Olle and Luisa were checking out of Prince Edward Island on Monday, so on Sunday night we took them out to Lot 30, Gordon Bailey’s new restaurant in the old Old Spain location on Kent Street.

It was, quite simply, a sublime experience. I have no recollection at all of what I ate (perhaps due to the bottles of wine we shared), but I do recall it was quite good.

Perhaps more than anything else it is the memories of service that remain, as it was of such a high level as to make other service in Charlottetown feel akin to being hit over the head with a blunt instrument: invisible when appropriate, witty and helpful when not, and never cloying.

The room itself is somewhat stark, but not unpleasantly so; all of the ghosts of Myron’s have been exorcised. The general effect was of stepping off Kent Street and into some other world, one not associated with Charlottetown in any way, more like eating in a Danish-inspired joint on Deep Space Nine. And I mean that in a good way.

It gives me a perverse sense of pleasure that Gordon has created a restaurant that, in the end, runs circles around the one his highfalutin former employers run out in the country. Bravo.

The doors at the brand new Holiday Inn Express Halifax Airport use a new-style contactless door lock instead of the traditional magnetic-stripe system:

The cards themselves come from Ilco and there’s a story about the technology at this location. The hotel, by the way, is not your father’s Holiday Inn: it’s clean, well-designed, has comfortable beds, plasma TVs, free wifi, and a serviceable breakfast.

Shadow of a windmill at Cape Jourimain, on the New Brunswick end of the Confederation Bridge:

WattzOn:

…works by harnessing many minds to create a tool for analyzing the power usage in a person’s life. Like a carbon calculator, it allows you to answer questions to identify your individual impact on the world. However, it uniquely goes beyond fossil fuel utilization to incorporate all of the different ways you consume energy in your life; whether you are driving to work or eating meat. In addition to your actions, you can track the impact of your belongings with the embodied energy calculator.

Here’s my WattzOn profile, with roughed-in numbers: 10,001W per year. One Million Acts of Green is a different take on the same genre, with the bonus of a George Stroumboulopoulos introduction.

Pop!Tech, “the other small east-coast conference,” is streaming everything live from Oct. 23 to 25, 2008 (i.e. right now!)

Iceland Express, “Iceland’s other airline,” has a blog with a mission statement:

How Do You Like Iceland? — a blog about Icelandic nature, nightlife, adventure, shopping, eating, drinking, recovering, and much more. It’s brought to you by the good people of Iceland Express, Iceland’s low-fare airline, as a way of luring you to Reykjavík. Go on, read it.

Given the tumult that the Icelandic economy is going through, it’s obviously an interesting time to be an Icelandic airline; fortunately, they have a sense of humour about it all.

From Deb Richardson, on Zap Your PRAM:

My need to create something rather than just consume things is in absolute overdrive.

A slide show of my photos from Zap Your PRAM.

Zap Your PRAM Mark II is over, and I’m just back from dropping Olle and Luisa at the airport in Halifax at the finish up of their 3-week residency here in Charlottetown. Tack our trip to Iceland on to the beginning of all that, and it’s been an exciting month filled with all sorts of talk and reflection. In the spirit of Dan’s bullet-list of Zap points, here’s my own:

• Dalvay-by-the-Sea, our venue, makes every other conference venue seem like an impersonal prison. It seems absurd, for example, to even consider attending a conference that doesn’t have roaring fires, an espresso machine, and grapefruit slices at the breakfast buffet.
• The breadth and quality of the formal program seemed like the result of careful and deliberate decisions on our part. Which is remarkable given that we threw it together so haphazardly.
• What Dan Misener called “inline discussion” — others might called it “interrupting the speaker, a lot” — seemed, with a few exceptions, to work really well. Unlike the usual 95% formal, 5% “I’ll take a few questions” format, the ratio was often 30% formal and 70% back-and-forth.
• The only thing that didn’t really click for me, Steven’s comments aside, was the live music: I was hoping for a sort of coffee house slash kitchen party atmosphere but what we ended up with seemed more like “nerds in the rec room with the lights on” and I don’t think the performers got the audience they deserved.
• I kept trying to use the word “atemporal” sarcastically after it was used during a session, but nobody bit: apparently atemporal is a word that people (or at least Zap people) use in regular everyday conversations and thus it holds no sarcastic punch. Same thing for “touch-points.”

• I believe the word “space” was used only once at the conference, in the “social networking space” way. This was nice. “Monetize” came up more frequently, but not to an annoying extent.

Like every experience that’s collectively experienced as being awesome, there was chatter about doing another Zap next year, or at least not waiting five years to do it again: I still think we should wait five years (or 7, or 12) to do it again, as it’s important that it’s a completely new thing every time and doesn’t become something that’s a hassle to organize and/or something that’s done only because it’s scheduled to be done. Like Dan says, we should do it again when we’ve got the fire in our bellies for it again.