This week in my Conversations with Bruce series I drove out to the Prince Edward Island Preserve Company in New Glasgow for a tour around the place with Bruce MacNaughton.

The camera work is a little sketchy and points out the value of having a camera operator whose only job is to make sure that it’s not only half of people’s heads that are in the frame – it’s hard to talk, walk, and focus the camera all at the same time!

I got an email late last week of the sort that I’d like to receive every week but that, alas, are very rare.  Art Ortenburger, a home-schooled teenager from Bonshaw, lives in an area of Prince Edward Island where Bell Aliant isn’t currently providing broadband infrastructure  (despite promising end-to-end broadband for the Island by the end of 2009).

Art was curious to know exactly how many addresses on the Island were in the same boat, and, being a sharp guy, he set out to use Aliant’s own lookup tool to find out.

Art wrote a well-crafted set of automated tools that takes every civic address in the freely-available PEI Civic Address Database and submits each one to Aliant’s web page.  That page responds with either “Congratulations! You can choose from the following list of services currently available to you…” or “Your address … does not currently qualify for Bell Aliant High Speed Internet service.”

Art’s “bot” is well-tempered: it only submits one query a second, so it takes several days to run. And this left Art with a problem: he didn’t have a server on which to host the tool. And so he got in touch with me.

I was happy to provide a mechanism for the tool to do its work, and on Friday night I fired up an Amazon EC2 instance and set the script running. Three days later, the results were:

• Total Addresses: 68,040
• Addresses with no DSL: 10,439
• Addresses with Basic DSL: 19,559
• Addresses with Ultra DSL: 38,039

Here’s what a Google Earth map of the addressed with no DSL service looks like (click the image for a larger version):

If you’re interested and have Google Earth yourself, download the Google Earth file of the no-DSL addresses and zoom in to any area of the province to see the situation in detail.

Keep in mind, of course, that what Art’s tool looks up is civic addresses, not “households that might want to have broadband Internet installed,” and so among those 10,439 non-served addresses are everything from vacant lots to barns (although what farmer in their right mind doesn’t want DSL in the barn these days).

Art has released his complete toolset with a GNU open source license so you can see how the magic works, run the bot yourself, or just get some ideas on how to write automated tools in Python.

As a follow-up to last summer’s (warmer) Weekend in Halifax, here’s a few more notes about visiting the city, based on a quick (colder) trip we took over this weekend.

1. On a whim I bid $50 for two rooms in Halifax on Priceline and it was, to my surprise, accepted by The Westin Nova Scotian. The hotel is perfectly acceptable, if (very) slightly off the beaten track. They charge $18/night for parking, but somehow we were exempted from that. There’s nice little swimming pool, a very well-equipped fitness room (the treadmills have built-in televisions), and the rooms are comfortable. The only downsides were that it was hard to control the temperature in the rooms, and that the entire hotel bristled with static electricity, making for a shocking weekend. But for $50, who’s complaining.
2. We had another great dinner at Chabaa Thai Restaurant on Saturday night. We arrived about 15 minutes before the supper rush and by the time we left the place was packed to the gills. Our friend (and world traveler) C. was with us and this broadened us out of our usual Thai menu habits, so we got to taste more of what they offer. The spicy halibut was especially good.
3. Dartmouth Crossing, which had been positioned in my mind as a sort of mainland shopping nirvana, turned out to be a depressing industrial shopping wasteland full of the same-old same-old big-box stores. Best avoided.
4. We made our first visit to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia based on a recommendation of the Machines at Play show helpfully tweeted by Iain. It had a very high neato quotient, and the rest of the gallery was interesting too. Best $20 (per family) you can spend in downtown Halifax, I think.
5. Conversely, the Discovery Centre’s much-hyped LEGO exhibit turned out to be little more than a bunch of LEGO models of iconic American scenes with some LEGO brick-filled tables sprinkled around. I love LEGO, and the our visit to LegoLand was one of the highlights of my life, but this had nothing at all to do with “discovery” and was more of a promotional opportunity for LEGO. The rest of the Discovery Centre is much more straight-ahead science centre-like, albeit with exhibits that look like they haven’t been refreshed in 10 years. While not completely without value, the overall impression one is left with is of a poorly-funded and unloved facility that pales when compared to any other children’s museum we’ve visited.
6. On Sunday night we used 2-for-1 coupons from The Coast to go out to dinner at The Wooden Monkey in its large new location on Grafton Street around the corner from where it started out. The service and the food were both excellent and this remains our favourite place to eat out in Halifax.
7. On Monday morning we drove over to Dartmouth to visit Chairs Limited, a bespoke chair maker. Met a very helpful salesperson who guided me through the options available (which turned out to be “almost anything you can imagine”). When I joked that I’d like a chair upholstered in the Prince Edward Island tartan he excused himself for a moment and emerge shortly with both PEI- and New Brunswick-tartan covered chairs. I’m preparing my chair order now.
8. I put out a call on Twitter for a new coffee place to try out and the consensus from all corners was Two if By Sea in Dartmouth. So on our way out of town we stopped in. Wow. They have a pain au chocolate on the menu that is indescribably good (albeit also indescribably rich) and also serve a very solid espresso. Not the kind of place you could go every day, but certainly worth a visit to see how croissants are supposed to be made.

