Tonight was “Parent Orientation Night” at Prince Street School for the parents of kids, like Oliver, who will be starting Grade One in the fall.

I have had two excellent sources of wise counsel in preparation for all of this.

My friend Ann offered the advice that, in essence, I shouldn’t try to play out my own educational issues at the expense of Oliver or his teachers. In other words the “homework’s for bores — go make a volcano” parenting that I might wish for will only lead to Bad Things for all concerned. So I’ve decided to channel the old “all formal education is evil” Pete into new-style “do everything you can to help, but don’t be a jerk” Pete.

And my friend Tom, who has a large brood of Prince Street alumni in his family, has been saying only good things about what a good neighbourhood school Prince Street is. Tom’s opinion of things goes a long way in my books, so I’m walking in with a Good Attitude to begin with (Tom also runs the dairy that fuels my morning cappuccino, so he obviously has vast influence on my life…).

So tonight’s mission for me was to sit there, take it all in, and resist the urge to stick my hand up and ask something like “so what’s your condom policy” or “do you include anarchist thinkers in your Grade One political theory classes.” So I whispered quietly to myself “Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be a jerk.”

The school itself, as you can see from the photo above, is very evocative of early-1960s Canadian institutional architecture, right down to the multi-coloured bricks cemented into its front. Inside it’s actually quite interesting: while the old Prince Street Elementary was an imposing behemoth of a building built two centuries ago, the “new” Prince Street is built sort of like a split-level house. I’ve been driving by the school for 15 years, for example, and I had no idea there was a gym tucked inside there somehow.

Grade One orientation was quick and to the point: get your kids to bed early, we’ll be watching for lice, we’re pretty sure they’ll know how to read when they come out the other end. The Principal, the Public Health Nurse, the School Counselor and one of the Grade One teachers all made a short presentation; they were all very pleasant and seemed very unlike the evil manipulators that I’d been casting for their roles in my head in the 36 years since I was in Oliver’s place, and the 6 years that I’ve been anticipating this next jump. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be a jerk.

Enrollment is down at Prince Street — where there were once 400 kids, there are just over 200 now. For Oliver this means that it’s an open question right now whether there will be two grade one classes or one; they’re losing a staff position for next year, and there are 30 kids registered for grade one right now, so a lot will depend on what rearranging happens between now and then. We were assured that we won’t end up with one class of 30 kids, however.

Next exciting step on this adventure (Don’t be a jerk.) comes next month when the current Grade Oners stay home for the day and the new crop comes in for a beta test. We’ve been instructed not to cry when dropping our kids off for that event: apparently seeing parents cry suggests to kids that school might not be all sweetness and light. Pluck up. Don’t be a jerk.

Media pundit Dan Misener says TVO is seriously showing up the CBC. He’s right.

There was a short outage here tonight — about 30 minutes — that I’ve traced back, oddly enough, to what seems to be a failed port on a Linksys switch. Problem solved, at least for now, by moving a cable over to another port on the same switch.

I don’t know the real story of how Chef Gordon Bailey went from being superstar Dayboat chef to running the new food court at the Confederation Court mall, but I’ve a sense that we’ll all be happy he did, no matter how it happened.

Today is opening day at Urban Eatery, the recasting of the food court — formerly home to traditional mall vendors like Grandma’s Deli and the Oriental Wok — as an upscale, well, urban eatery. It’s still a food court — you can’t completely seal off the Muzak — but boy is this not your father’s food court:

I stopped by on Saturday for their “soft opening” and had a slice of thin-crust brick-oven pizza (“Greek” style — excellent) and a cappuccino (a little milky, no takeaway sugar available, made by, alas, an espresso amateur, but nonetheless not a bad cup of coffee at all). Then Oliver and Catherine came by and we shared an apple danish (very good).

The real star of the show, however, is the “confederation deli” section, pictured above. From the looks of things this is a bona fide deli: meat, cheese, fresh veg, and bread that appears to be made in house. I’ll take lunch there soon and let you know how I make out. They also sell bread “to go,” by the way, and we took home an approximation of a baguette on Saturday and consumed most of it on the weekend. It wasn’t “oh my God, I’m in France,” but it was pretty good bread nonetheless, and surely it can only get better.

BGHJ certainly did a fantastic job on the interiors of the space: take out the Pepsi coolers that are anachronistically hulking in the midst of everything and you could be in Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen — it’s all wood floors and polished metal and lower case sans-serif. If nothing else the architectural exorcism of the food court aesthetic on the inside means the place deserves our support.

I’ve long been a fan of the Confederation Court Mall. Having seen the downtowns of several cities in Ontario completely ravaged by downtown “redevelopment” (Brantford, Hamilton, and Peterborough are only three examples) with large-scale razing of existing buildings, the fact that in Charlottetown the same impulse was carried out by preserving what existing and building in was a fortunate masterstroke.

Now that you can get what promises to be a decent sandwich, and the whole place is lit with free wifi, it’s possible that the second floor of the mall, a space that’s tried so hard over the years but has never really taken off, will become an interesting place to hang out. Stay tuned.

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.