I just had lunch with Ray Brow and got a debriefing on the Festival of Small Halls, an event, sadly, that I missed entirely as I was off the Island over the week it was taking place.

The Small Halls idea is simple: hold a decentralized week-long festival of traditional music, art and dance in the small halls of Prince Edward Island. The benefits are obvious: small halls and small communities get much-needed investment in infrastructure and attention, local musicians get work and new audiences, visitors get to experience real Island culture.

It’s the anti-Aerosmith.

From all reports the inaugural year was an unqualified success, so I’m sure they’ll be back again next year. And next year I’ll plan to be around.

Carlo Vespa Rent will rent you a Vespa in Berlin. Pointer from unlike (which is a good destination in its own right).

A helpful reader points out that on the Canada Revenue Agency’s Late remitting / Failure to remit page has been updated with a new penalty structure:

For remittances and payments that are due after February 26, 2008 and under proposed changes, the 10% penalty below will be replaced by a graduated penalty as follows:

• 3% if the amount is one to three days late;
• 5% if it is four or five days late;
• 7% if it is six or seven days late; and
• 10% if it is more than seven days late.

This means, for example, that a $4000 payment that’s a day late will now exact a $120 penalty instead of a $400 penalty. Which is welcome relief for someone like me who is inevitably late with payroll remittances at least once a year.

As usual, my return to the halcyon shores of Prince Edward Island last week after two exciting weeks in Copenhagen resulted in a bout of culture shock that could only be cured by an impromptu family vacation to Halifax.

This was aided significantly by my first Priceline hotel booking experience, which netted us an $80 room at The Westin Nova Scotian.

The last time we were in Halifax in the summer was last August. I groused then about the $53 cost to fill up my Jetta; this year it was $71. Here’s what we did for maximum fun this year:

After arriving late on Thursday night, we got up Friday morning and headed to Cabin Coffee for breakfast (coffee not the best, but atmosphere are cabin-like as ever, and Oliver likes the cinnamon rolls). We then walked over to the ferry docks and took the ferry to Dartmouth and then caught the #60 Eastern Passage bus out to Fisherman’s Cove. Pretty standard maritime tourist stuff — scenic views, museum with lobster dioramas, etc. Good coffee at Sea Gulps, though, and getting there was half the fun.

Upon return to downtown Halifax we took a tour of Province House, which is just like Province House in Charlottetown, but with an exagerated sense of self-importance, and interior decor that’s a lot more frilly around the edges. The people were friendly, however, and it was nice to be in a legislature that was more concerned with matters provincial than national.

Friday night for supper we went to The Wooden Monkey. Sweltering hot inside, but an excellent server and very tasty food. Highly recommended.

On Saturday morning, after excellent coffee at Caffe Ristretto, the allure of the Theodore Tugboat tour of Halifax Harbour proved too great to resist, so while Catherine went shopping, Oliver and I headed out on the water (if you’re looking for a good Halifax business idea, set up a sunscreen kiosk on the waterfront; it’s almost impossible to find it anywhere, and it’s where you need it most).

The tour was actually rather fantastic: Oliver was entertained by the Theodoreness of it all; I just enjoyed being out on the water.

Saturday afternoon Catherine and Oliver headed to the Museum of Natural History which, from all reports, was a great visit (turtles were touched, butterflies marvelled at, etc.). I took the opportunity to grab a coffee at Steve-o-Reno’s after a planned shoe-shopping venture ended in lack-of-selection catatonia.

Saturday for supper we followed a review in The Coast to Chabaa Thai Restaurant. We should have gone to Talay Thai: Chabaa’s food was bland, the portions much, much too large, and the service spotty. I don’t think we’ll be back.

After supper we headed over to the Park Lane multiplex to see WALL-E. We all enjoyed it, and basically everything that Mathew Rainnie said in his Compass review is true.

Sunday morning we grabbed breakfast at The Wired Monk, stopped at Pete’s Frootique in Bedford on the way out of town, made a perfectly-timed run for the ferry back to the Island, and were back home by supper time.

