I’ve been thinking a lot about something I’ve come to call funfrastructure — community infrastructure that has no purpose other than to bring fun into the lives of the citizenry. Brother Johnny came up with the excellent name.

Funfrastructure is infrastructure that’s not built to enhance the economy. Or to allow easier access to shopping. Or increase tourism numbers. Or to better dispose of sewage. It’s not roads or bridges or sidewalks (unless they happen to be otherwise needlessly beautiful). It’s not educational, or healthy. Well, it can be. But that’s not why it’s built.

Funfrastructure is infrastructure that exists just to let us have fun.

Kings Castle Provincial Park in Murray River is pure funfrastructure: how could a park filled with concrete fairy story animals, off the beaten tourist track, be considered anything else:

Victoria Park, in downtown Charlottetown, has fitness and nature overtones, but it also allows for a lot of straight-ahead fun, even if it’s just going for a walk:

In Frederiksberg Have in Denmark a few years ago we stumbled across an area of the park filled with experimental park furniture. It’s art, of course, but decidedly not of the paintings-on-walls variety, and anything you can climb on is more fun than art:

Playgrounds are almost always funfrastructure. And walking trails. The water slide at the CARI Pool in Charlottetown is funfrastructure: while the pool itself can be educational, therapeutic, or used to increase fitness, there is no other reason to go down a water slide than for the massive amounts of fun it involves.

Even a simple place to sit by the sea can be funfrastructure:

Museums can be dull and educational. But good museums — childrens museums, science museums — can be funfrastructure. Any place you have to take off your shoes, or that involves huge amounts of Lego, is probably a good candidate:

It’s important to think about funfrastructure right now because it’s the hardest kind of infrastructure to guide through the political process. And it’s extra especially hard to get built during times of constructed financial crises when we’re all supposed to stop having fun, and eat more turnips.

But funfrastructure is important: without it, well, there’s less fun. And we need more fun: it’s what builds communities, brings people away from their televisions, cures a heavy heart, and, in the end, makes life worth living.

For the past month I’ve fallen into the habit of dropping around the corner to the Seatreat for a bowl of chicken and rice soup for lunch. A descendant of Louis’ famous soup from The Town & Country, it is a cure for whatever might ail you.

Earlier this month came the announcement of a proposed tunnel under Grafton Street to connect the Confederation Court Mall with the Confederation Centre of the Arts.

The news story about the proposal mentioned “Mall owner Homberg [sic] International,” and, knowing that the same developer was associated with the Fitzroy Street skyscraper that’s going up next door to my office, I wanted to know more about this “Homburg International” company: who controlled it, what else do they own, and so on.

My first stop was a search for “Homburg” in the PEI Corporate Register. The only results there, however, were registrations for five “extra-provincial companies,” none of which was called “Homburg International.”

My suspicion was that Homburg International was likely a shareholder in an Island company that went by another name. My problem was that the Corporate Register doesn’t allow search by shareholder.

My solution to this quandary led me to create a new public-service website that I’m calling OpenCorporations and I’m opening the doors there this morning.

OpenCorporations scrapes the public data from the Corporate Register and makes it searchable in novel ways: in addition to being able to search for corporations by name you can now search for shareholders, directors and officers by name or address, by trade name, and by “nature of business.”

There’s no new information in OpenCorporations — anything you find there you could, eventually, find in the Corporate Register, albeit after a lot of laborious searching — it’s just a wrapper around corporations data that makes searching easier, and establishing connections between corporations possible.

It also allowed me to answer my Homburg question: an OpenCorporations search for “Homburg” showed me three shareholders. This led me to figure out that a Nova Scotia company called Homburg LP Management Incorporated is a shareholder in a PEI company Hardegane Investments that, in turn, is the sole shareholder in Dyne Holdings. Dyne Holding owns the Confederation Court Mall.