We packed a lot into 48 hours, and then made quick work of the trip back to Charlottetown, darting between snow squalls all the way.

Several people have asked me what I think about Apple’s newly-announced iPad.

While there’s no doubting it’s a significant technical and design achievement, and is filled with the usual Apple lusciousness, the iPad scares me, and why it scares me is well-expressed in the blog post Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?, the heart of which is this:

The fundamental difference between a Mac and an iPhone is that I can run any software I want on my Mac. I can buy it on a DVD, I can download it from the Internet, or I can compile it myself. I can get rid of OS X and install another operating system. The Mac is a general purpose computer in the classic sense. The iPhone is not.

Apple decides which software I can run on my iPhone. Apple provides the only means by which I can get it. The platform is for all intents and purposes, closed, and the hardware is closed as well. Sure, the iPhone is great to use, but the price of using it is that you’re rewarding Apple’s choice to bet on closed platforms.

What bothers me is that in terms of openness, the iPad is the same as the iPhone, but in terms of form factor, the iPad is essentially a general purpose computer. So it strikes me as a sort of Trojan horse that acculturates users to closed platforms as a viable alternative to open platforms, and not just when it comes to phones (which are closed pretty much across the board). The question we must ask ourselves as computer users is whether the tradeoff in freedom we make to enjoy Apple’s superior user experience is worth it.

I agree completely.

I don’t want the spirit of the digital devices in my life to become more iPhone-like, especially the devices at the heart of my digital nervous system; the prospect of owning an iPad seems awfully like buying a pair of exquisitely-design shoes that can only be shined, re-laced or repaired by sending them off to the manufacturer.

The iPad, like the iPhone and the iPod touch, represent another step down the road toward Internet devices being kneecapped into a conduit for us to passively pay for and consume tightly controlled and regulated content.

The power of the net for me has always rested in its utility as a vehicle for freely producing, sharing, mashing-up and distributing stuff, not in its utility for allowing me to watch re-runs of LOST more easily. While there’s no doubt that the iPad is a sleek device to enable the later, it fails abjectly as a device for the former, and if anything it has me thinking it might be time to sell the MacBook and invest in a more open solution for my desktop before it too falls prey to this emerging ethos.

I watched this Ricky Gervais movie over lunch today (it’s on Eastlink’s Video on Demand service in you’re a customer). With the proviso that I’m a big sucker for contemporary reality-turned-upside-down movies (it’s not for nothing that I loved Heaven Can Wait), I heartily recommend it: Gervais puts in a nice performance, as does Jennifer Garner. The only weak point was Jonah Hill, who seems like he had a much bigger part in the film at some point, most of which ended up on the cutting-room floor.

I’m not sure how I came to first know Bruce MacNaughton, but then again it’s hard to live on Prince Edward Island and not know Bruce. Among other things he has founded the erstwhile Perfect Cup Café in Charlottetown (where Leonhard’s is now), the erstwhile Piece a Cake restaurant (above the PEI Company Store), the erstwhile Marketplace (in the former Woolworth’s) and, most notably, the (very much alive) Prince Edward Island Preserve Company in New Glasgow, Prince Edward Island.

Bruce’s business sensibility is one I greatly admire: when Bruce says he’s “not in business to make money,” it’s more than a throw-away line, it’s at the core of how he operates (sometimes to his detriment, as the string of erstwhiles demonstrates…).

A few weeks ago Bruce suggested we have coffee; he wrote “I would like to discuss what we might do; could do, shouldn’t do online.”

And so we met on a chilly Tuesday morning at Casa Mia and Bruce bought me an espresso and we talked about, well, almost everything but the “online” thing. Okay, that’s not completely true: we did touch briefly on his new website, and what he might do with 11,000 email addresses he’s collected over the years but never emailed to, and other onlinely things. But we also talked a lot about sugar content and customer service, and customs regulations.

