I sent my mother to this Habitat thinking that I was sending her to this Habitat. For which I apologize.

Speaking of easyJet: they’ve now moved on to pizza. Really.

I’ve just finished watching two episodes of The Tube, a documentary series about the London Underground (downloaded from the excellent UKNova Bittorrent site). The series is in the tradition of Airline: a series of “behind the scenes” vignettes, focusing on workers and their jobs and the challenges those jobs present.

Airline spends days in the life of U.K.-based airline easyJet (there’s a U.S. version of the programme that uses Southwest). The Tube is about everyday life inside the London subway system.

I find both series extremely compelling. They remind me of a series of books that I loved as a kid, published in the early 1970s, by Arthur Shay, with titles like What It’s Like to Be a Policeman, What Happens in a Car Factory and What Happens When You Travel by Plane.

I love the world of “behind the scenes.”

I noticed that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was wearing a poppy during his interview on Meet The Press this morning.

Except his poppy didn’t look like a normal Canadian Remembrance Day poppy, it was longer, and had a bushy green extension.

I dug into the issue and found that, indeed, the Canadian and British artificial poppies used on November 11 are different. Here’s a side-by-side comparison, Canadian on the left and British on the right:

The Royal Canadian Legion and the Royal British Legion have considerable information about their respective poppy appeals, but, as far as I can tell, no information about the design of their respective poppies. There is, however, a Canadian law suit on their design.

In New Zealand, they use a modified British design. And I just can’t understand the American design.

The Public is new arts centre in the wilds of the U.K. You can learn more from this BBC programme (it’s the first segment on this week’s episode).

There’s an update on Hermann Kleefisch in today’s paper. A year ago, we were wondering where Hermann was. He’s back on PEI. Welcome home.

To try and bring slightly more order to the random content stream that is this weblog, I’ve started to categorize posts into an arbitrary set of homebrew topics.

I’ve never been able to extract a definitive answer from my library friends as to whether freestyling my own controlled vocabularly is a Great Innovation or a Great Evil. But no other vocabulary would fit, so I opted to make one up.

This will all manifest itself in a couple of ways, some immediate, some coming soon.

First you will notice that each post in the RSS feed has a , so your newsreader might display something like this:

You’ll also notice that there are now topic-specific RSS feeds available. I stole this innovation from my colleagues at silverorange; it lets you just pay attention to particular topics via RSS rather than the full-bore flow.

I’ll add a topic-specific set of archive pages soon, too. I’ve added category archive pages so that you can browse past posts by topic too (note that not all past posts have been categorized yet, so you won’t find everything except in the complete chronological archive).

First, Aliant’s selection of cell phones is still the pits. They seem to have an uncanny ability to select all the ugly, dorky, slightly non-functional phones from the myriad of those available in the marketplace. So while our cousins in other areas are drooling over the latest in cell phone wizardry, we’re left with the AMC Pacers of the phone universe.

That said, it’s nice to have real Aliant staff back on the job: I visited the Phone Center on Belvedere Ave. this morning, and the person I talked to was friendly, knowledgable, and ultimately quite helpful. I’m glad they’re not on the picket lines any longer.

Driving north, I found, by chance, that there are about 10 open WiFi access points between Aliant and the North River Road Tim Hortons. If you need a good place to pull over and check your email, the road in from North River Rd. to Charlottetown Rural is a good place, with two WiFi networks to choose from.

Stopped at Apple Auto Glass to get a stone chip in my windshield repaired (my first in 22 years of driving, so I’m doing pretty good on that front). I learned two things: first, stone chip repair is covered by my auto insurance, there’s no deductible, and making a claim doesn’t affect my rates. Second, the magical “we can fix a stone chip and the repair is invisible” rhetoric isn’t actually 100% true, and the Apple Auto Glass man admitted as much when he told me that I’d notice a “small white dot” on my windshield. Which I did. It’s still pretty magical, though.

I also learned that my auto insurance company — the one I’ve been with for about 16 of those 22 driving years, Dominion of Canada — still has a local Charlottetown contact number. Apparently a lot of other auto insurers force places like Apple to call national numbers in Ontario or Quebec where, I’m told “we have to wait on hold for 15 minutes.” My guy phoned Hyndman and Company, spent about 15 seconds on the phone, and we were ready to rock.

Looping over to the Ellis Brothers shopping area, I found the service at the Canadian Revenue Agency wicket quick and friendly — I was there to make sure my corporate payroll remittances were in by Nov. 15, lest I suffer the wrath of their huge penalties. Nice to know these folks aren’t on the line any more either.

Finally, I drove back downtown to pick up an ailing Oliver (he was running a mild fever, and has had a runny nose for a week, and the pre-school thought he should come home) and we stopped in at a very, very busy Formosa Tea House for lunch around 1:30 p.m. The place was literally packed to the gills, and Oliver and I had to shoehorn ourselves into a table for one in the back room. It’s nice to see them busy, but I got the sense that they were all a little run off their feet. If I had to guess, I’d say it was the pressure of all those teachers with a day off for “professional development” catching a late lunch.

It’s 3:00 p.m. and I’m back in the office now, ready to start my day.