The Temperature in Charlottetown is…

I’ve been doing some additional experimenting (read “procrastinating” or, more charitably, “long term R&D”) with Asterisk, the open source PBX that now answers my phone.

Tonight I added a “The temperature in Charlottetown is X degrees” line to the opening salvo, pulling the current temperature from The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

You can hear it for yourself at (902) 892-2556. Don’t worry, you can hang up the phone before you disturb me. Or you can ring through and say hello!

Export NetNewsWire OPML via Applescript

Just for the record, I’ll mention here that I asked Brent, creator of NetNewsWire whether it was possible to easily export the subscription list as OPML via Applescript. His response: “There isn’t a simple way. I’ll take it as a feature request.”

I mention this simply in case others are thinking that it should be simple, and can’t seem to find a way nonetheless.

Blogging the New Hampshire Primary

As regular readers will know, our client Yankee Publishing is based in Dublin, New Hampshire. And as followers of U.S. politics will know, New Hampshire is the focal point of the Democratic Primary this month, running up to the polling day on Tuesday, January 27th.

As luck would have it, I’ll be in New Hampshire that week (I arrive on the 23rd, and leave on the 30th), so I’ll have my first opportunity to experience primary mania first hand.

Helpfully, one of my colleagues at Yankee is working with the Howard Dean campaign, so I’ll be able to get more oriented than I might otherwise once I arrive.

I’ll blog and post photos throughout my time there. Stay tuned.

License this Content?

Adam Curry points to this feature on the MSNBC website. Notice how, at the bottom of that page there’s a “License this Interactive for your web site!” link that leads to this page at the Copyright Clearance Centre, which tells you that you can license the content for inclusion in your website for only $99.

Why on earth would anyone actually do this, rather than simply linking to the resource itself, as Adam did?

Housekeeping Items

A couple of minor housekeeping items.

First, for those of you in the modern readership that insist on visiting this website without the leading “www”, this functionality disappeared for a while after an Apache upgrade. It’s back.

Second, I’ve added Google Ads to the permalinked versions of items. Because the vast majority of the hits of these are “from away” — mostly inbound links from Google and MSN searches — this shouldn’t affect the daily readership, and will provide a modest income that will help offset the cost of providing Google energy to all those weirdos searching for strange stuff. In the last 24h, I’ve made $1.95!

I finally figured out duty free!

It took me 37 years, but I finally figured out what the deal with “duty free” shopping is. Here’s the best answer I found on the web.

Summary: if I buy a bottle of “duty free” alcohol in the US, and come across the border into Canada, the bottle is not “free” of Canadian duty — in other words, it’s still subject to any taxes or duties that Canada wants to apply.

The duty that is free is that which the duty free store would have had to pay to import the bottle originally into the US but for the fact that they’re not going to sell it in the US, and are therefore exempt therefrom.

The theoretical savings from buying duty free products, thus, derives only from the seller of duty free products being able to offer lower prices because they don’t have to pay duty to import the products in the first place.

Pages