My tickets are booked for reboot 9.0 in Copenhagen at the end of May.

I’d been debating whether or not I could get to reboot this year — my third time. I actually registered for the conference, on spec, back in mid-March, and then waited and waited until Premier Binns called an election. He finally did, for May 28th.

Which means that I’ll be up late on the night of the 28th stoking the furnace that drives the election results, then getting up at 4:30 a.m. for an early flight to Montreal, spending the day in Montreal, and then catching an overnight Swiss flight to Copenhagen by way of Denmark.

Although it’s somewhat inconvenient on the front end, I simply couldn’t bear the thought of taking Air Canada cross the Atlantic again, nor the thought of wading through that security line at Heathrow. I’m flying on points to Montreal, paying my way on Swiss; total cost, all-in, was $1,100, which isn’t a steal of a deal, but is still pretty good for late May.

On the way back I’m flying out from Berlin — I’ll get from Copenhagen to Berlin by a method to be determined later — where I hope, among other things, to visit the home Plaze.

They’ve been installing big solar panels on the roof of the Jean Canfield Building in [[Charlottetown]] all week long. They started with the ironwork, and today they started hoisting up the actual panels:

After making breakfast in bed with for Catherine on Mother’s Day, I headed over to [[Beanz]] to grab breakfast myself before heading into the office to get a little work done. I ordered my customary cappuccino and toasted bagel and sat down to read Saturday’s Globe and Mail along the front counter looking out over Queen Street.

Before I had a chance to take a sip of my coffee, someone — I won’t name them here because it might only serve to make a bad situation worse — came up behind me, said hello, and then asked me about something I’d posted here about them on my weblog. I attempted to explain my reasons for making the post, but before I could finish they responded by saying “so you think you’re pretty fucking smart” and then took a swing at the full cup of coffee in my hand, spilling it across the counter and over my newspaper and breakfast.

Without another word they went out the front door and sped off in their car.

The Criminal Code of Canada says that “assault,” among other things, happens when someone:

…attempts or threatens, by an act or a gesture, to apply force to another person, if he has, or causes that other person to believe on reasonable grounds that he has, present ability to effect his purpose

By that definition, I think I was assaulted this morning. I wasn’t injured, at least not physically, and certainly my assault pales in comparison to the kinds of things that others suffer every day. But violence is violence, it it ain’t fun no matter the degree.

After taking an hour to settle down — the kind folks at Beanz who witnessed the incident and helped me mop up the coffee gave me another cappuccino on the house — I decided it was important to report the incident to the police. I didn’t want to have this person charged with a crime, but I wanted their actions on the record. I called the Charlottetown City Police and they took my details and promised to have someone call me back.

About 30 minutes later I got a call from an officer. I explained the details of the incident, tried to give a little bit of the context, and asked them what they suggested. They told me they would go and talk to the person in question to explain that their actions were “an inappropriate response.”

I suppose this morning serves to refute, at least a little, my suggestion that, when it comes to Prince Edward Islanders:

…for the most part, things work out: Islanders have a way of relating to each other that allows people of wildly divergent political, religious or philosophical views to, well, joke with each other.

Certainly I’ve written some things that have been critical of my assailant in this space. But, going back now through the archives, I think my comments have always been fair. Forthright, perhaps. Rhetorical. But fair.

Which, of course, is completely beside the point. Even if my comments hadn’t been fair, the “appropriate response” to words is not violence. Indeed, as it says here:

In Canada, a criminal act is seen as a crime against all of Canadian society, since all people have an interest in seeing that the rule of law is upheld. Therefore, an individual who has been the victim of a crime does not have to handle the charge against the wrongdoer.

In other words, when someone gets angry about something that’s written about them and responds by assaulting the writer, they’re working to erode freedom of expression for all of us.

And of course it’s working already: why am I really not giving you the name of the person who took a swipe at me this morning? Because I’m afraid that if I do they’ll only get angrier, and the next time I meet them instead of spilling my coffee they’ll throw a punch. And that’s too bad.

Seventy years ago today my grandparents, Ross Caswell and Louise Fraser, were married. I never met my grandmother — she died in 1942 — but you can certainly see her reflected in my mother. Here’s a photo of Ross and Louise:

There’s an interesting new service called Wakoopa that combines a wee daemon that runs on your PC or Mac with a website to display information about the applications you use.

In other words, if [[Plazes]] answers the question “where am I?” and [[Jaiku]] answers the question “what am I doing?” then Wakoopa answers the question “what am I running?”

It feels sort of weird to be painting this information on so public a billboard — more self-intrusive than telling the world where I am all the time.

Today, for example, I used Coda for 3 hours, 7 minutes and 54 seconds and OpenOffice.org for 3 minutes and 41 seconds. While Wakoopa doesn’t reveal what I’ve been using the apps for — writing love letters or business letters, working for clients or procrastinating — presumably it wouldn’t be hard to Draw Some Conclusions.

Thanks to Ton for pointing the way.

Nominations for the Provincial General Election closed today at 4:00 p.m. A list of nominated candidates is now available. As an experiment we’ve also released a Google Spreadsheet of the list.

Correspondent G., who is now a mobile journalist with his digital camera strapped to his belt, sent in this photo of an oil tank unearthed on the grounds of Prince Street School:

G. reports that the tank was discovered when kids on the playground noticed oil oozing out of the ground; he says it was obviously left over from the old Prince Street Elementary School that was torn down in the early 1960s.

Kudos to those in the design department at the new Brit’s Fish & Chips in downtown [[Charlottetown]] for their new sign, which is a triumph of simplicity:

The latest from the product development lab here at ruk.ca is a line of ruk t-shirts for kids. Twenty-one colours. Printed on demand. Visit the store now and outfit your tiny relations.

I’ve come to realize that it’s impossible to simultaneously plan to travel and decide whether to travel.

The two involve incompatible thought processes.

This is because if you’re on the fence rather than fully committed every stage of travel-planning will involve some fulcrum against which you can make your decision to travel more difficult.

“Oh, if I do that then I’ll be carrying around that pair of bagpipes around London at six o’clock in the morning. I can’t go!”

“There aren’t any rooms at that great hotel with the yellow curtains. I can’t go!”

Travel is hard, and full of stress bogeymen. Unless you’re past the point of no return, those bogeyman can trump almost any logic.

A tremendous aid to easing this burden is to purchase non-refundable air tickets as the first step in any travel-planning exercise. There is nothing to focus the mind and make one fully commit to a project like having a pile of money on the line that will be rendered useless without the accoutrements to go with it (place to stay, something to do, etc.). And the will to go in the first place.