Plus ça change…

In the late 1980s, I was on the Board of Directors of an artist-run centre in Peterborough called Artspace. At the time, Artspace’s home was a large, multi-purpose space in downtown Peterborough’s historic Market Hall.

Artspace was constantly in financial trouble, mostly because the costs associated with maintaining and operating the Market Hall facility outpaced the organization’s ability to raise funds to cover them. But also because running the Market Hall required an administrative infrastructure, and this led to inevitable battles between administrators and artists (and among different types of artists). By the end, the subject of the Artspace conversation was the building, not the art it was intended to house and stimulate.

It appears as though the Arts Guild in Charlottetown is in a similar predicament.

My advice: sell the building, pay off the debt, and go back to making art.

It’s not that the Arts Guild isn’t a good idea. It has provided home to many excellent artistic endeavours that would have otherwise been homeless.

But when the anchor of maintaining a facility consumes the artistic community, drains resources from it, and saps artistic energy, it’s time to cut loses and move on.

About Mishal Husain

Every since a comment about BBC reporter Mishal Husain was made by “Wayne” back on March 20th, Google searchers have been showing up here looking for information about her.

As an aid to these desperate searchers, here is a brief Mishal Husain bibliography:

Please note that the inclusion of this bibliography here is simply a service to our accidental readers, and should not be taken as a validation of a “reporter as celebrity” culture.

Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead

One of the more thrilling developments at last night’s Maritime Electric meeting was a committment from both Jim Lea and Angus Orford to remove the annoying “crack of lightning” animation from the from page of Maritime Electric’s website.

Earlier in the week I’d sent Jim an email suggesting that it added nothing to their website; last night he told me that he’d canvassed others in the company, and found that everyone found it annoying.

Summary: sometimes the easiest way to affect change is simply to ask.

Maritime Electric Goes Public

Maritime Electric held a public session this evening at the Delta Prince Edward. Hosted by President & Chief Executive Officer Jim Lea, the session was an opportunity for the company to make its case to the public over the rather dramatic increase in electric rates that is scheduled for April 1.

For a matter of such importance to the day to day lives of Islanders, the session was poorly attended: there were perhaps a dozen people present. Nonetheless, the presentation by Mr. Lea was comprehensive and compelling. He began with a thorough overview of the electricity marketplace in the Maritimes: where the power comes from, how much it costs, and so on. He then explained Maritime Electric’s position in the marketplace, its regulatory environment, and the challenges it faces going forward.

I’m not a electricity expert, and I don’t have any way of testing the veracity of Mr. Lea’s remarks. But I have to laud him, and the company, for making the effort to meet with the public: it’s certainly more than our other monopoly utilities have done.

I recorded the entire session; the recording is 1 hour and 47 minutes long. Jim Lea’s presentation from the podium is very clear; there was no floor mic for the audience, so the questions are difficult to make out.

The question I wanted an answer to I asked at 1:38:46:

Is there a situation in which it is beneficial to Maritime Electric to have consumption drop?

Mr. Lea responded:

It would depend on, which customers reduced. Some customers we probably supply at a loss. So yah there are some customers — right across the board, generally speaking, from Maritime Electric’s perspective, no it would not be beneficial. All you have is fixed costs that you have to spread over fewer kilowatt hours.

And there’s the rub, if you’re someone like me who thinks we should all work to reduce energy consumption: it’s in Maritime Electric’s best interests to sell more electricity. I don’t fault them for this and, indeed, to pursue any other course would be irresponsible to their shareholders.

On first blush this means that those working to reduce energy consumption are at odds with Maritime Electric (and, in a more general way, with all profit-making investor-owned utilities). At the same time, it’s the utilities who know most about the energy market and how it works, and we depend on the utilities’ viability to toast our toast and power our computers.

I’m not sure how to resolve this paradox.

Island Tel Data Leak

If you look at the listing for Reinvented Inc. in the Island Tel white pages, you will see that our address is listed as “Charlottetown.” Although I could have had our actual street address listed, I decided there was no point in advertising this, as it’s not a place we do business with the public, and there’s no point in sticking a big “hey, there’s computers here” sticker out into the public domain.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I went to YellowPages.ca to see how the company was listed, and found that they’d included a link to a map that shows exactly where we’re located.

I phoned the Yellow Pages office (888-490-3001) to inquire about this, and I was told this was an inadvertent side-effect of our postal code being “on our contract.” The (very helpful) sales rep told me she would remove this postal code, and the map link would disappear on their next monthly updated.

If you’re in a similar situation, you may wish to verify that your address hasn’t been inadvertently leaked onto the Yellow Pages site.

Ideas I Stole from silverorange

Sometime last year, I received intelligence to suggest that the friendly folks at silverorange had rigged up a gizmo so that whenever anyone purchased something from one of their clients’ online stores, a cash register sound rang out throughout their spacious atrium.

Reasoning that this sort of positive reinforcement would be good for my clients too, I shamelessly stole the idea, and installed a tool that my friends at Yankee could pop-up on their desktops with a similar purpose. Much to my surprise and delight, the last time I visited, I saw the tool in use all over the company.

The success of this idea (thanks, silverorange) points out that simplicity often trumps complexity. Very detailed “who bought product X after clicking on link Y”-type sales reports are available to Yankee — and they certainly use them. But the visceral sound of a cash register ringing, and the pace at which it happens, has proved a better vehicle for communicating how well the store is doing.

In the same vein, I’m fascinated by the new Recent Google tool I installed last night (look over on the right). This is simply a bit of code that detects incoming traffic to this site as a result of Google searches, pulls out the keywords, and displays them, with links back to the same Google search.

While this same information is available from the nightly traffic report, somehow the “live” nature of the information right out here in public is more compelling. Somehow the notion that someone, somewhere, just used Google to end up here — perhaps just this second — is more interesting, more “real,” than a report of the same information prepared nightly.

Interesting to note: Wayne’s comment about BBC reporter Mishal Husain is currently on the front page of a Google search for bbc mishal husain, and that’s currently pulling in the most Google traffic.

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