Shadow of a windmill at Cape Jourimain, on the New Brunswick end of the Confederation Bridge:

WattzOn:

…works by harnessing many minds to create a tool for analyzing the power usage in a person’s life. Like a carbon calculator, it allows you to answer questions to identify your individual impact on the world. However, it uniquely goes beyond fossil fuel utilization to incorporate all of the different ways you consume energy in your life; whether you are driving to work or eating meat. In addition to your actions, you can track the impact of your belongings with the embodied energy calculator.

Here’s my WattzOn profile, with roughed-in numbers: 10,001W per year. One Million Acts of Green is a different take on the same genre, with the bonus of a George Stroumboulopoulos introduction.

Pop!Tech, “the other small east-coast conference,” is streaming everything live from Oct. 23 to 25, 2008 (i.e. right now!)

Iceland Express, “Iceland’s other airline,” has a blog with a mission statement:

How Do You Like Iceland? — a blog about Icelandic nature, nightlife, adventure, shopping, eating, drinking, recovering, and much more. It’s brought to you by the good people of Iceland Express, Iceland’s low-fare airline, as a way of luring you to Reykjavík. Go on, read it.

Given the tumult that the Icelandic economy is going through, it’s obviously an interesting time to be an Icelandic airline; fortunately, they have a sense of humour about it all.

From Deb Richardson, on Zap Your PRAM:

My need to create something rather than just consume things is in absolute overdrive.

A slide show of my photos from Zap Your PRAM.

Zap Your PRAM Mark II is over, and I’m just back from dropping [[Olle]] and [[Luisa]] at the airport in Halifax at the finish up of their 3-week residency here in Charlottetown. Tack our trip to Iceland on to the beginning of all that, and it’s been an exciting month filled with all sorts of talk and reflection. In the spirit of Dan’s bullet-list of Zap points, here’s my own:

• Dalvay-by-the-Sea, our venue, makes every other conference venue seem like an impersonal prison. It seems absurd, for example, to even consider attending a conference that doesn’t have roaring fires, an espresso machine, and grapefruit slices at the breakfast buffet.
• The breadth and quality of the formal program seemed like the result of careful and deliberate decisions on our part. Which is remarkable given that we threw it together so haphazardly.
• What Dan Misener called “inline discussion” — others might called it “interrupting the speaker, a lot” — seemed, with a few exceptions, to work really well. Unlike the usual 95% formal, 5% “I’ll take a few questions” format, the ratio was often 30% formal and 70% back-and-forth.
• The only thing that didn’t really click for me, Steven’s comments aside, was the live music: I was hoping for a sort of coffee house slash kitchen party atmosphere but what we ended up with seemed more like “nerds in the rec room with the lights on” and I don’t think the performers got the audience they deserved.
• I kept trying to use the word “atemporal” sarcastically after it was used during a session, but nobody bit: apparently atemporal is a word that people (or at least Zap people) use in regular everyday conversations and thus it holds no sarcastic punch. Same thing for “touch-points.”

• I believe the word “space” was used only once at the conference, in the “social networking space” way. This was nice. “Monetize” came up more frequently, but not to an annoying extent.

Like every experience that’s collectively experienced as being awesome, there was chatter about doing another Zap next year, or at least not waiting five years to do it again: I still think we should wait five years (or 7, or 12) to do it again, as it’s important that it’s a completely new thing every time and doesn’t become something that’s a hassle to organize and/or something that’s done only because it’s scheduled to be done. Like Dan says, we should do it again when we’ve got the fire in our bellies for it again.

Friend-of-the-blog Ian Williams wrote a few days ago, of Zap Your PRAM and his reason for attending:

It may not always work, but just dipping your head into the cold, bracing water of other peoples’ obsessions can occasionally give you something you didn’t even know you needed.

If we unpacked our own rationale for organizing Zap, I think we’d come up with something quite similar. The danger of this, of course, is that when you discover things you didn’t even know you needed, these things can be inconvenient: “I need to enter the seminary,” for example, or “everything I’ve been thinking for the last 15 years is bullshit” (examples for demonstration purposes only).

And so burbling through my mind, along with the pride and accomplishment of having helped to create something so awesome, and the thrill of hybridizing so many brilliantisms into my genome, is the terror that comes from a mind opened wider than usual.

The effect has not been unlike a sort of weird fire-grilled acid trip: the colours are brighter, the music sounds like tangerines, it may well take three weeks to recover, and I’ll still be having flashbacks in February.

Time to sleep.

While I loathe board games, casino games and card games (save Canasta), playing road-trip games (“Kansas, Sarasota, Alabama”) and parlour games (charades, etc.) is something I could give up everything for and do professionally.

And so it was my dream, in importing a motley collection of intelligent people to a remote television-less inn, that parlour fun would ensue. Thus charades were formally placed on the agenda.

When [[Steven]] made the call for the charadians to assemble, the result was me and Steven, lonely by ourselves, in the corner.

Fortunately the resourceful and imaginative Tessa came to the rescue with a suggestion to play “Celebrity” instead (if you ever need to organize an international peace conference or mission to Mars, I believe Tessa is the person for the job).

A distant cousin of charades (and, indeed, inclusive of charades in one act), Celebrity is a team-based game involving the guessing of commonly-known celebrities (the threshold being “known by at least half of the group”).

The upgrade to Celebrity from Charades was enough to bring in a good dozen Zapians, and two hours of wacky antics ensued.

It will (for perhaps me only) be the highlight of the conference, and I owe a great debt to all those who played along.