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).

This is two years old, and perhaps everyone has seen it already, but I found it quite moving.

Customers of Charlottetown-based Internet provider ISN began to get word this week that the company is about to be acquired by Nova Scotia-based Eastlink. The sale represents the end of a 14 year project for ISN’s founder Kevin O’Brien.

Kevin and I first met in the spring of 1993. We were essentially doing the same job — taking resources to the Internet — for two different sectors; Kevin was working for the PEI Federation of Agriculture and I was working for the PEI Crafts Council. What began with innocuous conversations about technology that spring led eventually, 18 months later, to the creation of ISN: I, in essence, goaded Kevin into creating his own ISP and was his unofficial technical co-conspirator in the early days.

Over ISN’s colourful history there haven’t been many projects I’ve engaged in, from my work with the Crafts Council to the founding of Digital Island and my work with the PEI Government, to my Okeedokee partnership to Dave Moses to my current setup sharing ISN bandwidth with silverorange, where ISN hasn’t played a pivotal role. The consumption of the company by Eastlink thus represents not only the end of a project for Kevin, but also the disappearance of a human-scale bandwidth provider for the Island. Things will never be the same.

As many of the early conversations where the seeds of ISN were planted took place at The Noodle House here in Charlottetown, Kevin and I returned to the scene of the crime to record a series of conversations about ISN past, present and future. We began with a discussion of what has happened, what’s ahead for existing ISN customers, and you can listen to this in the first of what will eventually be three podcast episodes/

In future episodes we’ll talk about how ISN got started, and about some of the misadventures along the way.

Beside my hotel on Luisenstrasse in Berlin there was a pick-up location for drive easy - pay low. I don’t completely understand the concept, but as near as I can determine this idea marries cheap car rental with brand advertising.

You may recall that my trip to Berlin was filled with twists and turns. I naively thought that this intriguing part of the trip had passed: the Berlin to London to Boston trip went smooth as silk, and the weather in Boston and New Hampshire miraculously cleared for the brief periods I needed to travel up to Yankee.

This morning, after a stirring Yankee “Publishing Star” awards lunch (this quarter honouring Heidi Stonehill, an excellent senior associate editor at The Old Farmer’s Almanac) I made a beeline for Logan and made it down in record time, despite the weather earlier in the morning being a combination of rain, sleet and snow.

I returned my car, got my boarding pass (not checking my bag, per my vow as a result of the earlier debacle) and went through security. After 10 minutes packed into the crowded Air Canada waiting room, I heard my name of the public address system.

I reported for duty, and was told by the friendly but harried agent that there was “a problem with my ticket.” He took my boarding pass, and I overheard him trying to get British Airways on the phone: the evils of inter-airline wrangling had returned (you may recall that I am traveling my entire journey on a British Airways ticket, despite flying parts of the trip on Air Canada).

It seems the source of the problem was this: when Air Canada was late into Montreal two weeks ago, causing me to miss my British Airways connection to London and necessitating travel 24 hours later on the same flight. Apparently when I was rebooked British Airways actually “reissued my ticket,” which meant that the “ticket number” changed (this is a long multi-digit number, not the “booking reference,” which didn’t change). It seems that when they did this, somehow my Air Canada ticket, at least in the Air Canada computer, didn’t follow along, so my trip from Boston to Charlottetown was attached to a ticket that no longer existed.

To repair this required that the agent get the new ticket number from British Airways. Which he had troubles doing because he couldn’t get anyone on the phone (apparently there is no special airline-to-airline hotline for this sort of thing). Fortunately I’d asked Maritime Travel in Charlottetown to double-check my reservations before I left Montreal for London and they had the presence of mind to email me my new ticket number. So I solved my own problem and obviated the need for the agent to call British Airways by digging out that email.

He told me that I was lucky, as if I hadn’t found the number, I would have had to pay for a new ticket.

Moral of the story: the benefits that I assumed would extend from having a travel agent book a complicated multi-airline trip on the same ticket seemed only to add complication to my travels. Granted, I did benefit when the “one ticket” meant that British Airways had to rebook me because Air Canada was late. But they didn’t exactly make it easy.

Oh well: I’m none the less for wear (although Catherine told me earlier that the Charlottetown Airport has closed, so my flight home tonight might leave me in Montreal again). And without travel intrigue what would I blog about.

“Hey,” I said to myself, “maybe I’ll rent an iTunes movie to watch on the plane,” as I sat down to wait for an hour after arriving early for my flight to Montreal from Boston. Fortunately I had the help of a friendly American with a US iTunes account (we can’t rent movies in Canada yet), so I went through the rental process. It was hard to find a movie that I wanted to watch, but I settled on Live Free or Die Hard. And clicked “Rent.” And then:

My plane leaves in an hour, so I don’t think I’m going to make it (the movie, not my plane).