I’m sitting here, supping my first post-France, North American café creme, and my first post-France, North American pain au chocolate, and thinking that its about time to update my blog.

Firstly, the cappuccino and pain-au-chocolate from Le Gourmand makes a pretty authentic French breakfast. Its not tartines, but it’ll do.

Secondly, if you really love me, you’ll tell me where I can find a café with authentic tartines somewhere in Toronto downtown.

And thirdly: if you call those wretched freezer-sticky-buns and dirty-dishwater-coffee meals a “continental breakfast”, I’m going to give you such a smack.

Now on to the vacation; Ah, Paris in the spring. Ah, France pretty much anytime.

Our vacation it was absolutely wonderful. Not necessarily as relaxing as some, but rich and varied. If you’ve ever thought you’d like to visit France, I’d urge you to go as soon as you can. The scenery is amazing, the food is phenomenal, and the people most certainly do not deserve the reputation Americans and the English have bestowed upon them. You can also do it much more cheaply than you’d imagine. We actually got a room for 56Euro in Paris, thanks to my wife’s French and crackerjack phoning. And it was clean and comfortable, even though the bed was a super single. Try doing that in Toronto!

If you’re at all interested in what we did over there, I can’t do better than point you to my wonderful wife’s blog. We’ll be tidying it up a bit, and I hope to add some of my stories to it later on.

True to form, it didn’t take long to feel as though I’d never left. We’ve had quite a week here at work, and life at the co-op has been madness. I’ve finally managed to read my email, and have only a few messages yet to which I must reply. If you sent me a number of things in the past week, you’re probably waiting for a response since I’m rolling your messages up into one response.

In more blog-related news, I’ve received a number of requests by email and a comment to go into more detail on my docket-oriented email organizing technique I mentioned in my post on Applying the ìGMail Journalî to Outlook. I’ve made some short responses in the past, but I think the time has come to write a full article. Expect that one to be appearing shortly.

Well, toodle-oo, all. I and my lovely wife are off to The Land of France for a little over two weeks. I don’t anticipate posting while I’m away, but I think M wants to get her travel log going. Go check out what she’s written over at Shmo-to-Go.

UPDATE: No one got the joke, and its not going to be funny now that I explain it, but “toodle-oo” is an English bastardization of “tout a l’heure”, a common French farewell.

If any people still believe that the Canadian media — and the Global/National Post duo in particular — lean anywhere other than right, this should set them straight. Peter Kent, Liberal-lambasting talking head for Global’s “news” reports, has announced he is running for leadership of the Cons. This article is full of the usual accusations of “criminality” in a case that hasn’t been fully investigated yet, and accuses the Liberals of FUD, a mainstay in Con electioneering.

At least we have the Metro reminding us that not only are the Tories no strangers to scandal, they actually have a proud tradition of it:

• In1873, a corruption scandal brought down Sir John A. Macdonaldís Tory government and cost Canadaís first prime minister the 1874 election. Macdonald and the Conservatives were accused of accepting $350,000 in donations from Sir Hugh Allan during the 1872 election in return for agreeing to give Allanís syndicate the contract to build the Canadian Pacific Railway.
• Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney led a government that was dogged by scandal. A dozen cabinet ministers left under a cloud, for everything from kickbacks to fraud.
• In May 1986, then-Tory MP Michel Gravel was arrested and jailed on 50 counts of influence peddling and corruption. And Sinclair Stevens, the-then minister of regional industrial expansion, stepped down because of allegations related to a $2.6 million loan to a family company.

(The only version I can find online is locked in a 37 page PDF, so I’m excerpting at great length.)

And on the Ontario side, lets not forget the Tory gutting of Hydro, and giving the nice bits to their friends.

In light of this, should Kent really be trying to claim the highroad?

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos.

Let me make sure you’re clear on two things before you read the rest of my post: I love trees and spring quite a bit? Got it? Okay.

Now, what I don’t like is allergy season and Poplar trees. I’ve always suffered from allergies. When I was a kid, pollen would literally hospitalize me. Midnight rushes to emergency to hook me up to a respirator wheren’t uncommon. I was what Victorian novelists would have called “a sickly and pale child”. Tracking my allergies in adulthood using the Claritin Pollen Report has confirmed that my spore-belching nemeses are the Poplar and the Birch trees.

Who can hate Birch trees? They’re singularly lovely. There is nothing like puttering along a Birch-lined shore in a canoe in cottage country. It feels like you’re in a Group of Seven painting.

The Poplar, however, has no redeeming qualities. It is a giant weed. Its arboreal Coffeemate, close enough to a tree that if you absolutely have to use one you can convince yourself it will do. Developers use the things to try and convince you that their McMansions have been around for more than a year. They’re the official flora of undifferentiated drab suburbia. They smell sickly and diseased on hot, humid summer days, and they drop these sticky red things. In short: Poplars suck. I hate ‘em.

This year, my lovely wife got me to start taking this homeopathic remedy early. Its called Pollinosan, and its very nearly dancing-in-Poplar-thatch effective. I take two little tabs under the tongue three times a day, and its kept me relatively functional during a season in which I historically pray for death.

If you’re at all prone to allergy attacks, I’d suggest you get to a health store and try Pollinosan out. Its not much more than a week’s supply of something like Claritin for a month’s worth, and I’m sure it takes fewer years off your life than these allergy nuclear weapons do.

