Sundays I like to sleep in until 10. But I’m not today. It’s 8:30 now, not 10. And I can’t fall back to sleep, because I’ve moved around too much.

At about quarter after eight, I was rolling around on my bed when I heard my door crack open a bit, then close. I heard this, but decided to stay snoozing.

Two minutes later, my mom comes into the room and says, “Rob, 911’s here, but you’ve been asleep, you didn’t dial did you?”

I hadn’t. But I crawled out of bed to see a cop at my front door checking things out. Saying they got a call ten minutes ago from my line. We have two phone numbers, the one with the DSL did it.

The 911 guy (who I assumed was a cop, I was too sleepy and dumb to look at his uniform, but he was packing heat), said that something happened with a guy not long ago and they think it was the internet. “Something about email or something, but I don’t know that stuff, so I can’t say”.

This made me think, yesterday morning at about the same time, my phone woke me up by making a strange ringing noise. It ‘blipped’ once, and then 30 seconds later, ‘blipped’ again. I don’t know any more about phones than that guy knows about the internet, but that DSL line also rang a few times last summer and I answered to find a strange noise (not a modem handshaking). But my phone actually calling somebody seems a little strange. Has anybody heard of this? We’re calling Island Tel tomorrow to see if they’ve ever heard of this or if they’ll tell us we actually dialed the number without knowing.

I think I’m tired again, I’m going back for another hour.

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.

I was sitting in the waiting room of my ENT doctor’s office, and I heard the regular music broadcast interupted with a boil order followed by the cancellation of all the Charlottetown area schools.

Looks like boiled-water sponge baths and hair dippings for the next week or so. Unless you want to attempt the whole javex-in-the-tub suggestion for killing e-coli.

I don’t know what to think. Somebody jumped Cookie Monster and kicked his ass.

One cool thing is that guy who beat Cookie’s name is ‘McPhatter’. What a great last name.

Alex, a friend of mine, has been busy taking pictures of pretty island things. He sent me a collection of them.

You get so used to scenes like these living here (if you ever drive out to the country), you tend to forget why the tourists keep coming.

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.

So these days I’ve been taking care of my step-mother’s cat while she is out of the province. The cat is a female of the grey and white variety whose only passion in life is aquiring cardboard boxes for her own inscrutable reasons.

Hank, the cat, has not run away. It has apparently been in the house all along, hiding out somewhere. This still does not explain why it has not eaten its food, or more importantly, why the kitty-litter has not been used recently. These are questions for an inquiring mind, and as such I will have nothing to do with them.

Much like Hank, I have not run away. I’ve been on AOV all along. The explanation for the lack of posts is simple: I haven’t been interested in writing anything that fits with AOV, and writing something just to fill a space is bad form. But I have been writing.

Recently:

Continuining coverage of the CFL on Forget
“If you don’t like what you got, why don’t you change it?”
Are You Watching The CanadianFootball League?br /
The still beta Five Feet of Dirt: all original content by myself and Kent Bruyneel, featuring:
31 Days of Kelly Gruber*

* If anyone has, or knows the whereabouts of, a few decent pictures of Kelly Gruber, send them in this direction. And no, I’m not going to add a link to my email address here, because frankly, I think you’ve been coddled enough.

… is what millions of preteens and teenyboppers are asking themselves as the poor Backstreet Boys seem to be having some problems according to Salon.

As far as I can tell as an innocent bystander, boybands (unlike the Moffats) are still all that and a bag of chips among hip young people and I know that genres don’t just vanish, but, could this indicate the beginning of the end of the boyband era? Or are the Backstreet boys getting too old and ugly?