So I’m into week number two of the fitness. My plan was to make it in to the UPEI Sports Centre three times a week; I managed two days last week because Wednesday was a snow day, and I had a sort of hybrid half-workout half-lesson day today as I had an appointment to receive my format “fitness program” for the next five weeks. But so-far, so-good.

While my activity to date has consisted, other than the initial fitness baseline, entirely of 15 to 20 minutes on the treadmill, tomorrow I’ll add something called “circuit training” into the mix: 20 to 30 minutes of work on the various weight machines, switching through upper, lower and middle-body workouts every three days. Stan my fitness man and I ran through my starting weights on each of the machines this morning, and while I think I’ll be able to pull off my scheduled circuit and repetitions, if last week’s tentative dip into the world of the machines is any guide, I may be temporary rendered motionless from the after-effects, at least for the first week.

I have, I’m happy to report, found the locker room, and thus have been able to have a bona fide change and shower experience rather than changing in the fitness centre washroom, which was not only weird, but also tainted with scent of poor hygienic practise.

With apologies for the intimate imagery, I’ve also realized that proper (or at least practical) protocol for a boxer-shorts-wearing man like me, when faced with gym shorts that have a built-in lining, is to not try to somehow squeeze the boxer shorts into a place they’re not made to fit. These are the kind of daunting practical questions that can only be answered by doing it the wrong way a few times first.

Although I’m happy to have found the locker room, it’s not exactly a Shangri-La of cleanliness, especially compared to the “you can eat off the floor” cleanliness of Reykjavik’s public pools, where not only do you remove your muddy shoes at the door (and place them in specially-provided bags to avoid locker soiling), but there are strictly-enforced “you must try off completely before leaving the shower” regulations too. The UPEI lockers are old and rusty and covered in filth, the floor is muddy from the slush of many boots, and the aesthetic is more “modern dungeon” than “spa.”

But it’s a university, and it serves the purpose, and I’m not really complaining.

In terms of the actual fitnessing, I’ve managed now to overcome almost all of the fears from the early days: I no longer fear the muscley people in the free-weights, nor the lithe people on the elliptical machines, and I can happily jog along beside intensely fit people without worrying about them turning to me and saying “hey, you’re not one of us.”

Aforementioned upcoming arduousness aside, I’ve also come to realize that, like they say, 90% of fitness is just showing up: the rest pretty well takes care of itself. Which is to say that it’s something of a minor miracle that I’ve managed to work out the logistics not only of going to making my way to class three times a week, but now tacking on a fitness elective onto the site. Once I actually get myself there, doing the fitness is easy.

Well, at least until tomorrow morning’s lower-body workout. Stay tuned.

Catherine Hennessey turned me on to Pex Mackay’s website, wherein he links to old films of Charlottetown and the Island, including Driving Through Charlottetown, 1966 and Prince Edward Island, 1952, Once Upon a Time in Parkdale. Amazing stuff.

The first time I ever met Catherine was at an event she organized at Charlottetown City Hall in the early 1990s of old films of Charlottetown; seems like it might be a good time to repeat that, as there’s a new generation of people to see them, and 15 years of history to fill in.

I uncovered an interesting connection today: both Arthur, the Trent University student newspaper, and Harold, the form of improvisation, derived their name from the same source: the Beatles’ haircut.

A little geopresence procrastinating tonight: using RFC 1876 as a guideline, I wired up my Plazes geolocation to a dynamic update of a DNS LOC resource record. This means that finding out where I am is, from the Unix command line, as simple as:

# dig +short peter.rukavina.net LOC
46 14 9.103 N 63 7 26.951 W 0.00m 10m 10m 50m

It took a little while to figure out the proper way to represent the LOC record in my rukavina.net zone file. It turns out it’s really quite simple, and exactly as described in the RFC; my issue was that I had peter.rukavina.net set up as a CNAME instead of an A record, and this caused issues. Changing it to an A record solved my problem.

I’m using a simple call to the Plazes API to grab my current location, and then using nsupdate (which is lovingly documented here) to do the dynamic update of my DNS server, feeding it a file that looks something like this:

server localhost
zone rukavina.net
update delete peter.rukavina.net. LOC
update add peter.rukavina.net. 1800 LOC 46 14 9.103 N 63 7 26.951 W 0m 10m 10m 50m
show
send

I’ve been thinking about a vendor-independent decentralized way of storing geopresence information for a long time; while using DNS might be too infrastructure-dependent to be a useful solution for everyone, it seems, at least on the surface, to be quite a dreamy way of achieving this.

Here, dear readership, is a challenge to you: for the next seven days, when walking about town, whenever you approach someone walking in the other direction before noon, say “Good Morning” to them. It doesn’t matter whether they’re young or old, familiar or a stranger, looking grumpy or looking chatty, say “Good Morning” to them all.

Then report back after seven days.

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.