Our friends [[Dale Sorensen]] and [[Sandy Nicholson]] live in an area of Prince Edward Island that was hard-hit by the ice storm this week, and thus have been, in theory, “without power” all week. Except that Dale and Sandy live “off the grid” so they’ve been as “powerful” as they regularly are. I asked Sandy to write a little bit about this; she replied:

Living off the grid can have its challenges at times, but when the provincial power system fails it makes me wonder if there isn’t a better way. Today is a bright sunny day and we have been getting free, clean energy pouring into our batteries all day from our solar panels. If only all those who are without power on PEI could have access to that same energy. I would love to see more discussion about options for people to have energy independence.

Although I don’t think that our system is necessarily the answer for everyone on PEI, we have been very happy with it. I certainly don’t have all of the answers, but I do think that it is a good time to start talking about having a different delivery system for our power.

Our solar power system contains the following components:

• 8 - BP Solar BP85 - 85 Watt Laser Grooved Solar Modules (generates electricity when exposed to sunlight)
• 8 - Surrette 6 volt, 460 Amp Hour Deep Cycle Batteries, with Hydrocaps (store electricity and provide energy)
• Trace PS2524 - 2500 Watt Sine Wave Inverter, 24 volt (converts DC (battery) power into AC (utility) power)
• Trace C40 - 40 Amp Load Controller (protects the batteries from being overcharged)
• Trace DC175 - 175 Amp Disconnect Box (over current and short circuit protection between the inverter and batteries)
• Kohler 8.5RMY - 8500 Watt Propane Generator Set (provides back-up or supplementary power)

Our power system was designed by Kevin Jeffrey, Avalon House, RR1 Belfast, PEI.

Sandy and Dale have a page on their website with more details about their house.

Reinvented Inc. came to life on May 21, 1999. Our corporate year-end is January 31, which means that today is the start of our 10th year in business.

Later this month I’m scheduled to head over to Sackville to join Shauna McCabe’s Architectures for Creativity — a “protracted symposium” at Mount Allison University — to talk about “Plazes and contemporary psychogeographies.”

I suppose it would behoove me to learn what “contemporary psychogeographies” actually means before I go…

Coming from the day-to-day world I come from, where we regularly lapse into buzzword-laced talk of XML-RPC and AJAX and “scrum forums” and “optimized user experiences,” it’s dangerous for me to point an accusing finger at the lingual arcana of other disciplines. But I do note, for the record, that I find Shauna’s world particularly laced with its own vocabulary (when’s the last time you had a casual conversation about “modernity and monumentality”).

That all said, as I scratch below this confusing surface I find intriguing overlap between the technical curiosities that underlie my interest in location and presence and what appears to be a different expression of the same curiosities from the academic side of the fence. If my “presence stream” is your “contemporary psychogeography,” then perhaps we have something to discuss?

Stay tuned for reports from the field; before you know it I’ll be blogging about “formal and more ephemeral architectures” here.

The power has been out in vast swaths of PEI this week because of an ice storm. We have been fine here in Charlottetown for the most part — our power has been out for no more than 5 hours in total — but in the central and western parts of the Island they have been dark and cold all week, and there are still 8,400 homes without power.

Maritime Electric, that provides electricity to the bulk of PEI, is obviously the focus of much of the attention here, and the public face of the company is Kim Griffin. She is doing a brilliant job, and anyone in the business of crisis management should take a page out of her book: she is honest, well-spoken, good at managing expectations, and, it would appear, able to exist without sleep.

Of course it’s the crews out in the field, both from Maritime Electric and from regional power companies lending a hand, who are bearing the brunt of the back-breaking work. But by being the straight-shooting spokesperson for the company Kim Griffin is doing them all proud. Please, give her a raise.

Remember my friend Mike from Peterborough and his film about his student loan?

Well on Sunday night [[Catherine]] and I were looking for something to watch on television — there is less and less these days — and flipping through the channels I happened, by accident, to catch Mike’s latest film, The Making of Lost in Canada playing on CTV.

It’s a great film; not only is it very, very funny, but Mike captures a sense of “Eastern Ontario DIY culture” better than anything I’ve ever seen or read.

A love song for Lisbon, and my mother from the Saturday travel section of The Globe and Mail. Doyle is my favourite Globe writer.

As I feared would happen, we’re now starting to see the results of so-called common assessments of Prince Edward Island grade 3 students used to advocate:

• School test results prompt requests for help
• PEI - Poor Education Results - Is it the schools???

No matter what your position might be on the tests and whether or not the school-by-school results should have been released, surely we can all agree that it’s not proper to extrapolate anything profound from how kids respond to a multiple choice test about Bobby’s Big Toe.

There may indeed be problems with our schools, but these test results aren’t a useful measure of what those problems are: they are a flawed statistical snapshot of a very thin slice of what’s “important” about education. To use them to make policy and resource decisions runs the risk of ignoring where and what the real educational challenges are.

Back in November I made a donation to the Give One Get One project of the One Laptop Per Child initiative: as a result, one laptop goes to a “child in a developing nation” and one laptop came to Charlottetown. It arrived a few weeks ago while I was in Berlin.

Oliver and I have been experimenting with it ever since (we took it “on the road” to Casa Mia this morning for the first time). After the quick and flashy world of Barbie, Dora, Elmo and friends on the Mac, the so-called “XO laptop” seems somewhat bizarre to a wide-eyed child: it’s got a very simple user interface, is focused on producing rather than consuming, and it’s a somewhat sluggish compared to modern rocket-fueled (and expensive) computers.

Which is not to say it’s without its virtues: it’s rugged, has a kid-sized keyboard, is easy to figure out how to use, and is surprisingly well-equipped (it has a built-in still and video camera, for example). And of course “under the hood” it’s built entirely on open-source software, which makes it ideal for taking a DIY approach to technology. Which is a pretty good approach to enable kids around the world to take: I’d far rather support efforts to get kids hacking the Linux kernel than efforts to enable them to become a better Disney customer.

Being of the inclination that I am, my own first XO project was to write a Plazer. Fortunately this was a relatively easy thing: combine the new Plazes API with the helpful work of the maemoplazer team (a tool written in Python, the “native language,” so to speak, of the XO) and some good documentation for setting up emulation on my Mac and with two or three hours work I had the basics hacked together:

I’ve still got a lot to learn about PyGTK, so the UI is the very most basic. But the OLPC Plazer grabs the MAC address of the laptop to pre-populate the “Where?” field, accepts a “What?” status message and creates an activity on Plazes.com.

The source code for the OLPC Plazer is rough around the edges and undocumented, but I think it’s worthwhile to get it out there for others as an example. Credit needs to go to the maemoplazer team which provided the most valuable bits of the Python. If you’re new to developing for the XO and its “Sugar,” you will find the Hello World tutorial useful — it was my starting place.

Ruth Radetsky and Edward Hasbrouck are in the middle of a year-long trip around the world, and Ruth’s trip blog has regular updates from the road. It’s interesting stuff — a mixture of the philosophical and the practical — and far more compelling than Frommer-style travel writing. ATMs, the Internet, and Foreign Policy, the most recent update, is a tale of what happens when all the complicated arrangements to make sure the bills back home get paid on time fall apart.

If you’re curious about what actually happened at PlazeCamp, I’ve just posted the demo session video on the Plazes weblog (since moved to The Internet Archive).