Nokia Sports Tracker is a nifty application from Nokia itself that you can use to track your workouts. As I have never, technically, had a workout before, this seemed like a good opportunity to leverage my geekliness with a dab of fitness. So now that spring has sprung, I ripped my bicycle from the back mud room and took the long way to work, stopping at Friendly Pharmacy to check out the nascent Uberloo.

The GPS was running and the Sports Tracker application was tracking over the entire grueling 2.4 km, and you can see the result online.

I obviously don’t update my wardrobe very often:

[[Johnny]] and I drove down from PEI to New Hampshire over Tuesday and Wednesday. The weather was beautiful, and I was glad to have Johnny along, as the hours went by much more quickly with our witty aphorism-trading filling the air.

This being a rare road trip for me — I prefer to emit my carbon higher in the atmosphere for maximum deleterious effect — it was a good time to take the GPS features of my new [[Nokia N95]] out for a ride. Not only does the phone have an internal GPS, but its Nokia Maps application purports to be a reasonable approximation of a in-car navigation system.

Things didn’t exactly go well.

First, it’s obvious that Nokia Maps, although it will run without an Internet connection (it has a basic set of street maps built-in), is relatively useless without one: it’s rare that you don’t know that you’re on the I95 going south (which is on the default maps) — when you need help is when you pull off the road in Fredericton looking for a place to eat lunch. Which is where you need the street-level maps that the application needs to pull from the network. Without them, we were left with our GPS location represented on a vague outline of Fredericton; more distracting and frustrating than useful.

After lunch at Ponderosa we used the city-wide free wifi to load up a route from Fredericton to the Maine border at Houlton. This worked well and quickly, and the man in the machine accurately guided us onto the highway north (“turn left in 300m” and so on). Unfortunately something caused the phone to reboot itself after about 20 minutes, and once it rebooted the route was lost and, without a network connection, we couldn’t re-establish it.

Stopping in Houlton we found free wifi at the tourist information centre, but all attempts to plot a route from Houlton to the door of our hotel in Waterville failed with a “no route” error. Sigh. So we had to rely on our wits (and Maine’s excellent highway signage) to guide us in.

The next morning we needed to stop at the Target store in Augusta on our way south. Although Nokia Maps couldn’t find the location with its address search, I found it in Google Maps and created a Plaze, and magically teleported it into the phone as a landmark. And then let the navigation begin.

Things started off well, as we got routed off the highway, told when to turn where, and seemed to be in a likely Target-holding neighbourhood. But then the phone told us to turn left down an unlikely residential street, and we decided to overrule it. But then, when Target didn’t rise out of the mists, we stopped and asked a man sweeping up a parking lot (we dubbed him “The Old Prospector”) where Target was. Because of his prospector-like demeanor, I became immediately afraid of him and so when he said things like “you know where the Kennebec Journal office is?” I would say “yep.” So when we were done with him we were as lost as we ever were.

I pulled a U-turn, and decided to put faith back in the GPS. We took the originally designated turn, drove into the residential area, and about a mile later the friendly robot GPS man said “you have arrived at your destination.” Except that we were in front of a bunch of 20 young children playing outside a home-daycare operation. They did not appear to have any Michael Graves-deigned tea kettles on offer.

After 10 more minutes of bemused wandering, we stopped at a tire store and got more helpful directions, albeit ones that included the phrase “go through the roundabout, then, as if your brakes were failing, roll on down the hill.” But they worked, and we found Target. On the other side of town.

This particular failure was really more a Google Maps failure than a Nokia Maps failure: this is where Google things Target is and it’s actually way over here. So our GPS got us to the right place, it just wasn’t the right place.

At this point, we quietly put the GPS and Nokia Maps to sleep for a while. Of course this may have contributed to our dipping well into Massachusetts on our way to southern New Hampshire (after an ill-conceived dodge off the highway that let us through Haverill on on the 495 south). But at least we were able to recover from that by navigating on our wits alone (as soon as I93 appeared I knew where we were).

As it stands, Johnny may have lost all faith in Nokia Maps as an aid to better living. I’m still willing to suspend my disbelief, but only because I have confidence that, with tenacity, any piece of technology can be wrenched to do what you want.