A week ago today my beloved, aging iPod heaved its last. And I mean heaved. It was in my pocket at the time and the drive started knocking so hard I felt it thumping against my leg. I pulled it out of my pocket to see the dreaded folder/exclamation mark icon flash just before it shut down. I reset it again and again. No go.

On Saturday I scoured the boards for info, and it really looked like I had a dead iPod. I tried everything on the Apple site. Setting the thing to disk mode and plugging it in to a PC would hang the PC until the firewire cable was unplugged.

I could probably get this thing repaired, but its old enough that the the cost probably wouldn’t be worth it. As my wife says, it owes me nothing. Who knows? It may be reborn as an iPod Super …

In light of my discovery that I prefer to have less music on my iPod, I decided to go for the iPod Mini 4G which has been upgraded to have 18+ hours of battery life, and uses USB2 instead of firewire. So far I’m immensely happy with it, but not with my case. I bought a Marware SportSuit Sleeve, which was the only non-silicon option available. Its alright, except that putting the mini in this case often dislodges the headphone jack, pausing the iPod. Then you have to pull everything out and start again. Its annoying. I’m also worried that I’m going to put a lot of stress on the headphone jack. As soon as I find something better, I’m ditching this thing.

UPDATE: … and I did. The Innopocket Metal Deluxe Case. Its light Lose Weight Exercise, doesn’t add much bulk, and has a fully detachable post for the belt clip I’m never going to use. The iPod slides around a bit in it, particularly when attaching the dock connector, but I don’t think its going to cause any harm.

I’m just posting a stub here to see if my Markdown plugin is working its magic. This should be a link to the Markdown syntax page.

This should be an

• un-
• ordered
• list

While

1. this
2. one
3. is ordered

How about “Smart Quotes”?

As two minutes skimming the Flickr Blog will prove, the big thing on Flickr seems to be the photo memes. They take off pretty quick, people just tag a couple of photos with the meme name, send it to their friends, then they tell two friends, and they tell two friends …

There are two I am really digging. The first is the desktop screenshot meme. One of the nice features of Flickr is that you can use the flash applet to annotate photos. The desktop screenshots then become a valuable pointer to neat apps and GUI eyecandy. Its how I discovered Samurize and WKrellm.

The second one I really enjoy is “What’s in your bag?” inspired by a gadget site that used to ask cutting-edge-geeks that very question. This series is almost obsessively annotated, and its a neat snapshot of the photographer. I’ve also learned the following things are true:

• most Flickr users are Mac users
• most Flickr users have iPods
• a shocking number of Flickr users use floppy disks

Floppy disks? ~1M of easily-crushable storage? It really blew me away. I was shopping for a spindle of DVDs at Staples the other day, and they didn’t even have floppies on the shelves. You can buy a 128M memory key for just a bit more than 30M worth of floppy drive storage. I figure its generally students who are dragging these files around on floppies, but its alarming to think that institutes of higher learning don’t have (or possibly don’t allow access to) USB ports on their machines.

If you’re at all interested, I participated in What’s in your bag.

A little while ago I read an excessively blogged article on keeping your blog fresh. This blog is not staying as fresh as I’d like, so I’m going to follow some advice: “If you haven’t got anything to say, review something.”

I am the proud owner of two nearly-broken-in pairs of Blundstone boots. One is the Blundstone Canuck, the other the Blundstone Original.

Those who know me know that I’m no clothes horse, especially in the shoe department. I generally tend to buy whatever is on sale and half decent, and wear them until they rot off my feet or my wife threatens to leave me. Which is why its really rocked the world of my nearest and dearest that I would go out and buy two pairs of shoes in just over two weeks.

I’ve finally found the good-looking, hard-wearing shoe that I really want to own. The first pair broke in so nicely that I went back as soon as I could for the Originals. If you’re looking for a boot that looks good with everything shy of a suit, I can’t recommend these highly enough.

Do you ever read Slashdot? Chances are good you do, if your job is even remotely tech-ish. I generally read Slashdot via RSS instead of going to the site, which means that if I’m interested in a story I have to click through to the site. That, in turn, means I may be exposed to the “discussions” that take place on the site. Very little of worth happens in the discussions of Slashdot stories, with the exception of the odd “Ask Slashdot“.

I had kind of resigned myself to this being the level of discourse between techies; big-name bloggers excluded. This all changed when I clicked through to the current discussions at the Joel on Software forum. People there are pretty intelligent, and seem to honestly want to help posters, not just show off their leetness. I wanted to share this quote with you. Shakespeare it ain’t, but it sums up pretty well my career in the web:

If you aren’t working on something amazing, chances are you are working on something stupid. There is not that much middle ground in software.

Made by an anonymous poster, no less.

If you’ve got time to kill, and are a bit of a computer wonk, I’d really suggest you check out the Joel on Software forums.

Perhaps I’m a bit thick, but I’m finding the current WordPress template development articles wanting. I have an idea in my head of what I want to do, but its not coming to me. I have to admit that I’m not really spending as much time on the task as I’d like. What I really want is a plain-vanilla template that’s thoroughly annotated so I can pull it apart, and make it look like the pictures in my head.

Until that time, lets all pretend to love my brutalized Kubrick, ‘kay? Thanks.

Excuse the reversion-to-Kubrick. I’m just futzing about with WP1.5. I like it so far, except for the ugly css problem on the admin side that people have been complaining about.