The specter of “Internet safety” reared its head last week at the Home and School meeting — there are plans afoot to bring the police into run a session for parents. And while I’m all for helping kids develop skills to keep them out of the hands of the evil-doers, I’m also conscious that concentrating so much on the notion that evil-doers may be lurking behind every corner of the Internet can create fog of paranoia and suspicion that’s not healthy.

I’m not saying “hey, go wild, give out your phone number and my credit card number to that MySpace guy who offers you candy,” but rather “let’s equally as much concentrate on the empowering aspects of this machine as the corrupting ones.”

(I also have my suspicions that a lot of what’s passed off as “Internet safety” is new-style Puritanism, a wrapper for irrational parental fears and ignorance — “censorship lite” under the guise of crime prevention).

When I walked into our den tonight to tell Oliver it was time for bed, here’s what I found in his browser:

Oliver had Googled “obama” — all on his own — and was watching a 2008 Obama campaign speech in Virginia on a YouTube player embedded in the UK-based Socialist Unity website.

Apart from my obvious pride — for Oliver’s ingenuity, spelling, and political tastes — I’m conscious that if Oliver lived in a household with a locked down web browser this might never have happened.

Of course sooner or later Oliver’s going to be Googling for “canoodle” instead of “obama” and he’ll no-doubt run across all manner of porn, hate, and terrorist recruitment. For the moment at least I’m continuing to operate on the assumption that, properly equipped with the mental agility to tell the difference between word and image and action, it’s ultimately worth the risk of his being exposed to evidence of society’s worst if it also means he can use the same machine to learn about society’s best.

This is big conference call week for me — I think I’m into hour number eight of a week long cavalcade of web redesign specification calls today. One thing that’s made a huge difference is using a headset for the calls instead of a regular telephone (as had been my habit to this point).

The benefits are several: much less neck strain, ability to type notes into the redesign wiki while the call is in progress, handy volume control and mute button on the headset.

My headset is a $20 Nexxtech USB model from Radio Shack; I’ve been using it with Skype this week simply because I don’t have a soft-phone set up to wire into my Asterisk phone system (I need to get one, as the quality with SIP is much better than I’ve been experiencing with Skype). Because the conference call number is toll-free, it hasn’t cost me a cent.

For the record, when the killjoys at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business suggest that Islander Day shouldn’t be a paid holiday they are not speaking for my independent business. One has a sense that this group would advocate for cancelling lunch, coffee breaks, and birthday parties if they thought they could get away with it.

Something that has disappointed me about Philosophy 105 so far is that, despite the professor’s clearly stated invitation for we across the lectern to engage in active debate and discussion, there is a paucity of student participation in class: outside of the usual suspects — leather-jacket guy, etc. — most of the class never says a word.

And then something happened this morning. It snowed. And so what is usually a class of 30 became a class of 16. And the dynamics of the class changed in a palpable way.

More people than ever before made contributions. Some who hadn’t said a single word to date. The class was more of a discussion than a lecture. It was as if an important population threshold had been dipped below and whatever combination of reticences had kept people quiet was suddenly not there.

I don’t want to exaggerate the change — we didn’t achieve Algonquin Round Table-levels of thrilling interplay — but that it was so obvious a change makes me wonder whether there is a natural size for the university classroom that, if exceeded, transforms the environment from one of collaboration to one of performance.

Of course a class of 30 would, in many situations, be seen as a luxurious ideal. And certainly this format, setting aside the reticence issue, seems to be working well.

This has me thinking a lot about my time at Trent University in the mid-1980s. One of Trent’s calling cards was “small group teaching” and because I’d never experienced “large group teaching” elsewhere, I never really saw what the big deal was: I simply took it for granted that a tutorial of a dozen students plus a professor gathered around a table was how university worked.

The further I get from Trent, and the more I see how other institutions work, the more I come to appreciate its virtues: at least back then Trent, through thoughtful architecture, the college system, class size and educational philosophy managed to achieve something very, very special. At the time I thought it was commonplace; obviously it is not.

On Friday, assuming the weather returns to normal, the class size will balloon back up to 30 and, I’m afraid, the unexpected breakout of collegiality will become a distant memory. It was nice while it lasted.

Not to turn this into an all-Leonhard’s all-the-time blog, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that their tea biscuits elevate the species to a new level, and that the mustard cream soup with meatballs is, well, just amazing.

If you’ve heretofore been intimidated by [[Leonhard’s]] because you haven’t been able to fathom making your way through an entire loaf of hearty dark bread, may I suggest you get yourself some of their rolls instead? We’ve had them two weeks in a row and they are simply fantastic: full of flavour, hearty by not brick-like and the perfect accompaniment to a stew or pasta dish. And at 90 cents each, they’re a bargain.

The Eastern School District is closing school one hour early today. This midday-closure thing has got to be one of the most confusing part of a parent’s life: not only does it mean last-minute logistics juggling, but it also means that on any day where weather is sketchy you have to listen to the radio all the time.

I’m not a Patersonian “all of the world’s problems can be solved through Twitter” person, but it does seem to me that some sort of push solution would aid in the struggle here.

To the untrained eye, the CARI Complex and the UPEI Sports Centre would seem to be the same facility. After all, they are housed in the same building on the campus of the University and both involve athletic endeavours.

And thus you might think that after an exhausting run on the treadmill, or a punishing game of basketball, you might cool off with a bracing swim in the pool, and that you’d do this simply by walking through the door parked “Pool” in the locker room.

But there is no such door.

The two facilities are completely separate.

There are two completely separate sets of locker rooms. Two membership schemes. Two sets of hours. Two front desks. Two sets of informational brochures. Two websites. There are even two parking lots.

So if you, naive member of the public, want to swim after a run you must get dressed, walk out of the Sports Centre and into the CARI door, pay another fee, go into another locker room, and so on.

Does this not seem crazy to anyone but me?

I assume things are as they are purely for reasons of administration and control: CARI was tacked onto the side of the Sports Centre with no thought of integrating its operations into the Sports Centre because those making the design decisions decided to have recreational infrastructure recapitulate bureaucratic infrastructure (the UPEI Sports Centre is run by UPEI; CARI is controlled by a non-profit Board of Directors).

Oh how much more useful a facility this would be if some systems thinkers had intervened at the beginning of the CARI planning process and suggested that a single door through which we could all walk, pay, and recreate would the smartest way to proceed. Now it’s too late: the design flaw is frozen forever in concrete.

Speaking of iPhoto, something I didn’t realize is that iPhoto has its own “Trash,” separate from the main Mac OS X “Trash.” This means that if you delete a photo, it doesn’t actually get deleted, it goes into the iPhoto Trash, and stays there until your empty the Trash (right click on the Trash in the sidebar and select “Empty Trash”).

Because I never realized this, every photo I’d ever deleted was hanging around in my iPhoto Trash, sucking up disk space — 7.5 GB of disk space as it turns out, as there were more than 6,000 photos there.