You think it’s Disney and Barney that are cleaning up in the North American baby media market? You’re wrong; it’s the bunny books:

That’s a photo that Ian posted this morning showing off new baby purchases. We own the same books. Indeed I think I’ve seen the same books in the house of every set of parents I’ve visited since Oliver was born.

By the way, let me take this opportunity to congratulate Mike the Stuffed Monkey on has new position at the top of Oliver’s stuffed animal collection. When Mike joined the family three years ago, Oliver was afraid of him. Which only makes sense because Mike was, at that time, actually bigger than Oliver. Today Oliver brought Mike to school to play a role in a workshopping of a stuffed “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Mike has arrived. He may not be a bear, but he’s arrived.

Almost every morning I walk through the Confederation Court Mall to Nature’s Harvest for a Red Berry Rush, and then out through the TD Bank on my way to the corner of Kent and Queen.

On the reception desk in the bank is a placard that gives an updated “customer service rating” for the bank. For the last while it has been reading “91.1%”

I wonder what that means. And whether it’s net positive or negative as a marketing effort. It’s possible to interpret this, without additional background, as “10 per cent of our customers are dissatisfied.” Which doesn’t seem like something you’d want to advertise.

A more effective, and actually useful approach to the same sort of thing was in the old Central Farmer’s Coop location on University Ave. The store has since been downgraded to a Coop Basics store, which has meant that most of the life has been sucked out of it; a decade ago, however, it still had some personality, and actually leant some credibility to the whole “You Are the Coop” slogan.

In any case, the old Coop had a suggestion box, and they actually read and posted their responses to all of the suggestions. Sometimes they could do something, sometimes they couldn’t, but they always responded. The suggestions ranged from things like “could you stay open longer hours?” to “how come you don’t have chocolate covered Oreos?”

What if, rather than giving us a hollow numeric representation, the TD Bank did likewise: add a suggestion/complaints box, and post each one, along with the response, on a bulletin board.

Okay, so I have an old iMac, without USB 2.0 ports. This means that transferring data to and from USB devices like flash memory keys and the new iPod shuffle happens at the old USB speed of 12 megabits per second rather than the USB 2.0 speed of 480 megabits per second.

So, the question is: if I bought an iPod shuffle, would I get really frustrated with how long it would take to transfer MP3 files to it at that slower speed?

Let’s do the math.

The cheaper iPod shuffle hold 512 megabytes of music. The slow USB transfer speed that my iMac support is 12 megabits per second. To convert megabits to megabytes, we divide by 8 (there are 8 bits in a byte), so that’s 1.5 megabytes per second. So to transfer 512 megabytes of music would take 341 seconds, or about 5 and a half minutes.

By contrast, if I had USB 2.0 ports, I’d be flinging music at 480 megabits per second, which is 60 megabytes per second. Meaning I could fill up the iPod shuffle in 8.5 seconds.

If I were a social scientist, what I would study is the “cc” lists in those email messages that friends, family and acquaintances send around of the “here’s a funny joke” or “get a load of this” variety. In those lists of addresses you can see the ties that bind us together; study them, and I think you could make very interesting “social maps.”

Here’s an example: I got an email with the animated penguin image pictured here from a friend. She got it from someone she works with who, in turn, got it from someone who works at the Patterson Palmer law firm in Charlottetown (who sent it to a whole host of people all around PEI) who, in turn, got it from someone in Nova Scotia who seems to have received it from her husband who, in turn, got it from someone at the Hemming Weir Casey law firm in Nova Scotia.

There are over 100 ‘cc’ people listed in the email at this point. And we’re all connected in some obscure way.

For some reason I find this deeply interesting.

I’ve always wondered how Crimestoppers works, especially how they pay out anonymous rewards. Here’s what their website says:

• The co-ordinator is contacted by the caller (tipster) and arrangements made to pay reward.
• The award (cash) is placed in a plain envelope.
• The caller determines the name to be placed on the envelope.
• Arrangements made, with the agreement of the caller, to deliver the envelope to a certain location.
• The co-ordinator delivers the envelope to the location.
• The caller then picks up the envelope.

I share a passion for the “corrections” section of the New York Times with several of my friends. What I didn’t know is that they retroactively update their website with corrections too. Like this article about Ljubljana, one of the corrections to which is (emphasis mine):

In addition, three captions were erroneous. One, on the front page, misspelled the name of a town in Slovenia; it is Piran, not Purin. Another, for a bridge in Ljubljana, mistranslated the Slovenian words Zmajski Most. They mean Dragon’s Bridge; they do not refer to the name of a dragon.

Here’s a photo of my Dad in front of the bridge:

And here’s the photo he took:

Hostel Celica in Ljubljana is a “Youth Hostel, Art Gallery and Former Prison.” Like the youth hostel in Ottawa, the rooms are in the cells.

The building at 1 rue Dijon in Paris has a weblog of its own. From the front page:

This Blog logs all kind of information about the building located at 1 rue de dijon 75012 PARIS — FRANCE People living in publish dayly.

You can rent an apartment in the building this summer.