I had a good chat with Olle last night, on the horn from HQ in Sweden. We talked a lot about our work and our workplaces and our workmates.

We agreed that, among other things, silence is important to us in the work environment (when we first moved into the Reinventorium I was so concerned with the noise made by Johnny’s oldish MacBook that I bought him a MacBook Air; ironically a few weeks later we installed the humidifier which also emits noise, albeit in a consistent fashion, which is more palatable).

As The Guild wakes up from its wintertime sleep and theatre and music starts to fill the theatre and art starts to fill the gallery, I’m starting to realize that being surrounded by other creative people doing other creative things is important to my work environment too.

Earlier in the week, for example, I was in the basement firing up the letterpress when Nudie wandered in (he has a secret bunker buried deep underneath The Guild) and we had a chat about what I was up to and he asked whether I was up for music-poster-making (answer: yes, but with a limited typestyle selection…).

And today, on the other side of the wall from where I type, ACT is busy putting the finishing touches on the set, sound and lights for its staging of Relatively Speaking, which opens tomorrow night. In the last 36 hours they have turned the empty black box theatre into a home for their production. Lots of people doing lots of small creative and technical acts.

In the basement gallery, which I walk through to get to the letterpress shop, there’s a show on the wall from Suzanne O’Callaghan called Survivor: The he(art) of survivors of violence. 

I appreciate all of this because I’m convinced that when there’s creativity in the air, it’s contagious: sit in 1 of 100 cubicles in an office park and you’ll catch infectious monotony; my theory is that if there’s art, music and theatre washing through your workplace every day there are opportunities abundant for both invisible and entirely practical synergies to result.

In light of all of this, I wonder if initiatives like the Atlantic Technology Centre, which purports to combine “form and function in its leading-edge space to create an atmosphere that promotes and sustains business achievement,” are wrong-headed.

The underlying assumption of such government-supported incubators is that if you colocate a bunch of geeks, hallway synergy will result — “hey, how about we take your municipal water billing application and merge it with our animation engine!” While I’m sure some of this actually happens within the walls of the ATC, perhaps a better tack would be to mashup IT companies not only with other IT companies, but to throw artists, musicians, craftspeople, cooks, philosophers, and longshoremen into the mix.

As Nick Paumgarten reports in last week’s New Yorker in an article on Davos:

I walked very slowly. I was new here, a first-timer. That Wednesday, I was eager to hear Merkel, but on my way I got sidetracked in the lounge by conversations that seemed interesting, especially the ones I wasn’t part of. It was a name-dropper’s paradise. Central bankers, industrial chiefs, hedge-fund titans, gloomy forecasters, astrophysicists, monks, rabbis, tech wizards, museum curators, university presidents, financial bloggers, virtuous heirs. I found myself in conversation with a newspaper columnist and an executive from McKinsey & Company, the management-consulting firm. This was serendipitous, as so many conversations in Davos turn out to be, because, at the urging of many, I was supposed to be angling for an invitation to the McKinsey party, at the Belvedere Hotel. A must, people said, with a glint. I was suspicious, owing to an incongruity between the words “party” and “management consulting.” But this was Davos. The executive cheerfully added me to the list. A McKinsey for a Merkel: a fair trade.

The Guild ain’t no Davos, but it’s got some of the same cross-pollinating potential for me, and I’d be interested in exploring whether this idea has broader application and interest. The key, whether Charlottetown or Davos, is to avoid workplace monoculture and architect for serendipity.

By the way, you should go and read Olle’s corporate elevator pitch — it’s not only simple and endearingly elegant, but it also describes, to a T, exactly what I know Olle is in the business of.  My only clumsy attempts at same pale in comparison. “I don’t want to persuade you, I want to work with you to get to a solution.” I love it.

After printing the black yesterday, I moved on to the red today. The last step will be to set the explanatory type that will appear under “explain” and will, well, explain.

For a few weeks now I’ve been working on a poster “You Have An Obligation To Explain.” I’m still working on it — and, indeed, an explanation of what it actually means. In the meantime, I made good progress today in the letterpress shop.

Conditions were good for printing (temperature? humidity? karma? patience?) and I managed to print a complete set of the large black parts of the poster (“You Have An Obligation To”). Which meant a room full of obligations set out to dry:

Next step is to print the red (“Explain”) and, possibly, the explanation itself.

