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).

Many of my friends and family have purchased new cars, or new used cars, in the last couple of years. Most of these people would define themselves as “progressive” if not “radical” and almost all of them would come out on the David Suzuki rather than the George Bush side of environmental issues.

To this end, I decided to look at the fuel economy of the vehicles of my friends and family, and the results are presented below. I used the fueleconomy.gov site, run by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for my figures; as a result, any differences between U.S. and Canadian models won’t be accounted for. I set the price of gas at 68 cents a litre (or $2.61 a gallon). I guessed where I didn’t know the specific year, model, or engine type. And of course older cars won’t be performing at their peak these days. All fuel economy numbers are combined city/highway miles per gallon; dollar figures are in Canadian dollars.

Johnny’s last-place finish is no surprise, as the Chevy Blazer isn’t exactly known as a paragon of fuel economy, and he didn’t purchase it with any illusions that it was. The surprise, for me, was Catherine’s second-place ranking with a 1995 Ford Escort Wagon; I never realized these were so fuel efficient.

If you look at the difference in what it costs for fuel, based on 15,000 miles/year, Johnny will pay $2175 and Frances will pay $1223, a difference of $952.

In terms of pollution, the difference between Johnny (10.5 tons/year of greenhouse gases) and Frances (5.9 tons/year) is 4.6 tons. It says here that U.S. President Clinton proposed “reducing U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2012.” The article goes on to say:

…if the United States agrees to limit its emission of greenhouse gases to 1.6 billion metric tons annually (the 1990 level), then the average American can produce no more than 5.3 tons of greenhouse gases if our population is 298 million in 2025, as it would be with moderate levels of immigration.

Because the vehicle figures above don’t include the greenhouse gases we produce from our electricity usage, we’ve all obviously got some ways to go, no matter the car we drive.

In 2003, the best fuel economy you can get from a generally available fuel-burning car is 64 mpg from the Honda Insight. It produces 3.1 tons/year of greenhouse gases, and has fuel costs of $612/year.

By way of comparison, the 2003 Toyota RAV4 Electric gets 112 mpg, and emits 3.8 tons/year of greenhouse gases (they say that “For electric vehicles, mpg represents the number of miles that can be traveled using an amount of electricity equivalent to the energy in a gallon of gasoline.”).

For those of you claiming poverty, the 2003 Toyota Echo gets 38 mpg, and produces the same emissions as the Insight, 3.1 tons/year. The Toyota Yaris, which is the model the new Canadian 2004 Toyota Echo Hatchback is based on, is rated at 50 mpg/combined in Europe. Both models are very cheap.

In response to my critique of Angel’s Restaurant, reader “Phil” recommended Piece a Cake in downtown Charlottetown.

I’ve had varied experiences with Piece a Cake.

When it was first opened by foodtrapraneur Bruce MacNaughton, it was based on the “marché” concept pioneered in North America by Mövenpick. Here’s how Mövenpick describes this:

The key to the MARCHÉ concept is our collection of market tables or stations where daily specials are prepared and cooked to order à la minute.

At Piece a Cake in its original incarnation, you were seated at your table, and given a chit to take with you to the salad station, the mains station, the dessert station, and so on. At each station, your chit was stamped with what you ordered, and when you checked out, everything was totalled up.

I remember discussing this at the time with Kier Kenny, no stanger to Island foodservice. Kier’s take was simple: Islanders want to be served at their table when they go out to eat.

And he was right. It wasn’t long before Piece a Cake reconfigured itself into a more traditional “waiters and waitresses” restaurant.

In the honeymoon period when the restaurant first opened, and things hadn’t shaken out yet, there were some interesting aspects to Piece a Cake beyond the self-service: they served an excellent selection of non-alcoholic drinks, like Seaman’s Ginger Brew, in tall flutey glasses. There were carafes of crayons at each table, and the tableclothes were covered with kraft paper, so it was easy to sketch, doodle, and play tic-tac-toe. The music was good. The chefs were animated.

It wouldn’t be proper to say that Piece a Cake has settled into mediocrity since, as all that’s really happened is that the owners have figured out what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, sometimes “what works” is the same as what works elsewhere, and that’s why so many restaurants are so alike, both in style and food.

All that said, I had a very good meal at Piece a Cake last night. Our babysitter-from-heaven unable to come Saturday, Catherine and I gathered for an unusual Friday night away from Oliver. We had a reservation for 7:00 p.m. When we arrived, our waitress checked a list, and wordlessly seated us at an excellent table. Feeling like Big Daddy Rukavina, I marvelled at her wordless recognition, only to find, when seated, that our waitress was Brenda Whiteaway, who knows Catherine well, and me a little.

Slightly deflated (although who wants to walk around town being known as “Big Daddy Rukavina,” anyway?), we settled into Brenda’s truly excellent service.

We ordered a flagon of the red house wine to start, which was served in a Daphne Large vessel (Brenda’s comment: “they’re beautiful, but we keep breaking them!”). For an appetizer, we had the spicy crab cakes: they were tasty and well-prepared, but could have been spicier. This was all underlaid by a carpet of very tasty house bread, which we finished off in short order.

My main course was the Penne on Fire. I’d seen this on the menu before, but had never ordered it, fearful that the “on fire” would prove to suffer from the same tepid approach to spicing that most purportedly “hot and spicy” Island cooking does. I needn’t have worried: the Penne on Fire was truly inspired, and sizzling melange of penne, zucchini, onions and a bona fide fire-filled red sauce. It was the kind of meal that makes you sparkle into a delightful haze when it’s done, happy to be alive.

I’m sorry to report that Catherine’s experience was less positive. She ordered the 6 oz. steak medium-rare, and when it arrived Brenda cautioned that it appeared to her to be rather more cooked than medium-rare. She was right: it was very, very well done. She quickly returned it to the kitchen, and when a new steak returned 5 minutes later, it was only slightly less well done. By this time, however, Catherine was ravenous, and I was done my Penne on Fire (ravenous myself, I refused Brenda’s kind offer to return my entree to the kitchen to be kept warm, sacrificing chivalry points for satiation). So she put up with the “medium well” steak, and polished it off in short order. Brenda was appropriately apologetic for all of this, and comped us the wine to compensate.

For dessert we were offered a field trip to the dessert case, which, with its echos of the Piece a Cake of old, we eagerly accepted. Catherine had a rum and pineapple cake, and I had a white chocolate cheesecake. Both were well-prepared, but neither was dreamy. I ordered a cup of tea, which was served boiling hot in a complete tea service and was excellent (making Piece a Cake one of the two or three places in Charlottetown one can get a good cup of tea, when judged using the Karen Mair benchmark).

Despite the steak debacle, we left feeling well-fed and well-served, and at $54 for the meal, it didn’t feel like an extravagent night out.

So here’s a vote for Piece a Cake as a good place for a meal in Charlottetown. Things are looking up.

There are only two more nights left to see All The Real Girls at City Cinema. We went last night.

I loved the movie, and the best reason I can give you for why is that it is about as close a representation as I’ve every seen of my romantic life between 19 and 25, and all its crazy, powerful, zingy, gut-wrenching glory.

See it if you have a chance.