Why is this important? The synopsis to the film The Corporation puts it this way:

In the mid-1800s the corporation emerged as a legal “person.” Imbued with a “personality” of pure self-interest, the next 100 years saw the corporation’s rise to dominance. The corporation created unprecedented wealth but at what cost? The remorseless rationale of “externalities” (as Milton Friedman explains, the unintended consequences of a transaction between two parties on a third) is responsible for countless cases of illness, death, poverty, pollution, exploitation and lies.

While I’m not suggesting that Island corporations are necessarily responsible for the scale of negative consequence that can be found elsewhere, I think it’s incumbent on we citizens to have a better understanding of the corporations in our community, for it’s these corporations that control the places we shop, live, work, the buildings that are built in our neighbourhoods, essentially all aspects of our daily lives.

Key to this understanding is being able to understand the ownership structure of corporations, for it’s only by having a complete picture of the web of corporate inter-ownership that we can begin to truly understand how to counter their “personality of pure self-interest.”

I don’t think corporations are bad, at least not all of them — I control one myself after all — but as it’s we the people, through our government, that give license for corporations to exist in the first place, we all have an obligation to be vigilant about their activities and their motivations.

All of which is what’s led me to spend time cobbling together OpenCorporations and releasing it as a free public resource. Use it wisely.

Disclaimer: The Island being the Island, I was also the programmer that created the online version of the official Corporate Register. I have not had a relationship with the project, nor access to the code or data, for several years, however, and OpenCorporations scrapes data from the public web pages just like anyone else would. The OpenCorporations FAQ for background and to grab the raw data and scraping code for yourself.

The OpenStreetMap for Charlottetown is really coming together nicely:

Yesterday was lunch at Leonhard’s; today it was time for breakfast. The place was empty when I arrived around 8:30 a.m. (it soon became quite busy), so I was able to negotiate a complicated off-menu egg-free breakfast alternative of smoked salmon, rye bread and cheese:

It was fantastic in all regards, but really about 3 times the amount of hearty breakfast food that any human should eat at 8:30 a.m., so I might have to guide them to create some sort of cut-down breakfast special — The Rukavina? — that’s a single slice of rye with a single slice of cheese and a smattering of smoked salmon.

The coffee was as good as it was yesterday, and I tried the espresso as well as the cappuccino to get a sense of the coffee in its own element and was not disappointed.

The first-week jitters are still there — far too much “how is everything” asking and so on — but they’re having a remarkably smooth take-off all things considered.

Today was the grand opening of Leonhard’s Café & Bakery on 42 University Avenue (next door to Shaddy’s and Bluenote and just up the street from Beanz) and, of course, I went for lunch. As you might expect there were minor bits of chaos escaping in the customer service — cash register not working right, etc. — but there were seemingly endless numbers of staff milling about being helpful, and the general vibe was cool and efficient.

I had the pea soup for lunch, which came with a couple of slices of hearty rye bread (tasty and hearty):

I also had a cappuccino, which was excellent and immediately vaults Leonhard’s toward the top of the Charlottetown cappuccino ecosystem.

They’ve got an intriguingly-bound menu that looks like a small portfolio:

Open it up and find out when they’re open (Monday to Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., closed Sunday):

What they have for hot drinks:

Breakfast (a little heavy on the eggs for my tastes):

And lunch and cold drinks:

Leonhard’s is probably more of a restaurant than Charlottetown deserves; we should count ourselves lucky that Alexandra and Axel, the Leonhards of the name, think we’re ready for what they have to offer. That they’ve set up 3 minutes from my house is a great and unexpected gift.

From Guy comes a pointer to this mind-boggling demo of computer vision. Here’s what it looked like when I tried it in my office:

You can try it yourself: you just need a browser with Flash, a webcam, and a printer (or, as Guy found, the ability to sketch).

Fido, the mobile network that Rogers Wireless acquired in 2004 has re-branded itself as a low-priced alternative to the mother brand.

Compare Fido’s prepaid plans to Rogers’ prepaid plans there is some pricing advantage to Fido: they have a basic, no auto-top-up, “anytime” rate of 20 cents/minute; Rogers’ equivalent rate is double that, at 40 cents/minute. Both Rogers and Fido charge 5 cents/KB for prepaid data.