We’re back from a week away in Florida spent with my parents in their condo on the beach near St. Petersburg. I never pictured myself a Florida-traveller, and it’s still not a suit of clothes that’s entirely comfortable, but a mid-winter break in warm climes well-equipped with waffles and iced tea has its attractions.

We flew down to Florida via United (it was originally a Continental reservation, but then, Continental became United just before we flew) from Halifax, which had the advantage of being cheaper ($1639 all-in for the 3 of us) and less labour-strife-stricken than Air Canada. We had a 2 hour stopover in Newark, New Jersey each way, which turned out to be rather pleasant due to excellent food court in Terminal C (hamburgers at Smashburger, coffee from Juan Valdez, juice from Jamba — all run-of-the-mill to Americans, but exotic for us).

Because we were arriving after midnight at Tampa International we took a limo to the condo, booked in advance from SuperShuttle ($65 one-way); our town car driver was at the bottom of the escalator when we arrived 30 minutes early, and was quick and friendly. The SuperShuttle website has a cool “where’s my car?” feature and my mother was able to follow along on her laptop as we neared the condo.

We spent out week in the sun doing all manner of things: we visited Winter the famous dolphin in Clearwater, the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa and the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg (an unexpected treasure). We ate well, had fun scrounging for good coffee, swam in the pool, and enjoyed the company of my parents.

And then, suddenly, it was time to come home: we booked a van from SuperShuttle to arrive at 5:30 a.m. on Friday morning; our man was there at 5:15 and got us to the airport by 6:05 a.m., leaving us plenty of time to clear security, have breakfast and make our 8:00 a.m. flight.

The flight back had DirectTV service which was pricey at $7.99 per person for the flight, but I used the “do anything you possibly can, no matter the cost, to make flying less stressful” approach and so Oliver watched 2 hours of Phineas and Ferb while I watched Contagion (which, confusingly, switched to New Year’s Eve halfway through — why did everyone suddently get healthy?!).

After another meal in Newark Airport and a quick (albeit TV-less) flight to Halifax, we were in the car and headed home at 4:30, and pulled into our driveway in Charlottetown, after supper at Bella’s in Amherst, around 10:00 p.m.

We are nothing if not a science-museum-going family. We could have saved hundreds of dollars if we’d simply joined a science museum years ago and taken advanatage of reciprocal admittance policies, but we’re not that organized.  In Florida last week our favourite museum was GWIZ in Sarasota, and our favourite part of GWIZ was the 90 minute introduction to robotics with LEGO Mindstorms, the end result of which was this:

This was my first experience with Mindstorms, and I found it all frightfully simpl, as did my mother and [[Oliver]], my lab partners.

GWIZ is remarkable for something else as well: it has a well-outfitted FabLab that’s open to the community. Almost makes wintering in Sarasota seem like an attractive possibility.

From tbt, the free newspaper put out by the Tampa Bay Times, part of an article about a plan to force boats to slow down in areas of the ocean frequented by manatees:

Tea party members showed up at the hearing to picket the proposal. “We cannot elevate nature above people,” said Edna Mattos, leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots. “That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights.”

The mind boggles.

I know that, after reading about our humidity challenges here in the Reinventorium, you’ve all been wondering “how’s the humidity in Peter’s office these days.” And so here’s an update.

The first humidifier I purchased for the office was a Honeywell Cool Mist Humidifier from Canadian Tire, advertised for “medium rooms.” It clearly wasn’t up to the task, as the humidity never went over 30% when it was running. I returned it and purchased a Honeywell Quiet Care Humidifier across the parking lot at Future Shop and advertised for “large rooms.”

This second unit worked like a charm, and kept the humidity in the office around 50%.

Life was good: the office was much more pleasant to work in, and the mid-afternoon dryness-induced headaches were gone.

For a week and a half.

Then, on Monday, [[Johnny]] arrived at the Reinventorium to a small-scale humidifier-induced flood. All Monday long we poked and prodded the humidifier trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Had we over-filled it? Was the filter broken? Was the o-ring that sealed the water in broken? Nothing seemed to be the culprit.

