremendous effects on our day to day lives in Canada. No doubt more so than even the “controversy in Ottawa” that led the National last night.

The thing is I want to know about the mid-term elections from a “Canadian perspective.” I would watch for the entire evening if the CBC applied Yukon-style resources to the US coverage.

Alas, twas not in the cards.

If you can bear to stay up late enough, you should be watching Charlie Rose on PBS. Here in Charlottetown we pick up his show on the Boston PBS station WGBH from Midnight to 1:00 a.m., so you’ve got to be a dedicated fan to watch regularly. Or you have to have wonkly sleep habits, which is how I qualify.

Last night’s guests included Chris Matthews, author and host of the MSNBC programme Hardball, and Carol Channing, actor and singer of much fame.

Both Channing and Matthews confirmed my “the more you think someone will be blathering airhead the more you will be wrong” theory. Matthews, who on his own television programme plays a loud referee was promoting his book on America; he was well spoken, passionate, and obviously incredibly sharp. Channing, who I knew previously only through Rich Little’s well-known impression of her, was saucy, witty, smart, and not the least bit cloying.

Rose is sometimes a little bit too familiar with his guests, but he is mostly just a fantastic interviewer, and what plays out on his show is very different from the “interviews” that happen on Letterman, Leno and their ilk, which are mostly “excuses to get the movie/book/TV special in front of the public for 10 minutes.”

If The New Yorker had a television show — and writers and editors from the magazine are frequent guests — this would be it.

How is it that I live in a city that uses Comic Sans as the signature font on its website? Help! Steven, talk to your father, please!

This description by Ian Williams captures, better than anything I could write, the mood on the ground here.

The new Rough Science programme, airing locally on the Boston PBS station on Sunday evenings at 8:00 p.m. starting yesterday, is a breath of fresh air.

The premise is this: take 5 scientists, put them on a desert island, and give them a set of tasks to accomplish in 3 days using only found objects.

Last night, for example, one group was charged with making a scale map of the north shore of the Island, another group with making paper, a pen, and ink to draw the map, and the final group with making a sound recording device.

Obviously mindful of the danger of being classed with Survivor and its progeny in the public mind, the presenter of the show makes it clear up front that this is all being done in the spirit of cooperation: this isn’t a contest, nobody gets “voted off the Island” and there is no million dollar prize motivating the scientists.

It’s all quite entertaining and educational. And perhaps the best advertisement for science as a career for curious people that television has yet come up with.

One of the problems with science education — and one of the reasons I’m not a scientist — is that it takes years and years to get to the point where you’re actually allowed to do something that remotely resembles science. In other words, something where you’re faced with a problem, a scientific method, and let loose to see what you can see. Most often science education in schools involves either rote study of the history of scientific discoveries or pretend role-play science where either the questions or the answers or both are known, obvious, and of no relevance to the student.

Rough Science shows science “in the raw” and setting it in a remote island location strips the scientists of the lab coats, test tubes and urge to speak in tongues. The programme gets to the root of why science is interesting, and that’s not something that we civilians get to see to often. Highly recommended.

I have written previously in this space about my fondness for the Metro Credit Union’s web-based banking system. I have been an enthusiatic user of the service from the first day it was available, it it is now my primary point of contact to the Credit Union, which is where we do most of our banking.

My fondness for the web-based system was largely due to its simple, elegant design and speedy operation.

I am sad to report that they have “upgraded” the system to something flashier, and in doing so have almost completely stripped out the elegance, and replaced it a slow-loading, JavaScript-drenched piece of ugliness.

Sad.

Catherine left Oliver and I alone at 4:00 this afternoon to go to a meeting. When she returned, Oliver was dressed like a cow. I couldn’t help myself: I spotted the cow-print pillowcase in the corner, and it was crying out to become Oliver’s first Hallowe’en costume.

When Catherine returned, she fashioned a tail and cow-ears to complete the effect (Catherine is very talented: I can cut arm-holes, she can craft realistic-looking cow ears).

Ever mindful of Oliver’s candy-virgin status (although he did have four Smarties, care of the cashier at Shopper’s Drug Mart), and suspicious that if he tasted the golden nectar of candy in great quantities he would be off chili garlic rice forever, we decided to conduct a limited neighbourhood tour.

I was concerned about leaving the house unattended during candy distribution prime time, but Catherine assured me that, based on last year’s traffic statistics, we would likely get few if any goblins and, anyway, we could simply leave the candy bowl out in the Reinvented Lobby and kids could equitably help themselves.

So we headed off on our small tour, first going to Catherine Hennessey’s house. We stayed for a piece of apple pie — no more than 30 minutes — and when we returned, the candy bowl was empty.

Judging from the amount of street traffic, this was not due to a sudden influx of equitably distributing children, but rather from a visit from one “hell, I might as well dump the entire candy bowl in my pillow case” rapscallion.

I am so naive.

I actually thought that, in the same Island spirit of “New Potatoes: Leave Money in Jar,” the kids who happened upon our self-serve candy cache would take a small amount, and leave the remainder for their peers, thereby serving both to broadcast their moderation, and to contribute to the Greater Good.

I guess candy and potatoes are in different morality classes.