It’s been 24 hours now since the Rogers Wireless network has been down, leaving anyone with a Rogers mobile phone without service for more than a day. I just phoned the local Rogers store at the Charlottetown Mall and they have no information about when service will be restored; navigating the seemingly endless telephone tree on the theoretical 1-877-764-3772 service number reveals no more information, although I’ve been attached to the “ticket,” whatever that means.

This can be added to the list of reasons why we need more wireless competition here in Canada. Rogers has the only GSM network in the country; when they go down, so does GSM.

I’ve coded up a Quicksilver Plug-in for Plazes. If you grok Quicksilver and want a seamless way to updated your Plazes status that bypasses the regular Mac Plazer, then give it a try. Of course there’s a Plazes Group where you can offer comments, suggestions and bug reports.

I began the day yesterday with a call from [[Johnny]] alerting me to the fact that [[Yankee]]’s web and database servers were offline. I piled [[Oliver]] into the car and we sped off to the office to see what there was to be seen. Turns out that the venerable Peer1 New York colo facility, famous for powering through the 2003 blackout, had an “unexpected power loss.” They were awfully good about communication — I got a call both from the NOC in Vancouver and from their man on the ground in New York — and we were back online in about 30 minutes.

Servers running smoothly we piled back into the car and sped off to the [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] for our usual, and then spent a few hours prowling the suburban retail jungle, emerging with a new wired Mighty Mouse (the wireless one has been too sluggish for my tastes), a 50-pack of CD-R and a box of 15 ballpoint pens. The cap off our suburban experience, we took in the 1:00 p.m. showing of The Simpsons Movie at the mall.

Which turns out to have been a good show to go to, given that as soon as we got back home the thunderstorm started and the power flickered on and off for several hours.

I left Oliver at home and spend a couple of flickering hours at the office, punctuated by one complete blackout that lasted only a few minutes, and I was back home at 6:00 p.m. to pick up [[Catherine]] to drive out to the Trailside Café for the Gordie Sampson.

We had a great meal before the show — I had a spanakopita that rivaled any I’ve ever eaten — and while we had the place almost to ourselves at 6:30 p.m. when we arrived, by 8:00 p.m. showtime the small room had filled with an audience.

Judging from the makeup of the audience, the heart of the Gordie Sampson demographic on PEI is the married mid-50s male with a predilection for hooting once fueled with a few beers. They were mostly harmless and certainly enthusiastic, especially as the night played on. One does have to wonder where all the young rockers were, however.

The storm that had circled over Charlottetown in the afternoon followed us to Mount Stewart by the time the show started and so the evening was peppered with the occasional brownout. All of which only heightened the intimacy of what is ultimately an absurdly good room in which to hear live music, especially of the ilk that in other circumstances would fill, if not stadia, at least big theatres.

The only stain on the evening was the lurking presence of Lord Voldemort (you remember, this guy) at the next table. And thus the ever-present, if completely irrational, fear of imminent disembowelment. Lucky for me, Lennie Gallant was sitting on the other side of us, and so my scenario-planning included situations where Lennie would leap to my defense with some freaky Rustico-style jujitsu should I be assailed.

In the end Voldemort kept to himself, no eye contact was made, and I lived to fight another day.

Gordie Sampson is certainly a virtuoso, and he put on an entertaining couple of sets. If you ever have the opportunity to take in his show, especially at a venue like the Trailside, do so. We capped the night be staying just long enough after the closing credits to hear the aforementioned Lennie Gallant play a tune.

We piled into the car and sped off home, watching the flashes of lightning move east over Kings County.

If you’re keen to know the current status of the 100 Prince Street wireless network, tune in to the live XML file with network status information on all the nodes in the network.

[[Oliver]] and I had just returned home from watching The Simpsons Movie this afternoon when the heavens opened up and dropped buckets of rain on downtown Charlottetown. Here’s the tape:

Rogers Wireless mobile phone service has been down in Charlottetown since at least 2:30 p.m. today. A call to the local retail store confirms that their entire network is down on PEI because “a tower got fried.”

I ordered a trio of Meraki Mini wireless access points last week, and they arrived yesterday and I installed two of them last night at 100 Prince Street in downtown Charlottetown.

One is pointing out the front window, the other is upstairs at the back; in theory this should flood a circle around our house with wifi, SSID “100 Prince Street” which you are welcome to borrow while you are in the neighbourhood.

The tiny Meraki access points are truly painless to install: I plugged one in to the cable modem, the other stands alone. They powered on, found the Internet (and each other) and I configured them through the web-based dashboard that Meraki offers.