I got on the phone to Kaz, the company that sells Honeywell-branded products, and after 20 minutes on hold got to talk to a customer service rep, who asked me the same questions I’d asked myself, and concluded that the unit was broken and needed to be returned, either to Future Shop (no charge) or to Kaz itself (I pay shipping, and then $10 administration fee, for a replacement). Needless to say, I returned the humidifier to Future Shop for a refund.

No matter what the source of the flooding, and whether a replacement would fix it or not, I was uncomfortable with the notion of having a device in the office that was capable of flooding at all (I keep a lot of stuff on the floor, and would have nightmares about soggy bank statements).

Canadian Tire and Future Shop only had similarly-dangerous Honeywell humidifiers, or safer-looking top-loading ones that weren’t capable of humidifying our apparently-not-medium-sized room (it’s amazing the market dominance that Honeywell cum Kaz has in the box stores).

So I went to Home Hardware in Sherwood.

Which is what I should have done in the first place.

Home Hardware not only had a full selection of the same Honeywell humidifiers that others had, but it also had 3 or 4 other brands, or varying types, sizes and mechanisms.

One of those was a Venta Airwasher which immediately appealed to me on several fronts:

1. It isn’t made by Honeywell/Kaz.
2. It doesn’t require replacement filters (nor, indeed, filters of any type).
3. It doesn’t seem capable of spilling: rather than the “fill container and then turn it upside down” Honeywell system, filling the Venta involved simply filling up a base with water.
4. It is made in Germany.
5. It is guaranteed for 10 years.
6. It looks like a NeXTcube.
7. It was on sale for $99, regularly $299.

So I bought it.

It’s been running for the last 24 hours and we’ve got office humidity in the 45% to 50% range. It’s quieter, easy to fill, and is mechanically simply and pleasantly analog.

Stay tuned for reports after it’s been in place for a while.

On last night’s Tavis Smiley show on PBS:

Tavis Smiley: “Technology offers us a lot of good, a lot of advances, but it’s as fraught with as much potential danger as it is with the good stuff.”

Steve Martin: “Well yah, but so is a hammer.”

I used a variation of the same line last night myself, by coincidence, discussing acceptable use policies at our home and school meeting (“a kid doesn’t need an acceptable use policy for a chair to tell him not to pick it up and bop someone over the head.”)

Steve Martin’s timing was a lot better. And he plays the banjo. But it’s nice to see we’re on the same page otherwise.

Every year at our Annual General Meeting, the PEI Home and School Federation considers resolutions presented by our local associations and by the provincial board. This year many of the resolutions concern information technology: how it’s funded, how it’s managed, where the emphasis lies.

My favourite resolution, and one I forwarded and wrote, is the one titled “Simplification of the Acceptable Use Policy” and its “resolved” section reads:

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the PEIHSF requests the Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development replace the current “Minister’s Directive for the Acceptable Use Communication and Information Technology,” with a simple statement, to be signed by students and affirmed by parents: “I agree to use computers, the Internet and related resources in a manner that respects myself and others.”

Go and take a look at MINISTERS DIRECTIVE NO. MD 2005-04 Acceptable Use of Computer and Information Technology, the policy we’re seeking to simplify: it’s a confusing rabbit warren of language for which the maintenance and evolution of inside the education system has consumed hundreds of hours of time. 

I like our simplification resolution because it’s clear, simple, and addresses a needlessly bureaucratic overhead the system bears each year: a policy that few if any parents or students ever read (and yet are required to sign) that fruitlessly attempts to cover all possible calamities and misdeeds and offers penalties — “cancellation of access” — that are, in this day and age, effectively impossible.

The suggested replacement of:

I agree to use computers, the Internet and related resources in a manner that respects myself and others.

is simple, comprehensive, respects rather than assumes the worst, and recognizes that there are shades of grey in everything. We’ll be considering it at our Prince Street Home and School meeting tonight, and then at the PEI Home and School Federations Annual Meeting on April 14th.

If you’re anything like me you have a regular need to know that 1242007264 in “Unixtime” means Monday 11th May 2009 02:01:04 AM in plain-language UTC.

Up to this point I’d been calling up a Terminal session, and doing something like: 

php -a
print strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S",1242007264);

But there had to be a better way!  So, in Alfred I created a new custom search:

• Search URL is: http://www.convert-unix-time.com/?t={query}
• Title is: Convert Unixtime
• Keyword is: ut

Now all I need to do is activate Alfred and type ut 1242007264 and, voila.