Oliver and Catherine and I drove out to the north shore on Saturday, taking advantage of the wonderful weather, for some holiday-weekend diversions. We had supper at the revitalized Ship to Shore in Darnley, and then doubled back to Sea View Hall for the “Jamboree” advertised out front on a sandwich board.

Truth be told I had no idea what a “jamboree” was. And so my first question on entering the hall was “I have no idea what a jamboree is,” to which the kindly ticket-taker simply replied “music.” So we bought our tickets — $5.00 each, free for Oliver — and joined a crowd of about 50 packed into the hall and waited to see what that meant in practice.

While you might expect Oliver to be the youngest person at such an event, we were somewhat surprised to find the Catherine and I were likely the next-youngest: the crowed skewed older and, while they were welcoming, we did feel somewhat like fish out of water.

At 8:00 p.m. the master of ceremonies took the stage and the proceedings began.

So here’s what a jamboree is: people with instruments show up, put their name on a list, and get to play two songs. As near as I could tell they’ll take anyone, playing in any musical style, and will keep going until everyone’s had their chance.

I’d say it was an “open mic night,” but it’s clear that these are not aspiring professional musicians, just regular everyday people with a song in their heart. They mostly played country songs, sometimes ones with a strong religious line running through them. They played guitars, mandolins, piano, drums and fiddle. Or just sang. And they did so with conviction.

The line between “audience” and “performer” wasn’t really all that clear: Catherine was talking to a nice older woman — the kind of person that could have been your mother or your grandmother — when suddenly she was called up on stage to play guitar.

In the hipster intelligentsia there’s a lot of talk about “maker culture” and about how everything’s gone all “participatory” of late. As if we needed digital tools to allow we amateurs to make and distribute stuff. A night in the audience at Reuben’s Jamboree reminded me that this isn’t a new invention at all, and that regular everyday people have been making their own culture for as long as there have been regular everyday people.

Reuben’s Jamboree takes place on the third Saturday of every month at 8:00 p.m. at the Sea View Hall (about an hour’s drive northwest of Charlottetown). If you show up with a guitar or mandolin I’m sure they’ll welcome you up to the stage; if you’re content to sit in the audience admission is $5.00 for adults and free for kids, which includes a lunch half-way through.

AOL reports that the Charlottetown Dairy Queen is the busiest Dairy Queen in the world. They don’t provide a source for this (old media!), so I’m wondering where they got their information and what measure they use to rank “busyness.” Thanks to A. for the pointer.

I’m not a customer of the National Bank, but they have an arrangement with the Credit Union that lets me use their ATMs without paying a service charge. So I was unduly excited when they got a replacement ATM this week. Here’s the before and after:

The new machine is a big improvement.

Walking directions from my house to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market: Cloudmap vs. Google.

Because Cloudmade uses OpenStreetMap data, the Confederation Trail is there, so I get routed along a pleasant route rather than up University Avenue.

See also Cloudmade’s routing web service.

Tangent: it’s been over a year since I submitted a request to have the spelling of Rochford Square as Rockford Square corrected by Tele Atlas, which supplies map data to Google for Charlottetown. Still wrong.

There’s a Jamboree at the Sea View Hall this Saturday (May 16, 2009) starting at 8:00 p.m.

Okay, here’s the missing link between the Visitors Guide Accommodations Search and the Tourism Inspection Reports: a bookmarklet that pops up the inspection report while you’re searching for accommodations in the Visitors Guide.

All you need to do is drag this link into your browser’s bookmark toolbar:

Then, when you’re looking at an accommodations listing — like this one, for example — just click on the bookmarklet and the inspection report should pop up in a new window. The “glue” between the Visitors Guide listings and the inspection reports isn’t perfect — there’s no unique ID to tie the two together, so I’m relying on a match of the names, which are sometimes different. But it seems to work most of the time. I welcome feedback.

You know those PEI accommodations inspections that Pat Martel told us all about this morning? I munged them all together — at least the 631 of them that had attached PDF files — into one big PDF file (warning: 124 MB) for your reading enjoyment. Consider it the sort of “visitors guide for people concerned about smoke alarms.”

Oh, and if you need to tell someone how to go to the actual web page where they appear, send them to bit.ly/inspections.

From Iceland Express (“Iceland’s other airline”), a free MP3 from folk-rock band Sprengjuhöllin.

My friend Elmine made a short film about the next 2009 conference in Hamburg earlier this month. The next conference looks like reboot, but with better-dressed people.

Here’s a story about Don Sutherland.

Three years ago I hacked together a little project to create an RSS feed of applications under the Lands Protection Act. The Act is administered by the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission and my hack scraped data from their website and reformatted in a form that made it easy to get automatically alerted to new applications.

As with many such projects of mine, there was a more than a small dose of “hey, you guys should be doing this kind of thing” moral suasion attached to this, an approach that usually fails abjectly to achieve its desired result.

Except that the person administering the IRAC website was Don Sutherland, and when I sent him a “hey, you guys should be doing this kind of thing” email his response was, two months later, to make the RSS feeds available directly from the source.

Now this may not seem particularly remarkable, but it was. Being a public servant is hard, and one of the things that makes it hard is the complicated dance required to serve the public, the public good, and ones political masters, each with their often competing impulses. A side effect of this complicated dance is that it’s rare the public servant who will accept feedback from outside institutional walls (especially cocky “moral suasion”-type feedback), see merit in it, and act.

This project was but one example of many over the last decade where Don manifested this openness. We were colleagues, of a sort, when I was working with Government on its own website, and we cooperated on projects several times under that umbrella. And, once I left that project, from time to time I would send him obscure questions about things like gas pricing data and he always responded with uncommon attention and detail.

Don Sutherland died tragically over the weekend, and in addition to the tremendous loss for his family and friends, we the people are worse off for his death, for we’ve lost one of those rare public servants who was able to dance that complicated dance expertly, and truly serve the public. He will be missed.