The irony of all this? We spent the entire weekend inside the prescribed tourist zones and had lots of fun, thus calling into question my entire Mask Tourism philosophy.

I’ve just released a new version of PresenceRouter that supports routing your Plazes geo-presence via Instant Message (using Adium). This means that you can now update services like Identi.ca that don’t have an API, but do support updating via IM.

To use this new capability, just add a new service in PresenceRouter, setting the type to Instant Message and the IM Name to the name of the contact you’ve entered in Adium.

From Surveillance Camera Players: How to Make Maps of Camera Locations. See also How to Stage Your Own Surveillance Camera Theater.

Bio Mapping:

The central notion of Bio Mapping is that we can make better sense of our own body data than a disinterested observer. By recording our own body’s bio data along with our geographic location we can review the information and make meaningful decisions about our life.

All over Copenhagen I saw signs for Is. For example, here at Boys Shawarma og Isbar on Nørrebrogade:

Is, it seems, is the Danish short-hand for “ice cream,” although it technically translates simply to “ice.” Which is fine, until you come to Iceland. Where, in Icelandic, a language with the same roots as Danish, the name of the country is Ísland. Which, to English eyes, looks a lot like Island.

Suffice to say that when arriving jetlagged in Keflavik and trying to navigate the currency jungle enough to buy a coffee, having currency that doesn’t say “Iceland” on it anywhere, but rather Ísland, is very confusing.

Something even more confusing: the Danish word for “Island” is simply Ø. Weird.

Over the weekend I descended into the heart of “tourist Copenhagen” — the area that radiates out from Tivoli. The main shopping street, Strøget, was stuffed full of tourists doddering along with their maps out and daypacks bulging, and the Metro station’s ticket machines had line-ups 10 deep of confused looking visitors unable to parse the local transit system.

Tourists are annoying, and my trip into their enclave was the least pleasant part of my time in the city. The irony of writing this as a tourist myself is not lost on me. But man did I ever breath easier once I got back out of the melee.

Which got me thinking: the least interesting parts of any city are those that are frequented by tourists. Think of the Halifax Historic Properties, or Peakes Quay in Charlottetown, or Quincy Market in Boston: worldwide these tourist ghettos are increasingly morphing into one giant mass of Beanie Baby and homemade soap shops, “authentic” pubs, faux heritage pageants, and souvenir stalls.

Every city has its official “tourist zone” — in Copenhagen, for example, it’s essentially the the city bike zone (the area where you’re allowed to take free city bicycles), and here’s the tourist map of Charlottetown.

So here’s my idea: in the same way you can now buy a DVD player that strips out profanity, why not publish “masks” that can be applied over city maps that filter out the naughty tourist bits — cartographic “here be boredom” devices. Take it to the next level and you could integrate the masks with mobile devices so that they would vibrate and flash when in danger of veering out of the interesting parts of a city.

Like last year, I used a Telia pre-paid SIM card in my mobile phone this year in Denmark. The SIM costs 100 DKK, which includes 100 DKK of credit. I used the phone mostly for data access, both also sent some SMS and made a few calls. I checked my balance on the way onto the airplane yesterday, and it seems that, for me, 100 DKK is exactly the right amount of credit to have, as my balance on leaving Denamrk was 0,02 DKK:

Here’s how my usage broke down over the two weeks:

• Sending 16 SMS: 32,10 DKK
• Data (email, web): 55,32 DKK
• Received 6 calls: 0 DKK
• Placed 4 calls: 12,56 DKK

The big sinkholes were the ten SMS I sent to “overseas” numbers — friends in Sweden and Germany who happened to be also in Denmark at the time — at 3,00 DKK each.

The 55,32 DKK (about $11 Canadian) got me 2766 KB (or 2.7 MB) of data, which I used mostly to check email when out and about, and to surf TinyPlazer.com and Jaiku. The same usage on my pre-paid plan on Rogers Wireless in Canada would have cost me $138 (where the rate is 5 cents/KB).