In the meantime, we may end up in Florida en route back to PEI on Friday.

The lads from upstairs and I have begun to assemble the horses for the next incarnation of Zap Your PRAM, our quinquennial fall conference about stuff that we find interesting.

This time we’re taking over the Dalvay-by-the-Sea on the Island’s north shore, and the conference is a sort of north-shore nerdy Sandals — albeit with less “romping about” — with accommodations, meals and conference fee all rolled into one.

As with last time, we’re struggling with the tensions between our “exclusive by-invitation-only” impulses and our “hey, come on up and hang out” impulses. Ultimately we’ve decided that Zap is more like a 3-day dinner party than it is like breakfast in bed for 400,000, and so that’s the way we’re playing it.

Best case scenario, we get a hearty brew of interesting minds, and all the people who should be there, for whatever reason, end up there. Worst case scenario, we end up eating foie gras in a chilly mansion for three days wondering what the hell happened. And so it goes without saying that if you read about ZAP and it feels like it’s for you, you should tell us immediately.

Here’s a bookmarklet that makes it easy to turn Plazes into Nokia Maps landmarks. First, drag this link onto your browser toolbar:

Next, visit the page of a Plaze. Here’s the one for my office, for example. Now click the “Make Landmark” bookmark on your toolbar: after a brief pause you’ll be prompted to save a file.

Save this file and copy it to your Nokia Maps-enabled mobile, and open it. You’ll now be able to save the location and details of the Plaze as a landmark, which you can then use just like any other landmark in Nokia Maps. I’ve prepared a brief how-to screencast that illustrates all the steps:

My longtime colleague, and valued friend, John Pierce, from The Old Farmer’s Almanac and Yankee Publishing, died suddenly this week at the age of 59.

In the late-1990s, after I’d worked for several years with the Yankee, John took on responsibility for the company’s websites and became my day-to-day liaison. Later it was John who convinced me to give up working with the Province of PEI and devote myself full-time to Yankee.

In addition to negotiating contracts, charting the overall course for Almanac.com and YankeeMagazine.com, and advocating for the web within Yankee, John was also my reliable source for company gossip, an excellent host for my quarterly visits to Dublin, NH, and a judicious saver of Car and Driver back-issues for me (after an off-the-cuff remark about how jealous I was of his subscription).

After reading in John’s official biography that he was once “an award-winning poet and… an accomplished student of botany” I took to referring to him has “my friend the poet biologist,” and although it was in jest, it also accurately reflected the breadth of John’s interests, his wit, and his willingness to engage in passionate discussion about the minutiae of almost anything.

Several years ago, for example, on one of my regular visits to Yankee, we ended up discussing some obscure aspect of the U.S. ZIP code system. While it was tangentially related to the real stuff of our work, it was ultimately a minor, albeit interesting, curiousity. But with John’s blessing and encouragement I headed off to the Dublin Post Office to consult with the town postmaster to get to the bottom of it.

John would happily talk to me for hours about how Wal-Mart manages its magazine inventory, how solar activity affects the weather, the merits of open source vs. proprietary software, the Indian caste system, or why there is a position of Measurer of Bark on Dublin Town Council. That said, he was neither a pedant nor someone who would “hold forth:” he was simply a curious man who appreciated the curiousity of others.

To say nothing of his dry wit and ability to trade in sarcasm. After once reading that John Irving had gone to Phillips Exeter Academy, John’s alma mater, I asked him whether they knew each other. It turns out that Irving was a little older, but their time there did overlap:

We passed each other in the “green room” of a Denver TV station a few years back and I had the chance to say “John, how are you? I haven’t seen you in years.” He just looked puzzled….

John once related to me the story of how it had come to pass that our colleague Steve Muskie (Steve is the guy who originally brought me to Yankee back in 1996) came to be involved in a helicopter crash while on a photography assignment for Yankee:

And for some reason he’s [Steve] still upset about the time the helicopter crashed while he was shooting aerial photographs of the Thimble Islands.

He had called me the day before that to ask if he could rent a helicopter. The conversation went something like this:

“How much will that cost, Steve?”

“They’re all around $1200 to $1400 per hour.”

