Here’s a recent note from the CBC’s Corrections Page:

In a news story on September 27 about the earthquake in Japan, CBC News Online said “Hokkaido is home to 16,000 people.” The population of Hokkaido is actually closer to 5.6 million.

Here’s a great page that gives details and pictures of the studio that Christopher Lydon uses to record his excellent audio interviews.

From CBC Prince Edward Island comes this perplexing story:

Canada’s four Atlantic provinces will have to pay back millions of dollars in health, social and equalization transfers to Ottawa following the discovery that more than one per cent of the people thought to be living in the region are gone.

Emphasis is mine.

Our take-no-prisoners babysitter Emily is part of a plan to purchase a new grand piano for the Beaconsfield Carriage House. Emily is the Dean Kamen of high culture in Charlottetown; it’s hard to resist her energy. If you’re Beaconsfield supporter, or enough the kind of culture that gathers around a grand piano, you would do well to support her mini-fundraising drive. I’m sure Beaconsfield can probably tell you where to send your cash.

Kudos to Bob Young for investing in Charlottetown’s downtown. We will be regular, devoted customers of his new hardware store.

Will Pate phoned me tonight and asked me to take a look at this CityFilter post about TownSquare.ca, and perhaps to post a response.

I started to write a well-considered review of my feelings, when it suddenly dawned on me that I was falling prey to the TownSquare time-sucking vortex, and I couldn’t waste my time paying attention to something that, in the end, is irrelevant, both to me, and to most of my fellow citizens.

Yes, the TownSquare.ca portal is ugly, expensive, poorly organized, and generally ill-regarded by anyone who lives on the webside.

But it is a product of bureaucrats who were charged with creating the sort of project — a “regional portal” — that hasn’t been warmly received by the web intelligentsia for 5 or 6 years. TownSquare.ca is ugly and poorly organized because nobody with any sense would spend any time on a project which, in the end, doesn’t actually make any sense in the first place.

The Emperor has no clothes. Do you really expect talented tailors, with plenty of other interesting, compelling garments on their sewing tables, to spend any energy either pointing this out, or trying in vain to stitch some up?

The blame for this irrelevance doesn’t lie on any one person, or even on the project team. Bureaucracies, by and large, are incapable of creating beautiful, well-organized, information systems; it’s simply not in their nature. Perhaps the real irony is that the sort of muddled brown fuzzy-headed vibe that TownSquare.ca reflects is a pretty decent reflection of the bureacractic systems that brought it to life.

TownSquare.ca was inevitable, and nothing anyone said or did could have prevented either its conception or birth nor its necessary uselessness. It doesn’t make any sense to try and forensically audit it, either conceptually or monetarily, because there’s not much more to it than that.

The saving grace of the project, as I’ve pointed out before, is that several excellent, worthwhile projects have managed to exist under the same umbrella. For that we can take some solace.

In a few years, when the money runs out, TownSquare.ca will quietly fade away. We probably won’t even notice. It’s a shame that we could have planted some more trees, or built better playgrounds, or even had a big party, with the money that was wasted otherwise. But let’s not user more of our energies pointing out the folly, when they are better spent doing the things that we actually think need to be done to virtually enhance our communities.

To do otherwise is to let the ugliness envelope us further. And that’s not healthy.

Ivan Dowling — actor, professor, singer, gadabout — writes in response to my earlier post about Catherine Hennessey’s birthday party, in part:

You mentioned that I had done a dance after my song. I presume you were referring to the second picture of me where I was curtsying at the end. I had just finished singing “Alice Blue Gown” , which to my embarassment my parents had me sing on radio 66 years ago. It describes the pride of a GIRL!! named Alice who had just displayed in public her new blue gown. As soon as I work up a dance to go with the song I’ll have my agent get in touch.

Apologies to Ivan for assuming he was dancing when he was really mid-curtsy. Sometimes it’s so hard to tell.

I’m still a heavy user of the text-only Lynx web browser. It was my first browser, and it’s still near and dear to my heart.

These days I mostly use Lynx on the server side to navigate web pages that lead to software downloads. It saves transferring from my local machine to a remote machine.

Today, downloading a particularly huge 500MB file from IBM, I found that Lynx was placing its temporary file for the download in my home directory, which, alas, had little space, and certainly not enough to hold 500MB of data.

The solution?

export LYNX_TEMP_SPACE=/directory/with/lots/of/space

Set this environment variable, and then run Lynx, and you’ll find that Lynx will use the location you specify as its location for the temporary file.