Well that was fun: this morning was my time to switch sides of the lectern and deliver my Privacy and The Obligation to Explain lecture to my Philosophy 105 class. You can grab a PDF of the slides I used if you’re interested.

Thanks to Alan and Chris for helpful comments on my original blog post: I ended up using a snippet of Alan’s comment in my talk.

By far the most interesting part of the proceedings was the 20 minutes of discussion that followed: my fellow students had a lot of good insights. The general consensus: this is all very well and good, but we’re going to have to get rid of capitalism and nationalism first, and everyone is going to have to be pure of heart; in other words there are aspects of my proposition that have a slightly Utopian quality.

I come away with a newfound respect for the life of the academic lecturer: it’s a lot of work, not only in preparation, but also in keeping all the freaky balls in the air.

Wednesday I’ll go back to my seat at the back of the room.

Regular readers may recall our last meal at the venerable Town and Country Restaurant back in 2006. In the intervening years the building housed an “asian fusion” restaurant for a time but more often than not has been standing vacant, waiting for someone new to breath life into it.

Unfortunately this never happened, and whoever owned the building decided it was better as an empty lot than a building waiting to be filled, so it fell to the wrecker’s ball over the last several weeks:

I’ve been experimenting with IIPImage and its companion IIPMooViewer as a way of serving higher resolution images in a web browser — think “Google Maps slippy map, but for images.” (the cool Java kids would use djatoka for this, but Java makes my head hurt).

I grabbed this 1958 aerial photo from the government collection of photos of Charlottetown and turned it into a Tiled Pyramidal TIFF with ImageMagick:

convert 16113-44.jpg \
  -define tiff:tile-geometry=256x256 \
  -compress jpeg 'ptif:charlottetown.tif'

And then set it up to be served from IIPMooViewer here. The result is imperfect: the image viewer appears to “stall” after loading an initial collection of tiles (it completes eventually). It would have been nice to have access to higher-resolution scans of the aerial photos to be able to dig deeper, but it’s still an interesting window into Charlottetown in the late 1950s.

As one of the final acts of my undercover mission inside the University of Prince Edward Island, I’ll be giving a guest lecture for the Philosophy 105 course that I’m tentatively titling Privacy and The Obligation to Explain.

I’m going to take a different tack on privacy, suggesting that the default setting for privacy should be “off,” that we should all share everything always. And to support this proposition I’ll use examples from my own dabbling in digital exhibitionism as well as practical examples from the open source movement.

Although there’s no officially sanctioned way for members of the public to attend the lecture, given that I’m not officially sanctioned myself it would seem appropriate for anyone who’s interested to just show up to Main Building, Room 120 on Monday, March 30 at 10:30 a.m. and act like you belong there. Wear a UPEI sweatshirt and/or carry a backpack if you want to blend in and, if anyone challenges you, just say “I missed the first 27 classes, but I’m here to catch up.” Casual mentions of of episteme and techne — “man, that is so totally techne” — will also help.

A solution to a constant source of frustration for me: I have a PDF — like this one — that has text formatted in multiple columns:

I want to copy some text from the PDF, but when I do this by simply clicking and dragging the mouse, all of the columns of text get selected:

The secret: use Option + Drag to select the text. Hold down the Option key, in other words, while you drag a box around the text you want to select:

The result is just the text I want, from the single column I want it from:

But St. Eleanors was not first settled by the English. In the last quarter of the 18th century, the southern shore of Malpeque Bay was populated by no fewer than 23 Acadian families, several of them refugees from the English expulsion of Acadians in Nova Scotia 20 years earlier. They bore familiar French names like Arsenault, Gallant, Poirier, and Bernard, and they had their own church, a little chapel situated on the east side of Rayner’s Creek. Most of the settlement was in Lot 17, which had been acquired in 1767 by two brothers, B. and P. Burke.

Annie Copps, who’s both a cook and and public health veteran, writes about how long you can leave butter and eggs out of the fridge. I’m a fridge paranoid — I think that mayonnaise left out of the fridge for more than 2 minutes will kill me — so this is comforting information.

At the Access 2009 planning meetings I’ve noticed that the browsers that the librarians use have a “Zotero” icon in the lower-right corner. At lunch with Don Moses yesterday he made a passing reference to Zotero, and in my ignorance I asked him to explain what Zotero is.

And what Zotero is is this: an add-on for Firefox that allows academics to do the same sort of things that we civilians do with tools like Delicious.

But what we call a “social bookmarking service” academics call a tool to “collect, manage, and cite your research sources.” And because academics are all about the bibliographic, Zotero is heavy on the Chicago Manual of Style-type of feature set, and somewhat light on the “hey, Olle, check out this cool site” feature set.

Otherwise, there’s a lot of overlap between the two approaches and, indeed, there’s something to be learned from the academics and their bibliographic obsessions. For example, OpenURL COinS: A Convention to Embed Bibliographic Metadata in HTML. Which, in webgeek-speak, means “a microformat for describing web pages.”

As a way of dipping my toe into this world, I’ve embedded COinS metadata in this very weblog. So here’s how it works in practice: let’s say you’re writing an academic paper on Jimmy Fallon and you come across my review of his new late night television show. If you’re using a browser with the Zotero add-in, you’ll see a special Zotero icon in the address bar of the browser:

If you click on the Zotero icon a reference to this post will automatically be added to your Zotero references, and if you open up the Zotero add-on in the browser you can see the reference, complete with the metadata that’s embedded in via COinS:

Furthermore, because I’ve set up my Zotero to sync automatically with the Zotero.org website, the same reference also can be found there, either available only to me, or to the public if I’ve set my account that way:

Now so far that’s really just a less-elegant, less-capable Delicious, but where Zotero really comes into its own is with features that cater to the kinds of things that academics like to do, like bibliographic citations in journal articles. So if I right-click on the reference in Zotero, I can select to Create Bibliography from Selected Item:

Then select a citation style:

And what I end up with is a snippet of text that I can paste right into my article:

The client-side features of Zotero are quite evolved, and it can parse references from sources like Amazon.com and many online library catalogues, including our very own Provincial Library here on PEI (and, if you use the slimmed-down version, the University of PEI catalogue too).