“We can’t justify that,” I said, “But if you can find something for about half that we could spring for an hour.”

The next day he found one for $700 per hour. We just forgot to ask if it would stay in the air for the entire time.

What was perhaps the zenith of our curiousity-trading relationship came in 2004 when I decided to immerse myself in that year’s U.S. Presidential Election, from New Hampshire Primary in January to Election Day in November: John took on the responsibility for explaining it all to me, and became a sort of electoral spirit-guide. We seemed to take equal pleasure in the prospect of hearing John Edwards speak in a bowling alley in Merrimack (with special guest Glenn Close), and more pleasure still when Edwards was late and we both left early. And in November John invited me down around the back of Dublin Town Hall on Election Day to watch him vote.

More than anyone else John understood how important the sheer improbability of Yankee is to the success of the enterprise. He was able to simultaneously understand that it made no sense at all to run a national publication with a circulation of 4 million from a rambling campus of cobbled-together old buildings in rural New Hampshire and also to celebrate that very fact as being integral to the spirit of the place.

While more a polymath than an eccentric himself, John certainly appreciated the eccentricities of others (a good quality to have working at Yankee, of necessity a company made up almost entirely of eccentrics — how else do you find staff equally skilled in begonia planting schedules and the position of the moon in the astrological zodiac?).

Back in 2003 I made the case with John that it would be perfectly fine for me to relocate to France for a month, continuing with my web work for Yankee all the while. After some initial hesitation, he trusted that I’d make it work; later that year he emailed me a note that suggested he understood my motivations:

I think you want to wander the world and still be able to make living with your computer sitting in little coffee shops or town squares from Provence to Croatia and anywhere else your whim takes you. Banagalore is so wired you probably don’t even need a computer to access the Web. Just inhale and you’re on line….

It’s so rare to have a client who both understands your passions and gives you the latitude to celebrate them.

The same trust and appreciation for the improbable manifested when I proposed to solve a labour shortage on the web team by recruiting my brother Johnny into the company. Johnny, an English major, knew nothing about the web, and had never written a line of code in his life. But I told John that he was a quick study, and that we could leverage our brotherly bond to good end. John gave the go ahead, and Johnny’s been a member of the team since.

By my count I’ve been down to Dublin fifteen times in the last 5 years. And every time I made the trip John welcomed me like a long-lost relative. He and his wife (and co-conspirator at Yankee) Sherin would always have me to supper at their house, often a supper of southern Indian food cooked by John himself. I watched the World Series with them, saw their sons Jamie and Alex grow from young kids into teenagers into young men, and felt as welcomed in their family as anywhere.

John’s unexpected death — he suffered a series of strokes a week ago and never recovered — is an unimaginable loss for Sherin and their children. I take some comfort knowing that John’s love of life, his insatiable appetite for knowledge, and kindness and strength are all qualities that will live on through them.

I’ll miss John Pierce more than I can say.

Walking down Chestnut Street this morning I got to experience the full effect of the monolithic snap-together-from-a-kit building that’s been dropped on Euston Street to house AIM/Trimark:

While it’s difficult to argue that what was there before was any great architectural marvel — a motley collection of two story buildings were torn down to make way — the new building isn’t exactly built in a “we’re glad to be a new member of your neighbourhood” style. It’s rather more “this could be suburban Indianapolis for all we care.”

How much more of downtown Charlottetown are we going to allow to be auctioned off to multi-national companies to set up cube farms before we realize that we’ve turned our neighbourhoods into architectural wastelands?

If you’ve got a subscription list of podcasts inside iTunes, and you want to subscribe to the same podcasts in the Nokia Podcasting mobile application, it turns out that it’s a really easy transition.

First, export your iTunes subscription list as an OPML file. Just select Podcasts in iTunes, and the from the menu select File \| Export, and make sure OPML is the export format:

Next send the exported OPML file to your mobile device. You can do this in a number of ways; I use the Bluetooth File Exchange application on my Mac:

Then it’s as simple as opening the OPML file on your Nokia mobile, which will prompt you to “Import OPML file to Podcasting directories?” Once you do this import, go to your Podcasting application, and you’ll see a new directory, named after your OPML file, with your podcasts in it; you can then select which you want to subscribe to: