I you haven’t paid attention to John Perry Barlow, you should. The archive of his Pop!Tech session will be on the Pop!Tech website shortly. Watch it twice. Then find what he’s read and read it. There can be no better operating system to install on the Prince Edward Island machine.

It seems that wireless is following me around. On Friday night I had dinner at the same table as the folks from Downeast.net, an ISP in Ellsworth, ME that’s rolling out 802.11a wireless to their customers as we speak. Then, last night, I had a great chat with an Australian Croat investor who’s been seconded to work at SkyPilot, which, on the surface, looks like it might have the right combination of technologies to make “roll your own neighbourhood ISPs” viable. Conference is over in 3 hours and I’ll be leaving the pleasant wireless womb I’ve been in for 3 days; I will be hard to plug in a modem and fiddle with calling cards after this.

Back in 1995, in an off the cuff comment, I suggested that the Government of PEI set up an online digital camera. I’d seen the famous coffee pot camera from the U.K. and figured we might do the same. Much to my surprise, some money flowed out for the project, and PEI got the IslandCam.

The camera has been in place for 6 years now, and has been based in locations as diverse as the Brookvale ski hill and the Marine Atlantic ferry from PEI to New Brunswick. And its hardware has evolved from a complicated (but mostly functional!) jury-rigged Apple QuickTake camera setup to an elegant (and almost completely functional) Axis camera setup.

I’ve never completely understood how wonderful the IslandCam is until this very moment: sitting in a theatre, 1000 km from home, missing my partner and my son, and now able, using this great wireless connection, to call up the IslandCam and see a little bit of my hometown chugging along through its own Saturday.

The wireless panel — John Sculley and Carl Yankowski — have just finished up, and one of their themes was that wireless everywhere has the capacity to grow and foster relationships. They talked about how the successful wireless apps in Japan, Korea and Europe have been SMS-like — sending small messages (60 billion in Europe in 2001) from person to person to “stay in touch.”

I understand.

I needed a laptop for this trip, and I needed it in a hurry. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy one of the generic Compaq or HP or Toshiba laptops from Future Shop or Staples in Charlottetown. So I bought an iBook from Little Mac Shoppe.

For the past three days, this, my chunnel to the Internet has been exclusively through Mac OS X, Apple’s new operating system for the Mac. It is beautiful and intuitive and amazing so far. More later.

One of our morning sessions here at Pop!Tech involved Don Norman and Marc Canter. They were an excellent matching: fire and water. Or oil and water. Or yin and yang. Marc Canter is channelling my friend and colleague Dave Moses. Or vice versa. Great stuff, and perhaps a bit of the “edge” that people at dinner last night thought might be missing from the conference.

By the way, I’m missing Cinemaniax this weekend — the shooting of the initial epsiode of Dave’s new TV series. If you’re around and about Charlottetown, you should check it out. If you’re in the right place at the right time, I imagine it will be self-evident.

I had lunch with Bob Rosenschein from Atomica, which is a product I know primarily from its connection with ActiveWords. If you haven’t tried out Atomica yet, you should: its essence is making every word, everywhere on you computer screen clickable. Bob is an interesting guy, who describes his product well. Check it out.

I have discovered that one of the useful educations of having a child is that you learn how to pee with one hand. This is an invaluable still to have when at a conference and trying to balance laptop and related stuff. Thank you Oliver.

Well, the new Jetta took me from PEI to Camden in fine style (thanks to Alan and Craig for sending me to Bob, Nettie and Tom at Sherwood VW — you were right!).

You can watch Pop!Tech live via Quicktime, and also read live blogging from Robert Scoble and Dan Gillmor.

I’m typing this live from the Camden Opera House floor during the coffee break on Saturday morning, courtesy of a wireless Airport network. Conclusion: cutting the umbilical cord is way cool. You wouldn’t think it would matter that much, but iut does. It’s transportative; it changes the nature of the laptop tool into something completely different. It’s a new medium.

Conference is something of a personal odyssey for me — I’m taking a decidedly less shy approach to the whole thing, and remembering to talk to people when I would otherwise cower away in the corner. Although I suppose I am cowering as I write this. Key to this, I have discovered, is asking people to talk about themselves and their passions; people love doing this. I have my grade 13 biology teacher Judy Libman to thank for this (thanks, Judy).
More updates later in the day, cowering notwithstanding.

I’m off to Camden, Maine for the Pop!Tech conference. Stay tuned from reports from the field.

The insurance world is changing. My wily brother Mike knows more about the background details of this — demutualization and the like — but here on the front lines you see everyone from banks to grocery stores to television commercials trying to sell you home and auto insurance.

Growing up in Ontario, my parents’ insurance company was State Farm and their agent was a man named Allan Bradley.

When I was really young, I got this confused with Allan Brady, Rob Petrie’s boss on the Dick Van Dyke Show. As you might imagine, I was very impressed, both by the fact that Mr. Brady could run a TV show (within a TV show) and also sell insurance, and also by the fact that my parents would contract with such a star for their insurance needs.

When I got older — driving age — I remember Allan Bradley always being the one my father held up as the reason that I couldn’t take the car out. “Oh, the car’s not licensed for travel to Toronto,” he would say, holding up the spectre of Allan Bradley’s wise judgement as proof. (Later, when I was more rebellious and wily myself, I actually phoned Allan Bradley myself and the jig was up).

When I moved away from home and bought my first car (a 1978 Datsun 510), I went first to State Farm for a quote, thinking that the long association of my family with the firm would give me a good rate. It didn’t. And so I ended up with an anonymous outfit called Dominion of Canada as my insurer, and I’ve been with them ever since. (I thought they were anonymous until I followed that link and found that their first President was Sir John A. Macdonald who, by sheer coincidence, helped to concoct Confederation of the actual Dominion of Canada just next door to where I write this).

When I moved to Prince Edward Island, I needed a new broker, and I found Gordon Full Insurance. I got 7 years of good service from them until Gordon decided to retire and merged the business into Hyndman and Company, of which it had been some sort of secret division for some time in any case.

Hyndman and Company was founded in 1872 by Fred Hyndman’s great-grandfather. Fred is now at the helm, two generations later. When I did a story on the history of the telephone number several years ago for CBC’s Island Morning, my research found that theirs was one of the first telephone numbers in Charlottetown, and every time the numbering system changed, they just tacked on an extra number or so. So the kernel of their phone number is very, very old too.

I’ve always gotten excellent service from Hyndman’s: they took us through a natural disaster (of sorts) this winter when the evil snow and ice infiltrated our house and made the walls fall off. And today, when I wanted to switch over car insurance (more on that later), they did the whole thing over the phone in about 3 minutes. And they knew who I was when they answered the phone.

Part of our responsibility, if we want the world to be less anonymous and big box evil, is to support local, long-standing businesses. Especially businesses that are firmly rooted in our downtown business district. You can’t go wrong buying insurance from Hyndman and Company in either regard.