Back in the day, when I was working at Canadian Tire selling Commodore VIC 20s and 64s, Commodore had an advertising campaign in Canada with the tag line “I Adore My 64” with an associated catchy jingle (another proof that eventually everything will be on the web). In French they had the same jingle, but the tag line was “Rien ne peut battre mon soixante quatre” — which translates as “nothing can beat my sixty-four.” All these years later, I’ve still got both versions running through my head.

The details for reboot 9.0 have been released: May 31 and June 1 in Copenhagen. Depending on the whether there’s a provincial election this spring here on [[Prince Edward Island]] or not, I may or may not attend. But I’ve registered anyway ;-)

My brother [[Steve]] emailed this morning and mentioned, about someone he’s working with, that “he jokes even with people that don’t like him.” He meant it as a compliment.

It got me thinking about living on [[Prince Edward Island]] — it’s my 14th anniversary of living here today — and how in many ways it’s like the 135,000 of us who live here are crammed into a small room with each other, and as such have to find ways of getting along.

This week I’ve been out and about in public more often than usual, and in my travels I’ve run into two friends who’ve run federally for the Conservatives, a friend who’s running for the Liberals in the next provincial election, several friends who are die-hard capitalists and a couple who are die-hard socialists. In my immediate circle of friends I have people on all points of the religious compass, from full-on drunk-the-Kool Aid believers to complete skeptics. I have friends who are adamantly pro-choice, and friends who are, well, not. I have friends who live on $12,000 a year, and friends who live on $120,000 a year.

And I’m pretty sure that I’m a pretty typical resident of Prince Edward Island in this way.

Of course many people elsewhere have a diverse and multi-opined community.

It’s just that here in PEI, where family ties are so strong, where overlapping family connections are so prevalent, where it seems sometime that everybody went to school with everybody else (or at least their brother did), and where, relatively speaking, there are so few of us, the fabric of everyday life is woven more tightly.

In other words, it’s best not to piss someone off because it’s likely that eventually they’ll be your boss. Or your brother in law. Or their sister the police officer will be arresting you.

And yet, 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.

This isn’t to say that Islanders get along all the time. And it’s certainly not to suggest that people don’t “talk.”

But when you see two people who, in any other place, would likely never meet, and who if forced to put all of their ideological cards on the table would likely be mortal enemies, gathered around the kitchen at a house party getting on like gangbusters, it’s hard not to marvel at the delicate balance that lets PEI society work as the well-oiled machine that it is.

[[Oliver]], [[Catherine]] and I, along with my [[Mom]] and [[Dad]], are taking a short vacation to Lisbon, Portugal next week over Oliver’s spring school break.

It’s a last-minute trip with destination inspired partly by all-time low overseas Air Canada fares, partly by a desire to renew our acquaintance the country we grew to love so much last year.

As last year, we used Holiday-Rentals.co.uk to find ourselves a base for the week in Lisbon (we’re now die hard adherents of so-called slow travel — it’s such a pleasant alternative to old-school “different city every night” style travel).

We’ve got lots of exciting plans for our week (Oliver is very excited to know there’s a toy museum); I also hope to be able to have a coffee with Pedro (my [[Plazes]] unofficial evangelical counterpart in Portugal). And Dan and Becky will overlap with us for a day, so we’ll have to have an overseas “Gong Bao Thursday on Monday in Lisbon” with them and impart our accumulated Lisbon knowledge so as to prepare them for their all-too-short two day stay.

Despite my interest in social networks and location-based services, I’ve come to realize that their actual utility to my regular everyday life has, at least so far, been somewhat limited. This may be due to the nascent nature of these tools. It may be due to my location (where the social utility of [[Plazes]] for me is limited to knowing where Cynthia Dunsford is all the time). Social networks might also be of more use to, well, social people.

That all said, I’ve come up with a killer social networking application that takes my Genealogy of Influence idea to the next level.

BarfWatch.

In my imagination, this is a web-based social networking tool that aggregates three sets of information:

1. Information about the people in my real, physical life — friends, family, colleagues.
2. Information about the location of these people.
3. Information about the health of these people, especially as regards infectious conditions like cold and flu.

The idea is that, by aggregating this information, I can, when struck with a cold or cough, both record this information in the tool, and also use the tool to find likely vectors for what ails me.

In other words, if 25% of the people in my office are out with a a cold, it’s likely, perhaps, that I caught the cold at work.

Because members of this network would also record the severity of their condition, information about remedies they’d tried, and a signal when they were feeling better — “mild headache, severe cough; rested for 3 days and drank only clear liquids and felt better on the fourth day” — there would be practical utility in the tool.

Indeed, over time the tool could become a sort of “personal health forecast” that would look at past trends and infection vectors — “whenever Peter gets strep, Oliver gets it 3 days later” — and predict future health, and suggest evasive maneuvers (“Your personal threat level for flu is up 15% today; suggest increased duration for hand washing”).

