Ten years ago my brother Steve was in South Korea teaching English. Reasoning that I should seize the opportunity to visit, I managed to figure out a way of getting from Boston to Seoul for next to no money. I got myself to Boston for free by cleverly combining a trip to Yankee into the mix, and because I flew out from Boston early in the morning, I ended spending the night before in the Harborside Inn on State Street.

Back in 1997 the “Big Dig” — the multi-billion dollar, multi-year plan to rid Boston of it’s elevated downtown Expressway by burying the highway — was in full swing. And the Harborside, which opened just two weeks before my visit, was right in the middle of it. Literally: directly in front of the hotel there was a deep bit being hollowed out with giant battering rams (the pit was the beginnings of what is now the new Aquarium subway stop).

I was warned when I checked in that I might notice “some construction noise.” That was an understatement: around 6:00 a.m. it felt like the world was going to end, with every smash into the bedrock of the giant machines out my window shaking the foundations of the hotel. This effect seemed only amplified by the atrium that forms the core of the hotel; it acted as a giant amplifier:

What a difference a decade makes: the Expressway is gone now, and the work to convert the ground it covered into greenspace is well underway. You can actually see North Boston from Quincy Market, and almost all of the chaos brought on by the Big Dig is gone. Indeed my journey down from Yankee to Logan Airport was only 2 hours, and I glided in on I-93 south and down into the Callaghan Tunnel without stepping on the brakes after I turned at the lights up in Manchester.

So now the Harborside, which once looked like a crazy enterprise in an inane location, is in the middle of a revitalized waterfront. Where once there were battering rams is now a nightclub patio. The T stop is right at their door, and the walk to gnocchi is only 5 minutes.

The hotel itself is showing its age a little — the cold water tap in my room came off in my hand, the carpets are a little frayed, and the free breakfast served in the atrium is no more. And there are several new “boutique” hotels in the city that have taken some of the shine off the high thread-count sheets and hardwood floors that seemed so revolutionary back then.

By you can’t beat the location — among other things you can be at the airport in 10 minutes, which is why I’m here tonight — and at $169/night in the high season, it is, for Boston, one of the best deals going for a spacious downtown room.

Last year after reboot I had coffee with Thomas and one of the ideas I floated was a parallel conference for kids that could be called rebootkins. I think the idea of “conferencing with your kids” has a lot of appeal, at least for we in the “I’d rather travel with my kids” set.

Well, there’s no rebootkins yet, but in today’s reboot email from Thomas comes the note, under “a couple of the changes you can expect…”:

kids friendly with hilmar, the icelandic babysitter, that can watch your sleeping baby or play with your kids if you bring them along

Sadly, wee O (who’s not so wee anymore) is staying at home this year, so they’ll be no hilmar for him. But with reboot’s new DIY spirit, I’m up for a full-on rebootkins for reboot 10.0 next year.

Another cause for excitement in Thomas’ email: it looks like the DIY T-Shirts idea I floated took off and is going to happen. This is very cool.

No, I wasn’t consumed by The Ghost of Robb Sagendorph; I’m still alive and thriving. It’s been a good, and very productive, week here at Yankee and I’m about to pack up and drive down to Boston. I’m in Boston for the night, and then back to PEI tomorrow morning.

The rest of this week, and over the weekend, I’ll be focusing on Elections PEI-related work and then, after polling day on Monday and the results posting on Monday night, I’m off to Montreal for the day on Tuesday, and then to Copenhagen, via Zurich, on Tuesday for reboot, which starts Thursday.

I’ll be back on the Island on June 7, after a brief stopover in Berlin to see my friends at Plazes. Oliver “graduates” from kindergarten the week after that, and then he and Catherine are off to Ontario for a couple of weeks. The last week of June I’ll be back here at Yankee.

Be careful what you wish for, they say. I wished for constant motion, and it’s happening. It will be nice to stop for a moment come July and spend languid afternoons on Victoria Row sipping sangria and discussing Descartes.

It’s 10:00 p.m. and I’m borrowing a desk here at Yankee to work a second work day. My first work day was concerned with travel databases and the moon’s place in the astrological zodiac; tonight’s work day involves a little fine-tuning of the system we’ll use to present results of the provincial general election next Monday.

I’m on the second floor of the Sagendorph Building, named after Robb Sagendorph founder of Yankee magazine. The building, began in 1805 and evolving ever since, is an architectural rabbit warren.

Around one corner you might find an old 128K Mac that used to run the company library. Around another the many mysteries of “Jud’s Museum,” the office of Editor-in-Chief Jud Hale, where you’re as likely to find Lee Harvey Oswald’s chicken’s head as anything else. Somewhere hidden in here is the Black Box that holds the secret formulas the underpin The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

In the library just down the hall from where I write you can find a copy of The Save-U-Money Book and The Pilgrim Way. Looking for the washroom just a minute ago I mistakenly walked into a room containing a nut meat grinder, a pair of tin candles sticks, a pair of eyeglasses and a manila folder labeled “Churchill, Sir Winston.”

