While the terrorist threat level may have lessened, this is not to suggest that CBC Charlottetown is without its challenges. Witness this shocking bottled pop controversy.

Revenues from the pop machine are in serious decline (emphasis mine).

What’s missing from this picture? The security guard post at CBC Charlottetown is history. After it was installed shortly after 9/11, every visitor to the station had to identify themselves and sign in. For regular visitors it was like a security guard was posted at the front door of a friend’s house.

Thankfully cooler heads have prevailed, perhaps realizing that the cost and energy expended by trying to product producers, reporters, hosts and technicians from terrorist threats wasn’t a worthwhile effort. When I visited today, and glided in the front door unimpeded, it felt like coming home again.

When I was a kid, music was a commodity, now it’s an ocean. I remember distinctly going into Sam the Record Man and buying 45s — two songs! — with money saved up from my paper route. Now, through iTunes, Limewire et al I have, essentially, access to all music ever made.

While this is heady and, by today’s generation expected and natural, I think that this era too will pass, and, again with technology as the enabler, we’ll return to a rather pre-historic era where music is hand-crafted and hand-delivered. After experiencing a generation of boundless, easy access to more and more generic music, I think we’ll seek out unique music experiences and a physical, more obvious connection to music makers.

By way of example, here is what arrived in the mail today from Issa (aka Jane Siberry):

Inside was a CD with two songs. I paid $15 for it — $7.50/song. I choose the price, and my receipt said:

1 x MAILORDER WILDERNESS (tour CD single) to help fund Issa recordings EF (education factor): disc=$1.5/paypal fee= .45/postage about $1 (US cities) so please pay above $3 if you want to provide revenue to Issa. = $15.00

I haven’t even listened to the music yet, and I already think of this as my most-treasured bit of music for the year.

This approach is not a return to music-as-commodity, nor is a “music as ocean.” It has more in common with patronage than anything else.

In its least soulful interpretation it is a realization of the untapped equity offered by a personal relationship — or at least the appearance or perception of a personal relationship — with the artist. In a more positive light it’s all about self-determination, disintermediation, DIY and all that other cool stuff.

But whatever it’s about, it’s really really cool to get a special, hand-addressed CD in the mail. You can’t buy the physical object anymore, but you can buy the MP3 files contained thereon.

When I first arrived on PEI, 14 years ago, I was almost immediately swept up into the maelstrom of Victoria Row, the stretch of historical Charlottetown street where the PEI Crafts Council, where I was working, was located. For some reason the businesses of the street decided that it should be me, a complete outsider (and not a business owner at that), who should lead their ragtag business organization. And so I spent a pleasant summer mediating the competing interests of the various merchants and restaurateurs (“sure having a brass band playing on the street is great for you, but it’s scaring away my customers!”).

Beyond the internecine business warfare, our little group actually managed to do some good that summer: we worked with the Red Cross to organize a big outdoor fund-raising concert to support their efforts in Rwanda.

Nobody worked harder on pulling that concert off than Sandra Furrer, owner of the Black Forest Café. Somehow, between the demands of soup making and bread baking and running her restaurant, Sandra found the time to organize sponsors, find bands to play, and myriad other tasks. She even donated her jean jacket to be raffled off (it ended up with my brother [[Steve]]).

A few years later Sandra sold the café and moved away. From time to time I would hear news of her from friends who kept in touch. And today came the sad news that, at the young age of 39, she died from cancer last month. Her friends placed an obituary in today’s paper:

May 8, 1968 — October 24, 2007 - Our friend and loved one passed away in Baden, Switzerland, from cancer. The former owner of the Black Forest Cafe in Charlottetown will be greatly missed by family and friends near and far. Sandra leaves her parents, Inge and Kurt, her siblings, Sabine (P.E.I.), Rahel and Jonas. Nieces and nephews Alice, Florian, Sarah, Allieanna, Andrin, Benjamin, Hannah and Sophie. Sandra shared her love of food and wine with colleagues and customers at the cafe and at many memorable feasts. Raised with an appreciation of opera and classical music, Sandra shared her passion for all genres of music. An avid reader, Sandra’s library was filled with books in the five languages she spoke fluently. Her passions included movies, art, photography and dance. She encouraged and displayed the work of several Island artists at the cafe. Sandra first moved to P.E.I. as an au pair and her love of children enriched many young lives. She was the proud godparent to five children, including Lucas LeClair (P.E.I.). Her ashes will be spread in one of her favourite places, Tocino, Switzerland.

Antigone, our wifi-enabled rabbit, is coming with me to CBC Charlottetown this morning to record an interview for a future episode of Spark. There’s no way I could expect Antigone to walk all the way out there, so we took the car. [[Oliver]] insisted that she wear her seatbelt:

That’s one week of my Plazes activities in iCal. Details in the Plazes blog.

I’ve gone back and forth on the “one laptop per child” program, but it was Guy who convinced me of its ultimate virtues. Starting today people in Canada and the U.S. can participate in the Give One Get One program, ordering two of the “$100 laptops” for $399, with one going overseas and the other coming to them:

From the Stumbler to Plazes Web Service Test page you can upload the logfile from a wifi-scanning application like MacStumbler or netstumbler and get XML returned that contains suggested Plazes for every MAC address you encountered.

This is a quick hack, not an official Plazes product, and is bound to disappear without notice.

By way of testing this, I took a walk around the block here at the office, and found, to my surprise, 78 wireless networks in the immediate neighbourhood. Only 3 of them were associated with Plazes.

I have a well-known aversion to acronyms, so attending my first meeting of POPS — “Parents of Prince Street” — was challenge for me. Let’s just call it “Home and School” between us. But somehow, against our better judgment (or at least mine), [[Catherine]] and I are turning out to be that sort of “active and interested in school” parent. The kind you find behind the Mcdonald’s Orange Drink dispenser at field day. So this was just part of the drill.

There are about 230 kids at Prince Street School. There were 4 parents at the meeting. Obviously other parents see the Orange Drink dispensers on the horizon and run in the other direction. And who can blame them. That said, it was interesting, and worthwhile. Here’s what I learned:

• The “zone” for Prince Street School runs from Queen Street to the Hillsborough River, and from Water Street to Allen Street.
• That said, 70% of the students at Prince Street School are bused in from Hillsborough Park, four kilometers away in the suburbs.
• If the Hillsborough Park students weren’t there, Prince Street School would have about 70 students.
• In the good old days, Prince Street School had more than 400 students. Indeed, all the students from St. Jean and West Kent — the other downtown elementary schools — could move to Prince Street and there would be enough room to house everyone.
• One of the important functions of the Home and School Association is to raise funds for items that teachers and staff identify on “wish lists” — things that aren’t otherwise paid for by the school district or the government.
• A frequent request on the wish lists is window blinds: many of the classrooms in the school are missing proper blinds. In rooms that face south this can be a big problem, as the temperature can soar. Apparently it takes up to 5 years to get this sort of thing paid for in the capital budget for the school.
• Other items on the wish lists: books, butterfly kit, microwave oven, listening centres, white boards.
• Crossing guards are paid for by, and report to, City Police, not the school.