Of course there are significant barriers to something like this actually working, not the least of which would be the reticence of friends, family and colleagues to share information about their illnesses (and even if they were willing, perhaps the last thing a barfing person wants to do is to update their BarfWatch profile).

But, nonetheless, I think it’s an interesting idea to think about because in there somewhere I think there are some actual practical notions for how we can share health information with ourselves outside of the formal health care system.

If you’re trying to send email to @gov.pe.ca email addresses (inside the provincial government here in Prince Edward Island) and your email is bouncing back, it’s likely because of a server outage they’re experiencing today. I just got off the phone with the Help Desk there, and they indicated that there was a power outage in the Aubin Arsenault Building and that, as a result, GroupWise email and other network applications inside government aren’t operating properly. They hope to have the problem corrected this morning.

Speedtest.net seems like a much friendlier (and prettier) alternative to the broadband speed tests at DSLReports.com that I’ve been using all along.

[[Catherine]] brought home some bread from [[Just Us Girls]] yesterday after seeing a big sign in the window advertising that they’re now selling their own loaves. This first loaf was encouraging, but was a little doughy and uncooked inside. I hope they keep at it.

If you’ve read Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik, you will recall his admission of the real reason he uprooted his New York City family to Paris:

When people asked why Martha and I, not long after the birth of our first child, left New York for Paris, we can usually think of a lot of plausible-sounding reasons. They vary in tone from the high-mindedly agonized (we couldn’t endure the malling of our SoHo neighborhood) to the cloyingly whimsical (we wanted to live within walking distance of the Gérard Mulot bakery, on the rue de Seine). The real reason was Barney. We had seen one after another of our friends’ children — charming children of parents who parse Greek texts or write long metafictions set in the eighteenth century — sunk dumbly in front of a television set watching a man in a cheap purple dinosaur suit sing doggerel in an adenoidal voice with a chorus of overregimented eight-year-old ham actors.

In our family, the battle is not against Barney ([[Oliver]] had a brief Barney flirtation, but it passed quickly), but rather against the ubiquitous colossus that is Disney.

When we had a family meeting a few weeks ago, for example, to discuss where in the world we’d go for March school break this year — anywhere in the world — Oliver announced that he wanted to go to Disney World.

One vital front in this war against Disney is Oliver’s web browser: we’ve strategically omitted any Disney links from Oliver’s Firefox bookmarks bar, choosing instead to provide him with links to things like Croatian television shows, perhaps Disneyesque in the old country, but somehow exotic and parent-friendly over here.

Of late, however, we’d been hearing Disney sounds coming from the office while Oliver was using the computer.

We’d leave him alone with Kids’ CBC and a few minutes later we’d hear the violins and flutes of the Make your Disney vacation a Magical Beginning page.

We had no idea how Oliver was making his way to Disney. He can type, but not well enough to string d-i-s-n-e-y-.-c-o-m together. Was it a surreptitious link from the CBC or Danish Children’s Televsion? Secret URL crib notes kept under the desk?

We got our answer over the weekend: seeing Oliver determinedly surfing through the Disney Princess site, I asked him how he got there. So he showed me: in Firefox he selected Bookmarks and then Organize Bookmarks and then simply selected one of the several links to Disney that appeared there.

Now these aren’t bookmarks that we put there. And we’ve never showed Oliver how to use the Firefox bookmarks system. Indeed I don’t think we’ve ever discussed with him exactly what a bookmark is. It is thus a testament to Firefox’s UI and/or Oliver’s intellect (and willingness to click on absolutely anything in sight, noting what the result is) that he’s been able to make Firefox do what he wanted to do: provide him with a quick (and heretofore secret) pathway to the wonderful world of Disney.

Every once in a while [[Catherine]] and I get accidentally transported out of the hoi polloi and invited to party with Charlottetown’s elites. As the city lacks for wealthy industrialists, the elites here are mostly dentists and judges. A few politicians. And Tim Banks. Last night was one such.

Regular readers may recall that two years ago I took Mr. Banks to task for being a megalomaniac. Last night was my first time sitting couch-to-chair with him in a social setting, and, to my surprise and delight, he neither gave me the finger, tore anything off the wall, nor threatened to replace my comfortable couch with an office tower. He was actually somewhat aloof, and didn’t appear to have it in him to rip out my still-beating heart and eat it for breakfast. What a relief.

By fortunate happenstance, among the elites in attendance at last night’s party were several people I knew, so I was spared the indignity of hiding in the corner nursing my drink while my arch nemesis scattered bon mots to those that would listen. Oh, and there was absolutely amazing tzatziki to boot. If not for the presence of cats and their attendant dander, which saw me lose my ability to speak at any volume after about 45 minutes, it would have been a perfect night.

Tonight we will resume our regular mundane life of Seinfeld reruns and being entertained by G. about his adventures in the Hindu Kush.