In other words, if any walls can talk it’s these ones.

Once I finish up here in 30 minutes or so — and I’ve been putting this off — I will have to exit the building, turning the lights off behind me. The last leg of my trip to the car, after the last light gets switched off, involves a fumble in the dark through the mail room, past the cache of canned pop, through the lunch room, and out the front door.

The path will also take me past the door to the basement. I have never been to the basement. But last fall, on a night just like this night, as I walked by I saw an unearthly glow emanating from the deeps. Thoughts of Robb Sagendorph immediately flooded my mind, and I high-tailed it out down the hall and out the door.

As long as I keep writing this post, I can avoid a similar encounter.

One of my favourite things to do when visiting Yankee was to eat lunch a couple of times at the Harrisville General Store. Harrisville is a small village just 5 minutes up the road from here in Dublin; it’s an old mill town, with the red-brick mill buildings forming the spine of the village along the river that drains from Harrisville Pond.

Harrisville is a strange mixture of an effete enclave and “back to the lander” service center, and at is heart has always been the general store:

The store, in recent times, was always a place to go and get an excellent sandwich and a drink and sit out front on the porch enjoying the spring sunshine. When Catherine and Oliver and I borrowed a house on Harrisville Pond several years ago the store was the place we bought all those American indulgences like Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and exotic iced teas and micro-brews.

A few years back, however, the longtime operator of the store moved away, and the new operators, veterans of a Dunkin Donuts it was rumoured, took over and, well, ruined the place. They turned it into something worse than a Kwiki Mart. And all Harrisville was sad. After a while I couldn’t even talk about the store to my Harrisville friend because it was like talking about a child that had wandered away.

I’m happy to report, however, that it looks like the Harrisville General Store is back: I took a leap of faith and drove up for dinner tonight and, to my surprise, some of the old spark was back. There was veggie chili in the crock pot, artisanal iced tea in the cooler, and excellent chocolate chip cookies in the cookie jar. Dinner cost me $6. It was excellent. The spring sun on the porch was warm. Harrisville gleaned.

• Just Us Girls + Gelato = Mmmmm.
• Tai Chi Gardens “Rice Combo” = Most interesting dish in town. Tasty.
• Urban Eatery: got the down-low on Phase 2 this morning from Chef Bailey; you ain’t seen nothing yet.
• Casa Mia: new restaurant on Queen Street beside Woolworths? Who has the scoop?
• COWS - Iced Cowpuccino = sigh.

Everything I know about education I learned from Venus Flytrap:

It’s opening day at Café Diem on Victoria Row in Charlottetown. This will be my first opportunity to experience the place as a bona fide coffee drinker. Not warm or sunny enough to sit outside, of course, but exciting nonetheless.

Update: Showed up for coffee this morning; sign on door said that opening is delayed, due to weather, until May 21st.

Well, okay, this isn’t really “day two” at all — it’s more like day 12 for us in terms of our work with Elections PEI on the Provincial General Election. But this is the first time I’ve had since “day one” last week to come up for air and report on what we’ve been up to.

Back last Monday when I last reported in, we were about to launch our big data entry effort. The next night we gathered in our bunker in the basement of the Shaw Building in Charlottetown and managed the process of having over 90,000 electors updated in the registry of electors by a team of 112 data entry staff.

The night went very well — there were none of the browser-compatibility and network access problems we’d encountered back in 2003 — and because the confirmation process, for the first time in a provincial election, involved working from “pre-filled in” confirmation forms — using information gathered in 2003 and in subsequent municipal elections and provincial by-elections — the whole province wasn’t being “entered in from scratch” so things, relatively speaking, flew by. By 10:00 p.m. on Tuesday night the majority of the data entry task was completed and with a little clean-up on Wednesday we were ready to print the Preliminary List of Electors on Thursday morning.

Once the Preliminary List was out the door, work began on processing any new information that came in from Returning Officers about changes, additions or deletions to the list. The deadline for changes was this Tuesday night, and with that information updated in the database we were ready to generate the Official List of Electors this morning. I burned the CD to go to the Queen’s Printer this morning just before lunch, and their giant super-capable steam-powered Xerox machines are busy churning out the lists as I write.

They’ll be put to use for the first time on Saturday when Advance Polls open for the first time.

With that CD out the door, our job is done for now. At least in terms of hard-edge data management. Our focus now turns towards polling day — May 28th — and the system we built first for the 1996 election (but that’s evolved heavily since then) that delivers unofficial election results. More on that later.