My place of work is strange and wonderful. The perks are many and the hours are long. Being in close quarters for a long time with a group of people can breed a bizarre little sub-culture.

What follows is a post in its entirety made on our company intranet. The frequent and unproductive nature of my posts on this company intranet was part of the impetus for aov itself. I felt that this particular post was representative of my life at silverorange.

Subject: Bananas are way cool
Date: 2:56 AM Sunday, July 15
Posted By: Dan James

I was at the Ken’s Corner Petro Can doing some grocery shopping tonight (I barely escaped with my life) and I picked up some bananas. They were in suprisingly good shape for being at a Gas station for more than 10 minutes.

Anyway, while eating my second juicy banana of the evening I began to wonder about the nutritional value of this oddly shaped fruit. Google was able to give me a nice list of pages to look at. The most informative one was this one. Not only was it informative, it was halirious. I think we should hire this guy as our creative writer (sorry Daniel). My favourite quote (located on the nutrition page) was “Way to go Bananas!”.
This site, although entertaining and informative, is somewhat scary. It is owned and operated by Dole (fruit company) and is all about how you should eat 5 bananas a day (look at the web address).

Have time to waste? Me neither. Still, I managed to find time to play Tux Racer and so should you. I was searching for K-Meleon, an open-source lightweight web browser based on Mozilla’s rendering engine (which is quite good). Anyhow, the K-Meleon website is missing (if you know anything about the project status or where the website went, let me know).

A Google search for K-Meleon took me to SoureForge.net, a site where open-source developers can host their projects for free. One of these projects is Tux Racer. It’s a simple and fun little open source racing game (I’ve always loved racing games. I rule at MarioCart and loved F-Zero). It ran nicely on my machine (a PIII500/256MB/Voodoo3) at the bad-ass resolution of 1600 by 1200 (you have to edit a text config file to change the resolution).

The best part is there are only a few levels so far, so you don’t have to worry about a long term addiction (like matt has to flash mini-golf).

While complaining can give one a feeling of superiority, however empty and short lived it may be, good things do happen. A good thing for anyone purchasing computer components, especially in Atlantic Canada, is Robotnik Discount Computers.

Their website is, well, lively (as the hilarious graphic to the right indicates) but don’t be too quick to judge them. The have consistently competitive prices (ridiculously cheap RAM right now) and their shipping is prompt. They claim to have live help, but I have never needed it.

Treat yourself to some RAM while it’s cheap. For $32, you can get 128MB, which will make a world of difference.

For those who participate in this discussion following a post here on aov about the death of the free web, you may find this comic interesting as it deals with the topic of file-sharing and micropayments.

The comic, by Scott McCloud is interesting for what it says and for how it says it. Check out I Can’t Stop Thinking #6.

Prince Edward Island’s Department of Agriculture and Forestry has photographed every inch of the Island from about 9000 feet. The provincial government website has combined these photos with their powerful mapping plugin to make for an amazing way to view the Island.

You’ll need to download the Autodesk MapGuide plugin and the browsing can be slow (it’s always “requesting dynamic map layers”) and the images are large (between 150Kb and 200Kb each) but it is worth it.

See the photos »
Note: You have to double click on the photo dots to open the images.

Big ups to Peter at Reinvented for this.

Home sick yesterday, the big boss man passed on a call from CBC Radio. The good Mitch Courmier, keeper of charlottetown.cbc.ca was doing a story on Human Portals (blogs) for the local morning show.

Mitch and I had a great chat about the state of web logs. He was inspired by Human Portals, the Brill’s Content article about Matt Haughey from MetaFilter.

Kevin O’Brien, Peter Rukavina, and Don from IslandEdition (R.I.P.) all got props. The definite highlight for me was that the story Mitch choose as an example from aov was that of my father, the city councilor, cleaning up the garbage on the streets with his wife and son. Too humble to tell anyone about it, but his big mouth son gets the story across the whole province. Happy Father’s Day, dad. 😉

Listen to CBC Radio’s Human Portals (RealAudio).

aov has been host to some interesting discussion of television and some less interesting rants by myself on the topic. I was pointed to a great Northern Exposure website where a fellow fan spoke nicely on my behalf.

The whole site is great. They have 1-megabyte windows help file with everything you could ever possibly want to know about the show. It’s pretty too.

There once was a man from Chicoutimi
Who was kind enough to lend his canoe to me
But when I fell in
I couldn’t swim
Because canoeing was new to me

While summer doesn’t officially start for seven days, it may as well have. It is beautiful where I live. While Matt from MetaFilter plays in the sun, I’ll toil in a stuffy basement (I love it here).

Nothing marks a beautiful pre-summer day like a set of random links. Enjoy:

• Kirby Ferguson, formerly of IslandEdition.com fame has a new site brewing at KirbyFerguson.com
• Signal vs. Noise links to an astounding satellite photo gallery
• Slashdot links to SPACE BLIMPS! Didn’t they lose one of these on Mars?
• One of the coolest websites in the world (explodingdog.com) linked to us when their Red Robot showed up on our site.
• The same guys who did the satellite photos did this very cool MegaPenny Project (click all the way through, it’s worth it).