The “social” side of Zotero is in its infancy and is less developed; take a look at my Zotero profile and my Zotero Library to get a sense of what it offers.

I’ve uploaded the photos of our trip to Europe to Flickr. My favourite is this one:

We had a spare hour to spend between our visit to the Eiffel Tower and catching the Eurostar to London so we took a taxi to Jardin du Luxembourg — the Luxembourg Gardens — and walked around in the warm spring sunshine. We watched old men on the Pétanque courts while we sipped hot chocolate purchased from a woman with a dog named Tango, considered the idea of riding the carousel (ultimately rejected by Oliver because of the perceived difficulty mastering the brass ring retrieving task on offer), and then made our way back to the metro station.

One of the nicest features of Luxembourg Gardens is that it’s filled with chairs: solid metal chairs in several forms are scattered throughout for use by all, and I snapped a photo of this group of six chairs arranged for comfort.

Our hotel in Paris was in the 11th arrondissement; I choose it simply because it was the least expensive hotel on offer from Tablet Hotels and because it was handy both to Gare de l’Est and Gare du Nord, the train stations we were arriving at and leaving from.

After an exciting afternoon at Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie we checked in at the hotel and, while Oliver compared and contrasted Slovak kids TV to French kids TV, I went online to find us a suitable place to eat our one Parisian meal. The first place that popped up in the Zagat guide was Le Pure Cafe, which was only a 10 minute walk from the hotel.

Looking around the net for reviews I quickly found that not only was the food reported to be good, and the atmosphere comfortably “neighbourhood,” but that the restaurant was featured in Before Sunset, the 2004 Ethan Hawke - Julie Delpy film that happens to be one of my favourites. So the deal was sealed: I called to make a reservation for 8:00 p.m.

After ambling over toward 14 Rue Jean Mace — we had some time to kill so we explored the neighbourhood — we arrived right at 8:00 p.m. and were shown to our table by a friendly (and, to my relief, English-speaking) waitress (I can make my way in French in an emergency, but I’m liable to ask for cheveux instead of cheval).

Our table for two — right next to the Hawke/Delpy table, appropriate for my fanboy status — was over in the corner. The vibe at Le Pure Cafe is exactly what you think it should be: a casual, comfortable mix of young and old, new and regulars, good music, friendly, helpful staff with a soft spot for Oliver and patience with me.

With language and culture translation from our server we ordered the goat cheese samosas with confit of duck to start and salmon for the main. I asked for “something less than a bottle of wine but more than a glass” and received an appropriate flagon of what was described as “a strong wine from the south of France” (it was very nice).

The food simply knocked my socks off. This is perhaps partly explained by the fact that any food in Paris would impress me, but it was very, very good, especially the salmon, which almost brought me to tears it was so well prepared.

As the night wore on, and I consumed more of my strong red wine from the south of France, I passed more and more of the practical responsibility for the evening over to Oliver (a post he assumed with aplomb); I wasn’t blotto, but by the end of the evening I was well lubricated.

We finished the meal with a dessert best described as a “long thing spring roll-like confection filled with molten dark chocolate.” It may be the best dessert I have ever had.

We rolled out around 10:00 p.m., Oliver in charge of navigation, happy and well-fed. I cannot think of a better way of spending a night in Paris.

Yotel is a tiny “capsule” hotel located right inside Terminal 4 at Heathrow Airport in London. We stayed here last night partly out of curiousity but mostly for the convenience of not having to battle public transit this morning. Some notes on the experience:

• The room is small, but it’s not a “capsule” — there’s enough room to walk around (a little) — and it’s more like a “pod.”
• Check-in is completely automated: there’s a touch screen at the door that spits out a key card. You need your booking number for this, which fortunately I’d remembered to print out.
• Your booking number is also your wifi password — the wifi is included at no extra charge.
• Our television was missing a remote control. I was able to get one from the person staffing the snack bar — “galley” in Yotel-speak — but it didn’t work. She finally resorted to “rebooting the TV” from her console and that did the trick. All I was trying to do was turn the TV off.
• The TV has a wake-up alarm feature you can set. But the TV’s clock was set 10 minutes slow.
• This morning the now “working” TV was as slow as molasses to do anything: changing channels took a few seconds and the remote “froze” several times. Obviously this system needs work.
• There are no windows. I didn’t think this would bother me but it did.
• There’s no door between the beds and the bathroom, only a curtain. Oh, wait, there is: just discovered a sliding glass door no our way out. And the toilet makes a shockingly loud noise when you flush it.
• The beds are very comfortable.
• The rooms are fairly well sound-proofed, but there is a fairly constant rumble of the surrounding airport: part noise and part vibration. They offer free ear plugs in the galley.
• Rooms let by the hour, with a minimum of 4 hours. We took 12 hours and paid £80.
• The “monsoon” shower is great, but hard to adjust the hot/cold mix of. And because it’s in the same area as the sink and toilet, water gets everywhere.

All in not a bad experience, but not the futuristic teleport into the future I’d anticipated either.