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.

I don’t completely know what day it is. Well-trained service staff keep bringing me food. And then dessert. There is good cappuccino. And wine. And interesting people. And you can’t beat the “siege mentality” vibe we’ve set up as an inspiration for unusual interaction. Zap Your PRAM is in full swing. If you missed it this year, we’ll be back in 2013.

There are 12,006 7-Eleven stores in Japan (there are only 7,600 in North America). Exploring the Japanese 7-Eleven website with Google Translate reveals that the stores there are a source for everything from Beaujolais Nouveau to printing from your home PC to home meal delivery. Amazing.

Here’s a sketch I made back in February, based on architect plans for the original proposal for a Fitzroy Street office building:

Here’s a photo of the approved design posted by the developers on the site last week that shows the building even more enormous than I expected:

How anyone can consider this to be a well-designed building that respects the scale of its neighbours I don’t understand. The designers did introduce some architectural flourishes — the set-back of upper floors, for example — but nothing they did serves to reduce the monolithic neighbourhood-destroying effect of the skyscraper.

Some of the people I live with have a queasy feeling about any sort of trespassing, something related to having spent childhood on a farm and thus learning from birth to respect other people’s fence-lines.

I have no such feelings myself, and welcome every chance to trespass that comes up, having a well-practised “oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed in here” defence in my hip pocket.

While I generally defer to the hesitant when in group situations, the presence of the Explorer of the Seas on the wharf in Charlottetown over the weekend was too good a prospect to pass up, and so Olle, Catherine, Oliver and I headed into uncharted waters of the newly-rebranded Historic Charlottetown Seaport to see what we could see.

To my surprise, our access to the Seaport was not restricted at all: we walked right in to the “fenced” area of the wharf, and there were no signs or guards or other restrictions to suggest we weren’t welcome. We walked into the old marine shed and down into the collection of souvenir sellers, tour hawkers and information vendors at the end of the building. It was only here that we were cut off by two private security guards who were checking IDs of passengers and crew before letting them out the back door and onto the ship.

This is all to suggest that if you’re around town on a day when a super-ship is in port and want to grab a closer look, you can walk down to the wharf and get a very close look without fear of arrest or being called out for non-touristic trespass.