The magic of the Meraki (over your run-of-the-mill wireless access point) is that they automatically work together, one getting Internet from the other. So, in other words, you can blanket a large area with wifi with only a single wired Internet connection at the very beginning of the chain.

If you want to outfit your neighbourhood, apartment building, campus, commune, etc. with wifi, this certainly seems a cheap and effective way to do so.

Back last year at the tail end of my trip to Copenhagen for [[reboot]], [[Nikolaj Nyholm]] and I took a walk in a park and he related to me his new involvement with a bunch of brilliant image processing minds. That “involvement” eventually became a living, breathing project, termed Polar Rose.

The company’s task is to develop applications that will “give meaning to digital photos and allow these to be indexable just like text documents on the web are today.” In its simplest form this means “automatically figuring out who’s in photos.”

After a long development ramp-up, Polar Rose launched a private beta of the current version of their web-based system today, and after a bit of ego-surfing to web to locate photos of myself, this is what it looks like:

In its current incarnation the Polar Rose beta is built around a Firefox plug-in that, as you browse the web, sticks a clickable icon on top of any image where it can pick out a person’s face. At your option you can click on the image and provide the name of the person it has identified. This data gets sent to the Polar Rose server where it joins their index of “who’s in photos.”

Ultimately — although not yet in its public form — their technology will be able to automatically identify people in photos using the clues it has obtained from previous human-submitted identifications.

Obviously this has some significant implications for privacy. For some people it’s problematic to have anonymous photos of themselves on the web, let along ones that can be Googled. In this blog post from last December Nikolaj attempts to address some of these concerns. This is certainly an ongoing issue, and one they’ll have to be ever-vigilant about addressing as they move forward.

As with other self-inflicted wounds against my personal privacy (see [[Plazes]] et al), I think it’s important to dive headlong into experiments like Polar Rose precisely because of the privacy implications of the technology. I don’t want Wal-Mart to be able to auto-tag me as I roll in the front door, but you gotta imagine that it’s coming soon. To say nothing of CSE and their ilk.

At the very least I want to have some personal familiarity with the technology terrain before this happens so that I can understand what evil can be wrought against me; otherwise I’m just a naive sitting duck.

All that said, the technology that underlies Polar Rose, when it’s working full tilt, is one of those things that will appear tantamount to magic (it’s already pretty magical that it can figure what’s a face and what isn’t). In other words, it’s pretty cool.

It’s been almost two weeks since I released PresenceRouter into the wild. While it’s been interesting for me to deploy an actual working desktop application for the first time, more interesting has been to see how, in a small way, an application can stitch together disparate services, services that might even otherwise be seen as competitors, into a cooperative eco-system.

While the application has [[Plazes]] at its heart, here’s an example (and here’s another) where I’ve been providing PresenceRouter support inside [[Jaiku]] (that has a way of commenting on presence streams that Plazes doesn’t).

I knew that there was support to offer because I have a Google Alert set up for keyword “PresenceRouter” that pointed the way.

Since I’ve been sending my presence information to Twitter, I’ve started to actually use Twitter again, and I’ve been using its “direct message” feature to communicate there about things that, in a sense, “happened” on Plazes.

And, even though I have my suspicions that it might all be a house of cards built of University of Phoenix advertising, I even find that, now that my presence trickles through there too, I’m visiting Facebook more often.

All of which is causing me to be more vigilant about my Plazes presence, and a more active user of Plazes itself.

After two weeks, the lines between Jaiku and Plazes and Twitter and Facebook are starting to blur and I’ve begun to conceptualize them as neighbourhoods of the same town, or tools in the same toolbox with different strengths, rather than distinct destinations unto themselves.

Last week my friend Fred Louder gave me an issue The New Quarterly in which some of his poems ran. In the same issue there was an essay by David Helwig about his life in the theatre scene in Peterborough, Ontario in the 1950s.

Having wandered on the fringes of the theatre scene of Peterborough in the late 1980s, I was struck by how much of what David wrote about echoed my own experiences 30 years later. Peterborough it seems, especially the ragamuffin world of small theatre, never changes.

Something born out for me again after reading about plans for a new theatre space in the city. A space that references The Union, a earlier incarnation of much the same thing that I was present at the conception and birth of (including one particularly drawn-out session in which the name of the space was chosen; in the end it came down to “Kitchen Sink” vs. “The Union”).

Just to neatly tie this thread together, it seems that David Helwid is, in addition, the father of Maggie Helwig, a friend of many Peterborough friends, including my friend Stephen Good. Who, if memory serves, was a member of the cast of at least a few productions mounted at the aforementioned Union.

I have now passed the David Helwig essay on to my friend Ann, resident of Peterborough in the 1970s, to confirm or deny that the scene of that era blew the same way.