Well, here I am at the Apple Store in Peabody, MA.

The coolest thing about this store is that everything is set up for customers to use. You can take pictures, shoot videos, run software. And all of the machines are connected to really fast Internet.

This approach to retail makes all other computer stores look like car dealers who won’t let you take the cars for a test drive (little mac shoppe excepted, of course).

Maybe I’ll go shoot a video now…

It’s amazing how amazing this all is; it represents the de-geekification of computing, taking their sales from the back alleys and grotty sweat-soaked dork-brothels into the modern age. Computers as towels. Or hammers. Or cartons of milk. Bravo, Apple.

Gotta go check out the iPod and then start the long ride home to Canada.

Our Reinvented server went off the air today for about 5 hours. This fact was made somewhat more difficult by the fact that I am in New Hampshire and Catherine and Oliver (who, admitedly, is too small to be able to reboot a server just yet) are in Stanley Bridge (note to criminal element: alarm system is armed).

I initially thought the problem might be server related, but when I couldn’t ping any of the machines on our network, it appeared then to be a network problem.

Thanks to the good efforts of my friend and colleague Dave, who braved the depths of our underground server vault and reset the Newbridge DSL device, we’re now back on the air.

The 4 or 5 times in two years that my DSL service has gone away, this has been the fix. It’s not a great advertisement for Newbridge equipment, but at least there’s a simple fix.

Note to other DSL customers: after this episode I checked with Island Tel and found that they can, in fact, do a remote reboot from their end. SO next time I can bother them, and not Dave.

From today’s Monadnock Ledger:

Tuesday, Oct. 16
Animal complaint: A Granite Street man told police he saw a lynx around 4:13 a.m.
Suspicious person: At 9:30 a.m., a Scott-Farrar Home official told police a woman opened the door of the home, looked in, and ran away when she saw home employees. Police did not find a woman matching the description provided.

I had the opportunity to chat today with Judd Hale Sr., Editor in Chief of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. He told me about his family’s connection to the Biodynamic Farming movement, a “method of agriculture which seeks to actively work with the health-giving forces of nature.”

Judd grew up in the small community of Vanceboro, ME — ” We are not quite the end of the earth, but it is visible occasionally.” — which, in Judd’s parents’ day, became a centre of biodynamics in America.

Reading the Biodynamics literature, it becomes obvious that, at least if the “cosmic life force” stuff is stripped away, the centre of the philosophy is the direction in which PEI agriculture must inevitably head.

In other words, everything old is new again.

Jack Daniels is a Tennessee Whiskey is made and mellowed in Lynchburg, Tennessee. It is also the name of the hotel where I’m staying here in southern New Hampshire.

I’ve been coming down here to work with Yankee for 6 years now, and have, until this trip, somehow avoided staying at the Jack Daniel’s Motor Inn. Partially this was a result of circumstances conspiring to give me other places to stay, partially it was a feeling, somewhere in the back of my mind, that a hotel named after a whisky wouldn’t be the best place for me, a weakling alcophobe.

This being something of a “new horizons” sort of trip, however, I decided the time had finally come.

And it’s actually quite pleasant.

It turns out that Jack and Daniel were two brothers who decided to start a hotel. And they named it after themselves. So there are not, assumptions to the contrary, whisky taps installed in the halls.

It would appear that Jack and Daniel had a sort of Scandanavian aethetic, as the Motor Inn is quite spartan: rooms have a bed, a washroom, a TV and bureau and two chairs. And nothing else. There’s no money wasted on adornments like paintings, or, in fact, decoration of any sort. It’s all quite clean and pleasant. But coming off 3 days in a frilly B&B in Camden, it’s a dramatic change.

And, in the end, in this heady afterglow that I find myself in post-Pop!Tech, I can think of no better place to write a novel or an essay or a treatise on life, than while sitting in the Jack Daniel’s Motor Inn, in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Stay tuned.

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.