What emerged from our conversation was the notion visiting the Preserve Company in New Glasgow is, for many people, a singular experience, and Bruce’s interest in finding out whether it’s possible to build on that experience after the fact.  Not (necessarily) to sell stuff, but for a host of other reasons, most of them intangible.

One of the things I admire about Bruce is that he is transparent and honest about doing business: if you have a bad experience at Bruce’s place, and email him, it’s likely that a few hours later Bruce will have emailed you back, apologized, and turned a bad experience into a surprising one.

Extending from this notion, and a strong desire on my part to avoid any hint of “developing a social media marketing plan,” I suggested to Bruce that, at least to begin, we keep the conversation going. But in public.

And so this Tuesday morning we met again at Casa Mia, but this time with a video camera. I pressed “record” and we talked. We’ll do it again next Tuesday.

I’d been hearing about Riverview Country Market from friends for a while now, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I managed to visit.

Wow.

I hadn’t made a point to rush over earlier because everyone talked about the meat counter and how great it was. But I eat less meat than, well, just about anything, and so that’s been of little interest to me.

But there’s more to the place than just the meat: they sell local produce (including potatoes and apples with their varieties labeled, which is just common sense but novel nonetheless), local preserves, local baking, and a smattering of non-local things like lemons to round things out.

It’s all laid out in a compact but efficient little space with friendly staff and good music.

If you lament the loss of bestofpei, another place that focused on local but that went out of business in the fall, take heart, as Riverview is everything that bestofpei should have aspired to be: well-stocked, focused, and without a hint of pretense.

The only downside is that they’re located, for all intents and purposes, “out of town,” being way out there in the wastelands of Riverside Drive (it’s only a 20 minute walk from our place, but it’s a harsh and unforgiving 20 minute walk through pedestrian-unfriendly terrain).

If these folks took over the Clover Farm in on Queen Street they would completely transform the grocery landscape for we downtowners; as it is, I’ll become as regular a customer as their location allows, and I encourage you to drop by and check them out if you haven’t yet.

Back in 2008, Aliant, the local brand of the Bell Canada telephone company, did a deal with the Province of Prince Edward Island: Aliant got to renew its communications contract with the province and in return agreed to “extend broadband services to every community in Prince Edward Island.”

In December of 2009 Aliant announced “Mission Accomplished” and published a press release titled, in part, “PEI broadband infrastructure build complete.” But over the year somehow “every community in Prince Edward Island” in the province’s original announcement had morphed into “virtually all areas of the Island” in Aliant’s.

And then, in late December, came the fine print that fleshed out the difference between “every” and “virtually all:” rather than actually installing wired broadband to every home in the Province, Aliant was opting out of the difficult bits and using its wireless cellular network-based Internet service as a sop to customers where they didn’t want to extend the wired network.

There’s been a lot of media coverage about this, culminating in a public meeting in the eastern part of the province last night where Aliant made some pricing and data cap adjustments to the wireless service to try and distract the wrath of the under-served.

What’s been largely missing in the media coverage and related discussion of this issue, however, is that Aliant is not living up to the spirit of their original agreement. 

Yes, wireless Internet is “high speed” in the sense that it’s faster than dial-up.

But it’s not “broadband infrastructure.”

If it was, then Aliant wouldn’t have wasted all that money installing DSL for everyone and would have just mailed out “turbo sticks” – its wireless access dongle – to all Islanders.

Broadband infrastructure Island-wide means that I should be able to run an Internet-based business in North Lake as easily as I can in Charlottetown. It means static IP addresses, the ability to scale bandwidth as my business grows, service-level agreements.

It doesn’t (just) mean the ability to watch YouTube.

And while Aliant might have tricky euphemisms for why it’s not installing actual broadband infrastructure, if it were being honest it would simply admit that it doesn’t want to pay for it.

There’s no technical reason why absolutely every home on Prince Edward Island can’t be provided with actual wired broadband service. 

There’s nothing different about the soil or the air currents or the angle of the sun in Eastern Kings that makes installing broadband there any different than in downtown Charlottetown.

It’s just requires additional investment. Investment that, apparently, Aliant believes it can dance its way out of.

All of which would be fine if Aliant were simply another Internet company making its way in a competitive marketplace.

But it’s not: it made a deal with the people of PEI. A sole-sourced deal that was allowed because of its “regional development benefits.”

I have no issue with the original deal: government used its power in the marketplace to extract benefits to Islanders at not additional costs to taxpayers. That was wise and frugal.

But if we really believe in “One Island Community, One Island Future,” we can’t let Aliant get away with this: if an Islander is an Islander is an Islander, and we’re going to commit to equal access to the network for all, then we need to call Aliant on its bluff and demand that it do the honourable thing, and make the investment it committed to, letter and spirit.